Which classic rock album was in the charts for the longest time?
We can sit here and debate which genre is best all day long, but the truth is, we’ll never come to an agreement, and yet, there is no denying the huge impact that classic rock has had on music.
It’s a style of music that people still celebrate today in the same way they did when it initially started rearing its head way back in the 1950s and ‘60s, and you can see why, given there is an excitement which surrounds the distorted guitar, the flamboyant onstage personas, and the rambunctious gigs, which are pretty timeless.
Just the solo to ‘Stairway to Heaven’ gives one goosebumps, and you can’t help but nod along to a riff like ‘Highway to Hell’, hence, no matter what corner of classic rock you peer into, you can find examples of why it remains such an important and exciting genre of music. However, there are other factors which contributed towards classic rock’s rise to prominence as well.
When we consider its rise in popularity, it would be easy for us to just consider the great songs that make it up and call it a day, but it’s a lot more complex than that. It wasn’t just the individual songs but was the progression that continued to impact rock music, wherein artists never seemed content letting the genre remain stagnant, and instead wanted to keep expanding upon what people knew and loved.
When you look at artists like Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, and Jimi Hendrix, they didn’t just regurgitate a specific sound, but they took that sound and injected it with other styles and variations in a bid to keep rock music growing. The excitement that was initiated by these artists was constantly being topped by new discoveries, which is why people consider the genre incredibly important to this day.
With developments constantly being made within the sound, it won’t come as a surprise that so many people enjoy revelling in the excellent music that has been made as a result. A great number of classic rock albums have captured the hearts of all those who listen, begging the question of which records have charted for the longest period of time after their release, and while there are plenty that have all earned a mention, only one of them was in the charts for well over 900 weeks.
So, which classic rock album charted the longest?
When Roger Waters was talking about the Pink Floyd albums that he did and didn’t like, he scorned their early record, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, saying that it saw the band try too hard to be experimental. “I don’t want to go back to those times at all,” he said, “There wasn’t anything ‘grand’ about it. We were laughable. We were useless. We couldn’t play at all, so we had to do something stupid and ‘experimental’.”
When discussing his favourite memories in Pink Floyd, he said it was during the creation of The Dark Side of the Moon, where the band became slightly less experimental and honed in on much more narrative-driven conceptual music. It was from here that the record The Dark Side of the Moon was born, leading Waters to say, “It’s hard to remember that far back, but I think probably pre-Dark Side of the Moon. In those days, it was a band. I’m sure that at that point we all agreed about the same things…”
It seems that the unified agreement between band members did wonders for Pink Floyd, who wound up making what was not only their most successful album, but the most successful rock album of all time, and despite only being number one for a week, Dark Side was in the charts longer than any other rock album for a whopping 970 weeks.
That’s all impressive, but what’s even more so is the fact that it still sounds as good today as it did when it was originally released, marking it a classic through and through, and deserving of this accolade.
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