The White Album
1968
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.
★ 9.2
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1968
Showing 18 albums from 1968
Astral Weeks
1968
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.
★ 8.9
Electric Ladyland
1968
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.
★ 8.9
At Folsom Prison
1968
Cash's career was finished when he talked Columbia into letting him record for prisoners. The laughter after the Reno line was added afterward.
★ 8.6
Music From Big Pink
1968
They wrote it in the basement of a pink house near Woodstock, and Bob Dylan painted the picture on the front.
★ 8.5
Beggars Banquet
1968
The label refused the original sleeve, a photograph of a graffitied lavatory wall, and held the record back for months over it.
★ 8.2
Sweetheart of the Rodeo
1968
Gram Parsons sang lead on much of it and his vocals were wiped for contractual reasons. The Grand Ole Opry audience booed them off.
★ 7.4
Axis: Bold as Love
1968
Hendrix left the finished master of side one in a taxi and had to mix the whole thing again overnight.
★ 7.1
Lady Soul
1968
Her sisters sing behind her throughout, and Eric Clapton plays guitar on one track without ever being credited for it.
★ 6.9
Odessey and Oracle
1968
The misspelling on the sleeve was the cover artist's mistake and they left it. The band had broken up before it came out.
★ 6.8
The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society
1968
The Kinks were banned from touring America for four years, which is part of why Ray Davies spent this record writing about English villages.
★ 6.7
Bookends
1968
Side one runs from childhood to old age, and the voices in the middle of it are real people Garfunkel recorded in nursing homes.
★ 6.1
Mama Tried
1968
Haggard had actually served time in San Quentin, and was in the audience when Johnny Cash played there. He sings about it plainly.
★ 5.0
The Dock of the Bay
1968
Redding wrote the title song sitting on a houseboat in Sausalito, and whistled the ending because he had not finished the last verse.
★ 4.9
The Notorious Byrd Brothers
1968
David Crosby was fired partway through the sessions, and the horse on the cover has been read ever since as a joke at his expense.
★ 4.9
GRIS-Gris
1968
Recorded in studio time left over from a Sonny and Cher session, in secret, using whatever instruments the previous band had left behind.
★ 4.4
Stand By Your Man
1968
She and her producer wrote the title song in about fifteen minutes, and she spent the rest of her life explaining what it meant.
★ 3.3
Live Wire Blues Power
1968
Recorded at the Fillmore in front of a rock crowd who had mostly never heard him, which is why he explains the blues between songs.
★ 3.1