Rock in 1974

1974In the wake of the '60s boom, rock began moving from clubs, ballrooms and theaters into arenas and outdoor stadiums. At the same time, it was growing louder and harder, as if that were the only sound that could fill these venues. The emergence of Bad Company illustrates how powerful the impact of rock had become. Though not the first "supergoup" (that term was coined around 1968 to describe various Al Kooper projects as well as the group Blind Faith), this English quartet was arguably the first group put together with the arena in mind.Lead singer Paul Rodgers came from Free, as did drummer Simon Kirke. Guitarist Mick Ralphs was the central player in Mott the Hoople, and bassist Boz Burrell was a King Crimson alumnus. They took their name from a 1972 Jeff Bridges film, and their debut album, cut in 10 days in Ronnie Lane's mobile studio, was a crunching simplification of Led Zeppelin's British blues-rock style. Not coincidentally, it was released on Led Zep's Swan Song label, and Bad Company was managed by Zep's head honcho, Peter Grant. Can't Get Enough helped make them the most successful new band of 1974.They were hardly alone, however. Grand Funk Railroad, one of the first bands popular enough to fill the stadiums, continued to penetrate the charts with remakes of proven oldies. In fact, their version of The Loco-Motion was the second song of the rock era to become No. 1 twice; Little Eva, the babysitter of the song's writers, Gerry Goffin and Carole King, had taken it all the way to the top in 1962. (The other two-time chart topper, Go Away Little Girl, by Steve Lawrence in 1962 and Donny Osmond in 1971, was also written by Goffin and King.) During this period, Grand Funk used The Loco-Motion as its concert encore number, projecting film footage of a train collision behind them as they played the song.Arena-rock took other forms, too. Elton John, for example, was no hard rocker, but his audience had grown to the point where he could fill huge venues anyway. Some of his triumphs were unlikely. The follow-up single to Good-bye Yellow Brick Road's title tune was supposed to be the Marilyn Monroe tribute Candle in the Wind, but a black Detroit DJ began playing Bennie and the Jets from the album. MCA then released the song stateside as the new single with Candle in the Wind as the B side; it became John's first soul hit as well as going No. 1. The Bitch Is Back, by John's standards, rocked harder and was perhaps even written with the arena in mind.Eric Clapton's I Shot the Sheriff and the 461 Ocean Boulevard album were the product of his return to the studio for the first time in nearly four years, following a heroin addiction he conquered with the help of a new process called electro-acupuncture. The album was cut at Criteria Studios in Miami (its title is the address of the house where Clapton lived during the sessions). Studio guitarist George Terry suggested that Clapton cut Bob Marley's I Shot the Sheriff, a plausible move given that Miami and London (where Clapton was from) were two of the pop markets where reggae had some impact. According to Marley, the enigmatic lyrics meant "I shot wickedness." He wanted to use the word "police" instead of sheriff but feared government reprisal. "But it's still the same idea--justice!" he said. (He also revealed that it was the sheriff who shot the deputy because the latter was "a good guy.") Though Marley still had problems getting air play for his own music (even in Jamaica), Clapton's single helped popularize reggae worldwide.The Allman Brothers, heretofore the Southern standard-bearers for arena-rock, were in the process of breaking up, though the world-weary Midnight Rider, from Gregg Allman's solo album, was a laid-back update of their sound. The Allman Brothers' banner was picked up by Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Jacksonville, Florida, rockers whose first major exposure came when they opened gigs on the Who's Quadrophenia tour. Sweet Home Alabama was Skynyrd frontman Ronnie Van Zant's confused and soulstirring response to Neil Young's chastising Southern Man. The irony is that the two men admired each other immensely; Van Zant was often spotted wearing Neil Young T-shirts, and Young wrote several tunes intended for Skynyrd (none were ever recorded). Wet Willie's Keep On Smilin', which proved to be that band's only hit, went back to the bars in representing the soul-oriented branch of Southern rock.There were still a number of novelties, none bigger than Billy Swan's fluid, rockabilly-based grove I Can Help. When he was 16, Swan wrote a poem for English class called Lover Please that became a Clyde McPhatter hit in 1962. Swan made his way to Memphis and then Nashville, where he played guitar in the first edition of Kinky Friedman's Texas Jewboys and in Kris Kristofferson's band. (He also inherited Kristofferson's job as custodian at the CBS studios on Music Row.) He composed I Can Help more or less on the spot after Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge gave him an organ as a wedding present, recording the tune in two takes (without overdubs).Brownsville Station's Smokin' in the Boys' Room was writer-guitarist Cub Koda's tribute to his childhood practice of sneaking cigarettes on Friday nights at the Clinton Theater in Detroit. Rikki Don't Lose That Number made explicit the cerebral Steely Dan's debt to classic jazz. British teen heartthrob David Essex made his debut with Rock On, which exploited the nostalgia themes of his plays and his two movies, 1973's That'll Be the Day (with Ringo Starr and Keith Moon) and 1975's Stardust (with Ringo Starr and Dave Edmunds). The infectious Come and Get Your Love was the sole top-10 hit for Redbone, a band made up of American Indians (their name is a Cajun epithet for half-breed), who sometimes wore traditional Native American garb onstage. The lascivious Midnight at the Oasis proved to be Maria Muldaur's only top-10 record; previously, she had been virtually unknown outside folk circles. And Help Me caught the reigning queen of folk, Joni Mitchell, switching to electric instruments to create a more sophisticated pop sound.The year's biggest novelty in black music was Carl Douglas's Kung Fu Fighting. Douglas was born in Jamaica but educated in the U.S. and England. Indian-born producer Biddu hired him to sing a Larry Weiss tune for release as a British single because the pair had worked together a couple of years earlier on the sound track to Richard Roundtree's film Embassy. Stuck for a B side, they cut Kung Fu Fighting, which Douglas, long a judo fan, had written for the newest martial arts fad and its icon, Bruce Lee. It was the B side that broke through in British dance clubs and then hopped across the Atlantic to America.During the summer, the Spinners opened a five-week theater tour, including some Las Vegas dates, for Dionne Warwick. That gave producer Thom Bell the idea of teaming them up for Then Came You, which gave each act its first No. 1 pop record ever.In October 1974, Al Green, then at the peak of his popularity, was taking a shower in his Memphis home when ex-girlfriend Mary Woodson burst in, threw hot grits on him and then shot herself to death. Green suffered second-degree burns. When he was ordained pastor of the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church in 1976, this event was cited as the turning point in his life. Although Green always maintained that his spiritual transformation was already well under way by then, Sha-La-La (Make Me Happy), released only a week after the tragedy, did turn out to be one of the last purely secular singles of his tumultuous career.--John Morthland

