All this weekend GREAT BIG RADIO is playing the music on that magical year, 1970. Relive that year in music where nothing new happened, where Led Zepplin records played back-to-back with the Carpenters. It’s the end of some musical trends and the holding place for others. Hear it here.But oh the memories….
1970
The Kent State Massacre.
Ziploc bags are invented.
Simon & Garfunkel win every Grammy.
Janis and Jimi leave us.
“Beneath the Planet of the Apes” and “Honeymoon Killers” are released.
Baltimore wins the World Series.
Hurricane Celia wreaks havoc in Texas.
There’s a Gay Rights march in Greenwich Village.
FBI agents arrest American Communist (and former UCLA professor) Angela Davis.
ABC has both “the Mod Squad” and “the Lawrence Welk Show” on the same primetime schedule.
One million cans of tuna are recalled by the FDA.
President Nixon sends combat troops into Cambodia.
“President Nixon” in general.
The Jim Nabors variety show is up against the Flip Wilson variety show.
Did I mention Ziploc bags?
The GREAT BIG RADIO salute to the music of 1970 plays through Labor Day. They're all there – the hits and the stiffs, and I defy you to tell them apart. Rare concert soundtracks will also be featured. I’m getting nostalgic just writing this. Broke up with my girlfriend… had to join the army … so many highlights…
Thank you so much for this post, Ken.
ReplyDeleteI won't, however, pay for your therapy after I unwittingly unleashed these repressed memories.
Great Big Radio is playing the music I grew up with. As a 10 year old in New England, this was the music that started my generation on their way toward adolesence and opened our eyes to how the world was.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Ken! 1970 was a fantastic year. I was 13 and had just started listening to the Top 40 AM radio of the day.
ReplyDelete(Incidentally, I know it's not getting past your that I've started giving myself whole sentences for a middle name like Bob Hope. and I’m doing it without Barney McNulty)
ReplyDeleteCripe, this was like a clip show of my day planner!
FDA recalled a million cans of tuna? Some “chick” here in Dallas said she thought it was cans of chicken? But all thinks being equal, it's nice to know you can now get salmonella from both.
But really, as usual, nice take on the 70’s. Just give our people some credit, she wasn’t just a former UCLA professor, she was a Brandeis grad. (Along with Abbie Hoffman, a student of left wing anarchist/political theorist Hebert Marcuse – "Surely, no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but in a democracy such a right is vested in the people,”) who as I recall still gave you the hook if you were in any way disruptive in class.”
As usual that’s not why I called Larry. You got me started on this jag and I can’t get out. (OK, not so much got me started ,but also as per usual, served as an enabler.)
Just feel it’s only ethical to tell you I used (but credited) your line in an email to a friend about the big letdown in, this time actual, Earl coverage on the networks. (They’ asked me to make it “sing.”)
Not that you asked (and btw, why do you never?), but he’s the investigative reporter who sandbagged the gov. of Arizona (www.govofaz.gov?) the other day on MSNBC/Maddow -- about a little staff conflict of interest in for profit prisons that could stand to be housing a passel (oh wait, El Paso?) of illegal immigrants if this making illegal immigrants illegal thing they started there ever catches on. This started about a week before the woman was dumbstruck in the debate last week. You gotta love Youtube. While my guy was hounding her over conflict of interest, she commenced the traditional silent perp-scoot hasty egress, high tailing it wordless as the invisible severed heads they claim to have seen on this side of the border to get folks all riled up. (Everything but the traditional fedora over the face fashion statement.)
Now he’s got a new nickname at the station – Debate Coach. If this isn’t proof people on TV need writers I don’t know what is? Oh, you were wondering what line I used to describe the overhyped coverage of this flaccid force of “nature’s fury?” It’s:
"Your stories aren't OK, they're nothing.
You have a beginning, then nothing...and then nothing."
And talk about your overhyped “zip” lock bags? How come we can’t get the zip locks to stay shut and can’t get the plastic mini-dry cleaner bags of the roll in the fruit section open? [As you can see, some of us are also highly gifted in oversvational humor that does nothin; for ya either.)
Now, where can we find some kinda mattress sale? I’ll settle for anything, but have to be mismatched like me and the wife -- otherwise I can't get to sleep.
Jeff, You were bar mitzvahed in 1970? What a watershed year!
I wasn't yet alive to see the 70's but I feel a strange nostalgia for them, maybe because my mom grew up then. You just have to love a decade that prominently featured orange, brown, shag carpets, medallions, and great mustaches.
ReplyDeleteThe 60's was a hard act to follow and the 70's proved that, even missing out on the first moon landing by 5 months.
ReplyDelete1970 is my favorite year in music. Good job Howard!
ReplyDeletepeppertree5706
"The Lawrence Welk Show" is a mainstay of public television. "The Mod Squad" is just a bad movie to most people. Forty years from now, will PBS be carrying "America's Got Talent"? Happily, I won't be here to find out.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Ken, now I know who they are. Sound quality is pretty good, too.
ReplyDeleteZeppelin's playing "Livin' Lovin' Maid," and Sly just started 'I Want To Take You Higher." Excellent start.
Thanks to alla you.
ReplyDeleteMax: We purposely process the audio to sound like a 1970's FM Top 40 station - loud, fun and relentless. Glad you like it.
