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Hunter S. Thompson’s Top 10 albums of the 1960s

by | 1st, July 2017

hunter s thompson great gatsby

 

Hunter S. Thompson was into music. “I resent your assumption that Music is Not My Bag,” he told Rolling Stone editor John Lombardo in 1970, “because I’ve been arguing for the past few years that music is the New Literature, that Dylan is the 1960s’ answer to Hemingway, and that the main voice of the ’70s will be on records & videotape instead of books.”

Bob Dylan is every inch Hemingway’s equal, at least in the eyes of the Nobel Prize winning committee he is. Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature (1954); Dylan took the same prize in 2016. Dylan never considered his songs literature.

You kind of wonder why the Nobel panel did? Is there a dearth of candidates? Was it a sop of populism? Is Paul Anker next in line? Carly Simon? Dr Dre? Was it just a chance for the Nobel doyens to meet their hero in a private show? If it was the latter, hard cheese: Dylan delivered his Nobel lecture via videotape.

But, yeah, Thompson was prescient.

And these are his Top 10 albums of the 1960s (according to Raoul Duke,” the hard-living alter-ego witnessed in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

 

  • Herbie Mann’s 1969 Memphis Underground (“which may be the best album ever cut by anybody”)
  • Bob Dylan’s 1965 Bringing It All Back Home
  • Dylan’s 1965 Highway 61 Revisited
  • The Grateful Dead’s 1970 Workingman’s Dead (“the heaviest thing since Highway 61 and ‘Mr. Tambourine Man'”)
  • The Rolling Stones’ 1969 Let it Bleed
  • Buffalo Springfield’s 1967 Buffalo Springfield
  • Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 Surrealistic Pillow
  • Roland Kirk’s “various albums”
  • Miles Davis’s 1959 Sketches of Spain
  • Sandy Bull’s 1965 Inventions
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    Spotter: Open Culture



    Posted: 1st, July 2017 | In: Celebrities, Key Posts, Music Comment | TrackBack | Permalink