Word: songs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...down. The music itself has become diffuse. Pop is not just rock: it is also disco, soul, reggae, country and ballads. The hottest trend in Top 40 music seems to be themes from successful TV shows. Last week's charts had no fewer than four, including the title songs from Baretta and Laverne and Shirley. When a smart, articulate song like Paul Simon's smash 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover gets to the top, it seems like a happy accident...
...scene is wide open," says Clive Davis, president of Arista, which shared in 1975's booming record sales of some $2.3 billion. Danny Goldberg, former vice president of Swan Song Records, which has hit it big with Led Zeppelin, complains that "everybody in the business knows a new era has got to come, but they're too busy cashing in on the old one to help it along." Some are helping, either by working their own personal territory (like Randy Newman, Ry Cooder, Tom Waits and James Talley) or, like Simon, Dylan, Bruce Springsteen (TIME cover...
...singer-songwriter of strong commercial rock in the late '50s. Sedaka lay low during the Beatles era, but in the past few years, with the enthusiastic support of his friend Elton John, has come back as strong as ever. His music, somewhat more urbane, remains essentially unchanged: catchy songs designed for the top of the Pops. Sedaka treats McCartney as a fellow tunesmith of the highest order. "A Pop hit has to have certain hooks you can hang your hat on," Sedaka points out. "The hooks can be either musical or lyrical, but the best is a marriage...
McCartney's roughest critic over the years was also his best friend. "He sounds like Engelbert Humperdink," said John Lennon of McCartney's first solo efforts. Later, in Lennon's remarkable album Imagine, he put it directly to Paul in How Do You Sleep?, a fierce song full of anger and injury...
...song was less spiteful than revealing, fueled with the kind of fury that can come only out of friendship, injured perhaps irreparably, that refuses either to disintegrate completely or to mend. Wounds went deep, and they stayed open for a while. "I find that I have to leave all that behind," McCartney says now. "It's a decision you make, that's all. Otherwise I would have ended up thinking John was the most evil person on this earth . . . saying all that...