What the hell is “Want Ads” by The Honey Cone? This my era, but I have never ever heard of this. I suppose it was not a hit in Britain, where I was then, but I I think that there is little doubt that I have heard all the other US-only major hits (certainly number ones) from this era multiple times, or if not every song I am at least familiar with the major bands and artists, but this one rings no bells at all. 
I never thought I’d see it on the 1971 list. To me, it sounds a good 8-10 years older than that.
Probably because the kind of person who loves Rod Stewart’s music is unlikely to have the courage to admit it. 
I do remember that “Maggie May” stayed on the A.M. radio playlists for an awfully long time, so somebody must have liked it (personally, I think it’s a good song that’s about 2 minutes too long).
This is the tough year, so many good songs. I voted for the Bee Gees “How Can You Mend A Broken Heart”. I also like “Maggie May”, although I mostly like Stewart’s , much later songs. The most unique one on this is “Theme From Shaft” by Isaac Hayes. It is a good example of a disco song, and made sense in the decade’s later years rather than 1971. It stood out that year.
“Who’s that black private dick who is a sex machine to all the chicks”.
Okay, so can someone tell me just what the hell happened? From 1964 to 1970, we’ve got a period of music widely regarded as revolutionary, and then in 1971, we’re starting to get into some very soft, mellow fluff. It’s as jarring a transition as the one between hard rock and grunge that occurred in the early 90s. But I understand what happened there, the 80s were a time of musical excess, so the music that came in the 90s was a reaction to that. But what caused the 60s music scene to essentially end at this point except for Motown? Were rock fans tired of the rock and wanted some easier listening?
I’m 27 so do not take my word as personal experience, but I remember a DJ here in L.A saying that folk music was really popular in the early 70’s, artists like James Taylor, Harry Chapin, etc, as a reaction to the late 60’s crazy, social movements. And while those continued into the 1970’s, music became more relaxed.
Okay that one long ass sentence, but you get the idea! To someone like me who was not around, makes sense.
Dopers here tend to be ancient, so they could say whether what I’m saying is true or not.
I can see that, but it seems to me that Beatles-style music was popular in the 60s and should have continued to be popular in the 70s. There were plenty of Beatles-inspired groups having success and I assume they ALL didn’t break up by 1971. Did the Beatles’ breakup just suddenly cause the mass audience to reject the imitators they’d previously embraced? “It’s the end of that era, let’s move on”?
After all, two other pillars of the 60s did continue to flourish: Motown and the Rolling Stones. But overnight, bands that sounded like the Beatles just seemed to go away.
Can’t answer your question, but I’ve heard the music of the 70’s referred to as “Wimp Rock.”
I’m not saying that your scenario did or didn’t happen, with audiences suddenly rejecting the music they’d embraced just the year before, but if you consider how suddenly public taste turned away from disco just a few years later? It’s possible.
The Supremes also broke by 70’, Diana Ross went solo. Temptations sound changed, Marvin Gaye’s sound changed also. So some Motown artists broke up or changed. The Beatles changed also, and would have continued had they stayed put. The Stones music in the 70’s was different then their 60’s stuff. If by bands similar to the Beatles you mean British Invasion, then most declined and vanished in the 60’s. Music changes, no reason why the 60’s sound would have been the same in the 70’s.
Lisa: I’ve never heard of these bands, mom. What kind of music do they play?
Bart: Crap rock?
Marge: No…
Homer: Wuss rock?
Marge: That’s it!
What happened, I think, was a combination of factors, two of which were the splintering of rock into subgenres such as hard rock, progressive rock, etc., and the migration of those genres to the rapidly emerging FM dial.
What was left to Top 40 radio was mostly the watered down, lightest weight vestiges that your mom might hear while shopping for groceries, while you destroyed your hearing with Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.
Ah, so Sabbath and Zeppelin are to the Lovin’ Spoonful and the Monkees what Nirvana and Pearl Jam were to Bon Jovi and Winger?
I actually knew someone who was a Rod Stewart fan but that was over 20 years ago. That being said, he did put out some great stuff early in his career but was never the same after he hooked up with Britt Ekland. Something about that woman instantly turned him into the hack he’s been for the past 35 years.
