[On August 25th, 1976, the rock band Boston released their self-titled debut album. It would go on to become one of the best-selling albums of all time, so for its 50th anniversary this week I wanted to pay rocking tribute by AmericanStudying what a handful of iconic 70s bands can tell us about the nation. Leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post through which I hope we can keep on rockin’ in the free(ish) world!]
Three quotes that reflect the divergent but ultimately complementary ways to define an iconoclastic 70s rock bond.
- “They never came out of their room, they stayed up all night. They looked like ghosts—black turtlenecks and skin so white that it looked like yogurt. Absolutely no activity, chain-smoking Lucky Strikes and dope.” That quote is from a 2006 Entertainment Weekly article on Steely Dan’s origins at New York’s Bard College, where Walter Becker and Donald Fagen met in 1967 while students. (It’s the perspective of Bard classmate and fellow singer/songwriter Terence Boylan.) In my Boston post earlier in the week I wrote about the shift toward more intellectual rock in the early 1970s, and in that foundational era no band embodied that “college rock” vibe—which included intellectualism but also a broader rejection of many elements of the rockstar image and lifestyle—more than Steely Dan. To cite just one striking illustration of that rejection, this was a band that stopped touring or performing live at all just two years after the release of their debut album.
- “I hear this guy practicing, and it sounded very professional and contemporary. It sounded like, you know, like a black person, really.” Taken from that same EW article, that’s Fagen himself, talking about the first time he and Becker met; Fagen was walking by Annandale-on-Hudson’s Red Balloon café, heard Becker’s guitar playing, and introduced himself and asked if he wanted to form a band. Besides being one of the most “college rock” origin stories I can imagine—as well as one of the most random and delightful founding moments for a rock band period—this quote also helps us remember that, however nontraditional and intellectual Steely Dan was in both its vibe and its lyrics, it was also a band based on profound musicianship, and on musical arrangements which fully reflected those skills (and which in service of that sound brought together tons of other talented musicians as well as countless genres, including jazz, Latin music, and blues alongside rock). For all those reasons, in 2001 Steely Dan was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which on their main page includes the Rolling Stone quote…
- …”the perfect musical antiheroes for the Seventies.” In many ways I agree, and would say that both of this post’s prior quotes and the details to which they connect reflect those elements of Steely Dan. But if this weeklong series has any main throughline about 70s rock, I’d say it’s that this was an era defined not by towering heroes like the Beatles of the prior decade, but by the diversity and breadth of the genre, by all the permutations that rock began to take on in this post counter-culture moment. Which certainly makes the iconoclastic and iconic Steely Dan a perfect reflection of a period when juke box heroes were becoming far more varied, and I would argue more interesting, than ever.
Last iconic and telling rock band tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Thoughts on this band or other iconic ones (from the 70s or not) you’d add into the conversation?
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