Every masterpiece released in September 1977
Any perusal of the 1970s musical calendar will reveal a decade preceding tumult as well as a pivotal trajectory.
The decade until 1977 had been buoyantly confident on all fronts. Classic rock was in its strutting pomp, Woodstock’s double-denimed stars still ruled the airwaves, glam had offered the kids a much-needed glitzy antidote to their elder siblings’ old record spins, Jamaica was pioneering the spaced-out sounds of dub expanse, and electronic music was in its fizzy ascendance across the German student campuses and political gatherings during the krautrock era. Country was enjoying as much middle-American attention as it’d ever had, soul was entering a celestial golden age, and the seeds of heavy metal had been sown in the working-class suburbs of Birmingham.
Much of popular music’s eclectic mosaic was burnished across that glowing decade. Yet, a new generation of kids unimpressed with just how self-satisfied sections of the rock and pop world had ballooned to would reach an insurrectionary apex seven years in, with 1977 immediately evoking the punk new wave and its fired-up lightning bolt unseen since rock ‘n’ roll’s big bang.
While another of the decade’s massive musical threads, prog, was just about weaving its pointy-hatted cosmic jams, The Damned, The Clash, and Buzzcocks all saw explosive debuts that upended the stagnant rock climate.
Punk’s skewering of rock’s lofty bubble triggered pangs of insecurity among some of its biggest names, but some embraced the scene’s ephemeral fury and sought to coarsen their sound. Pink Floyd cut the acidic Animals, a seething diatribe of the day’s engulfing political greed, and even theatrical pomp-rockers Queen shot the turbo-charged ‘Sheer Heart Attack’ for News of the World, often playing a sped-up version of ‘We Will Rock You’ during the day’s performances.
A tempestuous musical decade that saw rock and pop both in peacocking bluster and rug-pulled with iconoclastic fervour, the day’s dual bloom and fraught clashes all pepper 1977’s Autumnal shift, September collecting a proud litany of defining records. Talking Heads, The Stranglers, Ian Dury, Richard Hell, Diana Ross, and Cheap Trick all released much-loved albums across those 30 days. Yet to unveil true masterpieces, we have four nuggets that shine as exemplary numbers dropped during the month of September.
So, which masterpieces saw the light in September 1977?
Four artists can count this month as overseeing their defining LP effort. Fresh from The Idiot’s post-punk smog six months earlier, Iggy Pop, with David Bowie’s help, dropped the belligerently joyous Lust for Life. Featuring the canonical title track and ‘The Passenger’, Pop’s second LP of the year heralded the former Stooges frontman’s true resurrection, setting a stylistic template that would orient his output throughout his creatively dextrous album run.
While prog had died a death, yacht duo and arch-cynics Steely Dan carried on releasing whatever the hell they liked. Often singled out by their dedicated fans as the pair’s finest entry point, Aja saw Donald Fagen and Walter Becker expand operations toward a looser, jazzier scope, expanding their compositions to include as many as 40 session musicians, and their studio-only artistry yielded an album that’s beloved among audiophiles for its aural fidelity.
Over to the singer-songwriter, both Billy Joel and Randy Newman dropped essential works that month, the former gliding into the affections of the developing soft-pop realm with The Stranger, winning the hearts of middle-Americana with his downtime suburban ballads ‘Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)’ and ‘She’s Always a Woman’, swiftly becoming a superstar. Dosed with a keener sense of ironic humour, Los Angeles’ songsmith Newman cut Little Criminals, an LP that explored the American mores of the day via wry comic vignette such as ‘Short People’, yet scored urban decay and economic failure on the moving ‘Baltimore’ across a record that still glows as his finest hour.
