Closer to Home

In 1970 America and Britain each made the rock music its economy could carry, and the records still hold the shape of the places that made them. That is the argument here, and I offer it as context rather than cause. No band sat down to write a soundtrack for a recession, but every band rehearsed inside one, and the rooms they could afford, the distances they had to drive and the papers that decided who mattered all left marks on the sound.

I came to this music late and secondhand. I grew up in a suburb of Washington with an older brother who played the drums, and in a house like that the drummer picks the records. The first thing I learned about the Allman Brothers Band was that they had two drummers, and the first thing I learned about Grand Funk Railroad was that Don Brewer didn’t need a second one. Most of these records were older than I was. The critics had already sorted them into the canonized and the dismissed, and I had no idea any sorting had happened.

Two songs from that year have stayed with me longer than they had any right to. The closing mantra of “I’m Your Captain (Closer to Home)” is burned into my memory for good. “Midnight Rider” has a line about one more silver dollar that is about as American as a line can get, because it holds a whole American idea of freedom, and that idea is mostly about not getting caught. One of these songs charted that year and the other didn’t. Fifty years later the verdict has quietly reversed.

That same year Britain was making something else entirely. As a boy all I knew of it was Led Zeppelin, The Who and the one Pink Floyd song every schoolkid knew, “Another Brick in the Wall.” The rest of Pink Floyd reached me as an adult, during COVID, and Ozzy Osbourne was just the man who bit the head off a bat until I heard “War Pigs” in my forties. It turned out he could sing about war like nobody’s business. Wilde, writing in 1887, put it best: “We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.” In 1970 the two countries also had different economies, and you can hear it.

Both bands came out of 1969 and both lived on the road, and that is roughly where the resemblance ends. The Allmans were six men out of Macon, Georgia, with two guitars that locked into harmony, drifted apart and found each other again, and two drummers underneath them. Grand Funk were three men out of Flint, Michigan, a General Motors town, and they made more noise than the Allmans did with twice the people. They played for the back row, and in 1971 they sold out Shea Stadium faster than the Beatles had.

Chicago sat somewhere between them. They began as the Chicago Transit Authority and shortened the name in 1969 when the actual transit authority objected, which may be the most American thing that happened to any band that year. There were seven of them, including three horn players who were full members rather than hired hands. Their second album came out in January 1970, and “25 or 6 to 4” reached number four that summer. It is a strange record, with a brass section, a Terry Kath guitar solo that still holds up and a title a generation decoded as drug slang. Robert Lamm had written it about trying to write a song in the middle of the night, and the title is just the time on the clock. Anyone who has had insomnia knows that hour, and I am writing this at about the same time.

The rock press treated Grand Funk with something close to contempt, and the audience ignored the rock press. The Allmans got the opposite, and it took At Fillmore East in 1971 for the rest of the country to hear what the reviewers had been hearing. In 1970 “Closer to Home” reached number 22, and “Midnight Rider” didn’t chart at all.

To a drummer’s younger brother the difference was obvious before any of the history was. Two drummers is a luxury, and so is a six-piece band on the road; Chicago carried seven. That is a payroll, and both bands paid for it by almost never stopping. A trio keeps its margin. The Allmans were built for the room and Grand Funk for the stadium, and in 1970 the stadium was winning.

The American who mattered most in 1970 had to leave America to be heard there. Jimi Hendrix spent the early sixties as a sideman on the chitlin’ circuit, playing behind the Isley Brothers and Little Richard in an industry that sorted music by the color of the person playing it. Black artists belonged on R&B radio and rock belonged to white kids, and a Black guitarist playing loud, strange rock had no format to land in. In the summer of 1966 Chas Chandler, the bassist in the Animals, heard him in a Greenwich Village club and offered to take him to London. Hendrix went.

Britain had room for him, though it wasn’t entirely kind; one paper called him the Wild Man of Borneo. About a week after he landed he sat in with Cream at the Regent Street Polytechnic, and Eric Clapton, then the most admired guitarist in London, walked off the stage before the song was over. Three of Pink Floyd’s founders had met at the same polytechnic as *architecture* students, a detail I notice more than I probably should.

Chandler put him in a band with two Englishmen, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience had British hits before most Americans had heard of it. America got him back at the Monterey festival in June 1967, imported like any other British act. He died in London on the 18th of September 1970, at twenty-seven, on the side of the Atlantic that had found him first.

Britain spent 1970 losing its biggest band and finding out what came after it. In April Paul McCartney announced that he had left the Beatles, and the group that had defined British pop for most of a decade ended with a press release. Nobody inherited the crown whole. It was divided, and the pieces went in directions the Beatles had never gone.

The two bands I knew best as a boy were already at full strength. The Who released Live at Leeds in May, and it still sounds like a band trying to bring the building down. Led Zeppelin released their third album in October, half thunder and half acoustic, and by then they were the biggest live act in the world. Robert Plant came from the Black Country west of Birmingham and John Bonham from just south of it in Worcestershire, which matters more than it first seems.

Pink Floyd went the other way. Atom Heart Mother, with a title piece for brass and choir that filled a whole side, became their first British number one that autumn. It isn’t the Pink Floyd that found me during COVID, but it proved that a British audience would put a twenty-three-minute instrumental at the top of the chart.

