Anniversaries of classic albums such as Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On and Joni Mitchell’s Blue have listeners reflecting on the incredible range of groundbreaking, original music produced half a century ago, shifting the current locus of Boomer nostalgia from the 1960s to the ’70s. So this seems like a good time to appreciate a 50-year-old pop music phenomenon that ran against the current of the fresh, innovative sounds of those celebrated albums, and which provided the Woodstock generation with their first blast from the past.
While albums such as What’s Going On, Blue, and John Lennon’s Imagine seem to capture the early ’70s zeitgeist, those years were also defined by a revival of pre-Beatles rock ‘n’ roll. You could even argue that the ’50s provided the most distinctive sound of the early ’70s. The seeds had been planted in the late ’60s by the Beatles themselves (the Get Back album project that became 1970’s Let It Be), along with Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band (Live Peace in Toronto), the Who (“Summertime Blues”), and other major rock acts, not to mention the Woodstock performance of Sha Na Na’s “At the Hop”.