The Grand Duel Il Grande Duello (1972) [re Up]

Led Zeppelin's fourth album, Black Sabbath's Paranoid, and Deep Purple's Machine Head have stood the test of time as the Holy Trinity of English hard rock and heavy metal, serving as the fundamental blueprints followed by virtually every heavy rock & roll band since the early '70s…

Vol. 4 is the point in Black Sabbath's career where the band's legendary drug consumption really starts to make itself felt. And it isn't just in the lyrics, most of which are about the blurry line between reality and illusion. Vol. 4 has all the messiness of a heavy metal Exile on Main St., and if it lacks that album's overall diversity, it does find Sabbath at their most musically varied, pushing to experiment amidst the drug-addled murk…

Jimi Hendrix left behind more unreleased material than just about any other rock artist. Some tracks have rated as all-time classics ("Angel," "Izabella," "Drifting," etc.), while others should have remained in the vaults (such as the full-length albums Crash Landing and Voodoo Soup, two collections that were near-criminally touched up by then-Hendrix keeper Alan Douglas)…

There were a lot of terrible album debacles in the wake of Jimi Hendrix's death in 1970, but there were a handful of keepers. The Cry of Love and Rainbow Bridge were both excellent, but now the material from both albums has been officially released as part of First Rays of the New Rising Sun or on another compilation…

The first full-fledged L&M album found the duo in good form as songwriters, with Messina turning in the sparkling "Thinking Of You," and the two collaborating on the hit single "Your Mama Don't Dance" and "Angry Eyes." Their backup band was anchored by multi-instrumentalist Al Garth, and also featured keyboardist Michael Omartian and Poco steel guitarist Rusty Young.

The Doors were an American rock band formed in 1965 in Los Angeles, with vocalist Jim Morrison, keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger, and John Densmore on drums. The band got its name, at Morrison's suggestion from the title of Aldous Huxley's book The Doors of Perception, which itself was a reference to a quote made by William Blake, "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." They were unique and among the most controversial and influential rock acts of the 1960s, mostly because of Morrison's lyrics and charismatic but unpredictable stage persona…