On February 19, 1973, Time magazine printed a story called “The Returned: A New Rip Van Winkle” about prisoners of war arriving back in the US following the end of the conflict in Vietnam. They found themselves profoundly shocked by the changes the country had undergone while they were captured: women’s liberation, advances in civil rights, the sexual revolution, proliferation of drugs and divorce. Plenty of people who had never left the country were stunned as well.
If the cultural reformation of 1965–72 was a bomb, 1973 was the aftermath. The debris rained down. The sun streaked through the smoke onto the road ahead. Like everyone else, the musicians tried to process what had just happened and figure out what was next. They did so through a series of albums and singles that represent the zenith of classic rock.
But in rock’s triumph lay the seed of its dissolution, for 1973 was the year radio programmers figured out how to commodify “album-oriented rock.” The format soon segregated rock from the other genres that once spurred its evolution.
Under the radar, however, new forms flourished that eventually saved rock from its own stagnation, which is why Mick Jagger and Martin Scorsese set their television series Vinyl in 1973. Scorsese said, “The early 1970s, and 1973 in particular, was a time of great change in the music industry, and it all started in New York City—punk, disco, hip-hop, they all began that year right here in this city.”1 Beyond New York, country outlaws, reggae prophets, technopop scientists, female rockers, and defiant gender benders emerged to revitalize popular music.
The bestselling artists in history released some of the greatest music of their careers in ’73:2 the former Beatles, Elton John, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley, the Eagles, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Stevie Wonder, Bob Seger, the Who, Steely Dan, the Allman Brothers—and David Bowie, who recurs the most throughout this book: recording Britain’s second-bestselling album of the year, Aladdin Sane, retiring Ziggy Stardust at the peak of UK Bowie mania, producing Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, covering Bruce Springsteen, challenging friend and rival Mick Jagger to keep up.
Springsteen, Billy Joel, Queen, Aerosmith, the New York Dolls, and Lynyrd Skynyrd released their debut albums. In fact, Springsteen put out two albums inside the year—as did Elton John, Paul McCartney, Bob Marley, James Brown, Alice Cooper, Roxy Music, Waylon Jennings, Jim Croce, and Bowie.
At Max’s Kansas City in Manhattan, in a room that seated approximately 125 people, Billy Joel opened for Jennings. Springsteen and Marley switched off opening for each other throughout their summer residencies. Iggy Pop played midnight shows.
Classic rock stations today play more songs from 1973 than any other year, according to FiveThirtyEight, the website that uses statistics to analyze politics and sports.3 Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon began its 937-week run on the Billboard charts on March 17. Many fans consider it one of the most perfect albums of the century.
It was the last year the titans of the British rock establishment pushed themselves to outshine each other, with Houses of the Holy (Led Zeppelin), Quadrophenia (the Who), Goats Head Soup (the Rolling Stones), and Band on the Run (Paul McCartney).
All the ex-Beatles scored Top 10 albums, two hitting No. 1 (McCartney’s and George Harrison’s Living in the Material World). Collectively, the foursome had one of their best years ever for singles: McCartney’s “Live and Let Die,” Ringo Starr’s “Photograph,” John Lennon’s “Mind Games,” and Harrison’s “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth).”
Even they didn’t match Elton John’s dominance on the pop chart: “Crocodile Rock,” “Daniel,” “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting,” “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” “Candle in the Wind,” “Bennie and the Jets.” His albums owned the US No. 1 spot for two and a half months.
Springsteen released exuberant anthems like “Rosalita,” in the happy days before he worried about the contracting economy and whether his label was going to let him go. Like the Boss, Aerosmith dealt with poor sales by winning over the heartland in concert, city by city, night by night. Their management team ignored them in favor of their other client, the New York Dolls, but through relentless barnstorming the Boston band eventually turned “Dream On” into the most-played classic rock single of all time, per that FiveThirtyEight article.4
Dylan recorded the epic “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” Elvis Presley’s Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite TV special was NBC’s highest rated special of the year. In the Piano Man album, Billy Joel chronicled his trip to the West Coast to rescue his career from obscurity. The Grateful Dead kept the spirit of Haight-Ashbury alive with the caravan of Dead Heads that followed them across the country. Black Sabbath’s guitarist Tony Iommi found the “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” riff that revived the band in the dungeon of a haunted castle.
Gritty R&B classics crossed over to the pop chart in the golden age of protest soul: Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City,” James Brown’s “Down and Out in New York City,” Bobby Womack’s “Across 110th Street.” Funkadelic’s “Cosmic Slop” was too dark for either chart, though, as the singer lamented his mother’s life as a prostitute.
Critic Greil Marcus wrote, “Some months after [Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On] was released—from the middle of 1972 through early 1973—the impulses of its music emerged on other records, and they took over the radio. I don’t know if I will be able to convey the impact of punching buttons day after day and night after night to be met by records as clear and strong as Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Superfly’ … [War’s] ‘The World Is a Ghetto,’ the Temptations’ ‘Papa Was a Rolling Stone,’ Johnny Nash’s ‘I Can See Clearly Now,’ [or] Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstition.’ … Only a year before such discs would have been curiosities; now, they were all of a piece: one enormous answer record. Each song added something to the others, and as in a pop explosion, the country found itself listening to a new voice.”5
Rockers had enjoyed a similar renaissance, and could now sell albums of long jams without having to release traditional three-minute singles. But then radio programmers synthesized AM Top 40 with “progressive” FM, creating the album-oriented rock (AOR) format, and tamed counterculture rebellion into reliable formula.
“I’m tellin’ you, you’re coming along at a very dangerous time for rock ’n’ roll,” warns critic Lester Bangs (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous (2000).6 The film was set in 1973, inspired by Crowe’s experiences as a Rolling Stone journalist covering the Allman Brothers, the Eagles, and Led Zeppelin. Bangs/Hoffman laments to Crowe’s alter ego that the music business “will ruin rock ’n’ roll, and strangle everything we love about it.”
Until now AM had stuck to short pop singles, while FM played whatever it wanted. But program directors like Ron Jacobs began mining demographic data to zero in on the songs that attracted the young white audience that advertisers coveted. Billboard gave him the Progressive Contemporary Rock Program Director of the Year Award in August 1973 for his efforts. His rival Mike Harrison began writing the “Album Oriented Rock” section for the Radio and Records trade magazine. Program directors started dictating tight playlists to their disc jockeys, and the new format spread nationally.
The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau described how the AOR songs on constant rotation eventually settled into the current canon. “Although classic rock draws its inspiration and most of its heroes from the ’60s, it is a construction of the ’70s. It was invented by pre-punk/pre-disco radio programmers who knew that before they could totally commodify ’60s culture they’d have to rework it—that is, selectively distort it till it threatened no one. Three crucial elements got shortchanged in the process: black people, politics, and Pop-with-a-capital-P, Pop in the Andy Warhol sense.”7
In 1973, AM still garnered more listeners than FM. On many AM Top 40 stations, rock, R&B, pop, easy listening, and country coexisted.8 Ten of Billboard’s twenty-seven No. 1 pop hits of the year were by black artists.9 But over the course of the decade, FM supplanted AM, arena rock and yacht rock ascended, and by 1980 Billboard’s pop chart included only three No. 1 singles by black artists. In 1981, it had two, and 1982 had one by Lionel Richie and a duet by McCartney and Stevie Wonder, “Ebony and Ivory.”
In his book The Heart of Rock and Soul, critic Dave Marsh covered both genres in the title equally, maintaining they had always informed and intertwined with each other.10 AOR cleaved that heart in half.
For white US males, the crises were over. The war with Vietnam ended on January 27. Nixon would soon be on the ropes with Watergate. Long hair was mostly accepted in the Midwest and on the coasts. With the demons gone, the passion and urgency, the need for catharsis and battle cries, slipped away. But there were others who still had barriers to break and wanted to rock while breaking them: country artists, female musicians, gay liberationists.
In rural areas, long hair and marijuana were still grounds for a beating. Outlaws like Willie Nelson helped make the counterculture acceptable to rednecks who just a few years earlier cheered on the murder of hippies in Easy Rider. When Nelson held his first annual Fourth of July picnic at Dripping Springs, Rolling Stone writer Chet Flippo noted, “The longhairs weren’t beat up. It was the watershed in the progressive country movement.… Peaceful coexistence had come to Texas, thanks to Willie’s pontifical presence.”11 Kris Kristofferson sang his recent single “Jesus Was a Capricorn,” exhorting both hippies and hillbillies to stop looking down on each other.
The outlaws wanted to be free to produce their albums themselves, with their own bands, instead of submitting to the Nashville assembly line—just as Motown artists Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder had recently won the right to do. Nineteen seventy-three saw the first fruits of their labors, Nelson’s Shotgun Willie and Jennings’s Honky Tonk Heroes.
Two anthems still high in the charts in January reflected the ascendency of the women’s liberation movement: Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman” and Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain.” So did the musicianship of Joni Mitchell, Bonnie Raitt, Suzi Quatro, and the bands Fanny and Birtha. Quatro emerged from the second all-female band to get signed to a major label, the Pleasure Seekers. (Goldie and the Gingerbreads were the first in 1964.) Fanny was the third all-female band to get signed, and the first to release an album.
