The 10 best produced classic rock albums
Rock and roll has never been a genre known for sounding pristine. For every great album that has everything firing on all cylinders, some of the most celebrated albums of all time tend to be from artists that wouldn’t know the first thing about production if it bit them in the ass. Sounding pretty is for classical music and other fancy genres, but artists like Fleetwood Mac knew how to bring some sonic sweetness into rock and roll.
Then again, there’s no rule book when it comes to good production. Being a good producer is usually about being able to hear what every musician brings to the table and translate that to what’s on the tape, and these albums came as the result of a lot of listening to every member and finally having all of them capture that magic all at once.
That’s not to say that all of these albums are tuned to perfection. In fact, some of them have a lot of grit behind them, which is half the reason why they work. It is rock and roll, after all, and if you’re going to be micing a guitar, you’re going to make sure it sounds like it’s thundering from the heavens instead of someone jamming in their garage.
Whether it’s a prog rock masterpiece or just a decent piece of rock and roll, those behind the board help create a kaleidoscope of sound whenever you put on the headphones, almost like you’re dipped into a different sonic world when you’re listening. Rock and roll might be based on imperfections, but sometimes you end up making the perfect sound without even realising it.
10 best produced rock albums:
10. Boston – Boston
For the first half of the 1970s, pristine production felt like a dirty word for rock and roll fans. Since the flavours of the day included acts like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin trying to make their music more aggressive, there was no time to clean everything up in the mix whenever someone hit the record button. Tom Scholz was always a producer first and a guitarist second, and when he finally got his sound, there was no one else who could touch him in Boston.
Although the songwriting on Boston’s self-titled is fairly by the numbers by certain rock standards, the real power behind it is just how much Scholz put into the background. Having invented his own guitar pedal to work on most of the songs, his guitars have a cutting midrange that sounds like a metal guitarist just randomly decided to show up on a rock and roll tune.
Outside of playing most of the instruments himself, hearing Brad Delp pull off superhuman vocal exercises is the musical equivalent of looking into the sun half the time. ‘More Than A Feeling’ and ‘Smokin’ might get celebrated as singles, but taken as a whole, this album should be studied by any high-profile producer to know what to look for in a great mix.
9. Wildflowers – Tom Petty
Tom Petty never concerned himself with making anything too complicated. While he initially got in trouble with his fans for calling his own albums “cheap shit”, he clearly took a lot more care in writing about his characters than he did about trying to make the perfect guitar lick every time he sang. Petty may have been a rocker, but he was a storyteller at heart, and once Rick Rubin understood that, they busted out an album that felt like the perfect rustic rock and roll weekend.
Most of the songs on Wildflowers are meticulously recorded, but they sound like they took no time at all to complete. Just look at the title track. Even though there are a lot of great melodies on the final version of the track, it’s like a mini-orchestra when you hear it in context, especially when you hear Benmont Tench’s piano come in halfway through the song.
In terms of Petty’s heartland rock sound, this is pretty much everything you could ask for, from making the rockers when he wants to on tracks like ‘You Wreck Me’ to casually breaking your heart on ‘To Find a Friend’. The rest of the decade would see far more dark times for Petty on the horizon, but it’s usually a pretty good sign when even the composer doesn’t realise how the songs sounded so good.
8. Appetite for Destruction – Guns N’ Roses
Hair metal was never a genre that really concerned itself with actually sounding decent. If you saw some random joker who happened to play the guitar walking down the Sunset Strip, chances are that you found your next big star, even if what you got in the studio was a tone-deaf imbecile. Guns N’ Roses weren’t about that sort of lifestyle. They were a street gang that brandished guitars, and they spent their days wasting away until they birthed Appetite for Destruction.
Compared to other artists who could hardly put two decent guitar licks together, Slash was known to slave away on their debut album, even throwing an electric guitar through the windscreen of one of their vans in disgust when he listened to the initial mix. Once he got a Les Paul in his hands, the rest of the production was bound to be smooth sailing.
