100 Years of Music / Chapter 6 of 11
1970s: Maximum Volume, Maximum Freedom
Rock takes over the world, disco takes over the night, and in a Bronx rec room the beat begins.
Opening
The Bronx, 11 August 1973. A rec room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. A teenage girl named Cindy Campbell has rented it for a back-to-school party. Her brother Clive has two turntables and a sound system he built with money from his job. He calls himself Kool Herc. Instead of playing whole songs, he plays the drum break, the few bars where everything drops out but the beat, and then he plays it again on the other turntable. The dancers lose their minds. Nobody in the room knows they are at the start of something.
That same summer, on every FM station within reach of that rec room, Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side of the Moon" is on its way to spending fourteen years on the American album chart. In London a nineteen-year-old named John Lydon has not yet walked into a clothes shop on the King's Road. In Kingston, Bob Marley and the Wailers have just put out their first record for a British label. In Nashville, Dolly Parton has written a song about a red-haired bank teller. The decade is a dozen stories at once, and they do not sound like each other.
That is the point. If the sixties were about rebellion, the seventies were about evolution. Rock did not just grow up. It moved into stadiums, got high on its own supply, and split into a dozen wild forms: metal, prog, glam, punk, Southern boogie, arena anthems. Soul went to church and to the streets. Funk got thick. Disco built a new kind of room and a new kind of record to play in it. Country walked out of Nashville. Jazz plugged in. And FM radio, for a few years, let a DJ play whatever was good.
It was a decade of contradictions in the best way: decadent and deep, aggressive and experimental, underground and arena-filling. Punk burned it all down. Singer-songwriters bared their souls. Machines started to sing. And under all of it, in parks and rec rooms where nobody had a record deal, kids who could not afford instruments turned turntables into instruments.
Turn up the volume. Stretch the solos. Let the hair grow out. This is the decade that rewrote the rules with distortion, glitter and groove, and then, at the very end, pressed a party rhyme onto a twelve-inch single and changed the next fifty years.
The World
Vietnam ends, Watergate falls
The last American troops left Vietnam in 1973 and Saigon fell in April 1975. Richard Nixon resigned the presidency on 9 August 1974 rather than face impeachment. A generation that had marched in the sixties now had to figure out what to do when the marching stopped. Marvin Gaye asked "What's Going On" in 1971; by 1975 the answer was often a shrug, a joint, and a very long guitar solo.
The oil shock and the recession
In October 1973 Arab oil producers cut off exports to countries that had backed Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Gas lines stretched around American blocks and prices quadrupled. Britain limped through strikes and three-day weeks and, in the winter of 1978–79, a "winter of discontent" of rubbish in the streets. Disco was escape from that; punk was a fist through it.
The Bronx is burning
Through the 1970s whole blocks of the South Bronx burned, some for insurance money, some from neglect, as landlords walked away and the city cut fire stations. During the 1977 World Series a television camera caught a school ablaze near Yankee Stadium. Out of the same streets, kids with no instruments built a culture: DJing, MCing, b-boying and graffiti. Hip-hop was not born in a boardroom. It was born as a way to survive a neighbourhood.
FM radio and the album
AM radio played three-minute singles. FM stations, cheaper and freer, played whole album sides, and a new format called album-oriented rock let bands write eight-minute songs and expect to hear them on the air. The LP became the unit of ambition. Concept albums, gatefold sleeves and side-long suites all followed from a dial that had moved a few inches to the right.
The synthesizer leaves the laboratory
Robert Moog's Minimoog, introduced in 1970, was the first synthesizer sold in a music shop. It fit on top of an organ and needed no patch cables. Stevie Wonder built whole albums around it. Kraftwerk drove it down the Autobahn. Giorgio Moroder programmed one to pulse for eight minutes under Donna Summer and invented the sound of the next thirty years of dance music.
The twelve-inch, the remix and the drum machine
In May 1976 the Salsoul label put a twelve-inch single in shops for the first time, a Walter Gibbons mix of Double Exposure's "Ten Percent" cut loud and long for club systems. The remix became a form of its own. Cheap rhythm boxes meant for home organs crept onto soul and disco records, and by 1977 two men in New York called Suicide were making rock with nothing else.
Formats: eight-track, quad and the Walkman
The eight-track cartridge peaked in car dashboards mid-decade and was dying by 1979. Quadraphonic sound, four speakers instead of two, was sold hard by every label and failed because nobody could agree on a standard. Then, on 1 July 1979, Sony put a blue and silver cassette player called the Walkman on sale in Japan. It did not record. It only played, through light headphones, to one person. Music became private and portable in the same moment.
Two deaths, and a diagnosis
Elvis Presley died at Graceland on 16 August 1977, aged forty-two. Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols died in New York on 2 February 1979, aged twenty-one. In July 1977 Bob Marley was told a dark spot under a toenail was melanoma. He kept touring. Each was a signal that the decade's excess had a bill attached, and the bill was coming due.
The Sounds
The genesis: where the beat began
There was no record deal. No radio play. No chart. Just turntables, speakers and an energy pulsing through the Bronx. Hip-hop in the 1970s was a culture before it was a genre, and it had four elements: the DJ who built the beat, the MC who talked over it, the b-boys and b-girls who danced in the break, and the writers who put their names on the trains. It was a whole ecosystem, and it grew in parks, rec rooms and school gyms.
The spark is usually dated to 11 August 1973, when DJ Kool Herc, born Clive Campbell in Kingston, Jamaica, played his sister Cindy's party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. Herc's idea was simple and enormous. Dancers went hardest during the break, the stretch of a funk record where the singer stops and only the drums and bass carry on. So he bought two copies of the same record and cut from one break to the other, over and over, on what he called the Merry-Go-Round. James Brown's "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose", the Incredible Bongo Band's "Bongo Rock", Babe Ruth's "The Mexican": the breakbeat was born from records nobody else was playing anymore.
Herc's sound system, the Herculoids, came straight out of Jamaican dancehall culture, where a DJ (the selector) played and a deejay (what Americans would call an MC) talked over the record to hype the crowd. Coke La Rock, Herc's partner, was the first to do it in the Bronx. Afrika Bambaataa, a former warlord of the Black Spades gang, turned his crew into the Zulu Nation and pointed its energy at parties instead of turf. Grandmaster Flash, a technician from the Bronx's electronics classes, made the cut precise: he marked his records with crayon, backspun them to the start of the break, and punched short phrases in and out on time. Theodore Livingston, barely into his teens and part of the same Bronx circle, found that rubbing the record back and forth under the needle made a sound, and the scratch was born.
By 1978 Flash had a crew of five MCs, the Furious Five, and MCing had gone from shouting shout-outs to rhyming in rhythm, trading lines, working routines. Still no records. The music lived on cassettes taped at the party and passed hand to hand. Then in 1979 the outside world noticed. The Fatback Band put a rapping radio-jock routine, "King Tim III (Personality Jock)", on a B-side in July. In September a New Jersey label owner named Sylvia Robinson put three unknowns from Englewood in a studio over the bass line of Chic's "Good Times" and called them the Sugarhill Gang. "Rapper's Delight" sold millions. The Bronx DJs were furious that outsiders got there first. Everything after this is the next chapter.
Groove as a weapon, the beat that took over
Funk in the seventies was thick. James Brown had invented the groove in the sixties by putting every instrument on the One; now Sly Stone, George Clinton and a dozen horn bands took it further. Deep bass, tight drums, guitars played like percussion, chants instead of choruses. Sly and the Family Stone's "There's a Riot Goin' On" (1971) was funk with the lights off: murky, slow, cut with a drum machine, the sound of the sixties' hope curdling. Curtis Mayfield's "Super Fly" (1972) made funk carry a whole film's worth of social weight. The Isley Brothers put Hendrix-style guitar on it. The Ohio Players, Kool and the Gang, and Earth, Wind and Fire brought brass, sass and class to it, and Earth, Wind and Fire made it shine like a spaceship.
The spaceship was literal for Parliament-Funkadelic. George Clinton ran two bands with the same members, Parliament for the horns and hooks and Funkadelic for the guitars and acid, and in 1975 "Mothership Connection" gave the whole thing a mythology: a funk UFO come to rescue the planet. Clinton had the prop built after the record came out, and from late in 1976 a silver Mothership actually landed on stage on the P-Funk Earth Tour. Bootsy Collins, who had played bass for James Brown at nineteen, made the bass the lead instrument. A generation of hip-hop producers would sample almost nothing else.
Disco came from a different room. In February 1970 David Mancuso threw a private party called Love Saves the Day at his loft on Broadway in New York: no alcohol licence, an audiophile sound system, a mixed Black, Latin and gay crowd, and a DJ who treated the night as one long piece of music. Out of the Loft came the DJs, Larry Levan at the Paradise Garage and Nicky Siano at the Gallery, who turned the club into an instrument. Philadelphia International supplied the records: Gamble and Huff's lush strings and the drumming of Earl Young, who put the kick drum on every beat and the hi-hat on the off-beats. That four-on-the-floor pulse is disco's spine.
By 1977 the underground was the mainstream. Studio 54 opened in April. "Saturday Night Fever" arrived in December and the Bee Gees' soundtrack sold more than any album before it. Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder's "I Feel Love" replaced the band with a Moog and pointed straight at techno. Chic's Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards played guitar and bass with the precision of a drum machine and left the space between the notes open. Sylvester's falsetto made gospel ecstasy explicit and queer. Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" became an anthem. Village People and KC and the Sunshine Band supplied the camp and the floor-fillers. Then the backlash: on 12 July 1979 a Chicago rock DJ blew up a crate of disco records at Comiskey Park and the crowd rioted. Disco Demolition Night is usually called the night disco died. What actually happened is that it went back underground, to Chicago and Detroit, and came out again as house and techno.
Soul grows up: the album, the message, the church
In the sixties soul was a singles business. Motown and Stax cut three-minute records and the artist sang what the producer handed over. The 1970s broke that deal. Marvin Gaye fought Berry Gordy to release "What's Going On" in May 1971, a suite about Vietnam, ecology and police violence sung in his own overdubbed harmonies, and it became Motown's biggest-selling album. Stevie Wonder, turning twenty-one, renegotiated his contract for full creative control and delivered five albums in five years, from "Music of My Mind" to "Songs in the Key of Life", playing almost everything himself on Minimoog, ARP, clavinet and drums.
In Memphis, Al Green and producer Willie Mitchell at Hi Records made a quieter revolution: soul that whispered. "Let's Stay Together" (1971) is all restraint, a voice that never pushes over a groove that never hurries. Isaac Hayes at Stax made "Shaft" and became the first Black composer to win an Academy Award for Best Original Song. Bill Withers, a thirty-two-year-old factory worker, cut "Ain't No Sunshine" and wrote plain, grown-up songs about ordinary life. Donny Hathaway brought gospel and jazz harmony into the same voice. Roberta Flack sang like a jazz pianist thinking.
Philadelphia became the new capital. Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff's Philadelphia International, with arranger Thom Bell and the house band MFSB, made the O'Jays, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes with Teddy Pendergrass, and the Spinners into hitmakers with strings, vibraphone and a beat that disco would borrow whole. Stax staged Wattstax at the Los Angeles Coliseum in August 1972, a hundred thousand people for a dollar a ticket, Jesse Jackson leading "I am somebody" and Rufus Thomas leading the funky chicken. Aretha Franklin went home to church for two nights in January 1972 and "Amazing Grace" became the best-selling gospel album ever made.
The church kept giving. Andraé Crouch and the Disciples wrote the hymns that a modern Black and white church would both sing, with a soul rhythm section behind them. The Hawkins family, Edwin and Walter, followed "Oh Happy Day" into the seventies. In Detroit a family group, the Clark Sisters, recorded their first albums under Mattie Moss Clark's direction. And disco's biggest voices, Sylvester and Donna Summer among them, had all learned to sing in the pews. By 1979 the line from gospel to soul to disco to Michael Jackson's "Off the Wall" ran unbroken.
Rock takes over the world, in every direction at once
There was no single sound of rock in the seventies. There was every sound. The Rolling Stones made "Exile on Main St." (1972) in a French basement, a double album of blues, gospel and country played loose and mixed muddy on purpose. The Who wrote rock operas. Led Zeppelin fused Delta blues, English folk and pure volume into something mythic, and "Led Zeppelin IV" (1971) put a folk ballad that turns into a hard-rock climax, "Stairway to Heaven", at the centre of FM radio for the rest of the century. Aerosmith brought swagger and sleaze with bluesy firepower. Kiss painted their faces and set off flash pots. Blue Öyster Cult were mystical and weird and heavy in all the right ways.
Prog rock cracked open time signatures. While some cranked the distortion, Pink Floyd built atmosphere, politics and existential dread into "The Dark Side of the Moon" (1973), a record about time, money and madness that stayed on the American chart for over seven hundred weeks. Yes had virtuosity, spacey lyrics and Jon Anderson's high tenor. Genesis, with Peter Gabriel in costume, told stories. King Crimson were angular and aggressive. Emerson, Lake and Palmer had classical chops and big ideas. Jethro Tull put a flute in front of a rock band. Rush, from Toronto, had brains and brawn. These were not just songs. They were journeys, and they needed the LP side to make them.
Glam dolled it up while everyone else got heavier. David Bowie killed his old self and came back in June 1972 as Ziggy Stardust, an alien rock star with red hair and a band called the Spiders from Mars; his "Starman" on Top of the Pops that July is the moment a generation of British kids decided they could be anyone. Marc Bolan's T. Rex made boogie riffs glitter. Roxy Music, with Brian Eno twiddling a synthesizer at the side of the stage, made sophistication and strangeness in equal measure. The New York Dolls wore lipstick and played like a garage band falling down stairs, and punk heard them. Slade and Sweet supplied the stomping singles, and Gary Glitter did too, before later crimes put him outside any story a museum would tell.
The singer-songwriters turned inward. Carole King's "Tapestry" (1971) made honesty beautiful and stayed on the American album chart for six years. Joni Mitchell's "Blue" went further inside than anyone had. James Taylor was the soft-spoken heart of Laurel Canyon. Cat Stevens sang spiritual searching over acoustic guitar. Neil Young was fragile and fierce, sometimes in the same song. Jackson Browne wrote political and emotional ballads. Paul Simon, out of the duo, went looking for the world's rhythms. Elton John, with Bernie Taupin's words, made the piano a rock instrument again. Out of the same canyon came the Eagles, who polished country rock until it gleamed and then wrote "Hotel California" (1976) about what the polish cost.
The South rose again on amplifiers. The Allman Brothers Band married blues, jazz and country into twin-guitar jams and cut two nights at the Fillmore East in March 1971 that fixed what a live rock album could be; Duane Allman died on a motorcycle that October. Lynyrd Skynyrd answered with three guitars, "Free Bird" and "Sweet Home Alabama", and lost their singer Ronnie Van Zant in a plane crash in October 1977. The Band, four Canadians and an Arkansan, kept writing an America that never quite existed. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young sang harmony and heartbreak. And the arena filled: Boston's "More Than a Feeling", Kansas, Foreigner, Journey, bands built for hockey rinks. Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run" (1975) and Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours" (1977) were the decade's two great rock records about wanting out. Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" (1975), six minutes with an opera in the middle, proved a single could be anything. Steely Dan proved a rock band could be two cynics and the best session players in Los Angeles.
The riff that shook the earth
Heavy metal was born in the steel town of Birmingham, England, on Friday 13 February 1970, when four working-class kids who had been a blues band called Earth released an album named after a horror film. Black Sabbath's guitarist Tony Iommi had lost the tips of two fingers in a sheet-metal press and played with home-made thimbles, tuning down and playing slow so the strings would not hurt. The result was the heaviest sound anyone had recorded: doom, gloom and distortion, a tritone riff in the title track that classical musicians had once called the devil's interval. "Paranoid" that September added speed and a hit single. Metal had a template.
Led Zeppelin, formed in 1968, supercharged the blues in a different way: Jimmy Page's riffs, John Bonham's drums recorded in a stairwell, Robert Plant's wail, and a mythic streak that ran from Tolkien to the Delta. They refused to release singles and sold out stadiums anyway. Deep Purple put a classically trained organist, Jon Lord, next to Ritchie Blackmore's guitar and invented the speed riff; "Machine Head" (1972) and "Smoke on the Water" gave every beginner a first riff to learn. All three bands took their volume to America, where FM radio and arenas were waiting.
The second wave arrived mid-decade. Judas Priest, also from Birmingham, stripped out the blues and added twin lead guitars, leather and Rob Halford's four-octave scream on "Sad Wings of Destiny" (1976) and "Stained Class" (1978), laying the groundwork for everything the 1980s would call metal. Scorpions from Hanover and UFO from London, with a teenage Michael Schenker moving between them, added melody. AC/DC came out of Sydney with no frills, no keyboards and Angus Young in a schoolboy uniform, and "Highway to Hell" (1979) was the last record Bon Scott made before he died. In Pasadena, the second track on Van Halen's 1978 debut was Eddie Van Halen's "Eruption", one minute and forty-two seconds of two-handed tapping that changed how the instrument was played.
Core elements were set by 1979: power chords, soaring vocals, thunderous drums, bluesy roots and darker lyrical themes. What came next, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal with Iron Maiden and Def Leppard, and thrash after that, is the next chapter. But every one of those bands owned "Paranoid".
The middle finger to excess
Tired of solos that lasted longer than your lunch break? Punk stripped rock down to its studs: fast, loud, angry and raw. No frills, no solos, no apologies. Its roots were in Detroit and New York in the late sixties: the Stooges' bare-chested chaos with Iggy Pop, the Velvet Underground's drone, the MC5's noise, and then the New York Dolls in 1973, sleaze and glam and proto-punk rage. Rock critics coined the word "punk" for garage bands before anyone wore safety pins.
The scene had an address: CBGB, a biker bar on the Bowery that opened in December 1973 and let Television, then Patti Smith, then the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads and the Dead Boys play there on the condition that they played their own songs. Richard Hell, of Television and then the Voidoids, wore the ripped T-shirt and the spiked hair first. Patti Smith's "Horses" (November 1975), produced by John Cale, opened with her rewriting Van Morrison's "Gloria" as a poem about desire and refusal. The Ramones' debut (April 1976) had fourteen songs in twenty-nine minutes, three chords and a snarl, and Johnny Ramone's downstroke buzz-saw guitar. It sold almost nothing and started everything.
In London the manager of a King's Road shop called SEX, Malcolm McLaren, put together the Sex Pistols. "Anarchy in the U.K." came out on 26 November 1976. Five days later, filling in for Queen on a teatime television show, the band swore at host Bill Grundy live on air and woke up on every front page. "Never Mind the Bollocks" (October 1977) is one album and it is enough. The Clash gave punk political power and genre-bending ambition, writing about tower blocks and riots and, by "London Calling" (December 1979), pulling in reggae, rockabilly and soul. The Damned put out the first British punk single, "New Rose", in October 1976. The Buzzcocks pressed their own EP, "Spiral Scratch", and showed that anyone could. X-Ray Spex had a saxophone and Poly Styrene's voice. The Slits and Siouxsie and the Banshees proved punk's women would not be backing singers.
Then punk mutated. Wire's "Pink Flag" cut songs to under a minute. Gang of Four played funk with a political science degree. Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures" (June 1979), produced by Martin Hannett in Manchester, was punk's energy slowed to a cold, spacious dread, and post-punk had its masterpiece. In Coventry, the Specials' 2 Tone label put Black and white kids in the same band and revived Jamaican ska as an answer to the National Front. And on the pop side, new wave: Blondie's "Heart of Glass" put a disco beat under a CBGB band, Elvis Costello wrote bitter, brilliant songs at speed, the Cars, the Police and Devo made punk's energy safe for the radio without making it boring. By the end of 1979, punk had done what it set out to do: kill rock's excess. What it did not expect was to have children.
Jamaica's world moment
Reggae was a local music at the start of the decade and a world music by the end of it, and one man carried most of the weight. But the mechanism matters more than the star. Chris Blackwell of Island Records, a white Jamaican who had already sold Millie Small and Jimmy Cliff to Britain, signed Bob Marley and the Wailers in 1972 and marketed them like a rock band: an album, not singles; a sleeve shaped like a Zippo lighter; a tour; rock guitar and clavinet overdubbed in London on the Kingston tapes. "Catch a Fire" (April 1973) sold modestly and changed everything about how the world would hear Jamaica.
The film "The Harder They Come" (1972), with Jimmy Cliff as a country boy turned singer turned outlaw, did the same job for the music behind him: the soundtrack put Toots and the Maytals' "Pressure Drop", the Melodians' "Rivers of Babylon" and Cliff's own "Many Rivers to Cross" into American college towns. Toots had named the genre with "Do the Reggay" in 1968; now "Funky Kingston" (1973) showed how much soul was in it.
At home, the seventies were reggae's roots era: slower, heavier, Rastafarian in faith and African in longing. Burning Spear's "Marcus Garvey" (1975) is a history lesson with a bass line. The producers were the real innovators. King Tubby, an electronics repairman, took the instrumental B-side and started dropping the vocal in and out, drenching the drums in reverb and delay, and dub was born, a remix culture years before New York had one. Augustus Pablo's "King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown" (1976) is dub's touchstone. Lee "Scratch" Perry built a four-track studio behind his house in 1973, called it the Black Ark, and made records that sound like they were recorded underwater in a dream; the Wailers, the Congos and Max Romeo all passed through. Deejays like U-Roy and Big Youth talked over the dubs, and the line from there to the Bronx is direct.
Marley's arc was the decade's. "Natty Dread" (1974) without Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer. Gunmen in his house on 3 December 1976, two days before a peace concert he played anyway. Exile in London and "Exodus" (June 1977), a whole side of hymns and a whole side of love songs. The One Love Peace Concert in Kingston on 22 April 1978, where he pulled Michael Manley and Edward Seaga, leaders of two parties whose gunmen were killing each other, on stage and joined their hands. And a diagnosis in July 1977 he chose not to treat with amputation. By 1979 dancehall was beginning in Kingston, faster and more local again, and Marley had two years left.
Outlaws, Austin and the countrypolitan
Nashville in 1970 was a factory. Producers picked the songs, session players cut them in three hours and the artist showed up to sing. Two Texans broke the deal. Willie Nelson, who had written "Crazy" for Patsy Cline and been a Nashville songwriter for a decade, moved home to Austin in 1972, grew his hair and found that hippies and rednecks would both stand in the same hall, the Armadillo World Headquarters, if the songs were good. "Red Headed Stranger" (1975) was a concept album about a preacher who kills his wife, recorded so sparely that Columbia thought it was a demo. "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" went to number one anyway.
Waylon Jennings won the fight in a contract: the right to use his own band and pick his own producer. "Honky Tonk Heroes" (1973), written almost entirely by Billy Joe Shaver, was the result, and in January 1976 RCA gathered Waylon, Willie, Jessi Colter and Tompall Glaser on a compilation called "Wanted! The Outlaws". In November it became the first country album certified platinum. Kris Kristofferson, a Rhodes scholar and army helicopter pilot, had already shown that a country song could be written like a poem: "Me and Bobby McGee", "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down", "Help Me Make It Through the Night". Townes Van Zandt, in Texas, wrote better and sold less than any of them.
The women were writing too. Loretta Lynn's "Coal Miner's Daughter" (1970) was autobiography set to a shuffle, and "The Pill" (1975) got banned for saying what every woman in her audience already knew. Dolly Parton, still Porter Wagoner's duet partner, wrote "Coat of Many Colors" (1971) about being poor and proud and "Jolene" (1973) about a woman begging another not to take her man, then wrote "I Will Always Love You" to Porter as her resignation letter and left. Emmylou Harris learned country from Gram Parsons, who died in September 1973 at twenty-six; their duets on "Grievous Angel" (1974) are the hinge between country rock and what would later be called Americana. Harris's Hot Band, with James Burton and then Ricky Skaggs, kept that door open all decade. George Jones kept being the greatest pure singer country had, through a marriage to Tammy Wynette that supplied both of them with material.
Meanwhile the factory did fine. Billy Sherrill's countrypolitan sound, strings and choirs and a soft beat, made Charlie Rich's "Behind Closed Doors" (1973) a crossover hit and Tammy Wynette a star. Kenny Rogers, out of a pop group, cut "The Gambler" (1978) and became the biggest country act in the world by talking a story over a shuffle. Both roads, the outlaws and the pop, ran straight into the 1980s.
The personal became powerful
Folk in the sixties had been about causes. In the seventies it turned inward, and the singer-songwriter became a genre of its own: one voice, one instrument, one life. Carole King had written a decade of hits for other people from a cubicle in the Brill Building. "Tapestry" (February 1971) was her own voice on her own songs, recorded plainly, and it stayed at number one for fifteen weeks and on the chart for six years. It told a whole generation of women, and men, that a confession could be a hit.
Joni Mitchell's "Blue" (June 1971) is the record everyone else in this room measured themselves against. She wrote in open tunings nobody else used, sang about her own affairs and her own given-up child, and left the arrangements almost bare: dulcimer, piano, guitar. James Taylor, who played on it, had already made "Sweet Baby James" (1970), a record about heroin and hospitals delivered so gently it sounded like comfort. Neil Young's "Harvest" (1972) went to number one and he spent the rest of the decade running from it, into the ditch, as he put it, with "Tonight's the Night" and "On the Beach". Jackson Browne wrote "These Days" at sixteen and "Late for the Sky" at twenty-five. Cat Stevens sold millions of songs about searching and then, in 1977, found what he was looking for in Islam and stopped. Paul Simon, on his own, went to Jamaica to cut "Mother and Child Reunion" and to Muscle Shoals for "Kodachrome".
In Britain the folk revival went electric and strange: Fairport Convention, Pentangle, Nick Drake's three quiet albums nobody bought until he was dead, Richard Thompson, John Martyn's echoplexed guitar. And in Latin America a different folk was being murdered for its politics: Víctor Jara, the voice of Chile's Nueva canción, was tortured and shot in a stadium days after the September 1973 coup. The personal and the political had not separated everywhere.
Jazz plugs in
Miles Davis had heard Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix and decided jazz was going to have to deal with them. "Bitches Brew" (March 1970) was recorded with two bassists, two or three drummers, three electric keyboards and John McLaughlin's guitar, then cut up and spliced by producer Teo Macero like a film. It sold half a million copies, more than any record Davis had made, and it emptied the room of purists. Everyone in the band went on to lead the decade.
Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul formed Weather Report; "Heavy Weather" (1977) with Jaco Pastorius's fretless bass and the hit "Birdland" was fusion at its most joyful. McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra played faster and louder than any rock band. Chick Corea's Return to Forever went from Brazilian breeze to "Romantic Warrior". Herbie Hancock listened to Sly and James Brown, built a band called the Headhunters and made "Head Hunters" (October 1973), whose "Chameleon" rides an ARP Odyssey bass line for fifteen minutes; it outsold everything in jazz until George Benson's "Breezin'" three years later, and hip-hop producers have been cutting it up ever since. In fusion's swirl, the Minimoog and the Fender Rhodes became jazz instruments.
Other rooms stayed acoustic and went somewhere else. Keith Jarrett, exhausted and handed a broken piano at the Cologne opera house on 24 January 1975, improvised for an hour; "The Köln Concert" on Manfred Eicher's ECM label became the best-selling solo piano record in history and defined that label's clear, spacious sound. Alice Coltrane, after her husband's death, made "Journey in Satchidananda" (1971) with harp and tanpura and pointed jazz toward the spiritual. Pharoah Sanders kept the fire from Coltrane's last bands. In lower Manhattan, players locked out of the clubs turned lofts into venues, and Sam Rivers' Studio Rivbea and the loft scene kept free jazz alive on its own terms. Sun Ra bought a Minimoog in 1970 and took it to Saturn.
Salsa's golden age
Salsa was a New York word for a Cuban and Puerto Rican thing: son, mambo, guaracha and plena, played hard by kids from the Bronx and East Harlem. The Fania label, founded by Dominican bandleader Johnny Pacheco and lawyer Jerry Masucci in 1964, owned the decade. Its house supergroup, the Fania All-Stars, filled Yankee Stadium on 24 August 1973 with more than forty thousand people and the show ended early when the crowd poured onto the field during "Congo Bongo". Puerto Rican New York had a stadium-sized proof that it existed.
The label's stars were the decade's. Willie Colón, a trombonist from the Bronx who put gangster imagery on his sleeves, and Héctor Lavoe, the singer from Ponce with the most beloved voice in the music, made a run of albums together and then apart; Lavoe's "El Cantante" (1978) is a song about being the singer everybody loves and nobody knows. Celia Cruz, the Cuban queen who had left after the revolution, joined Fania and "Celia & Johnny" (1974) with Pacheco made her the face of salsa for the rest of her life. Ray Barretto, Eddie Palmieri, Larry Harlow and Cheo Feliciano filled out a scene that could sell out the Cheetah club every weekend.
Then Rubén Blades, a Panamanian law graduate, changed what salsa could say. On "Siembra" (1978), with Willie Colón, he sang "Pedro Navaja", a seven-minute street story built on Brecht's "Mack the Knife", and "Plástico", a satire of the middle class. It became the best-selling salsa album ever. Meanwhile, Carlos Santana, a Mexican kid from San Francisco, had opened the decade with "Abraxas" (1970) and Tito Puente's "Oye Como Va" as a rock hit, and Latin rock was a thing. In Brazil, Milton Nascimento and the Clube da Esquina collective made "Clube da Esquina" (1972), a record as ambitious as anything in rock, and Jorge Ben's "África Brasil" (1976) put samba on a funk footing. In Chile and Argentina, Nueva canción's protest folk, Violeta Parra's heirs, was silenced by the coups of 1973 and 1976 and went into exile with Inti-Illimani and Mercedes Sosa.
