1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything

BUT how can you not talk about Led Zeppelin,Yes, EL&P, or Jethro Tull. Yea yea yea I get that the Stones are the greatest band every and David Bowie is the coolest rock god but do we need to spend most of the episodes focused on them. At least when they looked at black groups the spread it around. It's well worth watching and reliving my high school years but like so many things in the 70s it was way too superficial.

I'm always interested in music documentaries, and there have been some good ones over the years. This was lacking. It didn't know what it wanted to be: a documentary about how culture influenced the music or how the music influenced the culture. And if it tried to make a case that the relationship was symbiotic, it fell short. Their was no real "through line." There were interesting sections or stories but in the end, it just felt forced.

I really loved this series, but they left out so many ground breaking albums. 1971 was the year Led zeppelin released IV with Stairway to Heaven, Pink Floyd released Meddle, The Allman Brother live at the Fillmore East, Janis Joplin released Pearl, Yes released Fragile, Van Morrison released Tupelo Honey, Jethro Tull's Aqualung, and Rod Stewart's Every picture tells a story. There were dozens of other albums that came out that year but these are just a few that helped shape my life. I was ten years old and had just got my first record player. The first 3 albums I bought were Aqualung, Zeppelin IV and the Allman Brothers live at the Filmore East. It was a great year for music.

I enjoyed much of what I saw in this series. The archival footage let me see things like Bowie's appearance at Glastonbury that I had never encountered before. I had seen footage of the Stones in the south of France in '71 but this offered some new clips and new background, which was interesting. The same holds true for the emergence of Elton John in the US that year.

The biggest flaw for me is that this often seems to take on the binary sort of thinking that has afflicted our political discourse of late and applied that to 1971 issues. It seems you were either for Nixon or a supporter of the extreme left. Obviously that isn't the case, but that is how it seems to be presented here. The same holds true for the episode dealing with the Black Panthers, Angela Davis and the Weather Underground subversives. It does a poor job of laying out the whole spectrum of positions with the various subtleties and instead goes for the simple political bad/good in presenting the characters. It seems to not understand that you could be opposed to Nixon and his policies without being a communist or far-left supporter. The same holds true for the segments about the UK underground press, which seemed to devote a lot of time to a group that was mostly appealing to an extremist fringe and did not make much impact on the greater society in the UK.

I was slightly baffled by the amount of time given to An American Family, the PBS series featuring Pat and Bill Loud and their children. While it was certainly a groundbreaking piece of work that helped illustrate the social changes in society at the time, I thought this series was about music, and so it struck me odd to find so much footage of it here. At least the producers do not sidestep the point that drug use was the cause of the downfall of many of the artists who had emerged around this time, showing that in all the years since, some things really never change in the music and entertainment business.

With all that said, the series is still fairly entertaining to watch, and really is mostly suffering from a misleading title. While some music certainly did lead to societal change, the series does not focus on that exclusively and takes the viewer to other areas where they probably should not have gone.

I disagree with some of the other reviews about this documentary I thought was really well done. A lot of people said there was too much context about the music and it made the documentary feel stuffy well I actually felt that the context was appropriately put together and flowed very well. I really enjoyed watching some of this footage that I've never seen before.