Reconsidering The Seventies: Baseline (Reboot)

(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.

43 thoughts on “Reconsidering The Seventies: Baseline (Reboot)

  1. That’s not a baseline, that’s the Mariana Trench.

    And you’ve located the heart of darkness — 1974.

  2. I dont get it. I really wasn’t paying attention to music until the 80’s. Most of the bands I liked had started in the early to mid 70’s, although I didn’t discover the Stones until Jagger was already 40 years old.

    Anyway, the music I loved, and still do love, came from 70’s groups that were in their mature periods during the 80’s

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BHJTMknipM

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9JEPeeohYs

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNWYHSbaFBs

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfM6nRVBvGs

  3. Back in the 70’s I felt I had died and gone to hell when Muskrat Love became an ear worm.

  4. And nothing to say about KC and the Sunshine Band?

    Or the BeeGees and falsetto disco?

    The seventies were a great time to turn off the radio.

  5. The 70s was a great time to turn off the AM radio. The “popular” music of the period was almost uniformly repulsive, even at the time. The 70s were a huge period of self-hate and division for most Americans: the loss of the Vietnam War, Iranian Hostage Crisis, Oil Embargo, Nixon impeachment, leftist domestic terrorism, disco, etc.

    Some of the stuff on the FM band was worthwhile, though. Rush (6 good albums), Pink Floyd, Blue Oyster Cult, etc. Of course, it wasn’t until the end of the 70s that FM radios became standard in cars.

    Disco destruction: early, often, and never enough!

  6. It’s not that I like, or dislike 70’s music. I was there. I bought the albums. I went to the concerts. I partied like it was 1999. I just don’t REMEMBER it much. Same for the 80’s.

    That I’m here at all is testament to the fact there’s a fundamental lie with the axiom ‘if it feels good, do it.’

  7. The seventies (which AFAIAC started in about 1973 and ended in about 1982) sucked in every imaginable way. The music sucked. The cars sucked. The fashion sucked. The economy sucked. The world situation sucked. If it weren’t for the movies and the drugs there would be no aspect of life in those ten years that didn’t suck.

  8. I used to listen to Beeker Street which broadcast from Little Rock, Arkansas. I beleive it was one of the first so-called “underground” AM stations back in the day. The strong 50,000 watt nighttime signal allowed for listening in the Midwest and as far away as Cuba.

  9. My older brother joined the navy in 1975. In 1977 he returned home with an English press of Never mind the Bollocks.
    The late 70’s weren’t too bad. Elvis Costello, Ramones . . .

  10. Thank God for older brothers! If it were not for mine I would never have had the opportunity to see: Humble Pie, Frank Zappa, Led Zeppelin, Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer and The Climax Blues Band, He also turned me on to The Talking Heads, which came out of the same CBGB’s era the Ramones came from. Elvis Costello and the Clash would have been nice to see as well.

    As an aside; Costello has a beautiful wife named Diana Krall who is in her own right an accomplished Jazz pianist and singer.

  11. I remember the 1970’s as the decade of dreadful ballads. And as someone else noted, the cars were dreadful, too, full of pollution control performance robbing nonsense like air pumps.

  12. Emery, I, too, was a big Humble Pie fan. “30 Days in the Hole” was a barracks staple while I went through basic training. Over the course of two years, I wore out 2 of their eight track tapes. I continued to appreciate Steve Marriott and stayed a fan even after HP folded. I grieved for a week after he died in 1991.
    On another note, my kids, who revolted at my “old shit” that I listened to while they rode in the car with me, finally admitted that the bands of our era, each had a unique sound and that you could tell them apart. Ah! Progress!

  13. bosshoss429, You are correct sir, Marrriot was a talented singer-guitarist and a great stage performer. Humble Pie also featured a (then) little known guitarist named Peter Frampton. They evolved into a very talented blues-boogie group.

  14. I spent some time in England in the late 70s and came back with Elvis Costello and Dire Straits albums. I remember the elusive, almost mythical “Bleaker Street” that we could sometimes catch, and Zappa and Little Feat were among my favorite albums in college.

    My musical memories of the 70s, however, are irreparably scarred by being stuck on a bus for a week on our high school senior trip with nothing but an 8-track of “Frampton Comes Alive” playing in endless loop (the only 8-track on the bus that didn’t break within the first 100 miles, and no one wanting to use money to buy new tapes that could otherwise be used to buy beer and other, um, stuff.

  15. @ Night Writer, I am nearly certain the tinfoil on my head allowed for better reception of the signal from Little Rock. ;^)

  16. Something else we can agree on Emery – how was Zappa? Do you remember? He is one act I would truly like to have seen but never got a chance.

  17. Saw Zappa at the old St. Paul Civic Center. This was when Zappa was touring and promoting his “Overnight Sensations” LP. Bruce Fowler (trombone) including a complete horn section (more of the Fowler family). George Duke (keyboards) with Aynsley Dunbar on drums. I don’t remember if Steve Vai (guitar) was there or not. I do remember that Tom Fowler the bassist had recently broken his wrist playing “touch” football with the band, so he was queuing the replacement bassist with placards. It was a sold-out show. I was nearly thirteen when my older brother took me. Pretty cool brother if I may say so.

