The self-titled New York Dolls debut, released in July of 1973, is considered one of the greatest rock albums (and one of the greatest first albums) of all time.
This band, and this record, influenced countless acts in the rock and punk worlds, from Kiss and the Sex Pistols to Guns N Roses and The Smiths. It reminds me of the line people use about The Velvet Underground’s debut, “not many people bought it, but everyone who did started a band.”
I’ve never been a fan of Steely Dan. I enjoy a lot of artists and genres that are Steely Dan-adjacent (I’m even into Donald Fagen’s solo work) but for some reason the band itself has always left me cold.
In fact, Steely Dan leaves me so cold that this is — astoundingly — the first ever song of theirs I’ve featured on the blog. Eleven years and more than 4,100 posts without a single ‘Hey Nineteen,’ ‘Deacon Blues’ or ‘Do It Again.’ That’s dedication to not giving a damn about Steely Dan!
I’ve spent a fair amount of time with The Rolling Stones’ catalog, after coming to them a little late in my musical life. I know seven or eight of their albums very well, including the half-dozen classics they released between 1966 and 1972.
Somehow, though, I never got around to 1973’s Goats Head Soup. Maybe that’s because, as the follow-up to Exile on Main St. and the start of a half-decade period considered their first creative slump, it just doesn’t have the cachet of the rest of their work.
Bob Marley and the Wailers’ 1973 album Catch a Fire was their fifth, but it feels like a starting point. It was their first album with the Island label, and the first to have the distinctive instrumentation and production with which casual fans are familiar.
If you’ve owned and loved the classic Legend collection, those songs started here.
Our next 1973 album comes courtesy of Mr. Marvin Gaye, who followed up his seminal 1971 political album with one of the greatest albums ever made about sex: Let’s Get It On.
Gaye grew up physically and emotionally abused by his minister father, who instilled in the young man a deeply troublesome view of sex that contributed to bouts of impotence. Not exactly the mental image you get of the man who sang ‘Let’s Get It On’ and the rest of the slow-funk love jams featured on this album.
Meet Me In Montauk 