10 masterpieces fans never gave the time of day
Most artists are usually aware when they have a masterpiece on their hands. Whether it’s them breaking through to a new sound or working with different people to create hits, there’s a certain energy in the air whenever someone starts writing music that changes how they think about it. It’s easy to look back on some records as something spectacular now, but some of the biggest names in music, like Paul McCartney, have a handful of records that were treated like trash the minute they came out.
Whether it was because they were released at the wrong time or weren’t what the critics were looking for, some of these albums could find themselves either dragged through the mud or outright forgotten by the end of their respective release years. But when looking at what people were listening to, they were accidentally turning their backs on some of the most interesting music in an artist’s catalogue.
Half of the albums here aren’t going to sound like how everyone expects them to, but that’s exactly the point. None of them were meant to be the same old tired tunes that everyone was used to, but since they weren’t exactly a retread of what everybody expected, most artists had to either act as if they had committed a crime against human hearing or sharply pivot away from what they were doing.
And even if they are still treated like lesser parts of their catalogue, the albums in question still have pertinent points that deserve to be studied years later. Not all of them match the typical definition of a masterpiece, but it’s worth checking up on a handful of the songs here to see what the world was missing out on upon release.
10 masterpieces fans never gave the time of day:
The Truth – Prince
Prince was one of the few people on this Earth who was too fast for anyone to keep up with. He had his superfans who would devour anything he put out, but looking at the amount of material he could crank out in so short a timeframe, it’s no wonder that there are still vaults of music in the backlog that fans never actually got to hear. But the true neglected pieces of his catalogue come from those never formally announced.
While ‘The Purple One’ was undoubtedly glad to be rid of Warner Bros on the album Emancipation, Crystal Ball was as extensive as his last record at nearly three hours, with no mention of The Truth being released in the middle of everything. So if anyone somehow didn’t have their fill of Prince material in the last album’s three-hour runtime, this was a delightful treat, especially since it showed him in his rawest form, with only a guitar and his voice throughout most of the runtime.
Considering how Prince has a specific formula when it comes to how his tunes sound, it’s nice to see this kind of record bring him back down to Earth and do his own version of Unplugged right as that era of MTV was ending. Unless you were literally related to him, there was no reason to have this much Prince at once, but for those willing to take the journey, The Truth was the kind of dessert at the end of this massive buffet of music.
Sketches for My Sweetheart The Drunk – Jeff Buckley
It’s a lot more difficult trying to judge that an artist might not have wanted people to hear. Some pieces stay in the vaults for a reason, and while the artist might be robbing their fanbase of some fantastic pieces, there are occasionally those times when you can hear them still figuring out what they want their tunes to be. Since Jeff Buckley wasn’t able to comment on Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, though, all we have to judge the album on is the raw music behind everything.
Is it on the same level as Grace? No, but most 1990s albums aren’t. A lot of what turns up on the album was Buckley woodshedding material that would come out later. Since he tried to make the album a little less commercial, the fact that ‘Yard of Blonde Girls’ managed to remain as catchy as it is was practically a miracle, coupled with the strange detours that would happen on songs like ‘Vancouver’.
But the same can’t be said for the second disc of demos released with it, which ends up sounding like the ugly side of Buckley as he reached his wits’ end towards the final years of his life. No one really wants to see their favourite artists in that frame of mind, but the main album is a look into an alternate world where we got to hear what Buckley sounded like had he been able to come up from the depths of the water that night in 1997.
The Who Sell Out – The Who
Not every band is meant to arrive with their sound fully formed. It’s easy to make a by-the-numbers record to start with, but the follow-ups are the moments where fans get to see what their favourite acts can really do when they have the right ideas and the right resources. It would have been nice for The Who to stay on the same trajectory of being the loudest band in the world, but The Who Sell Out is the moment their core ethos came into view, despite everyone looking at the one right after it.
Because while songs like ‘I Can See For Miles’ have been given their due praise in recent years, the majority of this record pales in comparison to what Tommy did. The story of a deaf, dumb and blind boy finding a way to speak through music and pinball was a far more captivating premise, but the idea of them making their own spoof of pirate radio stations was a perfect way to break up the monotony that Pete Townshend can find himself in from time to time.
