The Allure of Listening - Chapter 6 - Cultural Defiance for its Own Sake

 Were the 45 rpm records and spoken-word diatribes of mid-decade 1970s a harbinger of punk or privilege? - 1975-77

     Long before Patti Smith’s introduction to the world at the end of 1975, the paramour of Robert Mapplethorpe had fascinated me with her New York adventures, chronicled in Creem magazine and elsewhere. I picked up Smith’s poetry chapbooks Seventh Heaven and WITT before graduating high school, and was astonished to find she had released an underground 45 rpm record, “Hey Joe”/”Piss Factory.” I had gotten so used to associating an LP with innovation and the 7-inch record with mainstream culture, the prospect of flipping the media expectations jolted my world – and it wasn’t long before Pere Ubu and DEVO released underground singles, long before the primary wave of punk hit US or U.K. shores. The arrival of re-imagined music led to a revival of 45-rpm singles in at least two instances – punk’s early days in 1976-78, and the grunge-indie launch of the 1990s. In both cases, the dormant market for 7-inch singles exploded anew.

    My last months in high school were strange times, with the first resignation of a U.S. president in history, making way for a Michigan native, Gerald Ford, as a temporary stand-in. The mythical nation of South Vietnam fell in the spring of 1975, youth culture seemed all but dead, and I put out a couple issues of another underground broadsheet, Tiger Mountain, in an attempt to explain it all. I followed the adventures of music writers like Lester Bangs in hopes of catching new elements of club culture, but except for hints of new acts being booked by CBGB in New York, I seemed cursed to graduate under the slogan “May you live in uninteresting times.”

    There was certainly a host of intelligent singers breaking the charts – Phoebe Snow, Harry Chapin, Roberta Flack. The problem was that they all felt so “grown up.” Top 40 culture had lost its sense of careless youth, even more so than FM AOR – even though album-oriented rock had been launched with the intent of being more serious and grown up than the Top 40. Odd, then, that KISS and similar arena-rock bands dominated the FM charts. The true start of the disco era was in the spring of 1975, long before The Bee Gees or John Travolta got involved. One band cracking the Top 40 in that spring was called Disco Tex & The Sex-O-Lettes, and Van McCoy released his seminal “The Hustle” at the same time.

    A big change in electronic music took place in mid-decade, though its implications did not become clear until the mid-1980s. Pioneers of both the analog synthesizer and modular synthesizer made the banks of electronics a visual centerpiece in their own right. Such maestros included Rick Wakeman and Keith Emerson in prog-rock, and Allen Ravenstine in proto-punk. Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream led a krautrock invasion in mid-decade that awakened listeners to synthesizers’ possibilities. In 1970, Moog Music introduced the Minimoog to bring portability to the analog synthesis world (and Yamaha followed with the portable digital DX7 in the early 1980s). As krautrock grew in popularity even as the Minimoog dropped in price, bands that once considered only standard electronic keyboards could move to portable synthesizers. Many artists from Eno to Pink Floyd to Jean-Michael Jarre considered the VCS-3, manufactured by London’s EMS, to be the definitive mix of functionality and portability, and the VCS-3 rapidly became the primary choice for the touring progressive band. This was a positive trend until 1980s producers began to over-use the musical style, giving rise to the dreaded “1980s production wasteland”. In Chapter 9, we will look at how the supposed sins of the compact disc really reflected poor engineering and production choices made in pop music during the decade. For now, suffice it to say that decisions made by bands and individual musicians to add portable synthesizers in the mid-1970s eventually led to a poorer pop music production environment in the decade to come.

