1975, The Year in Review

The Vietnam War ends in April 1975 as Saigon falls and South Vietnam surrenders; the last of the U.S. forces flee by air from the U.S. Embassy.

In the UK, the conservative party chooses Margaret Thatcher as its leader, the first time a woman has occupied the role.

The economy is in the shitter.   Oil prices are way up, inflation follows, and then unemployment. President Ford declares a recession.

Spanish dictator Francisco Franco dies. Ex-teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa disappears. The Baader-Meinhof Gang attacks the German embassy in Sweden, killing two hostages during an 11-hour siege.

After being kidnapped in 1974 by members of the terrorist group Symbionese Liberation Army and subsequently raped and threatened with death, Patty Hearst, the granddaughter of American publisher William Randolph Hearst, joins the group in robbing a bank and other crimes. She is captured, tried, and sentenced.  Future President Jimmy Carter will later commute her sentence, and President Bill Clinton pardon it.

The first blockbuster, Jaws, is released, as well as such classics as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Three Days of the Condor, Dog Day Afternoon, Shampoo, and for a bit of twisted fun, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. For those who would soon begin to prefer their movies at home, Betamax and VHS tapes are introduced.

1975 is a great year for music, with many undisputed classics being released. Bruce Springsteen makes the covers of both Time and Newsweek in the same week. And, seeds of what is to come—the Sex Pistols play their very first show. They are very loud.

My Top 6 Albums of 1975

As always, you can jump to the playlist at the bottom of each post to listen while you read.

Within each tier (Top 6, Next 6, etc.), all albums are listed roughly chronologically (all release dates from Wikipedia, unless otherwise noted).

Bob Dylan
Blood on the Tracks

Released 1975/01/17

Bob Dylan has staunchly denied that Blood on the Tracks is about the decaying of his relationship with his first wife, Sara Dylan—née Shirley Noznisky, later Sara Lownds—whom he had married in 1965 and would divorce in 1977. And I’ll take him at his word.

Yet it’s surely not a stretch to suggest that the album has probably been greatly informed by the experience, even if its songs themselves may not be directly autobiographical. Throughout, Dylan tells of doomed relationships, of searches for lost loves that can’t be shaken from memory, of regrets, of conflicts embedded deep within the origins of a romance that can never be resolved.

“Tangled Up in Blue” reflects on the past, present, and future of a relationship in flux. “Simple Twist of Fate” tells of a brief fling that leaves a mark. “Shelter from the Storm” pays tribute to the woman who saved him (at least temporarily) from his demons. “If You See Her, Say Hello,” as the title makes plain, asks the listener to keep an eye out for a lost love and wish her well.

Throughout the album, the pervading feelings are those of loss, longing, and regret, only briefly touching upon bitterness with “Idiot Wind,” with its chorus of “You’re an idiot, babe / It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe.” (Although the song eventually concludes, “We’re idiots, babe,” to include them both, the spite of the earlier insults still lingers, I feel.)

Everything here feels both intensely personal yet entirely universal, the only exception being the extended piece “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”—an allegorical tale whose characters and actions are metaphorically linked to different cards and hands of poker—which ties the more personal tales together in an abstract, thematic way.

Dylan, having proven a master of both the surreal and the political in the ‘60s, shows himself an equal master of the personal throughout Blood on the Tracks, one of the great singer-songwriter albums of the ‘70s. In truth, Dylan’s great albums of the ‘60s all contained songs of this ilk, even when the main thrust of the albums may have been elsewhere. Indeed, it could easily be asserted that the entire singer-songwriter movement arose from Dylan’s work. It’s no surprise that many Dylan fans count Blood on the Tracks as their favorite.

Listen to more Bob Dylan.

