Twenty From 1971

 by whiteray

I saw a squib the other day on Facebook for a book titled Never a Dull Moment: 1971, The Year That Rock Exploded by writer and broadcaster David Hepworth, a book that’s now waiting on my to-read pile. The squib was followed by a challenge to list the twenty best albums from that admittedly very rich year. I find that kind of thing irresistible. 

So, here – in no particular order – are my twenty favorite albums from 1971, which was, in fact, a great year for music. The greatest? Impossible to say, except to note that it lies right in the middle of my sweet spot. The years of high school and early college – 1968 through 1974 – were the best years for music for me. 

I should note that one album that I wrestled with was the star-studded live album The Concert For Bangla Desh (organized by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar and featuring Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr and more) but I decided that all-star live albums have an unfair advantage. I’ll just note that Leon Russell’s “Jumpin’ Jack Flash/Youngblood” medley at that concert might be the single best thing released in 1971. 

Beyond that, I’ll just say that on another day, this could easily have been a very different list. There were at least ten other albums that could have made the list without any angst on my part. 

Tapestry by Carole King
Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones
It Ain’t Easy by Long John Baldry
Naturally by J.J. Cale
The North Star Grassman and the Ravens by Sandy Denny
Madman Across The Water by Elton John
Pearl by Janis Joplin
Ram by Paul & Linda McCartney
Mudlark by Leo Kottke
Every Good Boy Deserves Favour by the Moody Blues
Stargazer by Shelagh McDonald
Leon Russell & The Shelter People
Stoney End by Barbra Streisand
Teaser & The Firecat by Cat Stevens
Every Picture Tells A Story by Rod Stewart
The Low Spark Of High Heeled Boys by Traffic
Just An Old Fashioned Love Song by Paul Williams
2 Years On by the Bee Gees
Chase (Self-Titled)
Closer To The Ground by Joy Of Cooking 

I didn’t know all of these in 1971, though most came to me during the decade of the 1970s. Those I knew in 1971 – whether through my record collection, or my sisters, or those of friends’ – were Tapestry, Pearl, Ram, Mudlark, and Teaser & The Firecat. The folks hanging around in the lounge at St. Cloud State’s radio station early in 1971 liked to cue up Long John Baldry’s “Don’t Try To Lay No Boogie-Woogie On The King Of Rock & Roll” along with the shaggy dog story that preceded it; we’d laugh at the tale and the nod our heads to the music coming from Studio B as the faculty-mandated classical music went out over the air from Studio A. But it was years before I heard Baldry’s full album. 

By the end of the Seventies, most of those albums had found places on my shelves. Two of them – the albums by Sandy Denny and Joy of Cooking – didn’t come home with me until sometime in the Nineties, during the time that I was living within half a mile of a used record store and was bandaging the hurts of life with regular purchases of LPs. (There are, to be sure, worse addictions.) 

And two of the albums among my twenty best of 1971 were off my radar until after the century changed. Even though I’d liked Barbra Streisand’s single “Stoney End” when it popped out of radio speakers in 1971, I’d ignored the album until sometime in 2016, when my external hard drive died and I found myself trying to rebuild the vast collection of mp3s that I’d lost. One of them was the track “Stoney End,” and by chance, I found the CD listed online at a ridiculously low price. I bit and learned I liked the rest of the stuff on the album too. 

The other album that came to me in this century is Stargazer by Shelagh McDonald. Sometime around 2005, I discovered her story. The owner of an achingly lovely voice, the Scottish folk singer, songwriter and guitarist had released two albums and was on the edge of stardom in Britain when she simply disappeared in 1971. When her music was released on CD in 2005, piquing interest in her, she showed up one day in the offices of the Scottish Daily Mail and told her tale. Wary of being swallowed up by both life in London and by the music-making machine, she’d gone off with her boyfriend to live the gypsy life in a caravan – called in the States a camper – in quiet corners of Scotland. She’s since supposed to have released new music, but I haven’t been able to track it down. 

So which album from those twenty is the best of the best? The most successful commercially and critically – as judged by sales and awards – is Tapestry, and that’s probably a good choice. (A blogging friend of mine wrote once that the piano figure that open the album’s best-known track, “It’s Too Late,” is the sound of the summer of 1971 distilled to seven seconds.) 

But sales and awards aren’t everything? How about death? Bill Chase – leader of the group that took his name and released a self-titled album in 1971 – died along with several members of his band in a 1974 plane crash in my home state of Minnesota. Sandy Denny died in 1978 in suburban London after several falls. And of course, Janis Joplin died in September 1970 of a drug overdose. 

Well, sales, awards, or death may make an album famous or notorious, but of course they add nothing to the quality of the work. And I can’t really say which of those twenty albums is better than all the others. Their value to me shifts like the phases of the moon, waxing and waning so that one of those albums fits my mood perfectly on, say, one Monday morning as I take care of laundry while on another day, I find no joy in it. Another of those twenty might fit a bleak midnight mood one week and be utterly unsatisfying the next time a similar mood passes through. 

If forced to choose, well, I wrote some time ago that of all of life’s flavors, I tend to default to bittersweet. And there is no album that among those twenty that offers more of that flavor than the relatively neglected Paul Williams album, Just An Old Fashioned Love Song. It was the diminutive singer-songwriter’s first album to hit the Billboard 200, topping out at a less-then-stellar No. 141, and its lead single, “Waking Up Alone,” was Williams’ highest charting single, reaching No. 60 on the Hot 100 and No. 19 on the Easy Listening chart. It would be my favorite of those twenty listed. 

And the single “Waking Up Alone” is my favorite track from the album. Here it is: