10 Vinyl Albums We Will Never Sell No Matter How Broke We Are

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We all go through tough times. It’s an inevitable part of life, especially if you’re raising a family with multiple kids, a mortgage, a couple of car payments, and so on. You get behind on your credit card bills, have an injury, get sick—anything can happen. When it does, you usually end up looking for ways to raise as much cash as you can. The allure of websites like eBay and Amazon can inspire people to sell some of their prized possessions. For many of us, that’s our record albums. There are some albums out there that go for high prices online. It’s a temptation that many of us just can’t deny. I have sold so many albums out of my collection over the years that I wish I had never sold. However, there are some that no matter how tough it gets, I just can’t do it. Here are 10 of them. What are your 10?

# 10 – Aja – Steely Dan

We open up our 10 Vinyl Albums We Will Never Sell No Matter How Broke We Are list with Steely Dan’s iconic album Aja. This is an album that grew with me as I developed my skill set as a musician. When I first bought this album, I didn’t hear the depth of it; I just heard the songs, which I really liked. But over time, I started to hear how good the playing was. It wasn’t just the playing; it was the production. It was perfection. If there ever was a perfectly recorded and performed album, it was Aja. It seems that’s what their goal was. But even in the search for that perfection, there still is this amazing soulfulness that flows throughout the entire record.

I remember how shiny it was when I first bought it, the beautiful gatefold, and all the musician credits. It is such a wonderful experience to hold this album in your hands, looking at it while listening to it. That, for the most part, is what’s going to fuel most of the albums on this list, and that’s the reason why I would never give this up.

# 9 – Gonna Take a Miracle – Laura Nyro

The first time I ever heard Laura Nyro’s voice, I was captivated by the soulfulness in her phrasing and style. I initially thought she was just a singer, not realizing that she was indeed a songwriter and truly one of the best ever. As I learned more about her, I purchased every single one of her albums. When I discovered that she was from the Bronx, like me, it made me fall in love with her even more. My favorite was the album she did with LaBelle that I fell in love with the most. It’s one of the most soulful albums I’ve ever heard, and there’s just no way that I would ever get rid of this one.

# 8 – Street Survivors – Lynyrd Skynyrd

Like many rock fans in the 1970s, I was a big Lynyrd Skynyrd fan, especially due to the popularity of their live album and the incredible live version of “Free Bird.” I purchased Street Survivors the first day it came out. I believe it was just a few days later, or very shortly afterward, that the band crashed, and we lost Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines, and Cassie Gaines in the tragedy. The record companies quickly pulled the album off the shelves because the band had been encased in flames on the cover.

I listened to it every day; the songs were just stunning, and Steve’s playing was incredible. It seemed like they were on the verge of taking their music to an entirely new level, maybe even developing a new musical genre, or perhaps it could have been just an album that would stand as their greatest ever, even if they had continued to record and never endured that horrible plane crash. One will never know. In the coming years, of course, the album cover became a highly collectible item because there were very few out there. No matter how big the temptation was to sell this album on places like eBay, especially at the height of eBay’s popularity when albums like this were going for extremely high numbers, I just couldn’t do it. This is too much of an important memory from my teen years. I can never get rid of this record.

# 7 – At Fillmore East – The Allman Brothers Band

The Allman Brothers Band at Fillmore East is a live album that all other live albums have been compared to over the years. This was the album that broke the band big time. I remember when I first bought it, it was encased in very thick, hard cardboard. I sat in my room listening to it night after night, imagining that I was up there with the group and jamming out. It took a long time for me to really understand what Duane Allman was doing, and in many ways, I’m still trying to figure that out. I’m sure there are many other people still trying to figure it out too. In the end, it doesn’t really matter because it was just so wonderful.

# 6 – Good Singin’ Good Playin’ – Grand Funk Railroad

I became a Grand Funk fan the moment I heard “We’re an American Band” on the radio when I was 12 years old. For the next couple of years, Grand Funk Railroad was the biggest band in the world to me. One of my favorite albums was All the Girls in the World Beware!!!. It had so many hits on it, and I liked those songs because I thought writing a hit song was an art form. However, it was the band’s album Good Singin’, Good Playin’, produced by Frank Zappa, that became my favorite Grand Funk album of all time.

I can’t tell you how much of a joy it was to interview Don Brewer and talk about this record. I always believed it was one of their best and most underrated albums, and he pretty much agreed with me. We talked in great detail about the songs on the album and why the band sounded so good on that record. It’s a shame not many people know about this album. It also sounded amazing—I mean, how could it not? Frank Zappa produced it.

