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[Images from 1974 scrapbook by js]

It was thirty five years ago today. Doesn’t have much of a ring does it, and indeed 1974 is an elision in most pop/cultural histories. A gap, a lacuna only partially filled by recent accounts of progressive rock – amusing and a necessary corrective though they might be. The political story is well told, most recently by Andy Beckett in his journey through 1970′s politics, When the Lights Went Out: the year of two Labour election wins, the three-day-week and the miners strike, the Birmingham IRA bomb, the slow upward rise of the New Right and free-market economics, the effects of the OPEC oil strike. It’s as though all these events have crowded out all other memories of this pivotal year.

In fact, as Paul Tickell has recently suggested, 1974 is ‘the year the 60′s ended and the 80′s began’. In pop, it’s the year of terminal glam: Diamond Dogs and Rebel Rebel. Bowie changes tack during the Diamond Dogs [tour] and opts for Philly Soul, while Roxy Music find affirmation with the surprisingly straightforward All I Want Is You. There is a late sophisticated glam flash from Sparks, with two huge hits and two albums, Kimono My House and Propaganda. Brian Eno releases Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, with the proto-punk The True Wheel (“we saw the lovers, the modern lovers, and they looked very good’), while producing Nico’s one and only Island album, The End – most notable for the synthesiser ice-storm on Innocent And Vain. Nico also crops up on Kevin Ayers’ Irreversible Neural Damage and the whole thing is wrapped up by June 1 1974 – an album recorded live on that date and featuring Ayers, Eno, Nico, John Cale and the rest of the Island community.

The big new teen sensations are the Bay City Rollers, a classic boy band plucked from the street and heavily manipulated. Apart from Saturday Night, most of their early records are pretty wimpy but they will foster harder imitators in the years to come (Slik, Hello (notable for their 1976 epic, Teenage Revolution and the Sex Pistols). For those requiring hard rock, Dr. Feelgood are a heart-stopping sensation on the live circuit and, by the end of that year, are busy recording their first and classic LP, Down By The Jetty.

On the West Coast, it’s the year of the two late hippie era masterworks: Neil Young’s On The Beach and Gene Clark’s No Other, which swings from cosmic exultation to despair (for more in this vein, hear if you can Syd Barrett’s last ever studio session from 1974 and Nick Drake’s Hanging On A Star, two late sixties golden boys floundering in the brutal seventies). The Doobie Brothers clean up with the New Orleans chapter in their early/ ambient travelogues: Black Water. American resident John Lennon makes his last good album: Walls and Bridges. In New York, the Dolls are running out of steam while the CBGB’s scene is getting under way: the Richard Hell Television, Ramones, Patti Smith – who releases her first 45, Hey Joe/ Piss Factory.

It’s a fantastic time for black music: funk, jazz-fusion, soul: Funkadelic’s Standing on the Verge of Getting It On, Bobby Bland’s Dreamer, Gil Scott-Heron’s The Bottle, Al Green’s Livin’ For You, Miles Davis’ Big Fun, Weather Report’s Mysterious Traveller. There are soul songs of surprising, if not shocking frankness: Swamp Dogg’s Did I Come Back Too Soon (Or Stay Away Too Long), Laura Lee’s I Need It Just As Bad As You, Betty Davis’ He Was A Big Freak (‘I used to whip him with my turquoise chain’). It’s the year of the early disco breakthrough: from Patti Jo’s Make Me Believe In You (mentioned in Andrew Holloran’s ur-disco text, Dancer From the Dance) and Gloria Gaynor’s Honey Bee through to huge US hits like George McCrae’s hypnotic drum-machine mood piece, Rock Your Baby, and the Hues Corporation’s Rock The Boat.

