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In 1999, Mobile Fidelity reissued Blue Oyster Cult's first two albums, Blue Oyster Cult (1972) and Tyranny and Mutation (1973) on a single 24-karat gold CD that was aimed at audiophiles. Hearing the albums back to back on the same disc, one is reminded how much crisper, tougher and sharper Murry Krugman and Sandy Pearlman's production was on Tyranny and Mutation – it's a production that's more suitable for a heavy metal/hard rock band…

In 1987, it was anyone's guess if the Stones would ever get back together. Sure, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were well known for their public disagreements, but when Jagger decided to tour in support of his second solo album, Primitive Cool, Richards was disheartened and finally succumbed to the idea of recording without the Rolling Stones…

Bob Dylan and the Band both needed the celebrated reunion tour of 1974, since Dylan's fortunes had been floundering since Self Portrait and the Band stumbled with 1971's Cahoots. The tour, with its attendant publicity, definitely returned both artists to center stage, and it definitely succeeded, breaking box office records and earning great reviews. Before the Flood, a double-album souvenir of the tour, suggests that these were generally dynamic shows, but not because they were reveling in the past, but because Dylan was fighting the nostalgia of his audience - nostalgia, it must be noted, that was promoted as the very reason behind these shows. Yet that's what gives this music such kick - Dylan reworks, rearranges, reinterprets these songs in ways that are still disarming, years after its initial release…

The full-blown rock opera about a deaf, dumb, and blind boy that launched the band to international superstardom, written almost entirely by Pete Townshend. Hailed as a breakthrough upon its release, its critical standing has diminished somewhat in the ensuing decades because of the occasional pretensions of the concept and because of the insubstantial nature of some of the songs that functioned as little more than devices to advance the rather sketchy plot. Nonetheless, the double album has many excellent songs, including "I'm Free," "Pinball Wizard," "Sensation," "Christmas," "We're Not Gonna Take It," and the dramatic ten-minute instrumental "Underture." Though the album was slightly flawed, Townshend's ability to construct a lengthy conceptual narrative brought new possibilities to rock music…

Although Eric Clapton has released a bevy of live albums, none of them have ever quite captured the guitarist's raw energy and dazzling virtuosity. The double live album Just One Night may have gotten closer to that elusive goal than most of its predecessors, but it is still lacking in many ways…

Instead of playing it safe and writing Moving Pictures, Pt. II, Rush replaced their heavy rock of yesteryear with even more modern sounds for 1982's Signals. Synthesizers were now an integral part of the band's sound, and replaced electric guitars as the driving force for almost all the tracks…

The first solo album by the former leader of the Impressions, Curtis represented a musical apotheosis for Curtis Mayfield - indeed, it was practically the "Sgt. Pepper's" album of '70s soul, helping with its content and its success to open the whole genre to much bigger, richer musical canvases than artists had previously worked with. All of Mayfield's years of experience of life, music, and people were pulled together into a rich, powerful, topical musical statement that reflected not only the most up-to-date soul sounds of its period, finely produced by Mayfield himself, and the immediacy of the times and their political and social concerns, but also embraced the most elegant R&B sounds of the past…

Shostakovich Quartet (Квартет имени Шостаковича) was founded in 1966 by Alexander Korchagin and Andre Shishlov in the Rafael Davidyan class at the Moscow Conservatory. A few years later, professor Sergei Shirinsky (legendary cellist, member of Beethoven Quartet) mentored the ensemble…

In a debut consisting of covers, nobody could accuse Vanilla Fudge of bad taste in their repertoire; with stoned-out, slowed-down versions of such then-recent classics as "Ticket to Ride," "Eleanor Rigby," and "People Get Ready," they were setting the bar rather high for themselves. Even the one suspect choice – Sonny Bono's "Bang Bang" – turns out to be rivaled only by Mott the Hoople's version of "Laugh at Me" in putting Bono's songwriting in the kindest possible light. Most of the tracks here share the common structure of a disjointed warm-up jam, a Hammond-heavy dirge of harmonized vocals at the center, and a final flat-out jam. Still, some succeed better than others: "You Keep Me Hanging On" has a wonderfully hammered-out drum part, and "She's Not There" boasts some truly groovy organ jams. While the pattern can sound repetitive today, each song still works as a time capsule of American psychedelia.