Pet Sounds
1966
Brian Wilson made it with session players while the rest of the band toured, using bicycle bells, dog whistles and a Coca-Cola can.
★ 9.9
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1966
Showing 112 works across all media from 1966
Revolver
1966
On Tomorrow Never Knows, engineers held five tape loops on pencils and mixed them live. No Beatle plays an instrument on Eleanor Rigby.
★ 9.9
Good Vibrations
1966 · From Smiley Smile
Brian Wilson's pocket symphony, months and a fortune spent chasing one shimmering theremin line into the sunlight.
★ 9.8
Strawberry Fields Forever
1966 · From Magical Mystery Tour
Two takes in different keys and tempos spliced into one, a Mellotron haze over Lennon's Liverpool childhood.
★ 9.7
God Only KnowsThe Beach Boys
God Only Knows
1966 · From Pet Sounds
It opens by admitting doubt and spends the next two minutes refuting it; McCartney still calls it the greatest.
★ 9.7
Blonde on Blonde
1966
The Nashville session men sat around for hours while Dylan finished writing. Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands was cut at four in the morning.
★ 9.3
Eleanor Rigby
1966 · From Revolver
No Beatle plays an instrument on it; George Martin's string octet does everything, sawing away at two solitary lives.
★ 8.9
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Directed by Sergio Leone
1966 · Italy
No spaghetti western got higher, and no film score is better known: Leone shoots faces like landscapes, and Morricone's music does as much work as the dialogue.
★ 8.9
Try a Little Tenderness
1966 · From Complete & Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul
A 1932 Tin Pan Alley ballad, rearranged by Isaac Hayes, until Redding and Al Jackson tear the roof off.
★ 8.6
Persona
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
1966 · Sweden
More has been written about this film than almost any other: Bergman put two women on an island until their faces merged, and left everyone to explain what happened.
★ 8.5
Paint It, BlackThe Rolling Stones
Paint It, Black
1966 · From Aftermath
Jones's sitar made it the first number one to feature the instrument, and Decca added the comma by mistake.
★ 8.2
Wouldn't It Be NiceThe Beach Boys
Wouldn't It Be Nice
1966 · From Pet Sounds
Two accordions, a key change eight beats in, and 21 takes at Gold Star before Wilson sang about growing up.
★ 8.2
In Cold Blood
1966 · 343 pages
In 1959 two ex-convicts murdered a Kansas farm family of four they had never met. Capote spent years with the killers and turned reporting into a novel, patient and entirely without comfort.
★ 8.0
The Battle of Algiers
Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo
1966 · Italy
Both armies and revolutionaries have studied it as a manual: Pontecorvo staged the Algerian insurgency so plainly that audiences have always mistaken parts of it for newsreel footage.
★ 7.9
When a Man Loves a WomanPercy Sledge
When a Man Loves a Woman
1966
Sledge gave the writing credits away to two bandmates, and Atlantic pressed the take with the out-of-tune horns.
★ 7.9
Au Hasard Balthazar
Directed by Robert Bresson
1966
Godard said it contained the world in an hour and a half: a donkey passes from owner to owner, and Bresson makes cruelty and grace arrive without warning.
★ 7.8
It's a Man's Man's Man's World
1966 · From It's a Man's Man's Man's World
Betty Jean Newsome shares the credit and later claimed all of it; Sammy Lowe's strings carry Brown's most exposed vocal.
★ 7.7
Andrei Rublev
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
1966
The Soviets shelved it for years and cut it repeatedly: Tarkovsky follows an icon painter through a brutal Russia, and the bell casting sequence justifies the whole three hours.
★ 7.7
Eight Miles High
1966 · From Fifth Dimension
Columbia rejected the RCA session on a technicality, so McGuinn recut his Coltrane-inspired twelve-string and radio banned it anyway.
★ 7.6
You Keep Me Hangin' On
1966
Dozier reportedly took the Morse code guitar figure from a radio news signal, and Ross demands her exit over it.
★ 7.6
You Can't Hurry LoveThe Supremes
You Can't Hurry Love
1966
The frame came from a Dorothy Love Coates gospel record, and Jamerson's bass did the rest.
★ 7.6
River Deep, Mountain High
1966 · From River Deep - Mountain High
Twenty-one musicians at Gold Star, Turner singing until she was drenched, and a US peak of eighty-eight that broke Spector.
★ 7.6
96 Tears
1966
A Vox Continental organ, a Michigan basement studio, a tiny local label, and somehow the number one record in America.
★ 7.5
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Main theme)
1966
Alessandro Alessandroni whistled the two-note coyote howl, and Hugo Montenegro's cover of it reached number two in America.
