Ben Campbell is right.
I could list hundreds of great releases and rarities by largely ignored Soul, Reggae, and Country & Western musicians that, though totally ignored by radio programmers, MTV & Rolling Stone magazine, are nevertheless acknowledged masterpieces among the geeky subcultures that collect these sorts of things.
I have a proposal for saving this thread. Let's stick our necks out and say a word on behalf of albums by well-known performers that were unfairly labeled as duds, or as being inferior to the band's best work. So here goes:
"London Calling" by The Clash gets all the hype, but I find it to be a mere mediocrity in comparison to "Sandinista!"
Les Zeppelin's "Presence" is almost never cited as their best work, but I love it. Here is Led Zep album mercifully free of airy-fairy songs and dopey lyrics about The Lord of the Rings and other such hippie nonsense.
Elsewhere on Audiogon, I have argued that Iggy's "New Values" is the equal of some of the best Stooges material.
I have often pitched a bitch about the US market's fixation on the overproduced recordings of Bob Marley. This fixation includes/entails ignorance of the great volume of far better music that has come out of Jamaica. That being said, there is one relatively overlooked disc by Bob Marley and the Wailers that I could not do without. "African Herbsman" benefits from Lee Perry's signature lo-fi production. "African Herbsman" allows you to hear The Wailers at a critical point in their evolution, in transition from the Rock Steady to the Roots idiom, and before they were sanitized and packaged for the US/UK market.
