1971. The Best Year for Music?

50 years after possibly the most influential year ever for popular music, a reflection of the work produced in 1971. Originally posted at https://www.facebook.com/allthingmusicplus

50 years ago, those of us alive to experience it, couldn’t have imagined the albums being released that year might be the greatest achievements of each musician’s career. 1971 saw some of the classic rock era’s greatest musicians release their career-defining album.

And I was at the perfect age for this milestone: finishing my junior year in high school and entering senior year. The 60’s were history. The Beatles broke up; Woodstock happened, then 3 months later Altamont; Janis and Jimi were dead. Many at my age believed we missed the golden age of music, fun, and everything that went along with it.

Around 1971, radio was beginning to wake up to album rock largely by re- inventing FM station formats from classical music to rock music. FM (frequency modulation) was a much superior format because it provided higher fidelity sound for music. Since the late 60s, rock music was moving from a reliance on singles to the LP or long-playing album. The Beatles showed us how you could weave songs into a narrative or concept. FM was a place where longer form music like this could be played because advertising was minimal. Most advertisers had not paid attention to FM because most listeners only had AM radio.

Like many my age, we were finding newly formatted FM stations on our parent’s console stereo systems. I was lucky to find WXRT in Chicago where I could often hear an entire album side without commercial interruption. FM introduced us to new musicians and albums which in turn gave us the impetus to visit our local record stores. There we would find other like-minded people and share our discoveries.

For reasons still unclear, 1971 gave us an embarrassment of riches every time we visited our favorite record store. Every one of the albums I will highlight here have found their way into lists of the top 100 albums of all time - many in the top 10.

To paraphrase one career-defining concept album from Marvin Gaye that year, “What was going on?”

British author, David Hepworth even wrote a book about the year 1971 in music: Never a Dull Moment “Well, yes because there was a huge explosion of creativity in a very short period time. And a huge number of people were between the ages of 25 and 30, which is scientifically proven to be the most creative period for musicians. And so they did their best work during that period. And they did it very, very quickly. They did it with no second guessing.

Many of them were twenty-five at the time, the age that nobody appreciates being. You never get to be twenty-five again. For those of us who were listening, it never got any better than 1971.” Hepworth, David. Never a Dull Moment . Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.

Although most rock musicians were still in their twenties, they had already experienced some fame and some breakups.

The bands or musicians who released albums in ’71 had beaten the odds of staying together more than a few years, had not succumbed to drug overdoses, or they just managed their affairs well enough to be able to create. By 1971, the ‘hippie’ was long past dead, student protestors were shot to death in Ohio a year earlier, and there was still a war going on. This spiritual malaise led artists to lyrical introspection and experimentation with sound.

One of those experiments was to try to capture live performance on vinyl in all its ragged glory and even surpass the quality of the original recording. Two examples from 1971 are the Allman Brothers Band Live at the Fillmore East, and the Grateful Dead’s live album (known as Skull and Roses). Both bands were known for their exploratory jamming (the term “jam band” could be traced to these two bands) and their inability to capture their true sound in the studio. Both were double albums recorded at the Fillmore East in New York City, Bill Graham’s converted Lower East Side theater that was on the verge of closing its doors for good just after these recordings were made.

The Dead, through their association with Alembic studios, used a revolutionary technique to record tracks live. Each device (microphone or direct feed from an instrument) was fed directly into an input on a 24-track Ampex recorder. This allowed each track to be recorded as pristine as possible direct to tape with no pre-mix. So each track could be later mixed down in a controlled environment and blended together better than a live mix...rudimentary to today’s standards but revolutionary then. (For a much deeper dive, check out the podcast: “Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast”)

Live at the Fillmore East is generally considered one the best live albums of all time and contributed mightily to the Allman Brothers popularity from that point forward. Setting a new standard with 2 lead guitars and 2 drummers, it was a sonic boom of southern blues and exquisite double- leads that are still being imitated today. Although it was their third album, this one literally invented Southern Rock and induced many of us to discover their mostly obscure earlier records. Scouring the album covers (our wikipedia of the day), we discovered that the genius behind the double leads and especially the bottleneck guitar was one of the brothers, Duane Allman. Just as he was reaching stardom, he was killed in a motorcycle accident the same year, forever locking in his mythological status, and cementing the myth by leaving behind a body of work that was stunning in its depth for his short 24 years on this earth.

At the other end of the musical spectrum, a genre that exploded in 1971 was the female singer-songwriter, embodied in Joni Mitchell’s Blue and Carole King’s Tapestry. Mitchell moved into Laurel Canyon in the late 60s and fit right in to the collaborative scene. People like Frank Zappa, Chris Hillman, David Crosby, Graham Nash, Jim Morrison, and Michele Philips all made homes in the area.

“They made music together, played songs for one another with acoustic guitars in all-night jam sessions in each other’s houses. They took drugs together, formed bands together, broke up those bands, and formed other bands.” (Vanity Fair, An oral history of Laurel Canyon, 2015)

That scene not only broke up bands but led to Joni’s split with Graham Nash and the beginning of a relationship with James Taylor. Clearly, her exploration of relationships in her music were influenced by both these experiences. She produced and wrote the entire album. As the decade came to a close, Joni was asked about Blue: “there’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals... I had no personal defenses.” The NY Times chose Blue as one of the 25 albums that represented "turning points and pinnacles in 20th-century popular music.”

