The Hollies 198

Alan Parsons studied a number of musical instruments in childhood but, like many of his peers, settled on the guitar in his early teens. His job in the late 1960s at the EMI tape duplication facility allowed him access to many classics of the day, including the tape master of The Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), which fired him up to become a recording engineer. He subsequently managed to get work at the Abbey Road Studios and participated in the creation of The Beatles albums Let It Be (1970) and Abbey Road (1969) and the infamous Apple rooftop session. He also went on to work as mix engineer with Paul McCartney and George Harrison after The Beatles split…

It may not be the "ultimate" collection of hits from the 1970's, but this ten disc set does indeed offer 198 of the songs that helped define the decade. Happily, they are all original recordings by the original artists, as they were heard on the radio. True, in a few cases that means the selections are "radio edits" (Rod Stewart's 1971 hit "Maggie May", for example, is missing the 30 second instrumental introduction that was included on the original album, but rarely played over the airwaves), but why quibble? The songs, though not necessarily remastered, all sound great, and the set includes some genuine treasures that have not (yet) been offered on other compilations. Highly recommended!

Sounds of the Seventies was a 38-volume series issued by Time-Life during the late 1980s and early-to-mid 1990s, spotlighting pop music of the 1970s. Much like Time-Life's other series chronicling popular music, volumes in the "Sounds of the Seventies" series covered a specific time period, including individual years in some volumes, and different parts of the decade (for instance, the early 1970s) in others; in addition, some volumes covered specific trends, such as music popular on album-oriented rock stations on the FM band. Each volume was issued on either compact disc, cassette or (with volumes issued prior to 1991) vinyl record.