Another one down!

So how was 1971?

I was expecting 1971 to be pretty close to 1973 in that there would be some gems amongst a whole load of rubbish - but actually there was surprisingly few albums that were obviously tripe here. Yes, it wasn't all to my taste (a higher tolerance for prog would certainly have helped me) but there were obviously a load of very talented musicians at work throughout the year, so there was generally something to appreciate if you looked for it. The ownership count was a big fat zero amongst the albums we met but, looking at one's we would have reviewed this year had we not already done so, I own Carole King's Tapestry and the lovely Mrs Reed has her Dad's original vinyl copy of Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water - how cool is that? (and I think those are probably the oldest albums we own)

And speaking of that S&G album, looking at the best selling albums of the year we can see it was at #1 - which isn't a massive surprise because it spent nine weeks at #1 (just in this year - it's got 33 weeks at the top in total), didn't drop out of the top five until September and was never lower than #11. It was also #1 in the '70 year-end chart (it never dropped lower than #5) and #6 in the '72 charts (with their greatest hits album being at #3) - those guys started the decade strongly!

Rod Stewart took the #2 spot with an album I didn't mind when I met it on the Rolling Stone list, but suspect I'd probably appreciate more if I listened to it again because that era Rod has grown on me (but I think it's fair to say it hasn't had the staying power of Paul & Art's offering). The top five is completed by some pretty strong albums from The Rolling Stones, Motown Chartbusters Vol 5 and T. Rex (which did well because it was only released in September). 

Given it's early days, we only have a top ten for the year-end chart so we might as well do the lot - but I think it's fair to say the quality takes a bit of a dip here with James Taylor and The Moody Blues giving us tolerable but unremarkable offerings. This is followed by Andy Williams giving us a best-of (which we avoided, but it has some pretty decent tracks on it) and then, quite inexplicably, the dreadful offering from Paul & Linda McCartney - thankfully, Carole King finishes off the list with a proper quality album. I'd have to say I'm surprised not to see George Harrison on this list - he spent eight consecutive weeks at #1 early in the year, so I guess sales dropped off drastically after that.

Looking at the albums I met, we'll do the usual job of starting with the women we met because that's not going to take long. Surprisingly, we had two women with two visits with Melanie being my favoured option - I can't say I loved either of her offerings (with her latter visit probably shading it) but Diana Ross's two albums were very shoddy affairs that patently failed to make use of her talents. Shirley Bassey probably produced the best album from the ladies and I guess Nana Mouskouri was fine if you like that sort of thing - and that's all the women who have their names on the album cover for the year. 

We do have some women in bands though - the two albums from Curved Air were easily the pick of the crop with them both being interesting and certainly improved by the vocals from Sonja Kristina. The Supremes & The Four Tops collaboration was another example of Motown failing to make use of the skills available to them but was merely lazy as opposed to unlistenable - unlike the Wings offering, which was one of the worst albums of the year but I'm going to charitably not blame it all on Linda (but she was definitely there). And that's your lot for the women of 1971.

The next category has to be prog albums because this was a very proggy year - and the kings of prog were undoubtedly Emerson, Lake and Palmer who we met three times. They all featured a huge amount of skill (from Emerson in particular) but I'm afraid I'd had enough of it all by the time we got to the last one. I preferred the bands we only had to meet twice, with Atomic Rooster producing albums that were both perfectly listenable, Pink Floyd producing one album that was better than the other and Yes suffered somewhat from their noodly tendencies, but there's still no doubting their musical abilities. I found a lot of the prog stuff to be impressive rather than enjoyable and The Nice is probably the most extreme example of this, with some amazing keyboard playing on it - but that doesn't make it something I'll ever want to listen to again. Probably the most listenable of the lot (along with Atomic Rooster) were Jethro Tull, which I enjoyed a lot more than I was expecting.

Most of the other albums from groups are somewhat rockier and, for me, considerably more enjoyable. We had two Deep Purple visits, with In Rock being one of my favourites of the year, but Led Zeppelin, The Groundhogs and Santana all being pretty enjoyable. Slightly less rocky were Creedence Clearwater Revival and Ten Years After, both of which are probably the most "normal" albums of the year and enjoyable as a result. The rest of the albums from groups become steadily less rocky with The Moody Blues, Fairport Convention and McGuinness Flint all being reasonably listenable and Lindisfarne, Paul Kantner/Jefferson Starship and T. Rex all being pretty unlistenable. And then we have Osibisa which most definitely lives in a class of its own - I enjoyed both the music and learning that they even existed.

Looking at the single guys, we had two more artists with multiple visits. We unexpectedly met two Elton John albums in consecutive weeks and they were both pretty decent - Tumbleweed Connection shaded it for me, even though his eponymous album has "Your Song" on it. We also had two visit with Stephen Stills, both of which were fair enough but Graham Nash won the battle of ex-CSNY albums for me, with David Crosby producing something very odd (but there were reasons for this). Two other very decent albums were delivered by Cat Stevens and Leonard Cohen - I'd be very happy to listen to either of these again.

