Stuff I’ve Been Listening To

It is impossible to write about the music of 2020 without writing about the music of 1970, right? You just have to. Well, not you, maybe. But I am a man of a certain age, and if anyone releases any music in a year that ends with a naught, then men of a certain age feel a moral obligation to compare that music to the music released in other years that end in a naught. That’s just the way life is. And if you can go back a pleasingly round fifty years to compare, then the imperative is even more pressing. It’s more or less the law. A half century! I’d been waiting for 2020 to arrive since 1989. That it arrived in a state of some disarray, raging and plague-ridden, is of no concern to us here. People still made recorded music. If they didn’t want to be judged against history, then they should have worked harder and got their stuff out in 2019. Or worked less hard and gone for 2021. But no: they had the hubris to risk the zero. 

So let’s begin by looking at the albums of 1970. It was the year of Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, by Derek and the Dominos, and the home of one of my favorite-ever guitar solos, by Eric Clapton, on “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” (I prefer James Burton to Clapton most of the time, but the solo here is deeply musical rather than extremely fast, and it kills me every time.) And there’s the Velvet Underground’s Loaded, the one containing “Sweet Jane” and “Who Loves the Sun” and a few other tracks I’ve been listening to ever since, quite often while watching a support act in a club. It was the year of the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty, and the Stooges’ Fun House, and the Who’s Live at Leeds, and George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, and Van Morrison’s Moondance. You may have heard one or two of the tracks on Bridge over Troubled Water—the title song, for example, which begins “When you’re weary, / feeling small”—and a couple more on the Beatles’ Let It Be. My favorite Aretha album is Spirit in the Dark, I think, and if you haven’t bothered with the nearly eleven-minute version of James Brown’s “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine” (on the album Sex Machine) until now, then what is COVID for? (I understand you might not be feeling exactly like being a sex machine, but see how you get on.) Ladies of the Canyon was a 1970 record, and Led Zeppelin III, and Déjà Vu, and Paranoid, and Curtis, the one that gave us “Move On Up,” and the first Funkadelic album.