  18. My personal shame was listening to (and enjoying) the “Archies” and to a lesser degree; the Dave Clark Five.

  19. 1978 was the year I wrecked my hearing (though it would be 30 years before I new it) whenI saw Springsteen, Pat Travers Band, Patti Smith, The Eagles and Linda Ronstadt in concert, usually from right in front of the stage (I had friends at the student radio station). The most fun show then, and perhaps ever, though was The Tubes on their “What Do You Want From Life?” tour.

  20. “The Tubes on their “What Do You Want From Life?” tour.”

    Televisions on tall stands behind and to the sides?

  21. Swiftee: no, stacks of Altecs that looked about 40 feet high, and four concerts within one as lead singer Fee Waybill adopted different personas such as glam-rocker Quay Lude, a punk rocker (Jonny Vicious or something like that), some Rundgren-esque pop and at one point, a guerilla take-over of the theater. It was pretty awesome, even if most of it now is just a smear in my ears.

  22. @ Night Writer, You mentioned stacks of Altec speakers and that reminded me of the Grateful Dead’s “Wall Of Sound”. Which was designed by none other than Owsley “Bear” Stanley.

    The “Wall” consisted of 89 300-watt solid-state and three McIntosh 2300 (350-watt vacuum tube) Power Amplifiers generating a total of 26,400 watts of audio power. Including 586 JBL loudspeakers (15″, 12″ and 5″) and
    54 Electrovoice tweeters

    http://www.audioheritage.org/html/history/jbl-pro/jbl-pro.htm
    http://www.dozin.com/wallofsound/

  23. Thanks for that little history lesson Emery.

    Considering the beating their cranium’s took, it’s easier to understand the actions of the dried up lefties that show up to march in the streets of St. Paul whenever the opportunity lends itself.

    Clinging to their love beads and spliffs.

  24. Being from Oakland,CA. I’m sure you’d know something about that.

    My older brother was an electrical engineer for Collins Electric back in the 70’s. Collin’s had a hook-up with either Rose Productions (or the venues) as the lighting technicians. As the result of this, I was able to “tag-along” to some great concerts at the St. Paul Civic Center and Civic Center Theatre.

    It was my older brother who encouraged me to enter the field of engineering. His encouragement helped me to go on and earn my Doctorate Degree in chemical engineering.

    As for the ” Grateful Dead” I have never seen them in concert nor own any of their music. Although I am (was) fascinated with the technical aspects of their sound system.

  25. Growing up in 1970’s was like having your friend’s crazy older brother punch you in the teeth everytimg he saw you because he thought you were someone else.

    I think that could be made into a haiku.

  26. Came of age in the 80’s; was conscious in the 70’s. Kinda.
    Cars sucked for sure – I didn’t think cars were cool at all until 2006. Now I like ’em quite a bit.
    Late 70’s, early 80’s most of what music I heard was what my dad was listening to on the car radio – country music. And I thought most of that was pretty cool. Still do. Didn’t get into rock until about 8th grade, and then it was the enormous amount of music happening in the early/mid 80’s plus the cool stuff from the 70’s like disco (I thought disco was great) and then the metal stuff that came in a little later. I liked a lot of 70’s music when I heard it – a particular favorite was “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”. Had no idea what he was singing about, just liked the sound. Slip out the back Jack.

  27. I heard somewhere, possibly here, that your assessment of a period of your life time is just as influenced by the time of your life (or developmental stage, if you buy that) and age as it is the positive and negative factors you may have lived through then.

    I started the 70’s in the middle of my high school years and finished them out engaged to be married, and with my first job in my chosen profession. Somewhere in the middle I lost a lot of the weight that plagued me up to then, played in a couple of bands, went on some dates, and earned (barely) an undergraduate degree. How could I not look fondly on the 70’s?

    Again, not necessarily for the good that happened then (as well an equal amount of bad). Rather, for a period of life when I still felt invincible but hadn’t become wise enough yet to know that logically, I shouldn’t have taken some of the risks that I took then (and was successful with, or better for having taken), but would never even consider now.

    PaulC: I’m with you on Disco. The high opinion I held of my musical tastes back then make Mr. Berg sound like a part-time intern on the Cities’ 97. So, of course I rabidly excoriated it when it was current. However, I now recognize it at a valid complex form of musical high-jacking (White artists from Black R&B artists) that aside from the “good beat, easy to dance to” criteria, it is complicated enough to require some real musical talent from whatever cover band tries to tackle it.

  28. Joe – (sure this is chain is dead by now but who knows) –
    All you gotta do is play the riff to Stayin’ Alive on guitar in almost any environment where that would be appropriate (bonus if alcohol is being served) – you will receive positive responses, even unto this day. As I’m sure you know.
    I never understood the people who said they hated disco – great grooves, cool guitar parts – and you end up with your teen girlfriend’s mom… kinda liking you. Ha ha! Who could hate disco?

  29. Actually, I ran into a then-teen girlfriend of the disco era at a funeral recently. She had become her mom. Sadly, the guy she dumped me for died and left her childless at a late age.

    Her mom, who never did like me, was also there and asked if I knew any single guys about my age for her daughter. Hence the side-by-side comparison.

    And (I flatter myself) it was possibly was as you observed; she liked me a lot more now, given the way things worked out (and I take no satisfaction from his untimely death). I wish it would have been a simple divorce – then I could have indulged in some bad (but not as bad) schadenfreude.

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