Loud Family - Music: What Happened?

1973
by Scott Miller

"Can You Hear the Music" - The Rolling Stones
1973 was the peak of the classic seventies as opposed to the later punk/new wave seventies. Nowadays, 1973 is one of my favorite music years, but it must be said that at the time it felt like civilization had crested with the Beatles and the moon landing, and now was just deteriorating into "Seasons In the Sun" and Watergate. Consider Exile On Main Street being followed by Goats Head Soup; don't pay much attention, and it just seems cheaper and stagier. Pay attention, and there's gold, like "Can You Hear the Music," which I hear as the Stones' first serious return to Brian Jones territory: flute, dark psychedelia. "Love is a mystery I can't demystify/Sometimes I'm dancing on air and I get scared"—not textbook Mick Jagger, but maybe a window on something he was actually feeling.

"Needles In the Camel's Eye" - Eno
I once had the chance to ask Brian Eno what he had wanted to do with lyrics at the point of departing from an approach as socially charged as Bryan Ferry's. (He said, "what you don't say is as important as what you do say.") I'll let that thematize this start of a four-album run constituting the era's most successful experimental pop music. The key to success appears to have been making a science out of decision points (see "Oblique Strategies") rather than being willfully weird or different at the usual unexamined decision points. How about if several guitars have fearsome vibrato? Do they cancel to something quasi-normal? Kind of! Choosing this song over "Baby's On Fire" was a very close call, and I'll note that "Baby's On Fire" contains my single favorite rock guitar performance, the lead by Robert Fripp.

"Speak To Me/Breathe/On the Run" - Pink Floyd
Dark Side of the Moon was the great harbinger of the "solid state" aesthetic that would endanger sound quality almost as much as anything since consumer audio was—we now realize—at its best, around the late fifties. It's a fine aesthetic, but mostly just because Pink Floyd were extroardinarily good, especially David Gilmour's singing and what I credit to be Roger Waters's, let's call it "cinematography." A nice low noise floor and lack of audible crummy reverb do not perfect sound make; the vocal mike signal chain sounds outright botched to me. But the managed jazz influence, the use of available-to-anyone sound effects, and the cool sequencer bloops had nations erroneously reasoning "who needs big, fat sounding anything?" for years.

"So Very Hard To Go" - Tower of Power
This is one of my favorite soul progressions: subtly surprising, harmonically complex without turning soapy, and decorated with state-of-the-art horn arrangements. Listen to that descending line after "I could never make you unhappy": that's people making some music. It's rare that you hear lyrics taking apart a moral achievement in real time this convincingly: "I've got to make it right for everyone concerned/Even if it's me, if it means it's me what's getting burned." It would be beyond my best efforts to tell it that straight.

"Everyone's Agreed That Everything Will Turn Out Fine" - Stealers Wheel
It's the same artist who did "Stuck in the Middle With You" (the singer was Gerry Rafferty, of the great "Baker Street"). Important: this is the original single, not the substandard remake on the otherwise quite good Ferguslie Park. For such a halting groove, it's oddly propulsive, and there's something about the nothing-really-happens tune as tone poem for the words ("everybody seems to have a good time, nobody goes stepping out of line") that ends up really ringing my bell.

"Jet Boy" [edit] - New York Dolls
This is one of those years where there were many songs it hurt to leave off ("Sail On Sailor," "That Lady" by the Isley Brothers, "Willow's Song" from The Wicker Man, "Band On the Run," to name a scant few), and to cram more in, I resorted to using ProTools to edit some long songs down to just what I felt like hearing. So, okay, I am evil. But my God, don't some songs need some freaking trimming down? This is one: whiskey-voiced, three-minute hard barroom boogie about an above-it-all rival, that goes on for six minutes! But I do have to re-do it to somehow retrieve the off-key "oo-wee-oos" at the end. It's the only moment you can really picture them wearing dresses.

"Just Don't Want To Be Lonely" - The Main Ingredient
Gorgeous chorus, and how great a line is "I'd rather be loved and needed/Depended on to give a love I can't give"? I've probably listened to this song two hundred times, and I laugh every single time I hear "say wait a minute... where you going with that suitcase?"

"Gimme Danger" - Iggy and the Stooges
When I first got Raw Power, bargain, used, '76 not '73, it was with the understanding that no one on God's earth liked it, with the sole exception of Lester Bangs at Creem, who wouldn't let the issue drop; big credit to him. If you don't know what the Stooges sound like yet, this isn't it. It's actually one of the more Velvets-like Stooges songs—heavy folk content, even some creepy viola—and the first one I attached to. "Search and Destroy" is amazing, but the mix was so bad it got in the way of enjoying it. "Gimme Danger" sounded very good even on the original pressing. Iggy is sort of doing Son House on the vocals or something—for my money an inspired device whatever it is.

"All the Way From Memphis" [edit] - Mott the Hoople
I seem to recall you heard "glam" in connection with Mott the Hoople in those days, what with Bowie writing "All the Young Dudes" and all, but somewhat surprisingly, they appealed just fine to what would later jell in my mind as the Bad Company audience. The image projected by the Dolls or Mott was that glam was just today's reason to get hammered. If you don't like this chorus, there's something wrong with you, especially if you saw the use in "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore." The edit is just that I shortened the fadeout.

"Sweet Lady Genevieve" - The Kinks
To me, this tops any but maybe two or three sixties Kinks numbers, and no one knows about it. At an L.A. tribute show with Dave Davies in about '95, I chose for my two-song allotment this and, I think, "I'm In Disgrace." It's from the point of view of a troubadorish rogue who loved and left a maiden on a, uh, previous tour, but has now decided she's the one. There's a magic combination achieved among the harmonica, harmony vocals, and lines that are apt to go on two or three words longer than you expect.

