That may also pertain to discovering the details of how your favorite records were made by the musical acts you admire.
I’m not naive enough to know that the smiling faces on album covers don’t always tell the whole story about the relationships between the people on them. But somewhere in my most optimistic delusions I would like to believe that the band members who make beautiful music together get along beautifully as well.
That’s certainly not the case according to David Browne, author of “Fire And Rain: The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor, CNSY, and the Lost Story of 1970.” The book was written nine years ago by the music journalist and Rolling Stone contributing editor, but I just recently discovered it and finished reading it. Much of the story Browne tells comes from his own interviews with the artists themselves and those in their circles at the time, as well as from extensive research of period documentation.
Like Browne, I grew up in the 70s and was (and am still) a big fan of the bands he profiles in his book. While casual followers of these last-century artists may be overwhelmed by all the behind the scenes details, I relished every word.
Until Browne pointed it out, I hadn’t realized how pivotal that one year was in the music of my youth. Songs from the four albums produced in 1970, Let it Be, Déjà Vu, Sweet Baby James, and Bridge Over Troubled Water, not only sold millions of copies and dominated the radio, but also competed for Grammy Awards the following year.
It was also a year of tensions and breakups. The most famous, of course, had to be the splitting up of The Beatles, but the book also describes the lesser known tensions between Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel and among David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and Neil Young.
I knew the creative process between all these guys was not all rainbows and unicorns, but I didn’t know the extent or reasons before.
In a coda to the book, Browne jumps ahead four decades and shows how age eased some of those past tensions and how some reunion performances have even come about.
During the last stop on Paul McCartney’s most recent tour he and the other surviving member of the Beatles, Ringo Star, performed a few songs together. But currently there still seems to be some feuding between Crosby and his former bandmates.
Browne tries to show how the turbulent political and social events of the late 60s influenced the music and artists of the following decade and how the mood of the country affected popular song tastes.
“… I couldn’t resist revisiting a moment when sweetly sung music and ugly coexisted, even fed
off each other, in a world gone off course,” he writes in his introduction.
I, for one, am glad he didn’t resist that visit to the past and I too feel his lament for what has been lost in the years since the dawning of the 21st Century.
“Rock and Roll no longer piloted the culture the way it once had,” Browne writes, “and the album itself – a cohesive long-form piece of music that had first flourished during the era of the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Taylor, and CSNY – was now a dying art form in the age of single-song downloads and digital players.”