Holland, The Beach Boys, 1973

“He just sat in his camper and wrote all that shit.”
    - John Steinbeck’s son on Travels with Charley

Sitting in the Netherlands, the Beach Boys wrote touching tributes to California. "Sail On, Sailor" is so beautiful and evocative and sad. So’s "Steamboat." "California Saga (California)" is a favorite of mine. I hear human-ness and deep caring, something unusual in the rock of that time. The mainstream critics don't like this album very much -- “a shitload of drivel” says Mark Coleman in the Rolling Stone Album Guide.

Raw Power, Iggy and the Stooges, 1973

An album I listened to all the time before I went down the rabbit hole (i.e. started this project), its brilliance shines more brightly next to many more pedestrian records from 1973.

Johnny Marr said of guitarist James Williamson in The Guardian "he's both demonic and intellectual, almost how you would imagine Darth Vader to sound if he was in a band." (Quoted in the album's Wikipedia entry). Somehow the Stooges (and Bowie, who mixed the album) refined the rawer power of the earlier Stooges into something civilized but still menacing.

Goats Head Soup, The Rolling Stones, 1973

This album is way better than I thought, especially "Coming Down Again" and "Heartbreaker." For reasons I can't remember, I was overly biased against this album. Jeez, even hearing "Angie" isn’t a terrible experience.

It’s an OK album, but what’s fascinating is that it’s one year after Exile and it’s not at all cut from the same cloth. Were the Stones distracted with extra-musical things? Everything, writing, playing, and recording, sounds half-assed sometimes.

Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd, 1973

Wow, low energy, like on cough syrup or something. Or heroin. Where’s the sense of humor gone? It’s like Gray Floyd. Contrast this to what Bowie was doing at the same time. (Aladdin Sane and Pinups). Pink Floyd has the weight of world on their shoulders and it’s not pretty. It's bombastic without any leavening.

"New York City Serenade" from The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, Bruce Springsteen, 1973

I still love love love this song. Compared to what else was going on in 1973, Springsteen appears to be living on his own musical planet. This is an elaborately produced, long, leisurely song. This whole album appears to be by an old soul, someone who knows exactly what he wants to do and has nothing to prove.

The one thing in my recent musical diet this reminds me of is The Hold Steady, with its journalistic/painterly focus on a subculture.

The surprise is I love this now even more than then.