Bridge Over Troubled Water
1970
Garfunkel's voice climbing a gospel staircase, the last verse arriving like the cavalry.
★ 9.5
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1970
Showing 136 works across all media from 1970
Bitches Brew
1970
Davis gave the players almost no written music, and his producer Teo Macero cut the tapes together afterward with a razor blade.
★ 8.9
Let it Be
1970 · From Let It Be
McCartney dreamed of his mother Mary telling him it would be all right; Harrison cut two different solos.
★ 8.9
Bridge Over Troubled Water
1970
Simon wrote the title song and gave it to Garfunkel to sing alone, and spent years regretting it. They had broken up by release.
★ 8.6
ParanoidBlack Sabbath
Paranoid
1970 · From Paranoid
Iommi's riff arrived as three-minute filler for the album, Butler wrote the words fast, and Sabbath had their biggest UK hit.
★ 8.5
After the Gold Rush
1970
Recorded mostly in the basement of his Topanga house, with an eighteen-year-old Nils Lofgren on piano, an instrument he had not played before.
★ 8.2
Deja Vu
1970
It took roughly eight hundred hours of studio time, and by the end the four of them were barely speaking to each other.
★ 8.1
War PigsBlack Sabbath
War Pigs
1970 · From Paranoid
Called Walpurgis until the label balked at the witchcraft, and Butler aimed the lyric at politicians who start wars.
★ 8.1
Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs
1970
Clapton wrote it about his best friend's wife. The long piano ending was brought in by the drummer, and he was paid for the co-write.
★ 8.1
Iron ManBlack Sabbath
Iron Man
1970 · From Paranoid
Osbourne heard Iommi's riff and called it a big iron bloke walking; Butler built the science fiction around that.
★ 8.0
Paranoid
1970
The title song was written in about twenty minutes as filler. Tony Iommi plays with plastic fingertips after losing his in a factory.
★ 8.0
Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex MachineJames Brown
Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine
1970 · From Sex Machine
One of Brown's first dates with the new J.B.s, Bootsy Collins on bass at eighteen, Bobby Byrd answering every line.
★ 7.9
Immigrant Song
1970 · From Led Zeppelin III
Zeppelin played Reykjavik in 1970, and Plant came back with Vikings, Valhalla, and that double-tracked wail.
★ 7.8
Your SongElton John
Your Song
1970 · From Elton John
Taupin scribbled the lyric over breakfast at a kitchen table, and Buckmaster's strings turned it into John's first Top 10.
★ 7.8
American Beauty
1970
The bassist Phil Lesh wrote Box of Rain while his father was dying, and sang it himself. The Dead had never written this plainly before.
★ 7.7
Ohio
1970
Seventeen days between the Life photographs from Kent State and four voices cutting it live in a Los Angeles room.
★ 7.7
I'll Be There
1970
Hal Davis cut it at Hitsville West in June 1970, and Michael, eleven years old, made the ballad sound lived-in.
★ 7.7
Moondance
1970
Morrison arranged the horns himself and has spent decades saying he does not much like the record. Everyone else disagrees.
★ 7.5
Sweet Jane
1970 · From Loaded
Tucker was pregnant, so Yule played bass and drums, and the bridge stayed missing from the mix for twenty-five years.
★ 7.5
Plastic Ono Band
1970
Lennon made it straight after four months of primal scream therapy, with almost nothing on it but piano, bass and drums.
★ 7.5
Into the Mystic
1970 · From Moondance
Written first as 'Into the Misty', recorded at A&R in New York, and the warmest thing Morrison ever sang.
★ 7.5
My Sweet LordGeorge Harrison
My Sweet Lord
1970
Harrison started it backstage in Copenhagen, gave it to Billy Preston first, then took the first ex-Beatle number one.
★ 7.4
Maybe I'm AmazedPaul McCartney
Maybe I'm Amazed
1970
Booked into Abbey Road as Billy Martin, McCartney played every instrument in a day and declined to release a single.
★ 7.4
Have You Ever Seen the Rain?
1970 · From Chronicle: The 20 Greatest Hits
Fogerty said the rain falling on a sunny day was Creedence breaking up around him; the record aches accordingly.
★ 7.3
Fire and RainJames Taylor
Fire and Rain
1970 · From Sweet Baby James
Kunkel's brushes, Carole King's piano, and three verses that hold a death, an addiction and a band's collapse.
★ 7.3
Pressure DropToots and the Maytals
Pressure Drop
1970
Leslie Kong cut it in 1969, Hibbert called the subject karma, and The Harder They Come carried it worldwide.
★ 7.3
Move On Up
1970 · From Curtis
Master Henry Gibson's congas drive it, the horns arrive like good news, and Britain sent it top twelve.
★ 7.2
Oye Como Va
1970
Tito Puente wrote it as a 1962 cha-cha-cha; Gregg Rolie's Hammond organ replaced the horn section.
