Yet another dominant year from the late sixties/early seventies.
Against my better judgment, I’m undertaking a project to determine my top 10 albums of every year since 1960. Instead of just picking my favorite stuff out of my collection, I intend to explore, re-visit and discover. While I can’t promise to leave no stone unturned, I am going to go deeper than I ever have before. Why would I partake in a journey that will inevitably take many years and that I ultimately may never finish? Most importantly, to uncover great music that I’ve never heard before. Second, to boost my knowledge of music history and get a sense of what was happening at a macro scale in a snapshot of time. Finally, I want to share my passion for music with you and, fingers crossed, generate a dialogue down in the comments. So without further ado, here is #29 in the series. My random number generator says that our next year to tackle will be 1988.
Check out my previous entries here.
The Greatest Albums of 1971
If I had to pick the greatest decade for music, I would probably vacillate between the 60’s the 70’s and the 2010’s. The 90’s were pretty great too. Basically, every decade has its stake to the claim depending on what you value from your tunes. The slightly different question of what is the best 10-year span for music, on the other hand, is one that I am fully prepared to answer. 1966-1975 is a period where I consistently struggle to narrow down to ten selections for each post, where my honorable mentions are the longest, where the numerous outstanding new discoveries are drowned out by the classics of my personal canon. I am just approaching the halfway point of this project, and so I am projecting the results in the manner that cable news networks project presidential elections (in any normal election year, anyway), but it is very clear to me that this period will remain my personal favorite. Every “best year” I’ve had so far has come from this ten-year stretch, and 1971 is another strong contender for that distinction. In some ways these are exciting years to cover because it is easy to write about these beloved albums that I’ve been obsessing over for, in some cases, decades. I always feel a pang of regret, however, for all of the lesser known gems that I won’t have the opportunity to champion. Like, Led Zeppelin IV doesn’t really need my endorsement at this point, but lesser known releases from Assagai or Baby Huey might benefit from a few paragraphs of praise. Due to the limitations of my own approach, you won’t get to hear about the ways that Curtis Mayfield and Bill Withers were contributing to the expansion of what soul music could be, or the endorphin rush I get from the telepathic interplay of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, or how the Isley Brothers are the greatest cover band of all time. Chances are you are already familiar with some of the heavy hitters in the top ten, so I encourage you to give the Honorable Mentions section a thorough perusal – there is a ton of great stuff in there.
As far as the top ten goes, it’s bulletproof. Not only is each album an unqualified recommendation, but they tell a collective story as well. On the rock side, you get a sense of the ways the genre had mushroomed from blues and folk based stylings in the 60s to AOR, heavy metal, Southern rock, prog and glam. The creative explosion of soul music, however, made rock’s parallel expansion feel glacial by comparison. The soul and funk music of 1971 was exponentially more diverse and complex than what we heard in 1969, a monumental transformation in just two years. Especially interesting is the dichotomy of the top two albums on my list, presented here Jeopardy-style, with the answer appearing before the question. How did the country feel as the Vietnam War raged on with no end in sight and the social ideals of the 60’s had started to curdle? Asked and answered. Let’s dig in to expand that thought, and many others, as we look into one of the greatest years in the history of modern popular music.
There’s a Riot Goin’ On – Sly & the Family Stone
I’ve always assumed that There’s a Riot Goin’ On was a heroin album. The best heroin album, actually, or at least in the holy trinity with Dirt and Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating Through Space. Despite the occasional snarky aside about having a “no-research policy”, the truth is that I do try and fact check myself from time to time, particularly if the fact in question is something that I’ve assumed to be true for twenty years with no ascribable source. Turns out that Riot is actually a cocaine album. Huh. Color me surprised. It makes sense actually, now that I think about it, given that one of the album’s most heavily featured instruments seems to be paranoia. It does dash the opening paragraph I had planned about the outsized allure that heroin has on musicians and the correlation fallacy about genius heroin addicts and the great music they have produced. It was going to feature John Coltrane and Eric Clapton, and maybe even Nikki Sixx… ah well, there will be opportunities to revisit those thoughts elsewhere in this project. The most fitting thing I can think to say about the notorious drug spiral that led Sly to bust up his band and record an album with a primitive drum machine and a billion overdubs, is that he was so brilliant that he couldn’t even sabotage himself. Oh, the drugs would eventually sap the genius out of him, but it would be years after he released his most striking, confounding, revolutionary work.