King was a part of the NY music scene - a songwriter in the Brill Building that churned out hits for 60s groups. Carole wrote “Natural Woman” for Aretha Franklin, and “Up on the Roof” among other hits, always for other musicians. It was her turn to not only put her name on an album but to perform. The production style gave her voice an ‘every woman’ tone to connect with her largely young, female audience who memorized every note. Indeed, her first hit from the album, “It’s too Late” was a common breakup song for many of us in high school at the time (myself included... on the receiving end).

I’m not sure anyone was quite ready for the opening blast to side 1, track 1 of Who’s Next and Jethro Tull’s Aqualung. Pete Townsend had been experimenting with a new electronic gizmo called an ARP synthesizer. This bright and unique sound kicked off the first song, “Baba O’Riley,” with a cautionary reflection on the audience he was seeing at their concerts - “it’s only teenage wasteland.” Who’s Next appeared to be a collection of songs with no apparent connection until we learned much later it was birthed from the ashes of Townsend’s shelved concept project Lifehouse. But the synthesizer that opened the album and closed it with “Won’t Get Fooled Again” couldn’t overshadow the great songs collected here. The last song was a timely commentary on being wary of what revolution might bring - “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” Who author Dave Marsh described singer Roger Daltrey's scream near the end of the track as "the greatest scream of a career filled with screams.”

Widely considered Jethro Tull’s masterpiece, the album Aqualung begins with the title track - an in-your-face blast of guitars and snarling vocals telling a story about a down-on-his-luck vagrant. As reviewed in Rolling Stone magazine, “‘Aqualung’ is actually three songs in one; as the different moods of the narrator unfold, the music changes accordingly.” It also confounded critics as the album’s musical styles ranged from heavy metal to English folk and acoustic. Indeed, the title song evokes all those moods within itself. It was the band’s fourth album, and their only non- compilation that reached platinum sales.

In the much-maligned genre of the day, Heavy Metal, two of it’s inventors released their most popular albums of their careers: the critically and commercially successful Led Zeppelin IV and the groundbreaking Master of Reality from Black Sabbath.

Featuring what would become one of the most requested songs of all time, “Stairway to Heaven,” Zeppelin reinvented the genre with dynamics that ranged from soft and bluesy, to teeth-rattling screams. It would be their best-selling album in the US and is regularly cited as one of the greatest albums of all time.

For Sabbath fans, Master of Reality was unique in that it contained the first acoustic songs of the band’s career so far. It was released just a few months after “Paranoid” and depending on who you talk to, these 2 albums are considered their most successful critically and commercially.

Two bands who made a major impact on the previous decade released albums some consider their all-time best 50 years ago: The Rolling Stones and The Doors. With Sticky Fingers, the Stones 11th album released in the US, they finally scored number one on both the US and UK album charts. It was considered a return to the basics of their blues-based rock. At turns raw (“Sister Morphine”) and other turns melodic (“Wild Horses”), Sticky Fingers featured their new guitarist Mick Taylor who could play hard core blues as well as a more melodic jam like “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” or turn psychedelic in “Moonlight Mile.” It is now considered one of their greatest albums in their 60 years of recording.

Jim Morrison of The Doors only survived 3 months following the release of LA Woman, their sixth studio album. Like the Stones release of ’71, it was heavily influenced by the blues but contained a wide variety of styles from the radio-friendly “Love Her Madly,” to the mysterious and creepy “Riders on the Storm,” and finally to the raucous, crescendo-building closer of the title song.

Another 60’s band who made their mark on the Britain blues scene, debuted a new, more accessible sound - Fleetwood Mac. Known for their blues rock and the incredibly polished rhythm section of Mick Fleetwood on drums and John McVie on bass, they introduced a new softer, melodic take on Future Games. This album introduced Christine McVie (John’s wife) on piano and vocals along with American guitarist Bob Welch. Known for their guitar prowess (Peter Green was the legendary driving force in their earlier recordings), they enlisted a young player named Danny Kirwan who could play blues, country, or pop with a quiet flair. He had a similar impact to the Mac as Mick Taylor’s impact on the Stones sound.

Quite possibly the most influential album released in 1971 was Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. As recently as 2020, it was listed as number one on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Inspired by his brother’s gruesome tales of his Vietnam experience and his return home, Gaye’s concept album is told from that point of view. All the issues of the day appear here - racial division, hatred, and injustice. His take on police brutality is horribly prescient 50 years later. John Legend described it as “the voice of black America speaking out that we couldn’t always smile on cue for you.” Indeed, Marvin told the Detroit Free Press at the time of its release, “Human rights ... that’s the theme.”

These few albums I focused on really only scratch the surface of the rich legacy that is 1971. A deeper dive will reveal many other gems that made this year something special. Summer job cash only went so far for me back then, but my investments at the time have given me 50 years of listening, and memories of a special year in music history.