April 30, 2010: Psychobabble’s Eleven Greatest Albums of 1970!

From a Rock & Roll standpoint, the ‘70s began in a far neater manner than most other eras. The ‘60s didn’t really begin until The Beatles became mega-stars three years after the decade’s calendar launch. It took the debut of MTV in 1981 to kick-off the ‘80s, and the first year of the ‘90s remained a wasteland of hair bands until “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and, as VH-1 has told us time and time again, “everything changed.” I’m still waiting for the ‘00s to start. But the ‘70s arrived without delay. December of 1969 was marked by Altamont, the event that many site as the official conclusion of the ‘60s. Just as the Stones’ doomed response to blissed-out Woodstock symbolized the death of ‘60s hippie idealism, 1970 found the previous decade’s definitive band in ruins, and each ex-Beatle wasted no time in releasing his first solo record that year. The Stones and The Who would not break-up in ‘70, but both were in the process of radically redefining their sounds, and they commemorated their metamorphoses with a pair of raw live albums that year. Punk, the single most earth-shaking Rock movement of the ‘70s, was already in the sites in the form of breathless new records by the MC5 and The Stooges, while their most significant predecessor, The Velvet Underground, released their final album (well, their final album with the last line-up that had any right to call themselves The Velvet Underground). Jimi and Janis died. Simon and Garfunkel finally admitted they hated each other’s guts and split. Even The Monkees broke up. Amidst all this flux was a lot of great music. Here are eleven of the best albums that dropped 30 years ago.

11. Rides Again- James Gang

Joe Walsh is most famous for his jokey solo hits like “Life’s Been Good” and his stint in the über-boring Eagles, but his best work was unquestionably with Cleveland power-trio James Gang. They only put out three records with the Walsh line-up, the first and third of which being worthwhile but hit-and-miss overall. Rides Again, James Gangs’ second LP, is a classic. A little Southern twang, a little Philly funk, a little British Rock ingenuity, Rides Again hangs together seamlessly even as it jumps genres jollily. The most well-known track is the percussive trampoline “Funk #49”— a terrific number, for sure— but there's also the glorious “Tend My Garden”, which sums up the breadth of The Beatles’ Abbey Road in one tidy six-minute package, the succinct country-pop songs “There I Go Again” and “Thanks”, and the brooding atmospherics of “Ashes, the Rain, and I”. “The Bomber” is a heavy rock epic that shows off Walsh’s ability to mimic Jeff Beck (even quoting “Beck’s Bolero” mid-song). The one misstep is “Woman”, which marries a dumb lyric to some so-so riffing, but the mass of Rides Again reveals a great band ripe for rediscovery.


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10. Pendulum- Creedence Clearwater Revival

Confoundingly, Creedence Clearwater Revival once took a lot of heat from blinkered critics. They were without peer the greatest singles band of the ‘69/’70 season, but singles were pretty out of vogue with snobby hippies who saw more artistry in an interminable Grateful Dead jam than three minutes of CCR’s refreshing choogling. Pendulum was John Fogerty’s bid to prove he could be as indulgent as any of his contemporaries. Released the same year as Cosmo’s Factory—a veritable greatest hits record containing six Top 40 hits—Pendulum has fewer recognizable Creedence classics than any of their previous albums. This may be because there is much less emphasis on the Fogerty brothers’ muscular guitars. Aside from “Pagan Baby”—a long jam that would have been dull in the hands of a band lacking CCR’s seething intensity (such as the Grateful Dead)—and the fabulously frothy “Hey Tonight”, there isn’t much in the way of electric guitar workouts here. Acoustics drive the album’s one hit, the brooding “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” Doug Clifford and Stu Cook’s in-the-pocket rhythm section are the coal in the taut “Sailor’s Lament” and the terrific Otis Redding-tribute “Chameleon”. Funereal Procol-Harum organs are the main ingredient of the gut-wrenching “(Wish I Could) Hideaway” and the tensely beautiful “It’s Just a Thought”, while all these elements mingle brilliantly on “Born to Move”. The album is also rich in Stax-style sax arrangements, which John Fogerty overdubbed himself. His misplaced “artistry” results in one tremendous fumble—a go-nowhere collage of crescendos without climax called “Rude Awakening #2”—but Pendulum is otherwise proof that CCR could make far more meaningful music than their more pretentious peers.