The machines learn to sing
In 1970 a synthesizer was a wall of modules in a university. By 1979 it was in every pop record. The Minimoog started it: portable, affordable, with a pitch wheel so a keyboard player could bend a note like a guitarist. Then the ARP 2600 and Odyssey, the string machines, and at the very end of the decade the first samplers, Australia's Fairlight CMI (1979), which let a musician record a sound and play it on a keyboard. Each of these instruments arrived first in prog and jazz and disco, then everywhere.
The people who made the machines the whole point were in West Germany. Kraftwerk, from Düsseldorf, spent three albums as an experimental rock group and then, in November 1974, released "Autobahn": a twenty-two-minute drive down the motorway made of synthesizers, a vocoder and a rhythm box, and it went to number five on the American album chart. "Trans-Europe Express" (1977) was steel wheels on rails as music; Afrika Bambaataa would build "Planet Rock" on it five years later. "The Man-Machine" (1978) drew the robot pop that would fill the eighties. Around them, what the British press called Krautrock: Can's grooves, Neu!'s motorik beat that never changes, Tangerine Dream's long synthesizer suites, Cluster and Harmonia. Brian Eno went to Germany to work with them and came back with "Ambient 1: Music for Airports" (1978), whose sleeve notes named a new genre: music as ignorable as it is interesting.
Disco made the machines dance. Giorgio Moroder, an Italian in Munich, borrowed a Moog modular and sequenced a bass line that never stops under Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" in the summer of 1977; Eno ran into David Bowie's Berlin studio with the single saying he had heard the future. Cerrone in Paris and Jean-Michel Jarre, whose "Oxygène" (1976) sold twelve million copies with no words at all, made France a synthesizer country. In New York, Suicide, two men with a Farfisa organ and a cheap rhythm box, played CBGB and Max's and put out their debut in December 1977, and it was punk without a guitar. The line from all of this runs to house, techno and every bedroom producer of the next fifty years.
Timeline
The Minimoog goes on sale
Robert Moog's company turns the wall-sized modular synthesizer into a single keyboard with three oscillators, a filter and a pitch wheel, small enough to sit on top of a Hammond organ and cheap enough for a working band. It is the first synthesizer sold in music shops. Sun Ra records with one the same year; Keith Emerson, Herbie Hancock, Stevie Wonder and Kraftwerk follow. The three oscillators never quite lock together, which is the fat sound everyone falls for.
Black Sabbath invent heavy metal on a Friday the thirteenth
Four kids from Birmingham, England, who had been a blues band called Earth, release a debut named after a horror film on 13 February 1970. Tony Iommi, who lost two fingertips in a sheet-metal press, plays slow and low with home-made thimbles; the title track opens on the tritone, the interval old church music called the devil's. Critics hate it. It goes top ten in Britain and top twenty-five in America, and every metal band since owns a copy.
Love Saves the Day: David Mancuso opens the Loft
On Valentine's night 1970 David Mancuso throws an invitation-only party in his loft at 647 Broadway in Manhattan. No liquor licence, no bar, an audiophile sound system, balloons, and a mixed Black, Latin and gay crowd dancing until morning. The DJ as storyteller and the club as a sanctuary both start here. Larry Levan and Nicky Siano learn the trade on this floor, and disco's underground has a template years before the word is on a record.
Miles Davis releases "Bitches Brew"
Recorded over three days in August 1969 with two bassists, multiple drummers, three electric keyboards and John McLaughlin on guitar, then spliced together by producer Teo Macero, "Bitches Brew" hits shops on 30 March 1970. It is the loudest argument yet that jazz can absorb Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix. It sells half a million copies and empties the room of purists. Nearly every member of the band leads a fusion group within two years.
The Armadillo World Headquarters opens in Austin
A former National Guard armory in Austin, Texas, opens as a music hall in August 1970. Within two years Willie Nelson has moved home from Nashville and found that long-haired students and boot-wearing ranchers will stand in the same room for the right songs. The Armadillo becomes the clubhouse of "progressive country" and the reason "outlaw" becomes a category rather than an insult.
"Paranoid" gives metal a hit single
Black Sabbath's second album arrives in September 1970, seven months after the first. The title track, written in twenty minutes to fill out the running time, is under three minutes and goes to number four in Britain. "War Pigs" and "Iron Man" are on the same record. The doom of the debut now has speed to go with it, and the shape of metal is set: heavy, fast, dark, and built on the riff.
Santana, "Abraxas"
A year after Woodstock, Carlos Santana's band releases "Abraxas" in September 1970 and it goes to number one. "Oye Como Va" is a Tito Puente cha-cha-chá from 1962 played through a Hammond organ and a sustaining guitar; "Black Magic Woman" is a Fleetwood Mac blues taken to Latin percussion. Latin rock becomes a shelf in the record shop, and a generation of Mexican-American kids hears itself on FM radio.
Carole King, "Tapestry"
Released 10 February 1971. King had spent the sixties writing hits for other people from a cubicle in the Brill Building. Now she sings them herself, plainly, at a piano, with Joni Mitchell and James Taylor in the room: "It's Too Late", "I Feel the Earth Move", "You've Got a Friend", and her own "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman". It spends fifteen weeks at number one and six years on the chart, and it makes the confessional singer-songwriter a commercial fact.
The Allman Brothers Band at Fillmore East
Over 12 and 13 March 1971 the Allman Brothers record two nights at Bill Graham's Fillmore East in New York. Duane Allman and Dickey Betts's twin guitars, Gregg Allman's organ and two drummers stretch "Whipping Post" past twenty minutes without wasting a bar. Released in July, it is the record that makes Southern rock a national thing. Duane dies in a motorcycle crash in Macon that October, aged twenty-four.
Marvin Gaye, "What's Going On"
Berry Gordy called the title song the worst record he had ever heard and refused to release it. Gaye refused to record anything else. The single sold two million copies, and the album, released 21 May 1971, is a suite: Vietnam, heroin, the inner city, the ecology, God, sung in Gaye's own layered harmonies over the Funk Brothers and a Detroit Symphony string section. Motown's assembly line has just been overruled by an artist, and soul becomes an album form.
Joni Mitchell, "Blue"
Released 22 June 1971. Mitchell, twenty-seven, had ended a relationship with Graham Nash and gone travelling, and she came back with songs about wanting and leaving that were more direct than any pop record had dared to be. Dulcimer, piano, guitar and almost nothing else. "A Case of You", "River", "California". It did not sell like "Tapestry". It became the record every songwriter for fifty years measured their honesty against.
Isaac Hayes scores "Shaft"
Stax's biggest star writes and records the score for Gordon Parks's "Shaft", released in July 1971. The theme is a hi-hat, a wah-wah guitar, and a bass line that walks in like the man himself, and Hayes's spoken vocal is a comic-book boast. It wins the Academy Award for Best Original Song, the first for a Black composer, and it makes funk the sound of the movies for the rest of the decade.
Led Zeppelin IV
Released 8 November 1971 with no title and no band name on the sleeve, only four symbols. "Black Dog", "Rock and Roll", "When the Levee Breaks" with John Bonham's drums recorded in a stairwell at Headley Grange, and "Stairway to Heaven", a folk ballad that climbs into a hard-rock climax over eight minutes. Never released as a single, "Stairway" becomes the most-requested song on American FM radio. The album sells more than twenty million copies in the United States alone.
Sly and the Family Stone, "There's a Riot Goin' On"
The band that sang "Everyday People" at Woodstock releases, in November 1971, an album recorded largely by Sly alone in a Bel Air mansion, overdubbing over a Maestro Rhythm King drum machine, the tape worn thin from reuse. "Family Affair" goes to number one and sounds like a hangover. The record is murky, slow and paranoid, the sound of the sixties' integration dream curdling. It is also the first great record built on a drum machine, and funk's darkest hour.
"The Harder They Come" carries reggae abroad
Perry Henzell's film, with Jimmy Cliff as a country boy who comes to Kingston to sing and ends up an outlaw, opens in Jamaica in 1972 and becomes a midnight-movie fixture in American college towns for years. The soundtrack, on Island in Britain that year and in North America in early 1973, puts Toots and the Maytals' "Pressure Drop", the Melodians' "Rivers of Babylon" and Cliff's "Many Rivers to Cross" in front of listeners who had never heard the word reggae.
Aretha Franklin records "Amazing Grace" in church
On 13 and 14 January 1972 Franklin sings two nights at New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts, Los Angeles, with James Cleveland's Southern California Community Choir behind her and her father C.L. Franklin in the pews. Atlantic records it and Sydney Pollack films it. Released in June, the double album sells two million copies and becomes the best-selling gospel record ever made. The film sat unfinished for forty-six years because nobody had used a clapperboard.
Neil Young, "Harvest"
Released in February 1972, cut partly in Nashville with session players Young called the Stray Gators, partly in a barn. "Heart of Gold" goes to number one, the only chart-topping single he will ever have. Young later writes that it put him in the middle of the road, so he headed for the ditch. The next three years give us "Tonight's the Night" and "On the Beach", and the singer-songwriter has a model for refusing success.
The Rolling Stones, "Exile on Main St."
Tax exiles from Britain, the Stones record in the humid basement of Keith Richards's rented villa on the French Riviera through the summer of 1971, then finish in Los Angeles. Released 12 May 1972, the double album is blues, gospel, country and soul played loose and mixed murky on purpose. Critics are lukewarm. Within a decade it is the record people mean when they say the Stones.
David Bowie becomes Ziggy Stardust
"The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" arrives on 16 June 1972: a concept album about an alien rock star with five years to save the Earth, played by a bisexual singer with orange hair and Mick Ronson on guitar. On 6 July Bowie sings "Starman" on Top of the Pops and drapes an arm around Ronson, and a generation of British kids, many of them future punks and synth-pop stars, decides on the spot that they can be anyone. Glam has its king.
Curtis Mayfield, "Super Fly"
Mayfield writes a soundtrack for a film about a cocaine dealer and makes it a critique of the film. Released in July 1972, "Super Fly" outgrosses the movie. "Freddie's Dead" and "Pusherman" are funk with a conscience: falsetto, wah-wah, congas and lyrics about what the drug trade does to a neighbourhood. Alongside "Shaft" it makes the soul soundtrack an art form, and it is one of the most sampled records of the hip-hop era.
Wattstax: a hundred thousand people for a dollar
On 20 August 1972 Stax Records fills the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for a concert marking seven years since the Watts uprising. Tickets are a dollar. Jesse Jackson leads the crowd in "I am somebody", the Staple Singers, Isaac Hayes, Albert King, Rufus Thomas and the Bar-Kays play, and Mel Stuart films it. It is the largest gathering of Black Americans outside a civil rights event to that date, and the film is now in the National Film Registry.
Stevie Wonder, "Talking Book", and "Superstition"
Wonder turned twenty-one in 1971, let his Motown contract lapse, and came back with full creative control and a bank of synthesizers programmed by Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff. "Talking Book", released in October 1972, opens with "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" and holds "Superstition", a riff played on a Hohner clavinet through a wah pedal, with Wonder on drums, that goes to number one. It is the first of five albums in five years that no other artist of the decade matches.
Afrika Bambaataa turns a gang into the Zulu Nation
Lance Taylor, a warlord of the Black Spades in the Bronx River Houses, wins an essay contest and a trip to Africa, comes home calling himself Afrika Bambaataa, and steers his crew from turf wars to parties. The Zulu Nation (later Universal Zulu Nation) organises DJs, MCs, b-boys and writers as one culture and names the four elements. The Nation keeps 12 November 1973 as its founding date and this entry follows it. Other accounts put the organisation's real start several years later, once Bambaataa was running block parties, and the argument has never been settled.
Pink Floyd, "The Dark Side of the Moon"
Released 1 March 1973 in America and a fortnight later in Britain. A concept album about time, money, madness and death, built at Abbey Road with tape loops of cash registers, a VCS3 synthesizer, Clare Torry's wordless vocal and Alan Parsons at the desk. It goes to number one for one week and then stays on the American chart for more than seven hundred, the longest run of any album. Prog has its mass-market masterpiece and the LP has its standard for how a record should sound.
Bob Marley and the Wailers, "Catch a Fire"
Released 13 April 1973 on Island. Chris Blackwell took the Wailers' Kingston tapes to London, added rock guitar from Wayne Perkins and clavinet, mixed them for a rock audience and packed the first twenty thousand copies in a hinged sleeve shaped like a Zippo lighter. It sold modestly. It also invented the idea that a reggae group could be an album act with a tour, and it is the reason the world has heard of the music.
Kool Herc plays 1520 Sedgwick Avenue
On 11 August 1973 Cindy Campbell rents the rec room of her apartment building in the West Bronx for a back-to-school party. Her brother Clive, DJ Kool Herc, eighteen, born in Kingston, plays the breaks: the drum sections of funk records, cut back to back on two turntables so the dancers never have to stop. There is no record of this night except the people who were there. It is the date hip-hop calls its birthday.
The Fania All-Stars fill Yankee Stadium
On 24 August 1973 more than forty thousand people, most of them Puerto Rican New Yorkers, pack Yankee Stadium for the Fania label's supergroup: Johnny Pacheco, Willie Colón, Héctor Lavoe, Celia Cruz, Ray Barretto, Larry Harlow, Cheo Feliciano. During "Congo Bongo" the crowd pours onto the field and the show is stopped. Filmed for the documentary "Salsa", it is the night salsa becomes a stadium music and a word the whole world learns.
Stevie Wonder, "Innervisions"
Released 3 August 1973. "Living for the City" is a seven-minute story of a boy from Mississippi arrested in New York, with a radio play in the middle; "Higher Ground" is clavinet funk about reincarnation; "Too High" and "Jesus Children of America" are about the drugs. Three days after release Wonder is in a car crash that leaves him in a coma for days. He recovers, and "Innervisions" wins Album of the Year.
Herbie Hancock, "Head Hunters"
Released 26 October 1973. Hancock had been listening to Sly and James Brown and wanted a band that grooved before it thought. "Chameleon" opens with an ARP Odyssey bass line and rides it for fifteen minutes; "Watermelon Man" is rebuilt around Bill Summers blowing across a beer bottle like a Pygmy hindewhu whistle. It becomes the best-selling jazz album ever made, until George Benson three years later, and a foundation stone of hip-hop production.
Dolly Parton releases "Jolene"
The single comes out on 15 October 1973 and reaches number one on the country chart the following February. Parton says the name came from a young fan who asked for an autograph and the story from a red-haired bank teller who flirted with her husband. A minor-key guitar figure, a plea instead of a threat, and one of the most covered songs ever written. Parton had already written "I Will Always Love You" as her farewell to Porter Wagoner; both are on the same album.
CBGB opens on the Bowery
Hilly Kristal opens a bar at 315 Bowery in December 1973 meaning to book Country, Bluegrass and Blues, which is what the letters stand for. Instead, from March 1974, Television talk him into letting them play, on the condition that bands play their own songs. Patti Smith, the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, the Dead Boys and Richard Hell follow. The room smells of dog and the stage is tiny. Everything American punk becomes is worked out here.
Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, "Grievous Angel"
Parsons died of an overdose at the Joshua Tree Inn on 19 September 1973, aged twenty-six; his road manager stole the body and burned it in the desert. "Grievous Angel", released in January 1974, is what he left: country songs sung with Emmylou Harris, a folk singer he had found in a Washington bar, with James Burton on guitar. Their two voices on "Love Hurts" are the hinge between the Byrds and everything later called Americana.
ABBA win Eurovision with "Waterloo"
On 6 April 1974, in Brighton, England, two Swedish couples in glitter and platform boots win the Eurovision Song Contest with a glam stomp about surrender. It goes to number one across Europe and top ten in America. Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson turn out to be the best pop craftsmen of the decade, and "Dancing Queen" (1976), with its piano glissando and Agnetha and Frida's doubled harmonies, makes them the biggest group in the world outside America.
Kraftwerk, "Autobahn"
Released in November 1974, the title track is twenty-two minutes of Minimoog, vocoder, a rhythm box and a chorus that goes "wir fahr'n fahr'n fahr'n auf der Autobahn": a drive down the motorway as music, cool and clean and slightly funny. Edited to three minutes it goes top thirty in America and the album reaches number five. Two men from Düsseldorf with no guitars are on the same chart as the Eagles, and electronic pop has a starting line.
Grand Wizzard Theodore scratches a record
Around 1975, by his own telling, Theodore Livingston, twelve or thirteen years old, is practising in his Bronx bedroom when his mother shouts at him to turn it down. He holds the record still under the needle with his hand, then rocks it back and forth, and hears a sound. Grandmaster Flash makes it a technique. The scratch turns the turntable from a playback device into an instrument, and it is why a DJ can be a musician.
Keith Jarrett improvises "The Köln Concert"
On 24 January 1975 Jarrett arrives at the Cologne opera house exhausted, in back pain, to find the wrong piano on stage: a small rehearsal instrument with a thin top end and pedals that stick. He nearly cancels. Instead he plays for over an hour in the middle and low registers, in vamps and gospel figures the piano can carry. ECM releases it in November and it becomes the best-selling solo piano album ever made, and the sound of that label.
Willie Nelson, "Red Headed Stranger"
Nelson's new contract with Columbia gives him full creative control, and he uses it on a concept album about a preacher who kills his wife and rides west: mostly his guitar, Bobbie Nelson's piano and almost nothing else, cut in a few days in Garland, Texas. The label thinks it is a demo. Released in May 1975, "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain", a Fred Rose song from 1945, becomes his first number one, and the album goes double platinum.
Bruce Springsteen, "Born to Run"
Two albums in and about to be dropped, Springsteen spends fourteen months on a record he wants to sound like Roy Orbison singing Bob Dylan over Phil Spector's wall of sound. Released 25 August 1975, it is eight songs about getting out of a New Jersey shore town: "Thunder Road", "Jungleland", the title track with its glockenspiel and Clarence Clemons's saxophone. In October he is on the covers of Time and Newsweek the same week.
Queen, "Bohemian Rhapsody"
Released as a single on 31 October 1975: five minutes fifty-five seconds, a ballad, an opera of overdubbed Freddie Mercury voices (up to 180 of them, the tape worn transparent), a hard-rock section and a coda. EMI said it was too long for radio. Mercury gave a copy to DJ Kenny Everett, who played it fourteen times in a weekend. It spends nine weeks at number one in Britain, and the promotional film made to avoid miming on Top of the Pops is the model for the music video.
Patti Smith, "Horses"
Released 10 November 1975 on Arista, produced by John Cale at Electric Lady. It opens with a poet from New Jersey announcing that Jesus died for somebody's sins but not hers, and then tearing into Van Morrison's "Gloria". Robert Mapplethorpe shoots the cover: Smith in a white shirt and braces, jacket over the shoulder. It is the first album out of CBGB, and it says that punk can be literary, female and furious at once.
Donna Summer, "Love to Love You Baby"
A seventeen-minute version of a song Summer had cut in Munich with Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, extended at the request of Casablanca Records boss Neil Bogart so that it would fill a side. It is mostly sighs and moans over a slow disco pulse, and radio bans it, and it goes top three. Summer becomes disco's first international star, and Moroder learns that a groove can be a whole record.
Parliament, "Mothership Connection"
Released 15 December 1975. George Clinton, with Bootsy Collins on bass, Bernie Worrell on synthesizers and the Horny Horns fresh from James Brown's band, invents a myth: a funk spaceship come to rescue the planet, piloted by Star Child. "Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof off the Sucker)" and "P. Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up)" become chants. Clinton commissions a Mothership after the record is out, and from late in 1976 the silver prop lands on stage on the P-Funk Earth Tour. Hip-hop will sample this record more than almost any other.
"Wanted! The Outlaws" goes platinum
RCA releases a compilation of Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Jessi Colter and Tompall Glaser on 12 January 1976, with a fake wanted poster on the sleeve. In November it becomes the first country album certified platinum for a million sales. "Outlaw" is now a marketing category, and the argument Waylon started in 1972, that a singer should choose his own band and producer, has been won at the cash register.
The Ramones release their debut
Recorded in a week for about six thousand dollars and released 23 April 1976. Fourteen songs, twenty-nine minutes, three or four chords each, Johnny Ramone's all-downstroke guitar, Joey's hiccup, and songs about sniffing glue and beating on the brat. It peaks at 111 on the American chart. In July they play London's Roundhouse and members of the Clash and the Sex Pistols are in the crowd. British punk speeds up overnight.
The first twelve-inch single goes on sale
Tom Moulton, who had been making extended mixes on reel-to-reel for Fire Island discos, worked out that cutting a single onto a bigger disc gave it wider grooves and a louder, punchier sound, with room for a longer track. In 1976 Salsoul puts Walter Gibbons's nine-minute mix of Double Exposure's "Ten Percent" in shops: the first commercially released twelve-inch single. The DJ now has a format of his own, and the remix becomes a way of making records rather than a way of playing them.
Stevie Wonder, "Songs in the Key of Life"
Two years late and released 28 September 1976 as a double LP with a bonus seven-inch, it debuts at number one, only the third album ever to do so. "Sir Duke", "I Wish", "Isn't She Lovely", "As", "Pastime Paradise" with its choir and Hare Krishnas, "Village Ghetto Land" on a synthesizer string section. It is the end of a five-year run nobody in pop has matched, and Wonder wins his third Album of the Year Grammy in four years.
"Anarchy in the U.K.", and the Bill Grundy interview
The Sex Pistols' first single comes out on EMI on 26 November 1976. On 1 December, standing in for Queen at short notice on Thames Television's teatime "Today" show, they are goaded by host Bill Grundy and Steve Jones calls him a dirty rotten rotter and worse, live. The next morning's Daily Mirror headline reads "The Filth and the Fury". EMI drops them in January. Punk is now the thing every parent in Britain has heard of.
Gunmen shoot Bob Marley; he plays Smile Jamaica anyway
On 3 December 1976, two days before a free concert meant to cool Jamaica's election violence, seven gunmen enter Marley's house at 56 Hope Road and wound him, his wife Rita and manager Don Taylor. On 5 December he plays the show at the National Heroes Park with his arm in a sling, then leaves the island for more than a year. "Exodus" is written in that exile.
Eagles, "Hotel California"
Released 8 December 1976. Don Felder's twelve-string figure, Don Henley's lyric about a hotel you can check out of but never leave, and a two-guitar coda with Joe Walsh, who had replaced Bernie Leadon and turned the band from country rock to rock. The album sells more than twenty million copies in America. It is the sound of the Laurel Canyon dream after the money arrived, and the band knew it.
Fleetwood Mac, "Rumours"
Released 4 February 1977 by a band in which two couples had just broken up and the drummer's marriage was ending, recorded in Sausalito on cocaine and grief. Every song is an argument with someone else in the room: Lindsey Buckingham's "Go Your Own Way", Stevie Nicks's "Dreams", Christine McVie's "Don't Stop". It spends thirty-one weeks at number one and sells forty million copies. Pop-rock production has a new benchmark for polish.
Kraftwerk, "Trans-Europe Express"
Released in March 1977. The title suite is a train ride rendered in synthesizer and steel percussion, "Metal on Metal" clanking beside it, and "Showroom Dummies" and "The Hall of Mirrors" are cold, funny songs about being looked at. In the Bronx, Afrika Bambaataa plays it at parties. In 1982 he and Arthur Baker build "Planet Rock" on its melody and its rhythm, and electro, and through it much of hip-hop and techno, descends from a German train.
Studio 54 opens
Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager open a nightclub in a former CBS television theatre on West 54th Street on 26 April 1977. Bianca Jagger rides in on a white horse a week later. The door policy, the celebrities and the balcony make disco a spectacle for the rich; the DJs and dancers at the Loft and the Paradise Garage, who invented the music, watch the world confuse the two. In December 1978 the IRS raids it, and the owners go to prison for tax evasion.
Bob Marley and the Wailers, "Exodus"
Recorded in London in exile and released 3 June 1977. Side one is prophecy: "Natural Mystic", "Guiltiness", "The Heathen", the title track's long chant of movement of Jah people. Side two is love and joy: "Jamming", "Waiting in Vain", "Three Little Birds", "One Love/People Get Ready". It stays on the British chart for fifty-six weeks, and it is the record that makes Marley the first Third World superstar, a phrase the press used and he disliked.
Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder, "I Feel Love"
Released 2 July 1977, made in Munich on a Moog modular synthesizer borrowed from the composer Eberhard Schoener. Moroder and Pete Bellotte sequence a bass line that pulses for the whole record and delay it to make it gallop; there is no band, only Summer's voice floating over the machine. Brian Eno, in Berlin with David Bowie, says he has heard the sound of the future. He is right: house, techno and synth-pop all start here.
The New York blackout
On the night of 13 July 1977 lightning knocks out power to all of New York City for twenty-five hours. In the Bronx and Brooklyn stores are looted and buildings burned. Among the things carried out of electronics shops are turntables, mixers and amplifiers, and Bronx DJs later say that the number of crews multiplied in the months after. It is folklore as much as fact, but it is how the culture remembers the summer the city went dark.
Elvis Presley dies at Graceland
Found on the bathroom floor of his Memphis mansion on 16 August 1977, aged forty-two, overweight and dependent on prescription drugs, the year after he cut his last studio tracks in the Jungle Room. Tens of thousands line Elvis Presley Boulevard. RCA's pressing plants run around the clock. The first rock and roll generation has a death to mark the end of its own youth, and the Elvis-imitation industry, and the cult of the dead star, both begin.
Talking Heads: 77
Three art students from Rhode Island and a keyboard player from the Modern Lovers release a debut in September 1977 of tight, nervous songs about buildings and food and, in "Psycho Killer", a murderer who cannot stop apologising, sung by David Byrne in a strangled yelp over Tina Weymouth's bass. Recorded the same year as "Never Mind the Bollocks", it is the other thing punk could be: brainy, funky and polite. Brian Eno produces the next three.
"Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols"
Released 28 October 1977 on Virgin, after EMI and A&M had signed and dropped the band, and after "God Save the Queen" had been kept from number one during the Silver Jubilee, by the chart compilers many still believe. Twelve songs, Steve Jones's guitar recorded in layers, Johnny Rotten sneering about the Berlin Wall and abortion. Shops are prosecuted for displaying the title. It is the only studio album the band makes and it is the whole of British punk in thirty-nine minutes.
The Lynyrd Skynyrd plane goes down
On 20 October 1977, three days after "Street Survivors" was released with the band in flames on its sleeve, Lynyrd Skynyrd's chartered Convair runs out of fuel over Mississippi. Singer Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines and his sister Cassie die. The sleeve is withdrawn. Southern rock's biggest band is finished for a decade, and "Free Bird" becomes something shouted at every concert in America for reasons nobody can quite explain.
"Saturday Night Fever" and the Bee Gees
The soundtrack is released 15 November 1977, a month before the film, with the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive", "Night Fever" and "How Deep Is Your Love" alongside the Trammps, Tavares and KC and the Sunshine Band. John Travolta walking down a Brooklyn street to Barry Gibb's falsetto makes disco the mainstream of the world. The double album spends twenty-four weeks at number one and sells more than forty million copies, and three brothers from the Isle of Man are the biggest act in pop.
Sylvester, "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)"
A gospel-trained falsetto from Los Angeles, out and flamboyant, records in San Francisco with Harvey Fuqua producing and makes the decade's most joyful disco record: a synthesizer pulse borrowed from "I Feel Love" and a voice that testifies. It is a top-forty hit and a number-one club record, and it puts the queer Black church that disco came out of on the radio without apology. Patrick Cowley, who heard a rehearsal and asked to remix it, points the sound toward hi-NRG and house.
Brian Eno, "Ambient 1: Music for Airports"
Eno, recovering from a car accident and lying in bed unable to reach the volume knob on a record of harp music, decides that music can be part of a room like light. "Music for Airports" is four pieces of piano and voice loops of different lengths drifting in and out of phase, with sleeve notes proposing a music as ignorable as it is interesting. The sleeve says 1978; some discographies date the release to early 1979. Either way, ambient has a name.
The Paradise Garage officially opens
After a year of "construction parties" in a former parking garage at 84 King Street in SoHo, Michael Brody's club opens fully on 28 January 1978 with Larry Levan as its only DJ. No liquor, a Richard Long sound system tuned like a studio, and a mostly Black and gay membership who come for Levan's three-hour stories in records. "Garage" becomes the name of a whole style of dance music. It runs until 1987.
Van Halen release their debut
Released 10 February 1978. Track two, "Eruption", is one minute and forty-two seconds of Eddie Van Halen alone, tapping the fretboard with both hands through a Marshall at full volume, a warm-up the producer had left the tape running for. Guitar players stop what they are doing. With David Lee Roth's grin and a cover of "You Really Got Me", the album makes hard rock a party again, and the eighties' guitar hero has arrived a year early.
The One Love Peace Concert
On 22 April 1978 Marley returns to Kingston for a concert organised by two rival political gunmen who had shared a jail cell. During "Jamming" he calls Prime Minister Michael Manley and opposition leader Edward Seaga on stage, joins their hands over his head and holds them there. Peter Tosh, earlier in the night, lectures both men about ganja laws. The peace does not last. The photograph does.
Willie Colón and Rubén Blades, "Siembra"
Released on Fania in September 1978 (some sources say December). Blades, a Panamanian law graduate, writes salsa with a novelist's eye: "Pedro Navaja", a seven-minute street story built on "Mack the Knife"; "Plástico", a satire that ends with a roll call of Latin American nations. Colón's trombones and arrangements carry it. It becomes the best-selling salsa album in history, and it makes the music a place for ideas.
