If you wanted to characterize my 1970s with a single adjective, and polled for their opinions not just the me of 2023 but anyone else who knew me then, the consensus might cluster around the word “confused.” Hindsight, of course, is everything; but at the outset, in January 1970, here’s kinda where things stood:
I’d gotten midway through my freshman year at Wake Forest University, in North Carolina, with every expectation of continuing there through graduation. That was really my only expectation of the future, though. While I enjoyed my course schedule (except — ugh — the physics class which met at 8:00 AM on Thursday and SATURDAY mornings), I saw nothing in their syllabi which tempted me to anything like long-term commitment. I was on friendly terms with, if not exactly close to, the seven other guys who shared my dormitory suite, and anticipated no trouble on the horizon in that respect. (I was right about that much, whew.)
My family were all healthy; the nearest blood relative who was no longer living was my paternal grandfather, who’d died when I was a year old.
Romance? Or rather “romance,” in quotation marks? Nearly nonexistent for me. I took note of a few girls (we were all still boys and girls then) around campus, but I was also separated from them by the thick shroud of social clumsiness I’d draped myself in. I couldn’t even start to imagine a setting in which I might actually talk to any of them. Almost certainly approachable, they were, but that didn’t mean I had, y’know, approaching on my mind.
On the other hand, there was this one girl, back in New Jersey… One of these days, I may write about her — I could probably do an entire post or three or four about her — and she certainly remained a fixture of my life (inwardly and emotionally, at least) until her death from cancer over 30 years later. For purposes of this playlist, though, just know that like all the rest of the above, she certainly played a part in the ways that some of these songs stuck in my head from the outset.
As 1970 rolled on, though, “things happened”: fate started to bump up against the scaffolding beneath my comfortable life:
Let’s start with Dad. He had been a maintenance mechanic for most of his working life; in mid-1970, the workers at his plant, including Dad himself, went out on a strike which lasted for most of the summer. (It was also a tough summer for Dad because his mother — Nan, to me — died that July. Not that Dad himself ever complained about any of it, at least to me; for him, I think, it was all just Stuff to Be Gotten Through.) Mom wasn’t working yet; when I asked her about it recently, she explained that she couldn’t work because my younger brother was still in elementary school. (The times, they change…) Between one thing and another, then, I wound up transferring for my sophomore year from Wake Forest to a small — and new — community college in South Jersey.
I did return to WF for a visit in the fall, and was astonished how much the guys had changed over the summer — beards! they had facial hair!
Among other things, my time at the community college gave me a real sense of how I might spend the rest of my days once I became an adult (whenever that’d be). I was writing, for one thing; taking pictures, for another. I had mentors, not just teachers, and got a sense of genuinely moving forward (vs. just scrambling to keep my feet)…
But 1971 and beyond, of course, still lay ahead. What did I know???
About the playlist…
Not all of these songs were actually released in ’70; but they were all hits that year, which is why I heard them so much on the radio — and which also says much about how the music industry functioned then: singles were “released” to radio program managers, who then offered them (via the DJs and the airwaves) to anyone tuned in. [*] The stations’ listeners would (a) call the stations to ask for repeats and (b) go out and buy the singles on vinyl, or — even better — buy the entire albums on which the singles appeared. It took time to get the momentum chugging along on individual songs.
(As an aside, it also means that some songs released in 1970 wouldn’t appear on the Billboard list until 1971, but that blog post still lies ahead…)
As far as specific songs on the list, I have no specific memories. In general, though, I remember:
- A couple of them were favorites of that girl back in NJ, and maybe that’s why they imprinted on me, too.
- At Wake Forest, I was a contributor to the campus literary magazine. The editor that year was a brilliant guy named Al — the next year, he went on to a Rhodes Scholarship — who possessed an incisive wit and shrewd editorial instincts. But he also had a bit of a mushy side to him: the managing editor on one occasion put the “Bridge Over Troubled Water” LP on the office phonograph, and Al yelled something, completely seriously, to the effect of Goddammit, Jonas, you KNOW that song makes me cry!
- Ten years ago, one of my annual “Potpourri” posts included a brief discussion of “American Woman.” The song had actually come out during my senior year in high school, but it had staying power into 1970!
Stray observations:
- Some monster hits of the time aren’t in this list, or in future ones of the series… because they were too long to be played by AM radio stations. The version of “American Woman” in this playlist, at five minutes’ duration, is the longest one here — but it wasn’t the version being played on AM then; they chopped off the intro passage and probably shortened (or accelerated) it otherwise, too.
- The Beatles’ influential shadow remained long in rock/pop music of 1970 and beyond. Their own songs — like “Let It Be,” here — continued to be released, of course, both as a group and solo. But their Apple Records production company introduced a respectable number of other artists to the public… including Badfinger, above, which was sometimes referred to in the music press as especially Beatles-like. (The group changed their name from The Iveys to Badfinger as a subtle nod to the Fab Four: the original title of “With a Little Help from My Friends” was “Bad Finger Boogie.”)
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[*] “Tuned in” then meant, among other things, within a few dozen miles’ radius of the broadcast antenna. No coast-to-coast monolithic AM networks existed — none which compelled local stations to follow the playlists established by corporate headquarters. Philadelphia radio stations, which I listened to, of course played quite a bit of the same music as their New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles counterparts. But they wouldn’t be marching in lockstep, and generally skewed toward the tastes of their nearby audiences. The Jacksonville Florida-raised Missus’s memories of music back then only partially overlap my own: I don’t think I heard a single Allman Brothers song — not often enough to remember — until I was in my 30s or older.
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