The premise of this enjoyable book sounds like one of those slightly over-emphatic late-night assertions by the Hornby-esque music nerd to the assembled company which has decamped after the pub to the North London bedsit of one of their number, to rummage through the record collection, debate the relative merits of Joni Mitchell and Carole King and finish off whatever miscellaneous bottles can be dug out of forgotten kitchen cupboards. (If that sounds a little retro - the "record collection" bit? - then that is entirely appropriate, as we will see.)
Anyway, in this case, our music nerd is the author, David Hepworth, whose nerdism became his profession, and his assertion is that 1971 was the greatest, most fecund, most propitious year in the history of rock music, with an outpouring of unassailable long-playing classics, which shaped the popular culture for years to come. "Long playing" records (LPs) are a critical dimension in this. Hepworth's thesis is that the transition from sixties pop to seventies rock is essentially the transition from singles to LPs, from 45s to 33s, from kids' music to something for an older, wealthier audience, from a societal fringe phenomenon to a mainstream industry, and that the transition is marked, temporally and symbolically, by Paul McCartney on New Year's Eve 1970 serving the writ that made the breakup of the Beatles irreversible.
As you would expect from such a highly qualified über-nerd, Hepworth assembles a mass of evidence and anecdote to back up his thesis, beginning with the release of Carole King's Tapestry in January and working his way through the year to Bowie's Hunky Dory in December.
Is he right? I am more than happy to accept that he is, though doubtless someone in the North London bedsit will argue vehemently for another year. The truth is it matters not a jot. The point is that Hepworth has provided himself with an excellent pretext to do what I suspect he likes doing most, telling the fascinating, eye-opening stories of a crazily creative, productive, self-destructive era which did so much to shape the popular culture for years to come. And it is true that, for my generation at least, and, mark you, I was 7 in 1971, both the characters and tunes of that year are extremely familiar, embedded in the consciousness as it were.
Let's try a few of the dramatis personae for a moment: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, David Bowie, the Rolling Stones (entering their tax-exile phase), the solo Beatles, the Who, Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, Nick Drake (unheard of at the time, actually), Marc Bolan, Rod Stewart, Cat Stevens, Don McClean, Stevie Wonder, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, Isaac Hayes, James Taylor, Miles Davis, Marvin Gaye, Sly Stone, Pink Floyd, the Carpenters, Bob Dylan, Carly Simon, and many more who simply don't come to mind here. And behind the principals, a second cast of promoters, producers, managers, a fascinating collection of individuals, slightly older, products of the war, who saw how music could be made to mean money and who built an industry on the outpourings of their fickle, unreliable, often drugged-out protégés. This is a huge strength of Hepworth's book: he is a genuine expert, with a knowledge of the early rock music world going beyond a mere appreciation of the music itself to an understanding of its economic underpinnings and an encyclopaedic knowledge of its personal dramas.
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| The über-nerd, David Hepworth |
As we are often reminded, except for the music, which would be very familiar to the contemporary time traveller (this being very much the point), 1971 was a very different world. Three TV channels in the UK, no celebrity press, smoking everywhere, air travel the exclusive privilege of the rich, political correctness not even conceived of, women, despite the first stirrings of "women's lib", still largely confined either to the home or a narrow range of gender-assigned roles (including in the world of rock music, let it be said), and so on and on. Cinema was in seemingly terminal decline, US cities in particular seemed to be sliding into an abyss of crime and dereliction, world events gave little hope of anything, only rock music seemed in the ascendant. Hepworth tells the stories of this perversely innocent, debauched world with glee. The Rolling Stones decamping to the south of France to live the life of tax exiles, the marriage of Mick and Bianca Jagger, the seeming endless flow of hangers-on, drugs, girls, prefigured the celebrity culture we are now (unfortunately) so familiar with, but, at the time existed in a semi-vacuum, without the ecosystem of today's celebrity driven press - still less the social media - to know quite what to make of it all. For sure, it was an age of unrestrained sex'n'drugs'n'rock'n'roll. It seems remarkable in hindsight that so few of that era succumbed to an early drug-induced demise, given the sheer volume of illicit substances being consumed, and a constant revelation to discover just how free "free love" was at the time, at least in the microcosm of these young merchants of rock and roll.
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| In the beginning, was ... Carole King |
But in the end, Hepworth always comes back to the music. Literally so, as at the end of each of twelve chapters (one for each month), he proposes a playlist of songs from that month in 1971. Their familiarity is striking, re-emphasising how canonical the music of 1971 has become. This is a book to read with your iPod and preferably a Spotify/Apple Music subscription to hand, because you will want to listen again to the tracks so lovingly and expertly described. What you will realise, listening with that contemporary ease which simply did not exist in 1971, is how familiar the music is, even if you did not think you knew it. It is hard to disagree with Hepworth's contention that 1971 was indeed special - a moment on the unrepeatable cusp of the pop culture world, for good and ill, we live in today. Moreover, argues Hepworth with some conviction, this is not only true of the fifty-something generation nostalgic for an era when twelve inch vinyl discs were the only consumer good worth having, but also their children and even grandchildren who have absorbed the music of fifty years ago as part of the ambient culture.
This was a total impulse purchase, but one I am intense grateful to myself for. You have the feeling Hepworth had enormous fun writing this book, for sure it is huge fun to read. Nerds of the world, enjoy!
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| Posh and Becks, 1971 style |
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