(NOTE: I first ran this piece almost a year ago – April 17 2013 – fully intending to follow through and write this series. And then…I didn’t. But now I am. So I’m going to re-run the piece from waaaay back when, and try to do a new piece roughly every Friday).
As I noted when I started this series a week or so ago, part of the reason I didn’t care much for most of the music of the seventies was because, in my drive to be just plain different than everyone around me, I figured if I was in for a dime, I’d best be in for a buck; go all-in with the punks and whatever else was cooler-than-thou.
When I was a kid in the seventies, I was too tall, coulda used a few pounds; the athletic gene skipped a generation (or at least the “willing to put up with coaches” gene did). I wasn’t popular, I wasn’t especially smart, I wasn’t “in” with any crowd. I had greasy hair and terminal social awkwardness.
But I did read Rolling Stone. I knew what the cool kids were listening to in New York and LA and Chicago, and I sought it out; the Clash, the Sex Pistols and Generation X, to be sure, but all sorts of other stuff that was “alternative” in its day; Tom Petty, Dire Straits, Bruce Springsteen, the Police, all of them were off the beaten pop path at that point. That they all became the top forty within half a decade is one of the glorious things about early-eighties music.
And I buried my teenage identity in pretty much anything that the kids in North Dakota weren’t listening to. The guys? They dug Bad Company, Shooter, Trooper, Rush, Ted Nugent, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Kiss and the like; the girls were into Dan Fogelberg, Styx and the Bay City Rollers and God only knows what else. The music geeks thought Chicago and Alan Parsons and Emerson, Lake and Palmer were just dreamy.
So I was pretty insufferable.
But it needs to be added that it was, in many ways, a terrible, terrible decade for pop culture.
Maybe it reflected a hangover from the turmoil of the sixties. Maybe it was a measure of a society floating aimlessly and beginning to decay after a couple of decades of purpose and dynamic growth. Maybe it was just all those baby boomers.
But like polyester clothes, The Brady Bunch and the Chevette, much of the music of the 1970s was a reminder that times were really not good.
And it’s maybe just because music like this…:
…and this…
…and this…
…and HO LEE CRAP I CAN’T BELIEVE I ONCE OWNED A 45 of this…
…(and I can’t believe Quentin Tarantino hasn’t done a movie based on it) and especially this…:
…all impacted during at the depths of what was (if you’re anywhere near my age) one of the most awkward stretches of one’s life – but something about seventies music at its worst actually made the awkward teenage years even worse than they needed to be.
So that – the apex of dweeby self-help-book pop music reflecting the worst of what at that time was two decades of pop music – was part of it.
But then everybody knew that everything above was awful stuff. The mainstream, but awful.
The worst part? The stuff that was (and is) acknowledged by the people who have appointed themselves to do the official acknowledging of these things to be “the best” music?
This sort of thing was depressingly normal at the time – the shambling masses of drug-addled dissipated stars (whose prime I’d missed – the first I ever heard of the Beatles was news on the TV they’d broken up) working their way through their awkward, post-prime years by slogging their way through rambling, self-indulgent, excessive, just plain dull music…
…and thought “I’ve got nothing to lose by seceding from this whole scene”.
And it took me a solid thirty years to realize I threw out a lot of baby with the bathwater.
But lest you think I’m going all kumbaya on the whole dismal decade – let me reiterate; it was mostly crap.
Crap, crap, crap.
More to come. Every Friday until I run out of material.
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