It's all a long time ago, before £100 tickets, before streaming, before horribly over-compressed music. A time of nylon underwear, brushed polyester sheets and blue Cresta 'it's frothy, man' pop that made your throat sore.
Here's what was happening in rock history between January 1 and January 8, 1976:
One of the most significant events in 70s rock happened this week when Peter Frampton released his double live album. 'Frampton Comes Alive' on 6th January. Before this, Frampton was a respected but moderately successful musician. This album became a cultural phenomenon, staying on the charts for 97 weeks and becoming one of the best-selling live albums of all time. It introduced the "Talk Box" guitar effect to the masses and turned Frampton into a global superstar overnight. Still don't quite know why this album and at this time
On January 5, Mal Evans, the longtime road manager, personal assistant, and "fifth Beatle" figure for the band, was tragically shot and killed by Los Angeles police. Evans was in a depressed state and brandished an air rifle which police mistook for a real weapon.
While Bob Dylan's Desire album officially hit shelves (Jan 5 in some regions, Jan 12 in others), this week was the peak of the hype for it. Featuring "Hurricane," the album was part of his legendary Rolling Thunder Revue era. It remains one of his most collaborative and "gypsy-rock" sounding records, featuring the haunting violin of Scarlet Rivera.
By the first week of 1976, the Sex Pistols had only been playing live for about two months. They spent this week rehearsing and playing small, confrontational shows in London pubs and colleges. They were still a "niche" rumor in the press—just a few weeks away from their first-ever print review in NME, where Steve Jones famously declared, "Actually we're not into music. We're into chaos." My comment at the time was "they're not as good as Budgie." And I still think it's true.
Queen’s "Bohemian Rhapsody" was the #1 single in the UK until 24th January
The Bay City Rollers were at #1 in the US with "Saturday Night," representing the peak of that whole tartan madness that girls at our school seemed obliged to like, especially those from the roughest estates, for some reason..
Patti Smith’s Horses was steadily climbing the charts this week, proving that the New York "punk-poet" scene was starting to find a mainstream audience. Much more interesting than the UK's punk scene and a more long-lasting influence.
In one of the most obscure and fascinating "what-if" moments in jam-rock history, Jerry Garcia (of the Grateful Dead) spent this week performing with the legendary, eccentric New Orleans piano genius James Booker. These two nights at the Sophie's in Palo Alto were a "shambolic" mess of classical, operatic, and blues influences. Garcia was essentially acting as a sideman to the "Bayou Maharajah," playing everything from "Für Elise" to New Orleans R&B. It remains a holy grail for tape traders looking for Garcia’s most "out-there" collaborations. There's no hits on it!
While UK prog was turning into stadium rock, the Italian scene was reaching a peak of symphonic beauty. This week, the band Celeste released their debut album, Principe di un Giorno (Prince of a Day). It is widely considered one of the most beautiful "mellotron-heavy" albums ever made, yet it remained almost entirely unknown outside of dedicated proggers like me until decades later.
By January 1976, Marc Bolan was moving into a new phase. This week, he was finalizing the release of Futuristic Dragon. The album featured a strange mix of disco rhythms and heavy orchestration—a far cry from the glam hits. It was a cult favorite that showed Bolan trying to find his place in a world that was moving toward punk, or at least the press was, I was going to see Barclay James Harvest!
On January 1, 1976, while the rest of the world was nursing New Year's hangovers, Bill Nelson and his band Be-Bop Deluxe were preparing for a BBC "In Concert" session. Nelson was a niche hero—a guitarist who could outplay almost anyone but preferred writing strange, beautiful, elegiac, art-rock songs about futurism and classic cinema. If you were a "guitar geek" and I was, this was the band you were probably talking about. So much more radical than the music that was claimed to be radical. There's a lesson there.
In the small pubs of London like The Hope & Anchor and The Nashville Room, places that we only saw in the classifieds in Sounds, the "Pub Rock" scene was dying, but the energy was being sucked up by the first wave of punks...it says here. Some of us were going to see Al Stewart, thank you very much. The Sex Pistols were still so niche they hadn't even been reviewed/slavered over in the major music papers yet.
The 101ers (featuring a young Joe Strummer) were the kings of this particular circuit this week, playing raw R&B. Just a few months later, Strummer would see the Sex Pistols and realize his niche pub-rock band was "history," leading him to form The Clash, not that it changed my mind on Budgie, like. In fact, its impact might have been important but most of punk seemed dreadfully average to me and largely media and image driven. What we didn't know was they were all secretly listening to King Crimson.
