by Bob Stanley
One thing the old and new guard were in agreement on was that whatever came next would be album-shaped. Pop had never been an album format until the late sixties. The album may have pre-dated the 45 by a year but it had been the stage for Frank Sinatra’s song cycles, for A Kind of Blue, for Glenn Gould or the Sound of Music soundtrack. Mostly, modern pop albums of the fifties and early sixties were overloaded with filler – usually rush-recorded covers of contemporary hits – and only sold to the wealthy or obsessive fan. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Rubber Soul, then Pet Sounds and, most significantly, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band were the milestones that led to albums becoming a format of choice. This had coincided with psychedelia’s stretching out; by 1969 a group like Led Zeppelin could become stars without even releasing singles.3 1969 was the first year when albums in Britain outsold singles, which, very quickly, became derided by rock fans and rock musicians as purely commercial ventures, an industrial by-product. Standing at a bus stop with Atom Heart Mother (cow in field, no text at all) under your arm looked considerably cooler than clutching a 45 on the Parlophone label (how very mid-sixties). Singles were now for parents and kids.
By 1970 the UK singles chart had become a house full of yellowing newspapers. Motown reissues were constantly in the Top 20, as soul fans who had been raised on uptempo floor-fillers rejected the new, darker sounds of urban America; the Miracles’ ‘Tears of a Clown’, a track from their 1967 Make It Happen album, went all the way to number one. Records seemed to hang around the Top 20 for months, and there were lengthy stays at the top for Mungo Jerry’s ‘In the Summertime’, Freda Payne’s ‘Band of Gold’ (both six weeks) and the reborn Elvis Presley’s ballad ‘The Wonder of You’ (seven weeks), a 1959 hit for Ray Peterson and Ronnie Hilton. Mungo Jerry were the breakthrough act of 1970, an attempt to breathe new life into the goodtime jug-band sound of the Lovin’ Spoonful, refracted through the post-flower-power free-love vibe: ‘If her daddy’s rich take her out for a meal,’ they advised. ‘If her daddy’s poor just do what you feel.’ Singer Ray Dorset had an afro, manly side-burns, a vicious gap-toothed smile, shoulders like girders and a voice that could switch from elfin warble to gargling bare-knuckle boxer. They had no drums, sounded like a one-man band with a pub piano on the side, and pressed their singles as value-for-money, ten-minute-plus EPs – great for your pocket, less so for your hi-fi. ‘In the Summertime’ was followed to the top by ‘Baby Jump’, maybe the grubbiest number one ever. Manic Jerry Lee Lewis-style piano tried to push along a song that sounded like a JCB stuck in a claypit, as Dorset leered, ‘She wears those see-through dresses, she likes to wear her stockings black, and if I see her tonight you can bet your life I’ll attack.’ This was more the work of a potential stalker than a pin-up. So grey and sludgy, such an uncomfortable listen.
It was downtime for pop. A new wave of British songwriting teams who had emerged on Denmark Street in ’67 and ’68 seized their chance and, in the absence of new heroes, they hogged the remainder of the Top 20, bringing rare glimpses of daylight: Cook/Greenaway, Hammond/Hazlewood, Carter/Stephens, Fletcher/Flett, Macaulay/McLeod. The Brit Building. These cats certainly knew their way around a studio: super-sessioneers and fine harmonists, they spurned jams and classical-inspired suites for fluid, upfront basslines, clean Seaside Special brass – more mussel shells than Muscle Shoals – florid strings and tight melodies. This was Britain’s version of bubblegum; while the Kasenetz/Katz team had always seemed cynical and intentionally short-term (and was largely extinct by 1971), the UK output seemed much more crafted, bright and uplifting, the sound of sunset yellow. Edison Lighthouse’s ‘Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)’ was the year’s first UK number one and it was a soufflé of a single, one sustained hook (a pretty great one), and it owed nothing to the album chart’s prevailing hard-rock sound whatsoever. The singer was a session man called Tony Burrows who was so anonymous that he also sang a run of hits for White Plains (‘My Baby Loves Lovin’’, ‘I’ve Got You on My Mind’, ‘When You Are a King’), the Brotherhood of Man (‘United We Stand’), Butterscotch (‘Don’t You Know’) and Pipkins (‘Gimme Dat Ding’) without record buyers being any the wiser. The only singles he couldn’t buy a hit with were under his own name.4 Burrows was so ubiquitous in 1970 that he appeared three times on the same Top of the Pops.
