Rock and Roll Gallery likes to take a trip back in time, let’s say most of the time. A magical musical Time Machine trip back to 1973 would be a little fun. We blogged before about the tours of 1973 and how the concert business blossomed due to Led Zeppelin, The Who and Alice Cooper’s major tours and record attendance numbers, but nothing touches all the albums released that year and the lasting effect they have had on the music scene since.
We want to just talk about some of the albums that came out the first 6 months of 1973 because it’s just too much of a good thing if there is such a thing. I guess you start in January with Elton John’s “Don’t Shoo Me I’m Only The Piano Player with Daniel and Crocodile Rock as the singles, then you get Aerosmith’s debut that didn’t really click until a few months later when Dream On was released as a single…..seems unfathomable when you look back at it knowing what we know now.
As the calendar is ticking into February, March and April we see Alice Cooper dominate with Billion Dollar Babies and Iggy and The Stooges deliver Raw Power….we had to have Detroit represented and they helped put it on the musical map with those 2 releases. Then March happened….the game is now changed forever with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon…we could just stop there but that wouldn’t be easy as Led Zeppelin put out the seminal Houses of the Holy lp…let that sink in for a minute, thats a lot of evergreen classic rock and then we see April! This is the month that gave us Eagles Desperado and David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane….if you were in this for the album cover art alone, you would be happy, there were good times to be alive! That being said, May brings us Yessongs by Yes, their most important live album and Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells which scared a lot of people because it was used in The Exorcist movie and it blew up.
This is just a little time stamp of the first few months of classic rock history that was being served up as just more every day music at the time…we knew it was cool and plentiful but who knew the lasting power and impact it would have. This year in music changed a lot of lives for a lot of people and we are forever grateful for the freedom that existed to foster this sonic environment !
Below is a link to all of Rock and Roll Gallery’s images and prints available for sale from 1973: