FRIDAY FLASHBACK: Every Friday we set the Hot Tub Time Machine to one year in rock history and give you the best (and worst) music from that year, all day long beginning at 1:00 AM EST and running for 24 hours on Jivewired Radio powered by Live365.
This week: 1973
Next week: 2000
Article Sources: Previous Friday Flashback Articles, Billboard, Wikipedia Search on 'The Year In Music 1973', All Music Guide, Joel Whitburn, America's Top 40, Rolling Stone Magazine, Tom Donahue, KSAN-FM, Rob Dimery, 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die
To listen to music from the year 1973 all weekend long, just press play on the radio widget at the bottom of this article or use this link to open in a new window that will allow you to listen when you navigate away from this page:
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1973 Album I Wish I Owned: Closing Time by Tom Waits
1973 Album I'd Give Back If I Could:A Passion Play by Jethro Tull
1973 Nominee For Worst Album Cover Ever:There Goes Rhymin' Simon by Paul Simon
1973 Most Underrated Song:Thirteen by Big Star
1973 Most Overrated Song: Piano Man by Billy Joel
1973 Most Memorable Song: You're So Vain by Carly Simon
1973 Most Significant Song:A Song For You by Gram Parsons
1973 Most Forgotten Song: Ooh La La by Faces
1973 Fan's Choice For Most Popular Song: Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd
1973 Album Of The Year: Dark Side Of The Moon by Pink Floyd
1973 Most Likely To Start A Party Song: Dixie Chicken by Little Feat
1973 Please Don't Play Anymore Song: Seasons In The Sun by Terry Jacks
1973 Song That I Like More Than I Actually Should:Diamond Girl by Seals & Crofts
1973 Album I Liked More Than I Thought I Would: Honky Tonk Heroes by Waylon Jennings
1973 Song That I Tend to Leave on Repeat:Rosalita (Come Out Tonight) by Bruce Springsteen & The E-Street Band
Guilty Pleasure of 1973: Bad, Bad Leroy Brown by Jim Croce
Breakout Artists of 1973: Styx, Aerosmith, Bruce Springsteen, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Jackson Browne, The Eagles
Overplayed In 1973: Paul McCartney
Not Played Enough In 1973: George Harrison
Greatest Chart Re-Entry from 1973:Runaway by Del Shannon (1961)
Best Cover Song Of 1973: Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy by Bette Midler
Worst Cover Song of 1973: A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall by Bryan Ferry
An unheralded great album from 1973:The World Is A Ghetto by War
An unheralded great single from 1973: Sail On Sailor by The Beach Boys, Celluloid Heroes by The Kinks
Best Soundtrack of 1973:American Graffiti
Jivewired's Top
01. Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd
02. The Rain Song by Led Zeppelin
03. Rosalita (Come Out Tonight) by Bruce Springsteen & The E-Street Band
04. Money by Pink Floyd
05. Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth) by George Harrison
06. 5:15 by The Who
07. Ooh La La by Faces
Jivewired's Top Five Albums Of The Year
01. Dark Side Of The Moon by Pink Floyd
02. Houses Of The Holy by Led Zeppelin
03. Quadrophenia by The Who
04. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John
05. The Wild, The Innocent & The E-Street Shuffle by Bruce Springsteen & The E-Street Band
This week we take you on a one day odyssey into one of two benchmark years in the first half of the polyester decade. Dark Side Of The Moon. Houses Of The Holy. A coming out party, musically speaking, for Elton John. Debut albums from Bruce Springsteen (Greetings From Asbury Park), and Aerosmith -- yes they're that old. Way underrated albums by the Rolling Stones (Goat's Head Soup) and Neil Young (Time Fades Away). Toss in some Marvin Gaye, War, Aretha Franklin, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Paul McCartney's Band On The Run and it all adds up to a pretty spectacular year in music.
Also, let us take a moment to pay homage to the father of alt-country. 1973 gave us alt-country/rock releases by Gram Parsons, leader of the movement, as well as songs by Little Feat, The Marshall Tucker Band, The Eagles, Jackson Browne and even the Rolling Stones, all inspired by the late Mr. Parsons. Tom Waits (yes I said Tom Waits) wrote Ol' 55 which is the closest that man ever came to alt-country, a song which was eventually taken a step further toward the movement by The Eagles in '74. If you've never heard Silver Train, a blues and alt-country hybrid masterpiece by The Rolling Stones, you should listen to the wonderful piano/slide guitar interplay that sounds like it was produced and arranged by Parsons himself.
1973 also proved to be the birth of Outlaw Country, a roots/country sub-genre led and inspired by Waylon Jennings. Jennings' 1973 album Honky Tonk Heroes is considered an important piece in the history of country music. Billy Joe Shaver, who is highly regarded for helping push forward outlaw country, opined that by creating an amalgam of roots rock and blues country, Jennings became the sub-genre's first forefather. Ken Burns, in Robert Dimery's book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, says that Honky Tonk Heroes is "one of country music's landmark albums", and points out Jennings' rock and roll roots as bass player for Buddy Holly. Indeed, Waylon Jennings painted a near-defiant stance that merged rock's attitude and cocksurety with country and western's roots traditions to create the hardest country tunes imaginable.