Rock in 1979

1979In the early '70s, disco music was primarily aimed at urban gays, blacks and Hispanics, especially on the East Coast. Midway through the decade, disco had gone commercial and national, and white artists were beginning to toy with the form. By 1979, in the wake of Saturday Night Fever, a film largely about disco music and dancing, disco had become mainstream and a backlash was beginning that included the public burnings of disco records. Due to the role of their music in that popular movie, the Bee Gees were the white group most associated with disco. But the 1979 hits of Rod Stewart, an established rocker, and Blondie, punkers gone pop, were perhaps more emblematic of the music's across-the-board prominence.For his longtime fans, Do Ya Think I'm Sexy? was the last nail in Rod Stewart's artistic coffin; his "sellout" to disco was taken as proof that there was little the man wouldn't do for a hit. And his fans weren't the only ones upset. Brazilian songwriter Jorge Ben sued, claiming that the song borrowed too freely from Taj Mahal, his tribute to the young American blues recreationist. Stewart, meanwhile, performed the tune on A Gift of Song--Music for UNICEF, a benefit television special for needy children, and donated royalties from the single to the United Nations group. The concert had been conceived and built around the Bee Gees by British impresario David Frost. They performed Too Much Heaven and donated all royalties from its release as well.Blondie, fronted by Deborah Harry, a longtime downtown Manhattan scenemaker who exploited her physical similarities to Marilyn Monroe with overtly sexual appeals to her audience, emerged from CBGB, the Bowery dive that spawned the U.S. punk movement. One of the few seminal punk groups with chart aspirations, Blondie had been performing Heart of Glass for some time before incorporating a disco beat into their original girl-group sound for their Parallel Lines album. Harry wrote the lyrics as a retort to the girl-group hits in which the singer gives her life over to boys and love, and is left empty-handed. Guitarist Chris Stein, Harry's boyfriend and song-writing partner, always considered the song a novelty item and had been reluctant to record it, even as album filler.The year also produced some disco anthems. Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive became the theme song at Studio 54, the glitzy, exclusionary Manhattan club that symbolized the music's excesses and celebrity fixations. The song also marked a comeback for Gaynor, who'd been known as the "Queen of Disco" in the early '70s. She recorded I Will Survive for her album Love Tracks while recovering from spinal surgery following an onstage fall. Initially, this was the B side of Substitute, but disco DJs flipped the single to create a new hit.Sister Sledge was a group of four sisters from Philadelphia who'd been around most of the decade with scant results. Produced by the hot team of Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic, We Are Family became the Pittsburgh Pirates' theme song as that team came from behind to take the World Series from the Baltimore Orioles that fall. It also became the anthem of gay activists marching on Washington, D.C.The Pointer Sisters were yet another family group. Launched in the early '70s as a scat-swing trio, they expanded into a quartet and had pared back to three members doing pop R&B by the time producer Richard Perry signed them to his new Planet label and fixed them up with Bruce Springsteen's Fire.Producer Frederick Knight (a soul singer for the Stax label who hit with I've Been Lonely for So Long in 1972) wrote Ring My Bell for 11-year-old Stacy Lattisaw, who was expected to sign with his production company. He wrote it for her with the telephone in mind, but when Lattisaw went with a major label instead, he sexed up the idea for Anita Ward, a former gospel singer who agreed reluctantly to sing it. Knight sang backup on this version, which was one of the first records to use synthesized drums, a practice that would become more widespread as disco music became more pervasive.As the follow-up to Shake Your Groove Thing, the ballad Reunited sealed the comeback of '60s soul duet Peaches and Herb. Actually, Linda Greene was the third Peaches enlisted by Herb Fame, who himself had spent most of the decade outside the music business working as a cop in Washington, D.C.One of the year's biggest successes was also one of its shortest-lived and inspired a backlash of its own. The Knack was known as a "skinny-tie band" and was heavily promoted as the new Beatles, both for their look and sound. Punks reviled the power-pop group for allegedly taming the angry sound of punk rock to make it acceptable to radio and record labels, and their derision fueled a "Knuck the Knack" movement. The Knack cut their album (produced by Mike Chapman, who also worked with Blondie) in 11 days for just $18,000, and My Sharona, with lyrics by lead singer Doug Fieger about his new girlfriend, was a runaway hit.With What a Fool Believes, singer-songwriter Michael McDonald, who had joined the band in 1975, completed his transformation of the Doobie Brothers into a slick blue-eyed soul band. McDonald began writing the song on a flight from New York to Los Angeles when he imagined a pair of former lovers meeting in a restaurant--one of them remembering their affair as the highlight of his life, the other seeing it as a meaningless fling. But McDonald couldn't flesh out the idea until he hooked up, at the suggestion of Doobies bassist Tiran Porter, with singer-songwriter Kenny Loggins. Loggins provided the bridge one afternoon at McDonald's beach house, and the two finished the song over the phone later in the week.J.D. Souther