Rock's golden age happened to correspond with the golden age of vinyl. The third of a series that explores this music year by year, this book documents the albums you should hear and own from 1970. It includes more than 500 recommendations, 57 of which are featured as essential. A LAVISH GUIDE TO THE ALBUMS THAT MATTER The greatest albums from the greatest period in the history of popular music were disseminated on 12-inch circles of pressed black plastic. There were other formats but none that competed for dominance, and the whole point of rock was to separate an album culture from singles-based pop. The fact that rock artists found other ways to fill those 12-inch circles than simply collections of three minute songs, in defiance of the economics, the commercial pressures, the disapproval of their labels, and radio playlists, is the joy of the age. Individual singles from the period exist in undifferentiated globs to be plucked out of history at random and discarded just as quickly. It is the albums of that period, albums half a century old, that last and will continue to last as long as there are people with ears to enjoy them. This series of books documents the golden age year by year, revealing how a succession of remarkable developments took place over a very short period of time. In each volume, Scott Meze discusses the overall changes in rock — what was happening and why — and lists the albums that you should hear and preferably own in whatever format is most convenient to you. 1970 This was the year it all became inexorable: that Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died, that the Beatles admitted they’d broken up in 1969, that our dreams of the stars were wrecked by Apollo 13, and that Nixon ordered his troops to fire on his country’s own children. Buoyed by Woodstock, there was still enough celebratory communion to carry 1970 through another wave of festivals. But there was also Altamont to contend with, and the Manson trial hung over rock’s darkest city, and even the cocaine that rock’s brightest stars were snorting was benign compared to the heroin that was now flooding the scene. But this was also a year of immense promise. Miles Davis trampled jazz’s bastions to storm rock’s, James Brown laid the foundations for funk, and Bob Marley stripped reggae to its basics. Psychedelia launched its second wave, rougher and more extreme than its predecessor, the originators of art rock began to coalesce, hard rock found a voice and a force, and the innovations of King Crimson’s In The Court Of The Crimson King came into focus in a host of hungry British bands. 1970 saw new venues, new labels, new audiences, new electronics, new possibilities. It was a wild year, an improbable year, a year of simmering change. The rest of the golden age was just a refinement of the energy unleashed here. Special features include: An introduction that places the year in context - An exploration of how the rock infrastructure developed in 1970 - A look at the significant singles of the year - Separate in-depth sections on movements in 1970 in pop, prog rock, folk and roots music, blues, blues rock and heavy metal, singer-songwriters, soul, jazz, British and European music, and all kinds of fringe - Two full pages on every featured album