What were The 70's really like?

[E5RSY]

1. Ridiculously large, ornate, and generally unattractive American cars. This did not apply to pickup trucks, which looked pretty cool.

2. For some reason folks in charge of making guitars decided it was a good idea to use brass components anywhere they could find a spot to hang one. Heavy was "good" for some danged reason.

3. 8-track tapes were everywhere (via a Columbia House membership, of course), with the lovely "cha-klunk" as it changed to the next "channel", seemingly always in the middle of your favorite song.

I still think "Dazed & Confused" is one of the best cinematic representations of what life was like as an American kid back then.

 

[7171551]

Inflation, strikes, power cuts and a 3 day week.

Recession, fuel price crisis.

Nowt much has changed.

Very true- but we also had:
Men on the moon, with Mars next.
We had music exploding in all directions- Prog, glam, pub-rock, disco.. punk later...
There were next day appointments at the health centre- which resulted in you seeing a real, live doctor!
Free university education and Grants (not loans.)
And most of all... Some optimism that things could get better!

 

[maxvintage]

Graduated high school in 77. I don't remember them fondly, for the most part. Alternative rock radio was good for a few years, then turned into crap. Fashions were terrible. American made cars were terrible and broke down all the time. Fenders were heavy and had poly finishes a half inch thick. Rock concerts in hockey rinks had lousy sound.

The 80s were better IMHO, except for gated snare drums on everything

 

[deytookerjaabs]

Story about my dad when he was a teenager told by his friend:

"So, your dad had this big Oldsmobile station wagon that was powerful. We used to cruise in it all the time. One day we got a keg in there with a few of our buddies. We're getting pretty buzzed and coming up on the lake. At the hill your dad says Let's See What This Sucker's Got and floors it. By the top of the hill we're going over 100 miles per hour. All the sudden we look around there's blood everywhere, and guts, and parts, and feathers. We ran into a flock of geese!! They were in our drinks and all over man, like a horror show. So we get past the lake then into town. Of course the cop pulled us over. He laughed his ass off, made us pour out our splattered drinks then sent us home."

 

[mountainhick]

Party days for me. I felt a lot of freedom, played rock music, partied with my friends and went to SO MANY great rock concerts! I drove my dad's GTO, and bought a van for my first wheels. Girls were easy. One broke my heart, but it's part of growing up. I was still young enough to not be worried about politics and such, but I was pretty terrified about the draft and Nam. The war ended before I turned 18.

 

[Geoff738]

Everyone smoked. Everywhere.

Cheers,
Geoff

 

[stxrus]

I graduated from HS in 1970. Parts of the ’70s were fantastic in so many ways. In other ways there was great suckage. Disco was about the worst thing to come out of the ‘70s.
Sex, drugs, and Rock and Roll was the mantra of the ‘70s.

I got my first real sports car that started a 2 decade immersion into them. I rode Harleys from the 50s. I fell in love with sailing. I saw many of the greatest bands, some world famous and some only locally well known.

I bought my only 100w Marshall and a full stack. It was magical but useless in my life. At least I can say I had one and the amazing feeling of it dimed with a SG is something you have to experience to understand.

There were so many experiences, that will get me booted from here, that I mostly remember with fond memories.

At the end of the ‘70s I moved to St Croix, for the first time, and fell in love with the island.

There were ups and downs but the ups definitely outweighed the downs. The biggest downer was losing my dad.

I‘ll take the 70s over the 80s even though there was a serious overlapping of many experiences

 

[Skully]

Maybe so in some ways, but i'll tell you this....it was a damn sight better then todays insanity. I never even heard of a mass shooting which is a weekly event today. Cancel culture and political correctness thats so rampant today you can't even open your mouth was unknown. Gas was dirt cheap even in 70s dollars. This country is so screwed up right now it makes the 70's look like paradise. I could write a book on why today's society, at least here in the USA is the worse it's ever been by a country mile. I didn't do drugs back then or now, but i can't imagine anyone thinking today's society is better then the 70s unless THEY were on some very heavy drugs. Oh and the music.....don't get me started ! Of course i DO realize taylor swift is far better then zeppelin or tull or james taylo or on and on and on and on. (sarcasm alert)

What we had then that I couldn't give my kids was the freedom to roam and be out on our bikes and go wherever, from the streets to the creeks to the sewer lines that ran under the street (I was too chicken to do that, fortunately).

The music was better then and, shockingly, the country was less divided, even when you factor in Vietnam, but culture was a lot more backwards then in regards to marginalized groups -- although we all got along in my neighborhood -- and the cigarette smoke was yucky. Thankfully, my parents didn't smoke.

I certainly wouldn't want to go back and give up all the technology. I've got a recording studio in my garage, thousands of movies and TV shows at my fingertips and, you know, the internet.

Remember when once a movie had left the theaters and you had to wait, often years, to see it again on TV? I was lucky that there was a junior college within walking distance (Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, Ca.) that had a free film program, so I got see things like... well, I just showed my daughter the 1972 big screen adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s "Slaughterhouse-Five," which I probably saw there as an unaccompanied minor at the age of ten, with Valerine Perrine's boobs 'n' everything. There was also a second run movie theater within walking distance that would let kids into R-rated movies, so as a 10-year-old I saw things like "Lenny," with Valerie Perrine's boobs again (in a lesbian scene!) and "Marathon Man," with Marthe Keller's boobs!

 

[bgmacaw]

I'd be in bed with the radio on
I would listen to it all night long
Just to hear my favorite song
You'd have to wait till you could hear it on the

AM radio AM radio
Yeah you could hear the music on the
AM radio AM radio
I can still hear Mama say
"Boy turn that radio down!"

