Tapping into a seam of gold: Sanjoy Narayan on the best tracks of ’75
Music was already a big part of my life in 1975. I had my father’s Western classical music LPs, and Beatles, Rolling Stones and Doors records borrowed from luckier friends in Calcutta. But at 16, I didn’t fully grasp what that year was giving the world.
I came to the best 1975 albums only years later, in moments that often arrived as personal revelations. As this year ends and these masterpieces turn 50, I find myself returning to them with something more than nostalgia. With gratitude: for discovering them, albeit late, and for the fact that they’d been waiting all along.
This was a phenomenally generous year. It gave us Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, a meditative introspection that blends acoustic back into the electric; a work so deeply personal that it seemed to anticipate the confessional era of song-writing that would follow.
I heard it first soon after it came out, but truly discovered it much later, during a phase of my own reckoning, and it felt like Dylan was speaking directly to me across the decades.
Similarly, when I finally sat down with A Night at the Opera by Queen — the most expensive album of its time, it was said; made on a then-princely budget of $40,000 — I understood why Bohemian Rhapsody had become a phenomenon. It was ambition made audible; the sound of artists refusing to be confined even by the rules of rock.
In 1975, rock was everywhere and nowhere. Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti sprawled across two albums with the gumption of a band that already had nothing to prove, moving fluidly from the starkness of blues to the mysticism of folk. The album’s willingness to contradict itself, to be both gentle and crushing, became a kind of permission to not conform.
This was a year of rock innovators too. David Bowie’s Young Americans arrived during the height of Ziggy Stardust mania, yet it moved sideways into soul and funk with the nonchalance of an artist who had already shown us a lifetime’s worth of creativity. Listening to Bowie take something as foreign as soul music and make it sound like the inevitable next chapter of his story taught me that growth requires curiosity. And courage.
There were other worlds, of course, beyond rock’s comforting certainties.
There was the perfection of Elton John’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, which became the bestselling record of 1975, achieving platinum status the day it arrived in stores. It’s a deeply personal work dressed in theatrical garments, which is probably why it has aged so well.
Paul Simon’s Still Crazy After All These Years offered something similar: the sound of a man taking stock, finding humour and sorrow in equal measure, in the course of staying alive.
There were genre-defying releases. Earth, Wind & Fire’s That’s the Way of the World, with tracks such as Reasons and Shining Star, moved hips and hearts simultaneously. Joni Mitchell’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns seemed almost too ambitious in its hybridisation of jazz, pop and world music elements, yet it anticipated musical directions that would fully arrive only decades later. Patti Smith’s Horses brought poetry and raw energy into a collision so violent that rock music changed shape in its wake. Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger, made on a budget of $4,000, whispered its way to selling 100,000 copies.
And then there was the pure experimentation: Keith Jarrett’s solo piano improvisation, The Köln Concert, recorded live in a single, painful sitting, became the best-selling piano recording in history. Over the decades, it has become one of my favourite albums to listen to while I write or read or just lose myself in thought.
Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, meanwhile, remains the album I play when I need to be challenged, to be reminded that rock music is more a state of mind than a collection of notes. And the Grateful Dead’s Blues for Allah — ah, that one came to me in the late-70s, during my own early wanderings into altered consciousness and musical exploration — became a kind of compass for journeys of expansiveness and seeking.
These 50-year-old albums are part of my non-negotiable collection. If I were ever forced to choose a finite number of records to live with, these would be the ones I’d fight for. Not because I don’t seek out newer music — I do, voraciously — but because these contain something weatherproof. They have already survived 50 years, and I suspect they’ll survive many half-centuries more.
Each one holds the soundtrack to a different version of me. After a particularly rough break-up, I had Dylan. In a moment of creative courage, I had Bowie. For late-night explorations of the consciousness, there were the Dead. In a night of wild freedom, there was Parliament’s Mothership Connection.
These are not just albums, then. They’re rooms in the house of my mind, each one inhabited by a different version of myself.
(To write in, email sanjoy.narayan@gmail.com. The views expressed are personal)