Notable Critical Mentions:

• Acclaimed Music top albums of the ’70s, No. 8
• Pitchfork: The 100 Best Albums of the 1970s, No. 5
• Rolling Stone: 500 Greatest Albums of All Time (2003), No. 16
• Rolling Stone: 100 Best Albums of the Past 20 Years (1987), No. 12
• The NME Greatest Albums of the 70’s, No. 29
• NME Writers Top 100 Albums (1993), No. 85
• MOJO: The 100 Greatest Albums Ever Made (1995) 39, No.
• Paste: The 70 Best Albums of the 1970s, No. 1
• Uncut: 200 Greatest Albums of All Time (2016), No. 18

Steely Dan
Katy Lied

Released 1975/03

Every silver lining has its dark cloud lurking beneath—or so it seems in the world envisioned by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker of Steely Dan. Sure, on a superficial listen, their songs feel palatable enough—an engaging-but-not-overly challenging pop-rock structure with some touches of jazz here and there. It feels a little clean, a touch fussy, actually.

But the fact that Fagen and Becker named their band after a dildo from the William Burroughs novel Naked Lunch reveals that all is not entirely wholesome beneath the surface.

“Everyone’s Gone to the Movies,” for example, might seem to be about a nice family outing, with its warm calypso steel drum trills, but a closer listen reveals a tale of a dirty old man trying to seduce underage girls by showing them pornographic films. “Doctor Wu” describes a bizarre love triangle between a drug addict, his girl, and the doctor who promises to cure him. And the filthy old geezer in “Daddy Don’t Live in That New York City No More” can’t party and drink and smoke and fuck like he used to—perhaps because he’s dead.

Elsewhere, the nonsensical reigns supreme.   The shifty investor of “Black Friday” proposes a series of erratic responses as he braces for the next stock market crash. “Your Gold Teeth II” suggests that we metaphorically pull out our false teeth (or other improvements we’ve made on ourselves to stave off our eventual decay) and roll them like dice to read our absurdist fates, like some sort of fortune-telling relics. And the narrator of “Any World (That I’m Welcome To)” wants to trade in his life for a new one, to start over fresh.

Katy Lied catches Steely Dan at their peak, for their most consistently engaging set of songs. Check it out.

Listen to more Steely Dan.

Notable Critical Mentions:

• Acclaimed Music top albums of the ’70s, No. 308
• Rolling Stone: 100 Best Albums of the Past 20 Years (1987), No. 98

Neil Young
Tonight’s the Night

Released 1975/06/20

Tonight’s the Night was conceived out of anger, sorrow, and grief. Recorded in 1973, shortly after Young and his backing band Crazy Horse had suffered the losses of guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry to drug overdose, it wouldn’t see release for almost two years.

Two versions of the title track bookend the album. The first begins with some delicate, wavering piano that flickers hesitantly into consciousness, as if from a deep sleep, only to have its melodic line almost imperceptibly continued by guitar; then Young and the band begin singing, faintly at first and gaining in strength until Young begins his narrative—about Berry, his life and death. It’s a haunting opening, personal and intense—at times uncomfortably so.

“Speaking Out” follows, although it’s unclear what Young thinks he’s actually speaking out against—it appears to be a pledge of faith to someone he loves, amid a period of searching and uncertainty. But the music crystallizes much that is great about the album into a single track. Young’s voice sounds tired and weary, and the band plays the song’s country-blues in loose arrangement, as if in a daze but still managing to somehow hold things together. Instruments fade in and out of focus at times like voices from a lazy, meandering dream. This is not a rocking album—it’s one to be listened to alone, on a quiet, melancholy evening, with the lights turned low.

It’s an album whose quiet touches demand repeated listens. I could listen to the opening guitar of “Albuquerque” over and over—something about it just touches me. And the rest of the song, about someone who just has to get away, is pitch-perfect in its simplicity: “So I’ll stop when I can,” mumbles Young, “Find some fried eggs and country ham / I’ll find somewhere where they don’t care / Who I am.”

