Tonight on 'Coast to Coast' - Remembering 1970

[johnnysain]

Rock Music

Date: 06-26-11 - 1 am - 5 am EST
Host: George Knapp

Guests: David Browne

Many people point to 1969 as being a pivotal year for change. But Rolling Stone writer David Browne is more convinced that 1970 is the true culprit to the end of peace and love. He joins George Knapp to look at how 1970 changed the world through the stories of four rock and roll bands.

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Why 1970 Deserves Its 15 Minutes of Fame


The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY, and the Lost Story of 1970

By David Browne Illustrated. 369 pages. Da Capo Press. $26.



The Beatles broke up, the Weathermen accidentally torched a Greenwich Village brownstone, and pop music went really soft. (Except when it didn’t.) That’s the tale, in a nutshell, told by “Fire and Rain: The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY, and the Lost Story of 1970,” which proposes to wrap together a year in the life of several loosely connected artists.

David Browne, a Rolling Stone editor and frequent contributor to The New York Times who has written books on extreme sports, Jeff and Tim Buckley, and Sonic Youth, wants to chronicle what he calls a misunderstood year in American history. He’s looking for a link between these musicians and their era — to consider “how these remarkable artists both shaped and reflected their times,” as the jacket copy has it.

Mr. Browne begins promisingly enough, with puckish descriptions of his early ’70s childhood, when the chiming guitars, miniskirts and brash optimism of the ’60s already felt distant. “Compared to that, our era was an even darker Dark Ages,” he writes in his introduction. “Welcome to the world of Watergate, KC and the Sunshine Band, ’50s nostalgia and gas rationing.” Many of the great ’60s bands had shattered; in their place came “flaxen-haired troubadours.” American society seemed to have become sick, its culture gone limp.

On reflection the author realized that 1970 was the hinge between two eras: “I couldn’t resist revisiting a moment when sweetly sung music and ugly times coexisted, even fed off each other, in a world gone off course.”

As lively as much of it is, “Fire and Rain” rarely regains the bite of this introduction, nor does it resonate the way the book’s framing suggests. What follows is a prologue set in January that begins with three of the Beatles working on “Let It Be”; four sections (each set, like a Yasujiro Ozu film, as one season fades into the next); an epilogue in gray December; and a coda bringing his main characters up to date.

Mr. Browne’s artists have seen resurgences of various kinds: Mr. Taylor sells out Tanglewood and other big-ticket places; Paul Simon has an acclaimed new solo record; and Buffalo Springfield — a prequel of sorts to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young — just completed a reunion tour. We live in what the critic Simon Reynolds calls “retromania”; soft rock keeps experiencing little revivals, and its harmonies inspire bands like Grizzly Bear and Fleet Foxes. The Beatles, of course, never go away.

But 1970 was also the year of important albums by Miles Davis, the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, Curtis Mayfield and Fairport Convention, as well as stirring records by outliers like Captain Beefheart, John Phillips and the Flying Burrito Brothers. Though none sold as well as the mainstream albums Mr. Browne spotlights — “Let It Be”; “Déjà vu” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; “Bridge Over Troubled Water” by Simon and Garfunkel; and Mr. Taylor’s “Sweet Baby James” — all continue to exert a powerful influence, and most have retained their sense of mystery better than the staples of album-oriented rock radio that the book concentrates on.

Other albums by several of the book’s players — John Lennon, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell — have more weight than Mr. Browne’s key recordings. By comparison his four centerpiece albums sound not only overexposed but often bland and airless. (The elusive and ornery Neil Young, the musician here with the greatest heft after John Lennon and Paul McCartney, barely shows up in “Fire and Rain.”) While Mr. Taylor, Mr. Simon and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young have returned to fashion, we shouldn’t forget that their music made punk necessary.

Could the story of the transition from the ’60s to the ’70s be better told through that alternative list, or, say, with Led Zeppelin, Nick Drake, David Bowie or Gram Parsons as its protagonists? Maybe, but that’s not Mr. Browne’s agenda.

As a reporter he is dogged and earnest; as a profile writer, crisp and professional. As “Fire and Rain” jaunts from London to Laurel Canyon, Mr. Browne drops in memorable details: the Tuesday-night songwriting class Mr. Simon taught in a drab room at New York University; Joni Mitchell’s break-up with Graham Nash by telegram; the way, after primal-scream therapy, it became impossible to tell Lennon’s and Yoko Ono’s handwriting apart. As a historian Mr. Browne is less inspired. The sections of context — on Richard M. Nixon, campus riots, the green movement and so on — are brief. Saying that Mr. Taylor’s placid songs helped soothe the country’s frayed nerves after all the chaos isn’t quite enough.

Part of the disconnect comes from the fact that many of Mr. Browne’s artists were intensely private figures, less likely to reflect the mood of the times than their own circumstances. Admittedly the ’70s saw a move away from the public square (and burning cities) that was the focus of the ’60s, but the book feels less like the portrait of an age than profiles of four mostly disengaged musical acts.

“Fire and Rain” bears similarities to several recent cultural histories. Mark Harris’s “Pictures at a Revolution” looked at a period of similar drift in the film business, using five Academy Award nominees to describe Hollywood’s uneasy move out of the studio system and into the Age of Aquarius. Fred Kaplan’s “1959: The Year Everything Changed” argued that Lenny Bruce, the early space program and Margaret Sanger became the fulcrum on which the century would turn. Rob Young’s “Electric Eden,” though at times rambling and overwritten, used a brief window in the late ’60s and early ’70s to explore the overlooked roots and branches of British folk rock.

“Fire and Rain” doesn’t attain the sweep of any of them. The book is very readable, but at times you feel Mr. Browne straining to jack up the drama or consequence of his story. What are the stakes, really, of recording a Ringo Starr album?