 

[Skully]

Graduated high school in 77. I don't remember them fondly, for the most part. Alternative rock radio was good for a few years, then turned into crap. Fashions were terrible. American made cars were terrible and broke down all the time. Fenders were heavy and had poly finishes a half inch thick. Rock concerts in hockey rinks had lousy sound.

The 80s were better IMHO, except for gated snare drums on everything

Hey! Watch what you say about gated snares!

 

[ficelles]

From what I can remember, the 70s were a great time.

 

[maxvintage]

Also regarding those pictures, I lived in Manhattan in 1978, age 18, camping out in various apartments. NYC was great--gritty, dirty, graffiti, crime but also much awesomeness. There was still actual meat packing going on in the meatpacking district. There was still industry. There was this weird concentration of businesses--48th street was all music shops for one entire block. The was a flower district, there was a novelty joke and magic shop district: there were three shops on the same block in Greenwich village that specialized in chess. There were pay phones and they always had a line. Times Square was spectacularly sleazy and awful.

It was very different; I lived there for two years in the late 80s and it was great still, but changign int all finance and no industry, and it was eve more expensive and it was being "cleaned up" which made it in some ways less interesting and in some ways better

 

[Harry Styron]

It was a good time to be in college, which was still pretty cheap, but not a great time to be looking for a job.

The economy in the US generally was weak. Energy prices began shooting up because of OPEC. Inflation was high from 1973 for the rest of the decade. We experienced “stagflation,” which was simultaneous high unemployment and price inflation, with recessions and little economic growth.

If you managed to get a job out of college as a teacher, you might start around $8,000 per year. If you were an accounting grad with good grades, maybe $13,000. In the Midwest, a starter home (1,200 sq ft) went for around $18,000.

Major environmental laws were enacted between 1970 and 1975, which would lead to the end of a lot of the most visible kinds of air and water pollution, such as black smoke pouring out of powerplants and factories and untreated sewage and industrial wastewater discharged into streams and lakes, and acid rain. Also, after lots of bad technology, car exhausts eventually became cleaner, and the thick brown layer of smog that hung over even small cities began to lessen. Away from industrialization, the ecology was much more intact than now.

There were less than half the number of cars and people didn’t drive as many miles. You could escape from traffic.

Suburbanization outside of Boston-DC, Chicago, Houston, Dallas-Ft Worth, St Louis, Atlanta, Detroit, Denver, and LA-San Diego, was much less intense. Austin, Nashville, Tulsa, Columbus, Orlando and other places now having metro areas with more than a million people, were under 500,000.

The population of the US has almost doubled since 1970, and the population of the southern tier of states has tripled. In other words, there are a lot more people in a lot of places. But in the 1970s, the hollowing out of small towns in the northeast, the Midwest and the upper south had not progressed much. A town of 8,000 or more would have a Sears store, JC Penney, Montgomery Wards, Safeway, Kroger, SS Kreskge, Rexall, Dayton-Hudson, Woolworths, Walgreens, etc. There would be a locally-owned newspaper, radio station, menswear store, etc. Walmart, Kmart, Woolco, and Target were just getting rolling and would create the pre-Amazon retail landscape.

 

[Hags]

When your living in a particular time, let’s say the 70s
you didn’t say this is great l don’t have to wear a seatbelt and I can smoke anywhere or this is a good time for rock music.
It was just life as you knew it.

 

[Ricky D.]

Gigging in southwest Baltimore dive bars with an eight piece soul band five nights a week plus working forty hours. Sharing a house with three other players, probably averaged six or seven hours a day with a guitar in my hands.

Cheap gear by today’s standards. I had a 61 LPSG Custom and a BF Bandmaster with an extra cab, all bought used for $650.00. No pedals.

Life was good.

 

[Esquire Jones]

I’ll just add that my Schwinn Stingray in 76 was a birthday present that I’ll never forget.

Canary yellow, cheater slick in the back, sissy bar.

My god, it was beautiful.

And, once again, despite the negatives, social cohesion was infinitely better.

 

[telleutelleme]

I finished college in 1972. I met my wife Jan 20, 1973. She owned a 71 Mustang and I had a 69 Beetle. We met in an apartment complex club with DJ music, cheap beer and a large dance floor. They all had them. We went to a flat track and TT race in the Astrodome on our first real date (she was automatically a keeper). We lived in a 1 bedroom apartment that cost $130/month, bills paid. Later a 2 bedroom for $180. We bought vinyl records and played them on an RCA stereo console. I had a 19" Panasonic color TV with Rabbit ears. Weed was cheap. I loved my job as a software engineer and she loved hers working for an attorney. During the 70's we went to great concerts and a few Willie Nelson Picnics. I had a leisure suit in Salmon color and I wore it several times. Later on I went to Gilley's and still have the cowboy hat I bought (the only time I ever wore one and ever will). In 1979 I got to go to China as part of the first O&G technology sale of a seismic vessel. My wife was able to join me later. It was the trip of a lifetime. For me it was a wonderful decade.

 

[drf64]

Motorcycles came into their own. Super bikes And they were awesome.

 

[trev333]

finished high school in '72... I was in London by '77....

the world was open and free, there was work, surf, music and travel....

went to places without a problem that you can't go to anymore.... or are just rubble...

 

[Lou Tencodpees]

I turned 11 in 1970. My family moved to a bigger, nicer house. My dad was a hard working blue collar man gainfully employed. It was the year I started playing guitar. It was the decade I first fell in love. I had a happy childhood and the 70's were the biggest part of that. My parents were young and still alive. 70's get a thumbs up from me from my experience, all things considered.