Never a Dull Moment: 1971 The Year That Rock Exploded by David Hepworth

Author:David Hepworth [Hepworth, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Music, History & Criticism, Genres & Styles, Rock, History, United States, 20th Century
ISBN: 9781627794008
Google: k3_tCgAAQBAJ
Amazon: B01828N3H8
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2016-06-07T04:00:00+00:00

JULY

Rod Stewart: “Every Picture Tells a Story”

T. Rex: “Jeepster”

Cat Stevens: “Tuesday’s Dead”

Leonard Cohen: “Dress Rehearsal Rag”

Graham Nash: “Wounded Bird”

The Doors: “Riders on the Storm”

Shuggie Otis: “Strawberry Letter 23”

Alice Cooper: “I’m Eighteen”

Dave and Ansil Collins: “Double Barrel”

Harry Nilsson: “Without You”

8

AUGUST

Wild Night

In years to come, the Concert for Bangladesh, the benefit concert that took place at Madison Square Garden, New York, on the first day of August 1971, would come to be viewed as one of the defining events of the era. It marked the emergence of a new senior league of rock stardom, as illustrated by pictures of George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, and Leon Russell performing together in a new ecumenical spirit. The event also provided the blueprint for every subsequent effort to harness the popularity of rock music and the perceived moral stature of the people who play it to benefit some sort of deserving cause. This was the kind of thing that folkies had always done. They were always ready to gather to protest this or propose that and had a long tradition of linking arms at the end to belt out songs of unity and brotherhood. However, they were just folkies, and it was unlikely that anything they did would move the dial of public attention in the wider world or end up on the front pages that landed on America’s porches. But once a Beatle was involved and the show was at Madison Square Garden, all that changed. This was rock turning respectable for the first time.

The Concert for Bangladesh was as hastily improvised and as ill considered as every other decision made in the accelerated atmosphere of 1971. The conflict between Pakistan and its reluctant citizens in faraway East Bengal had been simmering ever since the Indian subcontinent was partitioned at the end of British rule at the end of World War II. The declaration of the state of Bangladesh in March 1971 had been followed by a combination of massacre and natural disasters that left thousands dead and millions displaced or threatened with starvation. It’s likely this would have had no more effect on George Harrison than any of the other convulsions the wider world was going through in 1971 if he hadn’t noted the effect it had on his friend and teacher Ravi Shankar, with whom he was collaborating on the soundtrack of a documentary called Raga. The Indian maestro’s father had been born in Bengal, and he felt the events keenly. “Bangla Desh,” Harrison’s song about the catastrophe and the need to draw the West’s attention to it, began, “My friend came to me with sadness in his eyes.” Over ten years later, when Bob Geldof felt similarly moved to do something to alleviate the suffering in Ethiopia, the only musician he could go to for advice was George Harrison. Harrison’s advice was “Do your homework”; he knew that’s what he had failed to do.

In the summer of 1971, the twenty-eight-year-old Harrison was uniquely well placed to make a big gesture on behalf of rock.

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