Due to the ongoing fuel crisis, Nixon appealed to citizens to cut back on holiday lights. The White House did not bring in the typical giant Christmas tree and illuminate it with 74,500 watts. They decorated one on the grounds with 9,640 watts. Inside the White House, the Nixons used just tinsel on their tree, no bulbs.1 Many towns reduced the number of days they lit their trees. Cities from Houston to Detroit decorated trees but did not light them. St. Paul abstained from decorating altogether.
The No. 1 song as 1973 became 1974 was Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle.” He had written the song three years ago in December, when his wife told him she was pregnant. His producer Tommy West added a harpsichord, having heard the instrument in a horror movie the night before the recording session. The song was originally just an album track. But in the wake of Croce’s death, his lament that “there never seems to be enough time” inspired deejays across the country to start playing it, so ABC released it as a single, a fitting reminder at the end of the year to make the most of the life you have left.
Other artists in the Top 20 included the Steve Miller Band with “The Joker,” Elton John, Todd Rundgren, the Carpenters, Stevie Wonder, Chicago, and two Beatles, McCartney with “Helen Wheels” and Lennon with “Mind Games.” Starr wasn’t far below with both “You’re Sixteen” and “Photograph.”
Thus passed the crowning year for the rock and roll monoculture, a year that witnessed milestones from five of the eight artists who have sold over 250 million units: the Beatles, Elvis, Elton John, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd.2 Fifteen of the year’s nineteen No. 1 albums were rock albums. By contrast, in 2018, only eight out of the forty-one No. 1 albums were rock.3 The genre is almost gone from the singles chart, comprised now mostly of hip hop and pop, with some electronic dance music and some country.4 Blues rock, the strain that dominated the genre after the Rolling Stones and Yardbirds rose out of the British club scene is now gone except for occasional albums by Jack White, the Black Keys, and John Mayer, faded like Tin Pan Alley before it.
In 2017, Nielsen announced that hip hop and R&B had surpassed rock as the top genre in overall sales in all formats, accounting for 25.1 percent of music purchased as opposed to rock’s 23 percent. Rock was still responsible for 40 percent of all album sales.5 However, album sales now only made up 4.3 percent of the Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) revenue.6 In 1973, they made up 61.8 percent. Streaming now generates more money than the sale of CDs, downloads, and vinyl put together, accounting for 75 percent of music industry revenue. The music business is now once again all about the singles, as it was in the era before 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Most of today’s singles sound closer to Kraftwerk than to the earthy rock that dominated ’73. You’d be hard-pressed to find a real drum in pop music today, and even rock drums are airbrushed by “drum replacement”—with each hit of the snare swapped out for a clip of the perfect drum beat, to make the track sound flawless.7
There’s also the “loudness war.” Producers once allowed dynamic contrast between the quiet moments of a song and its loud sections. But starting in the late ’80s many producers strove to be louder than the other songs on the radio by mixing their quiet parts to be almost as loud as their peaks, while pushing the loud parts into the red zone so that the guitars distorted or “clipped.”8 Dylan complained in 2006, “You listen to these modern records, they’re atrocious, they have sound all over them. There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like—static.”9 Which is one reason vinyl endures (currently making up 2.17 percent of all music sales, including streaming and downloads). Analog allows for more depth between quiet and loud, and vinyl holds more information than the MP3 digital format, so it is closer in quality to the original master tape recorded in the studio.
