Honestly not all that impressed by that list, expected more. Some great stuff came out a few years later, some great stuff a few years before. IMO, YMMV and all that.

How did Graham Nash make that list?

Fall of 1971. Freshman in High School. Bought "Who's Next" shortly after it came out. A very good year...

Ohhh, 1971. I was well on my way to turning 7. :D

I would say that 75% of that list influenced me for years after their release.

Flashback to 1971...
 

My first acoustic group (I had given up electric over a year before in the interest of hearing preservation, didn't pick it up other than home practice for the next fifteen years), my first college girlfriend, and some rather enlightening on-campus experiences inside and outside the classroom (which Forum rules prevent me from discussing here), that would henceforth and irrevocably shape my worldview...

Truth be told I didn't like most of the electric music (still don't) - listened to pre-disco R&B/soul and horn bands (Chicago/BS&T), picked up on singer/songwriters (Gordon Lightfoot, Cat Stevens, Neil Diamond, etc.) and acoustic vocal-harmony groups (CSNY, America, etc.), took some music majors' courses in harmony/ear training (proved valuable when I did freelance arranging a decade later), got my first exposure to "serious" music circles (for better or worse), also the year I rediscovered 48th Street "Music Row"...

Then there was the '64 Pontiac Star Chief 4-door - 389 under the hood, total sleeper inside and out, ran like a bat out of Hades (unbeknownst to me the previous owner had done some creative under-hood work, found out first time I mashed the gas :wild:) - and this '64 fuelie 'Vette I caught on Flatbush Avenue at 2AM in my first (and only) street race, but that's another story... :cool:

I was only 10 in '71 and still probably 4 years away from my musical 'awakening' but two albums jump out that became staples of my heavy rotation - Led Zeppelin IV and Jethro Tull's Aqualung. Easily two of what I would call my top ten albums of my rock-oriented listening of the latter half of that decade.

Even with disco and punk?!!! :eek:

I was only 5 in 1971, and yet I own all but six of the records on that list. But I'll take the '60s anytime over any other decade. There were so many different genres, but it was all good. But the '70s? The first 5 years of the '70s was a golden age for prog and the last few years saw the rise of the NWOBHM and post-punk set the stage for a mod revival drawing heavily on the mid-60s. Heavy rock still prospered with the likes of Heep, Purple, Rush and Led Zep and it was a good time for singer songwriters, especially in the US. However, in the UK, in the mid-70s all we were subjected to on the radio was disco and punk and John Peel became a complete hypocrite and slammed prog and psychedelia, which remains unforgivable in my book.

I still have six vinyl albums on that list