Brit Building music was optimistic, innocent, functional. These records may have been as glamour-free as Pink Floyd, but it’s hard to think how a single like White Plains’ ‘When You Are a King’ (UK no. 13 ’71) could be improved, wheezing along on barrel-organ minor chords before exploding like a mass of butterflies emerging from a cornfield.
If there was a problem with this school of writers it was that they seemed solely in the business of writing hits, amassing cash and investing in golfwear. None of them were, as Leonard Bernstein had described 1966 pop, ‘grasping at the unattainable’. This is where a team like Murray/Callander (Vanity Fare’s ‘Hitchin’ a Ride’, Tony Christie’s ‘Las Vegas’, Paper Lace’s ‘Billy Don’t Be a Hero’) differed from Mann/Weil, who had been striving to make a political statement that would sell (the Crystals’ ‘Uptown’, the Animals’ ‘We’ve Got to Get Out of This Place’), or Leiber/Stoller’s promotion of R&B, or Goffin/King’s public dissection of their relationship. The days when musical ambition was married to the three-minute single were over; with no need to overstretch themselves, the self-contained Brit hit machine purred along while pop’s progressive tendency were split over where to go next.
One single bridged the gap between the two factions. Matthews’ Southern Comfort were led by ex-Fairport Convention singer Ian Matthews, and their sole hit, ‘Woodstock’ (UK no. 1 October ’70), had been written by Joni Mitchell immediately after the festival. The arrangement’s musty, pastoral mood suggested Woodstock in Oxfordshire as much as upstate New York; Mitchell’s lyric was quite specifically about something lost, the slight desperation of the chorus – ‘We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden’ – hinting that it’ll never happen. Of course, it might also come across that way because Joni wrote it having been unable to get to the Woodstock festival because of the traffic, but from this distance it does sound remarkably like an elegy.
The growing split between singles and albums is revealed by taking a look at the British number ones of 1970. Aside from the generation-spanning ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ and sore thumb ‘Voodoo Chile’ (issued as a ‘tribute’ within days of Hendrix’s death) in the singles list, and the various compilations on the album side, the split is complete and the modern pop consensus dead:
SINGLES
Edison Lighthouse ‘Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)’
Lee Marvin ‘Wand’rin’ Star’
Simon and Garfunkel ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’
Dana ‘All Kinds of Everything’
Norman Greenbaum ‘Spirit in the Sky’
England World Cup Squad ‘Back Home’
Christie ‘Yellow River’
Mungo Jerry ‘In the Summertime’
Elvis Presley ‘The Wonder of You’
Smokey Robinson and the Miracles ‘The Tears of a Clown’
Freda Payne ‘Band of Gold’
Matthews’ Southern Comfort ‘Woodstock’
Jimi Hendrix Experience ‘Voodoo Chile’
Dave Edmunds ‘I Hear You Knocking’
ALBUMS
Led Zeppelin Led Zeppelin II
Various Motown Chartbusters Volume 3
Simon and Garfunkel Bridge over Troubled Water
Beatles Let It Be
Bob Dylan Self Portrait
Moody Blues A Question of Balance
Creedence Clearwater Revival Cosmo’s Factory
Rolling Stones Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out
Black Sabbath Paranoid
Pink Floyd Atom Heart Mother
Various Motown Chartbusters Volume 4
Led Zeppelin Led Zeppelin III
Bob Dylan New Morning
Andy Will
iams Andy Williams’ Greatest Hits
Listening to albums also meant you didn’t have to get out of your chair every three minutes. They suited the heads, sweating in their digs to heavyweight stoner material from Pink Floyd and Black Sabbath, as well as the bucolic world of the early seventies’ failed revolutionaries. The singer-songwriter tones of Cat Stevens, Melanie and Gordon Lightfoot provided homespun philosophies; Carole King – transposed from the Brill Building to the west coast – was now an earth mother. They provided balm for the walking wounded, the sixties fighters burned by the events in Chicago and Hornsey in ’68 and the return of Republican and Conservative governments in 1969/70 who were unwilling to take the fight forward with the Weathermen or the Angry Brigade. New Morning, Carole King’s Tapestry, and Bridge over Troubled Water all pointed to resolution. Dissenting voices were welcome but thin on the ground. The brittle, nihilistic debut album by Loudon Wainwright III was one: monochrome and proto-punk on the cover, he tried to stir to things up – ‘Earth is a mystery mother,’ he sniggered, ‘but then again so is Mom.’
