The 200 Best Albums of the 1960s
Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Albert Ayler, the Velvet Underground, Eric Dolphy, Dusty Springfield, and the other artists who changed music forever
When considering the whole sweep of 20th century music, the 1960s loom especially large. Some of the importance placed on the music of the decade can be traced to demographics (the massive baby boomer generation born after World War II reached prime music-listening age) and technology (the consumer electronics industry was creating new listening spaces in automobiles and on television, and advancements in sound reinforcement made large concerts possible). Still, there’s no getting around the fact that the music of the ’60s made a huge impact at the time and never really went away. In the 1950s, the album charts were dominated by easy listening singers like Bing Crosby and endless musicals, records that only have niche audiences now. But so many top LPs from the 1960s continue to enthrall old and new listeners, and they're still re-discovered and re-assessed.
This list is Pitchfork’s attempt to do just that. The key for us in assembling this list, which is based on votes from more than 50 full-time staffers and regularly contributing writers, is to make sure we opened up our look at the decade to incorporate all places where great music was happening in LP form. That means, in addition to a mix of rock and pop and R&B, our list is heavy on jazz and includes quite a bit of early electronic music alongside records from outside the English-speaking world. Inevitably, our list also reflects the realities of the marketplace in the ’60s—some brilliant singles artists never made a great album. But we hope this list represents the best of what the decade has to offer and reflects how people explore music now. In 2017, we’re not making the same divisions between, say, Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way and John Fahey’s The Legend of Blind Joe Death or Nico’s Chelsea Girl; they’re all gorgeous records that fill a room, records we stream and collect and share with our friends with a “you gotta hear this one.” Here are 197 more.
Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and our Apple Music playlist.
Composer Ennio Morricone and director Sergio Leone worked in tandem throughout the 1960s on Italian spaghetti westerns, and their masterpiece is The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The entire three-hour epic is conjured fully in the first five notes of Morricone’s theme, that mythical coyote howl. Then comes the anachronistic kang of electric guitar, the strident trumpet, and wooden flute; you can feel the dirt from the graveyard and smell Clint Eastwood’s cigar.
Before the film was shot, Morricone and Leone worked out musical themes for the three main characters, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is one of the greatest soundtracks in history because it feels like the movie was retrofitted to it. What should happen during “L’Estasi Dell’Oro (The Ecstasy of Gold)”? Let’s just have a guy run around in circles for a few minutes. What about “Il Triello (The Trio)”? How about three guys just stand there and stare at each other? These are thrilling moments in cinematic history, devoid of dialogue—just the tactile, otherworldly music of Morricone guiding the film into the sunset. –Jeremy D. Larson
Listen: Ennio Morricone: “Il Triello”
Before the Summer of Love, there was the Season of the Witch. In it, Donovan Leitch transformed from the Scottish Bob Dylan into the Sunshine Superman, a paisley-clad and permed psychedelic who wrote fables about rotund angels, Arthurian queens, and Sunset Strip nightclubs where Fellini dream women danced with sequins in their hair.