    It took a few months to appreciate the rich music environment I stumbled into at Michigan State University in the fall of 1975. Roscoe Mitchell of Art Ensemble of Chicago had begun a residency there at the start of my freshman year. Two campus organizations, ASMSU Pop and Showcase Jazz, regularly brought people like Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny, Sonny Rollins, Steve Goodman, Bruce Springsteen, and Tom Waits to campus, while a local bar showcased Captain Beefheart and Patti Smith within my first year. Even when appealing to a wider student body with a free outdoor festival, ASMSU chose Bonnie Raitt, Little Feat, and NRBQ for its spring 1976 lawn fest. I had little to complain about.

    My father and I shared a few moments of common musical love by seeing Tom Waits live a couple times in the 1975-76 period, once on the MSU campus. Dad had always had a soft spot for scat jazz, be bop, and Dixieland jazz (and had his own retro jazz band), while I was a fiend for Waits’ drunken spoken-word albums from that late 1970s period. Dad wasn’t always able to follow Waits into the Swordfishtrombone years, but I gave him good marks for trying (as I would for his efforts with everything from Zappa to Incredible String Band).

    I was also lucky to move into the Case Hall dormitory with an overabundance of progressive-rock and jazz nerds. While I knew most of the favorites of my new companions, I grew to appreciate Genesis, King Crimson, and the jazz artists of the ECM label more profoundly, due to being fed a constant diet during stoner sessions and keg parties. Nevertheless, despite the abundance of campus riches, I still felt overwhelmed with ennui at times. The pop music controversy of the fall semester centered on Bruce Springsteen appearing simultaneously on the cover of Time and Newsweek.

    Those of us who had been with the Boss for the first two Columbia albums knew that the hype for Born to Run was not unwarranted, yet it seemed producer Jon Landau was unleashing such Svengali-like powers, he became the epitome of the professional in Joni Mitchell’s “Free Man in Paris” song, “stoking the star-maker machinery behind the popular song.” The move augured the rise of the major-label ultra-event, one factor that drove the reaction of DIY punk in the late 1970s, and later drove the arrival of 1990s indie rock after a decade of the 1980s where the big corporations ruled the entire supply chain of popular music. The larger than life appearance of the first two Fleetwood Mac albums to feature Buckingham and Nicks,  the eponymous 1975 release and its 1977 Rumours follow-on, set the tone in the mid-1970s for the type of ultra-event characterized by Michael Jackson’s Thriller! in the 1980s (not to mention Springsteen’s own Born in the USA, which brings us full circle back to the Boss).

    Patti Smith’s debut album Horses occupied a unique corner at the end of 1975 with her spoken-word poetry layered on Lenny Kaye’s minimalist riffs. Outside Patti’s universe, the initial punks to hit the scene were not enraged barons of accelerated 4/4 anger, like The Damned or The Dead Boys, but the acts associated with minimal chord changes and a sardonic dumbing down, exemplified by The Dictators in 1975 and the debut Ramones album in 1976. Playboy Records made a very belated release of The Modern Lovers’ 1972 black heart sessions in 1976, which prepared the world for both Jonathan Richman’s childhood regression in a reformulated Modern Lovers, and Jerry Harrison’s later role in Talking Heads, which was making some of its first CBGB appearances in 1975. The middle of my freshman year was when the first zines like Punk arrived, giving me ideas for later forays into indie publishing in 1977.

    There seemed to be fewer excuses all the time to check out the Top 40 singles of the week. Vapidity was a description that not only applied to the Barry Manilow breed of songwriters filling the charts, but also to the tactic of recycling favorite tunes of AOR FM-radio bands. Both Aerosmith and KISS had re-engineered versions of previous hits enter the charts in early 1976 – like a summer rerun, and just as pointless. There also were only a handful of bands, exemplified by The Sweet, Thin Lizzy, or Bay City Rollers, keeping alive the mid-1960s explosive poppy hooks. Even bands at the heart of AOR cred could use repetitive lyrics going nowhere, like Free or Foghat, as well as slow and largely uninteresting arrangements, like Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell In Love.” This made the mid-year arrival of The Ramones’ debut album all the more comical and critical. The four New York revivalists were deliberately repetitive, dumb, and loud, while waxing on adolescent silly themes. Many found irony in the fact that Paul McCartney & Wings’ “Silly Love Songs” was at the top of the charts just after The Ramones’ debut.

