Bizarre 1970s Albums You Should Drop The Needle On At Least Once

Fictional languages you can actually learn to speak, death, the Book of Revelation, the emotional well-being of plants, and, especially, space travel: The more out-there and intense a topic was, the more likely there was a '70s band or artist that was obsessed with it and transferred that fascination to vinyl. The populations of artists and eccentrics have overlapped since the first caveman painted a wall, but the 1970s seemed to nurture a particularly high number of musical weirdos.

During the reign of physical media, music obsessives and fans of the weird in general were the primary listeners of esoterica like what we've gathered here. They were the ones rummaging through record stores and yard sales to score strange albums (and pick up something that "looked cool" from the bargain bin to give it a spin). Now, thanks to the internet, the whole world is a plastic bin of unsold records in the backs of a music store. We offer you the below selection to start virtually rummaging through. 

It's not for you. Mort Garson's "Mother's Earth Plantasia" is, at least theoretically, made to be played to plants. The album, 31 minutes of soothing synthesizer, boasts tracks with titles like "Ode to an African Violet" and "You Don't Have to Walk a Begonia." It was originally only sold at a single plant store in Los Angeles and, in a hard-to-explain cross-promotion, was an additional giveaway that came with mattresses purchased from Sears. "Plantasia" later caught the interest of the internet ecosystem, finding new audiences through renegade uploads to YouTube. Eventually, it was formally rereleased through Sacred Bones Records, okayed by Garson's startled heir, daughter Day Darmet. (Amusingly, Garson's own family found the album blah, with Darmet noting to The Guardian that she preferred her father's other work.)

Garson is a bigger deal than his limited name recognition would imply: A Juilliard grad who worked as a prolific songwriter, TV and film composer, and craftsman of commercial jingles, he scored the moon landing for U.S. television. "Plantasia" is an exception in his discography — much of his work was released under assumed names, making it difficult to identify them as the work of the same artist. An extreme example is his 1971 album Black Mass, which he released under the name Lucifer.

Experimental composer John Cage may be best remembered for two pieces that stretch the definitions of music: The famously silent "4'33"" and the epochal "As Slow as Possible," which a German church will be playing for the next six centuries. Even his works that are more comprehensively musical, though, are still thought-provoking and peculiar. An excellent example is "Cheap Imitation," in which he revamped a piece by the composer Erik Satie (himself a bit of an odd bird who wrote the longest piano masterpiece ever recorded). The impetus for "Cheap Imitation" originally emerged from a licensing dispute, when Cage's partner Merce Cunningham couldn't get the rights to Satie's "Socrate" for a dance performance. Cage made his love a "Cheap Imitation," distinct enough from the original, to allow the project to proceed.

Cage used an algorithm-like process to transpose the notes of "Socrate" into something distinctly his. He kept the rhythmic line and then transposed the notes according to I Ching divination, which provided him with a randomized result. Effectively, this means the key is repeatedly changing, preventing the listener from being able to predict how the next note will sound. The result marries the gentle playfulness of Satie with Cage's own expectation-smashing, a confusing piece too weird to be quite pretty but interesting enough to keep listeners engaged.

Jobriath is a heartbreaker for a handful of reasons. For one, his career was badly mismanaged, with extreme overpromotion leading to a backlash that sank his future. He was also one of the first famous people to die of AIDS, even if by then he had slid back into obscurity. And his early career collapse and death meant that he never got to wholly blossom into the weird and glorious pop star he could have been. We get glimpses, though, in his sophomore effort "Creatures of the Street," produced even as the anti-Jobriath backlash boiled against him. It was the last album released while he was alive, though some additional material has come out since.

Whether you like Jobriath's voice really, really depends on your tolerance for reedy, nasaly tones, but he undeniably delivers with verve, and the result is something like a glittery oboe, pinched but enthusiastic. The songs are more mature and energetic than the baseline he laid down in his self-titled first item, with little splashes of compelling experimentation: A plummy old-lady voice here, a lick of something that sounds like a steel drum there. Jobriath himself even plays with a country accent, twanging along on some songs. "Creatures of the Street" shows such growth and continuation from "Jobriath" that it's tantalizing and maddening to imagine what the artist could have done in a kinder world, more accepting of gay people and genre-crossing eccentricity and more concerned with queer men's health.

