1970

The World Turned Upside Down, Part IV

Tony Alterman — Sun, 31 Jan 2021 15:00:00 +0000

The World Turned Upside Down, Part IV Tony Alterman January 31, 2021 - 10:00

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1970

If the first three parts of this short history of 1970 did not get you excited about its Golden Anniversary, consider a 50^th anniversary survey 10 years from now (or a 40^th anniversary today). It would be quite a dismal affair: seventies bands singing their swan songs, punk giving up the ghost, and New Wave not quite soup yet. There really was very little to get excited about in 1980. Notable albums were few and far between: there was David Bowie's Scary Monsters, Zenyatta Mondatta by The Police, the B52's Wild Planet, and a few others. Bruce Springsteen had his first #1 album with The River, as did Kate Bush with Never for Ever; in both cases, your present critic judges their success to be due primarily to a hit song ("Hungry Heart," and "Babooshka," respectively) rather than the overall quality of the albums. (Bush squeezed two other UK top 20 singles out of Never For Ever; none of the three charted in the U.S.) Without a serious doubt, the best album of the year was by a former Beatle and his wife. Double Fantasy has only grown on me over the years, including Yoko's songs. But what you won't find in 1980 is a wealth of great efforts in a variety of styles, a long list of songs that ring in your head after 40 years, or anything that greatly expanded the boundaries of rock. Next to it, 1970 looks like the Bicentennial fireworks.

I'll have little to say about 1990. Little. To. Say. How little? It featured decent albums from Luka Bloom, Suzanne Vega, Midnight Oil, and The Replacements. I'm done.

Here's the truth: 1970 was so rich that it took this 10,000-word essay to cover just the best of it (and a little of the worst). Many albums I have said little or nothing about have devoted followings: metal fans may still wax eloquent about Uriah Heep's ...Very 'Eavy ...Very 'Umble; Randy Newman's 12 songs still gets kudos from fans of his style of music; and Todd Rundgren followers have hardly forgotten Runt. There's too much, for too many kinds of audiences, to capture the full depth of 1970 in music.

Instead, what I'm going to offer you now is a list of ten albums that are not on most people's mental playlist, but perhaps should be. Among the hundreds of albums released that year, these recordings give a sense of the breadth and depth of the era, and help support an alternate narrative to the one that sees music going to the dogs until it was saved by punk rock. These albums at least deserve a place in the regular rotation of adventurous college stations, because they offer a compelling set of songs that thumb their noses at commercial radio; yet most of them have been marginalized to the point where they are known only to those with a special interest in some subgenre or other. No guarantee that you will fall in love with any of them; all I claim is that, with an open mind for the new and different, they will sound fresh, creative, and worth the time and effort to get to know them. All of them are available on Spotify, YouTube or both. The list is not meant to be in exact order of preference or quality; I find all the albums on it to be brilliant in their own way.

1. if - if 2

One day in 1970 or very close to it, I was lying in bed at home in New York listening to an FM radio station, and the DJ quietly announced a song called "Shadows and Echoes" from a new album "if 2". I have heard the song only rarely since then, and the album even more rarely than that, but the impression it made that first time will go to the grave with me. I was mesmerized at a song so beautifully unsettling, so hauntingly moving, that it just opens up a space inside your brain as if it had always been there. It's hard to think of a comparison; maybe Pink Floyd's "Us and Them," or the Moody Blues' "Are You Sitting Comfortably?". This impression has only been strengthened by repeated listenings; moreover, the quality of the entire album reasserts itself in ever stronger terms. "Your City Is Falling," the opening track, is not only the first in a line of urban destruction nightmares (Blue Oyster Cult, "Cities On Flame With Rock and Roll;" The Pretenders, "My City Was Gone;" Siouxsie and the Banshees, "Cities in Dust") but a terrific song that sets the tone for an album equally steeped in rock and jazz. There are only six tracks, and each one is noteworthy. I don't know why the album isn't more famous; among the several fine jazzrock albums this year it is one of the most original, with songwriting, instrumental and vocal performances throughout at a very high level.