was an L.A. songwriter and a favorite of Linda Ronstadt and Bonnie Raitt. Earlier in the decade, Souther had worked with the Souther-Hillman-Furay Band, a country-rock supergroup put together by Tinseltown mogul David Geffen. They'd had one quick hit (Fallin' in Love) in 1974 and faded fast. You're Only Lonely was Souther's first and only solo hit.America's Cheap Trick and England's Electric Light Orchestra represented different aspects of commercial rock. Cheap Trick, a suburban Illinois band with a goofy image and arena-rock longings, had been plugging away for several years with no luck outside of Japan, where they were superstars. In 1978 they cut a live album for release in Japan only, but it sold well enough as an import that Cheap Trick at Budokan was soon issued in America. The album yielded I Want You to Want Me and went platinum in the States, but it was triple platinum in the Land of the Rising Sun.Britain's Electric Light Orchestra, a Move spin-off which modernized Beatlesque melodies and harmonies with strings and synthesizers, had always been more popular in America than in England since forming in 1971. The band had a steady string of hits starting in 1975, and in 1978 they launched an ambitious tour, opening shows by emerging from a laser-equipped spaceship. But they relied so heavily on taped backing tracks à la American Bandstand that critics accused them of lip synching their lyrics. A chastened ELO took the year off, though lack of touring didn't keep Don't Bring Me Down, dedicated to the Skylab space program, from becoming their biggest American hit ever. Somehow, in the year of disco music, a sound that used taped backing tracks in place of live bands, the criticism leveled at ELO was ironic.--John Morthland

Rock in 1978

1978By 1978, disco music had been garnering occasional crossover hits, but Chic's Le Freak was the first by a black group to inject elements of rock into the idiom and make it truly hip. The single wound up selling four million copies. The masterminds behind Chic were Bernard Edwards (who played bass) and Nile Rodgers (guitar). They met while jamming in New York City jazz clubs in 1970, and by 1972 had formed a fusion trio called the Big Apple Band, which took its sense of theatricality from Britain's Roxy Music. In 1976, they formed Allah and the Knife-Wielding Punks, a male and female punk-rock outfit that went nowhere fast and promptly disbanded.Rodgers and Edwards moved toward disco not because they liked the music but because it seemed like the only way for blacks to win a recording contract. They adopted an international, high-fashion approach that they felt would prevent them from being racially pigeonholed. Their demo was rejected by every label in New York before Atlantic president Jerry Greenberg took a personal interest and signed them.By the time the single Le Freak was released, Chic had settled into a three-man, two-woman format augmented by studio musicians. This record took a popular gay-disco-rap phrase and turned it into slang, gave it an international flavor and created a new dance craze. Their minimalist sound--guitar/bass interplay, scratchy funk-pop guitar lines, a wash of strings and female voices that only seemed half there--became so popular that Rodgers and Edwards became one of New York's hottest production teams for black and white artists.The Bee Gees had written a tune called Night Fever that seemed a perfect fit for the John Travolta disco movie, Saturday Night Fever, produced by their manager Robert Stigwood. But Stigwood thought the title sounded pornographic. He had heard the group perform a song in Bermuda called Saturday Night, Saturday Night, which evolved into Stayin' Alive. Manager and band decided to combine the "Saturday Night" title with the name of the new song and call the film Saturday Night Fever. By the end of the year, it was one of the biggest grossing movies in history. The Bee Gees set new records for producing No. 1 hits for themselves and for other Stigwood acts such as Yvonne Elliman.Mike Chapman was another producer who had a good year in 1978. The Australian had been best known for collaborating with producer Nicky Chinn on recordings by British glam-rock stars such as Suzi Quatro (actually an American expatriate), Sweet, Gary Glitter and Mud. In 1975 he moved to Los Angeles, where he came across a demo tape by a Kentucky band called the Exiles. Liking what he heard, Chapman scouted the group at the grand opening of an apartment complex in Lexington, Kentucky. He changed their name to Exile and gave them Kiss You All Over, which he described as a crass pastiche of soft rock and middle-of-the-road pop, with a fashionable snatch of disco.Chapman also produced Nick Glider's Hot Child in the City. Glider, a veteran of the Canadian band Sweeney Todd, had moved to L.A., where he noticed many young prostitutes and their pimps on Hollywood Boulevard. But he was unable to turn his tale of a streetwise Lolita into an effective song until he rewrote it from the point of view of an aging lecher.Not all music in 1978, however, was influenced by disco. Eccentric L.A. musicians managed unprecedented commercial success. Steely Dan--by now consisting of Donald Fagen, Walter Becker and various studio musicians--had their first platinum album with Aja, which yielded three hit singles, including Peg. Warren Zevon set himself apart from the wave of Hollywood singer-songwriters by writing tough, skewed songs on complicated subjects. Linda Ronstadt cut two of his tunes in 1976 and two more in 1977. His friend Jackson Browne persuaded the one-time bandleader for the Everly Brothers to return from Spain, where he was living, and record a solo album in 1976. Browne produced Zevon's critically acclaimed debut, put it wasn't until 1978 that the singer-pianist reached a mass audience with Werewolves of London.Randy Newman, the nephew of Alfred and Lionel Newman, who scored music for numerous films, had been writing hits for others since the early '60s, and had recorded his own debut album in 1968 when he was a staff arranger at Warner Brothers. His cynical, insightful tunes--invariably about winners who end up losing and losers who end up winning--were melodic, artfully arranged and rife with hooks, but they were hardly pop fare. Short People was meant to satirize bigotry, a perennial Newman theme which had been growing in importance for him, as evidenced by his 1974 ode to the South, Good Old Boys. Short People, like much of his material, was widely misunderstood--and the object of angry boycotts. But the average-height (5 feet, 11 inches) Newman neither apologized for the song nor tried to exploit the new audience it attracted.Patti Smith, the queen