The Rolling Stone Album Guide, previously known as The Rolling Stone Record Guide, is a book that, along with its sister publication Rolling Stone magazine, contains professional reviews of popular music. The guide can be seen at Rate Your Music, while a list of albums given a five star rating by the guide can be seen at Rocklist.net. (More from Wikipedia)
Writing for the Rolling Stone Record Guide, David McGee states: “To get an idea of his indelible contribution to rock & roll, consider the critic Lester Bangs’ citation of [Ritchie] Valens as the prototypical punk guitarist whose signature ‘La Bamba’ riff links Valens to a hard-edged, no-frills style of rock & roll later advanced by the Kingsmen, the Kinks, the Stooges, and the Ramones.” The thrilling Ramones call “Hey Ho, Let’s Go” – from the opening song “Blitzkrieg Bop” on their first album, Ramones – might have been lifted directly from Ritchie Valens’ “Come On, Let’s Go”.
What I have found about most Internet music sites is that they are mostly geared toward modern music and don’t help me very much. Even Rolling Stone only goes back to 1967; the Rolling Stone Record Guide that I had pre-Katrina covered only albums in print except for the biggest artists. Allmusic truly tries to cover everything, though some of the UARB’s and UARA’s don’t show up in their database. Generally speaking, Allmusic has more bands and artists than Wikipedia, though some bands with a big write-up in Wikipedia have almost nothing in Allmusic.
(March 2014/2)
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There is a Bob Dylan album that scores even lower in Allmusic than his Christian albums, and here I need to put on my “Under Appreciated” hat – the 1973 release Dylan yields just *. Allmusic mentions that this LP is “[c]ommonly regarded as the worst album in Bob Dylan’s catalog”. The album is described in both Rolling Stone Record Guide and Allmusic as a collection of outtakes from Self Portrait – i.e., songs that didn’t make the cut for that head-scratcher – and that just sent chills up my spine.
Dylan is a recent rescue from Katrina, however, and I found it surprisingly easy to listen to. The album is entirely cover songs, many of them quite familiar; and if Dylan’s performance of Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” leaves no impression at all, that is not true of the lesser known songs.
The opening track, a traditional folk song called “Lily of the West” is beautifully performed; and the album is well worth owning for that song alone. Personally I am at least as big a fan of Bob Dylan as a folksinger as I am of Bob Dylan as a rocker, and this song was a welcome return to the performances that I remember so well from his early albums.
(August 2014)
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The New Rolling Stone Record Guide review of the first Rolling Stones album, The Rolling Stones calls it “the greatest white rhythm and blues album of all time. That isn’t an opinion; it’s a fact.”
(May 2015)
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