As for the poll, I ended up picking “Brown Sugar” after considering other candidates like “Isn’t It a Pity”, “Just My Imagination”, “It’s Too Late”, “Theme from Shaft”, and “Family Affair”. From the perspective of 43 years, “Brown Sugar” now seems like a massive attempt to troll the public long before the term “troll” even existed. Read the lyrics and tell me otherwise. It’s obvious Jagger and Richards went out of their way to write the most offensive song they could without using any of the big seven dirty words. It’s all there: racism, sexism, celebration of slavery, torture, and rape. Then, they add arguably the greatest opening in rock n’ roll history along with killer guitar riffs all throughout the song and release it as the lead single from their “Sticky Fingers” album. It of course shoots to #1.
Also, 1971 had some great singles that didn’t hit #1 and were thus ineligible for this poll like Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?”, John Lennon’s “Imagine”, and Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla” (which recharted in 1972 and made the Top 10). I would’ve easily picked these over any of the #1 songs that year.
Every Picture Tells a Story is one of the great albums of all time, and–all by itself–makes up for every bit of crap, pap, and pablum he’s put out since.
I think the shift to softer stuff in the Top 40 is tied to the fact that harder stuff was still popular (someone mentioned Led Zeppelin, e.g.), but on albums*, not singles.
Also, for various socioeconomic/commercial reasons, Los Angeles was becoming the place of origin for a lot of popular music (rather than New York or London), and the musical feel of that locale was more amenable to the mellow sounds of the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac, and the like. Country, folk, and even jazz/rock fusion were getting more slickly produced for mass appeal (even Black urban soul was trending this way, toward acts like Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway). Perhaps the merging of entertainment companies into movie/music/TV conglomerates (headquartered in LA) was a factor.
*Years later, radio stations which played Zep et al. would categorize themselves as “album-oriented rock” – AOR for short.
Vietnam happened, for one. Angry people write angry music. It was a big time for protest songs, recreational drug use was on the upswing, protests and riots in the streets, people being shot on campus. By the 70s, everyone was tired of it: tired of the anger, tired of the war, and ready to just chill. As the war wound down, so did much of the music. My two cents.
A year of . . . fluff (as was said upthread).
Of the few, the very few, cuts above that are non-fluff, Brown Sugar gets my vote.
BTW, njtt, I never heard of ‘Want Ads’, either. I’m Canadian.
I remember reading a bio of Led Zeppelin that presented a case. The guys in Zep were veterans of the British music scene and saw their group - which started out being named The New Yardbirds, after all - as counterparts and competitors of the stars of that scene. But when they got out on the road a funny thing happened. Their audiences were much younger; literally the younger brothers of the British Invasion fans. These kids needed a music of their own, not the ones the older kids liked. Zep was louder and rowdier and so were they. The drugs changed, the mellowness of peace and love vanished. That culture moved toward arena rock and albums.
The other side of that appeared in the younger sisters. Remember those squealing 13-year-old girls in the Ed Sullivan audience? They pushed the new music for several years. But traditionally a generation in music is four years, the amount of time it takes to get through high school. A new generation of 13-year-old girls emerged around 1970. They liked a type of music vastly different from their brethren. The Partridge Family, the Osmonds, Dawn. If they were slightly older they gravitated to singer-songwriters, who expressed the emotions they needed to hear.
This was abrupt change because it doesn’t take much to launch a new trend in music when a new audience is available. The old stuff doesn’t vanish overnight; it trails off or changes direction, like Joplin and King and Cher. And even Rod Stewart. I remember back a year, in 1970, when Rolling Stone gave rave reviews to two British singer-songwriters putting out their first solo albums: Rod Stewart and Elton John. Then came Every Picture Tells a Story, a great album even if its greatest song has been played to death.
Abrupt shifts are going to happen all the rest of the way through today. By the late 1970s Disco, Rap, and Punk would appear seemingly out of nowhere to the vast average U.S. listener. Only a small cult crowd saw their beginnings and growth. To everybody else the change staggered the world. Just like the Beatles. But they weren’t born from a clamshell in February 1964 either.
Carole King *was *1971, in my memory. So I’m voting for her. “Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)” is a great song, produced and co-written by the great Norman Whitfield, with lyricist Barrett Strong, who also wrote “War,” my last year’s choice. They were on fire in the early 70s. Their disappearance will be abrupt as Motown disintegrates and marks yet another end to the 60s.
For what it’s worth, I went for Three Dog Night, although I had to work to find a song I really liked. From 1964 to 1970, it’s hard to pick just one, or even three.
Since I actually dig disco, things will get better for my tastes soon.