of the New York City punk scene, was another unlikely hit-maker. Smith, a poet and rock critic who had collaborated with playwright Sam Shepherd, turned to music with an independent label single in 1974 and made her album debut with Horses the next year. Her streetwise mysticism, along with her appreciation for three chords and a big beat, sustained her underground reputation until she fell off the stage during a performance in Florida and was hospitalized in 1977. She recorded her next album, Easter, in a studio down the hall from Bruce Springsteen, himself still just a critic's darling. Smith's producer Jimmy Iovine introduced the two, and Springsteen gave her Because the Night, which she revised and parlayed into her first hit single. She then went into retirement until the late '80s. Ironically, this marked the first time the Boss' name reached the top 20.Queen and Kansas had more in common than a cursory listen might indicate. The former were pre-punk Englishmen who combined glitter and metal with harmonies to create an arty arena-rock hybrid. We Are the Champions joined with We Will Rock You as a double-sided single that went platinum. Kansas was originally conceived as a marriage of Midwestern metal and English progressive rock, though by the time they recorded Dust in the Wind they had moved beyond Anglo-boogie into something they considered more metaphysical.Many old and familiar sounds, too, were on the radio and the charts in 1978. With Use Ta Be My Girl, the O'Jays made their move from the topical songs back to romance; that summer, they celebrated their 20th anniversary with a show at L.A.'s Greek Theater. Eric Clapton wrote Lay Down Sally in the style of soft-country crooner Don Williams, with whom he formed a mutual admiration society. A modest country hit for Clapton, the single was covered by country singers Red Sovine and Jerry Paris. Joe Walsh, who had replaced guitarist Bernie Leadon in the Eagles just in time to add some overdue muscle to the group on its 1976 album, Hotel California, mocked superstar decadence with Life's Been Good. Speaking of which, even Rod Stewart admitted that his You're in My Heart was a calculated attempt to placate former lover Britt Ekland, who had filed a $12 million palimony suit against him. It worked, and once she withdrew the suit the cavalier Rod the Mod cheerfully claimed, "It wasn't totally about Britt . . . It could have been anybody I met in that period--and there were a lot of them."--John Morthland

Rock in 1977

1977Fleetwood Mac originated in 1967 as a spin-off of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. Fronted by hotshot guitarists Peter Green and Jeremy Spencer, the band built its reputation on the American ballroom circuit of the late '60s. By the turn of the decade, Fleetwood Mac was evolving toward guitar-oriented rock; as personnel came and went during the early '70s, the band endured lean years. In 1975, the line-up finally stabilized around original members John McVie on bass and Mick Fleetwood on drums. McVie's wife, Christine Perfect (who'd joined in 1970), played keyboards, wrote songs and sang. Lindsey Buckingham (vocalist, songwriter and guitarist) and Stevie Nicks (vocalist and songwriter) were lovers who'd been working together since the beginning of the '70s when Fleetwood met them at a recording studio in 1975 and invited them to join the band.The couple was instrumental in changing the sound of the 1975 album, Fleetwood Mac, into a haunting brand of Anglo-American pop-rock with much more passion, energy and backbone than was normally associated with that genre. Through 1976, the album climbed to No. 1 on the American charts while yielding three hit singles. By 1977, however, trouble was brewing.While the group was recording Rumours, the McVies were separating, Buckingham and Nicks were breaking up and the Fleetwoods were initiating divorce proceedings (they later remarried). All the tensions, frustrations and anguish came out in Rumours, particularly on Dreams, which would prove to be the band's only chart-topping single. Rumours went on to sell 15 million copies, unprecedented at that time, and topped American charts for 31 weeks before winning a Grammy for album of the year.Although Saturday Night Fever, the movie starring John Travolta, was not released until 1978, its sound track, featuring the Bee Gees, was out in time for Christmas 1977. The Bee Gees had been struggling in the studio outside Paris when they received two phone calls in succession from their manager, Robert Stigwood. He told them to abandon their recording efforts because he wanted to release a live album in 1977, and then he instructed them to come up with songs for the new film he was producing. They responded with How Deep Is Your Love before they even knew what the film was about.The Bee Gees intended the song to be sung by Yvonne Elliman, another Stigwood client who'd enjoyed recent success singing the role of Mary Magdalene in the rock opera Jesus Christ, Superstar. But when Stigwood came to Paris from New York and heard the demo, he told the Gibb brothers to keep the song for themselves because it was perfect for the movie. The song was the first single taken from the sound track, and it stayed in the top 10 for 17 straight weeks, the longest such streak for any single since Billboard conceived the Hot 100 in its August 3, 1958, edition.Stigwood also remembered hearing the Bee Gees sing something that went "Saturday night, Saturday night" years earlier in Bermuda. He told them to create an eight-minute version that began with a disco beat, went into a slow, romantic section and concluded with frenzied dance music. The group opted instead for the same tempo throughout, one that built dramatically, and changed the name of the song to Stayin' Alive because there were already too many songs with "Saturday night" in the title. After considerable argument with Stigwood, the group prevailed on both issues.Marvin Gaye's disco smash came about when, on a British tour, he failed to produce enough acceptable material for a live double album. Stymied after recording three sides of the album, Gaye entered the studio with producer Art Stewart to concoct a long dance track along the lines of his current favorite record, Johnnie Taylor's Disco Lady. Gaye's "Dancing Lady" (the title was later changed to Got to Give It Up) featured strange flourishes such as the singer tapping on a half-filled grapefruit juice bottle and studio guests chatting away in the background, which Stewart retained when he pieced together the track and stretched it to nearly 12 minutes. Gaye was ambivalent when Stewart presented him with the finished product on Christmas Day 1976. But it had