What was the best-selling classic rock song from 1973?
If you got to 1973 and wondered whether music would be fine after the break-up of The Beatles, then you simply weren’t listening close enough.
Because by this point, what is undisputedly the greatest decade in music was well underway. The dust that settled from the big bang of the Fab Four was harvesting musical diversity, and within it emerged a whole host of brand new genres. Popular music evolved into a myriad of sounds, from prog-rock to psychedelic rock, and from heavy metal to punk rock.
That’s just mentioning the more traditional realms of music, which centred around the four-chord wonders of a traditional band. Aside from that, the rich tapestry of soul was beginning to make more sense, eventually evolving into the liberated world of disco.
1973 was a year that encapsulated that better than any. Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon was the big record of the year, celebrating all of the weird and wonderful ideas of the new era, within one experimental concept album. Ambient atmospheric melodies, heavy rock jams and free-form jazz all married under one sonic umbrella to open up the realms of possibility for burgeoning new artists, desperate to express obscurity with their instruments.
Then there was Iggy Pop and The Stooges’ Raw Power, David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, and Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions. Records that might not have been as conceptual as the Floyd’s, but as ambitious and groundbreaking in their own right, giving voice and credence to the subcultures they represented.
It’s a year all of us music snobs look back on with envy, wondering what happened thereafter for it all to go drastically wrong and commercial pop to start budging this brilliance off the airwaves. Maybe though, that a deeply ill-advised attitude? Because while the rear-view mirror of romance allows us to view this year as one with widespread creativity, devoid of the baseless commercialism alternative music currently has to push back against, that doesn’t stack up as entirely true.
Dark Side Of The Moon’s success told a wider story of listening trends in the 1970s. It became the year’s biggest-selling album of the year and thus proved that music heads were digging deeper into the art of the LP. On the other hand, the singles charts told a very different story and proved that despite the unrelenting innovation of the decade’s greatest artists, commercialism still had a place at the very top.
So, what was the best-selling classic rock song in 1973?
Nothing screams commercialism quite like Christmas.
It’s a time of year when capitalism can flourish under the guise of community, and it’s as good a time as any for a willing rock band to write a festive song and climb to the top of the charts.
That’s exactly what Slade did, with their enduring Christmas hit, ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’. It sold over one million copies in its initial 1973 release, becoming the fastest-selling single in the UK at the time. It sold 250,000 copies on its first day and another 350,000 in the first week, reaching over a million sales by early 1974.