    Meanwhile, by attending parties of the MSU cognoscenti, I was learning of releases that qualified as a true pre-punk underground. They ranged from free jazz and improv, to a reimagining of issue-oriented folk. Judy Collins’ 1976 release of Bread and Roses sparked a bottom-up folk revival movement that was leveraged by women and gay groups as well as the nascent anti-nuclear movement, though because the Bread and Roses movement was decentralized and region-based, it was invisible to all but a few. Meanwhile, the heady improvisational world, led by pioneers like Carla Bley, Miles Davis, and Art Ensemble of Chicago, set a high bar for creativity that few in the rock world could ever hope to meet. This led me to conclude that if the first two Residents albums, and Bley’s Escalator Over the Hill, counted as a new underground, that must mean the album-oriented rock that defined my high school years was middle of the road music. AOR was now MOR, what a decline.

    What was true culturally was true politically and socially, with mid-decade winning the moniker of “Me Decade” from a media anxious to categorize and declare. Granted, there were fringe benefits to gazing at one’s own navel, such as the new-found obsession with gymnasium workouts, never a favorite in hippie years. The years between Nixon’s resignation and the fall of Saigon on the one hand, and Seabrook and anti-nuclear environmental concerns on the other, were never more than a brief hiatus, but the bicentennial represented the trough for political awareness in the country. True, a few brave anti-nuclear souls initiated the bicentennial Continental Walk for Disarmament, but except for the event introducing the world to folk singer Charlie King, there was little traction with youth in the nation. Gil Scott-Heron managed to turn ennui to the advantage of activists, releasing spoken-word tracks like “Bicentennial Blues” that bemoaned the empty state of the decade at midpoint.

    The one moment of furor at MSU centered on The Iran Film Project, a documentary effort sponsored by the shah of Iran and the CIA. Because the film was shaping up as a hagiography of the Reza Pahlavi family, Iranian students were incensed, but dared not come out in public. The protests of hundreds of students wearing blank square white cardboard around their faces set the tone for 1975-76 on campus, as did chants of “The shah is a U.S. puppet! Down with the shah!” (I was overjoyed to see Patti Smith later post a picture of herself surrounded by Iranian students with their paper masks.)

     It’s funny how both the arena-rock AOR traditionalists, and the protopunk malcontents, focused with equal fervor on disco as a symbol of all that was wrong in the world. Granted, disco’s exaggerated class distinctions and dress-up fake aristocracy seemed tailor-made for parody, so it would be difficult for many outside the mirror ball world to hold their tongues. But amidst all the Bee Gees and Average White Band soundalike hits, there were moments of pure enjoyment, characterized as guilty pleasure for the disco haters. Donna Summers’ “I Feel Love” (the first hit with a completely synthesized beat) stood out, as did Earth Wind & Fire’s “September,” KC & The Sunshine Band’s “Keep It Comin’, Love,” The Brothers Johnson’s “Strawberry Letter 23,” and so many others. A girlfriend dragged me to my first gay bar, Trammpps, during those years, where I got to witness a Cockettes chorus line dance to an augmented version of Polly Browne’s “Up Up Up in a Puff of Smoke.” Those kind of memories have as much staying power as one’s first Talking Heads or DEVO concert.

    My own deepest plunge into mediocrity during those months happened not with disco, but in a spontaneous car trip to Newport News, Virginia on the bicentennial weekend to drop off a friend. On the return trip, we stopped in Nashville for an outdoor Peter Frampton and Gary Wright festival that might have had some debauched moments, but seemed at the time to be the height of empty arena rock. During the late summer of 1976 I made a point of listening to more Ramones and following early press coverage of the Sex Pistols in London, just so I could feel a middle finger could be appropriately delivered to some corner of mainstream culture. It wasn’t until the punk wave crested in 1977-79 that I started asking if there was a method behind that particular madness.

