Once again, prog gets overlooked, so my vote goes to Patti Smith.
Preach it. My favorite prog rock album of all time (along with Rush’s A Farewell to Kings) is the 1975 Zappa and the Mothers release One Size Fits All.
I know not all of Zappa’s music qualifies as prog, but that disc sure does.
Had to go with Dylan, Blood on the Tracks. Tangled up in Blue is one of my favorite songs of his.
You know, Patti Smith has never done it for me. “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine” - I get the power and the protest against a repressed upbringing, religion, etc. - but I didn’t grow up repressed, so it just seemed like, well, an okay cover of a cool old song.
And Horses - I was watching some doc about punk music, and they were interviewing, I think, Jay Dee Dougherty, her drummer. He talked about going to a club after performing in London for the first time in the mid-70’s. The Sex Pistols were there, and one of them - probably Steve Jones since he was a big instigator - looked at Smith’s band and said “Horses?! Horses?! Horses?! Sounds like horseshit to me!!!” and Jay Dee said he thought to himself “well, that was a fast 15 minutes.” or something like that.
When I found myself chuckling a bit more that I realized I would, I realized that I respected Smith and her band a lot more than I liked her. A decade ago, I lived across the street from her literary agent - we were talking music and she showed me the original draft of “Piss Factory” - an important poem of Smith’s about working in a hellhole. It was cool to see.
When I first heard “Born to Run” (the song) on the radio, I thought “wow, what a great Phil Spector parody!” And it is.
For my choice, it was “Basement Tapes”, which, it turns out included a bunch of ringers in that some of the Band’s songs were not basement tapes at all but recorded for this package - but they’re great songs, and there’s nothing here I don’t still like.
The Who By Numbers for me.
There are lots of great albums here that would be #1 in a lesser year. But both Blood on the Tracks and Born To Run are in a class by themselves AFAIAC. The passage of 40 years hasn’t diminished their power.
It was gonna be a coin toss, so I checked the results so far and cast a vote to make it more even. Springsteen it is.