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9. Led Zeppelin III- Led Zeppelin

Having done things with traditional blues songs Howlin’ Wolf never intended on their first album and providing more of the same to lesser effect on their second, Led Zeppelin decided it was high time they actually wrote some songs when it came time to cut their third. Of course, I’m being flip: I and II had some phenomenal originals like “Good Times, Bad Times”, “Your Time Is Gonna Come”, and “Ramble On”, but neither record hosted as many great songs that didn’t actually turn out to have been written by Wolf or Willie Dixon as III did. Certainly no self-respecting bluesman would take credit for the mega-retarded mania of “Immigrant Song”, although the lengthy dirge “Since I’ve Been Loving You” might have made a few cats envious. The album’s greatest distinction is its wealth of acoustic numbers: some lovely (“Tangerine”, the ecology-minded “That’s the Way”), some rollicking (the funky country-honk of “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp”, an ode to Robert Plant’s dog), some gleefully menacing (“Friends”). The heavy rockers are no slouches either, with the joyous “Out on the Tiles”, the slippery “Celebration Day”, and even the mega-retarded mania of “Immigrant Song” providing as much fun as anything in the Led Zep archives. The two trad covers— a galvanizing, banjo-fueled version of “Gallows Pole” (made famous by Leadbelly as “Gallis Pole”) and a psychotic version of Bukka White’s “Shake ‘Em On Down” retitled “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper”— judiciously credit the boys as arrangers rather than composers this time around.


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8. Loaded- The Velvet Underground

It follows a perverse logic that The Velvet Underground—a group that mastered drugged-out noise rock on their first two albums and aching folk dirges on their third—would fall apart while making their poppiest, happiest platter. There’s no trace of the rotted-out junkie poetry that made their previous albums so grimly compelling on Loaded, which makes the album feel comparatively lightweight on first listen. But all that fades when the infectiousness of the songs take over. “Sweet Jane” and “Rock & Roll” are two of The Velvet’s most enduring songs for good reason: they are both mind-bogglingly catchy celebrations of Rock music that get under the skin as assuredly as Lou Reed’s needles. “Cool It Down” and “Head Held High” don’t have the legs the aforementioned tunes do, but they’re nearly as exhilarating. Even down-tempo tracks like “I Found a Reason”, “Oh! Sweet Nuthin’”, and the novelistic “New Age” possess a sweetness missing from earlier Velvet songs. “Who Loves the Sun” could pass for the latest Monkees single. All of this may not sound terribly appealing to the sometimes cynical Velvet Underground cult, but for anyone hankering for dazzlingly fresh pop and Rock tunes, Loaded is loaded with them.


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7. Moondance- Van Morrison

Astral Weeks was Van Morrison’s masterpiece, a work of unimaginable depth and feeling recorded by a mere 23-year old. It’s also an undeniably insular record and the most un-Rock record to be often regarded as the greatest Rock record. Moondance is not a work of art on the level of Astral Weeks—how could it be?—but it opened Morrison’s sound considerably, making it accessible to listeners unaccustomed to lengthy, modal jazz excursions without sacrificing the intense soulfulness at the heart of Astral Weeks. The drums are more upfront, the bass is electric, and backing singers are employed to provide counterpoint to The Man’s wailing, rumbling, and mumbling. “And It Stoned Me” and the perpetually swinging “Into the Mystic” are evocative and personal but also universal in their nostalgia and good-humored soul searching. “Caravan” is an aural party with Morrison multi-tracked endlessly to play the radio-loving revelers. The title song is jazz by way of Sinatra rather than Coltrane, and “Crazy Love” is a beautiful tribute to Curtis Mayfield’s falsetto. These are all Van Morrison standards, but the pumping soul of “Glad Tidings”, the baroque pop of “Everyone”, and the tripping-over-its-own-feet rhythms of “Come Running” are also tremendous. Moondance proved that Morrison could get back in the Top 40 without shedding his distinctive brand of Celtic soul; it’s just a little less enigmatic this time.


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6. Back in the U.S.A.- MC5

Powerful as it may be, MC5’s live debut, Kick Out the Jams, is a murky record full of songs more intent on jamming than kicking. Back in the U.S.A. bounces so far across the spectrum that it sounds like it was recorded by a different band. The lowdown murk of the former album has been replaced by tinny, harsh production, and lengthy jams are passed over for tight, three-minute rockers. While the thin sound does Back in the U.S.A. no favors, the band’s enthusiasm and the songs’ retro simplicity make for a really exciting listen. The band’s politics are limited to two tracks, “The Human Being Lawnmower”, a simple anti-war statement, and “The American Ruse”, which puts the shoddiness of capitalism in terms Carl Perkins could dig (“Phony stars, oh no! Crummy cars, oh no! Cheap guitars, oh no!”). The rest of the record does most of its thinking below the belt. That it’s bookended by classics from Little Richard and Chuck Berry reveals the LP’s true agenda: this is an old-fashioned, sex-crazed, party album that gets its paws dirty in everything from go-go grooves (“Teenage Lust”; “High School”, which rewrites The Capitol’s “Cool Jerk”) to slow-grind soul (“Let Me Try”) to cro-mag garage rock (“Call Me Animal”; “Looking at You”, later covered to stunning effect by The Damned) to funky R&B (the incredible “Shakin’ Street”). Awesome.