In three weeks - Everything Everywhere - Was the punk tsunami new wave, no-wave, or rogue wave? 1977-1980

Copyright 2024 Loring Wirbel

 

The Allure of Listening - Chapter 5 - Tapes, Taping, and Subgenres: Struggles for Market Dominance

 Many new entrants take on the hard-rock core to define the finest music for driving around stoned   -- 1973-75

As older friends got their first cars and driving around country roads with beers and joints became the ideal way to spend the weekend, the 8-track tape was suddenly everywhere – decent fidelity and a looped playback, not requiring any rewinds or media flip-overs. In our part of mid-Michigan, driving aimlessly while impaired was called “taping,” but it was never clear to me if this was a reference to 8-track or cassette tapes, or something else entirely. On rare occasions, the desire by corporate labels to place tracks of equal timing on the four programs of 8-track tapes led to unexpected bonuses: Lou Reed’s Berlin, for example, featured four minutes of orchestrated music on the 8-track that was not present on any other format among the 1973 releases.

    Certain tapes became de rigueur early on: Commander Cody’s Lost in the Ozone, J. Geils Band’s Full House, Deep Purple’s Machine Head. But I learned a trick in that early 8-track era about music rights and marketing of pirate editions. At local gas stations and convenience stores, 8-track tapes were sold in unadorned packages for cheap prices, no legal rights assumed (“of course it’s legit, what kind of place do you think I’m running here?”). Because the pirate manufacturers did not wish to incur the wrath of large labels, it was only occasionally one might stumble upon a pirated version of Elton John’s Madman Across the Water or Neil Young’s Harvest. Far more often, one might find pirated versions of less popular niche artists like New York Dolls, Mahavishnu Orchestra or The Tubes. Of course, this fit in with my listening preferences, so I assembled a collection of outsider music on the cheap. It was only barely discernible in the early to mid-1970s that the smaller audio cassette was displacing the 8-track tape, in both automotive and home applications, due primarily to Dolby noise reduction improving the audio quality of the former (I do not recall ever seeing a pirated cassette, not sure why). The 8-track would not fade away until the introduction of the Sony Walkman in 1979, however.

    Friends were pretty forgiving at being introduced to the Velvet Underground or Mott the Hoople, but it was no surprise to find loud repetitive tunes like “Smoke On the Water” and “Lazy” retaining their place as top driving-while-impaired tunes. And the programmers of album-oriented rock took careful notice. Lee Abrams and the market analysts copying his model pressured stations to make sure that these hard-rock favorites were played over and over again on FM radio stations.

    In 2024, after the back-to-back deaths of Karl Wallenberg and Eric Carmen, a producer who had worked with both musicians lamented that it was hard to get World Party and Raspberries music on FM radio because of the influence of the “More Zep, bro!” contingent. As much as I want to be partially empathetic to the hormone- and alcohol-fueled teenage male, the Zep crew was in effect doing Lee Abrams’ job. Among my own group of friends, maybe a third were truly inquisitive and open, while close to two thirds were proud to demand the loud and familiar. To this day, many of the aging head-bangers who were in the classic-rock mainstream don’t want to admit they should be ashamed of what lunkheads they were in the 1970s.

    By 1973, the trend got worse with Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird,” and at least three or four tracks from Steely Dan’s debut album. The most frustrating aspect of the dumbing-down of AOR was that these same tunes remained the most played a decade, even two decades later, hence giving FM-based AOR its nickname of “classic rock.” Few 1970s adolescents reaching the end of their teens saw any problem with being stuck in the hard-rock hits of 1968-75, as they were thoroughly convinced this was rock’s finest hour.

