Episode #21 - 1971

Let’s be honest. Early Seventies rock was really fucking weird. Like, weapons-grade weird. Sometimes that weirdness was good, and sometimes that weirdness was, well … really fucking weird. Like, Gentle Giant kind of weird. And at the point we mention Gentle Giant, we can also we rest the case against weird and instruct the jury to convict. Which is not to say Gentle Giant wasn’t also good. You just had to have smoked a lot of pot to be reading the same book, never mind be on the same page.

Anyway, we digress. The point is, the early Seventies was all about experimentation. The people who populated the early Seventies experimented with everything. Guitars. Effects. Drum machines. Wah-wah pedals. Magic mushrooms. Lunar landings. Nuclear warheads. Nothing was off the table in 1971.

All of which made it the perfect breeding ground for the bands that feature in this episode of the Enter Sadmen podcast - the only podcast in the world, remember, that aims to build the definitive list of hard rock and heavy metal albums you should hear before you die. And with that contractual obligation out of the way, let’s heat up the bong, turn down the lava lamps, try to ignore the orange anaglypta (no, I can’t be bothered - go and look it up) and swing the arc light on the three albums the boys chose - all released when our three lads had only just reached school age.

MC5 - High Time (1971)

Now then kids, if you wanted proof that the 1970s were off-the-charts crazy, let’s lay it out for you. MC5 are generally renowned outside their core fanbase for a solitary song - 1969’s Kick Out The Jams. I mean, this is a song so synonymous with the ancestry of hard rock that even long-lost Aztec tribes living deep in the Amazon rainforest have probably heard it.

It’s on every rock compilation album worth the name and if you haven’t encountered it then there are serious questions to be asked about your allegiance to the hard rock and heavy metal faith (unless you’re just starting out on your voyage of discovery, in wich case we’ll obviously let you off).

Kick Out The Jams isn’t on High Time, but the reason we’re bringing it up is because it is on the band’s 1969 debut album of the same name. Which is a live album. So in MC5 we have a band whose identity is so inextricably tethered to its live performance that it eschews the convention of recording a studio debut and just goes out in the world bare-ass naked and shouts here we are! from the rooftops of Detroit.

I mean - and excuse the pun - the cheek of it, right? And to add to the insouciance of it all, they then decide not to offer the fans a studio version of their most famous, crowd-pleasing song. This, at the risk of labouring the point, is a band that even in the first flush of youthful endeavour made no apology for unpredictability and subversion.

So subversive were they, in fact, that the establishment hated them. Corporate America hated them. Mom and pop hated them. Detroit - the Motor City of America’s industrial heart - had grown used to the gentle, upbeat baby-baby-where-did-our-love-go optimism of Motown.

Now it was presented with a brash collection of hairy activists who had much to say about the dark underbelly of America’s social politics. On the receiving end was a generation hell-bent on revolution, even if it was fuelled by flowers and dope. MC5 - or Motor City 5, if you haven’t already made that connection by now - were the self-styled new face of social politics in a socially aware America that had had a gutsful of the then 16-year Vietnam War and the shady politics that drove it.

Not that any of that translated into albums sales. MC5, it seemed, may have spoken to the masses, but the masses were more interested in blow than bravura and all three of their releases limped out of record stores. Always a critics’ band, High Time was their last hurrah before a slow and painful break up that would have made the night of the long knives seem like a jolly way to pass some time.

Uriah Heep - Look At Yourself (1971)

Once MC5 had rattled their way out of the show with an album that was, musically if not commercially, quite normal, the boys were left with two British proggers who between them have at times managed to reinvent the very notion of weird. First up was Britprog darlings Uriah Heep with their third album, Look At Yourself.

Naming themselves after the unctuous protagonist in Dickens’ 1850 novel David Copperfield - don’t say you never learn anything here, kids - the band gave a nod to the character’s references to his own ‘umbleness with their 1970 debut Very ‘Eavy, Very ‘Umble and discovered that this dalliance with literary linkage was the sum total of their smart-arseishness, The follow-up, in early ‘71, was given the decidely un-Dickensian moniker Salisbury.

Another hallmark of early 70s music was that bands didn’t sit around on their arses - smart or otherwise - for very long. After a whistlestop tour of the US supporting Three Dog Night and Steppenwolf, the duration of which can probably be measured in nanoseconds, the five-piece was back in the studio to record this reflective - geddit? - third release and it hit the shops just five months after its predecessor.

Having got themselves into something of a pickle on Salisbury, with a title track that ran to 16 minutes, Look At Yourself was, by contrast, a more pared back affair, if the 10-minute plus signature July Morning can be described as pared back.

As the boys got down to squabbling - and discussing more things that Mark ‘just doesn’t understand’, the now-familiar theme of divisive vocal performances didn’t take long to bubble to the surface …

Yes - Fragile (1971)

Anyone who has listened to the pod will know that Mark is a simple soul with simple needs and simple expectations. So a nine-track album which boasts three tracks that clock in at over eight minutes was always going to be a challenge.

The first album to feature Rick Wakeman lining up alongside Steve Howe, Jon Anderson, Chris Squire and Bill Bruford features enough cul-de-sacs and no through roads than an early hours of the morning cab ride south of the river, all punctuated by what feels like eons of introspective noodling and tinkling.

But then this is a band which, on a tour of Scotland, managed to draw musical inspiration from the sheer volume of roundabouts that became a daily feature of the journeys between shows. And to help our American friends, roundabout in the English language has three definitions.

One is what our cousins across the pond call a traffic circle - something you can just go round and round and round on for hours at a time without actually going anywhere. The second is a children’s playground ride that just goes round and round without actually going anywhere. And the third is a meandering route taken to an intended destination. Luckily for all of us, it turned out that all three definitions apply to this, Yes’ fourth album.