Thinking back to the seventies

You know, the seventies were an interesting time to grow up to adulthood. We started off with the end of the hippie era which began around 1967 and probably died at Kent State. We had the expansion and the end of the Vietnam war, which died with a whimper in the Ford administration. We had Watergate. Nothing like the struggle of politics and jurisprudence spread out on the television. Come to think of it, we could easily refer to the seventies as the media era.

War was graphically shown to us on the television and on the front covers of newspapers and magazines. We got to experience campus unrest, members of the president's cabinet before congressional committees, the trial of officials, the struggle between the executive branch, the legislative branch and the judicial branch. We got to watch a lot of musicians perform various styles of music on television. Radio expanded from am to fm. We had records, eight-track tapes and cassette tapes. Personal computers were born.

The era saw the beginnings of acid rock, country rock, glamour rock, jazz rock, folk rock, disco, punk rock, new wave rock. It seemed like any type of music could be heard on the radio. Country moved from Nashville to Texas and back again. Jazz faded from view. But we saw a wide variety of music at the Great Southeast Music Hall and Alex Cooley's Electric Ballroom in Atlanta.

Comedy changed. I saw Steve Martin open for Martin Mull. Suddenly comedy was post-modern, where it wasn't a comedian telling stories on stage. Instead, someone like Steve Martin was blurting out bits and pieces of humor without any plot. Saturday Night Live began. Suddenly the comedy ordinarily seen in comedy clubs like Second City were seen on television.

Movies were different. The seventies was the era of the Anti-Hero. Actors like Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nicholson came to the fore. The stories weren't glamorous and pretty. The heroes were flawed.

I remember buying books for my mother and she complaining that the characters weren't pretty for her taste. Well, that was the way in the seventies. Men wore beards and mustaches. Women wore their hair long or permed it out.

Then disco came and brought a sense of style and glitz. But that was short-lived and we went back to punk and new wave.

Yes, an interesting time.