1970-must-r/p

1970 Must Own Rock and Pop Albums

Emerson, Lake & Palmer – Out of This World Sound at Loud Levels

More of the Music of Emerson, Lake and Palmer

  • Boasting KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it throughout, this UK Island Pink Rim pressing makes the case that ELP’s debut is clearly one of the most powerful rock records ever made – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Spacious, rich and dynamic, with big bass and tremendous energy – these are just some of the things we love about Eddie Offord‘s engineering work on this band’s albums
  • Analog at its Tubey Magical finest – you’ll never play a CD (or any other digitally sourced material) that sounds as good as this record as long as you live
  • “Lucky Man” and “Take A Pebble” on this copy have Demo Disc quality sound like you won’t believe
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Lively, ambitious, almost entirely successful debut album… [which] showcased the group at its least pretentious and most musicianly …there isn’t much excess, and there is a lot of impressive musicianship here.”

If you’ve got the system to play this one loud enough, with the low-end weight and energy it requires, you are in for a treat. The organ that opens side two will rattle the foundation of your house if you’re not careful. This music really needs that kind of megawatt reproduction to make sense. This is bombastic prog that wants desperately to rock your world. At moderate levels, it just sounds overblown and silly. At loud levels, it actually will rock your world.

Near The Top Of The List

Without a doubt this record belongs in the Top Rock section. I’d even say it belongs in the Top Ten. It is one of the most dynamic and powerful rock recordings ever made. The organ on this album is wall to wall and floor to ceiling. The quiet interlude during “Take A Pebble” is about as quiet as any popular recording can ever be — the guitar is right at the noise floor. It’s amazing! (Which explains why so many domestic copies have groove damage. The record is just too hard to play for the average turntable. Hell, it’s hard to play with an audiophile turntable.)

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Van Morrison – Moondance

More of the Music of Van Morrison

  • An early Green Label pressing that was doing just about everything right, with both sides earning solid Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Drop the needle anywhere on the album for a taste of early-70s Tubey Magical analog sound, not to mention the kind of blue-eyed soul that will remind some of you just how good music on vinyl used to be
  • A tough title to find in clean condition these days – most are covered in repeating marks – but not this one!
  • “An album worthy of an Irish R&B singer who wrote a teen hit called ‘Mystic Eyes’ (not to mention a Brill Building smash called ‘Brown Eyed Girl’), adding punchy brass (including pennywhistles and foghorn) and a solid backbeat (including congas) to his folk-jazz swing, and a pop-wise formal control to his Gaelic poetry.” Christgau – A+ (a grade he does not give out often)

Musically the record Moondance most reminds me of is After The Gold Rush. Neil Young set out to make a commercial album that had nothing but strong songs built around catchy melodies, using the highest quality production values. What better describes Moondance?

Every song is good, you can sing practically every one of them from memory, and in fact you’ll probably feel like singing along with every one of them as you are playing this very copy.

Van Morrison never made another album as good as this one, and After the Gold Rush is still Neil’s Masterpiece (along with Zuma, of course). If there are two records on the planet that belong in everybody’s collection, it’s these two.

Finding good sounding LPs of both of them is a tricky proposition — unless, of course, you are a customer of Better Records, where superb sounding pressings of Classic Rock Albums can be found all day every day.

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Joni Mitchell – Ladies Of The Canyon

More of the Music of Joni Mitchell

  • This vintage Reprise pressing boasts solid Double Plus (A++) sound from first note to last
  • Ladies of The Canyon is a very strong album for Joni, with some of her most well known, seemingly timeless songs: “Morning Morgantown,” “For Free,” “Big Yellow Taxi,” “Woodstock,” “The Circle Game” and more
  • We guarantee there is dramatically more space, richness, vocal presence, and performance energy on this copy than others you’ve heard, and that’s especially true if you made the mistake of buying whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing is currently on the market
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Yet another essential listen in Mitchell’s recorded canon.”
  • If you’re a fan of this lady, and what audiophile wouldn’t be?, this title is clearly one of the best of 1970 and a true Must Own for the audiophile

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Van Morrison – His Band And Street Choir

More of the Music of Van Morrison

  • With very good Hot Stamper sound from first note to last, this vintage Green Label pressing of Van’s shockingly underrated album from 1970 will be hard to beat
  • It’s richer, fuller and with more presence than the average copy, and that’s especially true for whatever godawful Heavy Vinyl pressing is currently being foisted on an unsuspecting record buying public
  • The band is swinging, the material top-notch – “Domino,” “Crazy Face,” “Blue Money” and other classics are right here
  • The Best Sounding Van Morrison Album, a classic of 1970 Tubey Magical analog, and his only title to make our Top 100
  • “As ‘Domino’ opens the album with a show of strength, ‘Street Choir’ closes it with a burst of both musical and poetic energy which is not only better than anything else on the album but may well be one of Van’s two or three finest songs.” – Rolling Stone

This is the album that came out between Moondance (in the same year in fact, 1970) and Tupelo Honey, but for some reason, it don’t get no respect. We think that’s insane — the material on this album is stellar and the sound on the best pressings is out of this world!