such a loose, party atmosphere as an album track that the recording was soon edited to single length and proved to be Gaye's last chart record for Motown.Daryl Hall and John Oates stayed on a roll with their "blue-eyed" soul. Rich Girl was released after the first single from Bigger Than Both of Us fizzled. Hall wrote this hit about the fast-foods heir who had once been the boyfriend of his current lover, Sara Allen. But he changed the gender after concluding that he couldn't get away with saying "you're a rich boy" in a pop song. On a more grisly note, the tune was cited as an inspiration by David Berkowitz, New York City's infamous "Son of Sam" serial killer.Linda Ronstadt continued to parlay oldies into a career with her remake of Buddy Holly's It's So Easy. James Taylor, who shared Ronstadt's producer, Peter Asher, followed her cue and revived his own sagging fortunes by recording Handy Man, a No. 2 hit in 1960 for Jimmy Jones (who penned it with veteran writer Otis Blackwell). Taylor and guitarist Danny Kortchmar were fooling around with the song during breaks while Taylor was recording his first album for Columbia. Asher, no doubt thinking of the Ronstadt formula and wanting a surefire hit for the new label, talked Taylor into finishing the tune and including it on the new album in lieu of one of the artist's more somber originals.Manfred Mann got his own seesawing career back into shape by taking Bruce Springsteen's Blinded by the Light to the top of the charts with the Earth Band. (Springsteen's version had failed as a single when it was pulled from his Greetings from Asbury Park debut album in 1973.) Springsteen returned the compliment by frequently performing Mann's 1966 oldie Pretty Flamingo in concert.Arena-rock was represented by Peter Frampton's I'm in You (his biggest single ever) and by Feels Like the First Time and Cold as Ice from the eponymous debut album of Foreigner, an Anglo-American group in the spirit of Free and Bad Company. Southern rock persevered via the Atlanta Rhythm Section's So in to You. The group had grown out of the Classics IV and a studio band assembled for Roy Orbison; their boogie style was in contrast to the laid-back country styling of the Marshall Tucker Band as on Heard It in a Love Song.Glen Campbell was a different sort of Southern act, an Arkansas native who had become a Los Angeles countrypolitan star. Southern Nights was the title track from a 1975 song-cycle album by Allen Toussaint, the fabled New Orleans R&B writer-producer who enjoyed an early '70s fling as a recording artist. Toussaint used his own shimmering piano and voice to evoke the timeless mysteries of Dixie; Campbell followed that arrangement closely for his No. 1 country and pop single. As a hippie-era San Francisco album artist who became a top-40 star, Steve Miller represented a different kind of crossover. His earliest work ingeniously applied Beatles harmonies and production techniques to blues progressions, but he didn't dent the top 40 until 1973. After taking off nearly three years, he returned to cut two albums in one session. Fly Like an Eagle, the title song of the first, was one of six straight top-40 hits that resulted.--John Morthland

Rock in 1976

1976 By 1975 disco was crossing from the R&B to the pop charts, but 1976 was the year it truly arrived. Many white artists began performing this heretofore black music, and a number of novelty hits were spawned by acts that quickly disappeared again. The grand entrance of disco was illustrated by the emergence of Donna Summer, who proved to be one of the genre's enduring stars.Born LaDonna Gains in Boston in 1948, she joined the Munich, Germany, cast of Hair in 1968 and went on to perform in the Vienna Volksopera's productions of Porgy and Bess and Showboat. By 1973, she was back in Munich, performing in Godspell and singing backup vocals at Musicland Studio, where she met owner and producer Pete Bellotte and his partner Giorgio Moroder.Both men were keeping a keen eye on America's disco movement, which by 1975 was no longer the secret of urban blacks and gays. That year they had Summer record Love to Love You Baby, a heavy-breathing track inspired by the recent European success of Je T'Aime . . . Moi Non Plus by Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg. This record of frenzied whispers and orgasmic pants had been greeted with mirth and scorn when released five years earlier.Using new techniques spawned by the disco DJs, Moroder mixed a 17-minute version of Summer's sighing, groaning and gasping R&B tune for nonstop dancing. He leased it to Neil Bogart of Casablanca Records in America, where a few similar sexy tracks were underground disco hits. The single wound up hitting No. 2 in the States, and it set the image for both disco and Donna Summer, who ultimately proved to be a more complex artist than the recording suggested.Meanwhile, Wild Cherry typified the white novelty aspects of disco with Play That Funky Music. Leader Bob Parissi, who took the group's name off a box of cough drops while he was in the hospital, had already seen one incarnation of his band dissolve; he was getting frustrated with audiences on the Cleveland-to-Pittsburgh disco circuit that the rockers were playing. Discussing the problem backstage one night, drummer Ron Beitle repeated a cry they often heard from the audience: "Play that funky music." Only in jest, he added the phrase "white boy." Parissi dashed off the song on a napkin at the disco where his band was playing, and it was later recorded as the B side to a cover version of the Commodores' / Feel Sanctified. But the white-boy disco track got all the radio action, providing Wild Cherry with the third platinum single (one million units sold) ever as well as their only Top 40 hit.The Bee Gees were in the midst of a more enduring disco string of singles. In 1975, the Main Course album, produced by Arif Mardin, had yielded the Brothers Gibb their first No. 1 single in four years. When they went back into the studio, however, the politics of the record company prevented them from again using Mardin (who was signed exclusively to Atlantic). Unable to recapture the charmed Mardin sound using producer Richard Perry, the group went behind the board themselves, with assistance from engineers Karl Richardson and Albhy Galuten, who handled the all-important orchestrations. This team clicked on Children of the World, with You Should Be Dancing becoming the Bee Gees' third No. 1 single and setting the stage for their contributions to Saturday Night Fever a year later.English guitarist Peter Frampton was the year's biggest one-man phenomenon. A veteran of a teeny-bopper band, the Herd, and the arena-rocking Humble