'Fearless' - Fifty Years

Fifty years ago yesterday, the British band Family released their fifth album, Fearless.

This blog entry about Family's Fearless LP is not meant to be a proper review; for that, you can go here to an October 2011 repost of my original review of the album from my Family fan page.  It is, like my January 2020 post about Family's A Song For Me, a celebration and acknowledgement of the album, an album I believe to be the band's greatest album ever.

Family were known to be innovative and unorthodox in arranging music and writing lyrics, and on Fearless, they pulled out all the stops to make an adventurous, immaculately produced album that encompasses progressive rock, soul, folk, and straightforward rock and roll and delivers high-caliber musicianship and sold professionalism.  Fearless, fifty years on, is still a spellbinding work that fulfills all of Family's promise.  The die-cut layered paging of the album sleeve, with portraits of the band members melding into one, was the perfect metaphor for their ambition.

Fearless, ironically, had less to prove for Family or for rock and roll than A Song For Me did.  A Song for Me came out at at time of uncertainty as to whether rock and roll could carry on in a new decade without the Beatles and with the Rolling Stones chastened by Altamont.  By the time Fearless came out in October 1971, rock and roll was still peaking, thanks to the Stones' resilient Sticky Fingers, the Who's Who's Next, Rod Stewart's Every Picture Tells a Story, and, a week or so, after Fearless's release, Led Zeppelin's untitled fourth album.  Less was riding on Fearless than on A Song For Me, as Family had settled into a more or less permanent lineup of Roger Chapman on vocals, Charlie Whitney on guitar, Poli Palmer on vibraphone and keyboards, and Rob Townsend on drums.  They could put out a solid album with little if any effort.  But with so many masterpiece albums - too many to list here - having already been released in 1971, would that be enough?  Of course not.  That's why Fearless went beyond just being solid and effortless.

Family's secret weapon was John Wetton, their new bass player, whose fluid bass lines anchored Family and gave their songs a more melodic flair in the rhythm.  Wetton's vocal chops proved to be indispensable - his sharing of lead vocals with Chapman on songs such as "Spanish Tide" and "Save Some For Thee" created a new dimension to their sound.  Chapman's vibrato bleat, though, remained Family's signature, particularly on tough-minded songs like "Between Blue and Me" and "Blind."

Fearless was overshadowed somewhat by other events in rock music going on at the time.  Duane Allman died n a motorcycle accident the same day of its release, and Led Zeppelin's "Stairway To Heaven" and Don McLean's "American Pie" would soon suck up the oxygen as both songs vied to define epic seventies classic rock.  But with an album as perfect as Fearless, with a closing track like "Burning Bridges" - which summed up the entire concerns of a morality-play album like Jethro Tull's Aqualung album -  Family remained a band to be reckoned with.

Reckon with this - "Save Some For Thee," the best and best-produced song to grace Family's Fearless album, on which Wetton's lead vocal dominates.  Plenty of living for free here.