50 Essential Albums of 1967

In the year of Pepper-mania, the Beach Boys' Smile was expected to gallop out of the West and reclaim the honor of rock for its nation of origin. But Smile didn't materialize until 2004, stitched together from old bits and pieces and revived as repertory by a solo Brian Wilson and his enablers. Instead, Wilson retreated into his lonely room and oversaw this hastily recorded half measure – "a bunt instead of a grand slam," groused brother Carl. Towering it's not; some kind of hit it is. Without this product-on-demand, we'd lack such impossible trifles as the wiggy "She's Goin' Bald," the potted "Little Pad" and "Fall Breaks and Back to Winter," a transitional bagatelle featuring squeezebox and imitation woodpecker.

Produced mostly by Carl Wilson, this 24-minute album followed Smiley Smile by three months and got no respect from those who believed trick harmonies and arcane changes were what made the group artistic. Called their "soul" album, perhaps for its Stevie Wonder cover or its use of the term "out of sight," but more likely because it emphasized emotive lead vocals, its special gifts are an achieved naiveté and irrepressible good humor as Southern Californian as baggies and woodies. There's not a deep or wasted second on it.

Because it begins with the lame theme to their worst movie and the sappy "Fool on the Hill," few realize that this serves up three worthy obscurities forthwith – bet Beck knows the sour-and-sweet instrumental "Flying" by heart. Then it A/Bs three fabulous singles. "Penny Lane"/"Strawberry Fields Forever" may be the finest two-sided record in history. Goo goo g'joob, so may "Hello Goodbye"/"I Am the Walrus." "Baby You're a Rich Man"? OK, not in that league. Which is why it bows humbly before "All You Need Is Love."

One of the many remarkable things about the Concept Album Heard 'Round the World is how modest its individual parts are – as modest as the antiquely unhip touring band they pretended to be. Beyond the cosmic "Within You Without You," the all-encompassing "A Day in the Life" and the overtly fanciful "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," every unforgettable song is literal and legible, and not one truly rocks out. Another thing: This consciously cross-generational youth-culture summum is at its very strongest in Side One's three maturation texts – "With a Little Help From My Friends," "Fixing a Hole" and "Getting Better." Another: It runs under 40 minutes, climactic diminuendo included.

In August 1967, into a pop world totally besotted by Sgt. Pepper, was born a pop album mostly indebted to Revolver riding a rather literary hit called "New York Mining Disaster 1941" and addressed to a "Mr. Jones" who couldn't have been Bob Dylan's, right? The perpetrators were Manchester-born Australians returned to a U.K. where Robert Stigwood would eventually transform them into world-historic disco pop-up dolls and stars of the 1978 cinematic megaflop Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. But here they gave the world, among other sweetmeats, the soul standard "To Love Somebody" and an opener set in a 1900 equipped with a town crier and Robin Gibb's quaver. A tuneful hoot.

Janis Joplin's first band is still dissed for its crude musicianship, and its pre-Columbia album is still patronized for failing to showcase Joplin the blues singer. Only she wasn't a blues singer, she was a rock singer – a rock singer who learned to conceal her country twang after she cut these 10 crazed songs. Most are by her bandmates, whose folk-schooled garage-blues licks provide goofy hooks. One that isn't is the definitive Joplin original "Women Is Losers." She sensed what was coming – you know she did.

B.B. King was preaching the blues to psychedelic kids at the Fillmore Auditorium; Otis Redding turned them on at the Monterey Pop Festival and made a quantum songwriting leap in the folk-soul majesty of "The Dock of the Bay." But vocal lion Bobby "Blue" Bland spent his 1967 standing tall and still, belting these 10 tracks of heartache and bedroom triumph as if he'd just turned the calendar page on his '57 smash "Farther Up the Road" and the '61 hits "I Pity the Fool" and "Turn On Your Love Light." There were hints of modernism: the Stax-like gait of "Sweet Loving"; Bland's heated exchange with a female vocalist in "Sad Feeling," suggesting the call-response dynamite of Sly and the Family Stone. But the best moments, like the immolation of Charles Brown's 1945 chestnut "Driftin' Blues," were robust purism – the reason why white fans like Eric Clapton and the Grateful Dead adored and covered Bland, doing his crossover work for him.