Another reason 1973 sounds distinct from today is the omnipresence of Garageband, the music software available for free in Apple computers. Its beats and mixing features have been used on everything from Rhianna’s smash “Umbrella” to songs by Radiohead, Duran Duran, Kendrick Lamar, and Usher.10
On today’s radio, 1970s rock is closer to country than to the hits played on the pop stations. “Nashville is America’s new rock capital,” Rolling Stone wrote in January 2019. Today’s country sounds like the Eagles or Lynyrd Skynyrd with a more pronounced twang and updated production sheen. Ronnie Dunn of Brooks and Dunn noted that the Eagles would be “hardcore country by today’s standards.”11 Vince Gill observed, “Those guys [the Eagles] and those songs affected this music more than all of our heroes. If you look at today’s incarnation of what country music is, the Eagles had more to do with it than Hank, George Jones and Merle. There’s nothing that you hear out of our music today that harkens to that.”12
But there is one area of the business where rock still leads. “Hip-hop is huge, but on the concert circuit, rock is king,” The Wall Street Journal wrote in late 2018. Four of that year’s top twenty-five touring acts were 1973 stars: the Stones, the Eagles, Billy Joel, and Elton John. In 2019, Kiss, Paul McCartney, and Queen were scheduled to join them on the road. And the Journal noted hope for the future. “Older rockers like the Rolling Stones get most of the credit for driving North America’s $8 billion concert-touring industry, but an underappreciated reason for live music’s boom is the strength of smaller acts.”13
In Hollywood, Capitol Records took down the seventy-five-foot Christmas tree it traditionally lit atop its headquarters. The oil crisis also affected the records themselves. LPs usually weighed up to 120 grams (about 4 ounces), but a vinyl shortage reduced them to as light as 80 grams. On both sides of the Atlantic, people returned records for being warped and too thin.
The New York Times’s January 1 editorial “Resolution for a New Era” proclaimed, “With 1973, an era died, an era of profligacy unprecedented in human experience when most Americans embarked on an orgy of consumption, following the lean years of the Depression and World War II.”14
Many American consumers wondered why they should keep buying Detroit cars that only managed ten miles to the gallon and frequently broke down, and began buying more Japanese and German cars. When Toyota, Honda, and Volkswagen opened American factories, they did so in “right to work” (nonunion) southern states. General Motors followed suit, building eleven new southern factories by 1978.15 The United Auto Workers’ efforts to unionize these regions were largely thwarted.
Between the 1940s and 1970s, the American worker enjoyed a 90 percent increase in compensation. But from the early 1970s to 2018, the increase in average worker compensation (when adjusted for inflation) was 12 percent.16 According to Forbes, in 1950 the average CEO made 20 times the salary of the average worker. In 1980, the CEO made 42 times as much as a worker. In 2000, 120 times.17 In 2013, Bloomberg reported the average CEO compensation was 204 times as great. In 2018, 361 times.18
As mentioned in the introduction, the average worker’s wage peaked in 1973 when adjusted for inflation. The year also saw the opening of the World Trade Center twin towers and the completion of the Sears (now Willis) Tower. Nearly half a century later, the rebuilt One World Trade Center and the Willis Tower remain the largest buildings in the western hemisphere.19
On New Year’s Eve, a Monday, Kiss opened for the Stooges and Blue Oyster Cult at New York’s Academy of Music. The band could not afford top-of-the-line Marshall speakers but loaded huge (empty) speaker cabinets onto the stage to make it look like they used the same high-powered equipment as the major groups. They also brought a sign that flashed their name on and off like a marquee, four feet high by ten feet wide, a foot deep.
“Dude, it’s etched in my mind,” Iggy Pop recalled. “Kiss were third on the bill that night, probably getting fifty bucks, but they had a giant Kiss sign made of lights that must have weighed five hundred pounds.”20
Smoke machines hissed fog while Peter Criss’s drum platform rose. His drumsticks exploded, made of flash paper (a flammable compound used by magicians). During the song “Firehouse,” Gene Simmons filled his mouth with kerosene and spit it onto a torch for the first time. The torch set his hair spray on fire. “The left side of my head was in flames. I didn’t know what was going on except all of a sudden, the entire audience was on its feet.”21 A man ran onstage from the wings and put a leather jacket on his head to put the flames out.22
Simmons threw flash paper above the audience, as if shooting fireballs to explode above them. “That night my aim wasn’t so good and some guy was standing on his chair and that flash went off in his face. I saw it explode in his face, and he fell over like a pin in a bowling alley.”23
The band’s manager, Bill Aucoin, rushed to call his lawyer to get language for a release, which he asked the poor kid to sign. Criss recalled, “Bill ushered the kid backstage after the show and we had him pose with us for a photo and then Bill gave him a lifetime pass to the Academy of Music.”24
The young man had singed eyebrows and blisters on his face. Simmons said it looked like “Velveeta cheese had melted over the left side of his face. He looked like someone from a Hammer horror movie.”25
But the kid said, “You guys are awesome! Wow, that was the coolest show I’ve ever seen!”26 En route into the ambulance he told reporters that Kiss was his favorite band.27
Over the holidays, twenty-seven-year-old Donald Trump wondered if the strategy he and his father, Fred, had adopted to fight the Department of Justice would work. They were scheduled to face off against the agency in January at the US courthouse in Brooklyn.