Elsewhere, Young borrows the tune of the Stones’ “Lady Jane” when he claims to be too stoned to sing his own. “I’m climbing this ladder / My head in the clouds / I hope that it matters / I’m having my doubts,” sings Young, almost as if to himself. The song feels a bit like a wasted, weary and despairing rewrite of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” in which all that peacenik optimism appears only as a pipe dream.

Best of all, “Tired Eyes” recounts a cocaine deal gone bad. Young’s spoken delivery feels like a conversation, a half-dazed retelling of the story. “Well he shot four men in a cocaine deal / And they left them lyin’ in an open field / Full of old cars with bullet holes in the mirrors,” Young murmurs. And then, “He tried to do his best, but he could not”—it’s a striking moment, when the horror of the murder is reflected back in the despair of the perpetrator. “Please take my advice,” Young speaks and sings in the chorus, repeatedly, in a plaintive, anguished whine. “Open up the tired eyes.”

If the rest of the album recounts the personal losses Young has felt, then “Tired Eyes” does the same and more, expanding the scope to encompass the wasteland of American society, the death of ‘60s idealism and protest. In an era of arena rock bombast and glam-rock shimmer and shine, the quietly gritty feel of Tonight’s the Night was too much for the record company to initially accept. In the end, Young pushed it through, thankfully. To this day, Tonight’s the Night remains a highlight of Young’s career, and a landmark album of the decade.

Playlist Note:

• As of the writing of this post, Neil Young’s catalog is not available on Spotify.  From Tonight’s the Night, my selections are “Albuquerque,” “Borrowed Tune,” and “Tired Eyes.”

Notable Critical Mentions:

• Acclaimed Music top albums of the ’70s, No. 63
• SPIN: The Top 100 Alternative Albums (SPIN Alternative Record Guide, 1995), No. 14
• Rolling Stone: 500 Greatest Albums of All Time (2003), No. 331
• Rolling Stone: 100 Best Albums of the Past 20 Years (1987), No. 26
• The NME Greatest Albums of the 70’s, No. 43
• NME Writers Top 100 Albums (1993), No. 94
• MOJO: The 100 Greatest Albums Ever Made (1995), No. 83
• Uncut: 200 Greatest Albums of All Time (2016), No. 163

Bruce Springsteen
Born to Run

Released 1975/08/25

On Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen takes the rambling street-poet storytelling of his earliest work and gives it a more coherent storytelling structure and dramatic push and pull.

A part of me still prefers the less-manicured ramblings of Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., I must confess. But it’s impossible to deny the majestic, mythic power of Born to Run, especially on such classic cuts as “Thunder Road,” the title track, and the epic “Jungleland.”

“Thunder Road” opens the album beautifully, first with some lively piano and a touch of plaintive harmonica, which lasts until Springsteen enters with some of the more memorable opening lines of the time:

The screen door slams, Mary’s dress sways
Like a vision, she dances across the porch as the radio plays
Roy Orbison singing for the lonely
Hey, that’s me, and I want you only
Don’t turn me home again
I just can’t face myself alone again

In one short stanza, Springsteen manages to paint a beautiful image of a girl dancing across a porch, toss in a Biblical reference (I mean, any character named Mary, especially when portrayed in such a light…), allude to rock and roll and Roy Orbison and the power of music, and portray a down-and-out narrator desperate for one more chance at love. It’s almost the recipe-book for a huge chunk of Springsteen’s work. Musically, the band adds instrumentation in stages as the verses progress, until the band has worked up a passionate energy, as Springsteen tries to tempt his love to run away with him.

The same basic motifs fuel “Born to Run,” with even more power and urgency, right from the drop. It’s justifiably one of Springsteen’s—and rock and roll’s—most famous songs, a tale of a sad and lonely young man desperate to find someone he can escape with to search for fulfillment and meaning, far away from where he’s from, a story ripe with both frustration and hope.