Donovan drew his formula from Celtic mythology, hillbilly American folk, Indian sitar ragas, Beat poetry, and the occasional bongo solo. The 20-year-old gypsy also conscripted future Led Zeppelin members Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones as session men on the title track, which soared to No. 1 in the United States. In the process, Donovan hallucinated the modern archetype of the guitar-picking mystic, one that would be borrowed by Marc Bolan, pre–Hunky Dory David Bowie, and the Tolkien fanatics who’d just shared his studio. –Jeff Weiss
Listen: Donovan: “Sunshine Superman”
The fifth album from the Chicago-born pianist Andrew Hill catapulted him to the top tier of forward-looking jazz composers of the ’60s. As Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane pioneered jazz’s “New Thing” movement, loosening the shackles of long-established chord progressions, Hill’s tight-knit pieces played within them, drawing on post-bop, avant-garde, and the blues. Point of Departure is at once abstract and dynamic, labyrinthine and lyrical, dizzying and dense with ideas. In this session, Hill found his perfect foil in the adventurous woodwind multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy (who would tragically die just three months later). Joined by several other talented collaborators, they soar to the furthest reaches of Hill’s ever-shifting compositions, offering a fearless moment in a tumultuous era for jazz. –Andy Beta
Listen: Andrew Hill: “New Monastery”
Among the most intense of the early free jazz albums, pianist Cecil Taylor’s 1966 Blue Note debut, Unit Structures, still challenges notions of musical freedom. Recorded during the same season that the psychedelic ballroom scene was starting to bubble in San Francisco, Unit Structures did more to disassemble music than nearly all of the light-show-drenched psychedelia that followed. The album is by no means easy listening; the atonality is unrepentant. But Taylor’s septet finds numerous gorgeous spaces as they interpret “free jazz” not just as the freedom to improvise but the freedom to invent musical worlds and hidden syntaxes. The only way to tap into the “rhythm-sound energy found in the amplitude of each time unit,” as Taylor wrote in the liner notes, is to listen reverently. –Jesse Jarnow
Listen: Cecil Taylor: “Steps”
To read most rock histories, you’d think women started picking up guitars sometime in the mid-1970s. The truth is, pioneering singer-guitarists like Wanda Jackson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe were as instrumental as any male musician in helping rock’n’roll coalesce out of rockabilly, country, R&B, and blues in the 1950s. Jackson, nicknamed “The Queen of Rockabilly,” even toured with—and dated—Elvis when she was a teenager.
The best introduction to Jackson’s early work is Rockin’ With Wanda!, an exhilarating compilation of two-minute masterpieces that showcase her remarkable range. There’s the plaintive country balladry of “Sinful Heart,” the proto-girl-group hearts and flowers of “A Date With Jerry,” and clap-along jump rope jams like “You’re the One for Me.” But her charisma really shines on her fastest, toughest, most boastful tracks. Along with her famous novelty single “Fujiyama Mama” (a big hit in Japan, despite its distasteful references to Hiroshima and Nagasaki), “Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad” and “Don’a Wan’a” were the riot grrrl anthems of their day. –Judy Berman
Listen: Wanda Jackson: “Rock Your Baby”
Harry Nilsson’s third LP, Aerial Ballet, is where his work shifts irrevocably, moving from the quirky psychedelic pop that was tapering off in the late 1960s into the more naturalistic singer-songwriter style of the looming ’70s.
By the time Aerial was released, Nilsson hadn’t scored a hit for himself, but he had written mind-bending, orchestral songs for the Shangri-Las, the Turtles, and the Monkees. But the more low-key aspects of Aerial Ballet reflect the soft rock that would become increasingly popular in the next few years. Ironically, the album’s two most famous tracks are a cover of Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” and Nilsson’s own “One,” which the rock group Three Dog Night would turn into a major smash soon after. Both songs are the perfect encapsulations of Nilsson’s unusual yet direct approach to making music: embedding lyrical gut-punches into catchy folk-pop riffs and experimental production techniques. Even before Nilsson made his mark as one of the most coveted songwriters of his generation, Aerial Ballet served as a snapshot of the unconventional style that would make him a cult icon. –Cameron Cook
Listen: Nilsson: “One”
In 1963, Donald Byrd, already a leading light of bebop as a trumpeter and bandleader, set out to make what he called “an entire album of spiritual-like pieces.” The result was A New Perspective, a sort of symphony in five movements that incorporated blues, doo-wop, and even opera into its more conspicuous hard bop and liturgical influences. Brought to life by an ensemble that included a young Herbie Hancock and a sizable choir, A New Perspective is often dominated by the haunting, otherworldly passages Byrd wrote for its fluid female voices. But unlike other bop compositions of the era, which drew on popular melodies and forms as grist for improvisation, A New Perspective incorporated its hard bop forays into an ambitious art-music framework closer in structure to a classical oratorio like Handel’s Messiah. It’s perhaps one of the purest embodiments of Nina Simone’s famous assertion that the innovative project categorized as “jazz” might better be characterized as “black classical music.” –Edwin “STATS” Houghton
Listen: Donald Byrd: “Elijah”
After worshipping waves, babes, and automobiles for two records, the Beach Boys began to look inward on Surfer Girl. Thanks to the success of Surfin’ USA and “Surf City,” a No. 1 track written for their SoCal pop peers Jan and Dean, Capitol allowed Brian Wilson to produce an entire Beach Boys record for the first time; he pulled out all the stops, introducing string arrangements and more session players into the group’s sound.
