1971 – Never a Dull Moment: Rock’s Golden Year by David Hepworth review – lives up to its title

Was the year of Carole King’s Tapestry and Don McLean’s American Pie a turning point in pop history?

In July Carole King will play London’s Hyde Park and perform her signature album Tapestry in its entirety, an event that slots seamlessly into the narrative of David Hepworth’s engaging account of the year Tapestry “redefined the record business for the next decade” to become “the first evergreen of the rock era”.

Hepworth has other claims for 1971, which allegedly boasts “more influential albums than any year before or since” and remains “the most febrile and creative time in the history of popular music”.

As much is contestable. Previous years had hardly been short of groundbreaking bestsellers, while Hepworth, who wears his nostalgia on his sleeve, concedes that the music of one’s youth inevitably rings most potently. Yet he is surely right that ’71 marked a step change in pop history, one driven as much by the industry’s commercial clout as by its music, fecund and memorable though that often was. “TV was nowhere, movies were in retreat, music was king,” he justly claims.

The year’s innovations came in many forms. George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh provided the template for subsequent charity bashes. Arena rock reached new heights of grandiosity – Led Zeppelin at the Sam Houston Coliseum rather than the Bath Pavilion – with live albums such as the Allman Brothers’ At Fillmore East acquiring fresh importance. Palatial 24-track studios became the norm, their productions marketed with a new slickness, not least on FM radio with its freshly arrived concept of AOR. The vestiges of 60s idealism fell away; after 1971, there was no “underground”, everything was mainstream.

Even the staid Tapestry marked the emergence of a new kind of record buyer – young women, who identified with “themes of shelter, stability and trust… Carole King became the sister they might have had”.

To what is often a familiar story Hepworth brings rare perspicacity into the business machinations of the era, whose movers and shakers were, as he points out, often from a previous, less starry-eyed generation. Promoter Bill Graham’s mother had died in Auschwitz, Zeppelin manager Peter Grant was an East End evacuee, producer Tom Dowd had worked on the Manhattan Project. These were bruisers, “not a hippy among them”, who realised pop’s new money‑making power.

To counterbalance rock’s youthful glamour, Hepworth begins his book with a sobering sketch of everyday UK life: no mobile phones, 70,000 telephone boxes, two-thirds of the population have no bank account, smokers everywhere (even in hospitals) and “the only people with tattoos got them in the services”. Truly this was another country, though one whose music remains all too familiar, thanks to “heritage rock”, a concept Hepworth also traces to 1971; the year saw a burst of nostalgia exemplified by Don McLean’s American Pie and George Lucas’s American Graffiti.

Hepworth’s rocktastic perspective means he misses a trick or two; 1971 was also the year reggae insinuated itself in the British psyche via hits such as Dave and Ansell Collins’s Double Barrel, and if you are looking for 1971 music with “afterlife”, Al Green and Curtis Mayfield deserve attention.

Yet Never a Dull Moment lives up to its title. Among fine cameos comes Stevie Wonder, newly introduced to the synth (“more like the control room of a power station than a musical instrument”), the trial of Oz magazine (“the climactic event of Britain’s Great Hippy Scare”) and the rise of three London lads, Cat Stevens, Marc Bolan and Rod Stewart, the last “dressed like a disreputable clerk out of Dickens… a gifted cynic who knew the arts of survival”.

Who had most influence? Hepworth chooses Elvis, whose 1971 Vegas residency pioneered what heritage pop has become; a show packed with musicians in which nothing has been left to chance, and ultimately reliant on “the audience’s deep, surprising love for the music of the past”.

1971 – Never a Dull Moment is published by Bantam Press (£20). Click here to order a copy for £16

Contributor

Neil Spencer

The GuardianTramp

Related Content

Article image
Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars by David Hepworth – review
Hepworth’s lively study of rock’s greatest stars underlines how much the music industry has changed

Barbara Ellen

15, May, 2017 @6:30 AM

Article image
Paul McCartney: The Biography by Philip Norman – review
Philip Norman’s considered biography portrays the ‘cute’ Beatle in all his creative complexity and breadth

Neil Spencer

16, May, 2016 @6:29 AM

Article image
Sing Backwards and Weep by Mark Lanegan review – eye-popping trip
The singer-songwriter’s memoir is a harrowing but often hilarious chronicle of addiction and regret

Kitty Empire

11, May, 2020 @6:00 AM

Article image
Why Dylan Matters by Richard F Thomas review – Virgil, Homer, Ovid… Dylan?
An academic’s attempt to shoehorn Dylan into the pantheon of literary greats misunderstands the singer’s appeal

Sean O'Hagan

19, Dec, 2017 @7:30 AM

Article image
The Hard Stuff by Wayne Kramer review – portrait of a self-saboteur
He implausibly defied drugs, detention and death – now the MC5 maverick delivers an equally uncompromising memoir

Kitty Empire

06, Aug, 2018 @6:00 AM

Article image
So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley review – revelatory
Roger Steffens’s sprawling but compelling biography is a fitting tribute to Jamaica’s favourite son

Neil Spencer

14, Aug, 2017 @6:00 AM

Article image
Devil in a Coma by Mark Lanegan review – a rock star collides with Covid
The hard-living musician’s vivid memoir recounts his latest brush with death, this time in the form of the coronavirus

Kitty Empire

10, Jan, 2022 @7:00 AM

Article image
The Creative Act by Rick Rubin review – life lessons from the bearded beat master
The co-founder of Def Jam Records and the man behind countless hits, from the Beastie Boys and Jay-Z to Neil Young, offers artistic wisdom that is both gnomic and pertinent

Kitty Empire

10, Jan, 2023 @7:00 AM

Article image
Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011 by Lizzy Goodman – review
This oral history of New York’s musical renaissance is vivid, informative and full of passion

Barbara Ellen

08, Aug, 2017 @5:59 AM

Article image
Long Players, edited by Tom Gatti review – a new spin on an old favourite
Adapted from a New Statesman column, this collection of writers’ love letters to their most treasured albums soars when it ventures away from the canon

Dorian Lynskey

01, Jun, 2021 @6:00 AM