The modal title milestone one-upped Wilson Pickett's "Funky Broadway" and introduced JB's funky drummer number two, Clyde Stubblefield. But the uptempo oldies Brown added to the hit to make an album – Lloyd Price's "Stagger Lee," Wilbert Harrison's "Kansas City," Little Willie John's "Fever" and Roy Brown's "Good Rockin' Tonight" – smelled a little fishy at the time. Now, however, they're caviar – JB's full voice and flawless time yoking proven classics to some of the tightest big-band blues ever recorded. The slow side pits Brown's ballad falsetto and ballad scream against some of the most elaborate R&B strings ever recorded. Especially on the two Nat "King" Cole numbers and an over-the-top "Come Rain or Come Shine," the falsetto wins by a mile.

Tim Buckley's second album was a far cry from the folk-rock conventions of his 1966 debut, rich in acid-Renaissance trimmings (harpsichord, harmonium) and dominated by the elaborate title suite. Compared to the radical vocal freedom and liquid sadness of Buckley's imminent classics (1969's Happy Sad, 1971's Starsailor), Goodbye and Hello – produced by Lovin' Spoonful guitarist Jerry Yester – was a triumph of form, with Buckley's light tenor voice curling through "Hallucinations" and "Morning Glory" like incense smoke. But Goodbye and Hello was also a deeply personal album, even though Buckley wrote lyrics to only half of the 10 songs (he co-wrote the others with Larry Beckett). In the thrilling gallop and stratospheric scat-singing of "I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain," Buckley soars in desperate need yet defends the wanderlust that was breaking up his marriage. The song was so important to him – the child in the second verse, "wrapped in bitter tales and heartache," was his then-infant son, Jeff – that Buckley did 23 vocal takes, singing live with the studio band.

Fractious from the moment they formed, Buffalo Springfield made their superb second album in fits and starts alternately dominated by combative singer-guitarist-songwriters Stephen Stills and Neil Young. The latter predicted the wild eclecticism of his solo career with the California Stones-style fury of "Mr. Soul" and the symphonic restlessness of "Expecting to Fly," written after Young briefly quit the group in the summer of 1967. A gilded spider web of guitars and harmonies, Stills' "Rock & Roll Woman" pointed to his subsequent lifetime with Crosby, Stills and Nash: David Crosby is an uncredited voice on the track. It was left to singer-guitarist Richie Furay, who later co-founded Poco, to lament the internal warring in the stone country of "A Child's Claim to Fame," written in frustration with Young's coming and going. Young took no offense, contributing vocals and sharp down-home guitar.

The Byrds that made this album in late 1966 were a mess: reeling from the loss of singer-composer Gene Clark and the tensions between singer-guitarists Roger McGuinn and David Crosby. Yet Younger Than Yesterday was the Byrds' first mature album, a blend of space-flight twang and electric hoedown infused with the imminent glow of 1967 yet underlined with crackling realism. The galloping "So You Want to Be a Rock 'N' Roll Star" mocked overnight success, including the Byrds' own (the teen screams were taped at one of their gigs). Crosby's ballad "Everybody's Been Burned" hinted at the stress that soon culminated in his firing. And in "My Back Pages," McGuinn's stoic vocal captured the crisis and experience in Bob Dylan's lyrics, a lesson reflected in his own determination to keep the band alive.

This debut album could have been Captain Beefheart's ticket to ride, the bellowing singer and dada-blues lyricist's 1967 breakthrough. Co-produced with offbeat, commercial nuance by Richard Perry (his first big job on the way to Number Ones for Ringo Starr and Carly Simon) and featuring a young Ry Cooder on lead guitar, Safe as Milk was a thrilling whiplash of cheerfully craggy electric blues and twisted-pop ambition. But Safe as Milk never charted, inaugurating Beefheart's life sentence as a cult hero. The writing and ruckus here were steeped in the Delta blues and raw R&B that Beefheart and Frank Zappa obsessively studied as teenage pals, and the former's otherworldly scalded–Howlin' Wolf voice is a fully formed phenomenon. But the jubilantly twisted roots and futurism in "Sure 'Nuff N' Yes I Do," "Abba Zaba" and "Electricity" are also clear, feral steps to the impending, iconoclastic legend of 1969's Trout Mask Replica and 1980's Doc at the Radar Station.