# 5 – Animals – Pink Floyd

If you were a rock and roll fan and a teenager growing up in the 1970s, you had Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Of course, if you had Dark Side of the Moon, you probably also had Wish You Were Here, Animals, and The Wall. If you were a really huge Pink Floyd fan, you probably had Meddle in your collection too. These are all fantastic albums. However, I happened to see Pink Floyd on July 3, 1977, at Madison Square Garden in support of the Animals tour. It was a mind-blowing concert experience. I remember the very next day I put the Animals album on my turntable and couldn’t stop listening to it. Sometimes it’s just that one experience that helps you connect to an album forever, and that one surely did.

# 4 – Captain Fantastic & The Brown Dirt Cowboy – Elton John

Captain Fantastic & Brown Dirt Cowboy [CD]

Elton John’s Greatest Hits was the first album I ever purchased as a 12-year-old kid. The second album was Caribou, and the third was Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. This third album would become a life-changing experience for me. If we were just picking the greatest packages released from original albums, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy would definitely take the top spot. It was incredibly beautiful, with multiple booklets and a poster included. One could easily get lost just sitting on their bed or in the corner of their room, staring at all the material while listening to a collection of songs that stand as probably Elton John’s greatest work. Simply stunning songs with sound quality that made it feel as if the band was in the room playing just for you. There are life-changing albums, and this was one of them. You’d have to hit me pretty hard before you could ever rip this one out of my hands.

# 3 – A Hard Day’s Night – The Beatles

If you have been a reader of the many “10 Albums That Changed My Life” articles we have done on this site with so many legendary rock stars, you have undoubtedly read that many of those lists include Beatles albums. For the most part, it’s usually Revolver or Rubber Soul. However, for me, the Beatles album that I’ve always enjoyed the most was A Hard Day’s Night. Of course, when this album first came out in 1964, I was only 3 years old, so it wasn’t really something that I was engaging with daily. In fact, I really didn’t get into the Beatles until much later in my life.

My first Beatles album was actually Let It Be because of its popularity in the early seventies as the final Beatles album released, and I was just kind of discovering music at that time. Nonetheless, over the years, I’ve collected all their albums, and A Hard Day’s Night has always been my favorite. I just like the style of music they were doing at the time, and of course, the vinyl album with its beautiful cover. and gatefold was a pleasure to hold in my hands. So if I’m going to get rid of most of my albums, this is the one Beatles album that I would never part with.

# 2 – Born To Run – Bruce Springsteen

The term “life-changing albums” certainly gets overused a lot on this site. We just can’t help it; we are musicians and journalists, and in that aspect, we are passionate people who like to write dramatically. However, if I were ever going to use the term “life-changing album” for me personally, it would be Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run. The simple reason is that I decided to become a musician after I heard this album. I didn’t fall in love with it initially on the first listen; it took a while. But of course, after just a few plays, I completely fell in love with what he was doing.

Every song on this record is a keeper. My favorite will always be “Backstreets,” just because of the story; it was very similar to what I was going through as a kid growing up in the Bronx. The cover was just mesmerizing, as well as the gatefold that I was submerged in almost daily, reading the lyrics to every song I listened to. This was one really special album, and it changed the course of music and inspired so many artists for years to come.

# 1 – Physical Graffiti – Led Zeppelin

Remember when your parents and every adult used to say to you, “Enjoy your teen years; they’re the best years of your life”? I never really used to believe them because, well, for a lot of us, things weren’t always going so well. But of course, we had our moments, and there were times when we were teenagers when we did have the times of our lives. I spent an entire summer once hanging out at my friend’s house every day with a whole bunch of my insane friends, and we played Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti album all day long. My friend Brett didn’t own a lot of albums, but he owned this one. So in many ways, this pick is very sentimental to me because it was the soundtrack of my life during the summer when I was 16 years old.

I think most Led Zeppelin fans would agree that this was the greatest album they ever recorded. Of course some woudl argue it was IV oir maybe even II. I eventually bought my own copy, and even though I had heard it like a million times, I just kept playing it over and over again. It was a really great package; it was fun fitting the interior sleeves into the exterior cover and changing the windows, at least the pictures in the windows, that would show up depending on which album sleeve you put in. You really have had to have to owned it to understand what I’m talking about here. I still listen to this album all the time. It’s just an album you never get tired of. Try to take this one away from me, and you’re going to have a hell of a fight on your hands.