Since their opera years saw them getting way more serious, The Who have also never been this funny on a record, usually taking the token Keith Moon tunes that appeared on each record and having a field day with that kind of humour on tracks like ‘Odorono’ and ‘Heinz Baked Beans’. Everyone might like to see the big payoff from them working on their sound, but The Who Sell Out captures that magic moment when they had one foot in the past and one firmly planted in their future.
Desperado – Eagles
Every single artist who has ever lived has the potential of falling victim to the sophomore slump. A lot can happen in those few years between making the first album and touring the world for the first time, and everyone from Guns N’ Roses to Pretenders has had a fatal flaw in trying to do too much at once when they had a budget behind them. Though Eagles fit in that company in many people’s eyes, Desperado is hated purely because many fans weren’t ready for this kind of swerve.
The country rockers had never sunk their heels into full-blown country music before, so the idea of making what their label called a “fucking cowboy record” was not going to go over well. When looking at the tunes behind everything, they have many more points than most were willing to give them credit for. ‘Desperado’ has remained a core part of the band’s setlist for a reason, and even Randy Meisner’s tune ‘Certain Kind of Fool’ captures a specific glimpse at someone wanting to be an outlaw.
Fans wouldn’t fully let everything sink in until they started working on Hotel California, but for someone who doesn’t want to listen to yet another diatribe about how Los Angeles is sinful, Desperado is the next place to go. After all, rock and roll is the land of the outlaws, so in the context of the record, Don Henley and Glenn Frey were talking about the modern version of those living outside the usual restrictions on everyone else.
White Light/White Heat – The Velvet Underground
There’s a good chance that all of The Velvet Underground’s albums could have qualified for a list like this. For all of the brilliance scattered across their discography, the critics and the public never had the time of day for them, thinking that they would put a stake through the heart of the hippie generation by the time they got famous. If fans weren’t going to get on board with something as grotesquely beautiful as ‘Venus In Furs’, they would have been running away scared hearing White Light/White Heat.
Despite their first album not having the best production behind it, the group did everything they could to make sure the follow-up sounded as atonal as possible. There are a few songs that are plain messy like the title track, but over the course of the record, it feels like Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison are in a streetfight and using guitars as their weapons, which makes for one of the most chaotic jams of all time when they tear through all 17 minutes of ‘Sister Ray’.
It’s far from the most tuneful record and people really had to dig deep if they wanted to find the true gems, but White Light/White Heat exists for someone being in the right type of mood after dealing with the biggest amount of bullshit anyone has had to face. That doesn’t make for the greatest sing-alongs, but this is the granddaddy of every album that wanted to turn the listener into a punching bag.
Brutal Planet – Alice Cooper
Alice Cooper has always been known as one of the great cockroaches of rock and roll. Much like his peers like Keith Richards, there’s hardly any way to keep him down for much longer before he comes back even more grotesque than ever with something that will knock his fans on their ass. And while his brand of shock rock had been outclassed by a new school of rock and roll demons, Brutal Planet was him looking at rockers like Marilyn Manson and doing their schtick twice as well.
While the environmental message of some of the songs could have come off as a bit trite for anyone else, Cooper always found a way to keep the horror at the forefront. There’s no interest in saving the trees or anything here, but given his full embrace of Christianity, this was a dark warning at where the planet was heading if we all weren’t careful, even managing to capitalise on the recent Columbine shootings by getting into the mind of the attacker on ‘Wicked Young Man’.
Even though he still found time to go back to the demonic topics on Dragontown, Brutal Planet is a far more captivating version of what a modernised version of rock and roll hell could look like. There is a lot of pageantry involved, and it can be more than a little bit too macabre for the average listener, but whenever we’re talking about someone like ‘The Coop’, those may as well be compliments.
The Last DJ – Tom Petty
The last thing people want out of their rock stars is to be talked down to. Whenever someone comes onstage, they want to be able to relate to them in a natural way, and the minute they get on the soapbox is when people start taking issues with everything and telling them to stick to the music rather than the messages. But if you know anything about Tom Petty, he was the last person to roll over when seeing the music world trying to change him.
