What I’ve Been Listening to This Week: Sucking in the Seventies
Posted By William Heise on March 30, 2009
This week, I want to give you a comparison between the music I grew up with and the music my friends Larry and Charles introduced me to. This is part one. I will post part two on Wednesday or Thursday.
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I’ve been thinking about my past, and this has got me thinking about the 1970s. I still resent the 1970s for turning away from the ideals of the 60s. I felt in the 1970s that I had missed the golden age of rock ‘n’ roll.
Perhaps (perhaps) it was understandable that two factors conspired to give us the music of the 70s. The first of these followed in the aftermath of the 60s. After Woodstock’s experiment in organizing a free concert had turned to the disaster of the Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway and after the deaths of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morison people begin to take a new look at the cost of freedom pursued too far. Mainstream music trended away from extremes towards the broad center.
The second factor was even more important. During the 1970s, the music industry coalesced into a business, rather than the free-form art form that it had been in the 60s. Music producers were looking for music that could appeal to as mass audience, rather than a fanatical group of hard-core devotees. Even during the 60s themselves, music publisher Don Kirshner invented the Monkees to capitalize on the new craze for rock ‘n roll. By the end of the 1970s, Robert Stigwood had turned the raw energy of the Beatles into a sappy musical, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band starring Peter Frampton, who had the number one record of all time when the production began, and the BeeGees, who had the number one record of all time before the production ended.
This is the legacy of the music business to which Simon Cowell is heir. He wants to make music that people of all stripes will listen to. And this is why he likes the bland Neil Sedaka and Burt Bacharach and not country music.
So here are some of the songs that I absolutely hated as a child. It was not that it was bad--by an objective standard, it is probably pretty good. But the environment surrounding the music was horrible. I grew up thinking that I had been born into one of the worst periods in history, America in the 20th century, into the middle class, one of the least progressive sectors in the nation. The middle class stressed the norm. I wanted to be exceptional. All of this means that I still cannot entirely disconnect the music of the 70s from the middle class environment into which I was raised.
The Love Story Blight
In my mind, it all started with the movie Love Story, a lame story that film critic Judith Crist called “Camille with bullshit” (Wikipedia). (Myself, I’m not so sure that Dumas’ novel wasn’t bullshit itself, but it made great opera). In place of the raw energy of Jimi Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner” came the theme of Love Story. The film was based on the short life of Ali McGraw’s character, who is shortly to die of leukemia. But before she dies, she has a torrid affair with Ryan O’Neal of all people.
The film was totally unrealistic, as Wikipedia reports:
While the movie has antagonists like every other story, it features no villains. From Harvard’s nemesis on the ice — Cornell — to the aristocratic elder Barretts, every character is good at heart.
Here’s Andy Williams’ version of “Where Do I Begin.”
It seems to me that the film’s popularity had to do with the mass marketing of rock ‘n roll culture to wider and wider audiences. The sexual revolution had even merged into mainstream culture. As a result, film achieved huge popularity.
The film also spawned a trove of imitations, parodies, and homages in countless films, having re-engergized melodrama on the silver screen as well as helping to set the template for the modern “chick flick”. (Wikipedia)
The Way We Were was another film in which people fall in love but fall out of love quite quickly rather than settling down with the person they love and working things like petty political differences out.
The Sixties had been an era in which the Baby Boomers came of age and hoped to change the world. In the Sixties themselves, the Pepsi generation hoped that the change would be permanent. By the 1970s, “the dream was over.” Love was a fleeting thing, like the 1960s themselves, a brief moment in an otherwise long life.
The Musical Legacy of Love Story
This gave us some of the worst music ever, of which I give you the short list.
Terry Jacks was the king of sappy. Here he is performing Seasons In The Sun:
Then there were these gems:
- Eric Carmen’s Never Gonna Fall In Love Again
- and his All By MySelf
- Donny Osmand’s Puppy Love.
- Debby Boone’s You Light up my Life
- Nadia’s Theme
- My personal favorite for its appeal to lost love, David Geddes Run Joey Run, which features the lines:
Daddy Please Don’t.
It wasn’t his fault.
He means so much to me.
And, of course, Morris Albert’s Feelings:
The Seventies in the 90s
In the 1990s, Nirvana managed to record a version of Terry Jack’s Seasons in the Sun. This, like the music of Nina Hagen last week, speaks to the broad range of musical influence that punk rock brought to the otherwise narrow (and I would say bleak) landscape of mainstream 1970s music.
Maybe it’s because I lived through the 70s, but I cannot disassociate my feelings about Mr. Jack’s music to appreciate Nirvana’s effort.
I have another theory as to why music ebbs and flows, and it can be summed up in one word: Passion. Music oftentimes (if not always)reflects the times. The context of the 60′s of course was Viet Nam, protest, seething anger over the wrong direction our governments had taken us (plural because we have to include European governments, and the music of their cultures as well). In addition the sexual awakening of the baby boom generation further stroked the passions reflected in the music. I’m still pissed we missed that one, though I’m glad I missed Viet Nam, certainly. I wonder if the seething hatred the war stirred had something to do with the sexual revolution that followed? In either case, you listen to the music of the era and you can feel the passion. Its palpable. Janis’s cover of “Summertime” burns with it. Jimi took the Blues far beyond any point Muddy Waters ever envisioned it could go, and certainly he did so with skill, but with passion as well, a passion he no doubt felt having experienced life as an army paratrooper.
So the 70′s began with the end of Viet Nam and the Watergate and though, that era had plenty to be angry about, I think people were just worn out from peak of passion and anger of the Viet Nam era. Not all the music lost that power but the corporatization (not a word, but I don’t care, so bugger off)of the music industry certainly had a hand in the homogenization of the product, but I think it was more than that. I think the passion simply ebbed.
Not all the music of the 70′s was bad. Certainly the disco era could be considered repulsive. I recall a certain protest at Comisky Park one evening…. But Bruce Springsteen certainly retained that passion (Bruce himself had been classified 4-F due to a motorcycle accident). His passion was something different though. He drew his strength from the act of performing itself, taking pure joy from the music and sharing it with everyone in the audience. Springsteen live in the 70′s (I never saw him myself until ’80) rivaled anything the Woodstock generation produced, including I think, my beloved Who. Watch Bruce closing out any show from that era with “Rosalita” and you can feel the zeal, the energy (even after 3 hours onstage) Bruce and his band convey.
No, to me the truly devastating era in music is the 80′s. If the 70′s corporate music industry homoginization of the product hurt music, the Reagan era nearly destroyed it. The prevailing attitude in culture, with the music reflecting it, seemed to be greed (thank you, Gordon Gecko) and accumulation of wealth. To that end, the music industry mainstreamed even further, pop-synth crap prevailed and it was utterly devoid of passion. It was far more about appearance than ever before. Well, more on that later, when I see what you write about it.
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