4 get played quite a bit, actually: Pinball Wizard, I’m Free, Welcome and We’re Not Gonna Take It.
This gets into what is an ‘album’.
Undoubtedly, Berry’s top five or so singles were the most influential twenty minutes in Rock and Roll history, no question at all. They pretty much created and defined Rock and Roll, and as Keith Richards says, everybody since then is just ripping off his music.
But they were influential as singles, not as an LP.
I’m going to concur with whoever said Led Zeppelin IV.
Black Sabbath-Paranoid
Joy Division-Unknown Pleasures
Speaking of Tommy, the pinball-playing part was tossed in by Pete in an attempt to win over a particular critic (Nik Cohn).
The “rock opera” concept can be traced back further than Tommy; The Pretty Things’ S.F. Sorrow, for example, was recorded a year before The Who’s album. However, Pete, inspired by Kit Lambert, had experimented with a so-called “mini-opera” before with “A Quick One While He’s Away”. And the band toyed with a concept album with their 1967 faux-pirate radio “Sell Out”. It came together with Tommy. While the LP was less than “revolutionary” to some, anyone witnessing a live performance went away as a true believer.
But when I heard them, I thought “Cool, another band that sounds like Motörhead!”
Solidly in the already existing folk tradition. Very important in that this was the introduction of Dylan as a writer (not counting the two songs he wrote for his first album) and the beginning of Dylan’s symbolic poetry, in Hard Rain. But hardly a rock album. If they had included “Mixed Up Confusion,” perhaps.
While I suspect Highway 61 will be the popular choice, I’d pick Bringing it All Back Home. Great rock on side 1, and great poetry on side 2. If you listen to the bootleg series CD of the 1965 Carnegie Hall Concert, you’ll see how stunned the audience was by “It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding,” which was unlike anything they had ever heard before.
Music from Big Pink was the introduction of the stuff that Dylan and the Band was doing in the basement, which also got expressed later in “John Wesley Harding.” I’ve read quite a lot about Cream, but never that Clapton thought Cream was history after this. Cream, especially Clapton’s stuff, drank deeply from the blues tradition. Cream was the first supergroup, and also was the first supergroup to dissolve through personality conflicts. It’s not like Clapton ever adopted the tradition the Band represented.
Bursting? King had been writing for years before she recorded her own album. Wildly popular, yes, but revolutionary, not hardly - except perhaps to show that their was an audience for songs our parents wouldn’t find offensive.
Writers often labor in obscurity. Carole King was one, as was Neil Diamond and many others. As you say, while she’d been working for years, the Tapestry album was her first, and its success justifies my descriptive (15 weeks at #1 and four years on the charts). I think it inspired many female artists to jump into the fray, and also showed that pop music didn’t have to follow the standard rhyming schemes. I believe many artists rank her very highly.
Paul’s Boutique by the Beastie Boys
Bitches Brew by Miles Davis was jazz, but kicked off the (jazz-rock) fusion era.
Tom Waits? HUGE Beefheart influence. And a lot of major artists were heavily influenced by Beefheart even if you wouldn’t necessarily guess it from their music, like XTC and Red Hot Chili Peppers. And although they’re nearly as far away from the mainstream as Beefheart himself, I’ve gotta stick in a word for Pere Ubu.
I just finished reading two very nice biographies of (coincidentally enough) Cream and The Band, both of which made this point, and I’m pretty sure they included quotes from Clapton. I can provide you with more info if you like.
Please do. I wasn’t aware there was a book about Cream - certainly I knew of one about Clapton. From the liner notes of the Boxed set, which are quite extensive, they were pretty much down on themselves by the end.
Music From Big Pink has never been my favorite Band album - the bootleg versions of the Dylan songs are better, and Lonesome Suzie and Long Black Veil are awful. The Band on the other hand is a masterpiece. But I think I have a minority opinion about this, and it might have come from not hearing Big Pink before the second album. .
Huh. You know, that never occurred to me. I guess I can see it, although I’m still not sure how much it might be coincidental similarity… unfortunately, I don’t have enough TW to really judge. But you generally seem to be pretty knowledgeable about music.
So I guess we could add Rickie Lee Jones to the list of Beefheart influences too? 
I thought of that too, but I decided since it was the first punk album that got any notice from the mass media it still counts as revolutionary for alot of people. I’m sure I wasn’t the only 15 in 1977 who heard it and got hooked on a bunch of other bands that followed them.
A few that come to mind:
My Aim is True - Elvis Costello
Forever Changes - Love
Exile on Main Street - Rolling Stones
Blonde on Blonde - Bob Dylan
Kiss - Kiss
Blue - Joni Mitchell
Legend - Bob Marley & the Wailers
Graceland - Paul Simon
mmm
Not sure it was revolutionary in that it really influenced other bands or changed music much, but Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter was like nothing before or since.
Good choice, but I think I’m gonna vote for DESTROYER. IMO that album sums up exactly what the band is better than any other one they’ve released. Although I like either all or most of the songs on their albums since, the “Destroyer sound” seems to be the one that appeals to most people.
Just a nitpick; she released Writer the year before Tapestry but it flopped.
The book is Cream: How Eric Clapton Took the World by Storm, by Dave Thompson. (Judging by the content, which is not particularly Clapton-centric, I surmise that the subtitle was forced on the author by the publisher.) One particularly good thing about it is that it spends a lot of time on the very early British blues scene (Alexis Korner, Cyril Davies, Graham Bond, John Mayall). Anyway, this book quotes Clapton as follows regarding the Band’s debut LP (which Thompson unfortunately refers to throughout as “Music from the Big Pink”):
“I got hold of a tape of Big Pink from somewhere… and I used to put it on as soon as I checked into my hotel room, and listen to it, and then go and do the gig and be utterly miserable. Then rush back and put the tape on and go to sleep fairly contented, until I woke up the next morning and remembered who I was and what I was doing. It was that potent. And I thought, ‘Well, this is what I want to play – not extended solos and maestro bullshit, but just good funky songs.’”
(Of course, he had to get through Blind Faith before he even started moving in that direction.)
The other book I mentioned, This Wheel’s on Fire by Levon Helm with Stephen Davis, says that Clapton “was quoted in the British paper Melody Maker as saying Big Pink had made his group Cream, the contemporary kings of so-called acid rock, obsolete.” (But Clapton’s actual words are not given.) It also provides this little nugget: Clapton introduced the Band at the 1992 concert marking Bob Dylan’s thirty years of recording for CBS with the following words: “In 1968 an album came out called Music from Big Pink. It changed my life, and it changed the course of American music.”