Sly & the Family Stone ended the sixties as the hottest band in the world, bolstered by 1969’s powerhouse Stand, a trio of fantastic subsequent singles, and a crackling late night Woodstock performance that, by most accounts, stole the show. They were way ahead of the curve in terms of R&B artists looking to social issues for inspiration, and Stand was more akin to a Crosby, Stills and Nash album in terms of lyrical content than, say, Otis Redding. Their music was bright and energetic, featuring multiple vocalists trading verses and harmonizing. By ‘71, the Sly & the Family Stone template was being leveraged by a variety of acts, from the Temptations to War, but Sly took his music in a totally different direction. Riot sounds shockingly different than the 60’s version of the band. It is measured, muddy, almost primordial in its rawness. The vocals seem to be relegated mostly to Sly and sister Rose, and they are far more weary than the enthusiastic performances of just a couple years prior. If Marvin Gaye was setting aside the love songs to look at the world around him and make a plea for compassion, Sly had already been there and done that, and he didn’t care for the response he got. It’s supposedly true that the rhyming titles of their two albums was no accident – Sly is said to have changed his title (and added the zero-second title track) in direct response to Marvin’s query. The disillusionment and frustration comes through in the music loud and clear, but lyrically this is not an overtly socio-political record. Sly covers family dynamics, and the act of songwriting, and yodels for some reason, but rarely do the lyrics have the clarity of his prior albums. Still, there is something pervasively cynical that bubbles just below the surface, and results in verses like “The universe needs to be a little stronger; Time they say is the answer, huh, but I don’t believe it” or “Runnin’ away to get away, ha-ha ha-ha, you’re wearing out your shoes; Look at you foolin’ you” or simply “Timber, all falls down”.
Musically, this sounds like nothing that ever came before it, and really nothing since. You can pick up the influence it had on the darker offerings of Stevie Wonder and Curtis Mayfield in the seventies, and such a revered album is bound to have far-reaching tendrils that extend to all types of music over the years, but I don’t think anyone would deliberately try and replicate the conditions that led to this aesthetic. It’s hard to know exactly what is apocryphal in regards to the creation of Riot, but Sly was supposedly recording most of his vocals from bed. He would invite women to sleep with him and record backing vocals, then overdub their contributions as soon as the afterglow had faded. He laid down some of the earliest experimentation with drum machines, maybe because he was a visionary, but also mostly because he wasn’t on speaking terms with drummer Greg Ericho. Yet, the boundless creativity of his grooves, the immediacy of his hooks, the fundamental genius of this music could not be impaired by any number of self-inflicted constraints. I mean, my God, from whence did he summon the sheer, oppressive funk of “Thank You For Talkin’ to Me Africa”? It’s like Bootsy Collins formed a band with Herbie Hancock and the Staple Singers, and they were all dipped in molasses before the recording session. It is essentially a self-cover of 1969’s “Thank You Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin”, probably one of the three funkiest songs in existence to that point, and it makes the original sound like the Captain and Tenielle. “Luv an’ Haight” pulls off the neat trick of making a drug-induced catatonia sound like a joyful expression of freedom. Making a song with the lyric “Feel so good inside myself, don’t want to move” the most danceable on the album is a choice use of irony. The more tender moments are equally as impressive. “Family Affair” and “You Got Me (Smilin’)” are sweet, sepia-toned love letters where Sly is practically yawning his verses, and that somehow makes them even more poignant. It’s impossible to know how deliberately Stone crafted this album to be sui generis, and how much was a happy accident born of an unhappy personal situation, but it stands as the best among a particularly excellent crop of music from 1971.
