Last Updated on 25 February 2026 by Massimo M.
The year we are about to deal with was prolific for rock music. It is therefore a rather difficult task to isolate the ten most significant rock albums of 1968.
However, even though this is a list essentially based on my personal taste, and therefore certainly debatable, it does take into account the importance of the record in terms of its influence on the music to come and also the sales figures and popular and critical success.
Suffice it to say that practically none of the historical artists are absent as releases in 1968. It starts with Jimi Hendrix with his Electric ladyland, often considered his best work, continuing with Pink Floyd releasing A saucerful of secrets, the Rolling stones with Beggar Banquet and the Doors with Waiting for the sun.
Of course, one cannot forget an epoch-making record like the Beatles’ White album and another equally important one like Cheap thrills with the official debut of the unreachable Janis Joplin.
The records in this ‘chart’ are therefore basically milestones in rock history and should not be missing from any self-respecting vinyl rock record collection.
Following a fairly random order, we start with a group that has gone down in history above all for a very special song, starting with the title, namely the Iron butterflies and the song In-a-gadda-da-vida. Legend has it that the title in question is actually a mispronunciation, due to the drunkenness of the band’s singer Doug Ingle. The real title should have been In the Garden of Eden. The reality, regardless of the title, is that the song, characterised by an unmistakable guitar riff, and the entire LP containing it earned the Iron Butterflies a platinum record, the first in the history of rock music, and the chance to go straight into rock history.
As I wrote in the introduction in 1968 Jimi Hendrix published Electric ladyland, probably his best record. The track list on the vinyl includes some of the songs that made Hendrix’s guitar playing immortal, such as Vodoo child and Crosstown traffic, as well as the famous cover of All along the watchtower written by Bob Dylan for his John Wesley Harding, released in December 1967. It is an epoch-making record, an authentic rock milestone, from which entire generations of rock musicians, but not only, have drawn inspiration. Commercially, the record was also an immediate success, going platinum twice in the USA.
August 1968 saw the release of another rock music milestone that is also, as sometimes happens in the rock world, a kind of testament. Wheels of Fire of Cream in fact contains the quintessence of the band’s musical philosophy, which is expressed by mixing rock, blues and psychedelia, and is exalted during live performances where the technical expertise of the band’s three members, Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, emerges forcefully.
The album, which is actually a double, consists of two parts, one consisting of tracks recorded in the studio and the other containing live tracks. The studio-recorded tracks feature a fourth element. This is the record’s producer, Felix Pappalardi, who plays the viola, harpsichord, bell and organ, and enriches the compositions by using electronic effects that were decidedly avant-garde at the time.
The record is also a testament because the trio, due to too much competition between the three personalities, will break up at the end of 1968 and each of the three members will pursue their own solo careers.
Also in August 1968 is published Cheap Thrills, very famous album by Big brother and the holding company with an amazing Janis Joplin on vocals. On this album, the singer gave a particularly convincing demonstration of her singing qualities with songs that have gone down in music history like Piece of my heart, Summertime and Ball and chain, the latter recorded live at the Fillmore in San Francisco.
The album was a great success with the public. Cheap Thrills reached number one on the Billboard charts and stayed there for eight weeks, selling over a million copies.
Also of great impact is the cover specially made, at Janis Joplin’s wish, by Robert Crumb the famous American cartoonist.
After this record, Janis Joplin left Big Brother and the holding company to pursue a solo career accompanied by a new band Kozmic blues band with whom she would make her next album, I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama.
In this year full of great musical successes also came the Creedence Clearwater revival who publish their first self-titled album. It was a blues album inevitably influenced by the psychedelia typical of those years. It contained reinterpretations of classics from the forties and fifties that emphasised the folk revival character of the group. Evidence of this is the track chosen as the first single, a cover of Dale Hawkins’ Susie Q, interpreted by Creedence in a decidedly rock-like manner.
In addition to revival tracks, the album also included original tracks, almost all of which were penned by John Fogerty.
1968 also saw the publication of A saucerful of secrets, second album recorded by Pink Floyd and last with Syd Barrett. To tell the truth, Barrett’s collaboration on this album is already rather reduced. In fact, it was during this period that he began to suffer heavily from psychiatric imbalances. His contributions were guitar on Remember a Day, Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun, Corporal Clegg. Jugband Blues, on the other hand, is the only track on the album that he wrote and performed.
This progressive departure of Syd Barrett from the band allowed Roger Waters to profoundly influence the band’s sound, bringing a strong dose of melody to the compositions and transforming the apocalyptic and spatial disorder of The piper at the gates of dawn into something more coherent and orderly, which would only reach its perfection several years later.