Records were made all the worse by new twenty-four-track studio technology that had yet to be mastered by most producers used to smaller mixing desks; vocals and individual instruments would be recorded on separate tracks, leaving them sounding flatter, lifeless, caked in festival mud. Trying to revive the spirit of Woodstock, as if it had been a new dawn rather than a sunset, festivals sprouted in unlikely spots like Maidstone aerodrome and Bickershaw, a pit village near Wigan. The first free festival, soon to become a seventies staple, was at Shepton Mallet, where the Pink Fairies and Hawkwind – long-haired groovers relentlessly in search of inner space – played on a flatbed truck adjacent to the Bath Blues Festival, where Led Zeppelin were headlining and commanding a fee of £20,000. In America, the Powder Ridge Rock Festival was scheduled to be held over the first weekend in August at a ski resort in Connecticut. It was cancelled, but a crowd of thirty thousand arrived anyway. A volunteer doctor on the site declared a ‘drug crisis. Woodstock was a pale pot scene. This is a heavy hallucinogens scene.’ The water butts were spiked with any drugs people felt free enough to share. The Black Panthers gave a speech as a thunderstorm brewed and there were bad trips all round.
Flash was out. So similar-looking were the cheesecloth- and denim-wearing singer-songwriters5 that it only took a twist, a strip of tartan, a flat cap or a pair of oversize glasses and you stood out like a vicar in a tutu. Gilbert O’Sullivan dressed like an Irish schoolboy from the thirties, which – along with sentimental hits like ‘Claire’, dedicated to a six-year-old – distracted from a rather black worldview made commercial by a fine sense of semi-detached suburban detail. ‘Alone Again (Naturally)’ was his biggest hit, a rare American number one about suicide; ‘Nothing Rhymed’ (UK no. 8), his first hit in 1970, threw in references to Bonaparte Shandy, apple pies and starving Africans; ‘We Will’ (UK no. 16 ’71), with its nods to football, church, Uncle Frank and Auntie May, even suggested he could be pop’s Alan Bennett.
The main problem was his voice, which was reminiscent of Paul McCartney with a heavy cold. Gilbert also turned out to be a rather bitter man, as well as an arch-sentimentalist. When the public shunned him in the mid-seventies after one too many jaunty romps, one too many dad jokes, he blamed his management and disappeared in a sulk. The pleasures of ‘We Will’ would be historically outweighed by songs like ‘Ooh Wakka Doo Wakka Day’ (UK no. 8 ’72) that just weren’t built to last. The title of one compilation – The Berry Vest of Gilbert O’Sullivan – gets to the heart of the problem.
Elton John had been around for a while, playing piano for such unpromising-sounding acts as Bluesology and the Bread and Beer Band. To supplement his low income he was also a session pianist (that’s him on the Hollies’ ‘He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother’) and anonymously sang covers of current hits for budget supermarket compilations (his recording of Bob and Marcia’s ‘Young, Gifted and Black’ was quite something). By 1970 he had a solo deal with the tiny DJM label, and nobody expected much to happen except his best mate and lyricist, Bernie Taupin. Just a year earlier, they’d tried to write an entry for the Eurovision Song Contest called ‘Can’t Go On Living without You’. Sung by Lulu as one of six entries on national TV, it came sixth. Elton’s diary entry for April 22nd 1969 read: ‘Got home tonight to find that Auntie Win and Mum had bought me a car – Hillman Husky Estate – superb!!’
Short, short-sighted, far from hirsute, the reinvention of Watford FC season-ticket-holder Reg Dwight was a thing to behold. First, he decided that, rather than compete with the likes of sweet baby James Taylor in the pin-up stakes, he’d come over so outrageously that you’d forget all about his thinning hair and his indoor complexion: he started sporting a Julius Caesar crop, huge sunglasses, yellow and green velveteen trousers, a white ruffled Liberace shirt, a blue serge waistcoat, white patent leather boots and, to top it off, an enormous Donald Duck badge on his lapel. Then he wrote a very 1970-sounding mope called ‘Your Song’, which made the Top 10 in America before repeating the feat in Britain a few months later. On tour stateside, Quincy Jones shook his hand. Suddenly, little Reg was a star.
