The cover photo of Never a Dull Moment: 1971: The Year That Rock Exploded by British music journalist David Hepworth shows great promise — Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones seated on the floor playing guitar, with girlfriend Anita Pallenberg on his right and singer Gram Parsons on his left. The strikingly attractive Pallenberg is sprawled across a living room chair, wearing what appears to be a knit top, satin pumps, and a smile, long legs languidly crossed over the chair’s arm, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other.
Unfortunately, Never a Dull Moment does not consistently live up to that photo’s promise. The author was 21 in 1971 and believes that year in music was “the most febrile and creative time in the entire history of popular music.”
“ … (Y)ou might raise a skeptical eyebrow and say that for you too the music of the year when you were 21 or 18 or 16 or whenever you felt most alive, still speaks to you in a way that no other year does,” Hepworth writes. “ … There’s an important difference in the case of me and 1971. The difference is this. I’m right.”
Hepworth’s main point is largely correct: Most of the artists who released top 10 singles in 1971, such as Van Morrison, Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin, and David Bowie, to name just a handful, are still known to listeners born after 1982.
However, his other points are too diffuse. He skips around in describing 1971, mentioning social trends, books, TV shows, movies, crime, fashion, table tennis, concerts, politics, technology, underground magazines, how who met whom, who was married to whom, who worked with whom, asides, opinions, trivia.
Reading it is like trying to peer through a moving telescope, or making a meal of small bowls of candy. Just as the reader becomes interested in one topic, Hepworth shifts to another. And none of it is filling.
The book is arranged month by month. The reader goes from Bruce Springsteen to Slade to Yes to Pink Floyd to John Lennon to the Beatles, with diversions about Iron Butterfly, the death of the drummer of a British folk-rock band, why universities were increasing popular places to perform and what songs were on Slade’s playlist. And that’s just January.
Some of the trivia tidbits are interesting but tangential, such as an in-depth account of Mick Jagger’s 1971 wedding and the spectacle surrounding it. Hepworth seems to want to pack as many details into a sentence as possible.
The new Mrs. Jagger wore “an outfit whose décolletage had clearly been chosen with the express intention of getting a photo of it onto every front page in the world, and also subliminally advertising what nobody but the groom knew, which was that she was already four months pregnant.” After the wedding, Jagger’s father confided, “I hope my other son doesn’t become a superstar.” And Jagger’s discarded girlfriend Marianne Faithfull noted the bride and groom’s physical resemblance, writing, “He married himself.”
Here Hepworth’s prose leaps from metaphor to metaphor: “The Jagger wedding was the shabbiest free-for-all in the history of both rock and marriage and skin-crawlingly embarrassing for all the key participants. It apotheosized the ’60s generation’s genius for dismantling all the old formality and putting little but inebriation and self-indulgence in its place, perfectly framing the moment at which those who had come to tear down the temple of society were actually caught groping at its open blouse, taking their celebrity and their power and their beautiful girlfriends and their drugs and their tax exile and flaunting it in front of everyone from the World War II veterans looking at the pictures in the Daily News to the 16-year-old Black Sabbath fans reading all about it in Rolling Stone.” Then he segues into describing the Stones’ album Sticky Fingers.
One wishes Hepworth might have pared away some of the details to home in the ones that would best propel his narrative.
Never a Dull Moment will likely appeal to classic rock aficionados. Less zealous readers might be better served just listening to the music.
The Block News Alliance consists of The Blade and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Laura Malt Schneiderman is a reporter for the Post-Gazette.