Here’s a copy that really makes our case for us. Both sides of this vintage Warner Bros. pressing sound AMAZING! We went through a massive stack of copies and let me tell you — most of them sure don’t sound like this! Take this one home for some of the best Van Morrison sound you will ever hear.

For years I thought that Moondance was the best sounding album in the Van Morrison catalog. His Band And Street Choir is even better. One reason for that would have to be that Robert Ludwig mastered it, and he can usually be counted on to do an excellent job.

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The Beatles – Hey Jude

More of the Music of The Beatles

  • With solid Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them on both sides, this vintage import copy is doing just about everything right – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • An amazing 10-song compilation from 1970 of some of the band’s biggest and best hits – “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Paperback Writer,” “Lady Madonna,” and the iconic title track among them
  • Longtime customers know that we had never been able to offer this title up until 2022 – it took us twenty years to figure out what the right pressings are, and believe me, we had to go through a lot of crap to find them
  • If you know the album at all, you know how bad it sounds on the average copy, and my guess is you just gave up on the idea of finding good sound for these songs, which is more or less the way we felt too, but we finally found what we were looking for, and here it is (particularly on side one)
  • “…showcases the Beatles’ versatility and growth, as they move from the exuberance of Beatlemania to the intense psychedelia of the mid-60s and then settle into rich post-Pepper days…. Great songs all.”
  • And Past Masters, referred to in the Allmusic review below, is not the answer they seem to think it is — it has some of the most abominably bright and aggressive digital mastering we have ever heard
  • Your one other option for some of this music with top quality sound is the 1967-1970 compilation album, the Hot Stamper pressings for which have only recently been discovered
  • “…showcases the Beatles’ versatility and growth, as they move from the exuberance of Beatlemania to the intense psychedelia of the mid-’60s and then settle into rich post-Pepper days…. Great songs all.”

If you love these songs as much as we do, you won’t believe how good they sound here.

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Cat Stevens – Mona Bone Jakon

More of the Music of Cat Stevens

  • Incredible sound throughout this UK Island pressing of Cat Stevens’s brilliant third album, with both sides earning Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them
  • So transparent, open, and spacious, nuances and subtleties that escaped you before are now front and center
  • When you play “I Wish, I Wish” and “I Think I See The Light” on this vintage pressing, we think you will agree with us that this is one of the greatest Folk Rock albums of them all
  • One of the most underrated titles on the site – you owe it to yourself to see just how good the album that came out right before Tillerman can be when it sounds this good
  • 4 stars: “A delight, and because it never achieved the Top 40 radio ubiquity of later albums, it sounds fresh and distinct.”

So many copies excel in some areas but fall flat in others. This side one has it ALL going on — all the Tubey Magic, all the energy, all the presence and so on. The sound is high-rez yet so natural, free from the phony hi-fi-ish quality that you hear on many pressings, especially the reissues on the second label.

Right off the bat, I want to say this is a work of GENIUS. Cat Stevens made three records that belong in the Pantheon of greatest popular recordings of all time. In the world of Folk Pop, Mona Bone Jakon, Teaser and the Firecat and Tea for the Tillerman have few peers. There may be other Folk Pop recordings that are as good but we know of none that are better.

Mike Bobak was the engineer for these sessions from 1970. He is the man responsible for some of the best sounding records from the early ’70s: The Faces’ Long Player, Rod Stewart’s Never a Dull Moment, The Kinks’ Lola Versus Powerman And The Moneygoround, Part One, (and lots of other Kinks albums), Carly Simon’s Anticipation and more than his share of obscure English bands (of which there seems to be a practically endless supply).

Tubey Magical acoustic guitar reproduction is superb on the better copies of this album. Simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum, along with the richness, body and harmonic coherency that have all but disappeared from modern recordings (and remasterings). (more…)

The Grateful Dead – Workingman’s Dead

More Grateful Dead

More Hippie Folk Rock

  • This early Green Label pressing was doing practically everything right, earning KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them from top to bottom – unusually quiet vinyl too for any record pressed in this era
  • A Top 100 album and a truly superb recording of the Dead at the peak of their creativity (along with American Beauty)
  • We love the amazingly big, rich, weighty bottom end found on the better pressings such as this one
  • 5 stars: “The lilting Uncle John’s Band, their first radio hit, opens the record and perfectly summarizes its subtle, spare beauty; complete with a new focus on more concise songs and tighter arrangements, the approach works brilliantly.”