Pie, Frampton toured nonstop as a solo act, and in 1976 his work paid off. The double-album Frampton Comes Alive, recorded live at Winterland in San Francisco, sold an unprecedented ten million copies, six million in America alone. Show Me the Way featured one of Frampton's calling cards, the "voice-box," which channeled guitar sounds through a mouthpiece to form words.If Frampton was the guitar hero of the new generation of arena-rock fans, Elton John was the pop songsmith. Like Frampton, he was always more popular stateside. Don't Go Breaking My Heart, his duet with Kiki Dee, was his first British No. 1, although he'd had five No. 1 hits in America. The record also marked his first appearance on his own label, Rocket. He and his regular partner, Bernie Taupin, wrote the song under the names Ann Orson and Carte Blanche. As for Dee, she had previously been signed to Motown. Although she made little noise there, she did become friendly with British Motown executive John Reid, who went on to manage Elton John, which is how the pairing came to be. But when it was time for the real glory--an appearance on The Muppet Show--she had to take a back seat to Miss Piggy, who sang the duet with Elton.Another great duo of the '70s was Daryl Hall and John Oates. The inspiration for Sara Smile was Hall's girlfriend, Sara Sandy Allen, a former airline stewardess who was also the subject of Oates' Las Vegas Turnaround. Oates first met her, by chance, in Manhattan and took her back to the East 82nd Street apartment he shared with his singing partner. Hall, who was in the process of breaking up with his wife, fell for Sara instantly, and they were soon living together. Hall didn't like the vocals on this track, but when the first two singles from Daryl Hall and John Oates failed to hit, he bowed to the better judgment of a Cleveland DJ who'd been playing Sara Smile as an album cut. Released as a single, the tune became Hall and Oates' first Top 40 record.Paul Simon's 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover was, he insisted, "just a fluke thing I slipped into by accident," but the single and the album it came from, Still Crazy after All These Years, seemed to dwell on the recent breakup of Simon's marriage. Linda Ronstadt scored with her second remake of a Buddy Holly song; this time it was That'll Be the Day, which the '50s rocker had written based on a line spoken by John Wayne in John Ford's classic western film The Searchers.Among the year's oddities were former Raspberries leader Eric Carmen's solo debut, All by Myself, based on a Rachmaninoff melody; East Coast bar band Orleans' Still the One, which promptly became the ABC-TV network's theme; and good-time journeyman Elvin Bishop's Fooled Around and Fell in Love, with lead vocals by future Jefferson Starship singer Mickey Thomas. Bishop's swaying, soul-style dance ballad made as much sense in the year of the Hustle as a jug of moonshine at a champagne soiree, but as the swan song for Southern rock it couldn't have been more appropriate.After a period of critical drubbings and vituperative coverage of his jet-set romance with Swedish actress Britt Eklund, Rod Stewart came back strong in 1976 with A Night on the Town, which yielded three popular singles, including Tonight's the Night (Gonna Be Alright). Although banned in Britain because it concerned the seduction of a virgin, it was the biggest American single of the year, topping the charts for eight weeks. Since the Faces, the group Stewart had sung with for six years while pursuing a solo career on the side, also broke up in 1976, the recording proved to be a crucial turning point. But within two years, even Rod Stewart would be cutting disco singles.--John Morthland

Rock in 1975

1975No stranger to No. 1 hits, Elton John had a spectacular year in 1975. Two singles released in 1975 went to the top of the charts (as had Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, which was released at the end of 1974 but carried over into the next year). Rocket, the label John owned, was thriving, and he was touring in the biggest venues in America. Everything Elton John and his songwriting partner, Bernie Taupin, touched seemed to turn to gold.Philadelphia Freedom was no exception. John was a big fan of the fledgling World Tennis League and especially of player-coach Billie Jean King's team, the Philadelphia Freedoms. Whenever he could get a day off in the States, John jetted into the City of Brotherly Love to watch the matches. King, then at the peak of her game (and a media darling almost on a level with John), presented him with a custom-made Freedoms warm-up jacket; he paid her back by writing a song for the team. And since it was a Philly team, after all, how better to pay tribute than to bring in former Philly International arranger-producer Thom Bell and duplicate the Ken Gamble and Leon Huff sound that was taking over the charts at the time?Philadelphia Freedom was released as a novelty single. Its B side had a live version of Elton and John Lennon dueting on I Saw Her Standing There, recorded at Madison Square Garden on Thanksgiving 1974. John had sung backup on Lennon's Whatever Gets You Thru the Night in 1974, and the ex-Beatle, then in the depths of an extended lost weekend, played guitar under the name of Dr. Winston O'Boogie on Elton's version of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.Following the autobiographical Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, which yielded a No. 4 hit in Someone Saved My Life Tonight, John replaced his old rhythm section, expanded his band and entered studios in Colorado (hence the title pun) to cut Rock of the Westies. Like its predecessor, the album entered the Billboard chart at No. 1--they were the first two albums ever to do so. Island Girl then replaced Neil Sedaka's Bad Blood at the top of the singles chart, and the irony was that John had sung backup on Sedaka's hit, which had been released on Rocket.KC and the Sunshine Band were in the midst of a string of No. 1 hits that brought to disco a languorous Florida rhythm inspired by the "junkanoo" (steel-drum) bands of the Bahamas. That's the Way (I Like It) was the second chart topper in a row for the nine-man band headed by pianist-singer Harry Casey and bassist Richard Finch, co-writers and co-producers (and the only white members of the group). As in nearly all their tunes, the lyrics of the song consisted of a simple chant. According to Casey, the original version offered little more than a bunch of moaning and groaning over the characteristic whistles, cowbells, steel drums and rhythm section. After speculating about what his mother would think, Casey cleaned up the song for the final take.In 