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What’s Going On – Marvin Gaye
In one of many contrasts to There’s a Riot Goin’ On, What’s Going On is the result of an artist coming into complete control of his considerable abilities for the first time. Chafing against the lucrative but formulaic Motown approach to record-making, and also facing his generation’s near universal disillusionment at the start of the seventies, Gaye took the reins on what would become the label’s most experimental, and artistically successful, album to date. In one of many correlations to There’s a Riot Goin’ On, What’s Going On is an album that begs to be listened to in one sitting. Yes, they both produced #1 singles, but even those songs benefit immensely from the surrounding material. Particularly with Gaye’s album, the songs flow seamlessly in and out of each other, with musical phrases coming back up as the record progresses. No R&B artist, Sly and company excepted, created music this complex or sophisticated in the sixties. Particularly the arrangements, inclusive of the vocal layering, must have sounded revolutionary when the album dropped. Listen to “Save the Children”: The song starts as a somber social ballad with Marvin speaking each verse and providing his own sung rejoinders. About a minute and a half out the tempo shifts slightly and the music pulls forward jazz elements that had quietly been a part of the song all along, completely changing the complexion of the track. Then, with less than a minute left the track transforms into a cold funk tune, all while keeping the vocal and lyrical through-line intact. That type of motion and transition just wasn’t happening at Motown before this, and while Stevie Wonder’s Where I’m Coming From was attempting similar experimentation, he wasn’t yet able to pull it off as seamlessly as Gaye. In a similar vein, “God Is Love” acts as a sort of musical and thematic prelude to “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)”, itself a track that squeezes a jazzy bridge and haunting coda into a tight, three-minute package.
I like every single track on What’s Going On, even though it’s rare that I ever consider them individually at all. That doesn’t mean that I love any individual track, though. You won’t find anything as cleanly and perfectly constructed as, say, “Tracks of My Tears”. That’s because “Tracks of My Tears” is a song about having your heart broken and pretending you haven’t, and that is not a difficult topic to write a song about. It happens to be probably the best song about that topic, sure, but you can easily express that notion within the well-defined constructs of 1960’s pop music. What’s Going On is kind of messy and kind of stream-of-consciousness and seems to lack a clear point of view, because Marvin is just spilling his heart out onto the record. There is nothing simple about how he feels in this moment, and that’s why his title is a question, and the lyrics veer all over the place encompassing hatred and compassion and religion and pollution and war and poverty, and the dominant tone is something close to exasperation. It is beautiful and timeless. Listening to it in 2021 does not rob it of any of its power or relatability. Without this album, you couldn’t have Frank Ocean or D’Angelo or Sampha, at least not the way that we have them now. It’s funny, as widely lauded as it is, I actually probably underrate What’s Going On in some ways. Yet every time I listen to it, it has the power to remind me why it has captivated so many for so long.
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Maggot Brain – Funkadelic
If Sly and Marvin were pressing firmly against the boundaries of American rhythm and blues music in ‘71, George Clinton was ignoring those boundaries completely. His first two releases under the Funkadelic banner contained some moments of genius, but they were scattershot and discordant overall. The biggest takeaway from those records is that Clinton and company were willing to experiment with recording techniques, with rock elements, most certainly with drugs. All of the components were there to suggest that something like Maggot Brain would be possible, but I don’t think you could have predicted how successfully the band would pull it off. If you have accumulated any P-Funk trivia at all, then it is likely that you know the origin of the title track: Guitarist Eddie Hazel, in the midst of an acid trip, is challenged by Clinton to play as if his mother had just died. The track, essentially a guitar solo with a chugging rhythm buried way back in the mix, definitely has a mournful vibe to it, but it also contains a raw beauty. At ten minutes, the solo has the structure and flow of a great jazz composition. It is a bold choice to open the album, but never falls short of completely captivating. Hazel doesn’t seem to get his full due as a titan of electric guitar, with his style perhaps too close to Hendrix during a time when Hendrix was still a very fresh memory for him to be fully appreciated. Even with the passage of time, and the canonization of that “Maggot Brain” solo, Hazel is destined to be only the second most famous guitar-playing Eddie by a pretty wide margin. He shows his versatility on another guitar-forward track from Maggot Brain, the aggressive blast of garage metal, “Super Stupid”. It is a wildly heavy track for the time, perhaps the heaviest song yet recorded if you set aside the work of Black Sabbath and King Crimson. It points to Funkadelic’s willingness to ignore all previously held convention that they would include it on what would invariably be categorized as an R&B record just because they were black. Other tracks seamlessly blend rock with funk, in what I would consider the quintessential Funkadelic sound (“Hit It and Quit It”; “You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks”), while Clinton’s doo wop roots show up elsewhere (“Back In Our Minds Again”; “Can You Get to That*”), albeit in a far from traditional manner. The album closes with a ridiculous afrobeat sound collage that features baby cries, cowbell, fart noises, dirty puns and the sound of an atomic bomb, presumably the one that’s just been dropped on your conception of popular music. Maggot Brain is a psychedelic masterpiece, and a recording of limitless creativity. It is the type of album that can only be recorded when nobody is really paying attention to tell you that you are making every wrong decision. The accumulation of all those “wrong decisions” made a huge impact, and while they wouldn’t find commercial success for a while, Clinton and company ensured that anyone in the know would be paying attention from now on.
