1973: Rock at the Crossroads

Written by Andrew Grant Jackson

Narrated by James Patrick Cronin

1973 was the year rock hit its peak while splintering-just like the rest of the world. Ziggy Stardust traveled to America in David Bowie's Aladdin Sane. The Dark Side of the Moon began its epic run on the Billboard charts, inspired by the madness of Pink Floyd's founder, while all four former Beatles scored top ten albums, two hitting #1.

FM battled AM, and Motown battled Philly on the charts, as the era of protest soul gave way to disco, while DJ Kool Herc gave birth to hip hop in the Bronx. The glam rock of the New York Dolls and Alice Cooper split into glam metal and punk. Hippies and rednecks made peace in Austin thanks to Willie Nelson, while outlaw country, country rock, and Southern rock each pointed toward modern country. The Allman Brothers, Grateful Dead, and the Band played the largest rock concert to date at Watkins Glen.

Led Zep's Houses of the Holy reflected the rise of funk and reggae. The singer songwriter movement led by Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell flourished at the Troubadour and Max's Kansas City, where Bruce Springsteen and Bob Marley shared bill. Elvis Presley's Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite was NBC's top-rated special of the year, while Elton John's albums dominated the number one spot for two and a half months.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Dec 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9781630158354

Reviews for 1973

[scott green · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

You’re warned at the opening of the book there’s a lot about Bowie and he seemed to the person the book kept coming back to. Though not a huge Bowie fan I enjoyed and learned from it. There were some mistakes. One that stuck out was referring to Chicago at Carnegie Hall as Chicago 4. There was no #4. Chicago 3 and then 5. Also there were some mispronunciations. Glenn Frey among the worst. Also Okie From Muskogee was in there. From my time frame. A little short on Southern California rock but it was covered. Worthwhile listen.

[shrike58 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

That I picked this book up was mostly an exercise in seeing how much I really remembered, in as much as I was about to start high school at the time and was already developing a lot of my own musical tastes. On the whole, not bad, not great. While Jackson actually does do a pretty good job of capturing the zeitgeist, the book often feels more like a jumble than a mosaic in the end. Jackson also connects more often and not with his anecdotes, but a lot of the time he just feels like he's going for the "gotcha" moment. My general sense is that Simon Reynolds does this sort of thing better.

[pomo58 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

1973: Rock at the Crossroads by Andrew Grant Jackson is an informative nostalgic read for those of us who remember the year and a wonderful glimpse into a landmark year for both rock music and society as a whole for those too young (not old enough?) to remember 1973.As someone who remembers 1973 quite clearly, my opinion of the book will be heavily colored by that fact. One of the things happening during this time was the shift from AM stations to FM stations for rock and, eventually, other popular music. This book almost reads like a hybrid of those two formats. AM radio, while having some stations that were more narrowly focused on one type of music, was dominated by Top 40 stations, usually with a slight emphasis in one direction or another. On these stations you would hear a mix of different types of rock as well as different types of R&B and even some country. FM, starting with Album Oriented Rock stations, began the era of the separation of genres more clearly. This had positives and negatives. You could listen to more music in whatever genre you preferred, but it also meant far fewer opportunities to expand your tastes unless you consciously changed to a station playing a different genre. Which brings me to why I think of this book a lot like a hybrid of those formats.While the book is chronological it also can't be strictly chronological and still tell a decent story. So each chapter uses something that occurred on this timeline but, in telling the story (of an album or a song), it moves back to what led to the event and moves forward to tell what it foreshadows. So each segment (of which there were several in each chapter) might be primarily about rock or R&B, the next segment often changed genres. So you did get some immersion in a specific genre but you also read about what was happening in a different genre. So many books, understandably, focus on a particular narrowly defined type of popular music, mainly because those books are telling a history of that genre. This book, because it is describing a specific and short period of history covers a wider range because that more accurately portrays what was going in most areas of the music business as well as society.As for the actual information, there is a lot here that isn't so much new as presented within a holistic context. For example, it hadn't occurred to me that Bette Midler's Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy might not have been as popular had it been released just a little sooner while the Vietnam War was still claiming American lives. It might not have made a difference but it is something to consider. There are many such connections made in the book that make this nostalgic trip something more than just a passive ride down memory lane.I would recommend this to anyone with an interest in the period, whether limited to music or more societal and cultural. And of course those of us of a certain age can both reminisce and learn some things.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.