Blondie, "Parallel Lines"
Released in September 1978, produced by Mike Chapman, who had made glam hits for Sweet. Debbie Harry, a former Playboy bunny and CBGB regular, sings power pop, girl-group revival and, on "Heart of Glass", a disco song with a Roland rhythm box, which goes to number one on both sides of the Atlantic in 1979. Punk purists call it a betrayal. It is new wave finding out that it can be pop.
Chic, "Le Freak"
Turned away from Studio 54 on New Year's Eve 1977 despite a guest-list promise from Grace Jones, Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards go home and write a song whose original chorus is unprintable. Rewritten as "Le Freak" and released in September 1978, it sells more than six million copies, Atlantic's biggest-selling single ever. Rodgers's choppy rhythm guitar and Edwards's bass are the tightest thing in pop, and disco has its best band.
Kenny Rogers, "The Gambler"
A Don Schlitz song about advice from a card sharp on a train, cut by Rogers and released in November 1978. He half-talks it over a soft shuffle and it goes to number one on the country chart, wins a Grammy, and spawns a series of television films. Country's crossover to the pop mainstream, which the outlaws had fought and Billy Sherrill's strings had polished, now has its friendliest face.
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five make their first record
Formed in 1978 around Flash's turntables with Cowboy, Melle Mel, Kidd Creole, Scorpio and Rahiem trading lines, the Furious Five were the Bronx's best routine crew. "Superrappin'", released on Enjoy Records in late 1979, is twelve minutes of that routine over a re-played funk track. It does not chart. It is the first record by the group that will make "The Message" three years later, and it is the sound of the party finally reaching the studio.
Sid Vicious dies
John Simon Ritchie, who had replaced Glen Matlock on bass in the Sex Pistols because he looked right, dies of a heroin overdose in a Greenwich Village apartment on 2 February 1979, aged twenty-one, while on bail for the murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. The band had broken up on stage in San Francisco a year earlier. Punk, which had promised no future, has its first martyr, and its first cautionary tale.
2 Tone: the Specials release "Gangsters"
Jerry Dammers, a keyboard player from Coventry, prints five thousand copies of a single on his own 2 Tone label on 4 May 1979, credited to the Special AKA vs Rico, with a cartoon rude boy on the sleeve and a Prince Buster ska tune rewritten about a promoter who held the band's gear hostage. A Black and white band playing Jamaican ska at punk speed, in a city where the National Front marched, goes top ten. Madness, the Selecter and the Beat follow within months.
Joy Division, "Unknown Pleasures"
Released 15 June 1979 on Factory Records in Manchester, in a sleeve of white pulsar waves on black with no words on it. Producer Martin Hannett records the drums one at a time, drenches them in digital delay, and makes a punk band sound like an empty building. Ian Curtis sings in a baritone about losing control. Post-punk has its masterpiece, and the sound of Manchester, and of the 1980s' gloomier half, begins here.
Chic, "Good Times"
Released in June 1979: Bernard Edwards's bass line, an octave-jumping figure that a whole generation of bass players will learn first, and Nile Rodgers's guitar, with lyrics that quote the Depression. It goes to number one in August. Within weeks the Sugarhill Gang are rapping over a re-played version of it, Queen borrow it for "Another One Bites the Dust", and the bass line becomes the most copied in pop.
The Sony Walkman goes on sale
On 1 July 1979 Sony releases the TPS-L2 in Japan: a blue and silver cassette player the size of a paperback, with light headphones and no record button. Co-founder Masaru Ibuka wanted to listen to opera on flights; engineers built it from the Pressman journalists' recorder. Sony expected to sell five thousand a month and sold thirty thousand in two months. Listening becomes private, portable and personal, and the mixtape gets a reason to exist.
Disco Demolition Night
On 12 July 1979 Chicago rock DJ Steve Dahl and the White Sox let fans into Comiskey Park for ninety-eight cents and a disco record. Between games of a doubleheader Dahl blows up a crate of records in centre field. Thousands rush the field, light fires and tear up the turf; the second game is forfeited. The backlash had a racial and homophobic edge that many have named since. Radio drops disco within months, and the music goes back underground to Chicago and Detroit clubs, where it becomes house and techno.
The Fatback Band, "King Tim III (Personality Jock)"
On 25 July 1979 a New York funk band puts a rap on the B-side of its single "You're My Candy Sweet". King Tim III, a radio-style jock, rhymes over the band in the manner of the Bronx parties and of the jive-talking DJs before them. Nobody notices until "Rapper's Delight" arrives two months later, at which point it becomes the answer to the trivia question of the first rap record on a commercial release.
AC/DC, "Highway to Hell"
Released 27 July 1979, the first AC/DC album produced by Robert "Mutt" Lange, who tightens the Young brothers' riffs and puts Bon Scott's leer right up front. It is the band's first American top-twenty album. Seven months later Scott dies after a night of drinking in London, and "Back in Black", made with Brian Johnson, becomes one of the biggest-selling albums ever. The bridge from seventies hard rock to eighties metal is this record.
Michael Jackson, "Off the Wall"
Released 10 August 1979. Jackson, twenty, has met producer Quincy Jones on the set of "The Wiz" and asks him to make his first adult record. "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough", which Jackson wrote, opens with a whispered count-in and a falsetto shriek over a disco groove played by the best session band in Los Angeles; "Rock with You" is Rod Temperton's. Four top-ten singles, the first album ever to do that. The 1980s' biggest star has clocked in.
The Sugarhill Gang, "Rapper's Delight"
Sylvia Robinson, a former soul singer who runs a small New Jersey label, hears rapping at a Harlem club and cannot find a Bronx DJ willing to put it on record. She auditions three unknowns in a car outside a pizza shop in Englewood and has a house band re-play Chic's "Good Times". Released 16 September 1979, the twelve-inch runs fourteen and a half minutes and sells millions. The Bronx pioneers are furious that outsiders got there first. Hip-hop is on vinyl, and the next chapter starts.
Pink Floyd, "The Wall"
Released 30 November 1979, a double album that Roger Waters wrote after spitting on a fan in Montreal: a rock star builds a wall between himself and the world, brick by brick. "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2", with a school choir and a disco beat suggested by producer Bob Ezrin, goes to number one in Britain and America. The album is the last the classic line-up makes together, and the arena rock decade ends with its biggest band walled in.
The Clash, "London Calling"
Released 14 December 1979 as a double album sold for the price of a single one. Punk is three years old and the Clash are already past it: reggae ("Guns of Brixton"), rockabilly ("Brand New Cadillac"), soul, ska and jazz, produced by the drunk and brilliant Guy Stevens. The cover is Paul Simonon smashing his bass at the Palladium, in a layout copied from Elvis's debut. Punk's promise of freedom is kept by breaking punk's rules.
Artists
DJ Kool Herc
Clive Campbell brought Jamaican sound-system culture to the Bronx and then did something nobody in Kingston had: he played only the break, the drum section of a funk record, and cut between two copies so it never ended. That is the breakbeat, and it is the ground every hip-hop record stands on. He never made a hit record himself. He did not need to; he made the form.
- The Merry-Go-Round (live, 1520 Sedgwick Avenue)
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
Joseph Saddler was the technician. Where Herc dropped the needle by feel, Flash marked his records, backspun them to the start of the break and punched phrases in on the beat, turning two turntables into a drum machine years before anyone had one. His five MCs, Melle Mel above all, turned party chatter into rhymed routines. Their 1979 debut did not chart. "The Message" (1982) would make the next chapter.
- Superrappin'
- The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel
- The Message
Afrika Bambaataa
The philosopher king of early hip-hop. A former Black Spades warlord who turned his gang into the Zulu Nation and its energy from turf to parties, Bambaataa was also the DJ with the widest crates: Kraftwerk, the Monkees, calypso, rock, anything with a break. That taste would become "Planet Rock" in 1982 and electro after it. Serious allegations about his conduct surfaced decades later and are part of his record now too. He died in 2026.
- Zulu Nation Throwdown
- Planet Rock
Stevie Wonder
At twenty-one he took control of his own records, and from 1972 to 1976 he made five albums, playing almost every instrument, that nobody in pop has matched: "Music of My Mind", "Talking Book", "Innervisions", "Fulfillingness' First Finale", "Songs in the Key of Life". He made the Minimoog and the clavinet soul instruments, wrote about racism and God and joy in the same song, and won Album of the Year three times in four years.
- Talking Book
- Innervisions
- Songs in the Key of Life
Marvin Gaye
Motown's smoothest singer went inward and outward at once. "What's Going On" (1971) was a protest suite in his own overdubbed harmonies that Berry Gordy did not want to release; "Let's Get It On" (1973) was the opposite side of the same man. He wrote and produced himself and made the soul album a form. His father shot him dead in 1984, a day before his forty-fifth birthday.
- What's Going On
- Let's Get It On
- I Want You
Sly and the Family Stone
Integration, revolution and rhythm: a band of men and women, Black and white, that sang "Everyday People" at Woodstock. In the seventies Sly Stone went dark. "There's a Riot Goin' On" (1971), made largely alone on a drum machine, is the sound of the sixties coming down, and "Fresh" (1973) is the sound of him almost recovering. Every funk bass line since goes back to Larry Graham slapping his in this band.
- There's a Riot Goin' On
- Fresh
Curtis Mayfield
The falsetto that led the Impressions through the civil rights years left them in 1970 and started his own label. "Super Fly" (1972) is funk with soul and social weight, a soundtrack that argued with its own film. He played guitar in an open tuning of his own invention, ran Curtom Records, and wrote for Aretha, the Staple Singers and Gladys Knight. A lighting rig fell on him in 1990 and paralysed him; he kept recording.
- Curtis
- Super Fly
Al Green
With producer Willie Mitchell at Hi Records in Memphis, Green made soul that never raised its voice: a whisper, a moan, a horn section that sighs, Al Jackson Jr. on drums holding everything back. "Let's Stay Together", "Tired of Being Alone", "Love and Happiness". In 1974 a girlfriend scalded him with hot grits and killed herself, and Green went back to church; by 1976 he was a pastor, and by 1980 he sang only gospel.
- Let's Stay Together
- I'm Still in Love with You
- Call Me
Parliament-Funkadelic
George Clinton's space-funk empire: one band under two names, Funkadelic for the acid-rock guitars of Eddie Hazel, Parliament for the horns, hooks and Bootsy Collins's bass. "Maggot Brain" (1971) is a ten-minute guitar elegy; "Mothership Connection" (1975) is a cosmology; "One Nation Under a Groove" (1978) is a manifesto. Hip-hop producers from Dr. Dre outward built G-funk from these records.
- Maggot Brain
- Mothership Connection
- One Nation Under a Groove
Earth, Wind and Fire
Maurice White, a former Chess session drummer, built a band with a horn section, Philip Bailey's falsetto, a kalimba, Egyptian iconography and a stage show with pyramids and levitation. "Shining Star", "September", "Boogie Wonderland": brass, sass and class, funk that sounded like a spaceship and sold like pop. They were the biggest Black band of the decade and the bridge between funk and disco that neither side minded.
- That's the Way of the World
- All 'n All
- September
Donna Summer
The Queen of Disco had a gospel-trained voice and the good luck to be in Munich when Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte were there. "Love to Love You Baby" (1975) was seventeen minutes of sighs over a pulse; "I Feel Love" (1977) replaced the band with a Moog and invented the next thirty years of dance music; "Bad Girls" (1979) proved she could rock. She was the only disco star who came out of the backlash bigger.
- Love to Love You Baby
- I Feel Love
- Bad Girls
Chic
Nile Rodgers's clipped rhythm guitar and Bernard Edwards's bass, with Tony Thompson on drums, locked so exactly that the space between the notes did the work, and they wrote hooks to match: "Everybody Dance", "Le Freak", "Good Times". "Good Times" alone gave hip-hop its first hit, Queen a number one and a thousand bass players their first lesson. After disco died Rodgers produced Bowie, Madonna and Duran Duran, which is to say the 1980s.
- C'est Chic
- Risqué
- Good Times
Bee Gees
Three brothers who had been a sixties ballad group reinvented themselves in Miami with producer Arif Mardin in 1975, when Barry Gibb discovered his falsetto on "Nights on Broadway". "Jive Talkin'", "You Should Be Dancing" and then the "Saturday Night Fever" songs made them the biggest act in the world for two years. Pop geniuses who wrote for everyone from Dionne Warwick to Kenny Rogers once the backlash took their own name off the radio.
- Main Course
- Saturday Night Fever
Sylvester
The flamboyant falsetto of freedom. Sylvester James grew up singing in a Pentecostal church, joined the drag troupe the Cockettes, and with Harvey Fuqua producing made "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)" and "Dance (Disco Heat)" in 1978, remixed by Patrick Cowley: gospel ecstasy on a synthesizer pulse, sung by an openly gay Black man in a gown. He died of AIDS in 1988 and left his royalties to AIDS charities.
- Step II
- You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)
Led Zeppelin
Mythic, monolithic, masters of riff, rhythm and thunder. Jimmy Page produced, John Paul Jones arranged, Robert Plant wailed and John Bonham hit harder than anyone. They took Delta blues, English folk, Moroccan drones and pure volume and refused to release singles, and they were still the biggest band in the world. Bonham died in 1980 and they stopped, which is the rarest thing a rock band has ever done.
- Led Zeppelin IV
- Physical Graffiti
- Houses of the Holy
Black Sabbath
The birth of metal. Tony Iommi's riffs, played with prosthetic fingertips on down-tuned strings, Geezer Butler's lyrics about war and the devil, Bill Ward's swing and Ozzy Osbourne's flat, frightened wail. Six albums in six years from 1970 set the template: heavy, slow, dark, and from a city that made steel. Everything from Metallica to doom to stoner rock is a footnote to "Master of Reality".
- Black Sabbath
- Paranoid
- Master of Reality
Pink Floyd
Atmosphere, politics and existential dread in sonic form. After losing Syd Barrett to acid in 1968 the band spent four years finding a subject, and Roger Waters found it: time, money, madness, war, his father, the wall. "The Dark Side of the Moon" stayed on the chart for fourteen years; "Wish You Were Here" mourned Syd; "Animals" attacked Britain; "The Wall" built a barrier on stage and knocked it down. David Gilmour's guitar made all of it sing.
- The Dark Side of the Moon
- Wish You Were Here
- The Wall
David Bowie
Ziggy Stardust, the space-age icon and glam godfather, was only the first of the decade's Bowies. He killed Ziggy on stage in 1973, went to Philadelphia for soul on "Young Americans", became the Thin White Duke, and then moved to Berlin with Brian Eno and made "Low" and "Heroes", half songs and half synthesizer instrumentals. Every one of those turns started a genre. Nobody in pop changed more, or made change itself the point.
- Hunky Dory
- The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
- Low
Queen
A dentistry student, an astrophysicist, an electronics graduate and a Zanzibar-born art student with a four-octave range. Freddie Mercury's theatricality, Brian May's home-made guitar and their layered harmonies made "Bohemian Rhapsody" the single that proved a hit could be anything. They wrote stadium chants ("We Will Rock You"), disco ("Another One Bites the Dust") and rockabilly, and Mercury sang to the back row of a stadium as if it were the front.
