page_title: Album era
section_title: 1970s: Golden age of the LP
hierarchical_section_title: Album era / 1970s: Golden age of the LP
caption_attribution_description: This was one of the first photos I shot on campus, and it remains my favorite. I have a poster print of it hanging on the wall at home. The record he's listening to is Yes' self-titled debut album from 1969, a couple of years before Yes had its first big hit, "Roundabout." I myself did not become a Yes fan until 1975, when my med school roommate, Tom Grabenstein, played the cassette tape in his VW Beetle during a vacation trip we took to to Black Mesa State Park in far west Oklahoma. Since then, I have been a rabid fan of the group in its many incarnations. In 2010, this photo was used in the onstage video that accompanied the performance of the song "Jazz Man" by Carole King in her "Troubadour Reunion" tour with James Taylor. Even though the photo was in the Creative Commons, the production team courteously asked me for permission to use it, which of course I enthusiastically agreed to.
context_page_description: The album era was a period in popular music from the mid 1960s to the early 2000s, in which the album was the dominant form of recorded music expression and consumption. It was primarily driven by three successive music recording formats: the 33​¹⁄₃ rpm long-playing record, the audiocassette, and the music compact disc. Rock musicians were often at the forefront of the era, which is sometimes called the album-rock era in reference to their sphere of influence and activity.
  LP albums developed in the early 20th century and were originally marketed for classical music and wealthier adult consumers, while singles dominated the music industry, eventually through the success of rock and roll performers in the 1950s. It was not until the mid 1960s, when the Beatles began to release artistically ambitious and top-selling LPs, that more rock acts followed suit and the industry embraced pop albums to immense success while burgeoning rock critics validated their cultural value. By the 1970s, the LP had emerged as a fundamental artistic unit and a widely popular item with young people, often marketed using the idea of a concept album.
context_section_description: The mid 1960s to the late 1970s was the era of the LP and the "golden era" of the album. According to BBC Four's When Albums Ruled the World (2013), "These were the years when the music industry exploded to become bigger than Hollywood." "The album era had ushered in the notion of the rock singer as an artist who is worth paying attention to for more than the length of a hit", Pareles later observed. "Performers could become vivid presences to their fans even when they weren't ubiquitous on the Top 40, and loyalties were formed that continue[d] to the [1990s] for some performers of the 1960s and 1970s, from the Kinks to Michael Jackson to Sting." Marc Hogan of Pitchfork comments that female musicians and African Americans were rarely included in what became a predominantly white-male "rock-stuffed canon" during the album era, with exceptions being records by Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, among others.
  The 1970 Joni Mitchell LP Ladies of the Canyon is commonly regarded as one of the album era's most important records. The productions of Bob Ezrin – who worked on 1970s albums by Alice Cooper and Kiss' Destroyer (1976) – are also highlighted from this era. As music journalist James Campion writes, "The 1970s album era was perfectly suited to his cinematic approach. Its format, with its two sides, as if two acts in a play with an intermission, allows for a crucial arc in the storytelling." Along with the LP record, the 8-track tape was another format popular in the US in this period.
  Elaborating on the 1970s LP aesthetic, Campion identifies cultural and environmental factors that, in his mind, made the format ideal for young people during the decade. He describes the "solitary ambience" offered to listeners by the turntable and headphones, which "enveloped [them] in intricate stereo panning, atmospheric sounds, and multilayered vocal trickery". The popularity of recreational drugs and mood lamps at the time provided further settings for more focused listening experiences: "This kept the listener rapt to each song: how one flowed into the other, their connecting lyrical content, and the melding of instrumentation."
  In comparison to future generations, Campion explains that people growing up in the 1970s found greater value in album listening, in part because of their limited access to any other home entertainment appliance: "Many of them were unable to control the family television or even the kitchen radio. This led to prioritizing of the bedroom or upstairs den: the imagination capsule, locked away inside the headphone dreamscape, studying every corner of the 12-inch artwork and delving deeper into lyrical subtext, whether in ways intended by the artist or not. As if sitting in their own theater of the mind – already hijacked by comic-book fantasy images of horror and science fiction, advertising propaganda, and the American promise of grandeur – they were willing participants in the playful meandering of their rock-and-roll heroes." Adding to this observation, Pareles says, "Pop stars develop staying power when listeners' affection and fascination is transferred from a hit song, or a string of hits, to the singer. Successive songs become a kind of narrative, held together by the image of and fantasies about the performer."
  According to Hogan, with Sgt. Pepper having provided the impetus, the idea of a "concept album" became a marketing tool by the 1970s, as "no shortage of bands used the pretense of 'art' to sell tens of millions of records." Citing hugely successful albums like Pink Floyd's 1973 LP The Dark Side of the Moon, Hogan says "record sales spiraled upward until 1977, when they began ticking downward." This decline is attributed by Pareles to the developments of punk rock and disco in the late 1970s: "Punk returned the focus to the short and noisy song. Disco concentrated on the physical moment when a song makes a body move." Robert Christgau similarly said, "the singles aesthetic began to reassert itself with disco and punk", suggesting this ended the "High Album Era". In a different analysis, historian Matthew
caption: A Rhodes College student listening to the 1969 Yes LP on campus, c. 1970
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