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(Pink Floyd 1970 - A period of transition)
A few years before Dark Side Of The Moon became the classic it has, Pink Floyd were in the process of drifting. Syd Barrett, the guiding light and voice of the band had been out of the picture for two years and the remaining members were in search of their own. They were trying various things out, but to not much success. At the time of this live performance at the BBC's Paris Theatre in London, they had released Atom Heart Mother to decidedly tepid reviews. Their previous album Ummagumma was something of a failure and even the band on occasion have disowned it. But throughout all that, Pink Floyd had a large and loyal following and no one, least of all their fans, were ready to write them off. And it's good they didn't, because Dark Side Of The Moon was just around the corner.
This set consists of two tracks from Atom Heart Mother, Fat Old Sun and If as well as One Of These Days.
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(Nixon in 1970 - Just Say No. . and no. . .and no)
It was such a big deal, Nixon took Primetime television to talk about it. His veto of the Education and Health bills passed by the House on January 26, 1970. Despite his protests, it was largely viewed as a political move and a somewhat disingenuous display over the rising budget and our about-to-become involvement in Cambodia a few weeks later.
Nixon: “No matter how popular a spending program is, if I determine that it’s enactment will have the effect of raising your prices or raising your taxes, I will not approve that program. Now for these reasons, for the first time tonight instead of signing a bill which has been sent to me by the Congress, I am signing this veto message.”
Right after the non-signing, NET (pre-PBS) hosted a discussion of the bill, its veto and the implications hosted by Mitchell Krause. It was generally conceded that Nixon, as usual was not in touch with millions of Americans hanging by a thread and that social programs were not his strong suit.
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(King Crimson - Went from "The Cheerful Insanity Of Giles, Giles and Fripp" to this - and never looked back)
A special installment of the Roundtable tonight. A live performance during what is considered the heyday of one of the milestone Progressive rock bands, King Crimson. This 1970 concert, recorded by the BBC has as close to the original lineup as possible.
I've often wondered what would have happened, had King Crimson never existed in the first place. So many bands from 1969 on owe so much to the pioneering work of Robert Fripp and company. I'm sure someone would have come along, and maybe the direction would have been totally different. Or maybe it would have stayed frozen in time.
No. The nice part about music is that it constantly changes - it never quite stays the same. That's what's great about it.
And that's what was so great about King Crimson - they were constantly evolving.
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(John & Beverley Martyn - 1970 - further evidence music is timeless)
When my friend Mig Schillace mentioned he was working on a John Martyn tribute project, I instantly thought of some of the great albums he had done throughout his all-too-short career. One that came to mind was a collaboration he had done with his then-wife Beverley. Stormbringer was always one of my favorites. To me it was one of those perfect albums that has stood the test of time these, almost forty years.
For some reason, and I can't explain why, time seems to stop when I listen to The Ocean. Somehow seems apropos on a Saturday night.
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(Van der Graaf Generator - in a word, intense)
Probably one of the better known of the Prog-rock era of bands, Van der Graaf Generator were probably the biggest influences of that movement in the 1970's. This was a band you could never listen to casually - it was not party music. This track, "White Hammer" off their first Charisma release in 1970 "The Least We Can Do Is Wave At Each Other" is typical of who they were. Intense, lyrical and dissonant with highly dramatic vocals by Peter Hamill - they were never a band you could take or leave. You either loved them from the get-go or you couldn't stand them.
And their music has had wide ranging influence for a lot of musicians over the years. I remember talking with Lars from Metalica several years ago, and the subject of influential bands came up. Without a beat, Van der Graaf was high on his list.
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(Caravan - The Canterbury water system must've been amazing)
Shortly after my first exposure to the likes of Soft Machine, I was quick to realize there was a lot more where they came from. Seems the town of Canterbury was responsible for turning out a lot of talented bands with a lot of new and interesting ideas about music.
