It was the decade that started off one year after Woodstock (1969).
It was the decade of platform shoes! Saturday Night Fever! Nixon and Vietnam! The 1973 Oil Crisis! Margaret Thatcher!
And the movies! Oh, the movies!
Raging Bull, Serpico, Taxi Driver, Rocky, A Fish called Wanda, Love Story, Rain Man, Funny Girl!
Robert de Niro, Al Pachino, Marty Scorsese, Sly Stallone, Bruce Lee, Gene Hackman, Barbara Streisand, Jack Nicholson, John Travolta, John Belushi, Donald Sutherland, John Hurt, Farrah Fawcett!
The only thing that was eminently forgettable from the seventies was its god-awful TV. Remember All in the Family, The Brady Bunch and The Love Boat, Mork and Mindy?
MASH and The Bob Newhart Show were probably the only shows I can remember that were not mind numbingly awful.
TV has come a long way since then - thankfully!
The seventies was raging, it was angry, it was beautiful in its naive idealism.
We thought we could change the world.
We did. Our children produced the Internet and the iPhone.
Did we leave it a better or worse place?
You decide.
And the music - oh the music!
It was visceral, raw, sometimes mind-blowingly amazing, sometimes really embarrassingly kitsch, but one thing is certain, seventies music could NEVER be ignored.
The performers, singers and bands of the seventies transformed music FOREVER.
It was the time of Abba, Pink Floyd, The Bee Gees, Blondie, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Uriah Heep, Dire Straits, Rod Stewart, Bonnie Tyler, The Beatles, Aerosmith, Queen, The Rolling Stones, Sex Pistols, Sting and The Police, Bob Marley, Simon and Garfunkel, Eric Clapton, Earth Wind and Fire, David Bowie, Elton John, Don McLean, The Four Seasons, Leonard Cohen and on and on.
They don't make them like that anymore.
These guys got on stage and lit it up with performances that were authentic, passionate and real. They performed for two, three straight hours onstage and never once held back.
Now, I look at electronic dance and I think whaaaat?
People actually PAY to watch some poor dude with headphones in a little cubicle twiddling knobs on a turntable?
This is ENTERTAINMENT?
My God, I wish I could take them back to watch Queen or Pink Floyd and see what REAL musical entertainment means!
I can't, but I can show you a 70s music compilation:
Lemme know what you think?
Seventies good?
Seventies bad?