Then Birmingham. Black Sabbath released their first album on Friday the 13th of February and Paranoid in September, and Paranoid went to number one. The band came from Aston, a manufacturing district, and Tony Iommi had lost the tips of two fingers to a sheet-metal press on what was meant to be his last day at the factory. He played the rest of his career with homemade thimbles on those fingertips, and some of the weight in that sound comes from a man working around an injury. By the end of the year heavy music had its template.

Both countries made something heavy in 1970, and both made it in places where things were made.

None of this proves that an economy writes songs, but in 1970 the two economies were in different kinds of trouble, and the bands grew up inside them.

America was paying for a war and a domestic program at the same time, and inflation had followed. The Federal Reserve had tightened hard in 1969, and the economy went into recession that winter. In September the United Auto Workers struck General Motors, and roughly four hundred thousand workers stayed out for more than two months. Flint was a General Motors town. Grand Funk never wrote about the strike, and they didn’t need to; their audience had lived it, and what it wanted was something loud enough to drown out the rest of the week.

Britain’s trouble was older and slower. The pound had been devalued in 1967, the factories that had built the country were losing ground to newer ones abroad, and the strikes that would define the decade had already started; the dockers walked out that July and the government declared a state of emergency. Birmingham made cars and metal goods, and Aston was the kind of district where a boy left school for the factory floor. That is where Iommi lost his fingertips.

Britain never sent troops to Vietnam. Harold Wilson kept them out despite American pressure, and yet one of the most unforgiving songs about that war came from four young men in Birmingham. “War Pigs” opens Paranoid. When I finally heard it properly, the bat fell away. A drummer’s brother listens to the drums first, and Bill Ward on that record is something close to psychotic: loose, fast and enormously heavy, swinging like a jazz drummer while the rest of the band grinds. Under all of it is a song about the men who start wars and the men who are sent to fight them.

The two countries were also very different sizes. A band trying to break in America had to work region by region across a country three thousand miles wide. A federal rule had pushed FM stations to stop simply repeating their AM sister stations, and the new programmers filled the hours with long album tracks that helped make Grand Funk and, more slowly, the Allmans. Britain was small enough to cross in a day, and it was run from London. Two weekly papers, Melody Maker and the NME, could make a reputation in a single issue or end one, and more than one band learned to pronounce the NME as a single word. The BBC, which had national pop radio almost to itself after 1967, could do the same with a single session. An American band earned its audience at the speed of a van. A British band could earn it overnight and lose it just as fast.

Britain also had its art schools, which took in students who fit nowhere else. Pete Townshend went to Ealing, John Lennon to Liverpool and Keith Richards to Sidcup, and the habit of treating a band as an idea rather than a job came out of rooms like those. America had no single equivalent. Its musicians mostly learned in bars and on the road, which produces a different kind of player.

The money, though, was in America. Led Zeppelin made the most celebrated British music of the year and earned most of their fortune in American arenas, and within a year the Rolling Stones had left Britain altogether to escape a top tax rate of 83 percent on earned income and 98 on investment income. Hendrix had already shown how the arrangement worked: America produced him, Britain recognized him and America bought him back. Wilde’s two countries had everything in common except language, and by 1970 they had settled on a division of labor.

Earlier this year my business partner met Gerry Beckley of America in Los Angeles. Beckley’s band was formed in London in 1970 by the sons of American servicemen, and it took a crossing in each direction before they sounded like the country they named themselves after. Nearly everything in this essay made that crossing in one direction or the other, and most of it was judged wrongly on arrival.

In 1970 the stadium won on both sides of the Atlantic. Grand Funk outsold the Allmans, Zeppelin outdrew everyone and the critics who mattered dismissed Black Sabbath as noise. Fifty years later most of those verdicts have turned over. “Midnight Rider” outlived “Closer to Home,” At Fillmore East is held up as proof of what a band can do in a room, and Sabbath are credited with inventing a genre. The critics weren’t the only ones who got it wrong. I spent most of my life thinking Ozzy Osbourne was a joke.

My son Nouri is twenty and lives in London now. He studies at King’s, where one of his courses is called States and Markets, which is more or less the subject of this essay with the music taken out. He lives near Battersea Power Station, the building on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Animals. It was built to keep London’s industry running, stopped generating in 1983 and has since been turned into offices and apartments, which is the British economy of this essay in a single building. In 2017 Build Source Consult, the firm that came before BIMstream, did architectural production work on the residential conversion, so I knew that building from the inside of a drawing set long before it became a place my son walks past. Animals was Roger Waters borrowing loosely from Orwell, and it turns fifty in January. Next June, if plans hold, the two of us will hear it played at the Royal Albert Hall, across the river from the power station on its cover. My brother handed me this music a decade after it was made. I’d like to think I’m handing it to Nouri, though it’s more likely he’ll end up explaining parts of it to me.

Ozzy played his last show in July 2025 at Villa Park, a football ground in Aston, a few streets from where Black Sabbath began, and he died seventeen days later. Hendrix died an ocean away from where he started. Ozzy got closer to home.