This original Warner Brothers pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records rarely even BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. (more…)

Poco – Self-Titled

More Country and Country Rock

  • Poco’s Masterpiece of Country Prog Rock returns to the site for the first time in years, here with INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them from start to finish
  • These are just a few of the things we had to say about this stunning copy in our notes: “very rich bass and vox”…”jumping out of the speakers”…”full, breathy and 3D”…”lots of space”…”huge and open and tubey”…”dynamic guitar”
  • Big, rich, energetic, with an abundance of Analog Tubey Magic, this original Yellow Label Epic pressing has exactly the right sound for this music
  • A bonafide Desert Island Disc and 4 stars on the AMG: “These songs represent the group’s blend of country and rock at its finest and brightest, with the happy harmonies of ‘Hurry Up’ and ‘Keep on Believin” totally irresistible. Jim Messina’s ‘You Better Think Twice’ is a perfectly constructed and arranged song, one that should have been a huge hit but mysteriously never found its place in the Top 40 pantheon.”
  • When it comes to rock and pop music in 1970, our picks for the best of the best, numbering less than 30 titles, can be found here.

Poco’s second album is an unusual blend of country-rock, with some long, jazzy instrumental breaks that center around Rusty Young’s pedal steel, which doesn’t sound like any pedal steel guitar you’ve ever heard. It’s played with a wah-wah pedal and, if that wasn’t enough, the resulting sound is sent through a Leslie organ speaker.

We know it sounds crazy, but it really works. There is nothing else like it on record, nothing that we’ve ever heard anyway.

Country Prog Rock

Most of side two is taken up by a single track, “Nobody’s Fool / El Tonto de Nadie, Regresa.” It’s a suite in which the band stretches out instrumentally in a somewhat proggy way, although one could make the case that Bluegrass music is all about “stretching out instrumentally.”

The extended forays are held together by the brilliant pedal steel playing throughout. I have the feeling that Jim Messina, who left the band shortly after this album was released, was the guiding force behind breaking out of the 3-minute pop song format that Poco began with. Whoever may be responsible, they deserve credit for making what is in our minds one of the best Country Rock / Country Prog records of all time.

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Elton John / Tumbleweed Connection

More Elton John


  • Both sides of this early DJM import pressing have superb sound for Elton John’s 1970 Masterpiece, earning solid Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER
  • The sound here is richer, with much less transistory grain, and more of the all important Tubey Magic than most other copies we played
  • An incredible recording and longtime member of our Top 100 — our pick for Elton’s very best music and sound
  • 5 stars: “….[Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s] most ambitious record to date… A loose concept album about the American West… draws from country and blues in equal measures…”
  • If you’re an Elton John fan, this is a classic from 1970 that belongs in your collection
  • We consider this album to be a Masterpiece. It’s a recording that should be part of any serious popular music collection.
  • As is sometimes the case, there is one and only one set of stampers that consistently wins shootouts for this album.  Click on this link to see other titles with one set of stamper numbers that always come out on top

This has to be one of the best sounding rock records of all time — certainly worthy of a Top Ten spot on our Top 100 list. Engineered by Robin Geoffrey Cable at Trident, there is no other Elton John recording that is as big and powerful as Tumbleweed.

A copy like this really tells you why we love this album so. The highs are silky sweet, the vocals are full-bodied and breathy, and the tonal balance is perfection from top to bottom. And big drums — monstrously big. Can’t forget those.

By the way, if you have any doubts that Elton was a pop music genius, simply play this album a few dozen times. It’s all the proof you will need. Tumbleweed Connection and Honky Chateau are the two titles that are as close to perfect pop recordings as will ever exist in this world. 10 on a scale of 1 to 10.

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The Beatles – Let It Be

More of the Music of The Beatles

  • This vintage UK pressing boasts INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades on both sides – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Here are just a few of the things we had to say about this amazing copy in our notes: “big and punchy and breathy”…”sweet and spacious”…”jumping out of the speakers”…”weighty and rich and 3D”…”very full vox”
  • There’s no studio wizardry, no heavy-handed mastering, no phony EQ – here is the most realistic, natural Beatles sound you can get outside of the first album
  • Copies like this one make good on the promise that Let It Be captures the greatest rock band of all time playing and singing their hearts out
  • 4 1/2 stars: “The album is on the whole underrated… it’s an album well worth having, as when the Beatles were in top form here, they were as good as ever.”

At its best, Let It Be has the power of live music, but it takes a special pressing such as this one to show you that sound. It’s a bit trickier trying to find good sound for this album than it is for some of the other albums in the Beatles’ catalog.

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