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5. Home- Procol Harum

Matthew Fisher, who helped define the Procol Harum sound with his majestic organ lines on “Whiter Shade of Pale” (and recently sued for co-writing credit on that song successfully), quit the band after recording their masterpiece, 1969’s A Salty Dog. Because of Fisher’s absence and the greater reliance on Robin Trower’s eclectic guitar work, many critics would have you believe that Home is a radical shift from Procol’s previous work. Aside from “Whiskey Train”, the fire-snorting blues that opens the album, Home actually has far more in common with the proto-Goth creepiness of the band’s debut album than Salty Dog did. Lyricist Keith Reid’s running obsession here is death, and he imaginatively deals with the subject in a variety of ways. “Whiskey Train” deals with slow-suicide via the bottle. “The Dead Man’s Dream” is cartoonier, with its grotesque Poe-inspired lyric (“And the corpses were rotten, yet each one living/ Their eyes were alive with maggots crawling”) and a backing track worthy of a black mass in a Hammer horror movie. “Still There’ll Be More” hilariously matches roiling Rock & Roll with Reid’s first-person account of serial-killing (“I’ll blacken your Christmas and piss on your door/ You’ll cry out for mercy, still there’ll be more”). “Nothing That I Didn’t Know” is a genuinely moving elegy performed in the chantey style of Salty Dog. “About to Die” is written from the perspective of Jesus’s killers, and Trower’s purposeful, ultra-phased guitar sets a grim tone. The album’s masterpiece is “Whaling Stories”, an epic, multi-sectioned ode to the apocalypse, and one of the few Procol Harum songs that makes good on the band’s mostly erroneous reputation for being a prog group. Through all this chilling stuff Gary Brooker belts like the intense R&B crooner he is; these guys were always way too soulful to really be prog-rockers.


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4. Bryter Layter- Nick Drake

Much like Moondance was for Van Morrison, Bryter Layter was an attempt to draw Nick Drake out of isolation. Unlike Moondance, all the horns, backing singers, and electric guitars in the world couldn’t mask Nick Drake’s inherent remoteness. Even when the band cooks with as much sunniness as it does on “Hazy Jane II”, Drake still sounds like he’s singing into his lap, and the words he sings are anything but a call to frolic (“And what will happen in the evening in the forest with the weasel with the teeth that bite so sharp when you’re not looking in the evening”). Producer Joe Boyd (with a lot of help from members of Fairport Convention and former-Velvet John Cale) clearly made Bryter Layter with the intention of scoring some hits for Drake, but the singer/writer/expert-finger-picker doesn’t seem too interested in all that. At the same time, he delivers his most instantly pleasurable selection of songs. “Hazy Jane II”, the smoky “At the Chime of the City Clock”, the spacious “Hazy Jane I”, and the soulful “Poor Boy” are superb pop songs. “One of These Things First” is Drake’s best song, with its whirling, autumnal guitar/piano interplay and its message of either reincarnation or opportunities missed. “Fly” is his most deeply aching. The instrumental Muzak interludes strewn throughout the record are less essential but keep the tracks linked together nicely. Each of the three albums Nick Drake recorded during his brief life are exceptional, but Bryter Layter is his most completely satisfying.


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3. Lola Versus Powerman and the Money-Go-Round- The Kinks

Since cutting Village Green Preservation Society in 1968, The Kinks were Rock’s most committed storytellers. They would spend the following decade recording a string of concept albums, the most commercially successful being Lola Versus Powerman and the Money-Go-Round. The Kinks hadn’t had a major hit at home or in the U.S. in years, but “Lola”, a clangy number about a rube’s encounter with a cosmopolitan transvestite, changed that most assuredly. The album from which “Lola” was pulled recounts a young Rock & Roll band’s rise to success and dealings with a variety of unscrupulous music publishers, agents, journalists, and T.V. presenters. In other words, it’s The Kinks telling the story of The Kinks, and they do so with all the bitterness, humanity, sensitivity, humor, and melodiousness for which they are adored. While Ray Davies’s signature music-hall variations are present on “Denmark Street” and “The Moneygoround”, and his mastery of the delicate ballad informs “Get Back in Line”, “This Time Tomorrow”, and “A Long Way From Home”, the band rocks harder here than they had since their “You Really Got Me”, power-chord heyday. Dave Davies’s massive guitars tear through stuff like “Lola”, “Top of the Pops”, “Powerman”, and “Rats”. Dave also gets off two of his best compositions with the screaming “Rats” and the mysterious “Strangers”. Much of The Kinks’ ‘70s records followed the Lola Versus Powerman formula closely, but none replicated its power, beauty, or grasp of narrative.