The DOJ had brought suit against the Trump Management Corporation on October 15 for discriminating against blacks, claiming the family blocked them from renting units in their Queens housing development. Folk singer Woody Guthrie had noticed this after he signed a two-year lease in 1950, prompting him to write the angry song “Old Man Trump.”
I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
In 1927, multiple newspapers—including The New York Times, the Daily Star, the Queens County Evening News, and the Richmond Hill Record—had reported that Fred Trump was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan march in Queens “on a charge of refusing to disperse from a parade when ordered to do so.”28
The morning the DOJ brought suit against the Trumps, Donald read an editorial by Roy Cohn, former right-hand man of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the anti-Communist witch hunter. In the editorial, Cohn criticized Spiro Agnew for resigning as vice president, arguing that he should have fought to hold his position. Trump found Cohn that day in Manhattan’s Le Club and asked his advice.29 Cohn encouraged him to never admit guilt, to double down, to fight back. With Cohn as his lawyer, Trump filed a $100 million countersuit against the Justice Department on December 12 for false claims.
That year in Queens, white kids still dressing like the Lords of Flatbush in leather jackets and ducktails rioted against busing, forcing classes to be canceled and schools to be closed.30 Another Queens native on All in the Family was watched each week by up to a third of all Americans. Some feared the show made racism more palatable. Others found Archie Bunker lovable despite his flaws. “You think it, but ole Archie says it, by damn,” praised a fan.31
The day before Trump filed his countersuit, the Gay Raiders zapped the Most Trusted Man in America. A twenty-three-year-old activist named Mark Segal told CBS that he was a college student and requested permission to watch the taping of the evening news. At 6:44 p.m., Segal said, “I sat on [Walter] Cronkite’s desk directly in front of him and held up the sign [GAYS PROTEST CBS PREJUDICE] while the technicians furiously ran after me and wrestled me to the floor and wrapped me in wire [cables]—on camera. The network went black while they took us out of the studio.”32
Cronkite said to his audience, “Well, a rather interesting development in the studio here—a protest demonstration right in the middle of the CBS News studio.… The young man was identified as a member of something called Gay Raiders, an organization protesting alleged defamation of homosexuals on entertainment programs.”
Segal was charged with trespassing. After testifying in the court case, Cronkite asked him, “Why did you do that?”
Segal told him that CBS had neglected to do stories on the twenty-three cities that enacted gay rights legislation, doing only one story on how New York failed to pass it. CBS also did not cover Gay Pride Day.
Cronkite introduced Segal to CBS management and began regularly covering the gay rights movement on his program, closing his next installment on the local New York struggle with “Part of the new morality of the 60’s and 70’s is a new attitude toward homosexuality. The homosexual men and women have organized to fight for acceptance and respectability. They’ve succeeded in winning equal rights under the law in many communities. But in the nation’s biggest city, the fight goes on.”33
Segal said Cronkite became “his friend and mentor.”34 The $450 fine he paid for trespassing was “the happiest check I ever wrote.”35
“I’ve got this riff and it’s a bit Rolling Stonesy—I just want to piss Mick off a bit,”36 Bowie said to guitarist Alan Parker, whom Bowie enlisted to back him now that he no longer employed the Spiders from Mars.
