January 1970: the Beatles assemble one more time to put the finishing touches on Let It Be; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young are wrapping up Déjà Vu; Simon and Garfunkel are unveiling Bridge Over Troubled Water; James Taylor is an upstart singer-songwriter who’s just completed Sweet Baby James. Over the course of the next twelve months, their lives--and the world around them--will change irrevocably. Fire and Rain tells the story of four iconic albums of 1970 and the lives, times, and constantly intertwining personal ties of the remarkable artists who made them. Acclaimed journalist David Browne sets these stories against an increasingly chaotic backdrop of events that sent the world spinning throughout that tumultuous year: Kent State, the Apollo 13 debacle, ongoing bombings by radical left-wing groups, the diffusion of the antiwar movement, and much more.
Featuring candid interviews with more than 100 luminaries, including some of the artists themselves, Browne's vivid narrative tells the incredible story of how--over the course of twelve turbulent months--the '60s effectively ended and the '70s began.
Reviews with the most likes.
Thank goodness I finally finished this book. I have been reading it off and on since Labor Day and it is beyond clear to me that is not a good way to experience a book. I probably should have stopped reading it when I realized that it wasn't going to hold my interest (I was counting pages halfway through) but I had already listed it as “currently reading” and I don't break promises I've made to the Internet.
I'm sure that if the music industry is your thing and you have an extreme interest in the happenings of 1970 (I actually thought I truly cared about the 70s, but it turns out I didn't) then this would probably be a wonderful book for you. For me, it was all a jumble of names I didn't recognize or care about doing fairly boring things. I can only read about band members getting high on massive amounts of coke and heroin so many times. I realize that it was an in-depth look at an entire year, but I would have preferred the condensed version that didn't take an entire year to read. Not my thing. Now I know.