2. Spirit - Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus

If you know Spirit it is probably as the LA band that sued Led Zeppelin for royalties based on the rough similarity between Jimmy Page's fingerstyle progression at the beginning of "Stairway to Heaven" and a song of Spirit's that they claim he heard them perform. An ill-motivated grab for millions of dollars in royalties if you ask me. But don't let that stop you from exploring their music, beginning with this fascinating album. Aside from a variety of well-written and brilliantly performed songs, it may be the first rock album centered on environmental themes. "It's nature's way of telling you something's wrong" repeats the chorus of "Nature's Way," and that portentous claim is echoed throughout the album. It is endlessly creative, careening wildly along every available rock avenue, from basic pop/rock ("Animal Zoo," "Rougher Road") to hard rock ("Morning Will Come"), folk ("Life Has Just Begun") and jazz influences, plus unusual art-rock touches that give the album its standing as a "proto-prog" masterpiece. There's plenty of guitar virtuosity from Randy California (who, for you trivia buffs, began his career as the other guitarist in Jimi Hendrix's first band, Jimmy James and the Blue Flames); it is not gratuitous riffing but well-integrated with the music, especially when it leans in a jazz direction. Humor is seamlessly sewn into both the music and vocals, giving the set an appealing sort of facetiousness, reminiscent of some of 10cc's tongue-in-cheek recordings a few years later. In short, there's a lot to chew on here, and most of it has a very pleasant aftertaste.

3. Fanny - Fanny

The first all-female rock band to release an album on a major label (Reprise), Fanny played all their own instruments, wrote most of their own music, and opened for the likes of David Bowie, George Harrison and a long list of top acts. For those who don't look tenderly on the emerging progressive, artrock , heavy metal and jazzrock trends of the time, this is a no-nonsense album full of down-to-earth basic rock songs. That genre was hardly over; just give a listen to Fleetwood Mac's Kiln House of the same year, whose production qualities give it the aura of a 60's garage band rehearsal, with material that is basic by almost any standard (and not nearly as good as Fanny). The album features some fine keyboard work from Nickey Barclay, and an excellent cover of Cream's Badge (though Fanny would outdo this on their third album with their version of Lennon-McCartney's "Hey Bulldog"). This may not be Fanny's best album, due in part to Richard Perry's production, which tends to make the band sound like they are playing in a cardboard box. He would do much better with their next couple of projects, as well as producing a host of gold records for other artists. But the energy of the performances, the songwriting, and the band's sheer talent make this a record worth knowing. (This album is perhaps the most important oversight in Wikipedia's 1970 in Music page; another is Mandrill's first album, whose release date is given incorrectly on the album's Wikipedia page as 1971.)

4. The Move - Shazam

The Move is often known as the band that Jeff Lynne eventually transformed into the Electric Light Orchestra. But they released two albums before Lynne joined (and Carl Wayne left), the second of which was Shazam. The album's six tracks are mostly extended compositions with more than hints of prog influence, though, like the Spirit album, it is about as eclectic as a single album can get. Opening with a hard rock number, the next could be a piece of folklore from a Jethro Tull or Strawbs album; the one after that features (among other things) an extended guitar arrangement of several classical pieces in 9/8 time. The rest of the album is also laced with appealing but unusual, if not tongue-in-cheek, moments. One has to wonder if lyrics like "Fields of people / There's no such thing as a weed" are supposed to be funny, or just express the well-intended but naive optimism of the moment. Perhaps the oddest entry is the final cut, a 7 ½ minute version of Tom Paxton's "The Last Thing on My Mind," which is given a treatment that brings to mind the Byrds' version of Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man." I can't say that I think Paxton's song, beautiful in itself, is a good foundation for this heavily produced take, but the apparent sincerity of the effort offsets any sense of imbalance. In any case, you would have to have a deep prejudice against this sort of whimsical musical behavior not to find Shazam enjoyable, with some gorgeous moments. The Move released another album in 1970 -- Looking On, their first with Lynne. It suggests that the group was heading down the metal tubes with the James Gang, Black Sabbath and Mountain, but for a couple of cuts that seem to strain towards psychedelia if not prog rock -- and the fact that two albums later they were ELO.

