I Was There

"They were unkempt, hairy, hedonistic, improvisational, analog, inefficient — anything but neatly calculated and Instagram-ready." - Jon Pareles

"There’s a notion in the minds of some that the 70s were a carefree time, cool and kitschy and fun and innocent, in a peculiar fashion. It was not. For one thing, there was peculiar fashion. For another - well, consider this... a brief against the nostalgia that inevitably attends any bygone time. Every era has its good points and regrettable trends, but for sheer idiocy, ugliness, meretricious music, televised banality and general malaise the 70s are unparalleled.

Trust me on this. I was there"  - James Lilkes

I was there, too. In the 70s. That magical time in which we actually thought wearing "leisure suits" made sense.  If you don't know what leisure suits are, consider yourself #blessed.  Just imagine something Hillary Clinton would wear except it was made for a man.  You had to buy a shirt to go with it. The shirt had to have a collar that was nine miles long.  Some of our dads would buy one but wear a tie with it, which sort of defeated the "leisure" purpose of it.

Technically, the '70s was from 1970 to 1979. But, really, it was much shorter than that. I believe the 70's actually started in 1973, around the time of The Watergate Senate Hearings. It ended on November 4, 1980, the day Ronald Reagan was elected President.

It was the decade that saw The Vietnam War come to an end. It was not so much as we lost Vietnam, it was just the outcome was what it always seemed it would be.

It was the decade we had three Presidents in three years.

The first one, Richard Nixon (stop me if you had heard this before) was a deeply talented and thoughtful politician that thought the truth was as malleable as clay.  The Watergate Scandal was the Mother of All Scandals and frankly dwarfs anything Trump could come up with. Nixon had a Vice President named Spiro Agnew. For real. Agnew had his own scandal dating back from the time he was the governor of Maryland. He resigned so he wouldn't be sent to jail.  Nixon selected Gerald Ford, the House Minority Leader to replace Agnew. Then, about nine months later, Nixon resigned and Ford became President on my 15th birthday.  If you lived through this you know this is a very short summary.

Ford was different from Nixon in many ways, mainly because he appeared to have been born on the planet Earth.  He really wasn't a very good speaker and at times seemed like the President of The Kiwanis rather than President of The United States.  A former All-American center at Michigan, Ford was portrayed as an uncoordinated klutz.  Plus, and this is the truth, he survived two assassination attempts in the same month. The first was by a member of The Manson Family.  That's the way the '70s were. A member of The Manson Family could get close enough to the President of The United States to pull a handgun on him.

Ford was succeeded by Jimmy Carter, who was the former governor of my home state of Georgia. I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. He wasn't truth impaired like Nixon or a klutz like Ford. However, he turned the Bully Pulpit of the Presidency into just a regular Pulpit for Brother Jimmah. He lectured us about energy a lot. He was really concerned about the setting of your thermostat and not so much about lunatic theocrats taking over in Iran. To top everything off, he was attacked by a killer rabbit. This wasn't a "rumor" or an "urban legend". He told the Washington Press corps about the attack. On the record.

It was a time when you could buy a Pet Rock.  Someone brought theirs to school one time.  It was a small stone, in a box.  I'm not sure if you were supposed to name it.

As far as popular music goes, Elton John was the King, at least for a time.  He sang  "Rocketman, something, something, something here alone".  He also sang about Benny of "Benny And The Jets".  Benny (or "Ben-NAY" as Elton pronounced it) had "electric boobs".  No wonder we asked Candy and Ronny if they've seen them yet.

If it wasn't Elton, it was the Eagles. David Bowie was big, but let's face it, David Bowie was a couple of decades too early with his gender-fluid Ziggy Stardust mess.  Chicago (the band, not the city) was big at my high school.  My son once compared them to "The Backstreet Boys".

But the day the music died was when the "Saturday Night Fever" soundtrack came out.  It didn't exactly kill rock music, but it did lasting harm.  By the end of the decade, even Paul McCartney cut a disco song.

The beginning of the decade saw people willing to wait in line to see a movie because, well, you may not ever see it.  I know people that waited three hours to see "The Godfather", which was about Italian business practices.   I waited ninety minutes to see "Billy Jack".   To quote the great Ludlow Porch, Billy Jack was about a peace-loving guy that "loved to kick Republicans".

The biggest movie of the 70s was "Star Wars". You may have heard about it.  I saw "Star Wars" for free because of a bunch of kids from my high school worked at the theatre where it was showing. Yes, I used my connections to see "Star Wars".

In the 70s, you had to carry change around just in case you needed to use a pay phone. Our phone, now this is really wild, were connected to our house and came in one color: black.  If your parents were real tech savvy, they had a phone that had buttons on it.  North Georgia had one area code and I had only one phone number: 971-1904.

Cars were big-big enough to make babies in. Except for cars like "The Pinto" which Ford (the car company-not the President) placed the gas tanks in the back which made them rolling bombs.

The 70s were simply tacky. Over the next couple of months, I'm going to be reliving those thrilling days of yesteryear leading up to my big 60th birthday.  I'm happy to still be stayin' alive.