Shifting the Tempo
Well, here we are in 1970, and here I am on July 28, 2020, and my deadline for finishing these notes for a November 2020 release is coming up fast so I’ve got to take another approach. I asked my bright-eyed friend (and incomparable music essayist) Robert Christgau for permission to use his parts of his overviews in an effort to meet the deadline, and he kindly said, “yes”, to just give him credits. Along with acknowledgement, I want to say a few things about him. One, it may be possible that no one has ever done such an all-encompassing job of absorbing contemporary popular and semi-popular music for the length of time he has. And, two, it is a sure thing no one has managed to maintain the level of interest and enthusiasm he continuously maintains. Lastly, his grasp on other cultural forms and history is immense. Here he goes:
“The decade is of course an arbitrary schema itself—time doesn’t just execute a neat turn toward the future every ten years. But like a lot of artificial concepts—money, say—the category does take on a reality of its own once people figure out how to put it to work. ‘The ’60s are over,’ a slogan one only began to hear in 1972 or so, mobilized all those eager to believe that idealism had become passe, and once they were mobilized, it had. In popular music, embracing the ’70s meant both an elitist withdrawal from the messy concert and counterculture scene and a profiteering pursuit of the lowest common denominator in FM radio and album rock.”
According to Christgau, the decade also saw greater fragmentation along stylistic lines because of the rise of semipopular music:
“It goes back to whenever arty types began to find ‘the best’ rock worthy of attention in the ’60s, but in the ’60s tolerance was the rule; it was easier to name rough substyles—say British invasion, folk-rock, psychedelic, and soul—than to analyze their separate audiences (even racial distinctions were fuzzy). Not until 1968 or 1969, when it became a hippie commonplace to dismiss soul as ‘commercial’ and when bubblegum and ‘white blues’ developed into clear categories, did the breakdown really begin. And only in the ’70s did genres start asserting themselves: singer-songwriter and interpreter, art-rock and heavy metal and country-rock and boogie, fusion and funk and disco and black MOR, punk and new wave, and somehow straddling them all (except for punk, God bless) the monolith of pop-rock.”
Another reason for my circa 1972 depression, the one I describe in the individual notes, was that in the mid-‘60s I believed, as many did, that the combination of the counterculture and contemporary music were destined, goddamn it, to save the world. This went hand in hand with the widely held belief that if Kennedy and Khrushchev took LSD together, world peace would follow as sure as day follows night. And when would this joyous culmination occur I thought? 1972! Because 9 is a magic number! And 8 is a magic number! And 9 x 8 = 72! QE fucking D! By 1968 it was clear that this was not going to happen. Then here comes 1972, and boy, did it not happen. But then in July 1972, WCBS-FM started playing “Oldies” rock ‘n’ roll––songs from the early ‘50s to about the end of the ‘60s. And Oldies radio stations start to appear nationwide. I found this somewhat comforting. This is consistent with the fact that nostalgia for the past kicks back about 20 years.
In 1975, the rest of the Holy Modal Rounders, who had moved to Portland, Oregon, were on hiatus, so bassman Dave Reisch came to New York to visit. We decided to put a band together while he was here, which became the Unholy Modal Rounders (from 1975 to 1977). We played at CBGBs and elsewhere during the early Punk era. You could call our approach Freak Folk Rock, although nobody said Freak Folk until almost 20 years later. We also covered a lot of ‘50s and ‘60s rock ‘n’ roll, along with some ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s songs. We had a weekly residency at Broadway Charlies, around 12th Street and Broadway. We were just another sub-sub genre.
As a kind of bookend to the end-of-‘60s show I described, I’m going to describe an end-of-‘70s show girlfriend Betsy––who became my wife in 1982––and I saw in London in 1979. We had hooked up with Pete Frame of Rock Family Trees fame (check them out), the only person I knew in the UK, and he introduced us to a number of cool record people from Rough Trade, who clued us in to an unannounced concert The Clash were giving that afternoon. Wow, thanks! We got there early. I noticed there were selling beer by the bottle, which I thought was kind of strange. I also noticed a punky-looking guy with dyed-blond hair who looked like he was very high on speed. There were no chairs, just a wide space, enough for two or three hundred people. Wow, we thought, we can go straight to the stage, which was raised about three feet off the floor. We had the best non-seats in the house!
Soon, one of the record peeps we had met earlier that day came over to us and said, “You really don’t want to be here.” What? We were in the perfect place to be! A few minutes later (the show hadn’t started yet) another person we had met came over and said the same thing. We thought, “Are you crazy?” A few minutes later, I heard a loud crash to my direct right. I turned and saw the guy next to me holding his rapidly bleeding head. He was surrounded by broken glass from the bottle that had been cracked over his head. I turned and saw the blonde guy, the speeding guy I had seen earlier, holding the end of a broken beer bottle, his legs wide with an intense wanna-do-something-about-it look on his face. I waved my hand and shook my head, signifying no, no, no!
Betsy and I retreated to a spot about two-thirds away from the stage, just where the crowd, which had grown to fill the venue, began to not be shoulder-to-shoulder. Soon, another young goon came along, right on this barely-enough-room-to-begin-to-move perimeter, patrolling it as it were, while throwing nonstop punches. We retreated as far as we could, all the way to the far wall. The music had started at that point. The Clash sounded fantastic. Then, here comes another young goon, who proceeds to throw nonstop punches which keep landing two inches away from the side of my head. “Let’s go”, I said the Betsy. “Let’s go”, she agreed. We made our way towards the exit, where a number of people were sitting on the floor. I was trying to step with care, but I accidently stepped on a big skinhead kilt-wearing guy, who slowly got to his feet with a menacing expression. “Gee, I’m so sorry. I’m such a clumsy jerk”, I said. Fortunately, midwestern American accents seem to have a disarming effect on Brits, even scary ones. He gave me an I’m-not-going-to-pound-the-shit-out-of you nod, and we continued our retreat.
With those two shows, you have the difference between the ‘60s and the ‘70s.
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