Album closer “Jungleland” feels cinematic in scope and ambition, hearkening back to his earlier street tales (like “Lost in the Flood”) as well as West Side Story and more. Main character the Magic Rat takes a break from the partying in Harlem to head to New Jersey to chase after a barefoot girl. Meanwhile, street gangs face off in choreographed fashion until cops arrive to break up the dance. The Rat gets the girl, and then tries returning to Harlem, only to be gunned down. No one pays much mind. “The street’s on fire in a real death waltz,” and the poets of the street are too captivated by it all to write anything down. Throughout, the music surges and flows in dramatic fashion. And there’s a famous saxophone solo, courtesy of Clarence Clemons.

But not every song here feels like an epic. “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out” tells the story of the band’s origins in a raucous block party of horns and groove. One of Springsteen’s more haunting tales, “Meeting Across the River” gives a first-person account of a young street tough trying to prove himself to his girl. The listener can’t help feeling the speaker is doomed to fail. Both songs, two of the album’s best, keep things simple, in both musical structure and narrative; not only do they work splendidly on their own terms, but they add a necessary break from the melodrama that pulses through the rest of the album.

Indeed, there are few albums in rock history that have created such a fully realized and romanticized mythology of the street, such an all-embracing portrait of dissatisfied youth and its endless struggle to find love and strike out for somewhere new. Born to Run towers over most of the mainstream rock of its time.

Listen to more Bruce Springsteen.

Notable Critical Mentions:

• Acclaimed Music top albums of the ’70s, No. 5
• Rolling Stone: 500 Greatest Albums of All Time (2003), No. 18
• Rolling Stone: 100 Best Albums of the Past 20 Years (1987), No. 8
• MOJO: The 100 Greatest Albums Ever Made (1995), No. 41
• Paste: The 70 Best Albums of the 1970s, No. 5
• Uncut: 200 Greatest Albums of All Time (2016), No. 96

Bob Marley and The Wailers
Live!

Released 1975/12/05

I’m not ordinarily a big fan of live albums.

However. There are a rare few bands who are absolutely best heard in the live context. James Brown, for instance, knows how to work a funk groove and tease an audience so well, and always tends to pull out his best material for his live sets. Johnny Cash is also best known for his live albums, quite deservedly. Other artists have attained a consistency of approach in their live music that doesn’t come across in their inconsistent studio work—artists as diverse as Townes Van Zandt and John Cale come to mind. Some artists simply released their most iconic work live—Hawkwind, for example.

And I’d argue that Bob Marley and the Wailers belong in that select group. Live! is, for me, their best album, hands-down. (Babylon by Bus kicks it pretty hard, too.)   Now—grain of salt, here—I’m no reggae expert; but my insatiable quest to listen to nearly everything under the sun has led me to listen to far more reggae than the typical non-reggae expert would ever dream of hearing. And Live! Most certainly ranks among my favorite reggae albums ever.

With Marley, a live set will inevitably miss some of the quirky production details of Lee “Scratch” Perry or Chris Blackwell or whoever else might be twiddling the knobs in the mix. But what the live set might lack in production, it more than makes up for with the energy the ensemble and crowd bring to the occasion. Marley—with a chorus of singers singing jubilantly behind him, and the crowd cheering and clapping and singing along—simply cannot be topped.

To hear all of Marley’s essential songs, you’ll have to go elsewhere. There’s simply not enough space here to fit it all. But everything here is essential, and the overall experience can’t be beat. There is no better context in which to hear “Lively Up Yourself” or “Get Up, Stand Up” than here.

Listen to more Bob Marley and the Wailers.

Notable Critical Mentions:

• Acclaimed Music top albums of the ’70s, No. 106
• Rolling Stone 200: The Essential Rock Collection

Patti Smith
Horses

Released 1975/12/13

“Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” So begins the opening track of Patti Smith’s Horses—“Gloria,” a loose re-interpretation of the Van Morrison song, originally sung by his band Them.

Over hushed piano chords, Smith murmurs and sing-speaks her lines; gradually, her vocals and the musical accompaniment pick up the pace and intensity to burst forth into full-fledged, frenzied rock and roll, eventually arriving at a punk-fueled climax. It’s one of the more remarkable six minutes of the decade. Exhilarating, devastating, cathartic.