At first, Country Joe and the Fish were indie rockers. Three tracks on this trip-music classic, including the stoner's hymn "Bass Strings" and the drifting instrumental "Section 43," were initially cut by the Berkeley band for a 1966 EP on singer-songwriter Joe McDonald's agitprop label, Rag Baby. He started the Fish as a protest jug band (the name combines nods to Joseph Stalin and Mao Tsetung) but here temporarily kept his left-wing zest in check. Flanked by the electric organ of David Cohen and Barry Melton's biting-treble guitar, McDonald spread with a preacher's zeal and spearing wit the local gospel of chemical travel and carnal freedom in "Flying High," "Happiness Is a Porpoise Mouth" and "Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine." In fact, Vanguard insisted the Fish not include one of their most popular tunes, a McDonald zinger that later became a singalong pillar of the anti-war movement: "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag."

Cream's best album distilled their prodigious chops and rhythmic interplay into psychedelic pop that never strayed far from their blues roots. Except for the electricity, "Outside Woman Blues" is nearly identical to Arthur Reynolds' 1930s original. And the riff to "Sunshine of Your Love," written by bassist Jack Bruce, is Delta blues in jab and drive. But Disraeli Gears decisively broke with British blues purism in the ecstatic jangle of "Dance the Night Away," the climbing dismay of "We're Going Wrong" (driven by Ginger Baker's circular drumming) and the wah-wah grandeur of "Tales of Brave Ulysses." Producer Felix Pappalardi and engineer Tom Dowd contributed song sense and studio expertise; lyricist Pete Brown was unique in his union of Dada and confession. When Bruce sang "And the rainbow has a beard" in "SWLABR," you knew that didn't come from Robert Johnson.

"Mellow Yellow," a Number Two hit in the U.S., was a burlesque-brass grind a la Bob Dylan's "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35," scored by John Paul Jones (later of Led Zeppelin) with whispering vocals by Paul McCartney. The rest of Mellow Yellow is gently magnificent introspection, rooted in the modern acoustic folk scene then emerging in Britain ("House of Jansch" refers to guitarist Bert Jansch) and draped in John Cameron's pastoral-jazz arrangements. Donovan later noted that "Hampstead Incident" was partly inspired by Nina Simone and the chord progression in "Anji," by British guitarist Davy Graham. Ironically, the beauty of Mellow Yellow was obscured by the rumor that the title single advocated smoking banana peels as a legal alternative to marijuana. In fact, the "electrical banana" in the third verse is a vibrator.

In a year of historic debut albums, no record by a new American band so immediately electrified the world as The Doors, the first and best documentation of singer Jim Morrison's Byronic fury and the locomotive jazz-inflected drive of organist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore. The band was just a year old when it recorded these 11 songs in six days in August 1966. But in the crisp funk of "Soul Kitchen," the extended pop art of "Light My Fire" and the Shakespearean violence of "The End," the Doors perfected an airtight resolution of their live prowess (refined nightly that summer at the Whisky a Go Go) and Morrison's improvised explosions of lyric transgression.

The Doors' second album lacks the shock value and cohesion of the first, mostly because they made it in the manic wake of their Number One hit, "Light My Fire," and in the precious time between live gigs. "Moonlight Drive" and "My Eyes Have Seen You" were already two years old, first cut as demos in 1965. But the Doors channeled the daily chaos of their new fortunes into fierce performances – "Strange Days," the headlong lust of "Love Me Two Times" – climaxing with "When the Music's Over," an anthem for change driven home by Jim Morrison's ferocious, outraged demand: "We want the world and we want it – now!"