Mitchell butted heads with guitarist José Feliciano over the guitar chords she invented for “Free Man in Paris,” but Jimmy Page idolized her. Bowie raved about Fanny. “They wrote everything, they played like motherfuckers, they were just colossal and wonderful, and nobody’s ever mentioned them.”12
“We were like, ‘Yeah, catch up with us,’” said Fanny guitarist June Millington. “Essentially [our message was] fuck you. But fuck you with a smile on our face because we want you to buy our records!”13
As they blew the male bands they opened for off the stage, Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs at the Battle of the Sexes tennis match in the Houston Astrodome. The National Organization for Women (NOW) filed a lawsuit to force Little League to allow twelve-year-old Maria Pepe to play. The Equal Employment Opportunities Commission won the most expensive discrimination suit ever—against AT&T for blocking women and minorities from higher-paying promotions—then began its next case, against the Ford Motor Company.14 The Supreme Court overturned state laws banning abortions in Roe v. Wade.
Mitchell and Simon offered lyrics with the groundbreaking frankness of Erica Jong’s bestselling novel Fear of Flying, recounting their relationships with lovers and husbands like James Taylor, Jackson Browne, and Warren Beatty in songs like “Help Me” and “We Have No Secrets.”
As the gay rights movement picked up steam, David Bowie and Lou Reed kissed in publicity photos. Reed celebrated the drag queens from Andy Warhol’s films in the Bowie-produced “Walk on the Wild Side,” which made it to No. 16 on the pop charts in April.
“I first saw David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust performing at Lewisham Odeon in 1973 just before my twelfth birthday,” Boy George wrote. “He validated me and made me realize I was not alone.”15
The Rocky Horror Picture Show opened in London, celebrating bisexual chic. Freddie Mercury and Elton John dressed and performed with unrestrained flamboyance. Television’s first “out” performer, Lance Loud, starred in the reality show An American Family. The Gay Activists Alliance “zapped” (interrupted) The Today Show and CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite to protest negative portrayals of gay characters by the networks. In December, the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
“I belong to a generation that probably has to thank Queer David [Bowie] for the comparative ease with which we came out,” author John Gill wrote in Queer Noises: Lesbian and Gay Music in the 20th Century.16
Music has always served as de facto publicity campaigns for those striving for acceptance by hostile majorities. Martin Luther King’s compatriot Andrew Young observed, “I say all of the time, that rock and roll did more for integration than the church and if I was going to choose who I was going to let into the Kingdom … I might have to choose Elvis.”17
In the first episode of Vinyl, directed by Scorsese, protagonist Richie Finestra (Bobby Cannavale) plans to sell his record label—but then stumbles into a New York Dolls show at the Mercer Arts Center. Their frenzied performance reconnects him with the reason he fell in love with rock in the first place. The glam/punk of the Dolls was one of many new genres that rose in 1973 and eventually proved to be antidotes to AOR stasis.
The Dolls showed fans like the future members of the Ramones and Television that they didn’t need to be virtuosos to have a blast onstage, inspiring Television to record their first songs in April (under the name the Neon Boys). Todd Rundgren produced the Dolls’ self-titled debut, while Bowie produced Iggy and the Stooges’ Raw Power. Iggy was an ultimate crossroads figure, embodying the transition from garage rock to acid rock to glitter to punk. In July he created the self-immolating archetype imitated by countless punks to follow when he slashed his chest with glass while performing at Max’s Kansas City.
Also on the fringes, Big Star perfected the melancholy jangle pop that defined subsequent decades of indie rock with “September Gurls.” On Ralf and Florian, Kraftwerk began to focus on synthesizers, drum machines, and vocoders, prophesying the rise of electronic dance music.
A later episode of Vinyl coveys the rapture a young A&R executive (Jack Quaid) feels when he enters a black and Puerto Rican disco for the first time. Over the course of ’73, R&B began turning away from the bleak realism of protest soul toward the escapism of disco. Motown Records found a new competitor in Philadelphia International, and both scored proto-disco No. 1s, with Eddie Kendricks’s “Keep On Truckin’ (Part 1)” and the O’Jays’ “Love Train.” Philly session drummer Earl Young stumbled upon the “disco beat” while cutting Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ “The Love I Lost,” sung by Teddy Pendergrass. By the end of the year four other disco songs were recorded that would become No. 1 pop hits in ’74: Love Unlimited Orchestra’s “Love Theme,” “TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia)” (a.k.a. the theme to Soul Train), “Rock the Boat,” and “Rock Your Baby.” Deejay David Mancuso’s Loft created the blueprint for the discos that sprang up across Manhattan that spring: the Gallery opened in February, the Hollywood in May, and Le Jardin (the inspiration for Studio 54) in June.
