Remember, 1973? It was ten years before I was born, so no, no I don’t. That said, I wish I was alive at that time! And I wish the Internet offered opportunities to find and access music from around the globe as easily and effortlessly as it does today. Otherwise I’d probably be listening to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road or The Dark Side Of The Moon just like everybody else. I get the feeling even Houses Of The Holy and Quadrophenia might have eclipsed me, growing up in suburban middle-class New Jersey. And you can forget my having known about shit like Agitation Free’s 2nd! No way would I have had the means to uncover that shit. Although, maybe, at 30 years old…I might have been hanging out in record stores enough to hear about crazy European progressive records? Right? Anyway, here’s a list of the ten best records of 1973. Because most of ’em have already turned 40-years-old this year, just like me! Happy birthday, records! You’re way more expensive now.
The Top Ten Albums Of 1973
Honorable Mention:
• Gram Parsons – GP (Reprise)
• Museo Rosenbach – Zarathustra (Ricordi)
• Campo Di Marte – Campo Di Marte (United Artists)
• Leonard Cohen – Live Songs (CBS)
• Susan Pillsbury – Susan Pillsbury (Sweet Fortune)
10. Nine Days Wonder – We Never Lost Control (Bacilus) – ““Days In Bright Lights” opens the record sounding a bit on the glammy side, but the bass/synth melody is pure prog-rock. When the motorik drumming and swirling keyboards take over, it transform from a decent rock tune to a full-on awesome kraut jam. And then on “Fisherman’s Dream” you suddenly realize that the band sounds like a bunch of David Bowie wannabes. That’s not without merit, of course. Walter Seyffer of Nine Days Wonder has admitted that the this, the band’s second LP, was “very much in the style of David Bowie and Mott the Hoople. On the album cover we put on a lot of make up and we were dressed in flash clothes.” This was done in an attempt to gain attention from the British music press. The remainder of the album is a mixture of progressive and art rock, sounding slick and at times quite space-y. It’s ties to the krautrock movement as personified by bands like Can or Neu! are loose at best. But it is still an important album recorded at an important time in German rock history. Whether you think it’s a brilliant work or simply derivative of Bowie is up to you. For what it’s worth, I think it’s great. The band’s first album sounds quite different than this (and fetches quite the pretty penny), and though I haven’t heard the third album I’ve heard good things about it, too.”
09. Flower Travellin’ Band – Make Up (Atlantic) – “Released in 1973, Make Up was the final album (not counting their recent, and unfortunately disappointing, reunion disc) from these ’70s Japanese heavy psych rock gods, a gatefold double LP packaged extravagantly in a stitched, brown faux-leather case! (This compact disc reissue replicates the look of the original, the cds in a gatefold sleeve inside a slipcover, complete with lyric sheet insert). Despite the fancy packaging, this artifact doesn’t make Julian Cope’s Japrocksampler Top 50, in fact he rather pans it, calling it “useless” and a “disastrous hotchpotch” (it was assembled from recordings from an ill-fated live concert as well as studio demos). However, it must be said that we don’t always agree with Mr. Cope. While it may be that Make Up isn’t FTB’s most essential album, we think any fan will dig it. If it’s perhaps a document of the Flower Travellin’ Band succumbing to typical ’70s dinosaur rock band excess, a la Led Zeppelin (double album, extended soloing, and a ’50s rock n’ roll cover), that’s not necessarily a bad thing! While you need Satori first, your FTB collection will be lacking without this.” – Aquarius Records
08. Klaus Schulze – Cyborg (Kosmiche Musik) – “From the early days of electronic experimentation in the pop field, Klaus Schulze’s second solo album still today it stands as one of the most powerful examples of ambient pulse music ever conceived. The dense layers of rhythm and synthetic tone colors melt into a seamless, flowing soundscape of melody, motion and spatial effects. It’s a monumental double album of ‘cosmic music’.” – Archie Patterson, AllMusicGuide.
07. Robb Kunkel – Abyss (Tumbleweed) – “Obscure but surprisingly good LP on a Rocky Mountain independent that rode high on corporate money for a few years. It’s one of the best, perhaps the best, on the label, and opens with two terrific dreamy west coast psych tracks that alone makes this worth getting. The rest is an eclectic bag of melodic rock and singer/songwriter, with two weaker (but short) rootsy tracks, and the rest quite enjoyable. Heavy session names are all over this LP, which displays the typical Tumbleweed combination of a stoned, loose vibe and a classy production. When staff member Kunkel’s album was released the label’s money was running out, and it may have been pressed in as few as 500 copies.” Patrick the Lama, Acid Archives.
