The Lost Story of 1970

The Lost Story of 1970:

A Response to David Browne’s Fire and Rain: The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY, and the Lost Story of 1970

The year is 2013, but it never really has to be. With the flip of a page, we can escape into ancient empires, a medieval adventure or Victorian romance, even a fairy tale world unbounded by time. For me, the year is 1970 and what follows is neither a romance nor an adventure, but a chronicle of a year caught at the end of an era and the cusp of a new one. It’s a year defined by drugs, violence, and space exploration, but David Browne, the author of Fire and Rain, chooses to tell the story of 1970 through its music, namely four albums of the year: The Beatles’ Let It Be, Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, CSNY’s Déjà vu, and James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James.

The lost story of 1970 described in the subtitle of the book relates to the criticism surrounding music history, in which the late 60s take a huge precedence. Browne’s argument is that the music of 1970 is as crucial and revealing to the changing times as the years immediately prior.

For me, the “lost story” was that I had brief familiarity with the bands included and knew even less about the historical climate of the time. Beyond a general ‘Oh, I know that happened way back when’ for most events, my one point of reference was the Apollo 13 launch, because I’m a nerd who likes space things and Bill Paxton.

As far as music goes, my Beatles knowledge was limited to the singles I liked, but with no concept of chronology; Simon & Garfunkel I knew from their versions of “Scarborough Fair/Canticle”, “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (one of my mom’s favorites), and “The Sound of Silence”, as well as Josh Groban’s cover of “America”; Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young were just a string of names; and James Taylor was a person I’d met briefly through Carole King’s memoir, not realizing that she meant that “Fire and Rain” until I read about it in this book and looked it up. (Note: Carole King was the pianist for “Fire and Rain” and went on tour with James Taylor that year)

When it would be all too easy to write about these bands on a parallel field, that’s not what Browne does. He intelligently weaves their stories together, finding points where they meet and intersect and complement each other. In one such instance, Paul McCartney sits among the audience at Royal Albert Hall on January 6th 1970 when Crosby, Stills, and Nash perform their rendition of “Blackbird,” making it their own and musically proclaiming their intention “to pick up where the Beatles left off”(12). Yet at the end of the book on December 3, 1970, Stephen Stills and Ringo Starr run into each other at a London members-only club, both without a band and alone:

Like the Beatles, CSNY had experienced it all: early camaraderie, dizzying fame, endless hours in recording studios, ample drug experimentation, mounting interpersonal tensions, and finally, disarray. Remarkably, though, they’d managed to do it not in a decade, but a mere eighteen months. (288)

While the behind-the-scenes look at the people behind the music, not just the singers themselves, is an already interesting topic, it is these connections which serve to move the book through time and make it engaging to the end. Within it, we are allowed to see where the lives of these people collide and influence each other, where before we’d only see the resulting product of their artistry.

And while it could easily also be a book about the downfall of these bands, since they all fell apart that year, it’s not quite that either. The documentation of the bands’ struggles among their members has no apocalyptic overtones despite the time, nor is it a glorification of the resulting hit songs, which often bleed hope in the chaotic time. It is simply, what happened and what that meant for music – the rise of the solo album, which most of the musicians pursued upon the splits in their bands and which singer/songwriter James Taylor pursued through 1970 with Sweet Baby James, setting the tone for in the new decade.

With an introspective look at the songs that I’ve already loved and an introduction to songs I didn’t know or completely understand, Fire and Rain was a joy to read, even though many of the stories of the time, including the Kent shooting resulting in Neil Young’s “Ohio” and Charles Manson’s Helter Skelter prediction, further conceptualized and named from the Beatles’ The White Album, were quite heavy. These were the portions of the book where the music was most connected to the environment around its conception, though painting the canvas was also crucial for framing the musical foreground. The drug-use in the book, copious and unapologetic in many ways, is one instance where this was apparent.

With brilliantly interwoven stories, a strong combination of musical groups and artists, and an effective template for telling the story of a year, Fire and Rain is what I believe to be the way a book about music should be written, in which historical context and the people involved are as important as the product itself. Perhaps this is the lost story, then: perceiving music from all angles and sides and through different mediums until it becomes something different all together, but still just as special.

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