1970 in Music

A self-interview that ends an era On April 10, Paul McCartney includes a Q&A with advance copies of his solo debut. The questions are bland, the answers blander, but the press seizes on one exchange about having no plans for a new album with his former bandmates. Headlines declare the split. John Lennon had privately told the others he was leaving the previous September but was persuaded to stay quiet to protect business negotiations. The announcement that shakes the world isn't an announcement at all. It's a non-answer to a planted question in a press kit.

Twelve hours, almost no second takes Black Sabbath record their debut album live in the studio in roughly twelve hours, almost no overdubs, no second takes. The guitarist fashioned makeshift fingertips from melted plastic after losing the tips of two fretting-hand fingers in a factory accident at seventeen. The disability forced him toward simpler, heavier chord voicings and down-tuned strings. The title track opens with the sound of rain and a church bell, then a descending riff built on the tritone, the interval once banned by medieval theorists. The name comes from a horror film playing at a cinema across the street from their rehearsal room.

A cottage with no electricity After months of punishing concert tours, a singer and a guitarist retreat to an 18th-century cottage in south Snowdonia, Wales. There is no running water and no electricity. They write songs around campfires with acoustic guitars, a blue-eyed dog named Strider at their feet. The resulting album confounds fans expecting another heavy rock record. Instead they get folk-inflected hoedowns, pastoral acoustic pieces, and a mandolin. Critics are baffled. The songs written in that cottage will keep surfacing on albums for the next five years.

Eleven musicians who have never played together A trumpet player assembles eleven musicians, most of whom have never met, into a New York studio with a handful of thematic sketches and no rehearsals. Three electric pianists play simultaneously. Two bassists and three drummers layer polyrhythms beneath a bass clarinet. The producer splices and loops the tapes afterward, assembling the final tracks from hours of raw improvisation. The double album sells over a hundred thousand copies, unheard of for a jazz record, and demolishes the boundary between jazz and rock.

A song written in a week, recorded in a week On May 4, the Ohio National Guard opens fire on unarmed students at Kent State University during an anti-war rally. Four students are killed, nine wounded. A guitarist sees the photographs in Life magazine and writes a song the same day. His band records it within the week, after a single day of rehearsals. The label president is reluctant to release such an overtly political single. It comes out anyway, reaching the top fifteen, the opening line naming the president of the United States by name.

A song he wrote on the back of a poster James Brown writes a new song on the back of a 14-by-20-inch concert poster and brings it to the studio with a brand-new band. The rhythm is built on an insistent bass riff played by a teenager, his brother on guitar, and a drummer who locks into the one. The horn section is young and inexperienced, so they stay out of the way. What emerges is stripped-down funk reduced to its simplest elements: one groove, call and response between the vocalist and his backup singer, the band repeating the figure until the riff becomes a trance.

Four number ones from five brothers A family group from Gary, Indiana, becomes the first act to debut with four consecutive number one singles on the Hot 100. The lead singer is eleven years old. The second single replaces Let It Be at the top of the chart. The production behind them is Motown at its most polished: locking bass lines, crisp handclaps, swelling string arrangements. But the voice cutting through all of it belongs to a child with the phrasing of someone who has been singing his entire life, which, given that he started performing at age five, he has.

A backlog of songs and a triple album After years of having compositions sidelined by his former bandmates, a guitarist records thirty demos in two days and begins work on the first triple album by a solo artist. The producer layers guitars, keyboards, percussion, and multiple drummers into dense, reverberant walls of sound. Session musicians from three different bands rotate through the studio. The result is an eruption of pent-up creativity: two records of songs, one record of informal jams, and a single that becomes a global number one before a plagiarism suit catches up with it.

Primal therapy and a trio A singer reads a book about releasing childhood trauma through screaming and flies to Los Angeles for four months of therapy. The album he records afterward is the opposite of everything his former band produced: just voice, piano, bass, and drums, stripped bare, no orchestration, no studio tricks. The lyrics address his parents by name, dismantle his own mythology, and close with a litany of disbelief that ends with the words the dream is over. It is the rawest record any former member of the group will ever make.

Valentine's Day at a university cafeteria On February 14, a band sets up in a university refectory in front of two thousand students. A mobile recording unit captures the performance on tape. Mixing and a few vocal overdubs happen afterward, but the energy is all live: two hours of loud, unrelenting rock played by four musicians who have spent years performing at volume levels that permanently damage hearing. The resulting album is widely regarded as the benchmark for live rock recording.

A slide guitarist walks into a Miami studio A guitarist meets a slide player backstage at a Miami concert and invites him to the studio the next day. The slide player ends up on eleven of fourteen tracks, including a song inspired by a 7th-century Persian love poem about unrequited devotion. The song has two distinct halves, composed by different people: the frantic opening section, and a piano coda that the guitarist overheard the drummer playing between takes and insisted on attaching. The album is a commercial disappointment on release. It takes years for the world to catch up.

They paved paradise A singer-songwriter living in Laurel Canyon writes a song about a Hawaiian hotel demolishing trees to build a parking lot. The chorus reduces an environmentalist argument to eight words. On the same album, she writes a song about a festival she never attended, imagining it from a New York hotel room while watching coverage on television. Another band turns her festival song into a rock anthem. A third song on the album is written as a response to a friend's lament about growing old. Three songs, three acts of imagination, each one entering the culture on its own terms.