Was 1975 the fourth best year ever for albums? From Bob Marley to Patti Smith, how would you vote?
Meet The Conundrums!
No, that’s not an alternate title for The Beatles’ 1964 U.S. debut album, but it might be the most apt headline for today’s article about the greatest albums of 1975. Given how many outstanding albums were released that year, how can any respectable music critic — well, me — claim it was an inferior year compared to 1972, 1973 or 1974?
Those were the exact years that I hailed, as some readers may recall, in my annual articles between 2022 and today as, respectively, the first, second and third greatest years ever for albums. So, it would seem logical for me to now declare — completely subjectively, of course — 1975 as the fourth greatest year for albums, thanks to everyone from Joni Mitchell, Bob Marley, Led Zeppelin and Willie Nelson to Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Wayne Shorter and Earth, Wind & Fire, among others.
But I’m not sure how to make that case without painting myself into a corner. This holds especially true when I consider how much listening pleasure I still get from albums released before, during and after this four-year period.
Without a doubt, 1975 yielded some truly memorable albums that have stood the test of time. But it did not yield quite as many — at least, not to my ears — as 1973 and 1974, or the even more heady level of classic albums that came out in 1972.
A number of major artists released what I considered to be solid but not — by their own heady standards — superior albums in 1975. The list includes The Who’s “The Who By Numbers,” Linda Ronstadt‘s “Prisoner in Disguise,” The Band’s “Northern Lights — Southern Cross,” Elton John’s “Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy,” Paul McCartney & Wings’ “Venus and Mars,” the Eagles’ “One Of These Nights,” Black Sabbath’s “Sabotage,” Lou Reed’s “Coney Island Baby” and former San Diegan Tom Waits’ “Nighthawks at the Diner.”
It was a year that saw a number of debut albums by acts whose stars would rise later, or not at all. Some examples include the maiden voyages by AC/DC, Journey, Duck Baker, Heart, Sister Sledge, Pavlov’s Dog, Angel, Mannheim Steamroller, Guy Clark, Ted Nugent, Juice Newton, David Sanborn, Little River Band, Typically Tropical, Crack The Sky, Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, Moxie, Eric Carmen, Manhattan Transfer, The Tubes and Mexico’s Los Bukis.
And It was a year that saw star-making releases by artists who already had at least several albums under their belts but had not quite broken through until 1975. Most notable among these are Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band’s “Born to Run,” Queen’s “A Night at the Opera,” Aerosmith’s “Toys in the Attic,” Keith Jarrett’s “The Köln Concert,” Fleetwood Mac’s “Fleetwood Mac” (which was, in fact, that Anglo-American band’s 12th album) and Kiss’ “Kiss Alive!”
With the exception of “Kiss Alive!” by Kiss — a band whose cartoonish image and pyrotechnics too often often outweighed its modest musical abilities — all of these would be solid choices. On another day in another week, I’d welcome them on my list for a “Best Albums of 1975” retrospective, along with Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here,” Al Green’s “Al Green Is Love,” Joan Baez’s “Diamonds & Rust,” Paul Simon’s “Still Crazy After All These Years,” Eno’s “Another Green World,” Neil Young’s “On The Beach” and Parliament’s “Mothership Connection.”
But not today.
Of course, my choices and opinions are — like all of yours — highly personal and subjective. And I’ll readily acknowledge that 1959, 1966, 1976, 1992, and 2015 produced their share of terrific albums. So did other years that any of you might cite instead.
But as a teenager in the mid-1970s, I was able to devote more extended amounts of uninterrupted time to listening to music. This was in no small part because I had yet to take on many of the responsibilities of being a full-fledged adult (a status some of my closest friends maintain I have yet to achieve). As the teenaged music critic for Overseas Life, a monthly magazine published near Frankfurt, Germany, I wrote 12 articles a year. That’s six less than the 18 I wrote in December alone for the Union-Tribune.
One of the paradoxes of being a professional music critic is that the amount of time you expend listening to, thinking and writing about a specific piece of music, artist or performance can limit your time to do so with other music, artists and performances. During this dizzying digital era when more music is available — via more platforms, to more people than ever before — the amount of new music becomes more overwhelming by the day.
I make these observations as someone who keenly appreciates how very fortunate I am to have a vocation that allows me to hear, absorb and learn about a broad array of music from around the world, then share my thoughts with readers and engage in a dialogue with them.