★ 7.5
Wild Thing (The Troggs)
1966
Ten minutes at the end of somebody else's session, and an ocarina solo standing in for a hand whistle.
★ 7.5
Hey Joe
1966
Hendrix took Tim Rose's slow arrangement off a jukebox, Chandler hired the Breakaways, and Britain answered at number six.
★ 7.4
Hold On, I'm Comin'
1966
A shout through a Stax restroom door became the title, and Booker T.'s band made it an R&B number one.
★ 7.4
These Boots Are Made For Walkin'
1966
Chuck Berghofer's descending double bass, plus Sinatra talking Hazlewood into letting a woman sing lines written for a man.
★ 7.3
Sunny AfternoonThe Kinks
Sunny Afternoon
1966 · From Face to Face
A white upright piano, a bout of illness, and Britain's supertax reimagined as a lounging aristocrat pleading poverty.
★ 7.2
The Complete Poems
1966 · 908 pages
Waiting outside a Leningrad prison with a parcel for her son, Akhmatova was asked whether she could describe this. Requiem was the answer. Her love lyrics have the same merciless exactness.
★ 7.1
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
Directed by Mike Nichols
1966
Burton and Taylor were married and it shows in every line: a history professor and his wife drink through one night and take each other apart in front of guests.
★ 7.0
Scarborough Fair
1966
Simon learned it from Martin Carthy in London; Garfunkel wound an anti-war lyric through the ballad as counterpoint.
★ 7.0
Caroline, No
1966 · From Pet Sounds
Twelve players at Western, an empty water jug for percussion, and Murry Wilson speeding the tape a semitone.
★ 6.9
Sloop John B
1966 · From Pet Sounds
Al Jardine sold Wilson a Bahamian folk tune, and Billy Strange's twelve-string solo went down in a single take.
★ 6.9
Summer in the CityThe Lovin' Spoonful
Summer in the City
1966
Car horns and a jackhammer in the instrumental break, a garbage can for percussion, and the Spoonful's only number one.
★ 6.8
Against Interpretation
And Other Essays
1966 · 312 pages
Sontag's charge against criticism: pulling meaning out of a work is a way of not experiencing it. She wants attention paid to surface and speed, and asks for an erotics of art instead.
★ 6.8
The Crying of Lot 49
1966 · 183 pages
Named executor of an ex-lover's estate, Oedipa Maas keeps finding a muted post horn on bathroom walls. Either a secret postal system has run under America for centuries or she is unraveling.
★ 6.8
Substitute
1966
Townshend built it from a single word in "Tracks of My Tears", and American pressings rewrote the line about race.
★ 6.8
Mustang SallyWilson Pickett
Mustang Sally
1966
Muscle Shoals cut it in 1966, and the title was Aretha Franklin's idea; Mack Rice had called it Mustang Mama.
★ 6.8
Walk Away Renee
1966
Sixteen-year-old Michael Brown's hands shook when Renee walked into the control room, so he cut the harpsichord part later, alone.
★ 6.8
Ain't Too Proud to BegThe Temptations
Ain't Too Proud to Beg
1966
"Get Ready" stalled at 29, so Gordy handed the Temptations to Whitfield, and Ruffin tore into the result.
★ 6.6
That's Life
1966 · From That's Life
Ernie Freeman's arrangement, and a second take Sinatra resented making; the annoyance is why the vocal snarls.
★ 6.6
Sunday MorningThe Velvet Underground
Sunday Morning
1966 · From The Velvet Underground & Nico
Cale spotted a celesta in the studio, Warhol suggested paranoia, and the last track cut became the album's gentle opener.
★ 6.5
Gimme Some Lovin'
1966
Half an hour in a Marquee rehearsal room, by Muff Winwood's account, and Steve's placeholder yell became the title.
★ 6.5
Rain
1966
Emerick taped the backing fast and slowed it on playback; Ringo called it the best record he ever made.
★ 6.5
Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)Nancy Sinatra
Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)
1966
Tremolo guitar from arranger Billy Strange, a murder-ballad chorus, and the reading Tarantino chose for Kill Bill's credits.
★ 6.5
I Fought the Law
1966
Written by Sonny Curtis after he replaced Buddy Holly in the Crickets, then reborn as Bobby Fuller's number nine.
★ 6.5
You're Gonna Miss Me
1966
Erickson wrote this kiss-off at fifteen, and Tommy Hall's electric jug gave Texas garage rock its strangest sound.