* It didn’t naturally fit in my review, but “Can You Get to That” is probably my favorite Funkadelic song. Fortunately, Robert Christgau, a music critic whose opinions I have mixed feelings about but whose concise descriptiveness I would kill for, has already written the definitive statement on the song: “2:45 of post-classic soul-group harmonizing–two altos against a bass man, all three driven by the funk, a rhythm so pronounced and eccentric it could make Berry Gordy twitch to death.”
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IV – Led Zeppelin
If you only have one Led Zeppelin album, there is a 98.3% chance it’s Led Zeppelin IV. Much like Bob Marley’s Legend, it is the album culturally mandated as the entry point into the band’s music. With Legend, it kind of makes sense. That is essentially a greatest hits album with arrangements designed to make reggae more palatable to uninitiated Western ears. It’s a little harder to peg why IV is the obvious gold standard for Led Zeppelin fandom to launch. Don’t get me wrong, it is a masterful album, but in a decade-long career of nearly unimpeachable rock music, why is it the album? We can probably start with the fact that it contains what is clearly Zeppelin’s most iconic song: “Stairway to Heaven”. Unfortunately, that only provokes more questions. At the risk of repeating myself, in a decade-long career of nearly unimpeachable rock music, why is “Stairway” the song? It is a good song, no doubt, but the first six minutes (of eight) are uncharacteristically bland. John Bonham, history’s greatest rock drummer, doesn’t even make an appearance until halfway through. Basically, the most famous song of the most famous album of the most famous rock and roll act is not famous for being a great song. Its draw really hinges on one iconic moment, the one you are likely hearing in your head as you read this, where Bonham and Jimmy Page cap an extended solo sequence with a flurry of instrumentation, and then Robert Plant wails “And then we wind on down the road!” before the band sprints to the finish line with their asses on fire. Rock and roll has been preoccupied with sex from the days of Little Richard and Elvis Presley, and “Stairway to Heaven” is the closest the genre has ever come to approximating an orgasm.
So let’s agree that the album’s universal reverence doesn’t come from a single moment, no matter how euphoric it may be. What else is on offer? We can toss out the title and the album cover. Johnny Rotten might have been right about that one. The first two tracks are brazen blues-rock, in the vein of Led Zeppelin II, but with a twist. “Black Dog” has Plant, as always looking to contribute as much as his all-world instrumentalist bandmates, going a cappella for his verses while Page contributes one of his nastiest riffs. That riff, one of the guitarist’s most inventive, doubles back on itself like a rattlesnake or a misty mountain switchback. On “Rock and Roll”, Bonham leads the band through a boogie-woogie that feels like they are trying to outrun the apocalypse. John may have only had a hammer in his toolbox, but if you swing one hard enough anything can become a nail. “The Battle of Evermore” brings in the mystical folk sound that Zep introduced on their third album, and “Going to California” captures that vibe, minus the Tolkien lyrics, equally as well. The two tracks that kick off side B combine the psychedelic rock of the band’s debut with the more progressive rhythms that they would explore on the back half of their career. Perhaps that is the thing that makes Led Zeppelin IV the de facto Zeppelin heat rock – It is the first album where they really showcased everything that they did uniquely well. It’s also maybe their last, now that I think about it, since 1973’s Houses of the Holy spends a lot of time exploring reggae and funk in ways that are admirable, but don’t necessarily play to the band’s strengths. If that weren’t enough, there is the closing track which should have been the one in contention for greatest rock song instead of “Stairway”. “When the Levee Breaks” is raw, gritty perfection. It is a prime example of Led Zeppelin’s best trick, which is to ingest the great tradition of American blues music and spit out muscular, complex rock and roll that understands what makes Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf powerful without performing a sanitized version of their actual songs. It’s yet another reason why the album that Led Zeppelin didn’t even bother to name (IV is a construct we made up because the runes that make up the actual title aren’t ASCII friendly) is the best representation of who they were as the world’s greatest rock band.