The rapidity of Elton John’s breakthrough was largely down to his crazed stage antics. He’d jump on his grand piano, mashing it with his feet, reviving the spirit of Jerry Lee Lewis. ‘Jagger and Lennon’, he said, ‘show you that living an ordinary life is only boring. I love Jagger. Being outrageous on stage is part of it for me, I have to, because ordinarily I’m such a quiet person.’ Yet his music – gospel-inspired and largely balladled – reflected the bedroom-bound Reg who would occasionally leave the house to potter around Watford in his Hillman Husky.
‘My roots are listening to records. All the time. I live, eat, sleep, breathe music. Neil Young, the Band, the Springfield, the Dead, the Airplane. I feel more American than British. Really.’ He wasn’t kidding. Those were no Hertfordshire vowels on ‘Your Song’: ‘I hope you don’t mind’ became ‘I hawp yi dawn maand’. He should care if I mock. Elton turned out some beautiful, post-Spectorian things on his seventies hot streak – ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ (US no. 2, UK no. 6 ’73), ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’ (US no. 4, UK no. 22 ’75) – and he made so much money he could afford to splash it on Watford FC, helping to lift them from the fourth division to European contention. No matter how Hollywood he got his friends still called him Reg, even after fifty-six American Top 40 hits.
Another veteran of the sixties British R&B circuit was Rod Stewart. He liked football, too, and could have turned professional, but instead he found himself a band that needed a helping hand. After losing Steve Marriott in 1969, the Small Faces had become the Faces, and Rod – late of the Hoochie Coochie Men, Steampacket, Shotgun Express and the Jeff Beck Group – was another lad about town, the Sam Cooke of Highgate who sang with a rasp that was urgent enough for the heads and the soul boys but could also bring the birds down from the trees, and frequently did.
Rod had made all the classic Anglo pop moves – bought Little Richard records, joined a skiffle group and auditioned for Joe Meek – before he became an active supporter of CND, joining the Aldermaston Marches from 1961 to ’63, entertaining the protestors with early Dylan songs and getting himself arrested at sit-ins for his trouble. His main motivation wasn’t to see the red flag flying over Downing Street, though, but to meet and bed girls. One day in 1963, after Rod and his mates accidentally set fire to a squat in Hampstead, his mum threw his much-prized but rarely washed rollneck and jeans on the fire, and Rod split the beatnik scene to become a mod. When his career finally picked up momentum in 1969, he divided his time between solo and Faces albums and turned out to be a natural storyteller. He had an ear for the sound palette of blues, soul and folk, and could work them into something that sounded working-class, English, shrouded in a muted brown North London mist. ‘Maggie May’, a US and UK number-one single in ’71, didn’t even have a chorus, just a yarn that kept you hooked for four full minutes before
its mandolin coda. He’d invented his own myth before the single hit the run-out groove, the bruised lover who can seduce an older woman but, heck, if she packs him in there’s always the pool hall and the lads. A year later he reprised the affair on ‘You Wear It Well’ (UK no. 1, US no. 13 ’72), on which he gently ribbed his ex while still eating his heart out, trying to get back with her: ‘You wear it well, a little old-fashioned … but that’s all right.’
This appealed to boys and girls, men and women, and Rod Stewart became a superstar. By 1975 he had also become a tax exile, moving to LA, cutting the blustery, antiseptic single ‘Sailing’ (UK no. 1, US no. 58 ’75), and causing outrage among his fans. ‘Rarely has a singer had as full and unique a talent as Rod Stewart,’ wrote Greil Marcus, ‘rarely has anyone betrayed his talent so completely.’ The other viewpoint was that rarely does a working-class kid from the Archway Road get to move to California, dine on champagne and be fed grapes by blonde nubiles. He may have betrayed his talent, but he wasn’t betraying his roots – if his strike rate slowed, it was no great shock. Besides, his demise was in no way instantaneous. As late as 1981 he could still sit you down, spin a yarn and keep you fascinated. Set to a quickfire electro backing, ‘Young Turks’ (UK no. 11, US no. 5 ’81) – about two eloping New Jersey kids – was an anthem for the Pepsi generation: ‘Don’t let them put you down, don’t let them push you ’round, don’t let them ever change your point of view,’ winked Uncle Rod. I won’t spoil his curious cautionary-cum-celebratory punchline.