5. Curtis Mayfield - Curtis

Listen closely to Curtis Mayfield's first solo album and you can hear the roots of two completely different directions for R&B: on the one hand, the jazz-tinged sound, conversational tone and political activism that would emerge on Marvin Gaye's era-defining What's Going On? the following year; on the other, the soaring strings and wah-wah guitar sound that hailed the beginning of disco proper on Barry White's 1973 "Love's Theme." But being a source of new trends in R&B is not even the main virtue of the album. This is just great songwriting, as the immediately recognizable "Move On Up" attests, even though it failed to chart in the U.S.. "(Don't Worry) If There's a Hell Below, We're All Going to Go" did hit #3 on the R&B charts, but who cares? Throughout the disk Mayfield uses a catchy combination of jazz, funk, Motown, spoken word and free experimentation. This is a moment in history when Mayfield, Gaye, Isaac Hayes, Quincy Jones, and a few others were defining a new kind of black music. Curtis is one of the mouths of this musical river. Put it on once, you'll play it again.

6. Seatrain - Seatrain

If you don't know who Seatrain is, or was, join the club. Although they were the first rock group I ever saw in concert (at Carnegie Hall, no less), and I owned their first album and the songbook (whose importance I will discuss in a minute) and was very familiar with their minor hit "13 Questions", I still didn't know much about anyone but violinist Richard Greene until recently. Seatrain, it turns out, was formed out of the demise of the much better-known Blues Project. That group featured some top notch musicians (including Danny Kalb, the terrific blues and folk guitarist who backed up Dylan and Phil Ochs, and who I knew for a short time many moons ago.) Greene was a first class country fiddler who had previously worked with Bill Monroe. Besides "13 Questions" and other songs, the album contains a 15-minute cut of Greene playing the hell out of a bunch of country fiddle tunes, not least the virtuoso number "Orange Blossom Special". His version of that is sometimes considered the best ever, and it is fully transcribed in the songbook. (Personally I think Vassar Clements is a match for him, but that is of course fine company to be in.) The album has another place in history, though: it was the first project produced by George Martin after the Beatles went their separate ways. Enough reasons to check it out, I think.

7. The Stooges - Funhouse

Perhaps "under-the radar" no longer applies to an Iggy Pop album that is now recognized as a proto-punk masterpiece, but according to its Wikipedia page, "The album had sold 89,000 copies through March 2000." It's difficult to find up-to-date sales data for albums, but at #283 on Amazon's Hard Rock sales list it is well below numerous albums by lesser-known groups. On Spotify, the album's tracks seem to have generated a combined 14 million streams - about the same as a couple of individual tracks on Blue Oyster Cult's not very well-known (but similarly brilliant) first album. Those in the know, know, but most have yet to realize that this belongs in the Pantheon of rock classics. Although the search for the roots of punk rock has led critics to cite groups as diverse as Paul Revere and the Raiders, Question Mark and the Mysterians, the Velvet Underground, MC5, The Who, and T. Rex, most of this is bullshit; it's like saying that Mozart and Beethoven are the roots of Wagner. But Funhouse has the spirit, if not the pneumatic beat, of punk rock. (One can make a pretty good case that punk actually began in Michigan, rather than New York or London, since the proto-punk band Death was formed in Detroit the following year, and MC5 hearkened from there too.) The album defies efforts to define it in words: "raw," "energetic," "relentless"... what might have happened if Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison got a band together... one step beyond Sabbath and Paranoid... You've got to hear it to appreciate it. Basic rock plus some kind of nervous energy that is simultaneously manic and infectious. As for the lyrics, they seem like little more than a vehicle for the music. We can't all be Dylan, but we can't all make an album like Funhouse either.