Though Surfer Girl contains “Catch a Wave,” “Little Deuce Coupe,” and other songs about the Californian myth, two moments emerge as more searching masterpieces. One is the title track, a sleepy love ballad and a sincere expression of longing that portrays the ocean as a delicate place where “love could grow.” And “In My Room” moves even deeper into Wilson’s vulnerability, with nary a mention of romance. Instead, it pays tribute to the sanctuary of the childhood bedroom, a place where Brian and his brothers could escape their abusive father/manager, Murry Wilson, and sing together in peace. In these breaks from the Beach Boys’ pop gaiety, Wilson began to probe the wistfulness at his core, hinting at further genius to come. –Quinn Moreland
Listen: The Beach Boys: “In My Room”
You can’t quite call Link Wray’s debut album his signature effort, since his first and most famous garage-rock single, “Rumble,” isn’t on it. But his next three subsequent, equally great singles are, as well as a tune called “Ramble” that’s basically a self rip-off of “Rumble.” Add a ripping rockabilly jam called “Raw-Hide,” a few homecoming-dance-worthy rock numbers complete with swinging horns, and some more solid originals, and what could’ve sounded like a hodgepodge turns out to be a dead-spot-free display of Wray’s talents.
Most of Link Wray & the Wraymen bears a distinct sonic style that’s still influential today—especially Wray’s high-octane riffs, which basically invented the power chord. The album is also a charming family affair—brothers Vernon (rhythm guitar) and Doug (drums) were Wraymen—though Link’s the clear sonic leader, making the case for a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction that somehow still hasn’t happened. But the list of Hall-of-Famers who worship him—Dylan, Townshend, Page, Springsteen—is testament enough to his power. –Marc Masters
Amon Düül began as a radical art commune in Munich, one whose extended jam sessions were open to all. Soon, the most musically adept members went their own way, and this splinter group made their debut with Phallus Dei. In Latin, the title means “God’s Penis”—as statements of intent go, this is certainly up there. Krautrock didn’t exist yet, but 1969 was the year when the political, musical, and social currents running through the German counterculture began to coalesce into actual recorded music.
Pink Floyd and Hawkwind are obvious touchstones, though Amon Düül II felt distinct from much of the prog in the UK or U.S., their music unprissy and shot through with a primal weirdness. “Kanaan” weaves together Eastern scales, rolling hand percussion, and the operatic keening of Renate Knaup into something mystic and heavy, while “Dem Guten, Schönen, Wahren” is a hallucinogenic nightmare of delirious falsetto vocals, curdled acid-folk, and beer-hall chanting. And the title track is 20 minutes of gale-force psych and mangled violin that resembles a Germanic Velvet Underground. –Louis Pattison
Wildflowers sets three of Judy Collins’ songs alongside covers of Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, and her take on Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” turned into the hit that launched this album up the charts. Though a product of the acoustic guitar-favoring Greenwich Village folk scene, Collins was by this point singing over lush orchestral arrangements, with sweet choruses of clarinet and flute complementing the effortless formality of her own voice. It’s that formality that can be a stumbling block to enjoying an album like this some half a century later, but Collins’ powdery femininity is ultimately an impeccable match for the tender naturalism that fills the lyrics of her songs, where love stories play out amid images of “lilies and lace” and “amethyst fountains.” –Thea Ballard
Listen: Judy Collins: “Sky Fell”
While Cannonball Adderley may be the bandleader on Mercy, Mercy, Mercy! Live at “The Club,” the record is arguably as much a showcase for his brother’s songwriting and playing. Nat Adderley wrote the two opening numbers, “Fun” and “Games,” which are hard bop at its most enthusiastic and mercurial; his playing is appropriately ecstatic, buoyed by joy into gymnastic flights and contortions. The focus also inevitably drifts to pianist Joe Zawinul, three years before he played the sustained organ notes that opened the title track of Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way; here, his composition “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” merges soul and jazz in the hybrid timbre of his electric piano. But it’s the polyphonic sense of play in the group’s improvisations, particularly in Cannonball’s solos, that lends the session its aura of excitability and invention. It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t actually recorded at a club but in a Los Angeles studio, to which they invited a small crowd: It only contributes to the feeling that this record, from start to finish, was produced in a totally imaginative space. –Brad Nelson
Dave Van Ronk was a ubiquitous figure of Greenwich Village folk culture, one so essential and deeply rooted that he struggled to attract ears beyond it. Ironically, it was a scene he never quite fit into, literally or figuratively: A 6-foot-5 Swede and early mentor to Bob Dylan, the dive-bar philosopher cast a keen ear to blues traditions instead of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger’s acoustic, Americana strums.
