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The popular but not quite massively so offerings included Just as I Am by Bill Withers, Hunky Dory by David Bowie, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Pink Floyd’s Meddle, Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain, and Can’s Tago Mago. The next day, January 1, 1971, was “ou might say…the first day of the rock era.” Therefore, in narrowing down his options, the author chose to focus on the post-Beatles epoch, thereby ruling out 1966, when some of the greatest records by the greatest artists of the ‘60s came out.įinally, let us remember what some of the massively popular albums of 1971 were: Carole King, who “invented the album business,” released Tapestry, which was “destined to sell in quantities nobody had previously thought it possible to sell.” Led Zeppelin’s fourth album “put them into a commercial category that neither the Beatles nor the Stones ever reached.” Sticky Fingers was “the Rolling Stones’s most influential album.” Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On “changed people’s expectations of a Motown album.” People viewed George Harrison et al’s The Concert for Bangladesh as having “elevated pop above its tawdry history into something altogether finer and more noble.” There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Sly & the Family Stone, Hepworth opines, “remains the least tidy, least house-trained albums that ever dominated the number one spot on the Billboard post and soul charts for weeks on end.” (And there was American Pie by Don McLean.) As Hepworth sees it, the “pop era” ended on New Year’s Eve 1970, when Paul McCartney began the legal proceedings to disconnect himself from The Beatles. Second, although he sometimes uses the more inclusive term “popular music,” he refers specifically to “rock” in the title. Thus, he must have had his well thought-out reasons for picking the one that he did. Giving that for Hepworth this would have included all of the 1960s and half of the 1970s, he had myriad choice years from which to select. After all, human beings are significantly prone to the effects of the music that they hear during their first, say, 25 years of being alive.

I am right.”Īs raised as the aforementioned skeptical eyebrow might be, let us begin by giving Hepworth some of the more or less obvious benefits of the doubt.įirst, if he were convinced that the most significant year in rock had to have happened during his youth, he could have chosen one of several other worthy years. However, “There’s an important difference in the case of me and 1971,” Hepworth confidently asserts. After all, everyone has a fondness and deep connection to the soundtrack of his or her most impressionable and carefree years of life. While few if any will question the quality of the popular music which Hepworth and his contemporaries were present at the unveiling of, the author acknowledges that it will not take long for his readers to “raise a skeptical eyebrow” regarding his elevation of 1971’s output. In fact, I wished as a kid that I had been born in 1951, the year of my mother’s birth, so that I could have grown up on The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Beach Boys, etc. For a music fan, that’s the winning ticket in the lottery of life.”ĭespite my being more than a quarter-of-a-century younger than Hepworth, I can relate to his enthusiasm. Paraphrasing the nineteenth-century British imperialist Cecil Rhodes, who said that to be born an Englishman was to win “first prize in the lottery of life,” Hepworth (himself a Brit) writes, “I was born in 1950. The more pressing matter is whether the book is as convincing as it is impossible to look up from. Strangely, the title of Never a Dull Moment is the same as that of a Rod Stewart album that was released in 1972.īut never mind that now.

In fact, he contends on the first page of said book that 1971 was “the busiest, most creative, most innovative, most interesting, and longest-resounding year” of the rock era. With the resignation of a president, a lost war, gas lines, leisure suits, and disco littering the political and cultural landscape, it just doesn’t get any respect.Īccording to a new book by veteran music journalist David Hepworth, however, these 10 years started off exceptionally well by music standards. The 1970s is the Rodney Dangerfield decade of twentieth-century American history. Never a Dull Moment: 1971 - The Year That Rock Exploded by David Hepworth. Was 1971 greatest year in the history of rock? Read this delightful book and be prepared to argue.