Recorded in Nashville in three sessions, Bob Dylan's first album after the electric warfare of his 1966 tour and subsequent retreat to Woodstock was shockingly austere: an almost crooning Dylan with just a soft-shoe rhythm section and a few sighs of steel guitar. But that calm was a perfect contrast to the sermonizing fire be unleashed in "All Along the Watchtower" and the crossroads parable "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest." The moral fiber and martyr's temper in these songs were fierce and immediate. Dylan wrote "Frankie Lee," "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine" and "Drifter's Escape" en route to the first session, on the train from New York. But there was unembarrassed loving, too: "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight," recorded on the last day, pointed the way to the country comfort of his next album, 1969's Nashville Skyline.

This Motown vocal institution's sixth album was a greatest-hits collection in all but title. Six of the 12 tracks were Top 20 pop singles. Three of those comprised what proved to be the climactic sweep of the Tops' bond with writer-producers Holland-Dozier-Holland: the theatrical urgency of the late-'66 Number One "Reach Out I'll Be There"; the galloping Top Ten followup "Standing in the Shadows of Love"; and early '67's "Bernadette," with its hammering keyboard riff and a harrowing shout by lead singer Levi Stubbs in the plunge of silence before the final choruses. The collaborative momentum was so hot that "I'll Turn to Stone," originally a B side to the mid-'67 single "7-Rooms of Gloom," made Billboard's R&B Top 50. But Lamont Dozier and brothers Brian and Eddie Holland soon turned their backs on Motown, over royalties, and stranded the Tops, who shuffled between producers and didn't score another Top 10 record until 1972 – for another label.

Aretha Franklin didn't emerge fully formed from the head of Jerry Wexler – she had many minor hits on Columbia before Atlantic made her a goddess. But with its mix of superb new soul songs (Franklin helped write four) and perfect old R&B standards (from Ray Charles, King Curtis, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding), this is a living monument to a singer and the style she first epitomized and then transcended. Wexler wanted the Stax band to ground his great hope but was refused, so he turned to the white guys down the road in Muscle Shoals – who cut most of the album in New York.

One of the year's few supposedly psychedelic LPs that wasn't actually a pop LP (cf. Sgt. Pepper, Forever Changes, Mellow Yellow), the already legendary San Francisco band-collective's debut stood out and stands tall because its boogieing folk rock epitomizes the San Francisco ballroom ethos – blues-based tunes played by musicians who came to rhythm late, expanded so they were equally suitable for dancing and for tripping out. It's also the only studio album that respects the impact of Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, who died in 1973 of cirrhosis of the liver. McKernan's organ is almost as pervasive as Jerry Garcia's guitar. And although Garcia and Bob Weir both take vocal leads, their singing styles are still in Pigpen's white-blues thrall.

No one captured hippie politics better than Woody's 20-year-old son on the title cut, an autobiographical tall tale that for 18 minutes reduced pacifist anti-authoritarianism to a diffident, confident, skillfully timed cops-and-longhairs routine. The B side cuts four forgettable song poems with two more jokes, one of them "The Motorcycle Song," not yet the comic turn it became. NB: Guthrie re-recorded the entire album 30 years later. The new "Alice" is four minutes longer – and four minutes funnier.

Jimi Hendrix's first album is one of the most exciting and important records ever made, a reconception of the electric guitar as a symphonic instrument that still sounds fresh and unprecedented. So does Hendrix's fusion of galactic imagination, intense self-examination and deep-blues roots in the raging "Manic Depression," the R&B sigh "The Wind Cries Mary" and the sexy whiplash "Foxey Lady." Hendrix, bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell made Experienced on the run, on rare days off the road. Hendrix wrote "Purple Haze" backstage at a London club; "Red House," a blues on the British version of the LP, was cut in 15 minutes. But Hendrix also spent several sessions building the orchestral howl of "Third Stone From the Sun," with the passionate diligence he would soon apply to his magnum opus, 1968's Electric Ladyland.

Jimi Hendrix left the original finished masters for Side One in a taxi and had to mix all of the tracks again in one session. Today, Axis is Hendrix's most overlooked album. But it has some of his best writing in the mighty "If 6 Was 9" and "Spanish Castle Magic," a reflection on his boyhood in the Pacific Northwest. There was also the heavy soul of "Little Wing," which Hendrix later told a reporter he'd started writing when he was playing clubs in New York's Greenwich Village. "I don't consider myself a songwriter," he said. "Not yet, anyway." He was wrong.