1973 also provided our initial witness to the exponential growth of FM radio and it's burgeoning influence on popular music. FM radio represented the counterculture and gave it's audience the experience of deeper album cuts and longer, original versions of songs. AM radio was losing it's stronghold as the favored outlet due to its inherent lack of variety and it's aging demographic -- combining commercialized, repetitive playlists with high-strung, obnoxious deejays, and long-winded news/weather/traffic breaks between songs. It was a 1950's attitude forced upon a generation that had long-since disassociated itself from it's formative years.
FM radio also cast the album into mainstream airplay as the intellectual counterpoint to AM radio's obsession with the 45 rpm single (and what FM radio station didn't feature an album sides weekend at least twice a year?). Pop music enjoyed somewhat of a resurgence as well, returning triumphantly to the old-fashioned values that had sustained it's creative boon of the 1960s. A big part of the reason was the popularity of George Lucas' epic film American Graffiti and it's soundtrack that included some of the most popular songs from 1957-1962.
Don't believe me? I offer you Seasons In The Sun by Terry Jacks as proof, a song that was formulaic to a fault, leaning on the tragi-pop sensibilities that proved to be hits for artists like J. Frank Wilson (Last Kiss) and The Shangri-Las (Leader Of The Pack) in the previous decade. Regretfully, if AM radio in turn decided they liked a deeper album cut that proved popular on FM Radio, the record labels acquiesced by taking perfectly beautiful songs and chopping them down to somewhere around three to four minutes in length. On this point, I offer the AM radio version of Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd, which is actually as disgusting as it is disheartening.
Perhaps it was savvy marketing strategy, a trend toward conservatism after a turbulent era in society and more specifically, in music, or just plain selling out, but the restoration of traditional forms of popular music (rock, blues, country) helped spread new music and thus turn rock music into one of consumerism's most successful phenomena. We even witnessed the return of the thought-to-be-extinct one-hit wonder, a diminished music commodity due to gains in popularity of deeper album cuts thanks to AOR and MOR radio.
Through everything however, 1973 represented a transitional midpoint in the history of rock and roll. Think about what was considered popular seven years previously in 1966, and what was popular seven years going forward in 1980. Basically we made the jump from Rubber Soul and Pet Sounds to London Calling and The Wall, with Houses Of The Holy and Dark Side Of The Moon identifying the true midpoint in that time span. As a music culture we spent that span going into and past popular music anomalies such as psychedelia, one-hit wonders, disco, prog-rock, punk and post-punk and right into new wave, electronica and the birth of rap and hip hop. Similarly, we could split the differences in music from 1958 to 1988 for an even more dramatic example of music evolution, with some dilution of emphasis, however, because at that point you are speaking in generational terms.
Do you see anything odd about the following top twenty list?
Top 20 Songs For 1973
(rankings are based on initial and lasting popularity and on acclaim received from deejays on both AM & FM bands as well as critics and musicians)
01. Free Bird - Lynyrd Skynyrd
02. Let's Get It On - Marvin Gaye
03. Midnight Train To Georgia - Gladys Knight & The Pips
04. Dream On - Aerosmith
05. Living For The City - Stevie Wonder
06. Money - Pink Floyd
07. Piano Man - Billy Joel
08. Killing Me Softly With His Song - Roberta Flack
09. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road - Elton John
10. That Lady - Isley Brothers
11. Angie - The Rolling Stones
12. The Joker - Steve Miller Band
13. Radar Love - Golden Earring
14. Drift Away - Dobie Gray
15. Knockin' On Heaven's Door - Bob Dylan
16. I Shot The Sheriff - Bob Marley & The Wailers
17. Ramblin' Man - The Allman Brothers Band
18. We're An American Band - Grand Funk
19. Band On The Run - Paul McCartney & Wings
20. When Will I See You Again? - The Three Degrees
In 1967, KSAN-FM deejay Tom Donahue lambasted AM radio's top forty format in an article for Rolling Stone Magazine entitled "AM Radio Is Dead and Its Rotting Corpse Is Stinking Up the Airwaves." By 1973, Donahue was perceived as somewhat of a prophet. Blame American Bandstand for creating so many one hit wonders, and credit Soul Train for the crossover of funk and R&B back into the mainstream as the Motown Records hit machine began it's run of diminishing returns. In 1973, the differences in format between FM and AM proved that radio represented partisan ideologies as diverse as America's two-party political system.
But the term crossover, at least in 1973, no longer applied to music genres and sub-genres. Crossing over meant having hits on both AM and FM simultaneously. Arguably the king of that type of crossover in the mid-1970s was Elton John, who found success with his more mainstream work on AM radio and with his more progressive stuff on FM.
