If you were flipping through radio stations in 1973, you might have been forgiven for wondering whether you’d accidentally landed on multiple stations at once. In a single week, you could hear Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” — all nervous funk and clavinet — followed immediately by Tony Orlando & Dawn tying a yellow ribbon around an oak tree. That wasn’t a coincidence or a quirk of programming. It was just what 1973 sounded like: a year when pop music was genuinely pulling in several directions at the same time, and somehow holding together anyway.
Soul and R&B were operating at an extraordinary level. Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On,” Gladys Knight’s “Midnight Train to Georgia,” the O’Jays’ “Love Train,” and the Spinners’ “Could It Be I’m Falling In Love” all landed that year, each with its own emotional weight and personality. Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly” brought something sharper and more cinematic to the mix, while Ann Peebles’ “I Can’t Stand the Rain” — still somewhat underappreciated in the wider cultural memory — was as raw and soulful as anything released that decade. Eddie Kendricks, fresh off his Temptations run, went solo with “Keep On Truckin’,” and it clicked immediately. The breadth of what Black artists were producing in this single calendar year is genuinely remarkable.
Rock was doing its own sprawling thing. The Rolling Stones released “Angie,” one of their more restrained and melancholy singles. Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” was the title track of a double album that showed he could sustain a full artistic statement across four sides of vinyl, not just deliver three minutes at a time. Pink Floyd’s “Money” brought an odd-time signature to FM radio in a way that probably shouldn’t have worked as well as it did. And then there were the louder contingents: Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” became one of the most-played riffs in guitar shop history, Grand Funk Railroad declared themselves an American band, and Slade and Sweet were doing glam rock with considerably more volume than glamour. Meanwhile, Iggy & the Stooges released “Search and Destroy” — which most of 1973’s radio audience largely ignored, though history would eventually course-correct on that.
The year also captured several artists at particularly interesting transitional moments. David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” originally released in 1969, finally broke through in the US in 1973, reaching American audiences who were now ready for its strange, detached storytelling. Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” had no business being as widely played as it was, given its subject matter, but here we are. Bob Dylan contributed “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” via his Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid soundtrack — unassuming and brief, but immediately recognizable as something that would last. T. Rex’s “20th Century Boy” and George Harrison’s “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth)” filled out a year that seemed to have room for almost anything, provided it had a decent hook.
What holds up most clearly, looking back at 1973’s output, is that the music wasn’t being made according to any unified cultural script. Some of it was deliberately commercial; some of it was confrontational; some of it was deeply personal. Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” and Paul Simon’s “Loves Me Like a Rock” feel like they come from entirely different worlds, yet they all landed in the same twelve-month window. Ringo Starr had a hit with “Photograph.” The Allman Brothers were rambling. Cher was charting with “Half-Breed.” By any measure, 1973 was a disorganized, contradictory, frequently excellent year for popular music — and that’s precisely what makes it worth revisiting.
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