"Carrie Anne" is the only hit on this forgotten gem, which with no apparent effort or self-consciousness – you barely notice the French horn here and violin there – achieves the adolescent effervescence and lovelorn sentiment that indie-pop adepts of the Elephant 6 ilk spend years laboring after. Signature tracks: "Ye Olde Toffee Shoppe," which concerns candy and features a harpsichord, and "Games We Play," which concerns teen sex and features a knowing grin.

Of all the rediscovered bluesmen of the folk revival, Mississippi John Hurt was the least diminished by age because he was so unassuming to begin with. Having first recorded at 35 in 1928, he was 73 when he cut this posthumously released collection, which showcases his intricately unflashy fingerpicking, begins and ends with hymns and reprises both his moral take on "Stagolee" and his own fashion-conscious "Richland Woman Blues": "With rosy-red garters/Pink hose on my feet/Turkey-red bloomers/With a rumble seat."

Singer Marty Balin was so alienated by the acid-fueled indulgence of the sessions for the Airplane's third album – four months in Los Angeles, where the band stayed in a mansion that once housed the Beatles – that he co-wrote only one song, "Young Girl Sunday Blues." Yet Baxter's was the Airplane at their most defiantly psychedelic, exploring outer limits of despair and song form in the dark urgency of "The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil," Grace Slick's "Rejoyce" – a protest-cabaret adaptation of James Joyce's Ulysses – and the nine-minute instrumental improvisation "Spare Chaynge." The raw challenge of Baxter's was also a requiem for the Day-Glo life promised a few months earlier by the Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow. In the closing medley, "Won't You Try/Saturday Afternoon," Paul Kantner looked back in longing at the Human Be-In of January '67, a new dawn that already seemed a lifetime ago.

When vocalist Grace Slick joined Jefferson Airplane in the fall of 1966, she came with two songs from her old band, the Great Society – "Somebody to Love," written by her brother-in-law Darby, and "White Rabbit," her psychedelic translation of Alice in Wonderland – that became Top 10 hits in the Airplane's grip, dosing America with San Francisco Utopia. The rest of this second album is a definitive catalog of the Airplane's acid-rock dynamics and rare composing gifts: Jorma Kaukonen's metallic-snarl guitar and Jack Casady's grumbling-funk bass; the beautiful agony of singer Marty Balin's ballads (he wrote "Today" with Tony Bennett in mind); the weave-and-soar interplay of Balin, Slick and singer-guitarist Paul Kantner. The Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia attended the Los Angeles sessions as a "musical and spiritual advisor," suggesting arrangements, playing the delicate acoustic leads in "Comin' Back to Me" and coining the album's title when he remarked, "This is as surrealistic as a pillow."

Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page called them "my ideal band" in a 1972 interview. "Far out and heading further," ex-Zeppelin singer Robert Plant would later affirm on Twitter, citing the heady brew of country blues, Middle Eastern modes and ascending improvisation on Kaleidoscope's creative peak, the 1968 LP A Beacon From Mars. This 1967 debut (featuring the multi-instrumental wizardry of future Jackson Browne sidekick David Lindley) was even weirder, in its way – that winding fusion chopped into too-short nuggets that suggested someone restlessly switching stations on a short-wave receiver. The brevity meant the Jazz Age corn and slavish Byrds imitations passed quickly. Far more promising and influential, particularly on Page and Plant's acoustic tangents on Led Zeppelin III: the riffing oud, boogie cadence and prayer-call chorale in "Egyptian Garden"; the desert-march air of the Appalachian lament "Oh Death"; and the eerie Balkan-spiced blur of invitation and warning in "Keep Your Mind Open."

B.B. King wasn't yet a legend in the rock world in 1967. But props from Eric Clapton and others meant he was getting there. His canonical LP was 1965's Live at the Regal, which showcased his songbook at Chicago's version of the Apollo. But this live album, cut at the same town's International Club, is so raw vocally and untrammeled instrumentally it cuts even that classic in retrospect. "Gambler's Blues," which King never recorded again, tears and saws rather than stings before it vows not to "crap out twice." Willie Nelson's not-yet-standard "Night Life" is all riled up. Bobby Forte's tenor sax adds a sour-mash kick throughout.