1975, disco was in full swing. The most popular dance was the hustle, and journeyman writer-producer Van McCoy jumped on the fad reluctantly. When New York City DJ David Todd tried to talk him into checking out Adam's Apple, a trendy New York club, McCoy sent a friend instead. The friend returned to demonstrate the hustle to McCoy, who was excited to see touch-dancing making a comeback. Though McCoy had already finished his album, he threw together a hustle track in an hour and called the album Disco Baby. The Hustle went on to win a Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental and proved to be the only hit for McCoy, who died four years later.LaBelle's Lady Marmalade, an ode to a Creole prostitute, knocked Frankie Valli's My Eyes Adored You off the top of the charts. But Bob Crewe and Kenny Nolan weren't complaining--they'd penned both singles; they became the first writers, other than Lennon-McCartney and Holland-Dozier-Holland, to replace themselves at the No. 1 spot. The song had first been recorded in 1974 by the Eleventh Hour, a studio group fronted by Nolan. With its catchy French hook lyric, the song accented both LaBelle's emerging glittery space-age image and New Orleans producer Allen Toussaint's growing reputation as a crossover hit-maker.Pop Staples was reportedly upset about the sexual innuendo behind Let's Do It Again, the Curtis Mayfield title song to a blaxploitation film starring Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier. However, with Mayfield producing and releasing the song on his own label, it became a top-40 hit for the Staple Singers, although they never reached such heights again.War's Why Can't We Be Friends? was the kind of topical black single that nearly disappeared with the advent of disco; its Caribbean accents made the band at least distant cousins to KC and the Sunshine Band. Meanwhile, the Average White Band (given its name by Bonnie Bramlett when she and they played the Eric Clapton comeback concert at London's Rainbow Theatre in 1973) was proving that Casey, Finch and War's frontman, Lee Oskar, weren't the only funky white boys around. Pick Up the Pieces, which won a Grammy for the Scotsmen, rode disco's coattail even if it owed as much stylistically to the Crusaders and soul music.The charts also had a distinctly Californian flavor. You're No Good, a 1964 hit for the underrated Chicago (via Mississippi) R&B shouter Betty Everett, launched Linda Ronstadt's new sound. This sound was shaped by Ronstadt's manager-producer Peter Asher and guitarist Andrew Gold, who played most of the instruments on the track when the studio band couldn't get it right. Black Water, a salute to the Mississippi River, was originally the B side of the Doobie Brothers' Another Park, Another Sunday, but its theme and catchy a cappella section soon had southern DJs playing the other side of the single. With Sister Golden Hair, the Beatles' former producer, George Martin, continued to pump life into America's career, which had been sagging until he took over the band's sessions the year before.Finally, the year saw the successes of a one-hit wonder from England and two bands of American working-class heroes, one northern and one southern. How Long was Ace's only hit, which came out of the British pub-rock scene. Although the song sounds like a paean to lost love, it was actually singer-keyboardist Paul Carrack's bitter message to bassist Terry Comer, who temporarily crippled the group by quitting to work with the Sutherland Brothers and Quiver in 1973, just when things were starting to look up for Ace. Nevertheless, Corner returned to the fold in time to play on this song.Grand Funk Railroad remade Some Kind of Wonderful, a 1967 regional hit for Soul Brothers Six in Detroit. Though it had little impact elsewhere, the original remained so influential in the motor City that its signature riff was reworked into I Can't Get Next to You, a No. 1 record for the Temptations in 1969, long before Grand Funk of Flint, Michigan, made it into a pop smash themselves.Free Bird first appeared on Lynyrd Skynyrd's 1973 debut album as a tribute to Southern-rock hero Duane Allman, who had died two years earlier. The song, an ideal jamming vehicle for the band's three-guitar attack, became, in turn, a concert favorite, a belated hit single and a Southern-rock anthem.But in 1977, the unthinkable happened. Ronnie Van Zant, the band's charismatic writer and singer, was killed in a plane crash, along with guitarist Steve Gaines, backup singer Cassie Gaines and manager Dean Kilpatrick. The remaining members dissolved the group. But the Rossington Collins Band was formed in 1980 by four surviving members of Lynyrd Skynyrd. The band ended its concerts with an instrumental version of Free Bird that was a stirring tribute to Van Zant and a fond farewell to Southern-rock in general.--John Morthland

ROCK IN 1970

Rock in 1970 was the sound of things beginning to fall apart. The music--and the hype surrounding it--had represented an unprecedented show of unity through the rock boom of the late '60s. Whether it was true or not, musicians and fans had all been perceived as sharing a common vision, which grew out of the fact that as members of the same generation they shared a common experience. If any single event shattered that illusion, it was the Rolling Stones' free concert at Altamont Speedway near San Francisco on December 6, 1969. During the performance a gun-waving black youth was knifed to death by Hell's Angels serving as security guards. Three others died that afternoon, as did the idea of a generation of gentle hippies united behind their music, an image framed by the events at the Woodstock festival earlier that year. But the music would have fragmented anyway. By 1970, after all, the Beatles were breaking up, and many other musicians crucial to the '60s explosion were looking in other directions. Mostly they were reacting to the increasing unwieldiness of a music scene that seemed to have grown too big and too loud. Van Morrison, for example, had fronted the Irish group Them, often lumped in with the British bands during the original English Invasion. That group was short-lived, but Morrison moved to America and delved into an increasingly moody and singular brand of jazz-inflected R&B. Critics considered his music to have reached its apex with 1969's stunning Astral Weeks, but it didn't yield commercial dividends until songs like Domino and Blue Money were pulled from the album His Band and the Street Choir. Eric Clapton had been a member of the English blues-rock trio, Cream, one of the first bands to achieve so-called "supergroup" status. He then helped found Blind Faith, the first working band