And around the world — or at least parts of it — is where I found myself in 1975.
Late that summer, I concluded a 15-month residency in Frankfurt, where I had previously lived from the age of 7 to 16. This was followed by a three-month autumn stay in Washington, D.C.
There, I heard the then-almost unknown Leon Redbone perform for an audience of 11 people in a small club. I also attended a private rehearsal by the stunningly talented Virginia prog-rock band Happy The Man, which a year later so impressed former Genesis singer Peter Gabriel that he wanted them to back him on his first solo album. (They, unwisely in hindsight, turned him down.)
I moved to San Diego in late November 1975. It was just in time time to hear Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart’s joint Dec. 29 concert at the now-dormant Golden Hall. I went with my cousin, Larry Klay, and Mark Melendrez, the first fellow drummer I met after moving here.
Mark took us the next day to East County’s Big Oak Ranch to hear Mickey Ratt, a local band that — after moving to L.A. and morphing into Ratt — I would interview in 1984 for the San Diego Union.
I did not know at the time Zappa had attended both Mission Bay and Grossmont high schools, as he vividly recounted to me in a 1984 San Diego Union interview. I did not learn until some years after that about Zappa having frequented Arcade Records, a downtown used-records treasure trove that I discovered days after moving to San Diego.
The summer of 1975 included my first visit to Hungary. It was the country where both my parents were born and raised, and where my father was unable to return for the duration of the Cold War because of his job in Frankfurt as a U.S Air Force attaché to the CIA.
My trip to my parents’ homeland was eye-opening, politically and socially. My traveling companion and I did not know that merely possessing a copy of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s acclaimed book, “The Gulag Archipelago” — which we had brought with us — was a punishable offense. Or that being a long-haired young man in Hungary in 1975 was an invitation for being refused restaurant service and for being stopped and questioned a number of times by the police.
On a brighter note, I had the welcome opportunity to see several excellent Hungarian Gypsy quintets, along with a Budapest jazz-funk ensemble that performed a first-rate version of Herbie Hancock’s 1973 number “Chameleon.” The less said about the Hungarian hotel lounge band I heard perform a thickly accented, completely phonetic version of Jackson Browne’s “Doctor My Eyes” — while plain-clothes security guards patrolled the perimeters of the nearly empty dance floor — the better.
My single biggest epiphany of 1975, and one that had a major subsequent impact on my growing album collection, came when I went that summer to Switzerland to cover the famed Montreux Jazz Festival in its three-week entirety.
The genre-leaping lineup featured some artists I had albums by and had previously seen perform, including Billy Cobham, Rory Gallagher, Juke Boy Bonner, John Sebastian and several others. Also featured were some artists I had albums by but had not seen perform live, including Charles Mingus, Albert King, Etta James, Larry Coryell and Maria Muldaur.
But the biggest jackpot for me in Montreux was the dizzying array of bands and solo artists I had never seen in concert and whose albums did not yet grace my collection.
Over the course of two successive days, I heard terrific performances by the David Bromberg Band, Loudon Wainwright III, Belgian guitar great Philip Catherine, English troubadour John Martyn, Steve Khan, Julie Felix, Fred Neil and Country Gazette, whose soaring vocal harmonies on the bluegrass chestnut “Down the Road” still ring in my ears today. During the next few years, I bought albums by all these artists.
Happily, they were just a prelude to my Montreux musical motherlode.
Nearly a week of the festival was devoted to showcasing artists who recorded for Pablo Records, then one of the world’s preeminent jazz labels. What’s more, all their performances were recorded and released on nine live albums that I later happily acquired, mostly here at Arcade Records.
The star-studded Montreux ’75 lineup included Ella Fitzgerald, the Count Basie Orchestra, Dizzy Gillespie, Roy Eldridge, Benny Carter, Oscar Peterson, Milt Jackson, Johnny Griffin, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Louis Bellson, Joe Pass, Toots Thielemans, Gerry Mulligan, Niels Pedersen, Zoot Simms, Tommy Flanagan and more.
Hearing and watching them up close allowed this wide-eyed, slack-jawed teenager to experience a veritable jazz hall of fame — live and in real time — with back-to-back performances by some of the genre’s most influential artists of the 20th century.
