I’m going to a 1970’s-themed party tonight with my wife and a group of close friends.
Sounds like fun, sure, and it will be. For people in my age group, the 1970s was the time when we first opened our eyes to the world, fed to us on 19-inch Zenith color television consoles set on shag carpets in our parents’ living room by the pop culture media of the day before the three networks and two independents signed off shortly after midnight and the TV fizzled to a multi-colored test pattern or silvery static.
Hell, if you were first exposed to life in the early 1970s, you thought avocado green was an actual basic color.
The central unifying theme for my group of friends is music. The key element of any of our theme parties is the music. We bring a disc of five songs each, shuffle ’em and play ’em randomly, while we guess who picked that song. Ha, imagine that: a bunch of songs we first heard on AM radio or on 7-inch 45 RPM records morphed into mp3s and played through a computer. Beethoven is surely rolling over.
So the daunting task of picking five songs from the 1970s has been tormenting me all week. How can you narrow that decade down to five songs? So many things happened, musically, that decade. Springsteen. Elton. All those mellow singer songwriters. Beatles solo careers. Prog. Disco. Punk. Post-Punk. New Wave. No Wave. And so on.
It’s tough to narrow the soundtrack of your formative years – for me, this is the period from first grade to the first time I got laid – down to five songs. It’s almost tougher to sift through the emotions that come with the songs. For aren’t the best songs the ones we connect to? The ones that lead us back to a certain time and place, the ones that lead us to a certain smell, a certain color, change of seasons, a certain girl. There’s a story and a feeling behind each one of the really special songs.
That’s the criteria I finally used to narrow down a warehouse full of songs. If the song didn’t have a story behind it, and a meaningful one, it was dropped. So here they are: the post-fab five, if you will, in no particular order.
1. “Lola,” The Kinks (1970). For me, it all started here. My fascination with music, that began at age 6 and stays with me to this day, began the first time I heard this song. I remember the spring morning in 1970 when I heard it. The strum opening. The picking. Then those magic words: “I met her in a club down in old Soho, where they drink champagne and it tastes just like cherry cola.”
I have heard this song so many times, I sometimes skip over it if it comes up in an ipod shuffle. But what the song means to me can’t be denied. There was no way it could miss the cut.
2. “Ball of Confusion,” The Temptations (1970): This was selected because every time I hear it, my mouth drops and I’m amazed. This may be the most powerful song of the rock era.
3. “I Think I Love You,” The Partridge Family (1970): OK, stop laughing. This is the first 45 RPM I ever owned. That alone makes it worthy of consideration. I remember my father coming home with it one night after work. Problem was, I didn’t have a record player at the time. That’s a whole other story.
4. “Photograph,” Ringo Starr (1973): When the Beatles broke up, I think most people were convinced that Ringo would have the hardest time making it on his own. Surprise! His first few albums were better than any of the other three, and he had a worthy string of hits including this beautiful song that wouldn’t have seemed too out of place on “The White Album.” In mid-1979, I developed my first serious crush on a girl, who became my first girlfriend. She, too, loved this song, and it became “our” song. During the chorus of this song, I still see her smile.
4. “Tears of a Clown,” Smoky Robinson and the Miracles (1971): A song so catchy and universal, it reminds me of all the 70s radio songs I listened to as a kid. And I listened to a lot of them.
5. “Thunder Road,” Bruce Springsteen (1975): I’ll never forget the sticky August Miami night in 1980 when this song hit me – it was a triple shot weekend on WSHE, and they played this, “Hungry Heart” and “Born to Run.” My buddy and I were 16 and driving ridiculously fast up I-95 after a Miami Planetarium laser light show in his sister’s Monte Carlo and this came on. I’ve been a Springsteen fanatic ever since.
So that’s it. I’m sorry “Fire and Rain,” “Fox on the Run,” and “It Don’t Matter to Me.” I just didn’t have a good story for you. But maybe if I think about it, I’ll come up with something that takes me back to the AM radio days I first heard you on. But then I think we’ll need 70s party part two.
realityofdave 