
2001: A Space Odyssey
Kubrick took the audience from the first bone tool to the far side of Jupiter, explained almost nothing, and made every science fiction film since look domestic by comparison.

Kubrick took the audience from the first bone tool to the far side of Jupiter, explained almost nothing, and made every science fiction film since look domestic by comparison.
Seven minutes, four of them just na-na-na, and somehow nobody has ever wanted it to end sooner.

Motown shelved Gaye's version for over a year; it came out sounding like paranoia set to a Funk Brothers groove.

Hendrix took Dylan's parable and lit it, and Dylan has played it Hendrix's way ever since.

Ringo Starr quit for two weeks during the sessions and Paul played drums in his absence. The cover is plain white with a stamped serial number.

The western as ritual: Leone holds on faces until the tension turns physical, gives every character a Morricone theme, and makes three hours feel like a ceremony.

Morrison sat in an isolation booth and barely spoke to the jazz players hired to back him. The whole thing was done in three sessions.

Hendrix produced it himself, and spent so long in the studio that his manager walked out. One track is thirteen minutes of imagined underwater life.
Faithfull handed Jagger Bulgakov, Richards turned the folk sketch into samba and played both bass and the solo.

Redding cut the vocal three days before the plane crash, and Cropper finished it into the first posthumous American number one.

Robertson saw Nazareth stamped inside his 1951 Martin, and Helm sang the burden every verse hands over.

Cash's career was finished when he talked Columbia into letting him record for prisoners. The laughter after the Reno line was added afterward.

They wrote it in the basement of a pink house near Woodstock, and Bob Dylan painted the picture on the front.

Horror discovered it did not need monsters: Polanski built two hours out of a young wife nobody believes, and the dread comes entirely from politeness and closed doors.

The label refused the original sleeve, a photograph of a graffitied lavatory wall, and held the record back for months over it.
Named for the gardener who woke them up, and cut with an acoustic guitar recorded into a Philips cassette recorder.
Harrison opened a book at random, saw "gently weeps", and Clapton came in uncredited to play the solo.

Simon had it as Mrs. Roosevelt with nonsense syllables for a verse, and it won Record of the Year.

Webb sent it over unfinished, one verse short, and Campbell cut the loneliest three minutes in country music.
Cut May 3, 1968 with an ABC film crew rolling, and it became Hendrix's only British number one, posthumously.