Outside of the raw musicianship of every member of the group, each instrument seems to be playing a different hook whenever you listen, from Axl Rose’s biting vocal tone to Duff McKagan sprinkling in bass lines that you could sing back on ‘Paradise City’. Guns N’ Roses may have been born in the same streets that produced Poison and Winger, but this was the first sign that rock and roll was about to get a lot more dangerous.
7. The Black Album – Metallica
For a band as successful as Metallica, it’s a shame that they have so many production blunders in their catalogue. You can forgive their debut, Kill Em All, for sounding a bit ramshackle, but how does a band that presumably has a budget behind their records settle on And Justice For All and St Anger sounding like they were being recorded in a well and in a trash can, respectively? It boggles the mind, but you can at least admit that they were at their best once they got Bob Rock behind the board.
While the initial idea was to bring in Guns N’ Roses producer Mike Clink, Rock’s pedigree for working magic for everyone from Bon Jovi to Aerosmith spoke for itself before he even heard a note of music from the group. Everyone might remember the syrupy ballads from this time like ‘Nothing Else Matters’, but from track one to track twelve, there’s no mistaking this for a metal release before anything else.
Whereas the last records were made with the band punching in every time they tried to record, this feels closer to hearing the band live in a concert setting, especially when they stretch songs out a little bit more on ‘My Friend of Misery’, which might feature the cleanest sounding guitar harmonies that James Hetfield ever recorded. They may have been setting their sights on mainstream success, but anyone saying that the thrash legends “sold out” on this album should either take another listen to ‘Sad But True’ or have their ears checked.
6. Nevermind – Nirvana
When Nirvana first got started, selling a million records probably wasn’t on their minds. As much as Kurt Cobain may have wanted to be a star, his love for acts like The Beatles almost fell by the wayside in favour of his indie rock snobbery in their early days. Although Cobain would later complain that the sound of Nevermind was too slick, the work Butch Vig and Andy Wallace did behind the scenes is still the stuff of rock legend.
Then again, Cobain may have been thinking that he was working with a hardcore producer, seeing how Wallace was the man behind mixing Slayer. He may have had a pedigree in making thrash metal classics, but his way of making the listener his personal punching bag was production genius, especially with Cobain’s pop melodies soaring above everything on ‘In Bloom’ and ‘Come As You Are’.
Cobain may have considered the album one-note, but there are many different sonic faces on the record as well, including the tortured soul in the middle of ‘Something in the Way’ or the choice to make ‘Polly’ sound dry as a bone once it starts. It’s always better to serve the artist’s wishes, but if the record sounded the way Cobain wanted, the entire grunge movement would have probably never existed.
5. Aja – Steely Dan
Looking at their discography, Steely Dan feels more like a brand than an actual band. For all of the great music Donald Fagen and Walter Becker could write and create together, one of their often-neglected talents was their ability to bring the best out of every musician they worked with until their songs were practically flawless. They may have found their edge on The Royal Scam, but Aja was the moment when everything seemed to fit under one roof.
Then again, is it really right to call this a classic rock record? Sure, it has all the hallmarks that most would come to expect from a guitar record from this era, but the amazing sounds of songs like ‘Josie’ and ‘Deacon Blues’ seem to defy any kind of “rock” categorisation half the time, almost like these are just jazz veterans cutting loose in the studio.
The song lengths might look a bit demanding for casual fans, but almost every instrument gets a moment to shine in the mix between Fagen’s vocals, whether that’s Denny Dias crafting an amazing guitar solo or Steve Gadd laying down the kind of drum solo that could serve as a litmus test for what drums ought to sound like. For as much as Steely Dan may have scoffed at being included in the rock category, they are still the owners of one of the most sophisticated-sounding records in the genre’s canon.
4. The Dark Side of the Moon – Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd have always felt more like technicians in the studio than proper musicians. Sure, they had their moments when they would let improvisation guide them through a song, but there’s no way that someone comes up with a song like ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ without having a clear idea of where everything was going to go. Albums were becoming the chosen format for rock and roll at the time, and after dealing with their own personal trauma, the band channelled all their emotion into a descent into madness.
