hello! i'm a youngster, longing for the "good old days" being conceived on a couch in Del Paso Heights 1970(who knows where that is?)more importantly, when that was. are ther any old timers out there who would like to share some "war stories" from that era? from a musical prospective please! thanks to the greats like meral, waylen, buck, loretta, you guys gave us poor guys hope and direction! god bless you! god bless me! and please, never stop blessing the music! - featherangel
I'm a guy who went to high school from the fall of 68 to the spring of 72, and given that high school years seem to be the period when music imprints most strongly on people you'd think it would be my favorite era. But I actually I think that was a down time, and I'm glad that punk came along and swept most of it away. The good bands of the British invasion era were mostly running out of creativity - too much money, too many drugs, too many lps with just one or two good tracks and the rest filler. Like all generalizations, this one has its exceptions and there were some good bands and some great records and individual songs, but to my tastes they were too few and far between.
Quite a few years ago I began collecting up digital versions of my favorite songs and storing them year-by-year in iTunes. I can get a handle on how much I liked a particular period was by how many songs there are for that year. This is of course strongly colored by my personal preferences, but for example, in 1980 I have over 1,500 songs (these are the ones I think are especially good from that year, not just what I happen to have). For 1970 I have about 160.
Outside of music we had LBJ and then Nixon, the Vietnam War, shootings at Kent State and Jackson State, race riots, a threat of nuclear war that was far closer to reality than what you read about in the paper today. Adults who didn't even know you would hassle you on the street if your hair came over the ear - even though it had been years since the Beatles first did it.
Sounds like you are a country fan, which has never been my area. I'm always sympathetic to people who love music whether it's to my tastes or not, but I can't recommend anything in country. At the risk of missing something dead obvious by listing things off the top of my head, I'd say that some of the rock lps of that era that are really worth playing end-to-end are:
The Who - Who's Next, Quadrophenia
Stones - Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street
J Geils Band - Full House
Rod Stewart - Every Picture Tells A Story
Bruce Springsteen - The Wild, The Innocent and the E St Shuffle
Derek and the Dominoes - Layla
Santana - first three lps
New York Dolls first lp and Too Much Too Soon
Stooges - Raw Power
Like I said, there are a lot of great songs from that period, but there are so many instances of killers like "American Pie" (Don McLean), "Chestnut Mare" (Byrds) or "Story In Your Eyes" (Moody Blues) that are on an lp of otherwise flat and uninspired filler. I guess that's what makes that Nuggets series of compilations so good - it collects up loads of those one hit wonder type tracks and puts them in one place.
In spite of what came after, Stewart and the Faces were pretty widely regarded as one of the best live rock bands going in the period around 1970-73. I think if you downgraded everybody in music who eventually went up their own backside as they got older, you would hardly listen to any music by bands whose members were over 25, and this includes people from Paul McCartney to Steve Winwood to Eric Clapton to Bruce Springsteen to Paul Weller to Elvis Presley. I'd have to admit that Stewart eventually got closer to where his small intestine meets his stomach than most rock stars manage to do, but I still think he did good stuff with the Faces, and the title song from that lp is a classic.
I'm with you on this one Steve. My son denigrates Rod Stewart because he only associates him with the American Songbook series. But, I believe that his work with Jeff Beck, The Faces, and his early solo material is stellar. John.
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