Tag Archives: 1973

542. tonight’s the night [1]

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“The title track of Neil Young’s sixth studio album is completely concerned with heroin and the damage done, souls consumed, lives ended way too soon. It says 1975 on the cover (and it was actually recorded a couple of years earlier) but I didn’t find it until at least ten years after the fact, yet grimly perfect timing nevertheless, such is junkiedom — it never goes out of style. Which isn’t to say Tonight’s the Night is all one sustained dirge – the album that is. But that said, it never forgets what it’s about, always more shadow than light, always more nasty than nice.” (Philip Random)

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553. starf***er

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“Speaking of songs that proudly contain the f-word (and pre-date so-called gangsta rap) I remember first hearing Starf***er at a friend’s place when I was maybe fourteen. He’d bought the brand new Stones album Goats Head Soup (now there’s a title for a pop record) because he liked Angie, the big deal single. But Starf***er (labelled Star Star on the record cover, but we never called it that) quickly became the essential track, cranked as loud as possible even when his churchgoing parents were around. Which still sort of puzzles me. Did they just not hear it? Or maybe that’s what all rock and roll sounded like to them, just one long invocation to f*** like rodents. I guess for some decent folks, the world has always been ending.” (Philip Random)

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560. Aladdin Sane (1913–1938–197?)

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“As I’ve heard it argued, Aladdin Sane (the album) is song-for-song the best of the Ziggy-era Bowie albums. Yet as a whole, it somehow doesn’t add up the way the previous two do, and thus hasn’t gotten heard as much. Which is great for our purposes as it gives us a bunch of cool non-allergenic gems, like the genuinely insane title track, particularly the part where it goes all free jazz toward the end. Stratospheres over my teenage head when I first heard it. But I listened anyway. It was David f***ing Bowie.” (Philip Random)

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592. needles in the camel’s eye

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“Sometimes I need to see a song used in a movie to truly get it. In the case of Needles in the Camel’s Eye (the first song on the first side of Brian Eno’s first solo album), that movie was Velvet Goldmine, the title sequence in which glam-rock fervour erupts through drab Britain circa 1971-72. As the story goes, David Bowie refused to let director Todd Haynes use any of his music in a movie that was a essentially about him. So Haynes scrambled, signed up everybody else that was relevant at the time, and the result was perhaps more confusing than originally intended, but probably better.” (Philip Random)

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596. we were all uprooted

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First there was Aphrodite’s Child and its mad fusions of extreme psychedelia and extreme pop. Eventually, there was an Academy Award winning soundtrack so definitive it’s since become kind of a cliché. In the middle somewhere is Earth, Vangelis Papathanasiou‘s first solo album, where the two extremes fuse and find all kinds of room to move. Aeons of it as We Were All Uprooted attests, both ethereal and grounded, like history itself shrouded in mist, the clues buried in the earth.

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598. concrete jungle

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“The release date for Catch A Fire says 1973 but I didn’t have the right ears for Bob Marley and the Wailers (and reggae in general for that matter) until at least 1980. And Concrete Jungle was pivotal in that evolution, and marijuana. By which I mean, Old Ted (one of my more dependable dealers at the time) insisted that I get high on some particularly effective herb, and listen to Catch A Fire with him. ‘Because marijuana will never be free until Jamaica is free.’ Which sounds a bit vague now but trust me, it made profound sense then. And it all started with Concrete Jungle, first track on the album, one of the best bands ever in all creation, slowly slipping things into gear for a revelatory journey through the concrete and shadows of Babylon and beyond.” (Philip Random)

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