- A Night at the Opera
- News of the World
- Bohemian Rhapsody
Eagles
Country rock's kings of melody and polish. Formed as Linda Ronstadt's backing band, Don Henley and Glenn Frey wrote harmony-drenched songs about California and what it promised, and their greatest hits collection became the best-selling American album of the twentieth century. "Hotel California" is the moment the dream went sour and they wrote it down. Joe Walsh made them a rock band; the cocaine and the lawsuits made them a cautionary tale.
- Desperado
- Hotel California
Fleetwood Mac
A British blues band that lost its guitarists, moved to California and hired an American couple, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, in 1975. Two years later everyone was breaking up with everyone and they made "Rumours", forty million copies of arguments set to Buckingham's production and Christine McVie's piano. Then, with all the money in the world, they made "Tusk", a double album of weirdness that sold a quarter as much and is better.
- Fleetwood Mac
- Rumours
- Tusk
Bruce Springsteen
Signed as the new Dylan, he was really the last rock and roller: a bar-band leader from the Jersey shore who wrote about cars, girls, factories and the exit ramp. "Born to Run" (1975) was the Spector wall of sound with a saxophone; "Darkness on the Edge of Town" (1978), after a lawsuit kept him out of the studio for two years, was what happens when you do not get out. The E Street Band made every show a four-hour argument for being alive.
- Born to Run
- Darkness on the Edge of Town
Joni Mitchell
Introspective genius with unmatched lyrical depth, and the most restless musician of the singer-songwriter generation. "Blue" (1971) stripped everything away; "Court and Spark" (1974) added a jazz band and went top ten; "Hejira" (1976) put Jaco Pastorius's bass under road songs; by 1979 she was recording with Charles Mingus. She painted her own covers, tuned her guitar fifty different ways, and refused every box anyone built for her.
- Blue
- Court and Spark
- Hejira
Carole King
With Gerry Goffin she had written "Will You Love Me Tomorrow", "The Loco-Motion" and "Up on the Roof" for other people. "Tapestry" made honesty beautiful: her own plain voice, her piano, songs about friendship and getting older, and it was the best-selling album by a woman for two decades. She made it possible for a songwriter to be the singer, and for a woman in her thirties to be a rock star.
- Tapestry
- Music
Neil Young
Fragile and fierce, sometimes in the same song. "After the Gold Rush" and "Harvest" made him the softest-selling singer of the era; then he went into the ditch with Crazy Horse, the loudest and sloppiest band in rock, and made "Tonight's the Night" about two friends dead of heroin. "Rust Never Sleeps" (1979) had an acoustic side and a side that punks could respect, and it name-checked Johnny Rotten. He is the only one of his generation who could.
- After the Gold Rush
- Harvest
- Rust Never Sleeps
Elton John
Reginald Dwight, a pub pianist, and Bernie Taupin, a lyricist he met through a newspaper advertisement, wrote a song a day and sold more records than anyone in the world from 1972 to 1975. "Rocket Man", "Daniel", "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", "Bennie and the Jets": piano ballads and glam stompers played in feathers and giant glasses at Dodger Stadium. He made the piano a rock instrument again and the pop star a spectacle.
- Honky Château
- Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
- Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy
Kraftwerk
Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider decided that the guitar was an American instrument and that Germany needed its own pop. Their answer was synthesizers, a home-built electronic drum kit, vocoders and songs about motorways, trains, radios and robots, sung deadpan in suits. "Autobahn" reached the American top five in 1975. Bambaataa built electro from "Trans-Europe Express"; Detroit built techno from "The Man-Machine"; everyone else built synth-pop.
- Autobahn
- Trans-Europe Express
- The Man-Machine
Brian Eno
A self-described non-musician who played a synthesizer in Roxy Music, quit, and spent the decade inventing ways to make records: chance cards called Oblique Strategies, tape loops, treatments. He produced Bowie's Berlin albums, Talking Heads and Devo, named ambient music with "Music for Airports", and made four song albums of his own that art-rock has been copying ever since. The producer as artist starts with him.
- Here Come the Warm Jets
- Another Green World
- Ambient 1: Music for Airports
Patti Smith
A poet who started reading with Lenny Kaye playing guitar behind her, and who found that the reading wanted to be a rock band. "Horses" was the first album out of CBGB and the proof that punk could be literary, female and holy. "Because the Night", written with Springsteen, was a hit in 1978. She retired to Detroit in 1980 to raise children, came back in the nineties, and is still on stage.
- Horses
- Easter
Ramones
Three chords and a snarl, New York's speed freaks. Four guys from Queens who took the same surname, wore leather jackets and ripped jeans, and played two-minute songs about glue, beaches, brats and Nazis at a tempo no band had held before. Johnny Ramone's downstroke guitar is punk's engine. They never had a hit and they never changed, and every punk band since has had to decide whether to sound like them.
- Ramones
- Rocket to Russia
- Blitzkrieg Bop
Sex Pistols
UK nihilism in a safety-pinned package. Assembled by boutique owner Malcolm McLaren, with Johnny Rotten's sneer, Steve Jones's guitar and, later, Sid Vicious as a mascot who could not play, they lasted twenty-six months, one album and four singles. They were banned from most of Britain, dropped by two labels, and made "God Save the Queen" the anthem of the Silver Jubilee. Then they broke up on stage in San Francisco. Punk in Britain starts and ends with them.
- Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols
- Anarchy in the U.K.
- God Save the Queen
The Clash
Punk with political power and genre-bending ambition. Joe Strummer, a diplomat's son who had been a pub-rock singer, and Mick Jones, a Mott the Hoople fan from a tower block, wrote about riots, careers and boredom, and then, on "London Calling", about everything: reggae, rockabilly, soul, ska. They called themselves the only band that matters and, for about four years, they were.
- The Clash
- London Calling
Talking Heads
Art students who played CBGB in preppy clothes and wrote tight, nervous songs about buildings, food and psycho killers, sung by David Byrne in a strangled yelp. Then Brian Eno produced them and they discovered funk and Africa: "Fear of Music" (1979) and "Remain in Light" (1980) turned new wave into polyrhythm. Tina Weymouth's bass is the secret. They are the model for every art-rock band that followed.
- Talking Heads: 77
- Fear of Music
- Psycho Killer
Joy Division
Four men from Manchester who saw the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976 and formed a band that sounded nothing like them. Peter Hook played bass like a lead guitar, Bernard Sumner played guitar like a texture, Stephen Morris drummed like a machine, and Ian Curtis sang like a man watching himself from outside. Producer Martin Hannett made it sound like a cathedral in winter. Curtis hanged himself in May 1980; the other three became New Order.
- Unknown Pleasures
- Closer
Bob Marley and the Wailers
Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer had been a ska vocal group in 1963. By 1973 they were the first reggae band sold to the world as a rock act, and by 1975 Marley was alone at the front with the Barrett brothers, the I-Threes and Junior Marvin's guitar. Prophet, lover, footballer, Rastafarian, he was shot in 1976, played a peace concert with his arm in a sling, and died of cancer in 1981 at thirty-six. No musician from a poor country has ever mattered more to the rich ones.
- Catch a Fire
- Natty Dread
- Exodus
Lee "Scratch" Perry
The producer as madman and prophet. Perry ran the Upsetters, produced the Wailers' best early records, and in 1973 built a four-track studio behind his house called the Black Ark, where he made records that sound like they were recorded underwater in a dream: tape echo, phasing, drums that drop out, animal noises. The Black Ark burned, and both how and when are argued: some accounts have Perry setting it alight himself at the end of the 1970s, others an electrical fire in 1983 after an attempt to rebuild it. Dub, trip-hop and every producer who thinks the studio is an instrument owe him.
- Super Ape
- Heart of the Congos (The Congos)
- War ina Babylon (Max Romeo)
Willie Nelson
A Nashville songwriter who had written "Crazy" and "Night Life" for others went home to Texas in 1972, grew a beard and found the hippies and the rednecks would share a dance floor at the Armadillo. "Red Headed Stranger" (1975), so bare the label thought it was a demo, made him a star at forty-two; "Stardust" (1978), an album of Tin Pan Alley standards, kept him one. He phrases behind the beat like a jazz singer and plays a gut-string guitar with a hole worn through it.
- Shotgun Willie
- Red Headed Stranger
- Stardust
Waylon Jennings
Buddy Holly's bass player who gave up his seat on the plane in 1959. In Nashville he fought RCA for the right to record with his own band and pick his own producer, and won in 1972. "Honky Tonk Heroes" (1973), Billy Joe Shaver's songs sung in Waylon's bottom-of-the-well baritone over a phased Telecaster, is the outlaw sound; "Wanted! The Outlaws" (1976) sold it to a million people. He later said the word outlaw was a marketing gimmick, which is true, and beside the point.
- Honky Tonk Heroes
- Dreaming My Dreams
- Wanted! The Outlaws
Dolly Parton
The fourth of twelve children in a one-room cabin in the Smokies, she came to Nashville the day after high school and became Porter Wagoner's duet partner on television. In the seventies she wrote her way out: "Coat of Many Colors" about being poor and proud, "Jolene" about a rival, "I Will Always Love You" as a resignation letter to Porter, and by 1977 "Here You Come Again" made her a pop star. She wrote them all herself, which people forgot because of the hair. She died in 2026.
- Coat of Many Colors
- Jolene
- Here You Come Again
Emmylou Harris
A folk singer Gram Parsons found in a Washington bar and taught country by singing it with her. After he died in 1973 she carried his idea, the Louvin Brothers and the Byrds in one voice, through a run of albums with the Hot Band, James Burton and Rodney Crowell, and later Ricky Skaggs, that kept traditional country alive inside country rock. Her harmony is the sound of the decade's best records by other people, and her own are as good.
- Pieces of the Sky
- Elite Hotel
- Luxury Liner
Miles Davis
Having invented cool, modal and the sixties quintet, Davis heard Hendrix and Sly and plugged in. "Bitches Brew" (1970) sold half a million and split jazz in two; "A Tribute to Jack Johnson" was a rock record; "On the Corner" (1972) was funk chopped into tape loops that nobody understood for twenty years; "Agharta" (1975) was a wah-wah trumpet in a wall of noise. He stopped in 1975, ill and exhausted, and did not play again until 1981.
- Bitches Brew
- A Tribute to Jack Johnson
- On the Corner
Herbie Hancock
Miles's pianist in the sixties became the decade's most restless keyboard player: the Mwandishi band's spacey electronics, then "Head Hunters", a funk record that outsold every jazz album before it, then "Thrust", then disco, then the vocoder. He was the first jazz musician to treat the Fender Rhodes, the Minimoog and the ARP as his instruments rather than novelties, and hip-hop producers have been sampling him since the first sampler.
- Head Hunters
- Thrust
- Chameleon
Weather Report
Joe Zawinul, an Austrian keyboard player, and Wayne Shorter, the saxophonist and composer of Miles's quintet, formed the fusion group that lasted. Early albums were abstract; then Jaco Pastorius arrived on fretless bass and "Heavy Weather" (1977), with "Birdland", became a jazz record that people who did not like jazz bought. Zawinul's synthesizers, Shorter's soprano and Jaco's harmonics are the sound of fusion when it was joyful rather than fast.
- Heavy Weather
- Black Market
Rubén Blades
A law graduate who worked in Fania's mailroom before Willie Colón took him on as a singer, Blades gave salsa its novelist: "Pedro Navaja", a street killing told like a Brecht ballad; "Plástico", a satire of the middle class; "Pablo Pueblo", a working man walking home. "Siembra" (1978) became the best-selling salsa album ever. He later got a Harvard law degree, ran for president of Panama and served as its minister of tourism, none of which is the point.
- Siembra (with Willie Colón)
- Metiendo Mano! (with Willie Colón)
Héctor Lavoe
The voice of salsa. Lavoe came to New York at seventeen, met Willie Colón at eighteen, and the trombonist and the tenor made a run of Fania albums, "El Malo" to "Lo Mato", that defined the Bronx sound. On his own, "El Cantante" (1978), a Rubén Blades song about being the singer everyone loves and nobody knows, was his own life sung back to him. Addiction, a fire, a son's death and AIDS took him in 1993. Every sonero since sings his phrasing.
- La Voz
- Comedia
Celia Cruz
The queen of Cuban music left the island in 1960 and never went back. Fania signed her in 1973, put her on stage at Yankee Stadium, and "Celia & Johnny" (1974) with Johnny Pacheco, opening with "Químbara", made a fifty-year-old woman the face of a young man's music. Her shout of "¡Azúcar!" and her improvised soneos over a montuno are the standard every salsa singer is measured against.
- Celia & Johnny
- Tremendo Caché (with Johnny Pacheco)
Santana
Carlos Santana played a sustaining, singing guitar over timbales and congas, and after Woodstock "Abraxas" (1970) put Tito Puente and Fleetwood Mac on the same number-one album. Then he went looking: "Caravanserai" (1972) was jazz, a collaboration with John McLaughlin was devotional, and the band changed around him every year. He is the reason a Latin percussion section is a normal thing in a rock band.
- Abraxas
- Santana III
- Caravanserai
Aretha Franklin
The sixties made her the Queen of Soul; the seventies she spent proving how wide the kingdom was. "Spirit in the Dark" (1970) and "Young, Gifted and Black" (1972) were her own compositions on piano. "Amazing Grace" (1972), two nights in a Los Angeles church with James Cleveland, became the best-selling gospel album ever made and the record she called her favourite. She played piano on all of it, which people forgot because of the voice.
- Spirit in the Dark
- Young, Gifted and Black
- Amazing Grace
Andraé Crouch
The pastor's son who wrote the hymns a modern church would sing: "The Blood Will Never Lose Its Power", "Soon and Very Soon", "My Tribute (To God Be the Glory)", "Jesus Is the Answer". With the Disciples he put a soul rhythm section and pop harmony under them, toured with Billy Graham, and won Grammys through the decade. Black and white congregations sang the same Crouch songs, which almost nothing else in the seventies managed.
- Take Me Back
- This Is Another Day
- Live in London
ABBA
Two married couples, Agnetha and Björn, Frida and Benny, who won Eurovision in 1974 and turned out to be the best pop craftsmen of the decade. Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus wrote hooks inside hooks and produced them with the care of a Swiss watch; Agnetha and Frida's doubled voices are the sound. "Dancing Queen", "Knowing Me, Knowing You", "The Winner Takes It All" as both marriages ended. Critics hated them and everyone else bought the records.
- Arrival
- ABBA: The Album
- Dancing Queen
Michael Jackson
The eleven-year-old who sang "I Want You Back" for the Jackson 5 in 1969 spent the decade growing up in public: four number ones by 1970, a solo career on the side, a family split from Motown, and then, at twenty, "Off the Wall" with Quincy Jones. That record is the sound of a child star becoming an adult artist and of disco turning into pop. Four top-ten singles, and the knowledge, on his part, that the next one would be bigger.
