Something snapped after Watergate. Stevie Wonder released an angry “You Ain’t Done Nothing” and Billy Preston confirmed, “Nothin’ From Nothin’” (“leaves nothin’”). James accused the “Funky President” (“People, it’s bad”). The B-side was titled “Coldblooded”. Al Wilson declared that the time had come to “Show and Tell”. Country/Western made a rare visit to the LP Top Ten with Charlie Rich’s (“No one knows what goes on…”) “Behind Closed Doors” (at the Watergate Hotel?) Elton John waved “Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road”.
“The Way We Were” topped the charts in 1974. This title cut from a blockbuster movie served as a nostalgic look back to a better time, and captured the mood of the country. On the eve of our bicentennial, Americans looked forward in their rearview mirrors. Jim Croce wanted to catch “Time In a Bottle”. “Happy Days” hit the tube and the soundtrack of American Graffiti became the #9 LP of the year. Many retreated even further as Grease premiered on Broadway (where it would continue to run until 1980). “Well, she was just seventeen,” had been the opening line of the B-side of the first Beatles’ 45 in the USA. Now, a decade later, Ringo reached even farther into the cradle for his first solo hit: “You’re Sixteen” (“You’re beautiful and you’re mine”). Television offered a bittersweet “Welcome Back, Kotter” (“You’re dreams were your ticket out.”) TV even coaxed Speedy (Alka Seltzer), the Campbell Kids and the Hamm’s Bear out of retirement. Only Mel Brooks bucked the trend with a new TV show called “When Things Were Rotten”. It flopped.
Hula Hoops and Slinkies came back into style, as did dancing. Thus began Rock & Roll’s darkest hour… the dreaded Disco Era. The genre remains a painful topic for Rock purists, but we cannot ignore an entire period. Death… disease… Disco. Stuff like that happens. There’s nothing we can do about it. Simply put, Disco music is monotonous, mechanical, superficial, emotionless, and devoid of the peaks and valleys that one normally finds in real music. Android Rock would have been a better name. Worse than the crap of the Teen Idol Era (1958-63), when the creation of a hit record still necessitated a small degree of human participation, Disco offered very few live performances in the clubs, and no Superstars emerged in the genre. The dancers became the stars, and these inept amateurs demanded a constant, monotonous beat, between 120 to 160 times per minute, which acted as training wheels for their limited repertoires. The simple-minded music (with a drum machine, and often, one chord per song), and lyrics (“That’s the way uh-huh, uh-huh, I like it, uh-huh, uh-huh”), never disturbed the fragile connection between plodding feet and empty heads. These people bopped to Bandstand as preteens, but now, many pushed thirty, were still single and just plain lonely. Discotheques served as a great place to meet meat and start up a brief, but shallow relationship, based on a mutual appreciation of flashy clothes and boring music. Boomers yearned for a safe place to hide, and possibly a one-night stand. They avoided rebellion, anger, humor and excitement whenever possible. There are no lyrics worth quoting from this musical genre, so I will have to borrow a line from mid-Seventies Soft Rock to help explain the popularity of Disco: “Some dance to remember, some dance to forget.”
Android Rock pushed the last mumbles of protest off the pop charts in 1975. The Isley Brothers urged us to “Fight the Power”, but Earth, Wind and Fire just sighed, “That’s the Way of the World. War now asked, “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” The Average White Band tried to “Pick Up the Pieces”, and John Denver hid “Back Home Again”.
1976 will always be remembered as the worst year in the entire history of Rock & Roll… the absolute pits. We heard moans from Donna Summers and experienced the horror of “Disco Duck”. The new Disco lifestyle overwhelmed many Boomers, and Paul Simon suggested that there are “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”.
The mid-Seventies had begun with “I Know It’s Only Rock & Roll” (“But, I like it), and in two short years devolved into “Disco Duck”. How could this happen on our 200th Birthday? And, who could have ever imagined that, in the Presidential Election on our bicentennial, one candidate would be an incumbent who we had never elected in the first place, and the other, a peanut farmer/ nuclear physicist who admitted to lusting in his heart and claimed to have once sighted a UFO?
1976 marked another birthday for note: the 18-year-old Freshmen, First Wave Boomers, who, in 1964, proclaimed at Berkeley, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” now crossed over that point of no return.
Look for Don’t Trust Anyone Under Sixty… due out in 2006.
“You’re going to be told a lot of things. You get told things every day that don’t happen. It doesn’t seem to bother people, they don’t—It’s printed in the press. The world thinks all these things happen. They never happened. Everyone’s so eager to get the story before the story’s there that the world is constantly being fed things that haven’t happened. All I can tell you is it hasn’t happened. It’s going to happen.” —Donald Rumsfeld in a Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense briefing.