The #1 Albums »
The #1 Albums: “Led Zeppelin III”
On October 24, 1970, Led Zeppelin III blased onto the Billboard 200 album chart at #3. The next week, it knocked Santana’s Abraxas from the #1 spot and remained there four weeks, before Abraxas
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The #1 Albums: Santana’s “Abraxas”
My first radio was a green plastic box with a giant dial and tubes inside. I didn’t care that it got only AM—it got WLS, the Top 40 giant from Chicago, and that was
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The #1 Albums: “Cosmo’s Factory” by Creedence Clearwater Revival
Sweet mama this is one great album. Released at a moment when everybody knew that Creedence Clearwater Revival was pretty damn good, Cosmo’s Factory managed to live up to the expectations of that moment.
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The #1 Albums: “Blood Sweat & Tears 3″
At a distance of more than 40 years, we forget how big Blood Sweat and Tears was at the turn of the 1970s. Their second, self-titled album spent time at #1 in the spring
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The #1 Albums: “Woodstock”
Years ago, I worked at a radio station in small-town Illinois. An on-air discussion about Woodstock prompted one of the sales reps to collar me in the hall afterward. “I was there, you know,”
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The #1 Albums: The Beatles’ “Let It Be”
“I’ll finish you all now! You’ll pay!” So said Paul McCartney to Ringo Starr when Ringo tried to convince Paul to hold his solo album release so it wouldn’t conflict with the release of
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The #1 Albums: “McCartney”
It must be great to be Paul McCartney. All that fame, all that money. And it must be terrible, too, because you have to compete with Paul McCartney, and a reputation that will last
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The #1 Albums: “Deja Vu” by Crosby Stills Nash & Young
Their long musical partnership has been good to David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash. During the period when they added Neil Young to the group, it was very good indeed—although those good days
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The #1 Albums: Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water”
Several songs on Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water seem so perfect it’s as though they must always have existed. Surely the title song, “El Condor Pasa,” and “The Boxer” waited somewhere in
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The #1 Albums: “Led Zeppelin II”
In 2003, Eric Boehlert (now at Media Matters) wrote an essay for Salon called “The Greatest Week in Rock History” in which he proposed that the week of December 20, 1969, was “when revolutionary rock
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