"666 (The Apocalypse of John, 3/18)" by Greek band Aphrodite's Child starts the vibes strong. An opening chant of voices in unison intones something about "the system" — sources differ as to what they're actually chanting — louder and louder before heading right into a musical treatment of Babylon's fall. As the album continues, it stays creepy and gets even cooler.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are introduced with a sonically cool and technically out-of-this-world guitar solo, with lyrics pulled right from the description of the eschatological equestrians in Revelation. Even the Lamb gets creepy thanks to a jangling motif with minor chords reminding you that you're listening to Greek dudes with influences outside the Anglophone norm. Brief narrations of key events (like the opening of the Seventh Seal and the pouring out of the bowls of God's wrath) break up the songs while keeping the mood very, very intense, though Aphrodite's Child still leaves room for play. The Tribulation is dealt with in a brief, brassy track that will remind some listeners of chase-music classic "Yakety Sax," and a ragtimey track pops up near the end. 

Unfortunately, "666 (The Apocalypse of John, 3/18)" was the last album Aphrodite's Child released, though alumni Vangelis and Demis Roussos went on to successful careers. The other dudes presumably had a lot of fun telling women that they'd written a prog-rock concept album about the end of the world. And hey, when the apocalypse comes, they'll be ready.

Didn't know you could put an accent mark over a "W," did you? In fairness, "Mëkanïk Dëstruktïẁ Kömmandöh" are likely the first words you've ever read in Kobaïan, a constructed language that only exists in works by French band Magma. You see, you need a language like Kobaïan to make good zeuhl music, "zeuhl" of course being how you say "celestial" in Kobaïan. Translated into our mere English, zeuhl, a microgenre of which "Mëkanïk Dëstruktïẁ Kömmandöh" is one of the early examples, is a sort of ... metal/neo-classical/prog rock/space opera/howling music. And boy, does "Mëkanïk Dëstruktïẁ Kömmandöh" seem like it might have come from outer space.

The album begins with shouting in Kobaïan, which sounds too much like German for it to be a comforting experience. From there, we get a lot of chanting in unison, carefully calibrated shrieking, tactical-assault ululations, and a sort of overall jingling quality in the instrumentation that emphasizes the fact that this album is about space — and it's the third, in fact, in Magma's sequence of space-rock operas. It's worth a listen as a truly outsider project that wound up being more influential than seems possible. With that said, though "Mëkanïk Dëstruktïẁ Kömmandöh" plays by rules that can't be evaluated by human concepts of "good music," it's certainly more interesting than pleasant.

In June 1973, drummer Robert Wyatt got drunk at a birthday party and fell out of a window. The four-story plummet broke his spine, paralyzing him from the waist down and, among the many other complications of a life-altering injury, limiting his abilities as a drummer. Down but not out, during the initial months of his recovery, Wyatt began to work with vocals and instrumentation beyond the drum kit he was used to. The result is the weird, captivating "Rock Bottom," recorded just six months after his life-changing injury.

Discussions of "Rock Bottom" usually contextualize it with reference to Wyatt's injury, which is reasonable, but it would be interesting to play it for someone who didn't have the context. Wyatt is, calmly but defiantly, seeing what music he can make with changed circumstances, and a benefit of that situation is that he simply isn't interested in some of the rules. His vocals have the almost-straining quality common to men who really want to be tenors regardless of where on the staff God placed their natural range. Yet his singing interplays with the backing instruments in unusual, fresh ways. (Plus, this white boy is brave enough to scat.) The instrumentation is relentlessly original, with patterned passages that give a tiny hint of Philip Glass while freely veering into dissonance when Wyatt chooses. It's something of a "musician's album," but it rewards anyone who sits down to engage with this artifact of a skilled performer changing gears and going full speed ahead.

How do you top Orson Welles' famous, allegedly-but-not-really panic-inducing radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds"? (One of many infamous events that never actually happened.) With the only force in the world more powerful than human credulity: prog rock. Jeff Wayne, an American-British composer and Moog synthesizer pioneer who loved H.G. Wells' work, recorded a full musical version of the classic alien-invasion story and released it in 1978. The album flew off shelves, becoming the best-selling prog-rock soundtrack of all time (with the standard caveat that if you ask three people to define prog rock, you'll get 17 definitions).