Although five of its dozen selections had attained the lower reaches of the R&B chart twixt '65 and '67, few noticed this slapdash piece of product when the Bihari brothers' L.A.-based indie put it on the market. But as rereleased by Ace in 2009, it exemplifies how great artists' lesser work comes to feel more precious when they're gone. Otherwise unavailable highlights include the poverty-fighting title track, a short and sweet "Ain't Nobody's Business," and a "Beautician's Blues" that sics said blues on said beautician. A guy his ma called Riley plays guitar on every track.

Conceptually bound only by the compact genius of Ray Davies' writing, Something Else was the Kinks' last great album of songs before Davies became consumed by operatic studies of a disappearing Britain (1968's The Village Green Preservation Society, 1969's Arthur). The schoolyard romp "David Watts," the delicate envy of "Two Sisters," the plaintive rapture in guitarist Dave Davies' vocal on "Death of a Clown," the young lovers bathed in London twilight in "Waterloo Sunset": They are all complete dramas, concise in their emotional detail and depiction of fading majesty and morals, with harpsichord and brass adding shades of loss and yearning to the Kinks' basic spunk. A shocking commercial stiff (it peaked at Number 153 in Billboard on its U.S. release in early 1968), Something Else may still be the best Kinks album you've never heard.

Once unjustly ignored although it charted for 10 weeks, now lionized beyond all reason although it's certainly a minor masterpiece, the third album by Arthur Lee's interracial L.A. pop band voiced Lee's crazy personal paranoia and paradigmatic political paranoia. Its pretty, well-worked, somewhat fussy surface masks lyrics of unfathomable if not unhinged darkness. Rooted in existential despair and occult folderol, its aura of mystery is earned and indelible, its songcraft undeniable and obscure.

Armed with three virtuoso guitarists and five members who could all sing and write, Moby Grape had the greatest commercial potential of any San Francisco band in 1967. They quickly blew it all thanks to internal tensions, the acid-intensified psychological collapse of guitarist Skip Spence and Columbia's hysterical hype, which included releasing five simultaneous singles from this debut album. The irony: All five deserved to be hits. Moby Grape was that good – a pop-smart whirl of blazing white R&B, country twang and psychedelic balladry, mostly cut live in the studio in three weeks for $11,000. The cruel truth: Of those five singles, only one, Spence's "Omaha," charted. It peaked at Number 88.

In September 1967, the Moody Blues were asked by their label to record an adaptation of Dvorak's Ninth Symphony – as a stereo-demonstration LP. The struggling Moodies, a former white R&B band that had gone without a hit since 1965, instead created their own orchestral song cycle about a typical working day, highlighted by singer-guitarist Justin Hayward's ballads, "Forever Afternoon (Tuesday?)" and "Nights in White Satin." Days of Future Passed (released in the U.S. the following year) is closer to high-art pomp than psychedelia. But there is a sharp pop discretion to the writing and a trippy romanticism in the mirroring effect of the strings and Mike Finder's Mellotron.

Van Morrison's well-known distaste for the record business starts here. Fresh from leaving the Belfast band Them, he spent three days in a New York studio with producer Bert Berns in search of a hit single. When the cantina-heat lust of "Brown Eyed Girl" went Top 10 that summer (after he and Berns put it through 22 takes), Berns rushed out this eight-song quickie from the sessions, infuriating Morrison. But it catches him in heated, searching form, halfway between his demon bark on Them's "Gloria" and the Celtic-dream soul of 1968's Astral Weeks. (Later issues of the Bang tracks revealed early stabs at that album's "Beside You" and "Madame George.") The real mind-blower here is "T.B. Sheets," which crystallizes Morrison's roots and future in nine minutes of slow-burn blues and brutal honesty.

Not just for the half-rhyme's sake was this repurposed gospel up-and-comer called the wicked Pickett. If there were a genre dubbed hard soul, he'd exemplify it, and the reason there isn't is that none of his rivals commanded a voice so tough or an attack so unyielding. By his standards a love song is something suitable for a phone booth wall at the midnight hour – "634-5789," perfect. That's one reason dance records that don't quit such as "Funky Broadway" and "Mustang Sally" were his wheelhouse. "Man and a Half" would come later. So on this nonstop collection, make the theme statement a mere "Ninety-Nine and a Half (Won't Do)."

