I Miss the Seventies

While doing the end of my Christmas present wrapping this evening, I began poking around Youtube for some eye candy to occupy my visual field and pretty soon found myself looking at 30-plus year-old clips of the Jackson Five, among others, and after inundating myself with images of Carol Burnett and the progressive rock group, Curved Air, I began to feel a deep sense of nostalgia for the Me Decade, which—for all its reputation as an era of hedonism and naval gazing—wasn’t such a bad time to grow up during and which probably has more to do with my attitudes towards the environment, social justice, and respect for people’s basic liberties than I’m often aware of.

It struck me that for my daughter, Mimi, born 40 years after me in 1997, the “Seventies” will be the “Twenty-one Teens,” and it will be interesting to see how she recalls those formative years in her life as she moves from childhood, through adolescence, to the first tiptoeing into adulthood. I, of course, can’t separate the social experience of the 1970s from my own personal development; the decade begins for me with a transister on my paper route playing Led Zepplin's "Whole Lotta Love," and ends with me head-banging in the Mudd Club crawling around on the floor looking for my broken glasses. In between, there was high school, King Crimson, Nixon resigning, a variety of altered states of consciousness, and some really bad haircuts.

I don’t want to turn into one of those old guys who’s always talking about “the good old days,” especially since it’s not obvious to me that the Seventies really were; I recall, for instance, lying awake all night New Year’s even 1973, listening to my clock radio play songs like Carly Simon’s “Your So Vain,” and John Lennon doing “How Do You Sleep?” and thinking that the end of the world was clearly nigh.

Thirty-five years later, it suddenly seems to me it still is.