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Sticky Fingers – The Rolling Stones
Whether you think the greatest rock band of all time is Zeppelin or the Stones depends on how you value consistency versus longevity.* As evidenced by my previous review, I go with Zep because they are hugely consistent across all of their albums. However, if you look at the four best Stones records (1968’s Beggar’s Banquet – 1972’s Exile on Main Street), they stack up just as well as any four album stretch in Zeppelin’s career. Sticky Fingers is probably the one where they combine composed, mature song-craft with shaggy looseness in the most balanced way. Look at album centerpiece “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking”: It starts with one of Keith Richards’ meanest blues riffs and the first half of the track is a typically exuberant Stones rocker. Then there is a bridge into an extended jam session that wasn’t even meant to make the album, but is so vibrant and in the pocket that it would have been a crime to leave it on the cutting room floor. It also proves, against all odds, that saxophone solos can have a place in rock and roll. That balance is evident all over the place. “Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses”, two songs that are familiar to anyone with even a passing recollection of classic rock, offer two contrasting takes on sex and love. The former is a brash, suggestive (possibly racist) ode to lust, while the latter is perhaps the definitive example of the Stones’ underrated ballad game. Due to the strength of each individual song, something new always sticks out to me whenever I revisit the album. I used to fixate on the late-album psychedelic cuts, “Sister Morphine” and “Moonlight Mile”, but lately I’ve been really feeling the breezy Americana of “Sway”. That song in particular feels so lived-in, like you can picture Mick Jagger rolling out of bed, slipping into some boots, grabbing a bottle of whiskey and stepping over to the microphone right before he starts singing. I think the evolution of Stones’ sound has a lot to do with a palpable world weariness. Not a bleakness, or exasperation, but if you chart the sound of the early, Hot Rocks-era singles through what they laid down during the Exile sessions, there is a massive tonal difference. They unquestionably did a lot of living during those ten years, and all of it comes through in the music. I adore the ramshackle mess that is Exile on Main Street, but Sticky Fingers might be the objectively better record, capturing that moment in time right before the wheels came fully off.
* The Beatles are not eligible because they didn’t tour. If you are the type of person who has Velvet Underground or Sonic Youth or whoever in that spot, fine, I’m sure you’re an interesting person, but you’re overthinking it.
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Who’s Next – The Who
Who’s Next was famously cobbled together out of the rubble of Lifehouse, an ambitious rock opera Pete Townsend had been working on but couldn’t quite pull together. As Plan B’s go, this one is pretty fantastic. In fact, I think it is safe to say that Who’s Next is my favorite album from the band precisely because Townsend’s vision was thwarted. I love Quadrophenia, and I enjoy Tommy and The Who Sell Out, but I mostly find myself patiently waiting through the skits and the recurring motifs and the rock opera accoutrements to hear the great songs. Townsend is a terrific song writer, and in the mid-sixties he was becoming famous on the back of classic singles like “I Can’t Explain” and “My Generation”. Somewhere along the way, however, he became enamored with the rock album as a form, and spent just as much energy constructing hefty framing devices and elaborate plotlines as he did writing tunes. Who’s Next is jam-packed with iconic rock songs, unencumbered by any of the extras. “Baba O’Reilly” is the Who’s “Stairway to Heaven”, with the added benefit of being a better song. “Won’t Get Fooled Again” is their 70’s, arena rock companion to the 60’s, psychedelic single, “I Can See for Miles”. “Behind Blue Eyes” and “Bargain” are instantly recognizable from years of FM radio play, Nissan commercials, and ill-advised Limp Bizkit covers. Even the less famous tracks are outstanding. My favorite is the John Entwistle-penned “My Wife”, a very British trifle of a song which would have never seen the light of day on one of Townsend’s hyper-earnest passion projects. Entwistle is my favorite Who member in general, and his bass-playing is a highlight of the album without ever being the focus. He is so nimble and fluid in the background of the mix that I find myself listening exclusively to his playing for stretches at a time. What strikes me the most about the three, soul-leaning albums that top the list and the three rock albums that slot in next, is that the first three win out on the basis of being greater than the sum of their parts. Each of those records is a full-on experience. All Led Zeppelin IV, Sticky Fingers, and Who’s Next have going for them is that they are each a perfect collection of songs. You can’t find a bad tune across the set, and even if the sum of their parts is all they really amount to, that is enough to land them reasonably high on the list for one of the best years of music that I will ever review.