“Free Money,” about Smith’s mother’s dreams of winning the lottery (without actually buying a ticket), works in a similar way, starting soft and slowly building toward a blistering conclusion. One could easily make the claim that “Gloria” and “Free Money” are the first true punk songs.

In contrast, the lyrically flowing “Birdland” features Smith’s stream of consciousness poetry backed by frenzied improvisational guitar scrawl. And “Land” fuses both the flowing improvisational spoken word mode with the frenzied propulsion of punk in a ten-minute outburst of passion. Elsewhere, the band incorporates other influences—the white-girl reggae of “Redondo Beach,” for example. Somehow the disparate elements just work.

And the world had never heard a vocalist quite like Patti Smith. One minute, she can unleash a torrent of rapid-fire poetic delivery; the next, she’ll sing her lines twisted, stretching out her Jersey accent in a brassy drawl. Even her stance on the album cover photo feels iconic, as she stares out confrontationally at the viewer in her man’s white button-down shirt and shaggy hair, a far cry from the dolled-up, sexualized looks of many a female rocker of the time (and now, too, of course).

Indeed, her poetic persona seems beyond gender. “Gloria,” for example, seems sung from the point of view of a man (or a lesbian). Yet the music is far from neutered—it exudes an ambiguous yet raw sexual energy throughout. Surely the shape of “Free Money”—with its tender introductory explorations functioning as a foreplay that leads inexorably toward the apocalyptic thrust and shudder of the song’s final, dying notes—mirrors that of sex more than almost anything in rock and roll, before or since.

Horses, then, is a landmark album, vital in the development of punk rock primitivism, of spoken word poetry, of avant-garde noise, of alternative rock aesthetics, and of women in rock. Don’t miss it.

Listen to more Patti Smith.

Notable Critical Mentions:

• Acclaimed Music top albums of the ’70s, No. 9
• SPIN: The Top 100 Alternative Albums (SPIN Alternative Record Guide, 1995), No. 6
• Rolling Stone: 500 Greatest Albums of All Time (2003), No. 44
• Rolling Stone: 100 Best Albums of the Past 20 Years (1987), No. 16
• The NME Greatest Albums of the 70’s, No. 8
• NME Writers Top 100 Albums (1993), No. 31
• MOJO: The 100 Greatest Albums Ever Made (1995), No. 10
• Paste: The 70 Best Albums of the 1970s, No. 29
• Uncut: 200 Greatest Albums of All Time (2016), No. 70

Here’s the 1975: The Year in Review playlist for you—three tracks per album.

I’ll be building the playlist as I go, adding to it as I complete different tiers of commentary.  By the time I finish all Year in Review posts for 1975, the playlist will be complete! Enjoy!

Playlist Note:

• As of the writing of this post, Neil Young’s catalog is not available on Spotify.  From Tonight’s the Night, my selections are “Albuquerque,” “Borrowed Tune,” and “Tired Eyes.”

More 1975, The Year in Review

More Years in Review of the 1970s…

Art Citations:

• Blood on the Tracks: By Blood on the Tracks album cover, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2283078
• Katy Lied: Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1152270
• Tonight’s the Night: By Derived from a scan of the album cover (creator of this digital version is irrelevant as the copyright in all equivalent images is still held by the same party). Copyright held by the record company or the artist. Claimed as fair use regardless., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3098459
• Born to Run: By http://is5.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Music3/v4/2d/02/4a/2d024aaa-4547-ca71-7ba1-b8f5e1d98256/source/100000×100000-999.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50362132
• Live!: By Derived from a digital capture of the album cover (creator of this digital version is irrelevant as the copyright in all equivalent images is still held by the same party). Copyright held by the record label or the artist. Claimed as fair use regardless., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1943155
• Horses: By The cover art can be obtained from Arista Records., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=315316