After the countercultural dream of the late 60s got here crashing down, the artists whose music had on condition that dream a soundtrack had been all confronted with the identical query: What now? The period’s most iconic rockers all arrived at completely different solutions on their first albums of the ‘70s. The Who, The Rolling Stones, two newly emancipated ex-Beatles – every had their very own methods of managing the tough transition from the idealism and adventurousness of the 60s to the truth of the brand new decade.
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The Who
For The Who, the 60s had been a time of enlargement and experiment, from their pioneering 1966 electrical operetta, “A Quick One, While He’s Away,” to the tongue-in-cheek conceptualism of 1967’s The Who Promote Out and the full-blown, album-length 1969 rock opera Tommy. Alongside the best way, they joined the psychedelic vanguard (“Armenia City in the Sky”), spun fanciful fables (“Silas Stingy”), crafted aural approximations of a day on the circus (“Cobwebs and Strange”), and put their very own spin on every little thing from Motown hits to the Batman theme.
Who’s Subsequent, the primary Who album of the 70s, had its beginnings in an unrealized challenge that gives the right metaphor for the large concepts of the 60s crashing and burning on the shores of the following decade. Pete Townshend envisioned Lifehouse as a high-concept sci-fi rock opera that might make Tommy appear to be a nursery rhyme. It might have concerned an album, a movie, and a few type of interactive live performance sequence, using all the newest expertise.
Like a number of the interval’s hyper-ambitious proposals, Lighthouse turned out to be a case of attain exceeding grasp. Nonetheless, a bunch of tunes had been repurposed on Who’s Subsequent for what could have appeared like an much more radical thought on the time: an everyday ol’ rock album of self-contained songs. However earlier than you even obtained to the music, it was apparent one thing had modified.
The Tommy cowl was a mind-bending imaginative and prescient that might have floated straight out of any individual’s acid journey. On the quilt of Who’s Subsequent, the band stands amid a wasteland of mining rubble, the place they seem to have simply relieved themselves in opposition to a concrete pillar. Album photographer Ethan Russel has mentioned that it was partly a sarcastic play on the well-known monolith scene from 1968’s 2001: A House Odyssey. Once more, hippie idealism provides option to one thing markedly extra abject.
Few songs chronicle the comedown from Aquarian Age beliefs extra successfully than “Baba O’Riley.” In 2021 Townshend informed Guitar Participant’s Christopher Scapelliti that the “teenage wasteland” of the lyrics is a reference to “the absolute devastation of teenagers at Woodstock, where everybody was smacked out on acid.” “Won’t Get Fooled Again” takes the same tack. Casting a disillusioned take a look at the hippie revolution’s outcomes, they observe, “History ain’t changed,” and wryly be aware that “The parting on the left is now a parting on the right/And the beards have all grown longer overnight.”
The sonic make-up of these two songs marks a serious break with the previous, too. Each tunes interrupt the band’s conventional guitar/bass/drums axis with Townshend’s digital experiments involving nearly Philip Glass-like minimalist repetition.
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The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones’ 70s entrée was a much less drastic growth however no much less notable. On 1967’s Their Satanic Majesties Request, the Stones had flown their paisley flag as proudly as anyone. However they ended their 60s string with two back-to-the-roots information: Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed. Launched simply weeks earlier than the 60s got here to a detailed, the latter was actually their run-up to the brand new decade. Its surrealist cowl was nonetheless fairly rattling psychedelic although, that includes Stones pal Robert Brownjohn’s fanciful cowl picture of a loopy cake whose decrease layers embody a pizza, a clock, and a tire, all suspended above a Stones report being performed by an old-school gramophone-style needle.
In stark distinction, the well-known cowl of 1971’s Sticky Fingers, designed by Andy Warhol, was a gritty, in-your-face evocation of sexuality: a crotch shot with a zipper that (within the unique urgent) opened to disclose a layer of underwear. The songs inside had been revealing in their very own method, unshackling a number of the Stones’ darker inclinations whilst they continued down a rootsy, acoustic-tinged path.
It was the band’s first album with out Brian Jones, who had died in July of 1969. Although Jones had been one of many band’s greatest blues boosters, he was additionally their imp of the perverse, the spirit egging them on to surprising musical detours, whilst early as his track-defining marimba on “Under My Thumb.” Not solely had been the Stones now lacking that X issue, they had been lacking their departed pal.
You’ll be able to hear it within the downcast temper hanging over tunes like “Sister Morphine” and “Dead Flowers.” The previous’s nightmarish, minor-key moan a couple of hospital affected person craving medicine and/or demise has so much to do with initially uncredited co-writer Marianne Faithfull’s contributions. In 2013 she informed The Guardian’s Dave Simpson, “It isn’t exactly what happened to me, but my feelings about it are probably the same. I was hospitalized in Sydney after an attempted suicide after Brian Jones died. It was a terrible time.”
Gram Parsons, who would be part of Jones within the choir invisible in 1973, had turn out to be buddies with Keith Richards by the point of the Sticky Fingers classes, and the affect of his brokenhearted nation sound looms over tunes like “Wild Horses” and “Dead Flowers.” Mick Jagger has confessed he by no means felt fully credible as a rustic singer, so he camps up the latter a tad, however from its strikingly candid evocation of heroin use (“I’ll be in my basement room with a needle and a spoon”) to its macabre refrain, there’s no escaping the darkness.
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Paul McCartney and John Lennon
The Stones’ outdated “rivals” didn’t make it by means of the 60s intact. The 1970 solo debuts from The Beatles’ artistic core discovered each John Lennon and Paul McCartney stripping down and baring multi functional method or one other. McCartney couldn’t be farther from the Fabs’ closing recording, Abbey Street. The Beatles’ closing assertion (recorded after Let It Be however launched earlier than it) was lower within the legendary studio that gave the report its title, and its pristine manufacturing was exactingly overseen by George Martin.
Conversely, the one method Paul’s first solo outing may have been extra homegrown is that if he recorded it in his backyard. He did report it principally at dwelling, although, with a minimal of substances, engineering and taking part in every little thing himself. The result’s an unassuming, ramshackle manufacturing during which traditional McCartney tunes just like the love-smacked “Every Night,” wistful “Junk,” and transcendent “Maybe I’m Amazed” are embedded amongst endearingly offhand tracks just like the lo-fi garage-rock instrumental “Valentine’s Day” and the tongue-in-cheek percussive celebration of “Kreen-Akrore.” It was clear that the 1970 mannequin McCartney was a person intent on letting all of it hang around.
Take heed to Paul McCartney’s album McCartney now.
Launched eight months after McCartney, Plastic Ono Band truly introduced Lennon again to Abbey Street, with a full band and the manufacturing help of an uncharacteristically reserved Phil Spector. However Lennon’s open-wound strategy to the songwriting took the album even farther from Beatles territory than Paul’s challenge. Decided to interrupt with each the 60s and the band that outlined them, Lennon rips his troubled soul open, seems deep inside, and lets listeners in on the result.
With bare-bones preparations together with Ringo Starr on drums, Lennon takes himself aside piece by piece, delving into his points together with his absent mother and father amid primal screams on “Mother,” the popping of the countercultural balloon on “I Found Out,” and his battle to be greater than an ex-Beatle on “God.” The latter track’s final verse is about as succinct an announcement on the transition to the brand new period as any ‘60s rocker ever made.
I used to be the dreamweaver
However now I’m reborn
I used to be the walrus
However now I’m John
And so pricey associates
You’ll simply have to hold on
The dream is over
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