In many ways, 1973 represented the Dark Ages in rock music history, as many artists began to explore their more progressive sides. Even songs like Living For The City by Stevie Wonder and Funeral For A Friend/Love Lies Bleeding by Elton John veered heavily toward progressive experimentation. But rather than attempt to destroy the movement, established radio absorbed it, particularly on the FM side, allowing rare tracks and obscure artists into the mainstream. This diversification led to radio's renaissance. Just ten years earlier top 20 radio was dominated by The Beatles, The Beach Boys, and Bob Dylan. In 1973, and for the first time in modern rock history, twenty separate and distinct musical acts comprised year-end top 20 radio.
Gone Too Soon:
- Ron Pigpen McKernan of The Grateful Dead, aged 27 (March 8)
- Clarence White of The Byrds, aged 29 (July 15)
- Gram Parsons, aged 26 (September 19)
- Jim Croce, aged 30 (September 20)
- Gene Krupa, aged 64 (October 16)
- Zake Zettner of The Stooges, aged 25 (November 10)
- Bobby Darin, aged 37 (December 20)
For a look at the oddities surrounding the death and burial of Gram Parsons - check out this from the Jivewired archives: The Strange Death of Gram Parsons: 1973
Time Is Money, Money Is Time:
Dark Side Of The Moon was the eighth studio album by English progressive rock band Pink Floyd, released on March 1, 1973 to almost immediate success. It was Number One on Billboard's Top LP & Tapes List for only one week, but subsequently remained in the Top 200 charts for 741 weeks from 1973 to 1988.
741 weeks. Fifteen years.
With an estimated 50 million copies sold, it is Pink Floyd's most commercially successful album and one of the best-selling albums worldwide. It has twice been remastered and re-released, and has been covered in its entirety by several other acts, the Flaming Lips most recently.
The LP spawned two Top 40 singles, Time & Money and was engineered by Alan Parsons, who spring-boarded that success into a nice musical career as a performer.
It even carries with it an urban legend of sorts.
Dark Side of the Rainbow and Dark Side of Oz are two names commonly used in reference to rumors circulated that Dark Side of the Moon was written as a soundtrack for the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.
Fat chance? Or somewhat true?
Observers playing the film and the album simultaneously have reported apparent synchronicities, such as Dorothy beginning to jog at the lyric "no one told you when to run" during Time, and Dorothy balancing on a tight-rope fence during the line "balanced on the biggest wave" in Breathe. David Gilmour and Nick Mason have both denied a connection between the two works, and Roger Waters has described the rumors as "amusing."
That being said, there are thousands of annual showings of the movie simulcast against Dark Side of The Moon. The definitive answer may lie with Alan Parsons, who has stated that the film was not mentioned during production of the album.
Moves Like Jagger? Not So Much
The song is a mystery no longer!
After 40 years of guessing and wondering, Carly Simon has revealed who her iconic You're So Vain song is written about.
Ah well, it's out there, allegedly. The song, which was rumored for years to be about one of her ex-boyfriends, was actually written about gay record label boss David Geffen according to a UK tabloid.
So, while for years the speculation was that song was intended to be an angry-bitter break-up song, now the lyrics take on a whole new meaning. It may be that Carly is signing about her resentment towards Geffen because he allegedly put more effort into promoting rival star Joni Mitchell.
Stop the presses.
No really.
It's just more speculation with no textual reference or concrete evidence.
In truth, Carly Simon had never met David Geffen before writing Your So Vain. Simon herself stated recently, "What a riot! Nothing to do with David!"
So who is it about then? The person Simon is singing about in this song remains a mystery, as she has never made it clear who she wrote it about; rumors include Warren Beatty, Kris Kristofferson, Cat Stevens, and Mick Jagger, all of whom she had affairs with. Carly has been elusive and changed her story a bit when asked the inevitable question about the song.
In 1974, she told Modern Hi-Fi and Music: "That song is about a lot of people. I mean I can think of a lot of people. The actual examples that I've used in the song are from my imagination, but the stimulus is directly from a couple of different sources. It's not just about one particular person."
I vote she is singing about me.
I have a more pressing question: What the hell does "clouds in my coffee" mean?
It was a reflection of the sky in a cup of coffee while Simon was traveling, pointed out to her by a friend sitting next to her on the airplane. So she jotted down the phrase and used in the song. Ho hum.
To be honest, the best thing about the song is how everybody stops singing at the following line because nobody knows the exact phrasing: "You had one eye in the mirror as you watched yourself gavotte."
You can now stop. Please stop singing. That's why we do.
Go forth, for you are the future of Rock & Roll.....
The following bands trace their formations back to 1973: AC/DC, Bad Company, Cheap Trick, Pablo Cruise, Heart, Journey, KISS, Los Lobos, Quiet Riot and The Tubes. On the flip side, 1973 also gave us KC & The Sunshine Band.