Across town in the Bronx, DJ Kool Herc made his debut on August 11 as a deejay in a party hosted by his sister in the rec room of their apartment at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. Extending the instrumental breaks of songs through the use of two turntables, he created “break beats” for his friends to break-dance to. Today the date is celebrated as the birthday of hip hop, the form that overtook rock as the bestselling music genre in 2017.
American artists like the Four Tops appealed to the “Keeper of the Castle” to provide for all people like “the Good Book says,” but Jamaican Bob Marley and the Wailers advocated “Burnin’ and Lootin’” and shooting the sheriff. The Wailers’ “Get Up, Stand Up” and Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come” were two of the most galvanizing anthems of the decade, and reggae started to break through in the West. The Stones, Elton John, and Cat Stevens traveled to the studio where Cliff and Marley recorded, though the environment proved more perilous than they anticipated. McCartney found similar strife waiting for him when he trekked to Nigeria to soak up Afrobeat for Band on the Run. It would take the next generation of English rockers like the Clash and the Police to integrate reggae into their sound.
Three new genres emerged that would, decades later, coalesce into modern country: outlaw country, country rock, and Southern Rock. “What’s happenin’ now is that they’re mixin’ it, these rock-country groups and they really are bringin’ rock and country together,” Waylon Jennings told Rolling Stone after opening for the Grateful Dead in San Francisco. “That Kezar [Stadium] show showed the influence that rock’s had on me and the influence that country’s had on the rock groups. It was a complete circle and we didn’t sound out of place and they didn’t.”18
On the West Coast, country rock musicians mixed folk rock with the Bakersfield strand of country and western. Gram Parsons recorded two albums that finally captured the “cosmic American music” he’d been reaching for with the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and the Stones. Glenn Frey and Don Henley began their songwriting partnership in the Eagles with “Tequila Sunrise” and “Desperado.” Both they and Linda Ronstadt fought their producers to get the precise balance of country and rock they wanted.
Southern rockers mixed slide guitar blues, boogie, psychedelic, and jazz. The Allman Brothers survived the deaths of two of their members and released “Ramblin’ Man,” which they feared was too country but which became their only Top 10 single and turned them into one of the biggest touring bands of the year. In their wake arrived Lynyrd Skynyrd with “Free Bird,” the Marshall Tucker Band with “Can’t You See,” and ZZ Top with “La Grange.”
The year marked a turning point beyond music as well. After three decades in which incomes between the middle class and the 1 percent became closer (dubbed “the Great Compression” by historians), the oil crisis of October sparked the moment income inequality began to expand again.
The year 1972 had been a good one economically; the Dow Jones stock market index increased 15 percent. But the Dow peaked at 1,052 points on January 11, 1973, and would not return to that level again until November 1982.19
When the US and other Western nations supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War against Egypt and Syria, OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) took advantage of President Nixon’s weakness due to the ballooning Watergate scandal. They retaliated by quadrupling the price of oil and cutting off exports, creating a global recession. The Dow went down 45 percent between January 11, 1973, and December 6, 1974.
Middle-class workers had enjoyed a stunning rise in their standard of living since the end of World War II but now witnessed the dawn of the great stagnation. According to the Pew Research Center in 2018, after accounting for inflation, “In real terms average hourly earnings peaked more than 45 years ago: The $4.03-an-hour rate recorded in January 1973 had the same purchasing power that $23.68 would today.”20
Corporate management sought to contain wages to offset increased energy costs. Other elements hurt the workers’ bargaining position as well. One was the rise of automation. In 1969, GM introduced robotic arms to the assembly line in Lordstown, Ohio, and doubled its output of cars to 110 an hour.21 By 1973, BMW, Fiat, Mercedes-Benz, and Nissan followed suit. Meanwhile, the success of the civil rights movement for minorities and women meant more candidates competing for the same jobs. When corporations eventually returned to profitability, the middle class seemed unable to fight the rise of economic inequality, because it was fighting against itself, split down the middle by the culture war. One of the main fronts in that war was Roe v. Wade, decided on January 22.
This book features some overlap with 1972 and 1974. January’s biggest hits, such as Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” were recorded the year before. The Harder They Come soundtrack had been released in the UK earlier but was not issued in the States until February.
The book also recounts the creation of numerous albums in the second half of the year that did not see release until later, including Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark, Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night, Big Star’s Radio City, Waylon Jennings’s This Time, and Gram Parsons’s Grievous Angel, as well as some singles like Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.”
When I wrote 1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music, I was fascinated by the moment in which the oldies era mutated into the psychedelic era. Nineteen seventy-three was a year when the ’60s legends released their climactic statements while new giants and underground revolutions arrived to save music from decline. In Los Angeles, New York, London, Motown, Philly, Austin, Nashville, the Bronx, and Kingston the music both peaked and was reborn.