8. Al Stewart - Zero She Flies

In case you have ever confused Al "Year of the Cat" Stewart with the author of the "Stray Cat Strut", as I have, here is a kind of subterfuge: "My Enemies Have Sweet Voices," the first cut on this album is practically a prototype of Brian Setzer's hit. That aside, if you only know Stewart for his rock hits "Year of the Cat" and "Time Passages," prepare to meet one of the great folksinger-songwriters of the late 1960s and 1970s. No sooner is that first track over than you are plunged into some of the best acoustic guitar playing of the era, including great solo fingerstyle pieces reminiscent of Pierre Bensusan and songwriting on a par with the best of Donovan in his acoustic mode, or, say, Ralph McTell. It's just a consistently gorgeous and technically impressive performance behind outstanding songwriting. It ought to be better known than it is, but it had stiff competition in the folk arena in 1970. You won't find any hit-making string arrangements or gospel choruses here, just a few tasteful background instruments occasionally. It's a real musical breath of fresh air.

9. Tommy James and the Shondells - Travelin'

Full disclosure(s): I still own a copy of this album, and their previous one (Cellophane Symphony), not to mention their 20+ song Anthology CD, which replaced the slightly shorter vinyl anthology, and the 45 of Joan Jett's "Crimson and Clover" cover, with the picture jacket. In my head I hear "Hanky Panky" as it sounded on my 9" transistor radio when I was eleven. The opening of their hit song "I Think We're Alone Now" is my ringtone. In short, I make no claim to objectivity about the group. Travelin' has a couple of minor hits, which for a change are not even the best songs on the album. It broke into the Billboard Hot 100 in 1970, but I wouldn't really care if it had sold 50 copies and disappeared. In whatever they do, James and his band just bleed rock-and-roll authenticity. (Yes... more Michigan rockers.) Even their most intense forays into psychedelia have a straightforward simplicity that grabs me with the same raw energy of "Hanky Panky" or "Mony Mony." "Under-appreciated" seems like a funny term for a group with numerous Top 40 and Top 10 hits, but that is actually what they are: no one talks about them much, no one comments on James' magical melding of psychedelia with pop, no one credits their instrumental skills or inventive use of studio effects. I'm not sure what's up with that. They're great, and this, their last album, is a classic.

10. Tim Buckley - Starsailor

How did avant-garde classical vocalist Cathy Berberian end up getting a mention by Steely Dan and Tim Buckley? Did they happen to come across her 1967 recording of Beatle songs? Whatever the answer, Buckley attributed his efforts at vocal improv on Starsailor to listening to Ms. Berberian. I don't underestimate the challenges of listening to Buckley's recording - especially if you are not familiar with, say, Meredith Monk's Turtle Dreams, or Dame Edith Sitwell's Facade, or other explorations of the boundaries of female vocalization. In 1967 Buckley, age 20, released one of the most brilliant albums of the year, perhaps the decade: Goodbye and Hello consisted of accessible but very unusual folk-related material, with Dylanesque lyrics and a unique acoustic-electronic sound. But he was more intent on experimentation than mass appeal, and Starsailor was the outcome of that, with atonal instrumental jamming and vocal acrobatics that can seem quite random if you are not steeped in that sort of music. Amidst all that he planted a few more standard numbers, in particular the beautiful "Song to a Siren." Buckley is said to have considered the album his masterpiece. If you are a fan of modern classical, or jazz in the spirit of Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman, you may not have a problem with that characterization; if not, you will be challenged from almost the first note. I promise it won't bite. It's a unique document, at any rate.

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The World Turned Upside Down, Part III

Tony Alterman — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 22:53:04 +0000

The World Turned Upside Down, Part III Tony Alterman January 19, 2021 - 17:53

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1970

Rock Art

Please read Part I and the introduction to Part II for a little context. We are exploring the year 1970 in rock, and I have written about the more mainstream trends in Parts I & II. Here we will consider some of the more experimental side of rock in 1970, and what it meant for the future.