"Knockin' On Heaven's Door" - Bob Dylan
There's a scene in Don't Look Back where a Time interviewer makes some reference to Dylan's vocals not being as good as Pavarotti's, and Bob says, "I'll have to disagree with you; my songs have a lot of notes, and I hit them all"). Well, so he does. Anyone who doesn't think Bob Dylan can sing hasn't listened to "Knockin' On Heaven's Door," a masterpiece of technique (perfectly understated vibrato) as well as feeling and idiom. And what a tearjerker.

"The International Feel" - Todd Rundgren
Todd is a weird, weird guy. Not always even anywhere near good, but approaching infallible in the early seventies. Something/Anything was fantastic, and A Wizard/A True Star (how about the cojones to choose that title?) is somehow even more remarkable if not categorically better—side-long, break-all-the-rules art rock suites that happen to be consistently tight and entertaining, if difficult. "I only want to see if you'll give up on me" indeed. This opening sequence is so densely packed with unfamiliar sonics charmed into cohesion that it can't not mean a lot to a listener like me; I want to cover the song (Mitch Easter did once), and it is a hard one to figure out. Oh, the patented Rundgren 1971 2k snare sound is there, doing just the right amount of damage.

"Certain Kind of Fool" - The Eagles
Is it just me? I've never met an actual Eagles fan. Yet, they're something like the biggest selling band in history. It's like, most people must buy an album at far below the level of conscious enthusiasm—sort of, "oh well, this is something people buy"—and the Eagles devastate that market. Otherwise, statistically, I ought to know at least a couple of people who decided to start a band the day they heard "Best of My Love." Yet, before whenever that sorry pattern started, they were minimally very decent, and at moments, great. "Certain Kind of Fool"—a neglected moment from Desperado—is great. It's the best (only?) classic gunfighter ballad since "El Paso," sensibly paced, not a bit hokey. I adore the change at "He took it to the country."

"Drive-In Saturday" - David Bowie
The remaining songs here are immensely formative and important to me. "Drive-In Saturday" is about future nostalgia for the present, and probably did instruct me that sentimentality is relative in that way. But as much as it is a cynical, William-Burroughs-like exercise, it manages to touch a true nerve of human longing, and certainly fires on all cylinders as satisfying music. "She'd sigh like Twig the Wonder Kid and turn her face away" parallels Lou Reed in something like "there are even some evil mothers who will tell you... that women never really faint"; these are not shock-mongers, they have been more devastated than most at the prospect of the world's capacity for tender emotions being lost—or just a person's.

"The Song Remains the Same" - Led Zeppelin
"The Song Remains the Same" is about as symphonic and polychromatic as any essentially three-piece combo has ever sounded. John Paul Jones does at least his share of the heavy lifting; the guitar keeps your attention, but it is a stunningly expressive bass part. An unconventional, exploration-of-terrain sort of song structure, it gallops through moods and reference points effortlessly, maybe something like "Rhapsody In Blue." I want to guess there's a little influence from the group Yes in there.

"Funeral For a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding" - Elton John
I badly wanted to edit some or all of the first part out to make room for another song, but the rocket engine of "Love Lies Bleeding" somehow depends on the solid fuel of "Funeral For a Friend." Dear lord, there is some cheesy music in there, but never quite hack work, and there's a period of ramping up to "Love Lies Bleeding" that lets you know they're starting to mean business. Crack outfit, this. Very busy but entirely meaty bass. Guitar riff for the ages.

"My Old School" [original radio edit] - Steely Dan
This song will get me out of deathbed depression and back to loving life with mechanized efficiency. The spot-on lead vocal, the unequaled horn charts, the enrapturing Jeff Baxter guitar solos: what an achievement. I'm not the right person to run down all the names and places in the song, but I somehow felt the story of rambunctious behavior colliding with collegiate community with a strange immediacy.

"Do the Strand" - Roxy Music
The most stunned I've ever been by a song played in a record store was when "Do the Strand" came over the P.A. at the Watt Avenue Tower Records. It was like nothing I'd ever heard before. The stop-start arrangement, the other-planet key change of the piano riff, the Boris Karloff singing. I was mesmerized. No one I knew followed anything like this, and it took me months to track down. What did he say? Do the what? I might credit it with doing more to kill my instincts to produce commercially viable music than any other three minutes of my life. If my calculations are correct, this is the first really great Chris Thomas production (he of Never Mind the Bollocks); he had his hands full with so many instruments, and it all sounds so big, so clear.

"Living For the City" [original radio edit] - Stevie Wonder
"Her clothes are old, but never are they dirty." Talk about economy of expression (and I'm going to tailor a bit of my own by excusing myself from treating the long album version with the talking part that doesn't quite work for me). Of all the jaw-dropping brilliance on what for me are the peak Stevie Wonder albums, Talking Book and Innervisions, this is the pinnacle. First and foremost, that recurring 3/4 instrumental break with the "da-da-da-das" is simply mind-blowing. All these years later, I couldn't begin to explain in terms of any theory what makes it work. It simply takes all possible crazy melodic turns but somehow sounds like it was intended from creation. This was obviously a big hit, not an obscurity, so I think it's worth taking a step back and re-appreciating what a hard-hitting chorus this has. And it's just one line: "Living just enough/Just enough for the city." I have sure felt that, but I can't fathom the ingenuity it would have taken to phrase it like that, having how much you're living be about what the living is for.