    To be fair, some complex rock works like Focus’s “Hocus Pocus,” Golden Earring’s “Radar Love,” or Edgar Winter’s “Frankenstein” were innovative bright spots of fun in the charts. But by 1973, I had not only given up on Top 40, I was even finding reason to be skeptical of progressive-rock luminaries. The second and third albums of both King Crimson and Genesis seemed to lag a bit. For Robert Fripp of King Crimson, my turning point for appreciating the band again was the rise of the Red-era ensemble. I heard Lark’s Tongues in Aspic while driving all night to Colorado in the summer of 1973, and immediately became convinced that the band with Wetton, Bruford, and Cross was the best instantiation of Crimson ever. Similarly, once Genesis released The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, all was forgiven – at least until Peter Gabriel quit the band. In more mainstream environs, George Harrison and Eric Clapton won some brownie points for organizing benefits for causes like the new nation of Bangladesh. But because I was an early fan of Bob Marley and saw him live in 1974, I was all too aware that Clapton’s cover of “I Shot the Sheriff” represented a certain white-rocker ripoff of the reggae community, as much as it represented an attempt to give Marley greater exposure.

    The explosion of glam acts like Roxy Music, Bowie, New York Dolls, Iggy, and Lou Reed in 1972-73 captured my full attention, not due to gender questioning, but because the bands represented the kind of excitement and spontaneity I associated with 1966. Some bands broke through to Top 40 awareness – T. Rex’s “Bang a Gong,” Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” several Bowie songs from Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, and songs from the post-Country Life Roxy Music. Because of this, teen friends of mine were far more willing to accept glam rock in a little rural Midwestern town than I might have anticipated.

    It’s easy to read too much in the acceptance of glam as far as any real challenges to hyper-masculinity in rock, or as far as auguring a more collective approach to gay rights or women’s rights in music in the mid-1970s. As far as masculinity in performance, dozens of lead singers like Paul Rodgers followed the Jagger/Plant/Daltrey path into the “cock-rock” self-parody, and carried plenty of teenage males along for the ride. In fact, with the rise of hair-metal bands in the 1980s, many musicians combined hyper-masculinity with teased hair and makeup, leading to a message that was confused to say the least.

    As far as cultural messages for budding women or LGBTQ+ activists in the early 1970s, it was rare to see anything beyond the superficial Helen Reddy “I Am Woman” message. A group of Ann Arbor women activists centered on Meg Christian and what would become the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival formed Olivia Records in 1973. Lesbian activist Holly Near had founded Redwood Records in 1971, but the label did not center on gay rights and lesbian activism until two years later. The two labels reached their heights of fame around 1976-82, but were scarcely visible in popular culture. As for male gay rights, despite the regular presence of outspoken activists in the 50 years following 1973, it was only the arrival of Tom Robinson in the British punk movement in 1976 that married queer activism and anti-Thatcher activism. Rarely did gay rights statements mix personal lifestyles and collective politics until the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.

   The arrival of punk rock in 1976-77 would be rejected by many more mainstream rockers who had accepted glam, both because punk artists defiantly tried to stay underground, and because many listeners who were teens in the early 1970s hit that point in their lives, often reached at the end of high school years, when the search for new musical experiences slowly waned. Subsequent observations of generations entering their college years or early 20s at later dates confirms that most teens hit the end of music experimentalism around 18; a small coterie of music lovers sustain the search for new music into their mid-20s; but only a tiny few maintain that interest into middle or old age. It became obvious to me before leaving high school that I was going to be one of those life-long explorers.

    I had my own set of prejudices. The Southern California Eagles/Jackson Browne sound did little for me, even though many were jumping on that particular bandwagon by the end of 1972. When I spent a week in Colorado in the summer of 1973, I developed a little more patience with the genre later known as Americana, and with the mainstream artists who had recorded at Caribou Ranch near Nederland, Colo. This type of music was bound to be overplayed on both hit radio and AOR FM stations – The Eagles’ “Hotel California” serving as an excellent example. But even after rejecting those particular songs that were played to death, it was still possible to find lesser-known Americana acts like Souther-Hillman-Furay Band, that were much more fun than the mega-stars.