The big names all delivered pretty much exactly what was expected of them, with Elvis Presley, Tom Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash and James Taylor - and I still don't understand James's enduring appeal (but at least we avoided Frank Sinatra this year). We also had some new names (to me, at least) with Pourcel, Francis Lai and Waldo de los Rios all producing offerings I have no intention of ever revisiting. Which is also true for the only other album left, which is Paint Your Wagon, the only soundtrack album of the year.

I'm also going to talk about compilation albums, which is a category we met a lot throughout the year but always ignored. The most successful ones we saw in multiple editions with four TOTP dollybird volumes (two of which got to #1), three Hot Hits selections (one of which got to #1)  and three Motown Chartbuster volumes (one of which got to #1). These are really very much chalk and cheese though because the last one had original versions of very decent tracks and the first two were cover versions by anonymous artists - but they were so popular that the chart rules had to be updated to specifically exclude them. We also saw a whole load of "easy listening" compilation albums, some from well known names like James Last and Mantovani but there were also a LOAD of others I'd never heard of (and I'm completely fine with that).

Looking at the other statistics of interest, the number of #1 debuts this year was four, which sits as expected between the one we saw in '68 and the eight we saw in '73 and we saw eighteen #1 albums which also sits nicely between the thirteen in '68 and the nineteen in '73. We never actually listened to the #1 album of the week, but a lot of that is down to the Rolling Stone list because 38 of the weeks had a #1 album that we'd previously met, with Simon & Garfunkel taking nine weeks at the top, George Harrison taking eight, Rod Stewart taking six and The Rolling Stones a mere five. There were also eight weeks where a compilation album took the top spot (TOTP, Hot Hits or Motown Chartbusters) and another three weeks for Andy Williams rejects - so we never really stood a chance! 

The generally accepted (by the internet) best albums from the year that we never got close to seeing are Hunky Dory by David Bowie (it peaked at #3, but not until '72), What's Going On by Marvin Gaye (#56, but not until '00 - I own this one), Tago Mago by Can (#28 in '14), L.A. Woman by The Doors (#28), Bryter Later by Nick Drake (#94 in '24 - another one I own), Maggot Brain by Funkadelic (#22 in '26), There's A Riot Goin' On by Sly & The Family Stone (#31 in '72), At Fillmore East by The Allman Brothers Band (never charted), Pearl by Janis Joplin (#20), Nilsson Schmilsson by Harry Nilsson (#89 in '11), John Prine's eponymous debut, American Pie by Don McLean (#2 in '72), Pieces Of A Man by Gil Scott-Heron (never charted), Surfs Up by The Beach Boys (#15) and Just As I Am by Bill Withers (never charted). There are some properly decent albums in there and it's also interesting how many of them didn't chart until many years later (I assume due to deluxe and anniversary reissues).

And on our last round of statistics, the most expensive album of the year was the £700 copy of Pink Floyd's Meddle, but I feel I also have to give a shout-out to the €15,000 you'd have to shell out if you wanted the Lebanese colour-splatter vinyl of Led Zeppelin III which was only available from one seller in Italy. The most read post of the year was, quite obviously, Lindisfarne followed by James Taylor, but I'm pleased to see Osibisa in third place because hopefully that's educated a few people about them. And the least read post was Paint Your Wagon, which is possibly because it was the last album of the year but it's perfectly fine because no-one needs educating about that anyway.

So did I enjoy 1971? Overall, I'd say it was more admirable than enjoyable, with a whole load of skill involved throughout the year whilst not always making hugely enjoyable noises but there were certainly still highlights to enjoy. Looking at the #1 albums of the year, we'd already experienced a load of the "best" albums of the year (although some of them have aged better than others), but we still had some very decent offerings here - if I had to pick the top set I think I'd go for Cat Stevens, Leonard Cohen, Elton John's Tumbleweed Connection and Deep Purple's In Rock (which isn't my sort of thing at all, but I liked it a lot). The stinker of the year was quite obviously the offering from Wings because it was really quite astonishingly poor - it's scary when you think how talented Paul McCartney is but his output for this year was that monstrosity and Ram, which is quite possibly worse but I'm not going to listen to either of them again to compare them.

I was also pleased to meet some bands I'd never heard of including Curved Air, Ten Years After, The Groundhogs and Atomic Rooster, all of whom were pretty successful across multiple albums - with some still existing (with slightly different line-ups). I'd also say it's interesting how a lot of the music that was served up was really quite different from the norm (and not overly representative of either the '60s or the '70s as a whole) but large swathes of the chart (which we mostly avoided) were either incredibly bland or were just compilation albums of stuff that people had experienced before.

So, where to next? Continuing our jump forward through the decades, '81 is the year that presents itself and it will be interesting to see whether this aligns itself more with the '70s or the '80s or whether it decides to do its own thing in the way that 1971 did.

03/01/71 - Not great