King Crimson were a force indeed come 1973’s Larks Tongues In Aspic. Bill Bruford (recently with Yes) had just joined and they were well and truly armed and dangerous and unafraid to go anywhere, try anything, with the almost funky Easy Money the closest thing to what one might call a normal song (at the beginning anyway). Welcome to true progressive rock, or as Crimson main man Robert Fripp later described it, Bela Bartok by way of Jimi Hendrix.
Mike Nesmith being the Monkee that had genuine songwriting talent and thus a meaningful solo career, Some of Shelly’s Blues being a countrified ballad to make grown men (and women) weep.
In which Manfred Mann and his Earth Band rip off Gustav Holst’s Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity in aid of a high flying, irresistibly affirming (also kind of rocking) pop nugget. Who says there was nothing to smile about in 1973?
The word debacle applies to Emerson Lake + Palmer’s 1977. While the cool world went punk and the party world went disco, they released a dubious double album and invested big in taking a full symphony orchestra on a world tour with them. It failed. Meanwhile, a wigged out sort of post-meltdown boogie like Tiger in a Spotlight got buried on a secondary album of various odds and sods, suggesting a whole other possible history for mankind … until you do little research and discover it had been sitting on a shelf since 1973. That ship had already sailed, and probably sank.
Neil Diamond had it all by 1973. Millions of adoring fans, great hair, even a grudging sort of critical respectability in the wake of those recent live shows at the Greek Theater in L.A. So what does the man do with it all? He dives deep, he reaches high, he gives his all to a soundtrack for an awful movie based on a really dumb book about a seagull. Yet even in falling Icarus-like, Mr. Diamond soars “… as a page that aches for a word, which speaks on a theme that is timeless.”
In which Neil Young gets deadly serious in the wake of various deaths in and around the band (Crazy Horse) and weighs in with a public service announcement on the topic of smoking a little marijuana and going for a long drive if the times get too troubling. Because there’s nothing like a rear view mirror to put things further behind you than they really are. Which is kind of the opposite of Roll Another Number, which was already two years old before anybody ever heard it, the album in question having been held back for being just too grim.
Randophonic 