Parker said, “I spent about three-quarters of an hour to an hour with him working on the guitar riff—he had it almost there, but not quite. We got it there, and he said, ‘Oh, we’d better do a middle.…’ So he wrote something for the middle, put that in.”37
Bowie wrote “Rebel Rebel” that autumn for his musical based on 1984. When George Orwell’s widow refused to grant him the rights, he turned it into the album Diamond Dogs. “Rebel” was for the female glam rock fans, the ones who danced at Rodney’s English Disco like Cherie Currie and Joan Jett, the ones whose mothers were “not sure if you’re a boy or a girl.”
That could be Patti Smith, who fit into the androgynous Max’s/Warhol milieu (doing plays with Wayne County, opening for Jackie Curtis). But she arrived from the other direction; instead of a guy dressing like a girl, she was a woman who looked like a man. “I was in my beyond-gender mode,” Smith said.38 When Allen Ginsberg hit on her, she had to tell him, “Look at the tits, Allen! Notice the tits!”39 She cut her hair like Keith Richards, wore torn T-shirts, spit, swore, the ultimate beatnik angry-looking chick, something the pop machine would never manufacture.
Last New Year’s, when 1972 became 1973, she’d felt adrift. “Once again I found myself contemplating what I should be doing to do something of worth. Everything I came up with seemed irreverent or irrelevant.”40
But she started opening for the New York Dolls at Mercer, reading poetry, maybe performing an occasional song. It was rough going at first, but she learned how to face off against the drunken hecklers, and during the summer she began to win the crowd over.
She saw The Harder They Come and loved how the Rastas connected themselves to the ancient tribes of Israel and the Bible. “Somewhere along the line I decided to try their sacred herb.”41 Smoking pot helped her improvise when she jammed with Lenny Kaye, the critic-guitarist who curated the Nuggets garage-rock/punk compilation. She was a rock critic, too, writing for Rolling Stone, Creem, Circus, Crawdaddy. She sought him out after appreciating an article he wrote for Creem about doo-wop. He recognized her from Max’s. “She would come into Village Oldies, the record store I worked in on Bleecker Street, and we’d drink a little beer on Saturday nights and pull records from the stacks and dance to them and hang out.”42
Gradually she started thinking more about rocking. She went out with the bassist for Blue Oyster Cult, wrote a song for them called “Baby Ice Dog.” She and Bebe Buell would put on Raw Power and sing “Gimme Danger” into the mirror, practicing their moves.43
Finally, she went on a pilgrimage to Paris to visit the haunts of her favorite poet, Rimbaud.44 When she returned she started doing “Rock and Rimbaud” shows with Kaye accompanying her on guitar at Le Jardin, one of the city’s discos. Mickey Ruskin gave them six nights at Max’s opening for folk singer Phil Ochs, including New Year’s Eve.
On New Year’s Day, the duo performed at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. As she took the stage, she passed a writer she knew from Warhol’s Interview magazine, Victor Bockris. “She spat on the ground right in front of me, and said, ‘You owe me money, motherfucker!’ And I was like, ‘Fuck you!’ I mean, I thought, she’s an asshole, but she’s really good.”45
She and Kaye climaxed, as had become tradition, with “Piss Factory,” her autobiographical account of working in a New Jersey factory when she was sixteen, enduring the harassment of her fellow employees. “I’m gonna be somebody, I’m gonna get on that train, go to New York City,” she chanted. “Never return, no, never return, to burn out in this piss factory.”
And with that she strode past the cheering crowd and out the door, into the new year. Elsewhere, Nixon futilely stonewalled the release of tapes that exposed his obstruction of justice. Stevie Wonder prepped for his return to the stage later that month. Mid-level bands like Golden Earring drove all night with “Radar Love” coming in from above. Neil Young sat at his piano at Broken Arrow Ranch, drawing on the Stones’ “Lady Jane” to write “Borrowed Tune,” singing, “I’m climbin’ this ladder, my head in the clouds. I hope that it matters.” The next underground movements gathered steam, to bloom and wash away like those before, leaving behind an endless beach of jewels to be rediscovered in the decades to come, new ones rising from the algorithms of YouTube and Spotify every day.