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2. Parachute- The Pretty Things

The most obscure album on this list was chosen by Rolling Stone magazine as “Album of the Year” in 1971 (it appeared in the U.S. a year after its original UK release). That’s quite an honor considering the class of ’71 included such monuments as Who’s Next, Sticky Fingers, and Led Zeppelin IV, but one listen to Parachute is enough to explain Rolling Stone’s decision. The Pretty Things were on a creative roll begun with the pioneering, pre-Tommy Rock Opera S.F. Sorrow when they made Parachute. Like its predecessor, there’s supposedly a loose concept here (Side A focuses on the city; Side B on the country), but the story is pretty obscure. That deflects no power from the songs or the Pretties’ exemplary playing and singing, though. Their choral harmonies on “Rain”, “What’s the Use”, and the title track are staggering, easily in the league of any similar efforts by The Beach Boys, The Who, or The Beatles. Side A sports a mini-medley obviously inspired by the one on side B of Abbey Road, but the transitions between sections are more fluid than those of The Beatles, so the side plays more like a complex suite. The medley then gives way to a brilliant parade of stand-alone tracks: the searing rocker “Miss Fay Regrets”, the ominous “Cries From the Midnight Circus”, the brooding but rhythmically propulsive “Grass”, the funky “Sickle Clowns”, the stately “She’s a Lover”, and the hymn-like pair of songs that close the record, “What’s the Use” and “Parachute”. Unfortunately, Parachute was The Pretty Things’ last great record. They spent the remainder of the ‘70s churning out successively more conventional Rock records, but if that was because they expended so much of their inspiration reserves on Parachute, it was well worth it.


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1. All Things Must Pass- George Harrison

Wait a minute… a sprawling boxed-set of three LPs? One of which is barely listenable? Recorded by the Beatle who was usually only allowed two or three compositions per album? The ex-Beatle who never recorded another decent album after his solo debut? A solo debut that overflowed with religious dogma and spawned the mindlessly Hare-Krishna-ing hit “My Sweet Lord”? And this is the best album of 1970, the best album by an ex-Beatle, and arguably, the best album of the ‘70s? Yes on all accounts. Because Lennon and McCartney maintained such a stranglehold over the Beatles’ LPs, George Harrison was able to amass a truly astounding backlog of great songs. “The Art of Dying” dates back to 1966, which is funny since it’s the most ‘70s-sounding track on the album, with its heavily wah-wah-ed guitars and Shaft-meets-Superfly horn section (one can only guess how it would have been arranged if included on Revolver). The prevalent sounds of All Things Must Pass, though, are Harrison’s dulcet, expressive voice and fluid slide-guitar, chiming masses of acoustic guitars, ethereal organs, and tasteful but powerful string and horn embellishments. Phil Spector’s production is full-bodied but more delicate and expansive than his classic records with the Wrecking Crew. The band is top-notch, with Badfinger supplying rhythm guitars, Billy Preston and Procol Harum’s Gary Brooker on organs, Stones sidemen Bobby Keys and Jim Price on brass, the Plastic Ono Band’s Klaus Voormann on bass, and old-pal Ringo Starr behind the kit. That band as realized by Spector sounds magnificent, whether slow-burning through “Isn’t It a Pity”, wailing on “Hear Me Lord”, rocking out on “Wah-Wah” and “What a Life”, partying on “Awaiting on You All”, drifting into the cosmos on “Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp (Let It Roll)” and “Beware of Darkness”, or doing all of the above on “Let It Down”. But none of this would matter if Harrison didn’t deliver the songs, and these are some of the greatest he ever wrote. That Harrison chiefly used All Things Must Pass to advertise his sundry religious beliefs sounds a lot more off-putting than it actually is because these songs are so uniformly beautiful and because he gets off at least one good zinger at the expense of the pope along the way. Some have docked All Things Must Pass a point or two because its third LP is a completely superfluous collection of meandering jams, but that would be like criticizing the record because you don’t like the album cover (which is a totally hilarious shot of Harrison hanging out with some garden gnomes while wearing huge rubber boots). Toss the jam album in the bin and take in the bounty of brilliance on the other two records for an endlessly rewarding experience.


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Eleven More Great Albums from 1970
Barrett by Syd Barrett
The Madcap Laughs by Syd Barrett
Let It Be by The Beatles
Cosmo’s Factory by Creedence Clearwater Revival
Plastic Ono Band by John Lennon
Magnetic South by Michael Nesmith and the First National Band
‘Shazam’ by The Move
Gasoline Alley by Rod Stewart
Fun House by The Stooges
Live at Leeds by The Who
After the Gold Rush by Neil Young

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