The twin peaks of British psychedelia – Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and this historic debut album were both recorded in the spring of 1967, in adjacent studios at Abbey Road in London. But where the Beatles' album was a hermetic studio triumph, Piper (produced by ex-Beatles engineer Norman Smith) re-created the nuclear improvisation and double-edged whimsy of the Floyd's onstage freakouts. Singer-guitarist Syd Barrett was already fading into the acid-fueled mental illness that forced him out of the band in early 1968. But Piper was his triumph, dominated by his incisive songs of paradise gained and endangered, and charged with his slashing outer-blues guitar.

The success of Procol Harum's debut single, "A Whiter Shade of Pale" – Top Five in the U.S. in the summer of '67 – has long eclipsed the hard-rock might of the group's first album. That is partly because of its muddy sound ­– the band was recorded live in the studio, in mono. Nevertheless, lyricist Keith Reid's surrealist studies in melancholy and mortality rumble with a heavy-R&B noir powered by Matthew Fisher's ruined church organ, the haunted-Hendrix scream of Robin Trower's guitar and singer-pianist Gary Brooker's white-soul growl. British progressive rock rarely sounded this bold and bruising again.

The epitome of raw soul, Otis Redding made better albums than any other R&B artist of the Sixties. Carla Thomas was daughter to Rufus Thomas of "Funky Chicken" fame, with the teen novelty "Gee Whiz" and graduate school in English behind her. Together whenever conflicting schedules didn't compel Carla to overdub, the sparrow and the bear chuckled and moaned through the greatest duet album this side of Ella and Louis. In addition to reconceiving Clovers and Sam Cooke oldies and a bunch of current soul hits, they turned "Tramp" into their own classic and "Knock on Wood" into everybody's.

Accused of psychedelia, Beatlephobia and murky-mix syndrome, this underrated keeper is distinguished by complex rhymes, complex sexual stereotyping and the non-blues, oh-so-rock-&-roll pianos of Ian Stewart, Jack Nitzsche, Nicky Hopkins and Brian Jones. Like all Beatles and Stones albums till that time, it was released in different American and British versions. The surefire U.S.-only "Let's Spend the Night Together"/"Ruby Tuesday" single parlay is almost too much because its greatness is understood – "Backstreet Girl," bumped to the Flowers compilation released later that year, more closely resembles such gemlike songs of experience as "Connection," "My Obsession" and "She Smiled Sweetly." Capper: Mick and Keith's zonked music-hall "Something Happened to Me Yesterday," the Stones' drollest odd-track-out ever.

The Stones were cresting so high around 1967 that even this pieced-together hodgepodge of singles and tracks left off the U.S. releases of Aftermath and Between the Buttons has a distinctness of style and invention about it. It re-recycles "Let's Spend the Night Together"/"Ruby Tuesday," which shouldn't have been on Between the Buttons to begin with. It disrespects the rightful owners of 'My Girl" (the Temptations) and the target of "Mother's Little Helper" (yo mama). As for "Lady Jane," what's that about? Nevertheless, every track connects. That's more than can be said of Their Satanic Majesties Request, which is better than its rep even so.

Think of the Serpent Power as the Bay Area's version of the Velvet Underground. Led by poet David Meltzer, with Meltzer on untutored post-folk guitar, Meltzer and his wife, Tina, singing his songs, poet Clark Coolidge clattering behind on drums and the soon-vanished John Payne fixing a hole on organ, their music was minimalist folk rock with noise – the climactic, electric banjo augmented "Endless Tunnel" goes on for 13 minutes. Some songs began as poems, others didn't, but all feature notable lyrics – some romantic, some gruff, some both. And all but a few are graced by excellent tunes, none more winsome than that of the lost classic "Up and Down."