He had already been through an ordeal having to fight for his independence from his label, but when coming into the 2000s, he realised that the world looked a lot different for musicians. This was the era of American Idol and people trying to become famous within a matter of seconds, so The Last DJ was his attempt at showing the real truth behind the industry, whether it’s pining for the good old days on ‘Dreamville’ or giving warnings to labels trying to put him in his place on ‘Joe’ and ‘Can’t Stop the Sun’.
It would have been easy for this album to come across as an older rocker grumbling about how life used to be so much different back in his day, but it’s clear that Petty has no intention of complaining without any possible solutions. All he knew was that music mattered more than what reality television had to offer, and if that was the version of the industry he found himself in, he wanted to make sure what he said had some substance behind it.
Standing on the Shoulder of Giants – Oasis
The entire Oasis hype train seemed to come to a massive standstill the minute the 1990s ended. There were bound to be people who were still playing their copies of What’s the Story Morning Glory and Definitely Maybe, but after taking a massive break after Be Here Now, everyone started to look back on the last few years and re-evaluate some of the dumber moments that got the Manchester legends to Knebworth. Everyone finally seemed tired of that Britpop spirit, and Noel Gallagher was among that group as well when making Standing on the Shoulder of Giants.
After years of putting together that retro rock and roll mentality, hearing the band embrace electronics like this was a much different flavour of Oasis than most were used to. Even though half of the fanbase looks back on this record for ‘Go Let It Out’ and to talk trash about ‘Little James’, somewhere in between the cracks here is a more honest version of Noel that was deathly afraid that his 15 minutes of fame were up.
Outside of detailing his panic attacks on a handful of songs, tunes like ‘Where Did It All Go Wrong’ and ‘Roll It Over’ are the most transparent songs he had written since the days of ‘Talk Tonight’, which work perfectly when balanced out with the B-sides like ‘Let’s All Make Believe’. It was impossible to get away from the band circa 1997, but now that they had something to prove again, their fourth outing actually made them feel like normal people trying to make sense of being put through the wringer.
Twin Freaks – Paul McCartney
It’s almost impossible for someone to cover any Beatles material properly. Even looking at how most people approach the Fab Four’s solo work, there isn’t a soul on Earth who hasn’t looked at the celebrity version of ‘Imagine’ and not felt a bit uncomfortable seeing everyone embarrass themselves. While Paul McCartney is free to do whatever he wants with his own music, he also proved to be one of the only people to breathe new life into some of his old tracks.
Whereas Working Classical took his ballads and turned them into the elevator music versions of themselves, Twin Freaks is one of the most experimental pieces he has ever put out. Taking many of his upbeat singles from his career, this is what Macca would have sounded like had he been born to make music for the dancefloor, bringing a new sense of life to songs like ‘What’s That You’re Doing’ and ‘Live and Let Die’.
And for everyone who has sworn by the fact that ‘Temporary Secretary’ is his worst song, this version will make you think otherwise, especially as the different effects are swerving in and out of the mix on every single track. This might fit the criteria of a greatest-hits album in many people’s eyes, but McCartney didn’t want to put out a version of his old tunes. He wanted to reinvent everyone’s idea of his hits, and that’s no small feat for songs that the world has been singing along to for years.
Garage Inc – Metallica
When looking at the greatest records in any artist’s discography, covers albums normally don’t count. This is usually the moment where the band in question is either in desperate need to fulfil a record contract or have officially run out of ideas, so why throw together a bunch of covers so they have something? It can be a pretty cheap move on anyone’s part, but Metallica entirely committed to the bit when they decided to revisit their garage days one more time.
Since the thrash legends often played covers live and never told anyone that they weren’t original compositions, this was their way of paying some of them back, with covers of everyone from Misfits to Diamond Head going over well enough to where they could be mistaken for original tunes. But the best moments on the record come when they take a swing at someone they are well outside their wheelhouse with.
Not many people would have guessed that the band would be covering the likes of Bob Seger, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Nick Cave, but each one of their versions of those legends goes over much better than they have any right to. Then again, that’s always been what metal is about to a certain extent. This was music meant to disrupt what everyone thought a typical rock and roll song could be, and by going against their principles, Metallica were doing right by their heroes by giving fans what they didn’t know they needed to hear.
