Ry Cooder "Chicken Skin Music" (1976)

Part of my complaint about the earlier Cooder records was that they were a bit too by the numbers.  Boomer discovers the blues.  Boomer records Robert Johnson covers.  Yawn.  I think I've heard that one before. 

Chicken Skin Music flips the script a bit.  Yeah, it still starts with some blues covers, but the next thing you know Cooder is throwing in Latin and Hawaiian influences and it gets good and weird.

The Modern Lovers "The Modern Lovers" (1976)

Sometimes you come across an artifact that seems impossibly out of its time.  The cover of this first Modern Lovers album looks like it could be for a Babys album or something like that.  However, the music is perhaps the best of all the first generation punk albums (even though it was recorded in 1973!) and has elements of what we think of as post-punk.  Just get your head around that.  Why is this record not issued to all high school students?