Wayne's synthy score is just perfect for the project. Nothing says "creepy" and "space" like a synthesizer, and he pushes the instrument past mere imitation of standard orchestration to let it stand out as its own innovative force. If aliens had invaded Earth in 1978, this is exactly how it would have sounded. With a voice cast featuring none other than acting great and former two-time Mr. Elizabeth Taylor Richard Burton as the narrator and Thin Lizzy member Phil Lynott as a pastor reacting to the alien arrival, the acting is as superb and perfectly tailored as the music. "Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds" is such a good album that it's been adapted into a live show that occasionally tours.

The ancillary materials around Funkadelic's "Maggot Brain" certainly let listeners know what they're in for. The title alone is certainly ... vivid. The album cover features Black model Barbara Cheeseborough (glamorous enough in her other work to grace the cover of Essence), screaming with her eyes screwed shut, only her head protruding from the earth. The liner notes are an excerpt on the nature of fear, lifted from the pages of a cult called the Process Church of the Final Judgment, whose organization's magazine later featured an interview with one Charles Manson. Funkadelic can be accused of many things, but not soft-pedaling.

It's a shame that some listeners were probably put off by the above (it even apparently annoyed some members of the band), because the album is excellent. George Clinton's somber, ominous opening statement includes deathless lines like "I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe," and given the alleged magnitude of his drug use, he probably has. Yet what follows isn't the Lovecraftian journey you might expect but an album you would happily give to someone so they could learn what funk is. Bright and energetic vocals, transcendent guitar solos, and grooveable beats: It's all here, and it's all good. "Maggot Brain" was the last album put out by this specific membership, but what a note to leave on.

The Dolly Dots just make eligibility for this list, bursting onto the scene in 1979. The Dutch girl band was most popular in its native Netherlands but also got airplay and attention in places like Egypt, Lebanon, and Turkey, lit up the radio in Iceland, and was big in Japan. The group never really took off in English-speaking markets (despite generally singing in English), so its legacy is strongest on the Dutch-language internet and in the hearts and minds of Europop's most intense fans.

The band's debt to ABBA is colossal. Dolly Dots songs follow their predecessors' rubric of a memorable instrumental intro that gives people a few bars to get excited about the song, followed by female voices singing largely in unison, presenting melodies that are, shall we say, easy for even untrained singers to shadow. It's light, fun music that sounds exactly like its era, and if you've ever gone on a YouTube hole of acts that competed in Eurovision in the 1980s, you'll enjoy throwing on the Dolly Dots as you dance your way through your housework.

Not to be confused with Bette Davis, she of the song-inspiring eyes, Betty Davis was Miles Davis' second wife. Slim, young, and pretty, wearing elegant space-age thigh-high silver boots and sporting unabashed natural hair, Davis looks as fresh and sweet as an ingenue grace on the cover of her self-titled first solo album. (By then, she and Davis had split, in part because he thought she'd been sleeping with Jimi Hendrix. She kept the name.)

The lightly flirtatious album cover of "Betty Davis" is one of the best bait-and-switch plays in music history. Davis, her voice gloriously agile for how very raspy it is, doesn't sing about boys: She sings about men, what she wants them to do to her, and what she wants to do to them. It's a frankly "naughty" album, and her inimitable voice makes her sound like a succubus in the most complimentary use of the term. "Betty Davis" is a little too brash to be called seductive, but the woman knows what she wants, and she knows how to ask for it.

The first lyrics you hear of Annette Peacock's "X-Dreams" are "My mama never taught me how to cook / That's why I'm so skinny," delivered in a controlled caterwaul over a chill but technically excellent funk-inflected backing track. She continues through a text-heavy song, alternating between speaking, singing, and wailing, dropping incestuous innuendos through deniable-but-unmistakable phrasing. The next song, "Real & Defined Androgens," is a mournfully poetic eleven-minute reflection on the emptiness of pornography consumption. And then Peacock keeps going through five more songs.

According to an interview with Quietus magazine, Peacock said "X-Dreams" happened by accident — because she moved to London by accident. A missed flight during a quick business stopover on a trip to perform in Denmark led to Peacock, baby in tow, deciding to stay in England for a while. Her music publisher arranged for her to have some studio time, and, bless them, some musicians just showed up to jam with her, leading to 22 performers, many of whom had never worked together before, backing Peacock on the unrepentantly weird and uncategorizable album. Every track was a first take: Even if Peacock's dense lyricism and controlled chaos aren't to your taste, the fact that "X-Dreams" is essentially a live album commands respect.