Sourced and spun.
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Alive!
It is billed as a live album but a good deal of it was rebuilt in the studio afterward. It saved the record label from bankruptcy.
Slippery When Wet
They played demos to groups of New Jersey teenagers and cut the songs the kids liked least. It sold twenty-eight million copies.
Buffalo Springfield Again
The band was falling apart while they made it, recording their songs separately. Neil Young quit twice before it was finished.
Bat Out of Hell
Every label turned it down, and Todd Rundgren produced it partly because he thought it was a parody. It has sold over forty million.
Use Your Illusion II
Knockin' on Heaven's Door is a Bob Dylan song written for a western. The video for Estranged cost around four million dollars to make.
Use Your Illusion I
Both volumes were recorded together and released the same day, because the band could not agree on what to leave off a single album.
New York Dolls
Todd Rundgren produced it in about a week and nobody was happy with how it sounded. It sold almost nothing and changed everything.
Made in Japan
The band thought a live album was a waste of time and only agreed because it was for the Japanese market alone.
Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!
Recorded on the 1969 American tour, weeks before Altamont. Charlie Watts posed for the cover with a donkey carrying the band's instruments.
2112
The label wanted something commercial, so Rush delivered a twenty-minute dystopian suite about a banned guitar. It worked, and bought them their freedom.
Rocks
They recorded it in a converted warehouse they rented as a clubhouse. Slash and Kurt Cobain both named it the record that started them.
Pronounced Leh-nerd Skin-nerd
The band named themselves after a gym teacher who kept sending them home over their hair. Free Bird's guitar outro runs five minutes.
Disraeli Gears
The title came from a roadie getting derailleur gears wrong. They recorded the whole thing in New York in under a week.
Raw Power
David Bowie mixed it and everyone including Iggy Pop hated the result. Iggy remixed the whole thing himself twenty-four years later.
Toys in the Attic
The title of Walk This Way came from a line in Young Frankenstein, which the band went to see during a break in the sessions.
Axis: Bold as Love
Hendrix left the finished master of side one in a taxi and had to mix the whole thing again overnight.
Houses of the Holy
The song called Houses of the Holy is not on Houses of the Holy. The cover children were photographed at the Giant's Causeway.
Sticky Fingers
Andy Warhol's sleeve had a real working zip, which scratched the records stacked behind it in the crates. The tongue logo starts here.
Darkness on the Edge of Town
Three years of litigation kept Springsteen out of a studio, and when he got back in he gave away most of the catchy songs.