    Over time, I found myself showing less tolerance for the hard rock bands that crossed over into mass popularity. By the mid-1970s I had written off many arena-rock bands of the KISS-Kansas-REO Speedwagon-Journey variety that seemed to go nowhere in advancing musical styles. To accentuate the tedium, 1974 seemed the year when it was required that every mainstream hard-rock band release a double-live album. Yet even among the pantheon of more progressive stars, I found it hard to get excited over Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon – Floyd had made more interesting albums, and would make more in the future. As for Yes’s self-indulgent Tales from Topographic Oceans, I don’t think I’ve forgiven them, even 50 years later.

    It’s odd that I can’t remember the first concert I attended. Perhaps there was a mainstream act I attended with my family in the late 1960s or early 1970s, but it was only the emerging acts of mid-decade that stuck with me, primarily ones that played Detroit. In that category were Roxy Music, Bob Marley, Suzi Quatro, Lou Reed, Bruce Springsteen, and The Who. I was especially lucky to catch the New York Dolls at the highly unlikely yet oddly appropriate venue of a Lansing NASCAR racetrack, Spartan Speedway, in a midnight show in May 1974, the same night as our Junior Prom. We came in tuxes and evening gowns, of course. David Johansen was rambling on about communist lipstick, of course. In 50 years of hindsight, the circumstances seem all but unbelievable, but at the time, it seemed as though the universe was behaving in precisely the right fashion.

    That feeling would repeat itself three years later as punk rock hit the Midwest. The biggest waves rarely come with any harbingers. You simply have to approach them in matter-of-fact ways, and only look back to reassess after the biggest waves subside. There is also a legitimate debate about which waves might be big enough to ride. The arrival of pub rock in 1972-74 through bands like Brinsley Schwartz and Graham Parker & the Rumour, led to power-pop legends such as Nick Lowe, Dave Edmunds, Robyn Hitchcock, and even Elvis Costello. At the time, the leading fans of pub rock held great hopes for the genre, but it had been overtaken by punk by 1976 to the extent of being remembered largely as a footnote by punk fans.

    The Vietnam War was waning and few other social or environmental problems arising to take its place for engendering outrage. Truth be told, Michiganders should have been up in arms about cattle being mistakenly fed fire retardant in 1972-74, with the result that all citizens eating milk, cheese, or beef in that period had a significant load of polybrominated biphenyls (PBBs) in their bodies. But the universal reaction among most college and high-school youth at the time was, “Damage already has been done, this should accelerate your path to becoming a vegan anyway.”

    I was finding it tedious to rally around unjust drug arrests. Finding many former Michigan radicals heading to rural homesteads, where they would sing Judy Collins’ “Cook With Honey,” didn’t strike me as much of an avant garde movement either – in fact, I could foresee many back-to-the-land hippies quickly becoming as conservative as their neighbors.  It was about this time I was introduced to a small cloister of East Lansing intellectuals publishing a quarterly broadside called The Spectacle, a media vehicle for the Situationists. As I voraciously swallowed the works of Guy DeBord and Raoul Vaneigem, I realized that these misfits had developed an ideology that matched the size of the cultural enemy that freethinkers were facing. I only realized in the following century that the Situationists had accurately predicted the rise of the Internet and social-media culture. I quickly scribbled their mission statement on my bedroom wall: “The Spectacle is the organization of appearances made possible through modern means of communication. The facility with which images can be detached and alienated from their sources, and reorganized for representation in accord with the present ideology of power, forms the basis for the unprecedented amplitude of the modern Spectacle, where everything once directly lived has moved away into its own representation.”

