The
premise of this book is something that is frequently discussed by music fans
everywhere: which was the best year in rock? For many years I had a pet theory
that the music that people hear in their fifteenth year tends to be the
music for which they are most nostalgic. Quite a few friends have agreed. My
fifteenth year wasn’t a particularly glorious one for popular music (I was
sixteen in November 1989) but it still produced nuggets like Stones Roses, ‘New
York’ by Lou Reed and ‘Full Moon Fever’ by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
Sadly it also was the year of Jive Bunny.
David
Hepworth has produced a book that presents a compelling argument that 1971 was
the year of years. Not 1967, or 1991, but 1971. He ticks off a number of
reasons, and in the end is pretty convincing. He makes no apologies for the
fact that he was twenty-one in 1971. ‘I was born in 1950,’ he says, ‘which means
that in terms of music I have the winning ticket in the lottery of life.’
1971
was the first year of the post-Beatles Era, which might suggest that it was a
poor choice for rock’s greatest year of all. However, Hepworth paints a
colourful picture of quite how burnt out and un-Fab the Beatles had become by
then, their lives filled with lawyers, mud-slinging and bitterness. Allen Klein
was in his pomp. It was a miracle that individually they managed to produce any
music at all. It was a pleasant surprise to all at the time that the best
effort was George’s ‘All Things Must Pass’ (which appeared in 1970 but was
doing good business in 71). The long view of hindsight helps everyone to see
that George must have emerged from the shadows on Lennon and McCartney – it was
not obvious at the time. In 1971 he also organised the Concert for Bangla Desh.
It nearly bankrupted him.
With
no Beatles, it was, as Hepworth puts it, ‘up for grabs’. He paints a great
picture of Harry Nilsson as potentially the new Great White Hope. He would be the
first in line, with many to follow.
What
of The Stones?
By
1971, they were ready to jump ship. Taxation in the UK had reached such levels
that they elected to live and work in the South of France, where Mick was
married to Bianca on 12th May. It was the year of ‘Sticky Fingers’,
and the recording of ‘Exile on Main Street’. The Stones, he suggests, were at a
crossroads of sorts, and from 1971 on the band became famous for being The
Stones, and less for the music that they were writing and recording. The fact
that they could headline Glastonbury at the age of seventy suggests he is
right, and that everyone else has bought into the hype more comprehensively
than even the accountants could have dreamed. The idea that 1971 was the birth
of nostalgia in music is returned to and pondered several times, not least in
the reporting of the strange encounter between Elvis and Nixon; and how Elvis
had, by 1971, become his own tourist industry. The shape of things to come.
Even
if you do not agree that 1971 was the greatest year, it is hard to say that it
was not a busy one. There is so much to say that Hepworth has to prioritise. He
travels month by month, focussing on two or three musicians in each. Bowie is
given loving but not excessive attention (his star was still rising), as is the
folky duskiness of Carole King, Joni and James Taylor. Elton John and the emergence
of Rod the Mod, Cat Stevens and Marc Bolan are all skated across with warm
affection.
Something
this book does do well is explore the social setting into which the music was
first heard. TV was nothing. Hollywood was jaded and dull. Music, and
particularly the LP, was were ‘it was at’. Hepworth frequently returns to the
way music was enjoyed – not consumed – first by reading about it in the music
press, then absorbing all the details from the cover, then taking the plunge
and making a purchase. He contrasts this to the saturated, on-tap way that all
entertainment can be absorbed in the early twenty-first century. We have no
anticipation any more.
Perhaps
one fault is that the author also tries to look ahead and peak at what was just
about to happen (like the birth of The Eagles and the inability to resist
saying that Springsteen was just over the horizon). There was so much going
on, a look ahead isn’t really needed.
Another
strand of this book is an examination of how the long players were made. Studio
time was expensive. There was no bedroom recording. As a result, many of the
great records were rushed out, full of imperfections. He suggests that this is
part of their success – just as the large cardboard LP covers frayed from many
hours of playing, the rustic analogue nature of the sound is something much
sought-after in our digital world.
‘There’s something
about the recordings of 1971 that makes them sound more right almost fifty
years later than they sounded at the time […] You can now buy invisible
plug-ins for your desktop recording set-up that promise to make your record
sound like ‘the big room’ at Olympic studios […] To all intents and purposes
they’re selling the very air of 1971.’
This
book is a feast for people really in love with music. At the end of each month
there is a suggested play-list – a rather Q or Mojo approach – but it adds to
the richness of the experience. The author cannot resist the temptation of
ending with a final, more comprehensive list of the 100 albums that support his
argument. It is a fantastic list. Perhaps it should form part of the GCSE music
syllabus in this country.
Was
1971 any good, in the end? It was the year of ‘Imagine’, ‘What’s Going On’, ‘Tapestry’,
‘Led Zeppelin IV’, ‘L.A. Woman’, ‘Crazy Horse’, ‘Blue’, ‘Hunky Dory’ and ‘Surf’s
Up’. I picked these albums randomly from the list of one hundred as they caught
my eye.
Don’t
take my word for it, as that is not what it is about. Go and have a listen.