What makes this record unique is probably the coexistence of these two sides of the band, the one represented by Barrett’s visions and the more concrete one represented by Waters’ ideas.
The cover, like many others of Pink Floyd’s production, is by Storm Thorgerson’s Hipgnosis.
The main image is made up of a collage of 13 different images including some fragments of the Doctor Strange comic strip, an image of an alchemist, images of ampoules and bottles, a wheel with the signs of the zodiac, the sun, some planets and a small photo of the band on the banks of a river.
If with Pink Floyd we are still in the midst of psychedelia with the Rolling Stones and their Beggars banquet the situation changes, and not a little. For the Stones, the time had come to leave behind the psychedelic adventure, which in truth did not suit the band very well, and to throw themselves headlong into the red-hot climate of 1968, so much so that Mick Jagger went so far as to personally participate in some demonstrations against the war in Vietnam.
From a musical point of view, Mick Jagger and his associates make a sort of return to their roots, reappropriating the rock and blues sounds that had been their original sources.
However, they no longer simply pay homage to their favourite artists, but make these sounds their own and use them to create new and original compositions. A glaring example is one of the band’s most famous tracks, which is part of this very album, Sympathy for the devil, and is one of the most important testimonies of the creative collaboration of the Jagger/Richards duo.
In the 2003 book According to the Rolling Stones, about Sympathy for the devil Watts said: ‘Sympathy is one of those songs where we tried everything. The first time I ever heard it was when Mick played it for me on my doorstep in Sussex…. He played it all by himself, and it was fantastic. We tried a lot of different ways to play it; eventually I played a Latin jazz rhythm in the style of Kenny Clarke in A Night in Tunisia – not quite the same rhythm, but in the same style’. (Source: Wikipedia)
Beggars banquet thus began a profound transformation of the Stones’ music that would be confirmed by the next three records Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St with whom they form a quadrilogy of historical masterpieces in the Rolling Stones’ discography
The abandonment of psychedelia and the desire to find sounds free of any kind of unnecessary superstructure also characterises the Beatles’ record. The Beatles aka White album is a minimal album, starting with the choice of cover, which is totally white as opposed to the triumph of colour that had been the cover of Sgt. Pepper.
This need for essentiality in the case of the Beatles was also dictated by the fact that the story of the band had come to an end and the four, in essence, could no longer stand each other. Therefore, the work on the album proceeded on separate tracks and, when there were collaborations, they were reduced to a minimum, to the essential.
The white album is the album that sanctions the end of the most important band in contemporary music and simultaneously certifies the birth of four new solo artists. And as solo artists, in fact, the now former fab four are acting while recording this album.
Each proceeded and composed on their own, bringing in collaborators and session men to Abbey Road Studios on their own initiative. The most famous example is probably that of George Harrison, who brought Eric Clapton with him as lead guitarist on While My Guitar Gently Weeps, which Clapton personalised with a solo of his own.
Despite everything, this new album was immediately received very positively by critics and also by the public. In fact, in less than two months, the album sold over four million copies. The success of the White album was not only relative to 1968, but extended over time as this record turned out to be the best-selling double vinyl ever. It also remains the Beatles’ best-selling album in the United States to this day, with an impressive 19 platinum records.
Psychedelia, although not the dominant theme, is still present in the Doors’ third album Waiting for the sun. This album, considered somewhat more commercial than the previous two, consecrates the Doors to mass success as it is the first of their works to reach number one in the US charts, selling over nine million copies. It is also the first Doors album to appear in the UK charts. The single extract was also a great success. In fact, Hello, I Love You reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and sold over a million copies (gold record).
The genesis of the record was rather troubled mainly due to Morrison’s drinking problems. Originally, in fact, the entire first side of the record was to be occupied by a large musical and poetic composition of an apocalyptic nature written by Jim Morrison himself. The song was to have been entitled Celebration of the Lizard but the band never managed to record a complete and convincing version of the entire composition. Therefore, only the fragment entitled Not to Touch the Earth remained on the album.
This mega-poetic composition would later be re-released almost complete in a live version on the 1970 album Absolutely Live.
We close our roundup of the ten most significant rock records of 1968 with a legendary vinyl. In January 1968, Johnny Cash decided to hold two concerts inside Folsom Prison. These concerts had a high content and an equally high symbolic content. Cash himself, with his then recent past of excesses and nights spent in jail, feels particularly close to those people who listen to him from behind bars.
The recordings of these concerts produced the material necessary for the release of a double album entitled At Folsom prison.
At Folsom Prison probably does not contain all the best music written by Johnny Cash, although it does contain historic pieces such as Cocaine Blues, Folsom Prison Blues and Orange Blossom Special, but it is the best representation of the greatness of this artist.
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