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At Fillmore East – The Allman Brothers Band
When I wrote about the greatest rock band debate up above, I didn’t mention the Allman Brothers. They are disqualified for the opposite reason as the Beatles: Namely, the Allmans didn’t release a single great studio album, much less the string of such that would be required for such an honorific. As a live band though? If I was pressed to name the most talented rock band, in terms of pure ability to play their instruments, I would choose the Allman Brothers. At Fillmore East is proof enough to support that declaration. The first thing you would notice if you picked up a copy in the early 70’s is that the band wasn’t interested in repackaging the songs that made them famous in the first place. Of the recording’s seven tracks, only the last two had appeared previously on studio albums from the band. The second thing would likely be how long these songs were. With a median time signature of 8:31 and a mean of 10:55, there are obviously a lot of extended jams here. What separates the Allmans from even the most successful jam bands*, however, is the urgency and immediacy of their playing. They are obviously exploring, but they never feel self-indulgent no matter how far they stretch a song. Somehow “You Don’t Love Me”, a 1960 Willie Cobbs blues number that clocks in at 2:32 in its original version, not only feels justifiable at 19+ minutes, but downright vital, like you couldn’t possibly lose a minute from the performance. That track features an extended guitar and drum section that highlights the incredible interplay between individual band-mates, but also makes me wonder why so few bands have adopted the dual drummer approach to live music. If rock’s greatest live band and hip hop’s greatest live band (the Roots) do it, it seems like a smart move to emulate. All band members really get to shine across the album, particularly Greg Allman on his vocal and keyboard performances on “Stormy Monday”. In the end, however, it’s all about the guitars. Duane Allman and Dickie Betts are playing out of their damn minds for the entirety of the record. I have listened to At Fillmore East dozens of times and I remain just as captivated by their playing as I did the first time I encountered it. It helps that the whole thing is structured so smartly, with a couple of short tracks easing us into the proceedings, and wrapping up with the climactic, twenty-two minute version of “Whipping Post”. The rhythm section of that song adds so much to what is clearly a showcase for Greg’s voice and the boys’ guitar solos. They push such a crazy tempo for the first ten minutes before Duane and Dickie settle into some beautiful improvisational playing. That goes on for so long that you get lost in what they are doing, and then towards the end of the song the rhythm section snaps back into the song’s primary groove to remind you what it is that this started as, before Duane, Dickie and finally Greg bring us all the way home. It is such a magical moment that it always stands out among all the mind-bending musicianship on display prior to that. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a live album this well constructed or performed, and that includes gems outside of the rock genre from such geniuses as John Coltrane and James Brown.
* It’s probably not fair to even compare this to the big jam bands. The Grateful Dead and Phish have literally thousands of hours of recordings of their concerts available, and they are generally presented, warts and all, exactly as they happened. At Fillmore East is constructed from multiple nights of a tour, and indeed individual songs are composites of multiple performances. It is basically a representation of the platonic ideal of an Allman Brothers concert, not a document of an actual Allman Brothers show.
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Master of Reality – Black Sabbath
Black Sabbath’s first four albums are all pretty much bulletproof. While Master of Reality is probably the slightest of the four, it also has the distinction of being rawest. Sabbath came onto the scene in 1970 sounding nothing like prevailing rock music, but this is the album that probably most accentuates their unique sound. It is an album mired in sludge, and I mean that in the best possible way. A lot of that filthiness should be credited to Geezer Butler, whose prominent bass lines provide a constant rumble to compliment the distorted riffs of Tony Iommi. He’s not exactly Entwistle, but he’s certainly nimble enough to make his pronounced placement in the mix fully justified. That’s one thing that the stubborn critics of the time failed to notice as they shifted their sights from lambasting Led Zeppelin to this new band that did everything they hated about Zeppelin even more dramatically – Each individual musician is brilliant in their own right. It probably isn’t fair to call Ozzy a brilliant singer, I suppose, but a brilliant front man? Absolutely. And the rest of the crew are capable of awe-inspiring work. Granted, Bill Ward isn’t as dynamic here as he was on Paranoid, but Paranoid is one of the great drum albums of all time. Sabbath’s biggest strengths lie in Iommi’s riffs and the band’s transitions. Of which, there are plenty to salivate over here. “Sweet Leaf”, of course, boasts one of their most iconic riffs, but “Lord of This World”, “Children of the Grave” and “Into the Void” also deliver in that department. Lyrically, I am always struck by how moralistic Sabbath could be. I know they had a rap for being Satanists, or heathens, or whatever, but Zeppelin had just as much interest in the occult and not even a fraction of Sabbath’s social and philosophical leaning. Master of Reality features songs about legalization of marijuana, protesting atomic warfare, and two tracks specifically about faith in God. That’s right, lest you think that “After Forever” is some kind of ironic jab at Christianity along the lines of Tool’s “Opiate”, check these lyrics from “Lord of This World”: “Your world was made for you by someone above, but you chose evil ways instead of love.” The band had way more depth than anyone in the early 70’s gave them credit for, and that’s probably true even now. The only demerits I can hand out are that with only eight tracks, we probably didn’t need the two brief instrumentals, and “Solitude” is nothing particularly special. Nobody comes to Sabbath for their ballads, and I prefer “Planet Caravan” and “Changes” even then. Still, I’m glad they included slower songs on their albums, even if you could argue they don’t actually make the albums better. Black Sabbath has such an outsized influence on the entire heavy metal genre, every brush stroke that they made expanded the acceptable palette that future metal bands had access to. If there is no “Solitude” or “Planet Caravan”, there’s a good chance that there is no “Cemetery Gates” or “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)”. In just their second year of existence, Black Sabbath was already revolutionizing rock music and birthing their own new genre into being. If I considered them a rock band, they would be right up in the running discussion about the greatest that has threaded through this list.
