The 100 Greatest Songs of the 1970s, Part VI.

075. Leon Russell “Tight Rope”
(Leon Russell)
Carney, 1972

By 1972, Leon Russell had kicked around the music industry enough to be his own man at last. He’d worked for Phil Spector, reportedly clapping until his hands bled for a Ronettes track. He’d played piano for Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour, had dated Rita Coolige, had turned out two goofy swamp-psychedelia albums of middling interest with Marc Benno, and had seen songs he’d written taken to the top of the charts by Cocker, Donny Hathaway, and the Carpenters. And with this song, a cheerful, carnivalesque thumper, he took stock of his life and times, trying to deal with a newfound fame but self-mythologizing habitually, like any rock star worth his salt would. (The same album contains an extended criticism of Rolling Stone journalists and overinvolved music fans; one paranoid possibility for why his career petered out after the mid-70s.) The music is more or less ragtime gone country, with boogie-woogie accents and a circus-music breakdown which follows not just the pattern of the lyrics but the album art and, more generally, the fact that rock & roll, especially as it blossomed into a more variegated form of theater/ritual in the late 60s, had roots in older low-class entertainment forms like vaudeville, burlesque, medicine shows, minstrelsy, and even (once upon a time) opera and straight drama. Show business is show business; it always bleeds its practitioners dry. Doesn’t mean they shouldn’t enjoy the ride.



074. John Prine “Sam Stone”
(John Prine)
John Prine, 1971

The singer-songwriter phenomenon was in full swing by the time Prine came along and, with Kris Kristofferson’s help, scored a record deal and produced an LP that bore this, his most famous — and maybe his best-ever — song. Cat Stevens, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell had been the vanguard of the singer-songwriter movement (with Dylan, naturally, as its unwilling, irascible spiritual godfather), and their complex melodies and elegant, contemplative lyrics set the pattern; they’re the reason “sensitive” is so often prefixed to “singer-songwriter.” We might even call them emo today. Prine was cut out of different stuff altogether; unafraid to either shock or disgust (but devoid of the badass pretention that made someone like Lou Reed an underground icon), he cuts through the self-important bullshit of the genre with a clean picking style and a hoarse voice, and lands one of the best sucker-punches in music with the most devastating opening couplet to a chorus that I’ve ever heard. There’s grim humor here, and sympathy without sentiment, and even an approach to Harry Smith’s timeless universality, in the lean, sparse tale of a drug-addicted Vietnam veteran; and the reference in the final stanza to the G. I. Bill reminds you that, shit, Vietnam was hardly the first war to leave psychic scars on a generation — and it’s not the last, either.



073. Ike & Tina Turner “Funkier Than a Mosquito’s Tweeter”
(Aillene Bullock)
Workin’ Together, 1971

Let’s get this out of the way first: Tina Turner is one of the top three female soul singers of all time. (Aretha is of course the second, and the third spot is debatable, though I’d go with Etta James). Her adult-contemporary career in the 1980s, as well as an understandable reluctance on the part of liberal boomers to give credit or money to asshole extraordinaire Ike Turner, has almost pushed out of sight a jaw-dropping amount of funky, hot, raunchy, devil’s-own music that spanned two decades, and is the greatest little-heard treasure trove in rock & roll. And make no mistake: Ike had just as much to do with it as Tina, and often more. A relentless self-promoter and manipulative svengali, he was also a dynamite instrumentalist, bandleader, songwriter, arranger, producer, and (occasionally) vocalist. Now that Tina’s safe from his reach, living with her Italian millionaire while he hustles to get cheapo blues releases on the shelves, it’s time to even up the score again. This is deep funk, made by a man who knew his Stone and his Clinton, but nasty and trebly to match Tina’s sawmill of a voice. Though it follows the usual formulas of an early-70s dis song, it’s generally agreed to be about Ike (Aillene Bullock is a version of Tina’s maiden name), and he either was too dim to catch on or figured it would be more badass if he didn’t care.



072. Iggy Pop “The Passenger”
(Ricky Gardiner/Iggy Pop)
Lust for Life, 1977

Vo-de-o-do-Oi! Yes, that carefree electric strum recalls the sound of a cigar-box ukelele and nights spent spooning on the porch with the local shieks and flappers . . . but the song is one of Iggy’s trademark paranoid urban fantasias, aided and abbetted by David Bowie on production and backup vocals in Berlin. Iggy Pop is one of American music’s great mavericks, from his ear-splitting, vein-bursting years with the Stooges to the varied muses he’s followed as a solo artist, but this song finds him edging his dry, world-weary croon into a more sophisticated, European mold. It’s about what we would today call eurotrash glitterazzi, people who can afford smoked-glass limos enjoying that luxury, trawling through the decadent streets in search of ever more spectacular and sleazy thrills. And that’s where the Twenties swing comes in: New York socialites were doing the same thing in Harlem fifty years earlier (and don’t think Pop — and especially Bowie — didn’t know it), and at the same time the Bright Young Things were doing it in Soho and Chelsea in London, and the Old-World aristocracy was doing it in Weimar Berlin. (Speaking of which, fuck Cabaret; check out Pandora’s Box, G. W. Pabst’s much more truthful 1927 collaboration with Louise Brooks.) There’s no machinist noise here, but that lazy strum is all the scarier.



071. Candi Staton “Too Hurt to Cry”
(George Jackson/Robert Moore)
single, 1971

This might be the last great Southern soul song. No, Al Green doesn’t count. He’s something else entirely. The Muscle Shoals studios were never the equal of Memphis’s Stax/Volt behemoth in terms of sales and influence, but they were just as fine an operation, and the discerning knew it. (Even Lynyrd Skynyrd namechecked them.) And their Aretha was Candi, whose appealingly raw, emotion-soaked voice made up for her lack of gale-force lungs on record; producer Rick Hall used to make her sing at the top of her voice until her voice started to crack, and then recorded that. Like many insane, borderline-abusive producers, he was right. She covered country songs frequently, and to good effect; her version of “In the Ghetto” is about the only listenable one there is. But it’s this song that was her finest moment, both commercially and artistically. Over a breezy piano line and some of the funkiest drums outside of a beatbox, she manages to have it both ways, both raw emotion (her voice) and noble, silent suffering (the lyrics), without contradiction. The pop-soul instrumentation is flattering and punctuational, and the impression, on first listen, is that of discovering not just a lost classic, but a whole new universe of soul and spirit. She later became a disco diva (and was made comfortable in middle age by being sampled on house songs), and today mostly does gospel, but she saved soul’s soul back in the day.


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