Everything changed with the music of 1971. No, wait. It was 1973. Check if – 1974 was the year, except it was music, film, and television but only in Los Angeles.
If you’re writing a book or adapting one for television, you could do worse than picking a specific year as your organizational principle. This is especially true when you’re dealing with the tumultuous early 70s, when pop culture went up in flames and then regularly rose again.
The last to take on this challenge are the makers of “1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything”, based on the David Hepworth book “Never a Dull Moment: 1971 – The Year That Rock Exploded”. The eight-part documentary series, which was fully released on Apple TV + last week, offers plenty of evidence that their human subjects are as convinced of the premise as they usually are. “Music said something,” says Chrissie Hynde of the opening credits; “We created the 21st century in 1971,” says David Bowie.
But as difficult as it may be to avoid boomer bias – after all, a sense of generational self-esteem is anchored in the premise – it is perhaps even more difficult to limit the scope of such efforts to a single year: Did the music of 1971? really change things than ’72? What would 1969 say about that? How can you even start making the case?
“Sometimes you have to make a bold statement,” said Asif Kapadia, the series’ overall director and one of the executive producers, on a video call from London. “Our research revealed something amazing about this particular moment when it comes after the 60s, when it comes as a turning point in relation to the 70s.”
The series brings together so many captivating clips and stringing together so much recent history that it is hard to deny the results whether you buy the premise or not.
In 1971 Marvin Gaye transformed the protest song with the sublime “What’s Going On”; the Rolling Stones pounded on their raw classic “Exile on Main St”. (and copious amounts of heroin) in a rented villa in the south of France; Aretha Franklin showed her public solidarity with the imprisoned black activist Angela Davis; and David Bowie wrote the book on rock ‘n’ roll androgyny.
It was also a remarkable coming-out year for female artists. Carole King, who split from husband and songwriting partner Gerry Goffin in 1968, released Tapestry in 1971 and Joni Mitchell released Blue after her relationship with Graham Nash ended. These weren’t just great albums; there were also personal expressions of independence, resounding screams of defiance and vulnerability in a world that was still often male.
But life just doesn’t organize itself in 12 month periods, even if books and TV series dictate it. No project of this kind could provide the right context without spending time, for example with the Manson family massacre and the Altamont, California disaster in which four people died in a free concert with the Rolling Stones headline – two events from 1969, which signaled the end of the flower power era. The Kent state shootings of 1970 were another such trailblazer that helped set the table for the mood and music to come.
Even if it digresses from 1971, this is top notch cultural history with a killer beat. Sometimes you bend the rules a little.
Think Bowie, who has the last word on the series. The Man Who Sold the World was released in 1970 in the United States, but in 1971 in Bowie’s native England. He recorded the majority of “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars,” which is the highlight of the series, in 1971, but the album was released in 1972. Similarly, the Stones recorded most of “Exile” in this mansion in ’71, but they ended it in ’72, the year the album was released.
“We had a very basic rule that it had to have a very strong footprint in 1971,” said Danielle Peck, the series producer who directed four of the episodes. “It could start in 1969 and end two years later. But most of the event had to be felt in ’71 because we had to have a way to filter out all of these amazing stories. “
Of course, you can remove any ambiguity by adopting subjectivity. Pointing out that he turned 21 in 1971 – and that we probably all consider this personal milestone special – Hepworth doubles in his book: “There is an important difference between me and 1971,” he writes. “The difference is this. I am right.”
At least he thinks he’s right. When Ronald Brownstein, Senior Editor at The Atlantic, decided to celebrate a year, he chose 1974 and decided to include music, film and television. He also limited his geographic focus to the entertainment hub, Los Angeles, which was much more sleepy then than it is now.
The resulting book “Rock Me on the Water: 1974 – The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television and Politics” is a strong argument. Brownstein saw ’74 as the end of an era.
“Losing LA’s cultural supremacy has made a far greater change in American life,” he writes. “The most memorable works of Los Angeles in the early 1970s – from ‘Chinatown’ to ‘All in the Family’ to Jackson Browne’s great album ‘Late for the Sky’ – emerged from the collision of 1960s optimism with growing cynicism and pessimism of the 70s. “
But let’s play the devil’s advocate for a moment with “1971”. What if Hepworth’s Certainty is Justified? What if 1971 is really the be-all and end-all of rock and pop, and not just a year of a lot of cool music coming out? What if “I’m right” isn’t arrogance but accuracy?
A list of 1971 publications is certainly daunting. In addition to those already mentioned, there was Black Sabbath’s “Master of Reality”; Cans “Tago Mago”; the “LA Woman” of the Doors; Aretha Franklin’s “Aretha Live at Fillmore West”; “Led-Zeppelin IV”; John Lennon’s “Imagine”; Bill Withers “Just As I Am”; and Sly and the Family Stones “There’s a Riot Goin ‘On” to start with.
Not bad, says 1972. But look here: Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon”; Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly”; Lou Reed’s “Transformer”; the Staple Singers’ Be Altitude: Respect Yourself and so on.
Quality is in the ear of the beholder – only the writer Andrew Grant Jackson has depicted the meaning of the years 1965 and 1973 in book length – and to his credit, “1971” is aware of this. At best, it avoids the album checklist game that takes up the source book in favor of a decisive cultural history.
It shows the uprising in the prison in Attica and his statements about racial incarceration discrepancies and the conditions of detention in general. It deals with the obscenity allegations made by the British government against Oz, an underground magazine that sparked outrage when 20 teenagers published a special “schoolchildren” issue. (Among the publication’s loudest defenders: John Lennon and Yoko Ono.)
It was a time of social upheaval, not just great music. But they were encouraged by the music, by the empowerment of women and African American and gender warriors. Was 1971 the gold standard for pop, rock and soul? Any answer would be steeped in subjectivity. But it was absolutely a step out of the 60s into a hectic new era, difficult to define but rich in conflict and opportunity.
“I’m sure different people have different arguments,” Kapadia said, “but our point was that at that moment, with the end of the Beatles and the start of other artists, something special happened, who then create what we see now can. “was the music of the future.”
When you see 1971, it’s probably best not to worry if it was “the year music changed everything”. Perhaps it is enough just to appreciate the era and its soundtrack without checking the title.
Now let’s take a look at which albums came out in 1975.
