Whichalbums of the sixties should be inthe Top100?

Mortte: 600 is not a low number. If 600 people love the album that much, why should it not be high up the list? In statistics 600 is a pretty good sample size to estimate an average. (By the way I'm not one of these people. )

If 1000 ratings would be required or something, no new album and no album of less popular genres would ever have a chance to reach the top 100 (I think no RIO album apart from Zappa has anywhere near 1000 ratings; the maximum in Zeuhl seems to be 972 and there seem to be only 2 albums above 500).

In the Court of the Crimson King (1969)

In the poll lisit: A Saucerful of Secrets

I think PA ranking has voices that seem ambiguous to me, because it speaks of "essential" (5 stars) and "excellent addition to each collection" (4 stars), or "good but not essential" (three stars).

A nice listing ... and I do not exactly wish to think that none of them were as valuable and worthwhile as they really are, and the only thing that bothers me is that the PF album did not really get "known" until the secret was out that some trip band was doing some far out shows out there, and that was into the 70's ... the other two were fame based, and while I love the albums, I would not exactly have voted for them.

On the listing, I miss a couple of things that I find valuable and important ... Jefferson Airplane, deserves to be listed, even if it is a difficult band to get into because they are all over the place. The other one, and it did not have anything to do with Gary Duncan passing recently, is Quicksilver Messenger Service ... and listening to some of those long cuts, it's really hard to not imagine that it inspired other folks ... the least of which, of course, would have been MAN ... who eventually played with John Cippolina. Maybe another band, would have been Spirit ... whose album The 12 Dreams of ... was from 1970, but it really was a nice take on many of the "hits" in the 60's and it was absolutely well done, and fantastic, not to mention that their big hit off that album is such a beautifully done piece. (Nature's Way).

Lastly, It's a Beautiful Day, that for my tastes helped a lot of folks in rock music to appreciate different instruments ... not that they were not alive in Europe already -- where music history is not usually forgotten, but here in America, it's like ... nothing was ever done like that! ... it has been and it was ... but what IABD did was super nice and the sad part of it is that they are only remembered for one song, and deserved a lot better than they got.

There probably are a lot more things, while I do not think that "In a Gadda Da Vita" deserves to be mentioned, it did help with the long cut and the "trip" content of a piece of music, something that many places like the Fillmore, were playing and letting the audiences enjoy the musicality of any piece of music, and both Santana, and The Grateful Dead belong here, although Santana immediately switched to "hits" and "songs" the minute that one of their pieces hit the top of the pops.

It's a nice poll ... but one that I have a hard time voting, since I have all of these albums listed plus the ones I mentioned ... and even things like FZ are tough to vote since they are so divisive in terms of folks appreciating what was done ... for example, for my tastes, FZ best in that time was 200 Motels, which was unlike all of everything else a complete piece, even though it was too strange, weird and off kilter for most audiences ... but when you hear the live version of it done at UCLA just before Gayle passed away, it is easy to see why it was so great ... it's "modern" music, like rock'n'roll will never be!

But, for any art-work, you look at beauty, for example a painting, a film, a novel: when you say masterpiece you mean the most beautiful. The quality of a work of art is its beauty, which does not mean classical beauty. In fact, if you think of paintings, or music, from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century the concept of beauty has changed: now it can be considered beautiful a dissonant, atonal, cacophonous piece of music, which before they would have considered ugly, a crap, just as the paintings first followed the classical beauty while then with Cubism, Surrealism etc. there are paintings considered masterpieces (i.e. beautiful) that to see them however cause discomfort. Beauty today can be disturbing.

Okay, there is a couple of things I'd like to point out.

1. In order to make "room" for 60s albums, I looked at PA's Top 100 ranking and realized there is quite a few albums I'd never include. Recency bias aside (All Traps on Earth, penultimate IQ, Wilson stuff), I don't think Miles Davis should get a nod - superb quality, wrong genre. Prog metal albums are less controversial, but they still raise my eyebrow. In other words, I can see a place for an album or two.

2. Most of the albums presented above aren't full-fledged progressive rock as well. Soft Machine, Caravan, Ummagumma, We're Only in It for the Money and a few others are fun and quirky, but there is a separation between quirky and proggy in my mind. Then we have more mainstream, but colorful candidates, i.e. Sea Shanties, Valentyne Suite or A Salty Dog... all fine albums, but additional flavors and ornaments don't change my opinion either. Continuing that train of thought, I can't really put Stand Up in Top 100 because it also misses the "progressive" mark by a tiny margin. Believe me, I'm a die hard Jethro fan so it would be an easy way out of this thread, but trying to be honest here!

3. I'm leaning towards Uncle Meat and Ars Long Vita Brevis here. The former combines juvenile Zappa eccentrities with a healthy dose of surprising but engaging music. I think it fits the bill, quality-wise... but the latter is a much safer pick. I love the side long track, I totally buy into Emerson bombastic passages and showboating. To my ears, The Nice is almost as proggy as ELP themselves. So these two are my choices, with a slight preference for Ars Long Vita Brevis. Gun to my head, if I have to add a third album, I'd go with Phallus Dei.

4.

Beauty - the quality of being pleasing, especially to look at, or someone or something that gives great pleasure, especially when you look at it. [dictionary.cambridge.org]

Beauty - the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit. [Merriam Webster]