★ 7.2
Hope Against Hope
1970 · 442 pages
Osip Mandelstam wrote sixteen lines mocking Stalin and died in a camp for them. His widow Nadezhda memorized the poems to keep them alive, then set down exactly how the fear worked.
★ 7.1
MoondanceVan Morrison
Moondance
1970 · From Moondance
A melody Morrison worked out on soprano sax first, then Jack Schroer's alto solo swinging over Jef Labes' piano.
★ 7.1
Big Yellow Taxi
1970 · From Ladies of the Canyon
Mitchell threw back a Hawaii hotel curtain, saw mountains above a parking lot, and wrote pop's sunniest protest song.
★ 7.1
Black Sabbath
1970
Recorded in a single day for a few hundred pounds and released on a Friday the thirteenth. The riff is a devil's interval.
★ 7.1
Cosmo's Factory
1970
The band called their rehearsal warehouse the factory, because John Fogerty had them in there every day. Five singles came out of it.
★ 7.0
After the Gold RushNeil Young
After the Gold Rush
1970 · From After the Gold Rush
Piano and Bill Peterson's flugelhorn, cut at Young's Topanga home studio, written for a Dean Stockwell screenplay.
★ 7.0
Truckin'
1970 · From American Beauty
Hunter's lyric folds in a 1970 New Orleans bust, and the Library of Congress declared the record a national treasure.
★ 6.9
MASH
Directed by Robert Altman
1970
Altman's overlapping dialogue turns up fully formed: army surgeons in Korea behave appallingly in order to stay sane, and the film was really about Vietnam all along.
★ 6.8
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
An Indian History of the American West
1970 · 487 pages
Thirty years of broken treaties, forced marches, and massacres, told from inside the Cheyenne, Navajo, Apache, and Lakota camps. Dee Brown ended the frontier myth for a generation of American readers.
★ 6.8
Cecilia
1970
Friends banged on a piano bench at a party; Simon and Halee looped the thumping into a rhythm track.
★ 6.7
Ripple
1970 · From American Beauty
David Grisman's mandolin threading Hunter's London lyrics, a benediction the Dead tucked onto the B-side of "Truckin'".
★ 6.7
Sweet Baby James
1970 · From Sweet Baby James
Taylor wrote it driving through the Carolinas to meet his newborn nephew, a cowboy lullaby in waltz time.
★ 6.6
Who'll Stop the Rain
1970 · From Chronicle: The 20 Greatest Hits
A B-side to "Travelin' Band" that outgrew it, Fogerty's unhurried strum and a question about Vietnam still hanging.
★ 6.6
Five Easy Pieces
Directed by Bob Rafelson
1970
The diner scene has outlived the film's whole era: a classical pianist walked away from his family to work oil rigs, and nobody here will explain him or forgive him.
★ 6.6
Patton
Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner
1970
Coppola co-wrote it before The Godfather and George C. Scott refused the Oscar: a monologue in front of an enormous flag opens the most ambivalent film Hollywood ever made about a general.
★ 6.5
Live at Leeds
1970
They burned the tapes of every other show on the tour and kept this one, packaged deliberately to look like a bootleg.
★ 6.4
Helpless
1970 · From Deja Vu
One of three Deja Vu tracks the four cut together, Young keening about the Ontario town of his childhood.
★ 6.4
I'm Eighteen
1970
Ezrin cut an eight-minute jam down to three, and John Lydon mimed along to it to join the Sex Pistols.
★ 6.4
Workingman's Dead
1970
They made it in about nine days, in debt and facing charges after a New Orleans arrest, singing harmonies learned from Crosby, Stills and Nash.
★ 6.3
Gimme Shelter
Directed by Albert Maysles and David Maysles
1970
The sixties end on camera here: the Maysles followed the Rolling Stones to a free concert at Altamont, then sat Mick Jagger at an editing bench and made him watch what happened.
★ 6.2
25 or 6 to 4
1970
Lamm looked at his watch at 3:35 a.m. and had a title; Cetera sang it with his jaw wired together.
★ 6.2
Ooh Child
1970
Stan Vincent's song sat on a B-side until it broke out in Philadelphia and Detroit and climbed to number eight.
★ 6.1
Wild World
1970
Stevens called it his parting song for Patti D'Arbanville, and Jimmy Cliff took it into the UK top ten.
★ 6.1
Express Yourself (Charles Wright)
1970
Wright wrote and produced it, took it to number three R&B, and nineteen years later N.W.A sampled the groove.
★ 6.1
Rock and RollThe Velvet Underground
Rock and Roll
1970 · From Loaded
Tucker was pregnant, so Doug Yule played drums, bass and the solo; Reed's Jenny finds her life on the radio.
★ 6.0
Loaded
1970
The label asked for an album loaded with hits, so they called it that. Lou Reed quit the band before it was released.
★ 6.0