Which two albums sold over 30million copies in the 1960s?
At the onset of the 1960s, the single ruled the airwaves. Still powered by the previous decade’s rock ‘n’ roll prize of the holy 45″, the British invasion that dominated the Billboard Hot 100 were pumping out records at a fantastic rate, forever ready with a new pop cut three months ahead, save lapsing into obscurity from a fickle fan base. While the likes of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Kinks were hit single machines, no one touched California’s The Beach Boys’ voluminous output—ten albums across barely five years by the time of 1966’s Pet Sounds opus.
The Beach Boys’ pop marvel would prove instrumental in ushering rock’s shift from single veneration. With its artistic coherency and embrace of the studio as an instrument beyond merely a recording space, the concept of the album began to take shape as a creative expression. Not just an LP to compile a wealth of material for convenience, but a two-sided—even four or, on occasion, six-sided—medium offering the day’s bands a new, unreined scope to realise their most far-out ideas.
In came London Festival Orchestra arrangements for The Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed and Frank Zappa’s Lumpy Gravy tape collages, and the whole Canterbury scene sprang to life, owing to the album’s open conceptual planes. This would reach its apex in the early 1970s, the prog era taking the album format and milking it to the nth degree. Some like Pink Floyd or King Crimson would reach acclaimed creative peaks, while others like Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer would accelerate its demise and help pave the way for punk’s insurrectionary wrecking ball by the decade’s end.
Albums would go on to become blockbuster sellers in the 1970s, threatening Hollywood’s top spot as entertainment’s biggest seller. Following the precedent set by the album era’s initial explosion, two massive-selling LPs of the 1960s set the stage for future mammoth studio releases.
So, which two albums sold over 30million copies in the 1960s?
Selling 30million copies was San Diego’s Iron Butterfly‘s sophomore album, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, that gripped the West Coast counterculture with its heavy lysergic jams and acid rock strut. Sowing the seeds of heavy metal with its dramatic pull on psychedelia toward darker territory proved a winner, peaking at number four on the Billboard 200. The 17-minute closing title track is what they’re forever defined by, a heady organ riff with proto-metal swagger bookending Ron Bushy’s two-and-a-half-minute drum solo.
Boasting an added 2million sales, however, was unsurprisingly The Beatles’ lauded eighth studio effort. Their first record as a purely committed studio project and dropped at the height of the ‘Summer of Love’, 1967’s Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band would endure as the epochal statement of the album era as well as the Fab Four’s defining LP.
While some revisionism has posited Revolver as their finest work, Sgt Pepper’s best captures the band’s unreined creative freedom, resulting in a joyous kaleidoscopic swirl of pop innovation and conceptual ambition that kickstarted the concept album era’s magic and mythos.
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