Rock Scratches Acid

Whatever it is that makes an album "psychedelic," quite a few bands had enough of it to get themselves classified that way in 1970. It would not be long before "neo-" would have to be attached to such efforts, but at this time The Beach Boys, Blue Cheer, The Byrds, The Edgar Broughton Band, Fairfield Parlour, It's A Beautiful Day, Jefferson Starship, Love, Pretty Things, Procol Harum, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Shocking Blue, and Sid Barrett were all in some way trying to carry on the culture of sixties rock. There were feints in this direction from Led Zeppelin, Spooky Tooth, Blues Image, and others as well.

That's all very well, but it is clear that this form of rock was past its prime. The Beach Boys Sunflower is no Pet Sounds, or even Today!; Starship somehow flew well below Airplane's jetstream; and even bands like It's A Beautiful Day, Love, and Pretty Things had passed their psychedelic heydays. That leaves one to appreciate what was still alive and kicking all the more. Status Quo released their third album as they transitioned towards hard rock, but Ma Kelly's Greasy Spoon still has a foot in the psychedelic sound that made them famous with "Pictures of Matchstick Men." (They would go on to release thirty more albums -- so far -- as a hard rock band, and set records for charting albums and singles in the U.K.)

The Amboy Dukes should not be a psychedelic band, due to the presence of one member who is hardly associated with flower power hippies; nonetheless, Marriage on the Rocks/Rock Bottom offers trippy sounds and an excerpt from Bartok's 2nd String Quartet -- not exactly what you'd expect from an early Ted Nugent effort. (It does contain the song "Get Yer Guns," setting the sights for the double-barreled guitar on the cover of Weekend Warriors and his dubious status as one of the original "Second Amendment people" -- a cause that Grand Funk's Mark Farner would also sign on to in 1976 with "Don't Let 'Em Take Your Gun".)

The trailing off of acid rock is probably the single most important factor in the feeling that something grand, something that made the sixties a pinnacle in popular music, was gone, to the great regret of those who had grown up on it. This fact alone was enough to put everything new in a bad light, at least temporarily. But clichéd as it sounds, nothing that great lasts forever, or even very long. Classical music critics railed at Wagner, Liszt and Tchaikovsky too; who needed that kind of noise after Beethoven and Schubert? Once a certain medium has been perfected, once giant monuments like Sgt. Pepper, Surrealistic Pillow, Pet Sounds, Disraeli Gears, Live Dead, and Axis: Bold as Love have been erected, it feels like time to move on. The last thing any band would want to be accused of is a tired effort to mimic those achievements (though there would be plenty of that in years to come). We had no choice but to let it go. It wasn't the death of rock, but it was a melancholy moment that has in some ways shaped our lives. It was also what cleared the path for Dark Side of the Moon and Born to Run and all the later work at that level. None of that could have happened if rock musicians were still trying to sound like The Beatles. The permanent legacy of acid rock is manifold: that it is still enjoyed after more than half a century, by audiences both old and new; that it paved the wave for much of what came after it; and that its progeny continue to seed the airwaves with relevant new music, as Tame Impala and other neo-psychedelic bands have demonstrated.

Art rock: Erasing the Lines

"Art rock" is a catch-all term for the unclassifiable efforts of artists who just don't give a pluck what you think they should be doing. All you can say is that it should not clearly be some other brand of rock, though some of it might also be classified as "garage rock." The Velvet Underground, who almost seem like a pop band compared with some of the other entries in this category, released Loaded, their final album with Lou Reed; and it is all but the first Lou Reed album as well. He wrote all the songs on it, including the rock classics "Sweet Jane" and "Rock & Roll". It was perhaps the last stand of sixties rock, but also a hint that creative energy still flowed, as Reed would certainly show in his subsequent work. John Cale too took off in a solo direction, as did members of Soft Machine, with Kevin Ayers and Robert Wyatt each releasing challenging albums that ranged from free form or aleatoric compositions to something approaching standard songwriting. David Bowie gave us The Man Who Sold the World, neither one of his best nor most popular albums, but one that continued to demonstrate an unusually serious artistic vision.

Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart, followed up his noted Trout Mask Replica with the even beefier Lick My Decals Off, Baby, an album that simply knows no limits, verbal or musical. His pal Frank Zappa delivered the avant-garde effort Weasels Ripped My Flesh, which only in the final tracks devolves into something like ordinary songs. (In one of his typical chameleon turns, he followed it with Chunga's Revenge, an album of just slightly offbeat jazz, blues and rock songs.) If Weasels was not exactly surprising from Zappa, arty folk rocker Tim Buckley went in for a large helping of Cathy Berberian-inspired vocal gymnastics on Starsailor. (If you recognize Berberian's name and are not a fan of avant-garde classical music it might be due to Steely Dan's mention of her in "Your Gold Teeth" on Countdown to Ecstasy.) I will discuss Starsailor at more length later on; here I merely want to note the breadth it suggests for the experimental in popular music at this time.

In fact, there was so much classical avant-garde about that the line between that and serious rock composition was being challenged again and again. Building on the earlier experimental efforts by the serial school of Arnold Schoenberg and Americans like Charles Ives, Henry Cowell and Edgard Varèse, a raft of new composers -- Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, Pierre Boulez, Gyorgy Ligeti, Krzysztof Pendercki and Luciano Berio, for instance -- were acquiring popular audiences through concerts in less formal settings, the use of electronics that directly intersected with rock technology, and the use of their compositions in popular films, dance and other media. Self-taught composers like Harry Partch and Moondog built their own instruments, and acquired cult status with younger musicians, sometimes living the semi-vagrant life of street musicians.

Rock artists had shown an interest in this trend at least since 1967, and if John Lennon's "Number Nine" was not enough of a sign that it would make its way into the albums themselves, Zappa (who was influenced by Varèse in particular) and Canterbury groups like Soft Machine ensured that there was no longer any doubt about it. In 1969 the members of Spooky Tooth had teamed up with French composer Pierre Henry to produce Ceremony, and in spite of disclaimers by the band, who didn't want it released under their name, much of it is a paradigmatic merger of two apparently incompatible musical genres. The efforts of Kevin Ayers and Robert Wyatt in this direction were also directly inspired by the lively European-American avant-garde classical scene. This was to continue for quite awhile; for example, U.K. teen idol Scott Walker released a traditional solo album in 1970, but much later on re-invented himself as an avant-garde musician.

If you don't happen to like these forays into classical experimentation and atonality, you can hold 1970 in contempt for pushing it forward. I was an amateur musician at that time and had no dog in the game; later I was trained as a classical composer and also played in a rock band, so I had two. I still tend to be agnostic about the hybrid form, but I much prefer to hear creative new classical ideas make inroads into rock than to hear bombastic electronic reproductions (or imitations) of more traditional classical pieces, as ELP and a long list of other bands offered. You can knock "Cans and Brahms" off of Yes's Fragile as far as I'm concerned, but I'm fine with the excursions of Weasels, Ceremony, or Starsailor. In any case, it didn't kill rock and roll, which somehow still managed to produce artists as diverse and revolutionary as Steely Dan, Sex Pistols, Kate Bush, and Nirvana. Let a hundred flowers bloom, as a certain Chinese revolutionary once said; it can only infuse the music with new ideas, which still have to survive in the hearts of artists and the popular music market.

Wheels of Progress

Caravan is said to have coined the term "progressive rock" in the notes on their debut album in 1968, though I have never seen a good definition of it, nor of the even looser "proto-progressive" that can include almost anything before prog that's not straight pop. If the trend had been moving along in huffs and puffs before 1970, the offerings that year did a lot to get it over the mountain. By February there were prog or proto-prog releases from Van der Graaf Generator, The Strawbs, and Atomic Rooster, later to be joined by work from Quartermass, Barclay James Harvest, Hawkwind, if, Egg, Curved Air, and Colosseum. Among the Canterbury tales were Soft Machine and Caravan, as well as the previously mentioned ex-Soft Machine composers Wyatt and Ayers. And these were just the lesser-known prog bands.