Similarly with reggae: the Wailers’ Natty Dread, Rupie Edwards’ Ire Feelings (skanga!), Toots and the Maytals’ In The Dark. The first dub albums are beginning to appear, by Skin Flesh and Bones, Augustus Pablo (Ital Dub). The greatest of these is Keith Hudson’s Pick A Dub. From its cover in (tam-wearing Rasta smoking huge spliff under a coconut tree) Pick A Dub is a holistic masterpiece that does much to promote Dub as the present/ future form. Hudson uses Augustus Pablo’s melodica as a fanfare on the opening title track: it weaves in and out of a churchy organ, but everything is brought back to the fundamental bass, snare and cymbal at regular intervals before a brief scat vocals whoops into the fade. Every track is great but Dreaded Than is pure, organ-drenched skank of filth, while Don’t Move is a perfect paradox: a dropped in and out vocal that says ‘be still’ while the backing track moves like BMW pushed to the engine limit. Pick A Dub is one of the first dub albums to get a UK release, if not the first, and you can hear it blaring out all over West London.

In Germany, Faust release Krautrock – the all-consuming drone that comprehensively trashes the genre that it helped to name – while Kraftwerk have an international hit with Autobahn: the Beach Boys transplanted to the autobahns of West Germany. (I’ve road tested it in situ – on the A7 and the A24, and it works perfectly: don’t forget that there are no speed limits on the A-bahn). Other 1974 albums of note include Can’s Future Days (inc the funky Moonshake), Klaus Schulze’s Black Dance, the Cosmic Jokers’ Planete Sit In, and Sand’s extraordinary Golem (thanks to Julian Cope for this tip), where outré electronica meets tribal chant in a primeval cave. Much more approachable is Cluster’s Zuckerzeit (sweet time) – a collection of ten instrumentals that range from the almost sickly (Marzipan) to the darkly ambient (James) and the disconcerting: Rote Riki, where bleeping androids fade into a sticky soundpatch of underwater creatures. Best of all is the uplifting opener, Hollywood, which builds and builds over nearly four minutes before resolving within a perpetual ascent. You want it to last forever. Zuckerzeit is often credited with inspiring Eno at a crucial moment – sure you can hear it on Another Green World and, even more, on the ltd ed, all instrumental, 27 track EG Music For Films – but it needs no retrospective justification: it exists in its own world, poised between playfulness, European melodicism and Romantic presentiments of darkness.

The final selection from this year comes from the outer fringes. In February 1974, the Residents release 1000 copies of Meet The Residents on their Ralph Records label. The front cover detourned, in classic pro-Situ defacement style, the Beatles’ first US album: John Lennon has a drooling tongue, George Harrison fangs, Ringo Dr Spock ears, while Paul McCartney has a particularly disturbing insect face. The flip showed the Beatles in another classic shot, all in their Pierre Cardin collar-les suits, with crawfish heads. Apart from being entertaining, it was part of a polemic against the hegemony of 60′s culture (which by the mid seventies had become oppressive to many): they would as return to the Beatles on 1976′s epic sonic cut-up, Beyond The Valley Of A Day In The Life, but in the meantime the Residents began their habit of warping 60′s radio hits – like These Boots Are Made For Walking (Boots) and the Human Beinz’s Nobody But Me (which cuts into their oil crisis number N-Er-Gee – excised from the later CD version, presumably for copyright reasons).

They would return to this theme on 1975′s Third Reich n’Roll: ‘people are speculating,’ they wrote in the sleevenote, ‘whether the Residents are hinting that Rock’n Roll has brainwashed the youth of the world. When confronted with this possible philosophy, they replied “Well, it may be true or it may not, but we wanted to kick out the jams and get it on”.’ Manifestos mean very little if the a-music isn’t there, and Meet The Residents is a dizzying collage of found sound and musique concrete with the deliberately dissonant and the near pop (Smelly Tongues), resolving into moments of strange beauty (Rest Aria). It took a while for the album and the group to find an audience, but towards the end of 1977 they sounded perfectly in sync with the times: beginning with similar aims to punk – how to blow away pop culture’s false consciousness? – the Residents had the a-musical and conceptual ability to take that polemic and music much further, as they did throughout the 80′s. But their first album still rings loud and unique.

