Although our debut issue was published in July 1980, the following year remains remarkable in the annals of Guitar World, as it was the magazine's first full year of publication.
And it's a pretty good thing we were around; it was a banner year for rock music and the electric guitar. Disco was dead. Country hadn't gone pop yet. And alternative? Still 10 years away from being mainstream.
Yes, rock was in full reign in 1981. Of course, there were some great jazz and blues releases -- Jaco Pastorius' Word of Mouth and B.B. King's There Must Be A Better World Somewhere, for example.
But take a look at even a handful of the albums featured in the photo gallery below -- classics like Van Halen's Fair Warning, Rush's Moving Pictures, Ozzy Osbourne's Diary of a Madman and Iron Maiden's Killers -- and there's no denying it was a good time to be a hard rock fanatic.
For more great albums celebrating their 30th anniversary this year, check out the gallery below. And for more anniversaries, check out our galleries of classic albums from 1971 and 1991.
And don't forget to let us if we left your favorite off the list.
"The BTO sound is BACK!!" Bachman-Turner Overdrive release first new material in over 25 years – and it features a Neil Young guitar solo
“He would beat the crap out of the guitar. The result can best be described as Jackson Pollock trying to play like John Lee Hooker”: Aggressively bizarre, Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica remains one of the craziest guitar-driven albums ever made