This kind of rock music has come in for severe criticism as "orchestral," "technical," "over-produced," "keyboard-driven" (horrors!) and in general, not really rock at all but some highbrow deviation. According to the popular mythology, punk and heavy metal came along to revive rock and deep six prog within the decade. My feeling is we should not get too distracted by all this noise. What prog did was burst the form of the 3-minute, radio-friendly pop song, expand the sonic possibilities of rock instrumentation, exploit electronics that were soon to become standard equipment, and give the entire medium new air to breathe.

The Moody Blues, early out of the starting gate with the orchestral suite on their 1967 Days of Future Past, released A Question of Balance in 1970. From this album Alison Steele, the DJ usually credited with bringing progressive rock to mass audiences, adapted part of "Dawning Is the Day" as theme music. King Crimson, far from silent after 1969's stunning In the Court of the Crimson King, came up with two sets, In the Wake of Poseidon (which was in some ways a reboot of Court) in May, and Lizard in December. Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother, with its almost entirely instrumental first side, did as much as any album to create the prog-rock brand.

New prog efforts were a dime a dozen now. Time and a Word, the new album from Yes, was a kind of proto-prog statement, but one that gave much evidence of the expanding harmonic and technical vocabulary that would become the band's signature, and it lacked nothing in great songwriting. Emerson Lake and Palmer debuted with ELP, still a prog classic, while Gentle Giant and Supertramp each released their eponymous first albums. Genesis produced Trespass, sometimes considered their first prog album. Jethro Tull, a three-legged animal with a foot in prog, one in Scottish folk music and another in basic hard rock, released Benefit, where one could hear the distant rumblings of their more proggy later efforts like Aqualung, Thick As a Brick and Minstrel in the Gallery.

Together, these bands put out a series of albums in the 1970s that together constitute an essential component of what we mean by "rock" today. Their efforts, for the most part, veered away from the purely experimental, the lengthy electronic and orchestral suites, and managed to deliver highly listenable and emotionally powerful music, displaying instrumental prowess and technical wizardry without losing the thread of inherent musicality. No matter what I liked earlier, later, or at the same time, without Dark Side of the Moon, Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, Close to the Edge, Starless and Bible Black, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Thick As a Brick, and several lesser known prog efforts (Nektar's Remember the Future, Gentle Giant's A Free Hand) rock would seem to me a different and significantly less exciting form of music. It would be, roughly, like classical music without the late romantic, which is to say, music inhibited from exploring the limits of what it can do. The best of prog rock is comparable to the quality of the best popular music in the 1960s.

The argument against prog, as I have always seen it, to the extent that it has any validity at all, applies not to those bands, nor to the more challenging Canterbury groups, but to later efforts that came off more and more as spiritually empty imitations of the genre. That, in short, defines what I always held to be a more serious decline of rock's core: the later seventies efforts of Kansas, Rush, Toto, Styx, Journey, Steve Miller, Gary Wright, and others not worth mentioning. To implicate the artistry of a Robert Fripp, Chris Squire, Rick Wakeman, Ian Anderson, Roger Waters or Peter Gabriel on the basis of what prog devolved into seems to me a terrible mistake. Marx, correcting Hegel's claim that great historical figures always appear twice, added "the second time as farce." Not much more needs to be said about late-'70s prog.

Soul Is Saved

What has come to be called "R&B" was more commonly known as soul music at this time, and nearly all of it was in some way connected with the Motown label or its offshoots. Throughout the 1960s it had been generally oriented toward hit singles, and many of the most famous performers were singers only, with instruments played by the studio musicians collectively known as the Funk Brothers. In this they were comparable to a lot of early white rock groups, including the Beach Boys, whose album instrumentals were often filled in by studio musicians like the Wrecking Crew, or, in England, by the ubiquitous future members of Led Zeppelin. Soul music could be rather formulaic, but as pop formulas go, Motown teams like Holland-Dozier-Holland, or Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, were among the best ever.