- ABC (The Jackson 5)
- Off the Wall
- Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough
Deep Purple
Classical meets power chords. Jon Lord's distorted Hammond organ and Ritchie Blackmore's Fender Stratocaster duelled at a volume the Guinness Book once listed as the loudest in the world. "Machine Head" (1972) has "Smoke on the Water", written after a fire at a Frank Zappa show in Montreux, and "Highway Star", which is often named as the first speed-metal song. The Mark II line-up with Ian Gillan lasted four years and set the template for every twin-lead band after.
- Deep Purple in Rock
- Machine Head
- Made in Japan
Judas Priest
From the same city as Sabbath, Priest cut the blues out of metal and put twin lead guitars, leather and studs, motorbikes and Rob Halford's operatic scream in its place. "Sad Wings of Destiny" (1976) and "Stained Class" (1978) drew the shape of the 1980s a few years early. Halford came out in 1998 and the metal world, to its credit, mostly shrugged. Every band in the New Wave of British Heavy Metal was trying to be them.
- Sad Wings of Destiny
- Stained Class
- Killing Machine
AC/DC
Down-under, no-frills rock and roll fire. The Young brothers, Angus in a schoolboy uniform and Malcolm on rhythm, played Chuck Berry riffs at metal volume with a swing that most metal bands never learned, and Bon Scott sang like a man who had already been thrown out of the pub. "Highway to Hell" (1979) was their breakthrough and his last record. They never changed, and were never wrong not to.
- Let There Be Rock
- Powerage
- Highway to Hell
Van Halen
Two Dutch-born brothers, a bass player and a frontman with the grin of a used-car salesman, who played backyard parties in Pasadena until Gene Simmons found them. Eddie Van Halen tapped the fretboard with both hands, played through a Marshall he ran at reduced voltage, and made every guitarist alive start over. David Lee Roth made it a party. Their 1978 debut is the hinge between seventies hard rock and eighties metal.
- Van Halen
- Van Halen II
- Eruption
The Allman Brothers Band
Jam-heavy blues rock royalty. Duane Allman, the best slide player of his generation, and Dickey Betts played harmony leads over two drummers and Gregg Allman's Hammond, and they could stretch a blues into a Coltrane modal jam without losing the groove. "At Fillmore East" (1971) is the record that taught rock bands what a live album could be. Duane died that October and bassist Berry Oakley a year later, three blocks away, and the band carried on because they had to.
- At Fillmore East
- Eat a Peach
- Brothers and Sisters
Lynyrd Skynyrd
Three guitars, a piano, Ronnie Van Zant barefoot at the microphone, and Southern grit. "Free Bird" was a nine-minute elegy that became a request shouted at every concert in America; "Sweet Home Alabama" was a reply to Neil Young that he liked; "Simple Man" and "Tuesday's Gone" were the songs the bands that copied them could not write. The plane crash in October 1977 ended the band and made the songs permanent.
- (Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd)
- Second Helping
- Street Survivors
Blondie
A CBGB band fronted by Debbie Harry, a former bunny and cocktail waitress with a girl-group voice and a punk stare, and written by her partner Chris Stein. They did what the purists said punk could not: disco on "Heart of Glass", reggae on "The Tide Is High", and, in 1981, the first rap record to top the American chart, "Rapture", with a shout-out to Grandmaster Flash. New wave as pop starts with them.
- Parallel Lines
- Eat to the Beat
- Heart of Glass
Elvis Costello
Declan MacManus, a computer operator with a bandleader father, put on horn-rimmed glasses, took Elvis's first name, and wrote more sharp, bitter songs in his first three years than most writers manage in a career. "Alison", "Watching the Detectives", "Pump It Up", "Oliver's Army". With the Attractions he played them at punk speed with sixties organ and a pop sense that punk was not supposed to have. Nobody in new wave packed more words into a verse.
- My Aim Is True
- This Year's Model
- Armed Forces
The Police
A jazz drummer, a prog guitarist and a bass-playing schoolteacher who called himself Sting dyed their hair blond for a chewing-gum advert and pretended to be punks. What they actually played was reggae rhythms under pop songs with a lot of space in them: "Roxanne", "Can't Stand Losing You", "Message in a Bottle", "Walking on the Moon". Stewart Copeland's hi-hat and Andy Summers's chorused guitar are the sound of the 1980s starting a year early.
- Outlandos d'Amour
- Reggatta de Blanc
- Roxanne
Loretta Lynn
Married at fifteen, a mother of four by twenty, she taught herself guitar and wrote about her own life in a way no woman in country had: "Coal Miner's Daughter" (1970), "One's on the Way", "Rated X" about divorce, and "The Pill" (1975), which radio banned and her audience bought anyway. Her duets with Conway Twitty ran all decade. She said what every woman at her shows already knew and had never heard on the radio.
- Coal Miner's Daughter
- The Pill
Records
Miles Davis
Bitches Brew
Play it and you are in a swamp at night with three drummers, two bassists, electric pianos rubbing against each other and a trumpet through an echo unit. Nothing resolves. Teo Macero cut the tapes like film. It is the sound of jazz deciding that Hendrix and Sly were the future, and it outsold everything Davis had made.
Black Sabbath
Paranoid
Recorded in a few days, released seven months after the debut. "War Pigs" is a six-minute anti-war march that lurches; "Iron Man" is the riff every kid learns second; the title track was written in twenty minutes to fill the record and became the hit. This is the album that made metal a genre rather than a mood.
Santana
Abraxas
Congas, timbales, a Hammond organ and a guitar that sustains forever. "Black Magic Woman/Gypsy Queen" and "Oye Como Va" put Peter Green and Tito Puente back to back and both sound like Santana. It went to number one and made Latin rock a shelf in the shop, with a Mati Klarwein painting of an angel and a Black woman on a drum for a cover.
Carole King
Tapestry
A piano, a plain voice and twelve songs by the woman who had written half the hits of the sixties for other people. "It's Too Late", "I Feel the Earth Move", "You've Got a Friend", "So Far Away". It sounds like a living room because it was recorded to sound like one, and that intimacy kept it on the American album chart for six years.
Marvin Gaye
What's Going On
Nine songs that flow into each other, sung in Gaye's own multi-tracked harmonies over the Funk Brothers, David Van DePitte's strings and a party-chatter intro. A Vietnam veteran comes home to Detroit and asks what happened. "Mercy Mercy Me" is about the planet, "Inner City Blues" about the rent. The first soul album that was an album, and the sound of Motown losing an argument to an artist.
Joni Mitchell
Blue
Ten songs about wanting, leaving and coming back, in tunings nobody else used, with almost no band. "A Case of You" on a dulcimer, "River" on a piano that quotes "Jingle Bells", "Little Green" about the daughter she gave up. Mitchell said she had no defences when she made it. Nobody has made a more honest record, and everyone has tried.
Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin IV
No title, no band name, four runes. "Black Dog" and "Rock and Roll" for the riff, "The Battle of Evermore" with Sandy Denny for the folk, "When the Levee Breaks" for the biggest drum sound ever recorded, and "Stairway to Heaven" for eight minutes that FM radio never stopped playing. Play it loud and you understand why the seventies needed stadiums.
Sly and the Family Stone
There's a Riot Goin' On
Murky, slow, overdubbed on a drum machine in a mansion, the tape worn from reuse until the hiss is part of the music. "Family Affair" was a number one that sounds like a hangover; the title track is four seconds of silence. It is the sound of the sixties dream turning to paranoia, and the first great record built on a rhythm box. Prince and D'Angelo start here.
The Allman Brothers Band
At Fillmore East
Two March nights in New York, cut to a double album with seven songs. "Statesboro Blues" with Duane's slide, "Whipping Post" stretched past twenty-two minutes, and not a bar wasted. Two drummers, two lead guitars in harmony and a band that could take a blues into modal jazz and back. Made four months before Duane died.
Aretha Franklin
Amazing Grace
Two nights in a Watts church with James Cleveland at the piano and his choir behind her. The eleven-minute title hymn builds until the congregation is shouting; "Mary, Don't You Weep" and "How I Got Over" are the church Aretha grew up in, sung by the woman who had taken it to the pop charts. The best-selling gospel record ever made, and her own favourite.
The Rolling Stones
Exile on Main St.
Eighteen songs recorded in a basement in the South of France with the vocals buried and the horns leaking into everything. "Tumbling Dice", "Shine a Light", "Sweet Virginia", "Rocks Off". It is blues, gospel, country and soul played by rich men pretending to be poor ones, and it sounds like the greatest bar band on earth. Nobody understood it at the time; everyone does now.
David Bowie
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
A concept album about an alien rock star, played by an English singer in a jumpsuit and orange hair, with Mick Ronson's guitar making everything sound like a riot. "Five Years", "Starman", "Suffragette City", "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide". Play it and you understand why every kid who saw him on Top of the Pops went out and bought eyeliner.
Curtis Mayfield
Super Fly
A soundtrack that argued with its own film. "Freddie's Dead" and "Pusherman" are about what cocaine does to a block, sung in a falsetto over wah-wah, congas and strings. The movie glamorised the dealer; the record buried him. It outsold the film and became one of the most sampled records of the hip-hop era.
Various Artists
The Harder They Come
The soundtrack to the Jimmy Cliff film, and the record that taught America what reggae was. "You Can Get It If You Really Want", "Many Rivers to Cross", "The Harder They Come", the Maytals' "Pressure Drop", the Melodians' "Rivers of Babylon", Desmond Dekker's "007 (Shanty Town)". A compilation that plays like an album because every song is a classic.
Stevie Wonder
Talking Book
Wonder at twenty-two, playing almost everything: the clavinet funk of "Superstition", the Sunday-morning warmth of "You Are the Sunshine of My Life", the synthesizer strings of "You and I", Jeff Beck guesting. It sounds like one man discovering a bank of new instruments and a new freedom on the same day, because it is.
Pink Floyd
The Dark Side of the Moon
A heartbeat, clocks, cash registers, a woman wailing and a saxophone, arranged as a forty-three-minute meditation on time, money and going mad. "Time", "Money", "Us and Them", "Brain Damage". Recorded at Abbey Road with Alan Parsons and released with a prism on the cover, it stayed on the American chart for fourteen years, and it is the record hi-fi shops used to sell speakers.
Bob Marley and the Wailers
Catch a Fire
"Concrete Jungle", "Slave Driver", "Stir It Up", "Stop That Train": the Wailers' Kingston sessions with rock guitar and clavinet added in London so that Britain and America could hear them. Purists prefer the raw Jamaican mixes, released decades later. But this is the record that made reggae an album music and the Wailers a band the world would tour.
Stevie Wonder
Innervisions
"Living for the City" is a seven-minute film about a boy from Mississippi arrested in New York, with the street noise and the cop's voice in the middle. "Higher Ground" is clavinet funk; "Golden Lady" is a love song; "He's Misstra Know-It-All" is about Nixon. The most complete album of Wonder's run, made just before the car crash that nearly ended it.
Herbie Hancock
Head Hunters
Four tracks, two of them over fifteen minutes. "Chameleon" rides an ARP Odyssey bass line until it becomes hypnosis; "Watermelon Man" is rebuilt around a beer bottle blown like a Pygmy whistle. It outsold every jazz album before it and is the record hip-hop producers reach for when they want a groove that thinks.
Dolly Parton
Jolene
The album holds both "Jolene", a plea to a rival over a minor-key guitar figure, and "I Will Always Love You", the song Parton wrote to tell Porter Wagoner she was leaving. Two of the most covered songs ever written, by the same woman, on the same ten-song country LP. Everything else on it is good too.
Gram Parsons
Grievous Angel
Released four months after Parsons died in the desert at twenty-six. Emmylou Harris sings beside him on "Love Hurts", "Hearts on Fire" and "Return of the Grievous Angel", with James Burton on guitar and Elvis's band behind them. It is the record that named the thing between country and rock, and Harris spent the rest of her life carrying it.
Kraftwerk
Autobahn
Side one is a twenty-two-minute drive: a car door, an engine, a Minimoog bass, a vocoder singing about the motorway, passing trucks rendered as filter sweeps. Side two is quieter and stranger. It reached the American top five with no guitars, and it is the first electronic pop record that sounds like it means it, cool and funny and slightly sad.
Willie Nelson
Red Headed Stranger
A preacher kills his wife and her lover and rides west, told in old songs and new ones over Nelson's nylon-string guitar and his sister Bobbie's piano. Columbia thought it was a demo. "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" went to number one anyway. It is country music with all the Nashville strings taken off, and it is the sound of a man finally allowed to make his own record.
Keith Jarrett
The Köln Concert
An hour of solo piano improvised on a broken rehearsal instrument in front of a Cologne audience at midnight. Gospel vamps, folk melodies, long stretches on one chord, and Jarrett groaning along. It sold millions to people who owned no other jazz record, and it made ECM's clean, spacious sound the way a whole generation thought a piano should be recorded.
Bruce Springsteen
Born to Run
Eight songs about getting out of a shore town, recorded over fourteen months to sound like Phil Spector producing Roy Orbison singing Bob Dylan. Glockenspiel, saxophone, a wall of guitars, and Springsteen begging Wendy to strap her hands across his engines. "Thunder Road" opens with a screen door slamming and "Jungleland" closes with a scream. It is the last great rock and roll record made by someone who believed in it completely.
Queen
A Night at the Opera
The most expensive album ever made at the time, and it sounds it: "Bohemian Rhapsody" with its 180 vocal overdubs, "You're My Best Friend", "'39" as a skiffle song about relativity, "The Prophet's Song" as a canon of Mercury voices, and a music-hall number about a bicycle. Four musicians who could do anything, and on this record did.
Patti Smith
Horses
A poet with a garage band, produced by John Cale. "Gloria" rewrites Van Morrison as a hymn to desire; "Land" is a nine-minute fever dream in which a boy named Johnny becomes a horse; "Birdland" is her father seeing a UFO. Robert Mapplethorpe's cover, a woman in a man's shirt and jacket, has been restaged by photographers and record sleeves ever since.
Parliament
Mothership Connection
A concept album about a funk spaceship, with Bootsy's bass, Bernie Worrell's synthesizer bass on "Flash Light's" predecessor "P. Funk" and the Horny Horns from James Brown's band. "Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof off the Sucker)" is a chant you know even if you do not know you know it. Dr. Dre built a genre on this record.
Ramones
Ramones
Fourteen songs, twenty-nine minutes, six thousand dollars. "Blitzkrieg Bop", "Beat on the Brat", "Judy Is a Punk", "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue". Guitar in the left speaker, bass in the right, no solos, and Joey singing like a Ronette with a cold. The Roberta Bayley cover photo of four guys against a wall is the uniform every punk band has worn since.
Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Jessi Colter, Tompall Glaser
Wanted! The Outlaws
A compilation of old tracks with a fake wanted poster on the sleeve, and the first country album to sell a million. "Good Hearted Woman" as a Waylon and Willie duet, Jessi Colter's "I'm Not Lisa", Willie's "Me and Paul". It is less a great album than a great argument: that a country singer should sound like himself, and that people would pay for it.