One of those bands was Caravan - a really interesting mixture of rock, jazz, fusion and noise, all in one big overwhelming dose. Like Soft Machine, they weren't a band you could dance to - nor would you really want to. They came along at a time bands stopped being listened at and started being listened to. It was the start of what came to be known as Prog-Rock. Not for everybody. In fact Prog-rock really never took off in the States. By the early 70's the audience was fitting in with the whole Eagles-Linda Ronstadt-Black Oak Arkansas thing. Which was fine, but some of us wanted more to chew on.
Bands like Caravan did just that.
This is off their 2nd album released in 1970 "If I Could Do I All Over Again I'd Do It All Over You" - the title track, no less.
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(The Groundhogs - a power trio with no pretense . . go figure.)
When free-form FM radio came into being in the States in the late 1960's, bands like The Groundhogs were just what the disc jockey ordered. A Power Trio with a big following who first got started roughly around 1963, before the honing and refining process started and got them to where they were in 1970 when "Thank Christ For The Bomb", their third album was released. They were a staple on the festival circuit - raw, gutsy and loud; all the right elements.
They never toured extensively in the U.S. though - I think they did one brief foray onto the East Coast (if my somewhat addled memory serves me). But in any event, they were a popular band who are rumored to be still together and still gigging around the UK and Europe.
One of my favorite tracks off this album was Status People.
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(Great band - Terrible name - rotten cover - two out of three ain't good)
Here is another in a long line of mysteries in the never-ending perplexity of Rock. Fuzzy Duck were a very tight band that, by all intents and purposes should have been a massive hit. They came along at a time when bands were branching out in musical style, hitting Jazz, funk and elements that would later become progressive. They were in the right place at the right time.
But two problems become abundantly clear - Fuzzy Duck, let's face it, is a terrible name for a band. And the cover of their first and only album (the one in the photo up there) just sucked. To make matters worse MAM, the label whose claim to fame had been Dave Edmunds and Gilbert O'Sullivan, did virtually nothing to promote it and in fact pressed a very small quantity of albums when it was first released. It went straight into oblivion and the band, disillusioned, quickly broke up.
Over the years, Fuzzy Duck have achieved a kind of Holy Grail status, with original pressings trading for the prerequisite stupid sums of money, but belying the fact that they were a really good band who were just victims of corporate stupidity. Fortunately, a CD has been reissued covering their only album and some unissued material. But the damage had already been done - and reissuing an album some thirty years after the event doesn't make up for the thoughts of what might have been.
It is doubtful you've heard them. So this track, Time Will Be Your Doctor which starts the album off, is pretty indicative of what they sounded like.
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(A little close to home)
I think I heard this song once when it first came out in 1970 and only on an FM station. Needless to say, it didn't race up the charts.
From the best I can figure out, Fresh weren't actually a real band, but the brainchild of producers Ray Singer and Simon Napier-Bell, producers responsible for a lot of 60's hits in Britain. The musicians listed were Roger Chantler, drums Kevin Francis, bass and Bob Gorman, guitar. There were only two albums issued by this "group": Fresh Out Of Borstal and Fresh Today. And then nothing.
So Stoned In Saigon was an anti-war anthem that came out just around the time anti-war sentiment was at a high. In 1970 we had the invasion Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State and word back in the states was drug use was rampant in Vietnam.
So needless to say, I think the song's heart was in the right place, but it's sentiment was probably a little too close to home for the casual Rock Radio listener.
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( Survivor of the "Teaching Tour".)
Before the GOP succumbed to the lunatic fringe, becoming a burned out shell of its former self, there was something of a broader definition of who a conservative actually was - and it ran the gamut from staunch isolationist to downright left-leaning. The concept of "the big tent" seemed apt back then. But that was "back then"- 1970. Another whole lifetime ago. Even though the seeds of lunacy were being sown in abundance as early as 1958, they wouldn't make their full-fledged appearance for a few more years.
In May of 1970, NET (forerunner of PBS) had a weekly program called NET Journal where they ran a panel discussion featuring several prominent conservatives of the day, M. Stanton Evans, Russell Kirk, William Rusher and Milton Friedman, a sort of sampling of the gamut. The talk was remarkably civil by today's standards. But even so, you can tell where that freight train was eventually heading.
