During a party on June 1, 1973, a drunk Robert Wyatt fell out of a third-floor window. This accident left him completely paralyzed from the waist down, permanently bound to a wheelchair.
Naturally, for a raucous, hard-partying rock drummer like Wyatt, this took some time to deal with. Rock Bottom is the music Wyatt made to help with that healing process. The album was primarily written while he was healing in the hospital.
Enlisting friends like guitarist Fred Frith, poet Ivor Cutler, Mike Oldfield and Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason (as producer), Wyatt recorded Rock Bottom shortly after his release from the hospital.
The album is deeply inspired by his relationship with Alfreda Benge, who Wyatt married on the day Rock Bottom was released. She painted both covers for the album (for the original and the 1998 reissue) and appears at the end of “Alife”.
Rock Bottom was surprisingly successful, both in sales and critical acclaim. Most prominently and recently, Pitchfork Media named it the 98th greatest album of the 1970s.