Stevie Wonder
Songs in the Key of Life
Two LPs and a bonus EP, two years late, and it entered the chart at number one. "Sir Duke" with its horn fanfare, "I Wish", "Isn't She Lovely" with his newborn daughter crying, "As", "Pastime Paradise", "Village Ghetto Land". Everything Wonder had learned in five years is on it, and it is the record Coolio, Prince and every soul singer since raided.
Eagles
Hotel California
The California dream after the money and the cocaine arrived, sung by the people who cashed the cheques. The title track's twin-guitar coda, "New Kid in Town", "Life in the Fast Lane" with Joe Walsh's riff, "The Last Resort" about paving paradise. It sold more than twenty million copies in America and it knew exactly what it was.
Fleetwood Mac
Rumours
Two couples breaking up in the same studio, singing about it to each other. "Go Your Own Way" is Lindsey to Stevie; "Dreams" is Stevie to Lindsey; "Don't Stop" is Christine to John, who plays bass on it. "The Chain" is all five of them agreeing to stay in the band. Forty million copies, and the standard for how a pop-rock record should be built and sung.
Television
Marquee Moon
The first band to play CBGB made a record that sounds nothing like punk: two clean guitars, Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, weaving lines like a jazz quartet over a rhythm section that never rushes. The ten-minute title track climbs, breaks, and climbs again. Every indie band with two guitars playing counterpoint is playing this.
Kraftwerk
Trans-Europe Express
A train ride across Europe as a synthesizer suite, with "Metal on Metal" as the wheels on the rails, and "Showroom Dummies" and "The Hall of Mirrors" as cold, funny songs about being looked at. Bambaataa sampled the title track for "Planet Rock" and gave hip-hop its electro branch. Detroit techno is a Black city listening to this record.
Bob Marley and the Wailers
Exodus
Made in London after the shooting. Side one is scripture and warning: "Natural Mystic", "Guiltiness", "The Heathen", the seven-minute title chant. Side two is "Jamming", "Waiting in Vain", "Three Little Birds" and "One Love". Play it and you have the whole man: prophet on one side, lover on the other. Time magazine later called it the album of the century, which was silly and not wrong.
Sex Pistols
Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols
Steve Jones's guitar overdubbed into a wall, Paul Cook's drums, and Johnny Rotten singing "God Save the Queen", "Anarchy in the U.K.", "Pretty Vacant" and "Bodies" like a man being sick with a grin. It is loud, tuneful and brilliantly produced by Chris Thomas, which the band would hate you to notice. One album, and everything British punk had to say.
Bee Gees and Various Artists
Saturday Night Fever
The soundtrack that made disco the mainstream of the planet: "Stayin' Alive", "Night Fever", "How Deep Is Your Love", "More Than a Woman", plus the Trammps' "Disco Inferno", Tavares, KC and Yvonne Elliman. Forty million copies. Play it and you can see the lit-up floor and the white suit, and you understand why a Chicago DJ wanted to blow it up.
Steely Dan
Aja
Two cynics from Bard College and the best session players in Los Angeles, chasing perfection one take at a time. "Peg", "Deacon Blues", "Black Cow", the title track with Steve Gadd's drum solo and Wayne Shorter's sax. Jazz chords, rock groove, lyrics about losers with expensive taste. It is the record hi-fi shops replaced "Dark Side of the Moon" with.
Weather Report
Heavy Weather
"Birdland" is a jazz-rock tune people whistle, with Jaco Pastorius playing the melody in harmonics on a fretless bass, and it made this the fusion album that sold. "A Remark You Made" is Shorter and Zawinul at their most tender; "Teen Town" is Jaco showing off. Fusion when it was about joy rather than speed.
Van Halen
Van Halen
"Runnin' with the Devil", then "Eruption", then "You Really Got Me": the first five minutes tell you everything. Eddie's brown-sound guitar, tapping and dive-bombs, David Lee Roth's whoops, and a party where hard rock had been getting ponderous. Recorded in three weeks. Every guitarist who heard it went home and either practised or quit.
Willie Colón and Rubén Blades
Siembra
The best-selling salsa album ever made and the one with the most to say. "Plástico" opens as disco and turns into a roll call of Latin America; "Pedro Navaja" is a seven-minute street murder told like a novel; "Buscando Guayaba" is pure joy. Colón's trombones and arrangements, Blades's words. Salsa for people who wanted to dance and think.
Blondie
Parallel Lines
Produced by glam hitmaker Mike Chapman, who drilled a CBGB band until it was tight as ABBA. "Heart of Glass" put a Roland rhythm box under new wave and went to number one; "One Way or Another", "Hanging on the Telephone" and "Sunday Girl" are power pop at its most perfect. Debbie Harry in a white dress on the cover, the band in black suits behind her.
Brian Eno
Ambient 1: Music for Airports
Four pieces made from tape loops of piano and voice, each loop a different length so they drift in and out of alignment and never repeat quite the same way. It was designed to be installed in a terminal. The sleeve says 1978; some trade listings date the release to early 1979. Play it and the room changes. The sleeve notes named a genre, and everything from chill-out rooms to Spotify sleep playlists follows from them.
Joy Division
Unknown Pleasures
Ten songs recorded in Stockport with Martin Hannett, who put the drums through digital delay, recorded a lift shaft and a smashed bottle, and turned a punk band into architecture. "Disorder", "She's Lost Control", "New Dawn Fades". Ian Curtis sings from the bottom of a well. The white pulsar waves on the black sleeve are on more T-shirts than the music is in ears, and the music is better.
Michael Jackson
Off the Wall
Quincy Jones and the best session band in Los Angeles behind a twenty-year-old who had decided to be an adult. "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" with its whispered intro and falsetto shriek, "Rock with You", "Off the Wall", "She's Out of My Life" where his voice breaks. Disco was dying on the radio; this record proved that its groove was going to be pop for the next decade.
The Clash
London Calling
Nineteen songs on two records sold for the price of one: reggae, rockabilly, soul, ska, jazz and punk, about Spanish civil wars, supermarkets, Montgomery Clift and the end of the world. "Train in Vain" was a hidden track that became a hit. It is the record that showed punk could grow up without selling out, and the cover of Simonon smashing his bass has been on more walls than the record has been on turntables.
Pink Floyd
The Wall
Roger Waters's rock opera about a star who walls himself off from his audience, his mother, his wife and the war that killed his father. "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2" with a school choir and a disco beat, "Comfortably Numb" with Gilmour's two solos, "Run Like Hell". Bloated, brilliant and the last thing the four of them made together. On tour a wall was built across the stage and knocked down.
AC/DC
Highway to Hell
Mutt Lange's first job with the band was to make them sound as big as they were live without sanding off Bon Scott's grin. "Highway to Hell", "Girls Got Rhythm", "Touch Too Much", "If You Want Blood (You've Got It)". Chuck Berry riffs at metal volume with a swing. Scott died seven months later, and this is his epitaph.
Deep Purple
Machine Head
Recorded in a Montreux hotel corridor with the Rolling Stones' mobile studio after the casino burned down, which is what "Smoke on the Water" is about. "Highway Star" is often named as the first speed-metal song, and "Space Truckin'" is the sound of an organ and a Strat trying to out-run each other. Jon Lord's organ through a Marshall stack and Blackmore's Strat, and every beginner's first riff.
Jean-Michel Jarre
Oxygène
Six instrumental parts made in a Paris kitchen on an ARP 2600, a VCS3, an Eminent string organ and a rhythm machine, with a Michel Granger painting of a skull inside the Earth on the sleeve. No words, no drums to speak of, and it sold twelve million copies. "Oxygène (Part IV)" is the melody everyone knows, and it made the synthesizer a pop instrument in France before anywhere else.
Suicide
Suicide
Two men, Martin Rev on a cheap organ and a rhythm box and Alan Vega singing rockabilly like Elvis through a nightmare. "Ghost Rider" and "Cheree" are pop songs; "Frankie Teardrop" is ten minutes of a factory worker killing his family, with screams. Crowds threw things at them. Every synth duo, from Soft Cell to the Pet Shop Boys, and every industrial band, started here.
The Mixtape
The decade in tracks, in the order that tells its story. Press Listen on any of them.
Family Affair
Sly and the Family StoneA number-one single that sounds like a hangover: drum machine, Bobby Womack's guitar, Sly mumbling about a family that cannot hold together. Start here because the sixties end here.
What's Going On
Marvin GayeParty chatter, a saxophone, and a man asking his brother what is happening to the country. The song Motown did not want to release, and the sound of soul becoming grown-up.
I Feel the Earth Move
Carole KingA piano riff and a woman in her late twenties singing about desire in plain words. The first track on "Tapestry" and the moment the singer-songwriter became a commercial fact.
Stairway to Heaven
Led ZeppelinRecorders and an acoustic guitar for two minutes, then the drums arrive, then the solo. Eight minutes that FM radio built its format around, never released as a single.
Paranoid
Black SabbathWritten in twenty minutes to fill out an album, and the fastest, tightest thing they ever did. Under three minutes, and the whole of metal is in the riff.
Amazing Grace
Aretha FranklinEleven minutes in a Watts church with James Cleveland at the piano, building until the congregation is on its feet. The link here is the whole album; the hymn is track eight and you should hear how it gets there.
Starman
David BowieThe Top of the Pops performance from 6 July 1972: Bowie in a quilted jumpsuit pointing down the camera and draping an arm over Mick Ronson. Half of British music for the next twenty years was watching.
Superstition
Stevie WonderA clavinet riff through a wah pedal, Wonder on drums, horns punching. It was written for Jeff Beck and Motown made Stevie keep it. The funkiest thing on the radio in 1972.
Time
Pink FloydClocks, a two-minute intro of ticking and rototoms, then Gilmour's solo and a lyric about waking up one day ten years older. Prog with something to say, and the sound of a record designed for a good stereo.
Chameleon
Herbie HancockAn ARP Odyssey bass line, a clavinet, and fifteen minutes of groove. Jazz deciding it wanted to be funk, and the loop hip-hop producers reached for first.
Jolene
Dolly PartonA minor-key guitar figure and a woman begging, not threatening. Parton wrote it and "I Will Always Love You" in the same stretch, and this one has been covered by everyone from the White Stripes to Beyoncé.
Autobahn
KraftwerkThe full twenty-two minutes: an engine, a Minimoog, a vocoder, and a drive down a German motorway that reached the American top five with no guitars. Electronic pop starts here.
Born to Run
Bruce SpringsteenGlockenspiel, a wall of guitars, Clarence Clemons's saxophone, and a kid begging Wendy to get in the car. Fourteen months in the studio for four and a half minutes, and worth it.
Bohemian Rhapsody
QueenA ballad, an opera, a riff and a coda in six minutes. The label said it was too long for radio. The video made to avoid miming on television is the ancestor of MTV.
Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain
Willie NelsonA 1945 Fred Rose song sung over a nylon-string guitar and almost nothing else. The label thought the album was a demo. This was Nelson's first number one, at forty-two.
Gloria
Patti SmithJesus died for somebody's sins, but not hers, and then the band tears into Van Morrison. The first record out of CBGB, and proof punk could be poetry.
Flash Light
ParliamentBernie Worrell plays the bass line on a Minimoog, and the whole of G-funk, Zapp and a decade of hip-hop follows from that decision. P-Funk's first number-one R&B single.
Blitzkrieg Bop
RamonesHey ho, let's go. Two minutes, three chords, downstrokes only. The song British punk sped up to match, and the most useful chant in rock.
Anarchy in the U.K.
Sex PistolsA sneer, a laugh, and the line about being an antichrist. Released five days before the Grundy interview put the band on every front page in Britain.
I Feel Love
Donna SummerA Moog bass line that never stops, delayed to gallop, and a voice floating over it. Eno heard the future in it and he was right: house, techno and synth-pop all start on this record.
Exodus
Bob Marley and the WailersSeven minutes of movement of Jah people, cut in London after the shooting, with a horn line and a bass drop that make it a march. Reggae as scripture and as a dance record at once.
Dreams
Fleetwood MacTwo chords, Mick Fleetwood's brushed drums, and Stevie Nicks telling Lindsey Buckingham, who is playing guitar on it, that players only love you when they are playing. The band's only American number one.
Stayin' Alive
Bee GeesA drum loop made from two bars of another song, Barry Gibb's falsetto, and John Travolta walking down a Brooklyn street. The exact tempo, it turns out, for CPR.
Psycho Killer
Talking HeadsTina Weymouth's bass line, a chorus half in French, and David Byrne apologising for being a murderer. The other thing punk could be: nervous, funky, and smart.
Pedro Navaja
Willie Colón and Rubén BladesA knife, a woman with a gun, a drunk who takes the money, told over seven minutes of trombones. Salsa's "Mack the Knife" and the best-selling Latin record of its decade.
Good Times
ChicBernard Edwards's bass line. Learn it and you can play "Rapper's Delight", "Another One Bites the Dust" and half of the next decade. The last great disco single and the first hip-hop hit's foundation.
Disorder
Joy DivisionHook's bass playing the melody, drums like a machine in a cathedral, and Ian Curtis waiting for a guide to come and take him by the hand. Punk's energy turned into post-punk's space.
Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough
Michael JacksonA whispered count-in, a shriek, and a groove that disco's obituary writers had not heard yet. Twenty years old and writing his own hits. The next decade starts here.
Rapper's Delight
The Sugarhill GangFourteen and a half minutes of party rhymes over a re-played "Good Times". The Bronx pioneers hated it, and it is the moment the beat that began in a rec room in 1973 became a record the whole world could buy.
London Calling
The ClashThe Thames flooding, the ice age coming, and Joe Strummer howling like a wolf at the end. Punk three years old and already writing its own apocalypse. End the decade here.
What Came Next
By New Year 1980 the seventies' biggest sounds were all in trouble and all about to win. Disco had been declared dead at Comiskey Park and was quietly becoming house in Chicago and techno in Detroit, and, through Michael Jackson and Chic's Nile Rodgers, the sound of eighties pop. Punk had burned out and its children, post-punk, new wave and hardcore, were everywhere. Metal had a new wave coming from Britain and a new guitar hero in Pasadena. Country had two roads, the outlaws and the pop, and would take the second.
The machines were coming. The Minimoog and the ARP had made synthesizers instruments; the Fairlight had just made sampling possible; the Roland TR-808 drum machine was months away. Kraftwerk, Moroder, Eno and Suicide had shown what electronic pop could be, and a generation of British kids who had seen Bowie on Top of the Pops in 1972 were about to buy synthesizers and make it. MTV would go on air on 1 August 1981 and turn the promotional film Queen made for "Bohemian Rhapsody" into an industry.
And in the Bronx, "Rapper's Delight" had proved that the party could be a record. Kurtis Blow, Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa and a teenager named Russell Simmons were about to find out what else it could be. Bob Marley had two years left. Elvis was gone. John Lennon had eleven months. The seventies let the freak flag fly, and the eighties would sell it back, and then the beat from Sedgwick Avenue would take over the world.