Starting in the 1980s, I was privileged to interview Gillespie, Peterson, Jackson, Thielemans and other Montreux alums for the San Diego Union (which in 1992 merged with The Evening Tribune to become the San Diego Union-Tribune). Having heard those live albums — and having been present when they were made — provided a great resource, then and now.
So did being there for the 1975 festival’s concluding concerts, which enabled me to attend performances by Mingus,cq; Bill Evans, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Anthony Braxton, Archie Shepp, Andrew Hill, Japan’s Sadao Watanabe and other modern jazz luminaries who had built on the vital musical foundations laid by the venerated Pablo Records’ artists I had heard only days earlier.
I was surely unprepared to hear so many great performers in rapid succession, let alone knowing so little then about their artistic innovations and historical significance. But that only heightened the joy of discovery for me as a music-loving teen eager to hear and learn as much as possible. Fifty years later, that joy and eagerness continue unabated.
I also covered the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1976, 1980 and 1987, and each of them made an indelible impression. Nearly all of the live albums recorded at the 1975 edition were released later that year, and at least half of them could merit inclusion in my roundup of my favorite albums from that year.
But having just sung the praises of that music in this article — coupled with a desire to highlight as broad an array of artists as possible — I have opted to instead focus on these standout 1975 albums.
Bob Dylan, ‘Blood on the Tracks’
How soul-sapping was the 1974 dissolution of Bob Dylan’s marriage to Sarah Lownds? The answer can be found in “Blood on the Tracks,” which was released in February 1975. An often-wrenching masterpiece of romantic loss, despair and seething rage, it paved the way for such subsequent classic breakup albums as Marvin Gaye’s “Here, My Dear,” Roseanne Cash’s “Interiors,” Beck’s “Sea Change” and, just last year, former San Diego singer-songwriter Andra Day’s “Cassandra (Cherith).”
Dylan was only 33 and a father of five young children when he made this 10-song epic. Its themes of love lost, anger, regret and emotionally flailing in the wind are palpable. So is the the seething bitterness and outright contempt Dylan expresses in the lacerating “Idiot Wind.” And with such stunning songs as “Shelter from the Storm” and “Tangled Up in Blue,” he finds a form of catharsis within his personal tumult. In the process he makes personal pain relatable, if not universal, no more so than in this revealing couplet from “Simple Twist of Faith”: People tell me it’s a sin / To know and feel too much within / I still believe she was my twin, but I lost the ring.
Bob Marley & The Wailers, ‘Live!’
It would take until 1977, when reggae-music icon Bob Marley’s “Exodus” album was released, for this transformational Jamaican singer, songwriter, guitarist and band leader to reach a broader mainstream pop audience. But 1975’s “Live!” leaves no doubt he was already worthy of the status as a legend that he would soon achieve.
Indeed, you can hear and feel what a remarkably charismatic performer Marley was on this electrifying album, which was recorded at a July 1975 concert in London. From start (the call-and-response-fueled “Trenchtown Rock”) to finish (the anthemic “Get Up, Stand Up”), each of the seven songs here bristles with passion and power.
The Wailers, with then-new guitarist Al Anderson assuming a prominent role, perform with admirable crispness and concision as Marley ignites time and again. When they all dig into the triumphant “No Woman, No Cry,” which had been given short shrift in the shorter, oddly up-tempo version on their their 1974 “Natty Dread” album, the results are transformative.
Joni Mitchell, ‘The Hissing of Summer Lawns’
Asked in a 1985 Rolling Stone interview about his then-current musical favorites, Prince responded: “The last album I loved all the way through was ‘The Hissing of Summer Lawns.’” He went further in a 2004 Rocky Mountain News interview, declaring: “Joni’s music should be taught in school.”
With this 1975 gem of an album, Mitchell offers an intoxicating graduate course in the arts of songwriting, defying expectations and steadfastly refusing to compromise. Fifty years after its release, there is still nothing else that sounds like “The Jungle Line” or “Shadows and Light,” to cite just two of the standout tracks on the album.
Apart from the lilting opening number, “In France They Kiss On Main Street” — which harkens back to her 1974 album, “Court & Spark” — the genre-defying songs on “The Hissing of Summer Lawns” charted a bold new course for Mitchell. Her ability to consistently surprise her listeners on this nine-song album is matched by her ability to delight with her bold risk-taking, aversion to predictability and a painterly approach that she alludes to in such wonderfully evocative couplets as: Suntans in reservation dining rooms / Pale miners in their lantern rays / Night, night and day.
