In less than a year, the three albums listed here from 1975 changed rock history in dramatic ways. The first arrived with an emerging new genre and a female artist radically challenging the status quo. Next, a legend makes a comeback under the duress of a failing marriage. Finally, the songwriter destined to succeed the previous legend makes his own mark.
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Let’s look at three groundbreaking rock masterpieces that arrived in 1975!
‘Horses’ by Patti Smith
Though you cannot pinpoint the precise moment when punk came into existence, Patti Smith’s Horses feels like the instance in poetic terms. Take the album’s opening line: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” It’s about as punk rock a statement as one can make. When Smith, Lenny Kaye, Ivan Král, Jay Dee Daugherty, and Richard Sohl tear through Van Morrison’s “Gloria”, the convergence of mid-60s garage rock and proto-punk gets compressed into a rebellion.
John Cale produced Horses. Cale, with The Velvet Underground, and later producing The Stooges and The Modern Lovers, seemed to be in the middle of everything important during punk’s evolution. And on “Birdland”, Smith’s poem is backed by a band breathing as one. She occasionally stretches individual words, with and against musical time, like an old soul leading a youth movement.
For the cover, Robert Mapplethorpe captured the iconic photograph of Smith, cool, androgynous, utterly radical. Michael Stipe said of Horses, “It tore my limbs off and put them back on in a whole different order.”
‘Blood On The Tracks’ by Bob Dylan
Phil Ramone said recording Blood On The Tracks was to experience “a soul being revealed directly to tape.” Bob Dylan had the track listing in mind early on and worked quickly in the studio. The musicians had trouble keeping up as he often changed lyrics, dropped verses, and dropped measures in back-to-back passes. You can hear the players struggling on the final takes. But considering Dylan’s marriage to Sara Lownds was failing at the time, a band on the verge of falling apart puts the tumult to music. The result was one of the greatest albums of 1975.
Dylan re-recorded half the songs in Minneapolis. His brother David Zimmerman organized a larger band, in contrast to the stripped-down acoustic versions from the New York sessions. Along with several lyric changes, there’s a confidence in the Minneapolis reworks that didn’t exist on the originals. It’s most noticeable on “Tangled Up In Blue”.
Critics viewed Blood On The Tracks as Dylan’s comeback in 1975. And it’s endured as the standard by which subsequent Dylan albums have been compared.
‘Born To Run’ by Bruce Springsteen
This wouldn’t be a list of amazing albums from 1975 without mentioning this gem. Bruce Springsteen’s first masterpiece resulted from the commercial failure of his first two albums. “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” tells the story of the E Street Band’s formation. But it’s really Springsteen and his band coming into focus as a single entity.
Brian Wilson studied Phil Spector’s production on “Be My Baby” by The Ronettes. “I was driving and I had to pull over to the side of the road—it blew my mind,” he said. Wilson wasn’t the only one. Springsteen also aimed for Spector’s Wall of Sound on Born To Run. He recorded the epic title track over several months, with its wall of instruments backing Springsteen’s love letter to a girl named Wendy.
But it wasn’t just a love letter. It’s the kind of song Springsteen became known for. A working-class anthem. Finding light inside the dark realities of a nowhere town full of dead-enders hoping for something better. For now, young love will do. Soon, the tramps must run. Even if Springsteen had stopped here, they’d still call him The Boss.
Photo by Jorgen Angel/Redferns
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