{"id":841,"date":"2011-06-23T16:09:00","date_gmt":"2011-06-23T23:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2011\/06\/rockin-in-1970.html"},"modified":"2011-06-23T16:09:00","modified_gmt":"2011-06-23T23:09:00","slug":"rockin-in-1970","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2011\/06\/rockin-in-1970.html","title":{"rendered":"Rockin in 1970"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a><\/div>\n

<\/a>ON Friday I have a New York Times review<\/a> of an interesting if imperfect new book called Fire and Rain<\/i>, which looks at the year 1970 and the making of four hugely popular records — The Beatles’ Let it Be, CSNY’s Deja Vu, James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James and Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water.<\/p>\n

If you love all these artists, by all means pick up David Browne’s book. Otherwise — as I get into in the review — it’s a mixed success.<\/p>\n

Browne’s key records sold like crazy at the time — but even then there were people who considered them insubstantial.\u00a0“I consider his soft sound a cop out,” Ellen Willis wrote of Paul Simon in the New Yorker. “And I hate most of his lyrics; his alienation, like the word itself, is an old-fashioned, sentimental, West-Side-liberal bore.” (My guess is that she was rocking out to CCR at the time.)<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

(This BBC video of James Taylor from 1970 is better than almost anything on his albums, by the way.)<\/p>\n

More on all this later. What’s your favorite record from 1970?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ON Friday I have a New York Times review of an interesting if imperfect new book called Fire and Rain, which looks at the year 1970 and the making of four hugely popular records — The Beatles’ Let it Be, CSNY’s Deja Vu, James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James and Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[163,69,171,35,88,64,30,29],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-841","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-60s","7":"category-70s","8":"category-beatles","9":"category-books","10":"category-brit-culture","11":"category-folk-music","12":"category-los-angeles","13":"category-west-coast","14":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/841\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}