Aside from being known as one of the go-to logos everyone puts on everything, The Dark Side of the Moon is one of the most haunting listens in history due to how much is going on. There might be some elaborate musical sequences on songs like ‘Time’, but that’s matched by the sound design on everything, with Alan Parker bringing in clocks on some tracks and the ringing sounds of cash registers to lead us into ‘Money’.
And while David Gilmour has never really played a bad solo, every guitar break he makes has its own distinct character, whether that’s the weary slide on ‘Breathe’ or the twinkling chime on ‘Us and Them’. For an album that’s all about the darker side of life, the production value feels like that little bit of light in a black hole.
3. Pet Sounds – The Beach Boys
Every artist thrives on having competition among their ranks. Oasis probably wouldn’t have been as cutthroat about their status without Blur, and there’s a good chance that Robert Smith was driven to make better music just to make sure that Morrissey lost his mind about it. While everyone goes back to the rivalry between The Beatles and The Rolling Stones in the 1960s, it really should be whittled down to The Beatles and The Beach Boys when it came to the studio.
Although Brian Wilson liked what the Fab Four had done with the concept of the album on Rubber Soul, he knew he could take his group further, eventually locking himself away in California studios to create Pet Sounds. This could justifiably be called a Brian Wilson solo album half the time, but its real strength is hearing every band member sing together, whether that’s the round-robin effect on ‘God Only Knows’ or the sunkissed choir on ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’.
At the same time, special attention needs to be paid to The Wrecking Crew, who turned in some of the finest performances ever heard on a pop record, even if Wilson was telling them to play arrangements they might not have been comfortable with. The British Invasion might have gotten the ball rolling for the album format, but for all of the effort The Beatles put into Sgt Pepper, Wilson may have one-upped his English friends in terms of raw production value.
2. Abbey Road – The Beatles
The Beatles were probably never going to be half as good as they were without George Martin. They had plenty of potential as a scruffy bar band in their early days, but Martin’s knowledge of musical theory helped transform their good songs into modern classics half the time. That kind of band/producer camaraderie was wearing thin by the end of the Fabs’ careers together, but they did leave one last hurrah for the rest of us to enjoy, and the music world still has yet to recover.
While they didn’t have a set concept this time around, Abbey Road is just the result of The Beatles and Martin making incredible music together, no matter what genre it may be. Whether they were making the avant-garde precursor to metal on ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ or pure pop on ‘Here Comes the Sun’, everything seemed to come naturally to them at this point, especially on the flip side where they try their hand at making their best operatic material.
Even with the new reissue that they’ve made with its recent anniversary, there’s not much that needed changing, only sweetening up a few arrangements and making everything even more sonically gargantuan than it was before. We may have come a long way since the days of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, but it’s a testament to their ability that their true swan song still sounds like it could come out tomorrow and still sound fresh.
1. Rumours – Fleetwood Mac
Everything about an album like Rumours shouldn’t really work on paper. Fleetwood Mac may have finally been getting the praise they had dreamed of since the start of their career, but having Lindsey Buckingham breaking up with Stevie Nicks at the same time John and Christine McVie were divorcing should signal that we were in for one of the worst-sounding records of the 1970s. Then again, those raw wounds weren’t detractors by any stretch. If anything, they were rocket fuel.
Outside of the ugliness behind the scenes, the band showed up with some of the greatest arrangements of their career on their second outing as this lineup. Whereas Nicks and Buckingham were the new kids on the block, they had already adopted the habits of seasoned pros, including the delicate fingerpicking on ‘Never Going Back Again’ or the sparse arrangements of ‘Dreams’.
While the group may have been sent out on the road with those passive-aggressive emotions, Rumours became one of the cleanest records to listen to, turning into a fixture at record stores, where it was used as a reference record when testing out their new equipment. Some albums might seem like a product of their time, and others might try their hardest to be ahead of their time, but in just eleven tracks, Fleetwood Mac figured out how to sound truly timeless.