In August 1964, "Where Did Our Love Go" began the Supremes' run of chart-topping singles. By the end of 1967, they'd scored 10 of them. In the same timespan, so had the Beatles. Nobody else came close. All 10 are arrayed on this chart-topping 20-track double-LP along with well-remembered also-rans like "Nothing but Heartaches" and "Love Is Like an Itching in My Heart" and filler sure to grow on you as you down yet another round of upbeat erotic longing. Forlorn more often than fulfilled, Ross' sexy love is an up either way thanks to the irresistible Motown rhythm section and a soprano so sweet and lucid that half a century on it still gives the gift of optimism against all odds.

Macon-born and Philadelphia-raised, Howard Tate never went Top 10 even on the soul charts but is remembered along with James Carr as the great lost soul man. "Ain't Nobody Home" became a B.B. King perennial, "Look at Granny Run Run" was the best thing to happen to senior sex till Levitra, and "Get It While You Can" was taken up as a showstopper by none other than Janis Joplin. The album didn't chart at all. But Tate had a supernal falsetto shriek to complement his rough howl, and writer-producer Jerry Ragovoy knew how to milk them both – among other things, by adding two blues standards to his own sharp songs, which even for a guy who retired on "Piece of My Heart" got pretty peaky here.

Pioneers have it tough everywhere. But these Texas acid eaters paid especially hard for their zealotry, harassed by local lawmen to the point that in 1969 singer Roky Erickson went to a mental facility on a marijuana-possession bust. In 1967, the Elevators were still true believers and just back from a spell in San Francisco, reflected in this title's promise of heaven on earth and the sinewy raga guitar all over the record. The Elevators were punks, too, and the spiritualism was salted with the rare intensity of Erickson's wolf-man bleating and the bubbling-lava menace of Tommy Hall's electric-jug blowing. Forty years later, when Erickson crows, "I've got levitation," you still get liftoff.

The hippies and the marketplace both passed on this NYC classic, which proved as prophetic stylistically as Sgt. Pepper was conceptually. Its flat beats, atonal noise, bluesless singing, "urban decadent" subject matter and bummer vibe proved the wellspring of punk which, culturally if not stylistically, leads directly to the entire alt-rock subculture. Great songs here include the disillusioned "Sunday Morning" and "There She Goes Again" and the jonesing "Heroin" and "I'm Waiting for the Man." "Venus in Furs" and "The Black Angel's Death Song" remain subcultural in a rather specialized way.

By 1967, "Alfie" and the like had Warwick on the road to divahood, but that didn't mean this best-of, marked CIRCA 1962–1964 in gold on the cover, was perceived as an oldies record. Girl groups weren't considered quaint yet, and Warwick has never been more tuneful or charming than when she and Bacharach-David had them to contend with. The selling points here are Warwick standards like "Walk On By" and "Don't Make Me Over." But obscurities long vanished from her canon are only a shade less compelling: the delicate "Any Old Time of Day" or her proud, quiet cover of the Shirelles' "It's Love That Really Counts."

While making a full meal of their most delectable concept, a pirate-radio broadcast, the Who's finest album exemplifies how pop this famously psychedelic year was. The mock jingles – for pimple cream, deodorant, baked beans – are pop at its grubbiest. The fictional singles, typified but not necessarily topped by the actual hit "I Can See for Miles," are pop soaring like the dream of youth it is – exalted, visionary, even, in their crafty way, psychedelic. All the rest is English eccentricity.

Founded in Boston and named after an early solo album by singer-bassist Jesse Colin Young, the Youngbloods were a good-time schizophrenia in New York clubs – a Lovin' Spoonful–style coffee-house menu of courtly-ballad jangle and garage-band blues racket – when the original quartet recorded this modestly delightful debut, heavy on the covers (Jimmy Reed, Fred Neil). But the Youngbloods, who soon emigrated to the West Coast 1969 (losing guitarist Jerry Corbitt along the way), already had leaving on their minds. "I guess she's gone to Frisco-oh-oh/To dance it there," Young sang, dragging out the namecheck in "Grizzly Bear," a prescient allusion to his band's high rotation on Fillmore-concert posters. And while the Youngbloods were late to Dino Valenti's Aquarian standard "Get Together" (Jefferson Airplane's version came out in August 1966), the hint of last-chance dread in Young's fluid croon and the spare raga-flavored tangle of the guitars definitively caught the fragility of the song's – and 1967's – utopian certainty.