The Year of Our Lord, 1973
Television
First Full Female Nudity on Network TV (May 4, 1973): A broadcast on PBS of the play Steambath featured actress Valerie Perrine completely naked. PBS airs the series An American Family, about the dysfunctional Loud family.
Literature
- Pulitzer Prize, Fiction: Eudora Welty, “The Optimist’s Daughter”
- Pulitzer Prize, Drama: Jason Miller, “That Championship Season”
- Nobel Prize, Literature: Patrick White, Australia
Other great works:
- Duke Ellington, Music is My Mistress, autobiography
- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
- Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip is published, an intimate, shocking and sometimes hilarious account of the disasters that befell one small town in Wisconsin during the final decade of the 19th century. Lesy discovered a striking archive of black and white photographs in the town of Black River Falls dating from the 1890s and married a selection of these images to extracts from the town’s newspaper from the same decade. The effect was surprising and disturbing. The town of Black River Falls seemed gripped by some peculiar malaise and the weekly news was dominated by bizarre tales of madness, eccentricity and violence amongst the local population. Suicide and murder were commonplace. People in the town were haunted by ghosts, possessed by devils and terrorized by teenage outlaws and arsonists. The book was constructed entirely from authentic news reports from the Black River Falls’ newspaper with occasional excerpts from the records of the nearby Mendota Asylum for the Insane.
Marabel Morgan publishes an anti-feminist book, “The Total Woman,” in which she praised a wife who greeted her husband at the end of the day wearing an apron, stockings, heels, and nothing else.
Music
Pulitzer prize winning Music: String Quartet No. 3, Elliott Carter Grammy awards: Record of the Year: “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” Roberta Flack Album of the Year: “The Concert for Bangla Desh,” George Harrison, Ravi Shanker, Bob Dylan, Leon Russell, Ringo Starr, Billy Preston, Eric Clapton and Klaus Voormann (Apple) Song of the Year: “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” Ewan MacColl, songwriter Number 1 songs on August 12, 1973:
- U.S., “The Morning After” (from the “Poseidon Adventure”) by Maureen McGovern.
- U.K., “I’m The Leader Of The Gang (I Am)” by Gary Glitter
Iggy Pop and The Stooges were playing at Max’s Kansas City in New York. Iggy starts table hopping on the front row, falls, and cuts himself on a broken cocktail glass. Thinking nothing of the injury, he gets back on stage and continues, despite the copious amounts of blood spurting from his rather deep laceration. The show is finally cancelled as the front row of audience members are spattered in blood. Irving Berlin gives his original manuscript of “God Bless America” to Richard Nixon. DJ Kool Herc, the first hip-hop DJ, uses two records to create “break beats” out of snippets of percussion and instrumental tracks. Paul McCartney is fined 100 Pounds for growing marijuana at his farm on the Mull of Kintyre.
Arts
Norman Rockwell bequeathes 367 pieces from his personal collection to the Norman Rockwell Art Collection Trust. This included such large-scale oil paintings as Stockbridge Main Street at Christmas, Triple Self-Portrait, The Four Freedoms, Girl at Mirror and The Marriage License, and preliminary sketches and studies in pencil, charcoal, watercolor, and oil.
“Godspell” opens. The musical is a modern-day song-and-dance recreation of the Gospel of St. Matthew
“Hot L Baltimore” opens off-Broadway in February. In the play, the actors mill about in the lobby of a dilapidated old hotel, from which the “e” in the hotel sign is missing?hence the name, Hot L Baltimore. The play is comprised of a series of conversations between the residents of the hotel, who are contemplating an uncertain future after the hotel is condemned and scheduled for demolition.
