1972: Great album releases
Forty years have gone by...Forty years, as The House of Freaks once sang...
The following music albums were released forty years ago this year, and I place the album titles in order of my favorites:
"Thick as a Brick"--Jethro Tull
("Brick" is one of the singular musical achievements of the 20th Century by any musical artist or composer in any genre and deserves its own place in the list provided here)
"Close to the Edge"--Yes*
"Foxtrot"--Genesis
"Grand Wazoo"--Frank Zappa
"Banco del Mutuo Soccorso"--Banco del Mutuo Socorso
"Storia di un minuto"--Premiata Forneria Marconi (affectionately called PFM)
"Islands"--King Crimson
"Three Friends"--Gentle Giant
"Prologue"--Renaissance (first album with the incomparable Annie Haslam)
"Trilogy"--Emerson Lake & Palmer
"School's Out"--Alice Cooper (Band, not simply the individual)
"Flash"--Flash (debut album of ex-Yes alumni)
"Eat a Peach"--The Allman Brothers Band
"Fifth"--Soft Machine
"Let's Make Up and Be Friendly"--Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band
All of these albums represent remarkable and amazing musical achievements. During the era from 1967 to 1975, there was something in the air with respect to music, musicianship and an overall creativity and innovation of sounds ("air" art or sculptures, as Frank Zappa called music). And that era has simply not been equaled since then. In fact, nearly every sound today in pop, rock, post-rock, jazz or even modern classical etc. owes a debt to this era, which, as more careful readers of this blog know, was destroyed as much by crass, commercially compromised radio programmers and the idiocy and cynicism of corporate news media rock critics as anything else.
In every of those years in that era, my friends and I, who were budding musicians or music theoreticians, would greet the new year with anticipation: What outstanding music will be released this year? Who will it be this time? Will the music always get better and better?
By the mid-1970s, as disco "music" and then later punk bands began to permeate the cultural landscape, we began to understand punctuated equilibrium and much later full house concepts that Stephen Jay Gould discerned, and then helped explain and popularize...I never made my peace with disco or its even more violent and delinquent child rap/hip-hop, but I did like punk from the start, mostly because it made disco seem lame to those who are slaves to corporate media inspired trends.
God Save the Queen, indeed.
* Yes also released the "Fragile" album in the US in February 1972, but the album was released in England and Europe in November 1971. There was a delay back then for reasons I never understood, though I have speculated that it had to do with tour scheduling.
posted by Mitchell J. Freedman @ 7:19 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Mitch, you always did miss the mark when it came to Disco as well as Rap and Hip Hop... That said, 1972 also gave us: Lou Reed's Transformer, T. Rex: The Slider, David Bowie: Ziggy Stardust, Grateful Dead: Europe '72 (live album but full of then-brand new songs that would become classics), Neil Young: Harvest, Big Star: #1 Record, Stevie Wonder: Talking Book, Miles Davis: On The Corner, The Kinks: Muswell Hillbillies, Rolling Stones: Exile On Main Street, Nick Drake: Pink Moon, Steely Dan: Can't Buy A Thrill, Randy Newman: Sail Away, Todd Rundgren: Something/Anything and a whole slew of other records that complement and in some cases trump some of his choices. Neverthless...if it weren't for you, I would have never heard Gentle Giant!
Great to hear from you, Eric!
I admit I forgot about some of those albums, like Muswell Hillbillies, one of my all time favorite Kinks albums. And yes, Sail Away, Harvest, and Something/Anything. Absolutely wonderful albums!
Still, I chose the particular albums I did where the musicianship and composition was top notch (with the exception of the Bonzos, who were more of a comic musicianship)...I must check out that Miles Davis album you mentioned...
And yes, I admit I just don't get disco, rap and hip hop. I continue to see rap and much of hip hop as a social pathology posing as an art form. They tend to be the musical equivalent to Chris Burden shooting himself in the arm and saying, "Performance Art!"
Will The Circle Be Unbroken came out in '72- a 3 record album by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band that introduced a lot of folks to Doc Watson, Merle Travis, Vassar Clements, Earl Scruggs & many other fantastic musicians. Very influential record - might have been the start of the genre now known as Americana music.
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