Wayne Shorter, featuring Milton Nascimento, ‘Native Dancer’
In theory, a pairing of American jazz composer, saxophone innovator and Weather Report band co-founder Wayne Shorter and the exceptional Brazilian singer-songwriter Milton Nascimento would seem promising. In actuality, their magical collaboration easily exceeded all expectations, their own included, on the frequently extraordinary “Native Dancer.”
Accompanied by a talent-rich group of Brazilian and American instrumentalists that includes keyboardist Herbie Hancock — who had played alongside Shorter in the 1960s as a member of Miles Davis fabled second great quintet — Shorter and Nascimento created something remarkable. Drawing from jazz, Latin American folk traditions and an array of Brazilian styles, they made music that defied easy categorization and was by turns ethereal and otherworldly, buoyant and electrifying.
Nascimento’s angelic falsetto vocals and Shorter’s gloriously sculpted soprano and tenor saxophone work intertwine so seamlessly they seem to be the product of the same mind and body. A key force in Brazil’s shape-shifting Tropicalia movement in the 1960s, Nascimento wrote five of the songs on “Native Dancer,” while Shorter wrote three and Hancock one.
Nascimento sings entirely in Portuguese, which sounds as exotic to me now as it did when I first heard this album as a teenager. But the beauty and sublime expressiveness of his voice transcends language as surely as Shorter’s exquisite, constantly probing musicianship. It’s a heavenly match that still inspires goosebumps.
The Meters, ‘Fire On The Bayou’
A precursor to The Neville Brothers, The Meters was the first New Orleans supergroup — an instrumental and vocal powerhouse with outstanding songwriting skills. The band’s sixth album, “Fire On The Bayou” teamed keyboardist/lead singer Art Neville, guitarist/backing singer Leo Nocentelli, bassist/backing singer George Porter, Jr., drummer/singer Zigaboo Modeliste and percussionist/singer Cyril Neville.
The Meters’ brand of loping Big Easy funk. slinky R&B and snappy syncopations was propelled by irresistible grooves and Allen Toussaint’s no-nonsense production. A key influence on everyone from Little Feat, the Rolling Stones and Robert Palmer to A Tribe Called Quest, the Grateful Dead and String Cheese Incident, The Meters’ sinewy music exudes a sense of earthy celebration. “Fire On The Bayou’s” title track is a marvel in musical grit and finesse. So, for that matter, is the rest of this album, even the 88-second-long “Running Fast.”
Jeff Beck, ‘Blow By Blow’
A two-time Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee who died in 2023 at the age of 78, English guitar giant Jeff Beck never made music as consistently galvanizing and breathtaking as he did on “Blow By Blow.” The all-instrumental album combines deep blues emotion, percolating funk propulsion, jazz sophistication and sheer rock power into a mighty whole.
The nine-song album was produced by George Martin, who oversaw all but one of The Beatles’ albums. Perhaps coincidentally, the second song on “Blow By Blow” is a reggae-inflected version of the Fab Four’s 1964 favorite, “She’s a Woman.” Whether ripping through the Mahavishnu Orchestra-inspired “Scatterbrain” or seducing his guitar on Stevie Wonder’s beguiling “Because We’ve Ended As Lovers,” Beck combines finesse and ferocity like no one else.
Patti Smith, ‘Horses’
Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.
Those are the first words Patti Smith sings — or, to be more precise, snarls — on “Gloria: In Excelsis Deo,” It’s the first song on her electrifying debut album, and it’s difficult to think of a more powerful opening line by any other new artist, before or since.
Such a confrontational approach has long been a hallmark of Smith, a New Jersey-bred poet turned New York proto-punk-rock pioneer who has inspired everyone from R.E.M. co-founder Michael Stipe and Shirley Manson of Garbage to Lorde and Orville Peck. On “Horses,” Smith howls and cries out, exclaims and exults, a fearless woman-turned-shaman with attitude to spare. Her band, led by guitarist Lenny Kaye, plays elemental but celebratory garage-rock that — with Smith at the fore — created a vibrant template for a generation or two to come.
Your turn!
What are your five favorite albums of 1975, and why?
Send your responses to george.varga@sduniontribune.com. Please include your name and where you live (not your address, but the area, such as Chula Vista, Del Mar or El Cajon).