06. Kollektiv – Kollektiv (Brain) – “Kollektiv was an almost unknown Krautrock formation hailing from Krefeld. After listening to Frank Zappa, Blodwyn Pig and King Crimson records and a couple of jazz musicians like Jimmy Smith, Wes Montgomery and Cannonball Adderly they gradually got bored by Beat music they decided to do something completely different and much more exciting. They started using effect machines, sometimes homemade, a zither played with drumsticks on an amplifier, metal sheets and rotating discs, played the bass with a bow and employed any type of exotic instrument. To make a long story short Kollektiv had been a Krautrock band in its very original sense doing really inventive music mainly based on improvisations of minimal themes, often in excess of 10, 15 or more minutes. Some people compare them with closely related band Neu! but if one should draw comparisons at all I hear rather some similarities with Organisation’s “Tone Float”-album (which is for me the best work done by Kraftwerk). I’ve to say that the music presented here is much more diversified and elaborate than the one of Neu! and moreover despite all free-form and loosely structured nature much more enjoyable and comprehensible…Basically they were using rock, jazz and pop music as stocks and extracted the best ingredients from each of them or in other words omitted their individual drawbacks.” – Mutant-Sounds
05. Dedalus – Dedalus (Trident) – “When one thinks of Italy in the seventies, one is more naturally reminded of progressive rock, than the sub-genre jazz-rock fusion, specifically. Judging by the evidence in this excellent debut recording by Dedalus, there must have been a sophisticated jazz rock scene, and this album at the top of it. The music is completely instrumental, and is experimental in just the right way, mixing jazz with rock and almost African percussion in parts…Especially impressive is the drummer Enrico Grosso, whose technique is flawless, and bass player Furio di Castri, the same. There is intelligence and complexity in this album’s music, and one gets the feeling, as in Il Baricentro’s Sconcerto record, that everything is done just a bit better than other groups of the time.” – Presdoug, Prog Archives.
04. Judee Sill – Heart Food (Asylum) – “As XTC’s Andy Partridge points out in his sleevenotes for the Water re-issue of “Heart Food”, the mere fact that someone as fucked-up and resolutely unhippyish as Judee Sill could produce such sublime, celestial and yet gut-wrenchingly soulful music is one of life’s more enduring puzzles, but we should be eternally grateful that she did.”
03. Bill Holt – Dreamies (Stone Theatre Productions) – I still consider my interview with Bill Holt (aka “Dreamies”) as one of the crowning achievements of this website. If you haven’t read it, you really should. As for the album, it’s so entirely unique and beautiful it is truly unparalleled. Perhaps it is the quintessential home recording in that he turned his basement into a studio and spent a considerable amount of time hand-splicing tape together to create every sound you hear on the album. The one-man operation then marketed and merchandised the thing all by himself, and the result is a legendary musical accomplishment.
02. Walter Wegmüller – Tarot (Die Kosmischen Kuriere) – Considering this is my A1, most-favorite krautrock record of all time, the fact that it only ranks as number two on this list says a lot about how much I love the top-ranked entry on this list. Cope described it in Krautrocksampler as epitomizing the genre’s ability to “consume all American and British music, assimilate it, and then regurgitate it all as though the Mothers, the Velvets, the Doors, the Stones, the Fugs, the free-rock and free-jazz of Detroit, and the experimentation of Germany could all be thrown in some Kosmiche pot.” He also described it, quite literally, as “the sound of the cosmos.” And he’s probably right. It’s one of the most — hence best — psychedelic records ever made.
01. Gary Higgins – Red Hash (Nufusmoon) – I know I bring this up all the time when I talk about Gary Higgins, but I was there when he returned to the public eye. Months before the reissue of Red Hash by Drag City. It was at Tonic on New York’s lower-east-side, during a Ben Chasney (aka Six Organs Of Admittance) show. Was it early Spring? PG Six? Corsano duo? I don’t’ recall the specifics. I just remember being at the front left of the stage and seeing the crowd part for some random older, broad-shouldered dude who hopped up on stage as if out of nowhere. He grabbed an acoustic guitar and played “Thicker Than A Smokey” and maybe one other song? Chasney sat crouched watching at the corner of the stage, teary-eyed. I might not remember all the specifics of the date and time, or the opening acts, but seeing Higgins on that night I’ll never forget. Later that summer when I graduated college and drove cross-country for the first time, I listened to Red Hash at least once a day. I still spin it very, very often. It might still be the best singer-songwriter record of the last forty years.
Gary Higgins – Thicker Than A Smokey [MP3]
