10 most influential rock albums of the 1960s

Credit: Far Out / Album Covers

Robert Pollard of Guided By Voices’ mammoth guide to the greatest albums of the late 1960s

Mon 29 May 2023 17:00, UK

If you maturated the music of the late 1960s in a vat of beer and sloshed it back out it into a world of extreme fucklessness, then you might come close to the sound of Guided By Voices. With guitar strings more well-thumbed than David Attenborough’s passport, the prolific Robert Pollard and his cronies have refined their unrefined sound to such an extent that now the band’s mistakes are so well-practiced they are no longer mistakes. While this vagabond approach to music is certainly a niche of their own, it also owes a lot to the explosion of sound that came rattling forth in a renaissance-like whirlwind in the late 1960s.

Since forming in Dayton, Ohio in the early 1980s, Guided by Voices have been a one-band jukebox. The band were hugely influenced by contemporaries such as R.E.M. with Pollard telling Spin: “The thing that turns me on is when I’ve never really heard it before. Michael Stipe’s voice was so different. It reminded me of Peter Gabriel’s, and I was intrigued by this whole ‘mystery of the South’ and all that shit. There have been a few bands where I’ve totally absorbed myself into their world, and R.E.M. was one of them.”

However, they certainly looked to couple that sound with the inspiration of the late ’60s free-form experimentation as bands looked to, well, just do band things if that makes a lick of sense. Pollard looked to reinstate this ethos among his band in 2001 ahead of their Spring tour. So, he decided to dig into his vast record collection and collate a collection of the greatest albums of the late ’60s – which of course also means some of the greatest albums known to man – and cut these cherished onto cassettes to give to his bandmates as listening materials on the road.

In total Pollard’s assortment of greatest was spread across 62 cassettes. Given the extent of this labour of love, he obviously didn’t want his work to be merely confined to the tour bus, so he sent off a list of the albums he selected to The Big Take Over. There appears to be some sort of hierarchy to proceedings but its difficult to decipher what that may be with a degree of certainty.

However, he does notably begin with The Beatles, the band who he says got him into music (so, obviously he’s not afraid of being earnest). “I couldn’t believe there was actually a group of guys who could grow their hair long and just play this kind of music and have girls chase them around,” he said of the ‘Fab Four’. “We used to pantomime in front of our class in second grade, and then we’d go out on the playground and little girls would chase us. It was a good time to be alive.”

That notion of a good time to be alive is something that imbues the music of the era with a certain unplaceable sense of vitality. The aura of a cultural revolution is woven somewhere into the gravel track hiss of the vinyl as the world drove on to new horizons. As Hunter S. Thompson once wrote: “Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.”

There is a wallop of that mysticism in Pollard’s mammoth collection. In typical slack fashion a lot of the records tip over into the 1970s and he almost forgot entirely about the existence of women, but his list is comprehensive one in every other sense. Which is why we have painstakingly compiled it into a playlist for your explorative pleasure (NB not every track / album was available). Enjoy.