But 1970 was a year of change in soul music. It was the year that Diana Ross left the Supremes, that Parliament and Funkadelic became quasi-independent bands (albeit with the same members), and that Curtis Mayfield put out his first solo album after leaving the Impressions. A group of kids named the Jacksons were making hit records. It was also a year that both jazz and psychedelia made deep inroads into R&B. Not all of this was salutary, but change was in the air, and some of it was revolutionary. (That's why I chose to include soul music in this part of the series, on the more experimental side of rock.)

A list of the top soul singles of 1970 is a stunning collection of memorable songs: "Psychedelic Shack" (The Temptations), "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" (Diana Ross), "Them Changes" (Buddy Miles), "One Less Bell to Answer" (the Fifth Dimension), "Don't Let the Green Grass Fool You" (Wilson Pickett), "I'll Never Fall in Love Again" (Dione Warwick), "Didn't I (Blow Your Mind This Time)" (The Delfonics), "Rainy Night in Georgia" (Brook Benton), "Signed, Sealed, Deliver'd, I'm Yours" (Stevie Wonder), "O-ooh Child" (The Stairsteps), and "Give Me Just a Little More Time" (Chairmen of the Board). (I've ignored most remakes and releases from Greatest Hits albums.) That could be a year's worth of great cuts in itself, and nearly rivals the output of much more numerous white rock groups.

The Temptations released Psychedelic Shack, a departure from their previous sound; it contained not only the dynamite title track and a mostly spoken-word version of their later hit "It's Summer," but the powerful antiwar funk masterpiece "War," which the label refused to let them release as a single for fear of alienating conservatives in The Temptations' audience. Parliament's first album in their new incarnation as a psychedelic soul band -- and their last for four years due to contractual issues -- was originally called Osmium (later reissued under other titles) and is a good companion to The Temptations psychedelic entry. Funkadelic's first two albums were both released in 1970: the first one is a kind of wild musical party, while the second wins awards for most original song title ("Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow") and best musical impression of an acid trip (apparently they all were, throughout the recording). It could be considered an alternative rock/soul masterpiece, and has drawn high ratings from many music review sites.

There were other new sounds brewing as well: Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield, and Quincy Jones all released albums that had little to do with the old Motown sound (or the new "Philadelphia Sound" for that matter). The differences were fairly dramatic -- freedom in instrumentation, song form, song length and expressive qualities, undermining the authority of the tambourine-backed pop single. On the other hand, Marvin Gaye's 1970 entry, That's the Way Love Is, still seems constrained by tradition. But before the year was out he had begun work on What's Going On?, which blew the roof off '60s soul and is widely considered one of the most important albums in recording history. That alone makes 1970 a critically important year in soul. Mayfield, too, was already off in dynamic new directions on his first solo LP, Curtis, a soul masterpiece that I will have more to say about it later.

And yet... and yet... the psychedelic turn and the new jazz-inflected soul may still be just minor ripples compared with the rogue wave of rap poetry unleashed as the decade flipped. The most revolutionary development, literally and musically, was that both Gil Scott-Heron and The Last Poets released their first albums, spoken-word efforts that included (respectively) "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and "When the Revolution Comes," thereby initiating rap poetry as the sound of an angry black working class. The line to Kendrick Lamar may not exactly be straight as an arrow but with all due respect to DJs and their mixtapes, Sugarhill Gang, Marcy Playground and all that, hindsight says this is where it really started.

Reggae, too, was in full swing by 1970, but it would be a couple of years before it had a significant impact among rock audiences. After Jimmy Cliff's 1972 soundtrack for The Harder They Come and Bob Marley & the Wailers' 1973 album Burnin' reggae became a standard part of the European-American music scene.

If I have not made my point by now, I supposed it can't be made. While regrets in 1970 were natural after a decade that saw a revolution in music, and culture in general, it was not merely a good, but a truly great year for music. Much of what began then unleashed a flood of creative energy that showered the decade to come with outstanding new rock releases. Perhaps I should just issue a confident "Case closed"; but, unwilling to rest on my laurels, in Part IV I will discuss some under-the-radar masterpieces of that year, whose 50^th anniversaries are well worth celebrating alongside those of Déja Vu, Layla, and the like.