★ 6.4
Standing in the Shadows of LoveThe Four Tops
Standing in the Shadows of Love
1966
Holland-Dozier-Holland cut the vocals at Golden World in October 1966, and Levi Stubbs sings like the blow already landed.
★ 6.4
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
1966 · 128 pages
Two minor courtiers from Hamlet wait in the wings of a play they cannot follow, flipping a coin that lands heads ninety two times running. Stoppard wrings comedy and dread from their helplessness.
★ 6.4
Season of Migration to the North
1966 · 169 pages
Mustafa Sa'eed sailed north to London and left ruined Englishwomen behind him, an African answer to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Arab writers voted it the century's most important novel in Arabic.
★ 6.4
Don't Come Home A' Drinkin' (With Lovin' On Your Mind)
1966 · From Don't Come Home A' Drinkin' (With Lovin' On Your Mind)
Lynn and her sister Peggy Sue wrote it, and the album became country music's first gold record by a woman.
★ 6.3
Get Ready
1966
Smokey's song, Kendricks singing lead, number one R&B but only twenty-nine pop, which handed the group to Whitfield.
★ 6.3
You Don't Have to Say You Love Me
1966
Two people who had never written a lyric rewrote a Sanremo ballad, and Springfield cut her vocal in a stairwell.
★ 6.3
Strangers in the NightFrank Sinatra
Strangers in the Night
1966 · From Strangers in the Night
Bert Kaempfert's film melody, an Ernie Freeman arrangement, Sinatra's first number one in eleven years, and he reportedly hated it.
★ 6.3
I'm a BelieverThe Monkees
I'm a Believer
1966
Seven weeks at number one for Neil Diamond's song, with Diamond himself on acoustic guitar behind Dolenz's lead.
★ 6.2
It Was A Very Good YearFrank Sinatra
It Was A Very Good Year
1966 · From September of My Years
Ervin Drake's vintage-wine conceit reached Sinatra via the Kingston Trio, and Gordon Jenkins's arrangement won its own Grammy.
★ 6.2
The Kids Are Alright
1966 · From My Generation
Recorded at IBC in October 1965, it stalled at 41 in Britain, then became the mod movement's calling card.
★ 6.1
Season of the Witch
1966
Two chords built for jamming, Mickie Most in the producer's chair, and folk-pop suddenly acquired a shiver of paranoia.
★ 6.1
Tell It Like It Is
1966
Neville was working the New Orleans docks when he cut this for Par-Lo, a label built to release it.
★ 6.0
I Am a Rock
1966
Simon first cut it alone for a UK-only album, then Hal Blaine and Carol Kaye turned withdrawal electric.
★ 6.0
Give us this day our television, and an automobile, but deliver us from freedom.
Masculin Feminin · 1966
Daydream
1966
Sebastian was chasing the straight-eighth lilt of 'Baby Love' on tour with the Supremes; McCartney answered with 'Good Day Sunshine'.
★ 5.8
Aftermath
1966
Their first album written entirely in-house, with Brian Jones reaching for the marimba, the dulcimer and the sitar between the blues numbers.
★ 5.5
Devil with a Blue Dress On
1966
Shorty Long cut it slow and bluesy first; Ryder welded it to Good Golly, Miss Molly and hit number four.
★ 5.4
If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.
The Psychology of Science · 1966
KicksPaul Revere & the Raiders
Kicks
1966
Mann and Weil wrote it about Gerry Goffin's drug problems, by Mann's account; the Raiders took it to number four.
★ 5.2
The Psychology of Science · 1966
Bus Stop
1966
Graham Gouldman's father handed him the opening lines; Gouldman finished the middle eight on his own bus to work.
★ 5.0
The Sacrifice of Isaac (Chagall)
1966 · Musee National Marc Chagall, Nice
The angel comes down to stop the knife, in the deep reds and blues Chagall used for his late cycle of biblical paintings.
★ 4.8
If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears
1966
The four of them sang in a block harmony nobody had used in pop, and the first cover photograph had them all in a bathtub.
★ 4.4
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme
1966
The last track lays a Christmas carol over a real news broadcast, so the two get harder to separate as it goes on.
★ 4.3
Sounds of Silence
1966
Their producer added drums and electric guitar to an old acoustic track without telling them. It became a hit and the duo reformed.
★ 4.3
Fresh Cream
1966
Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker had already been throwing things at each other in a previous band. Baker's drum solo takes up five minutes.
★ 4.0
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly · 1966
Sinatra at the Sands
1966
Count Basie's orchestra behind him, Quincy Jones's arrangements, and a long unscripted monologue in the middle that is half the reason people keep it.
★ 3.9