To finish, some playlists:

1974, part 1

• Mr. Michael Bond’s Address – The Portsmouth Sinfonia
• White Light / White Heat (Live 1974) – Lou Reed
• At Home At Work At Play – Sparks
• Funky Kingston – Toots and the Maytals
• She Does It Right – Dr. Feelgood
• Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On – Funkadelic
• Ain’t No Love In The Heart of the City – Bobby “Blue” Bland
• Going Down On Love – John Lennon
• The Fan – Little Feat
• Rikki Don’t Lose That Number – Steely Dan
• Ife – Miles Davis
• The Bottle – Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson
• Let’s Get Married – Al Green

1974, part 2

• Sweet Home Alabama – Lynyrd Skynyrd
• The Thrill Of It All – Roxy Music
• My Teenage Queen – Harpo
• Amateur Hour – Sparks
• Devil Gate Drive – Suzi Quatro
• Honeybee – Gloria Gaynor
• Rock Me Again & Again & Again & Again & Again & Again (6 Times) – Lyn Collins
• Did I Come Back Too Soon (Or Stay Away Too Long) – Swamp Dogg
• Love Epidemic – The Trammps
• Doctor’s Orders – Carol Douglas
• Don’t Move – Keith Hudson
• Babylon Dubbing – Skin Flesh & Bones
• The Big Rip-Off – Augustus Pablo
• Androids – Robert Rockwell III
• Crystal Waters – Moolah
• Scarlet Woman – Weather Report

1974, part 3

• Autobahn – Kraftwerk
• Make Me Believe In You – Patti Jo
• Pick A Dub - Keith Hudson
• Train To Rhodesia – Big Youth
• In Zaire – Johnny Wakelin
• Rock And Roll Records – J.J. Cale
• Do It (Til You’re Satisfied) – B.T. Express
• Moonshake – Can
• Sweet Thing (Reprise) – David Bowie
• Time Machine – Sadistic Mika Band
• I Don’t Mind – Dr. Feelgood
• I Need It Just As Bad As You – Laura Lee
• Be Thankful For What You Got – William DeVaughan

1974, part 4

• Dreamer – Bobby Blue Bland
• Black Water – Doobie Brothers
• Observatory Crest – Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band
• Ambulance Blues – Neil Young
• Age Of Treason – Donovan
• The Cavalry Cross – Richard & Linda Thompson
• No Other – Gene Clark
• Kometenmelodie 1 – Kraftwerk
• Helicopter – Sand
• Electronic News – The Cosmic Jokers
• Mirror’s – Moolah
• Hey Joe – Patti Smith

1974, part 5

• Satan Side – Keith Hudson
• Fingerprint File – The Rolling Stones
• Out Of The Blue – Roxy Music
• Chant Of The Ever Circling Skeletal Family – David Bowie
• The Needle and the Spoon – Lynyrd Skynyrd
• Fear is a Man’s Best Friend – John Cale
• Piss Factory – Patti Smith
• DMT – George Brigman
• Irreversible Neural Damage – Kevin Ayers
• Innocent and Vain – Nico
• Erotic Neurotic – The Saints
• Krautrock – Faust
• Heiße Lippen – Cluster
• If You Go 2 – Syd Barrett
• Hanging On A Star – Nick Drake
• I’ll Be There If You Ever Want Me – J.J. Cale

Tags: Andrew Hollaran, Andy Beckett, Augustus Pablo, Bay City Rollers, Bobby Bland, Brian Eno, Can, CBGB, Cluster, David Bowie, Dr. Feelgood, Faust, Funkadelic, Gene Clark, George McCrae, Hello, John Lennon, Keith Hudson, Kevin Ayers, Miles Davis, Neil Young, Nick Drake, Nico, Patti Jo, Patti Smith, Paul Tickell, Roxy Music, Sand, Sex Pistols, Slik, Sparks, Swamp Dogg, Syd Barrett, Television, The Beatles, The Cosmic Jokers, The Doobie Brothers, The Wailers, Toots and the Maytals, Weather Report

Posted on October 5, 2009 at 4:33 pm  7 Comments