consciously put together as a "supergroup" (they broke up after one album). Clapton, seeking anonymity and purity, then toured Europe as one of many guest guitarists with Delaney and Bonnie, who had fused country blues and gospel with a rock setting to become the tastemaking act of the moment. That union also yielded Clapton's first solo album and a hit single, After Midnight, written by laid-back Oklahoman J.J. Cale and recorded with Delaney and Bonnie and producer Leon Russell. The Grateful Dead, primary organizers of the disastrous Altamont concert, had heretofore been known for their long, spacey, electric jams. By 1970, though, the Dead were arranging concise, well-rehearsed songs. Some of their best work is on Workingman's Dead, an acoustic album of countrified harmony tunes. Among these was Uncle John's Band, which eschewed psychedelia while reinforcing the San Francisco group's image as a "family band." Unlike the Dead, James Taylor had not been a hit act in the '60s. In fact, Fire and Rain, his breakthrough recording, referred specifically to the failures of his group, the Flying Machine, with its line "Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground." Taylor, whose drug addictions were documented by himself and the pop press for years, had spent time in a mental institution with the Suzanne of this song. Taylor's style opened doors for older acoustic artists writing self-referential songs that were said to represent rock growing up and taking itself seriously. All these artists had strong spiritual bents, an extension of '60s acid mysticism and the peace-and-love philosophy. The most popular songs of 1970 were Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge over Troubled Water and the Beatles' Let It Be, and similar themes permeated the pop charts in any number of other guises. Spirit in the Sky was a witty, infectious cry for salvation by Norman Greenbaum. He, along with the other members of the good-timey Dr. West's Medicine Show and Junk Band, had hit with The Eggplant That Ate Chicago in 1966. Greenbaum lived as a chicken farmer in the hippie Promised Land of Marin County, just north of San Francisco--in the town of Petaluma, the self-proclaimed "Egg Capital of the World." But the Hollies' He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother best demonstrates how fully hippie notions of brotherhood and spirituality permeated the mainstream. The song was cowritten by Tin Pan Alley types with few ties to rock. Bobby Scott, who'd composed scores for movies, and Bob Russell, the lyricist on Don't Get Around Much Anymore and Brazil, were introduced to each other at a California nightclub by Johnny Mercer. Though Russell was dying of cancer and the pair met in person only three times, they managed to turn out this song based on the slogan from a Father Flanagan-Boys Town poster Scott recalled from his Catholic childhood. The overwhelming success of the Hollies' song was proof that the contrived pop song could still dominate sales, even if "underground" rock got all the attention. One group that played well-crafted pop was Three Dog Night, whose Mama Told Me (Not to Come) (first recorded three years earlier by Eric Burdon) was written by Randy Newman. The smartest, least contrived pop songwriter working in Los Angeles, Newman had little success with his own songs. Meanwhile, Blues Image's Ride Captain Ride had nothing to do with the blues; The Rapper was the sole hit for a group, the Jaggerz, named after the lead singer of the Rolling Stones; and the Guess Who, a Canadian band together for 11 years, gained its first No. 1 record by tapping into the protest market with the scornful American Woman. English singer Joe Cocker mounted one of the year's biggest tours after he and Leon Russell, in effect, swiped the hip Delaney and Bonnie gang and expanded it to some 40 members. With this group, Cocker remade the Box Tops' soulful teen hit of 1967, The Letter. In black music, new directions were being forged by guitarist Jimi Hendrix and by Sly and the Family Stone. The Family Stone was led by a former, all-night soul deejay from Oakland, Sylvester Stewart, who had also produced some of the seminal mid-'60s bands from San Francisco. Sly's flamboyant group of men and women, blacks and whites, perhaps best personified the '60s ideal of unity, and his polyrhythmic soul music was, as one of his album titles boasted, "a whole new thing." He was the undisputed sorcerer of the Woodstock festival. Sly Stewart's Thank You (Falletin Me Be Mice Elf Agin) turned out to be a transitional, albeit great work. Even as the song reinforced hippie positivism, its violent imagery recalled Stewart's high-school days as a Northern California gang leader. The song also pointed toward the rage that provided the foundation for his 1972 album, There's a Riot Goin' On, born out of the struggle for his soul between himself, show business, black militants, drugs and the white counterculture. Motown remained firmly rooted in its own past but mindful of Sly's rhythmic revolution and the need for more topical music. The Jackson 5's ABC was a blatantly imitative follow-up to their first single, I Want You Back, but with all that sass and snap, nobody was complaining. War was first cut by the Temptations for the album Psychedelic Shack. This was during the peak of the anti-Vietnam era; Motown was bombarded with letters urging them to release the song as a single, but the company did not want to saddle the Tempts with a countercultural image. Writer-producers Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, therefore, cut War with Edwin Starr, who had recently settled a lengthy legal action against the label and was looking for a hit. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles' The Tears of a Clown followed a more circuitous route to the top of the charts. Motown producer Henry Robinson and Stevie Wonder had the instrumental track but could not come up with lyrics. They gave the song to Smokey, who was reminded of Pagliacci by the calliope sounds (Pagliacci lives in legend as the circus clown who makes everyone laugh and then retreats to his dressing room to cry alone). Smokey and the Miracles didn't like the song, but included it on their 1967 album, Make It Happen, as filler. It languished there until 1970, when a British Motown executive, looking for a follow-up to the Miracles' The Tracks of My Tears, realized the label already had a "Tears" tune by the group. He pulled the song off the old album and it quickly conquered first England, then America. Ironically, though Smokey Robinson was considered by many to be the leading song-poet of the decade, this was his first No. 1 record as an artist. --John Morthland