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Madman Across the Water – Elton John
Man, nearly halfway through this project and I’m just now getting to Elton John. He is one of my favorite artists, and boasts an impressive catalog, but I guess that’s just the luck of the draw. It also doesn’t help that his prime was during an era of such concentrated quality that it’s twice as hard to make the list than any other time frame. Madman Across the Water leads with strength, ripping off “Tiny Dancer” and “Levon” right out the gate, songs that are universally accepted as among John’s best. They are tunes that I could listen to ad nauseum without ever tiring of, a notion that has been tested by “Tiny Dancer”’s ubiquity in pop culture. The recent Elton John biopic, Rocketman, is bad in all the ways that most musical biopics are bad, but it did make one really smart choice by including an element of magical realism. That is the best possible way to capture the feel of Elton John, particularly a song like “Levon”. The way he sings and plays, and the melodies he writes, is best described as magical. That’s why I never felt like he compared to Billy Joel, an artist he is frequently associated with and even toured with at some point. Yes, they are both white, piano-playing dudes who made pop music in roughly the same period, but Joel’s music is so prosaic that it feels like a polar opposite of John. If I could be permitted a comic book analogy, Billy Joel is a street level hero like Spider Man or Daredevil, while Elton John belongs in cosmic storylines involving the Celestials and Uatu the Watcher. I’d also place pretty heavy odds that you’ll never see Billy Joel on these lists because I think he kinda sucks. Anyway, Madman starts off great but it is far from a two-trick pony. Less celebrated songs like “Holiday Inn”, “Razor Face” and “All the Nasties” never feel outclassed by their more famous counterparts. I don’t always understand Bernie Taupin’s lyrics, and I would hesitate to call him a great like Leonard Cohen or Neko Case, but everything he writes is at least interesting. He has a unique voice that seems to be perfectly suited for Elton’s gifts for phrasing and song-craft. The only reservation I really have is what to do with “Indian Sunset”. It is undeniably beautiful, and positioned as the clear centerpiece of the album. Yet, for all the storied history of white musicians singing the plight of Native Americans, this is the particular song that always makes me wonder if it is ok, no matter how well intentioned it seems. The Eagles’ “The Last Resort” and Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills” don’t seem to trigger the same unease, and I think that actually speaks to “Indian Sunset”’s effectiveness. It is just so damn earnest, but no amount of sensitivity can shield Elton’s impassioned turn as a young Iroquis warrior from a strange cultural dissonance. This could be a personal picadillo, however, and the performance is technically a marvel. I pray I’ll get the chance to represent Elton John again in the second half of the series, and I expect that I will. He excels at cheeky fun, which is not really something on offer on Madman. Between tackling the struggles of indigenous peoples, the title track which centers around a family visiting a man in a mental institution, and elegiac closing track “Goodbye”, this is one of Elton’s most somber albums, albeit one of his best. I look forward to revisiting him more frequently in the future to explore the other aspects of his oeuvre.
