The Best Rock 'N' Roll Records of All Time: A Fan's Guide to the Stuff You Love [Paperback]

Jimmy Guterman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1992

The coauthor of The Worst Rock 'n' Roll of All Time has some welcome good news: Great rock is alive and well. And in his new book, veteran rock critic Jimmy Guterman shares his choices--and his convincing reasons behind choosing them. Illustrated with photos, album covers and drawings throughout.

Product Details

• Paperback: 205 pages
• Publisher: Citadel Pr; First Edition edition (May 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080651325X
• ISBN-13: 978-0806513256
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,013,077 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not Too Helpful, June 22, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Best Rock 'N' Roll Records of All Time: A Fan's Guide to the Stuff You Love (Paperback)

Not nearly as interesting as "The Worst Rock Records" mainly because singing someone's praises is less interesting than ripping them to shreds. Whereas the "Worst" book was clever, funny, and offered true insight, Gutermann's biases don't work so well here. There's a lot of bootlegs listed to represent the best work of particular artists - Dylan's "Ten of Swords", Elvis's "Burbank Sessions" among them - which is fine for rock completists but not too helpful for the causal fan. Mr. Guterman should go back to slicing and dicing, puffing up isn't his particular skill.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars When Anybody Could Do It, June 8, 2009

By 

T-Ro (St. Louis, MO) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Best Rock 'N' Roll Records of All Time: A Fan's Guide to the Stuff You Love (Paperback)

Now with the internet, everybody's a critic. Criticism is subjective, so critics are usually good or bad depending on the tastes you have already formed. Jimmy Guterman and Owen O'Donnell's "Worst Rock-n-Roll Records of All Time" was fun. While it's easier to write about bad music, it's harder to find it, so many of the albums in that book are far from being among the worst rock albums ever. Listing the best albums is really easier; there's the usual "rock canon" suspects that the majority of dedicated rock fans can agree on. But it's harder to write about. Guterman's solo excursion, "The Best Rock n' Roll Records of All Time," makes both endeavors unnecessarily difficult. It features a list which appears to combine Guterman's favorite albums with very-good-more-importantly-obscure-ones that he can impress us with.

Even limiting it to one album per artist as this book does, most of us could come up with a 100 best that most folks would recognize. Not Guterman, he falls into the classic hipper-than-thou critic trap of hauling out stuff few of us have heard of and fewer of us would probably care about. If he wants to make "The 100 Greatest Albums You've Never Heard" fine, that's a great concept, but throwing Ted Hawkins, Iron City House Rockers, The Morells and "The Nonesuch Explorer" (Various Artists) into a list of 100 best rock albums? No.

Worse, he commits the ultimate crime of rock critic snobism: he includes bootlegs. So Bob Dylan (at #11) is represented by a 10-LP set called "Ten of Swords." Then Guterman hauls out another bootleg for Elvis Presley's contribution. Again, bootlegs are not the place for an honest consumer guide, they just serve to show the the writer has a cooler record collection than you do, which seems to be Guterman's point in this book.

My diatribe here could've been much shorter, though, if I'd just told you from the outset that Guterman's choice for the Number One rock album of "all time" is.... Rod Stewart's "Every Picture Tells a Story." 'Nuf said.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Guterman's Best Rock & Roll Records... is a very useful book., March 12, 2007

By 

Craig A. Moran - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Best Rock 'N' Roll Records of All Time: A Fan's Guide to the Stuff You Love (Paperback)

You can learn a hell of a lot about rock & roll and rock roots music by reading this book and listening to some of the albums Guterman lists here. He takes an interesting slant on the subject, different from that of many other best-of music books that I've read. I would definitely call Guterman a rock purist. He tends to look down on sub-genre's like psychedelic, punk, disco, and rap. The only punk album represented here is by the Clash and rap gets one old school compilation. The psychedelic genre gets nothing; though it's well represented in Guterman`s other book, Worst...Records of All Time.

Although Guterman gives short thrift to rap, many black artists and genres are included. You get a healthy dose of blues, soul, rockers, pop, and reggae. I consider that to be one of the book's greatest strengths. Some best-of books cover black or white artists, but not both. Others, like the Rough Guides, separate black and white music into different books. I don't like segregation on the radio so why should I put up with it in books. Here black artists are linked and compared directly with white artists and given their due, about half the book.

Guterman also does a good job covering the decades. No particular era is over represented; I never got a sense that Guterman preferred one over another. The albums and musicians in this book span the 50s, 60, 70s, & 80s. An appendix in the back lists some records covering music that preceded these decades and influenced rock. As you might have guessed, Guterman is a big country fan.

As a purist, Guterman seems to prefer retro groups and ignore innovators. No Kraftwerk here. But you do get a lot of fun stuff, sleepers by groups like Rockpile and the Morells. These groups were neither popular nor influential, but I sure am glad Guterman let me know about them.

Now that I think about it maybe "Best of..." isn't the best title for this book. Calling a lot of the retro music represented here "Best of..." is like saying the pre-Raphaelite painters were better than the impressionists. But you know that the pre-Raphaelite's put out some charming paintings.