Erika: It was all great unless you had to vacuum the carpet or wear the medallions in the dead of summer. The mustaches were mostly to retrieve leftover lunch particles for snacking later on.
Hope you'll check us out after the weekend. We play this kind of stuff from the mid 60s through the 80s - half of which regular radio is scared to play. We'd appreciate it!
Well even if you weren't part of our 70's, but do watch those nostalgic theme thingy concerts on PBS, you know one thing about us fer sure -- we really get off on lip syncing. And honestly, don't you wish like hell we didn't? Just saying. But God, those shows can really make you feel 50 again.
ReplyDeleteI'm still trying to figure out, when the local PBS stations apparently started outsourcing their pledge pitches to some kinda central headquarters was that a sign of the apocalypse. Or something recommended by Dr. Wayne Dyer in a rare moment of blisslessness?
At least I think they kept it in the country -- it's only their news , comedy and drama they get from England and, They do get props for the newer Wait Wait Don't Tell Me mugs. I just wish they'd wait wait and not pitch me.
Now if you'll excuse me, it looks like they've got some kind of special with a bunch of big name rockers rocking out with Roy Orbison. Don't believe I've ever seen that.
This great big radio is a hoot and a half.
The year the Beatles broke up. :-(
ReplyDeleteActually, I think the Beatles essentially broke up in 1969, but it took until 1970 for their last album, Let it Be, to hit the stores. (Paul McCartney joked that the over-production that Phil Spector slathered all over some of the tracks, particularly "The Long and Winding Road," constituted his first murder.) I could be wrong. I often am.
ReplyDeleteI remember hearing about the Kent State shootings on the radio and being absolutely shocked. Since we watched the evening news, campus unrest wasn't anything new, but people getting shot was. My parents were weak-tea Republicans and had voted for Nixon, but they always sort of disliked him, too. In 1972, it was a matter of disliking McGovern more that made them repeat their mistake (my mom's words, not mine).
I was eight in 1970, so I wasn't tuning into Zeppelin or The Stones (although my dad, whose musical tastes were eclectic, had committed the instrumental cuts from the two albums recorded by The Graham Bond Organisation--one of the great groups most people have never heard of--to his enormous Wollensack reel-to-reel tape recorder). I was listening to WLW in Cincinnati, which was an AM pop station in those days, and it was the tail end of the period in pop music when the era of Sinatra and Como and such were giving way to The Carpenters and Bread and Neil Diamond. By comparison with prog-rock and glam-rock and the electrified Dylan, they were square beyond belief. But at least they weren't the Osmonds. It was also on WLW where I heard some of the singles from Elvis' late 60's comeback and The Jackson Five and Glen Campbell (when he was turning out one great Jimmy-Webb penned song after another). Not wildly hip, but as light pop or soft rock goes, it was great stuff.
The only TV I really remember from that year was The Mary Tyler Moore Show; the kids I knew at school were all watching The Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch, but I always found the shows rather annoying, particularly the former. (Hey I was the class weirdo; in the spring of '68, I was the only kid in Kindergarten who was a fan of The Avengers).
Speaking again of Nixon, the night of his first election victory, I became violently ill and spent what seemed like hours throwing up. My mom blamed the fish we had for dinner. I think it was my latent liberal tendencies rearing their head for the first time . . .
I respectfully suggest that any accounting of 1970 American cultural milestones - in this of all blogs - should include a movie I saw that summer (despite its R rating) at a drive-in, when I was almost 14:
ReplyDeleteMASH
Spectacular, thank you. Vanity Fare's "Early in the Morning" -- holy cow..... It may have been 40 years since I last heard that. I may wind up staying up all night listening to this.
ReplyDeletegottacook: I also saw MASH at a drive-in that summer at age 13...blew my mind out in that car, and I was only watching the movie.
George Harrison's "Awaiting on You All"! Zow.
ReplyDeleteOK, I'll stop now.
Thanks, Ken, for re-awakening the 15 yr old in me.
ReplyDeleteYou forgot Ball Four, which struck a pretty nasty blow to namby pambly sports journalism....
ReplyDeleteAt least ABC had taken The King Family off of their schedule. Where did they store them afterwards? There seemed to be hundreds of them.
ReplyDeleteWow. This music does conjure up the feelings of the year. I was 14 aand we had just moved back to Dallas Tx, and I was entering 9th grade right about now.
ReplyDeleteI discovered "album rock" on this thing called FM radio, and started listening to that instead of AM.
And the radio station that I discovered it on was KNUS. Guess who the morning DJ was?
A guy named Rod Roddy who later moved to LA and became famous as a TV announcer.
But, damn, he was great to listen to in the morning in those days, and he made all kinds of liberal, controversial comments that had the people in Dallas calling for his blood.
What memories! Or is it "what memories"? I remember the songs, but very little of 1970. Sad really because it sure sounded like fun. Maybe the drugs and booze I ingested shortly after 1970 made all those swell times fade away. My sister is coming over in a few minutes for our barbecue. She'll probably tell me I was as a terrible shit and that 1970 sucked. Oh, guess I didn't miss anything. Thanks GBR for a groovy Labor Day Weekend.
ReplyDelete