    This was why any nod by a musician to social change seemed so superficial and inadequate. Until the arrival of Queen Patti Smith in 1975, the so-called liberatory nature of rock music would look like just another co-opted set of slogans. After seeing The Spectacle tabloid, I dredged out the third issue of National Lampoon from 1970, in which Michael O’Donoghue’s “Crossing the Rubicam” showed how every for-profit company hijacking a slogan in order to sell stuff, helped to spell the demise of any movement that claimed to move beyond such a thing. These conclusions did not depress me, but helped to place any musician’s work in context. After all, the president was under investigation and soon to be on his way out the door, the draft had ceased to play a role in most young men’s lives, weren’t we all stoned and happy and ready for some mellow Southern California music anyway? (Plenty of women, LGBTQ+, and people of color were ready to answer in the negative, but little could rouse the nation from its mid-1970s slumber. The occupation of Wounded Knee, and the arrival of bands such as Redbone and Fanny, made for token concerns with indigenous rights, but most such music of rebellion did not register.)

    Much was made in 2023 of the 50^th anniversary of rap’s founding, but did it creep into national awareness? In a very limited sense, though what was more evident was the fragmentation of R&B into many subgenres: reggae and ska were critical new interpretive voices, particularly in Europe and Latin America; the first predecessors to disco were coming out via bands like Earth, Wind & Fire and singers like Sylvia (who preceded Donna Summer). The descriptive labels (both stigmas and positive labels) attached to artists were as challenging in the early to mid 1970s as they would prove to be later. Some Black women singers like Gladys Knight clearly wanted to retain earlier Motown traditions, while fashion-leaning ensembles like Labelle and The Pointer Sisters were paving the way for disco’s arrival. In fact, the first album of KC and the Sunshine Band debuted in the spring of 1974. In the buzz of R&B’s multifaceted new reality, early rappers like Grandmaster Flash were merely one voice among many. But a fragmented R&B environment could still generate powerful singles – it may be mostly lost to history, but Tower of Power’s “So Very Hard to Go” could move a listener as much as any song from Motown’s heyday.

    The era was an echo of 1966 in generating its own excitement even in the apparent calm before the storm. On the threshold of Patti Smith, Ramones, and Sex Pistols, it was easy to forget that Brian Eno and Robert Fripp released their first ambient collaboration album No Pussyfooting in 1973, and Eno released two jaw-dropping vocal pop albums in 1974, Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy.  Fripp himself took King Crimson to the culmination of the Red-era trilogy, the dramatic Red. The former band Halfnelson re-branded as Sparks in 1972 with A Woofer in Tweeter’s Clothing, and released two critical albums, Kimono My House and Propaganda, in 1973-4.  Even David Bowie, who had annoyed a lot of fans with the deliberately-disco Young Americans album in early 1975, ended up using that album as a springboard to Station to Station and the Berlin albums that followed. (It’s eerie to watch Bowie’s debut of the title song “Young Americans” on Dick Cavett in December 1974, wearing white bucks and retro 50s fashion, in the same time period that Phil Ochs was debuting an Elvis Presley throwback in live sets. Ochs took his rockabilly into a depressive mode and eventual suicide, while Bowie redirected his disco to electronic mysticism and punk production.)

    In my senior year in high school, I moved out of home and into a small shared apartment in a bad part of Lansing. Music took on a special aura of snobbery, as I listened to more jazz, a few challenging works like Steely Dan’s Katy Lied, and headier singer-songwriters like John Prine and Steve Goodman. An old neighborhood friend who had moved to California came back for a semester, and we’d have little spats over who was the bigger intellectual, Donald Fagen or Jeff Lynne (she was Camp ELO for life). To this day, it’s hard to hear references to Matty Healy’s 21^st-century band The 1975, because I had a feeling that this was The 1975, and I had the distinct feeling something big was on the horizon.

In three weeks - Chapter 6 - Cultural Defiance for its Own Sake

Copyright 2024 Loring Wirbel