Jaco Pastorius - Come On, Come Over 
this one is bad @ss
  
 

batsbrew
Rundgren's "Sweeter Memories"
 

Oh one of my favorites, for sure!

I might listen to an enormous amount of jam bands.

Jam bands have measures of guitar riffs that are unique, and those that fall into the box patterns that notes are recognized but how put together like in blues runs can be appreciated in the uniqueness.

Then the masters like Clapton find their favorite places on a guitar neck and give us lots to listen to.

Now commonly mentioned are artists that reach back and show where they got some of their inspiration like Clapton and his Robert Johnson album.

Buddy Guy, covers and originals, another favorite.

Wow, great stuff.
 
Thanks to everyone, especially Bit for starting this thread.
 
Jesse Q. Screed

jamesg1213
ABC's 'Lexicon of Love' album was a benchmark in pop production by Trevor Horn. I loved the single 'All of My Heart', such a '3-D' sound.
 

An album that was bliss in that era. Really well executed.

I have to agree with the previous mention of Boston, in particular "More than a Feeling" but also most of that sadly limited discography (just 4 albums, IIRC). It's even more inspiring given that Mr. Scholtz was a kindred spirit of ours, a real DIY kind of guy. To this day, I get a great big grin if it comes on the radio while I'm cruising in the car; I just crank it up and sing along, yet again oblivious to the finer subtleties of the production. And that's exactly what I'm talking about - tunes so catchy that you don't even realize you're listening to a rare genius at work.
 
Here's another nominee for underestimated genius: the first King Crimson album.
 
We forget now just how ground-breaking that collection of songs was. Although it comfortably conformed to classical norms centuries old, it was also fundamentally different from anything that had come before. Sure, it capitalized on new technology (the Mellotron), but the other 95% was old-school instrumentation re-purposed. It wasn't jazz, it wasn't classical, it wasn't rock 'n roll, but an inventive blend of all of them, long before the word "fusion" had been coined to describe the combination of disparate musical traditions. And produced by Greg Lake in such a way as to be simultaneously accessible and novel (e.g. distortion on vocals, a common practice today but not in 1969, or mixed time signatures, previously unknown in rock). A watershed work of creativity that spawned an entire anti-genre that explicitly rejected the concept of genres.

bitflipper
 
Here's another nominee for underestimated genius: the first King Crimson album.
 

Couldn't agree more. It's hard to believe it was made in 1969. The sound canvas was so much ahead of its time,
and as compositional package it can be compared to classical masterpieces.
One of the memorable moments of my life: In the mid 90's I popped into my sons room (he was 14-15 then). There he was playing Doom or some hit game of the time on the PC, and listening loud  "In the Court of..."  .
I smiled the rest of the day.

Another +1 for Court Of The Crimson King!
 
If only for how I first heard it.
 
I was the designated driver for a bunch of us from UW-Madison. We'd gone up to Devil's Head to do some "skiing" (in Wisconsin, that means sliding down a sheet of ice on the north face of some pimple of a hill) and it was time to head back to Madison. The college car I was driving was an old Dodge with a pushbutton automatic and built-in a/c (the holes rusted in the floor) and an AM-only radio. Luckily, it was after midnight and the clear channel stations were bouncing nicely. My favorite was a C/W station from Little Rock that featured C/W from 5am to midnight, and then bizarrely the best, most progressive DJ I ever heard from midnight to 5am (bounce time!). After a couple of songs, the DJ announced that he'd just received a fantastic new album and would play it straight through.
 
Court Of The Crimson King
 
On AM radio. Broadcast from the middle of nowhere. Listened to in the middle of nowhere.
 
And I couldn't wake anyone else in car. Their loss. It was a transformational experience.

Robert Fripp freaking OWNS me. I'm embarrassed to admit to how many copies of each of their albums I've purchased over the years. Vinyl. Cassette. CD. Remastered HDCD.
 
The audio version of GAS.