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When James Gay-Rees, along with fellow executive producer Asif Kapadia, started to put together a docuseries about the music of 1971, they had to answer the basic question of what made that year so pivotal. “We realized it was a very tumultuous and very pivotal year in the sense that the sixties had come to this kind of crashing end with Kent State, Altamont, Charles Manson and The Beatles spitting up in December 1970,” Gay-Rees explains to Gold Derby in our Meet the Experts: Television Documentary panel (watch the exclusive video interview above). From seeing how the sixties ended, it clearly set up everything that was to follow in the next decade. “So all that kind of optimism of the sixties was replaced by the golden age of paranoia, Nixon, you know, bugging the White House and Vietnam in full effect.”

“1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything” chronicles the turbulent status...

“1971: the Year That Music Changed Everything” is streaming now on Apple TV+ and it covers a wide array of events that somehow all happened in or around 1971, including some of the most turbulent times in the Rolling Stones’ career as a band.

The Stones are one of the most prominently featured bands throughout the “1971” docuseries, which is eight episodes long. The docuseries dives deep into their history, including the band’s jet-setting lifestyle around the world as they became the targets of various governments, and covers the band’s descent into battles with drug addiction.

Here are a few of the Stones’ most outrageous (or alarming) stories that “1971” brings up.

Going broke and leaving Britain to avoid taxes

“1971” picks up in the spring of that year with the Rolling Stones when they arrived in the South of France as exiles from Britain. Beginning in 1971, Britain had enacted a vicious...

Was 1971 the best single year for recorded popular music, ever? Or merely the year in which it reached peak cultural significance? Maybe, just maybe, the answer could be: both. You’ll certainly be hard-pressed to come up with a better argument for another annum after watching all eight episodes of “1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything,” which just premiered on Apple TV Plus.

Let’s face it: Your well-considered alternate pick is going to have a hard time besting the year that generated Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” Carole King’s “Tapestry,” Joni Mitchell’s “Blue,” the Who’s “Who’s Next,” Elton John’s “Madman Across the Water,” T. Rex’s “Electric Warrior,” Bill Withers’ “Just as I Am,” the Rolling Stones’ “Sticky Fingers,” Sly and the Family Stone’s “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” Pink Floyd’s “Meddle,” the Doors’ “L.A. Woman,” Janis Joplin’s “Pearl,...

Apple TV+’s docuseries 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything makes it seem like The Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main Street album was more fun to record than listen to, and that sets a high standard. The record distills the band’s sounds, from acoustic world music political ballads, through deep heartfelt blues, to honky tonk so funky you have to shake your ass. The group plays country, Southern blues, R&b, and the almost-punk-before-punk “Rip This Joint.” “Tumbling Dice,” is a radio staple. Keith Richards even took the lead vocals on a track to keep you happy. There was so much material, it came out as a double album. What could be more fun than that?

Richards’ Nellcôte mansion, on the Côte d’Azur in the South of France, was the hardest rocking musical getaway paradise in 1971. It was a Rock and Roll Main Street, and even the...

Stylish film noir star known for her role in Lady in the Lake

I was kissed by Audrey Totter. At least, I share that experience with anybody who has seen Lady in the Lake (1947), when Totter plants her lips on the subjective camera, the surrogate for Robert Montgomery as Philip Marlowe. The film, directed by Montgomery, and based on the Raymond Chandler novel, was shot so that the whole story is seen literally through Marlowe's eyes.

The role of the gold-digging tigress magazine editor Adrienne Fromsett, who hires the private eye to find the missing wife of her publisher, was a breakthrough for Totter, who has died aged 95. Previously, she had been in a dozen movies, her hair colour and accent varying so much from film to film that she dubbed herself "the feminine Lon Chaney of the MGM lot".

Montgomery chose Totter for the part because of her versatility as a radio actor.