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Hunky Dory – David Bowie
Bowie is not a personal hero of mine, although I am not surprised that he is for so many. The way he approached music in 1971 was every bit as revolutionary as Funkadelic or Black Sabbath. Nothing else I listened to for this post remotely approximated Hunky Dory, but in just a few years you would have Queen, Iggy Pop, Roxy Music, the New York Dolls… all artists who owe a massive debt to the sound David Bowie pioneered. They are also all artists whose music is a mixed bag for me, with songs that I recognize as among the coolest and most re-listenable in all of pop music, and at least as many songs that I could never really connect with. Unsurprisingly, my relationship to Bowie is similar. Yet, while some of his acclaimed albums have a ratio that leans toward the latter end of the spectrum for me (Alladin Sane, Low), Hunky Dory is chock full of outstanding tunes. “Andy Warhol”, besides being the most on-brand thing possible for Bowie to sing about, has this quiet intensity and a great hook. “Song for Bob Dylan” incorporates some Southern rock elements, a rare thing for a Bowie song, and has a great hook. “Oh, You Pretty Things” could be prime Elton John, with its piano/vocal dynamic and great hook. “Changes” is one of his most famous tunes on the back of its great hook. Have you noticed a pattern? I haven’t even touched on the two best tracks on the album, saucy and flippant rocker “Queen Bitch” and melancholy, haunting, evocative, empirically perfect “Life on Mars”. Despite the litany of praise I have just heaped on all the amazing music of 1971, it is “Life on Mars” that I would probably consider the year’s pinnacle.
Compare Hunky Dory to Queen’s Sheer Heart Attack. Both are made up of excellent songs and both are experimental in their own way, certainly untethered to traditional rock album conventions. The latter definitely owes a debt to the former, but I may have a slight affinity for Sheer Heart Attack that would cause me to rank it marginally higher in my personal canon. Either way, its splitting the finest of hairs. Sheer Heart Attack was my number one album of 1974, while Hunky Dory sits in this spot. I know I have already beaten the drum of how great the music of 1971 is without going all in and declaring it the best year I’ve covered so far. I’m still not ready to say that, but I do believe it is the best top ten in the first 29 installments of this series. I didn’t cherry pick 1974 for comparison because it was a particularly bad year for music, it wasn’t, I simply wanted to compare two albums that felt similar to me. There are several years I could name that would have Hunky Dory as the album of the year if it had come out then. If there was ever a year that I endorse every album on the list without reservation, this is it. So if, by chance, you haven’t availed yourself of this music yet, please let this be the motivation you need.
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Honorable Mentions
Rock: Pearl – Janis Joplin; The Yes Album – Yes; Fragile – Yes; L.A. Woman – The Doors; Meddle – Pink Floyd; Tarkus – Emerson, Lake & Palmer; The Sun, Moon & Herbs – Dr. John; Nilsson Schmilsson – Harry Nilsson; Little Feat – Little Feat; Love It to Death – Alice Cooper; Rory Gallagher – Rory Gallagher; Rainbow Bridge – Jimi Hendrix; The Cry of Love – Jimi Hendrix; Santana III – Santana
Soul/Funk: Aretha Live at Fillmore West – Aretha Franklin; Roots – Curtis Mayfield; Curtis/Live! – Curtis Mayfield; Just as I Am – Bill Withers; Melting Pot – Booker T and the MGs; Shaft – Isaac Hayes; The Baby Huey Story – Baby Huey & the Babysitters; Where I’m Coming From – Stevie Wonder; The Undisputed Truth -The Undisputed Truth; Givin’ It Back – The Isley Brothers; Sky’s the Limit – The Temptations; Quiet Fire – Roberta Flack; Al Green Gets Next to You – Al Green; Earth, Wind & Fire – Earth, Wind & Fire; All Day Music – War; Donny Hathaway – Donny Hathaway
Afro-Beat: Zimbabwe – Assagai; Assagai – Assagai; Why Black Man Dey Suffer – Fela Kuti; Live! – Fela Kuti; Open & Close – Fela Kuti; Osibisa – Osibisa
Folk: Bryter Later – Nick Drake; Tupelo Honey – Van Morrison; Blue – Joni Mitchell
Jazz: The Inner Mounting Flame – Mahavishnu Orchestra; Mwandishi – Herbie Hancock; Ethiopian Knights – Donald Byrd; First Light – Freddie Hubbard; Straight Life – Freddie Hubbard; The Bill Evans Album – Bill Evans; Afrique – Count Basie
Country: Yesterday’s Wine – Willie Nelson; The Taker/Tulsa – Waylon Jennings
Reggae: Soul Revolution – Bob Marley & the Wailers
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