On Folksinger, Van Ronk’s somber masterstroke, he filters plaintive 12-bar traditionals through jazzy folk paces and a mournful yet bristling growl. His crawl through the standard “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me” is almost oppressively intimate, its spare fingerpicked guitar and slow-pooling croon as stifling as the solitude he’s succumbing to. His soulful yet chatty pass through “Cocaine Blues” brings a modern sheen to the addict’s tale, rivaling Dylan’s reedier, less convincing turn. For such troubles, Joan Baez called him “the closest living offshoot of Leadbelly,” while the Coen brothers loosely based Inside Llewyn Davis on him, finally giving this perennial outsider his due. –Stacey Anderson
Surrealistic Pillow is to San Francisco what The Velvet Underground & Nico is to New York: an iconic album that captures a city’s sound circa the Summer of Love. Surrealistic Pillow finds the band compiling their cornerstones of crunchy psychedelia, languid blues, and freewheeling jamming—but this time, they have Grace Slick, a femme fatale alto with the fury of a valkyrie. Coupled with Rick Jarrard’s Spectorian production, melodically top-heavy and immediate, Slick’s jagged hooks on “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit” earned Jefferson Airplane their reputation as the first big San Francisco band. Surrealistic Pillow is high-definition psychedelia that’s both exotic and approachable. –Zoe Camp
Listen: Jefferson Airplane: “Today”
Arthur could’ve been the Kinks’ Tommy. Commissioned to accompany a teleplay co-written by frontman Ray Davies, it was forced to stand on its own after the TV movie was scrapped. So instead of a zeitgeist multimedia experience, this follow-up to The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society became the band’s second great, quintessentially English concept album in as many years.
In a 1970 interview, Davies joked that Arthur was “about the rise and fall of the British Empire, which people tend to associate me with,” and he told that story through the eyes of a character based on his brother-in-law, Arthur Anning. After opening with the soaring “Victoria,” a rock monument to the Queen’s bygone Britain, the carpetlayer’s tale descends into the horrors of the World Wars on “Some Mother’s Son” and “Mr. Churchill Says.” Its centerpiece is a one-two punch of sarcasm on “Australia,” a sing-along escape anthem, and “Shangri-La,” a folk hymn to suburban consumerism. But while Davies is barbed, he still shows a grudging empathy for his countrymen, lending an undertone of sweetness to a history lesson that could have come off as merely bitter. –Judy Berman
Listen: The Kinks: “Brainwashed”
Few humans were ever able to wrestle melody out of an upright bass or command a cacophonous jazz band like Charles Mingus—though all that is basically irrelevant on this album of solo piano works. The idea seems a bit incongruous, like if Eddie Van Halen decided to release an oboe-only record in his prime, but Mingus was no dilettante on the keys. At a young age, he was mentored on the instrument by the quick-fingered jazz titan Art Tatum, and this album of originals, reinterpretations, and spontaneous performances adds another dimension to his staggering talent.
