1971 in Music

100,000 copies shipped without permission Berry Gordy is on vacation in the Bahamas when a Motown sales executive ships 100,000 copies of a single Gordy has rejected. Gordy had dismissed it as 'that Dizzy Gillespie stuff' and refused to release it. The phones ring. Another 100,000 copies follow within days. The song hits number one R&B and number two pop. Its composer had refused to record anything else until the label put it out. The resulting concept album, the first in Motown's history, tells the story of a Vietnam veteran coming home to a country he no longer recognizes. Songs bleed into one another in a continuous cycle. The bass player, found drunk in a blues bar and brought to the studio, reportedly plays his parts lying on the floor.

A living room with the lights turned down A producer at A&M Studios in Hollywood turns the lights low and clusters the musicians close together, recreating the feel of rehearsals in the songwriter's living room. They cut two or three songs a day for three weeks. The songwriter has been writing professionally since she was a teenager in the Brill Building, crafting hits for other people. Now the songs are hers, spare and personal, built on piano and acoustic guitar. The album spends fifteen consecutive weeks at number one, the longest run by a female solo artist in Billboard history, and eventually sells twenty-five million copies.

Drums in a three-story stairwell A band sets up in the entrance hallway of a dilapidated Victorian country house in Hampshire, using a mobile recording truck parked outside. Two ribbon microphones hang from the ceiling above a three-story stairwell. The drummer's kit reverberates through the entire building, the natural echo compressed aggressively through limiters until the sound breathes and pumps with the room itself. The resulting two-bar drum intro will become one of the most sampled breaks in recording history. The album has no title, no band name, and no record label logo on the cover, a deliberate challenge to critics who say the band is all hype.

Glitter under the eyes on Top of the Pops On March 24, a singer appears on Top of the Pops wearing a silver satin suit with glitter dabbed under his eyes. The performance is promoting a single that will spend six weeks at number one in the UK. The look is new. The sound underneath it is new too: electric, punchy, built on boogie riffs and falsetto vocals, a hard left turn from the acoustic folk the same artist had been making two years earlier. Within months, the look spreads across London. A whole genre gets a name from the sparkle.

Tax exiles in a basement on the Riviera Owing more than they have in back taxes, a band leaves England and relocates to the south of France. The guitarist rents a villa in Villefranche-sur-Mer for $2,400 a week and builds a makeshift studio in the basement, parking the mobile recording truck in the garden. The sessions run through the summer with a rotating cast of visitors and collaborators. The basement is damp, the equipment overheats, and tapes have to be baked to remain playable. The basic tracks recorded here will not be released until the following year, as a double album that sounds like it was made in exactly the conditions it was.

A keyboard sequence named after a spiritual master and a minimalist A guitarist writes a song titled after an Indian teacher and a minimalist composer. The signature pulsing sequence is not a synthesizer but an organ's marimba repeat feature, looped and layered until it becomes a rhythmic engine. The demo is transferred to 16-track tape, and the full band records over it. The resulting album, assembled from the wreckage of an abandoned multimedia rock opera, reaches number one in both the UK and the US. It demonstrates that keyboards can be structural in rock, not just ornamental.

The first charity supershow A sitar player approaches his friend, a former Beatle, and asks for help raising $25,000 for refugees fleeing a civil war in South Asia. The friend turns the modest request into two sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden on August 1, playing to 40,000 people total. The lineup includes a reclusive folk singer making his first major US concert appearance in years. The two shows raise $243,418 in a single day. The live album generates millions more. Every multi-artist rock benefit that follows, from Live Aid onward, traces its model back to this afternoon.

A drum machine and a silent title track A bandleader who once preached unity and optimism locks himself in a home studio with a preset drum machine and records most of an album alone, overdubbing instruments one at a time. The drum machine's artificial rhythms contribute to a dense, murky, paranoid sound unlike anything in popular music. The title track is listed at 0:00 in length: pure silence. The one single that breaks through, a sparse meditation on family dysfunction, reaches number one and becomes one of the earliest hit records to feature a drum machine. The album is the photographic negative of everything its creator had stood for.

A ten-minute guitar solo played in grief A producer tells his guitarist to play the saddest thing he can imagine. The guitarist thinks about being told his mother has died, picks up his instrument, and improvises for ten minutes. The resulting solo, largely unaccompanied, opens the album. It is raw, wailing, sustained, the guitar feeding back and crying against silence. The rest of the record blends psychedelia, gospel, heavy rock, and soul into something that defies genre. It is the last album by the original lineup.

An eight-minute song that was never a single A song composed over months, partly at a remote cottage in Wales, builds from a fingerpicked acoustic introduction through a folk passage into a hard rock crescendo. The guitar solo is played on a borrowed Telecaster in three takes. The band decides against releasing it as a single. It becomes the most requested song on American FM radio for the rest of the decade, eight minutes and two seconds long, proof that album tracks can eclipse singles entirely.

An Oscar, a wah-wah pedal, and a new kind of film score A former soul singer is hired to score a detective film and builds the soundtrack around an incessant wah-wah guitar, lulling flute lines, and a hi-hat pattern that ticks like a metronome. The theme reaches number one on the Hot 100. The composer becomes the first African American to win an Academy Award in a non-acting category. The sound, tight and rhythmic, seeps into more than two hundred films over the next five years.

Twenty-one and free A child prodigy turns twenty-one, lets his recording contract expire, and negotiates a new deal that gives him full creative control, ownership of his publishing, and nearly a million dollars in advances. He has been signed to his label since the age of eleven. The album he makes during this transition hints at the synthesizer experiments to come, but the real breakthrough arrives the following year, when he discovers a room-sized modular synthesizer built by two engineers and begins playing every instrument himself.