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(Kent State - April 4, 1970 - peace lay gunned down in the confusion.)
Probably as much as Altamont became the defining moment of antithesis to the Woodstock euphoria of 1969, the shootings at Kent State probably defined its own disillusioned view of protest, one that began in earnest and with idealism in 1964 with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. It came to a crashing halt here and probably did the most in speeding up the end to the Vietnam nightmare.
The reason for the Kent State protest was simple - it was a reaction to our invasion of Cambodia which began on April 29, 1970 - signaling an escalation to our involvement in South East Asia, at a time when we were told by a campaigning Richard Nixon in 1968, that an end to the war in Vietnam was in our sights. As was previously the case, we were lied to and we could see the war stretching on for years more, if not decades more.
Protests were held at college campuses all over the country. It was at Kent State in Ohio where it got violent, with a detachment of National Guard troops firing live ammunition into a crowd of protesters. Prior to this point, police and most National Guard used primarily rubber bullets or blanks, or in the case of shotguns, salt pellets rather than buckshot. In 1970 that seemed to have changed (I hate to say I know from personal experience, but I do).
When the deaths of the students at Kent State reached the national media it sent waves of shock throughout the country prompting, at least in California, Governor Reagan to go on the air and declare all college and university campuses closed for the better part of a week. With an air that was a bit reminiscent of his handling of the PATCO strike years later, Reagan cast doubt that the students killed by the guard were actually students, but "outside agitators" as he eluded in this address. If anything, it helped polarize an already divided situation that much more. The end result being an inquiry into the causes that brought about the death of people innocently protesting something they didn't believe in.
And thirty-nine years later . . . . .
(Governor Reagan reacts to Kent State the best way he knew how - blaming agitators.)
Well, if this doesn't paint Blue Gal as an aging hippie, nothing will.
Today is the 39th anniversary of the anti-war protests at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. For those of you under 40, May4.org has the history recap here.
Although I was in the first grade on May 4, 1970, I can't forget what happened in Kent, Ohio on that day.
I was there.
Not on campus, I was in first grade. In Kent, Ohio. My father and my mother's father were both faculty members at Kent. By 1970 my grandfather had retired from the Math Department. When he retired in 1968 he was the only math professor on record as opposing the War in Vietnam.
My dad, on the other hand, was in the Art Department. Nuff said.
We were rushed home from school that day in a panic of police sirens, smoke, and confusion.
When I got home, my mother had the front door locked for the first time in my life. "Mommy, what is happening?" "I don't know, dear." Mom not knowing, being visibly scared and shaken. Another first.
But she had the TV on and Walter Cronkite was talking about Kent. That was exciting to my six-year-old heart. I didn't see the consequences, had no idea what death was, let alone that four college students had been shot to death that day in my hometown. Their only crime was protesting their government's illegal, unilateral invasion of Cambodia.
I know, it's hard to believe a Republican president invaded a far away country based on lies and innuendo. (/snark)
The sad irony of Kent State, and what made it so explosive in terms of the "silent majority" of Americans, was that those Americans who could afford it avoided the military draft and the dangers of Vietnam by enrolling their children full-time in college and graduate school. All four students killed on May 4 were full-time students. If the war was going to kill sons (and daughters!) in OHIO? Many who were not outspoken before May 4, now said it was time to stop the war once and for all.
At my own house, a mile or so from campus, my two younger sisters, both pre-schoolers, were in their pajamas in the middle of the afternoon because my mother thought there might be an evacuation and getting the girls in their pajamas was something she "could do." They were playing making a tent with a blanket and the dining room chairs.
They do not remember that day, because it was just another day to play and make a tent.
I remember a few days later Kent was really, truly, on that proverbial "cover of Newsweek." I said to my dad:
"Daddy, before no one ever heard of Kent. Now no one will ever forget."