Unlike Mingus’ full-band albums and shows, which could be rambunctious affairs that teetered on the precipice of chaos, Mingus Plays Piano is gorgeously spare, incorporating elements of jazz, blues, and his beloved classical music. Opener “Myself When I Am Real” was largely made up on the spot, a shapeshifting ballad that doubles as a spiritual portrait of Mingus’ own creativity. Elsewhere, there are skewed standards, quiet confessionals, and an eight-and-a-half minute ode to Mingus’ America, a complex and troubling place where black men like him were often left out. The record’s haunted soul still speaks to artists like Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes, who sampled “Myself When I Am Real” to introduce his own profound and personal treatise on being black in America, Freetown Sound. Truth, beauty, liberty—it’s all here. Unadorned. –Ryan Dombal
The BBC Radiophonic Workshop was founded in 1958 as a space in which composers, musicians, and engineers experimented with techniques for producing sound under the auspices of soundtracking BBC programming. Released a decade into the Workshop’s tenure, this compilation collects 31 short works by Delia Derbyshire, David Cain, and John Baker. Though these pieces were designed for functional use in broadcast programming, taken together, they present a view of the strange, brilliant sonic terrain being forged at the Workshop.
Many of these pieces are essentially jingles, driven by lilting melodies, but even the most cloying of tunes are uncanny in their construction, featuring experimental techniques ranging from musique concrète tape-collage to recording and sampling odd everyday sounds. Derbyshire dips into the weird, particularly, and her work would prove invaluable to generations of electronic experimentalists who followed her, including Aphex Twin and the Chemical Brothers. She relishes in new sounds and unsettling melodic forms; the metallic clatter and modulated vocals of a track like her “Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO” anticipates the twists that pop would soon take. –Thea Ballard
Listen: John Baker: “Milky Way”
According to the chorus of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jenning’s song “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love),” the Holy Trinity of country music includes Willie himself, Hank Williams, and the somewhat lesser-known Mickey Newbury. The latter’s 1969 album Looks Like Rain might get chalked up as a record by a songwriter’s songwriter, but his music served as an offering to pop, soul, and country singers alike: Jennings, Kenny Rogers, Solomon Burke, Roy Orbison, and Jerry Lee Lewis all covered his songs. He became the spiritual forefather for the outlaw country movement, and later for indie singers like Bill Callahan and Will Oldham. Here, Newbury accompanies his songs of unbearable heartbreak with acoustic guitar, but he also couches them in church choirs and sitar, as well as the sounds of chimes, rain, and distant trains, creating a singular album that might best be described as ambient country. –Andy Beta
Soft Machine’s self-titled debut album is a Rosetta Stone for adventurous rock music. The British band’s founding lineup—bassist and baritone vocalist Kevin Ayers, shirtless drummer and devastating high tenor singer Robert Wyatt, organist Mike Ratledge, and Australian guitarist Daevid Allen—ranked alongside Pink Floyd in London’s psychedelic underground. After visa issues forced Allen out, the remaining trio toured with the Jimi Hendrix Experience and finally cut an LP with Hendrix’s producer.
The Soft Machine unites psych-rock frenzy with modern-jazz improvisation, a refreshingly new idea at the time, and the joyful medley kicked off by opener “Hope for Happiness” still breathes with discovery. Better yet is the Ayers-led “We Did It Again,” a brutishly minimalist link between the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” and krautrock’s motorik that could stretch out to a trance-inducing 40 minutes live. Today, the Soft Machine are known as pioneers of prog-rock, jazz fusion, and the Canterbury scene, and their members have enjoyed fruitful avant-garde careers. This debut captures a pregnant moment when all paths remained open. –Marc Hogan
Lesley Gore’s debut album, which she began recording when she was just 16, follows a party attended by a teenage love triangle: herself, her beau Johnny, and that interloper Judy. For a record that kicks off with seven songs about sobbing, I’ll Cry If I Want To maintains an impressively consistent, candied sweetness throughout; produced by Quincy Jones, the album epitomizes the sound of early-1960s girl-group pop, airtight in structure as it soars, dreamy-eyed, through tales of young love and loss. Gore eases through shimmery choruses and lovelorn ballads, but she also embraces despair, spite, and other less lovely parts of being a young woman. Before she released the second-wave feminist anthem “You Don’t Own Me,” Gore was, in a way, already carving out room for women within the narrow parameters of girl-group femininity. –Thea Ballard
Listen: Lesley Gore: “Cry Me a River”