I’m sitting here wondering whether to use the word “offal,” or the word “awful.” These are the things that keep me up at night. Well, the seventies were. Take your pick.
No one was up at night in the seventies. Well, not so’s you’d notice. You couldn’t buy a gallon of electricity with the proceeds of four misappropriated BEOG grants, so everyone left all their lights off all the time. I don’t know how much time I spent standing on a friend’s darkened porch pressing what I thought was a doorbell, but found out later was just a loose shingle. I’d give up and go home and they’d wonder what happened to me, and ring my phone once and then hang up, because no one could afford a phone call back then, either. You’d send coded messages to one another by counting phone rings. It limited you to a selection of very few coded messages, because after four rings or so from one of those black Ma Bell rotary wall phones with the four-alarm-fire bells in it, you’d answer it just to shut it up, and ruin the whole procedure.
Drugs were much simpler then, I’ll give you that. Rich people, who were somewhere between imaginary and hunted to extinction during the decade, started doing cocaine. But all that stuff accomplished was keeping you up all night so you could worry about how you were going to pay your rent for the next four months now that you spent it on fifteen-minutes-worth of cocaine.To save money, you could get a tubby girlfriend, and bum diet pills off her, which was pure speed. The pills, not the girlfriend. Those would make you stay up day and night, too, but on a budget, and with the money you saved you could find that guy, usually driving a Datsun B210 with an “Gas, Grass or Ass” front license plate bracket, and buy some Quaaludes from him. Then you could gobble those and reach a sort of equilibrium. You could manage to stay awake through all seven minutes of that video, for instance, but it wouldn’t gouge out your retinas and melt your cerebral cortex like it would if you were stone sober or speeding like state trooper.
What, you mean you’re sober right now? Well, don’t watch the video, then. If you’ve already watched it, I apologize, because some things can’t be unseen — like the elephant pants halfway through that extravaganza, or a picture of the President of the United States in a canoe trying to kill a bunny with a paddle.
If you were of a more traditional mind, say, the kind of person that wore a Whip Inflation Now button unironically, you could just abuse alcohol like a normal person. The drinking age was more informal then. You had to be tall enough to put the coins on the counter at the liquor store. That was about it. And the smokes are for my mother, honest.
By the by, I mentioned irony, but everything in the seventies was done unironically. There were no hipsters, so there was no irony. There was Andy Warhol, but he was acting ironically ironically, so he doesn’t count. Those people in that video meant to do whatever it was they were doing. They did it on purpose. You were supposed to like it, and be entertained by it. No, I’m not joking.
As I started to say earlier, alcohol abuse was your only hope to get through the entire 120 months of Seldom and Gommoron the seventies brought upon us. All the bars were full of ferns, brass rails, and disco, tube tops and turd curls, but they served liquor. They served liquor like Niagara serves water. They never shut you off in those places, just handed you a toe tag to go with your bar tab. It was glorious. I think.
Note to my readers from the non-distaff side of the ledger: If the seventies come back, you’ll be buying all the drinks for girls in the bars again. No one went halfsies back then, and men were expected to have a job and everything. Anyway, word to the wise: It’s really hard to get rid of the smell of a Sloe Gin Fizz that’s been vomited on the deep shag floormats in your AMC Javelin, so shut her off after five or so.
22 Responses
I think this must have been done by the same people who did Prisencolinensinainciusol.
To long for the seventies. This is the whimper not the bang of our foretold doom.
Well, I see you still have a few Heroin/Cocaine suppositories left over.
I dunno. When you had that 7 foot clown do his singing, it appeared to me that you were looking for your readers to conclude that this was gimmicky music. After all,isn't a 7 foot clown a bit of a gimmick?
Maybe so, but Postmodern Jukebox, the band backing the 7 foot clown, has a rather high-level gimmick- being able to play in a wide variety of styles. IOW, Postmodern Jukebox is much better than it would appear from their 7 foot clown bit- though even in the clown bit the pianist's skill showed.
Granted, this Busby Berkeley takeoff on Beatles' songs is rather schlocky, and it could also be said that '70s culture and music were schlockly. The elephant trunk, flopping in an interesting part of the human anatomy, was a hoot.
OTOH,Rafaela Carrá, the singer in the video, looks and sounds much better to me when sung in Spanish. I suspect that part of the problem is that works in one culture doesn't work in another, which is why the Beatles set to dancing seems ridiculous. Though maybe you and others don't go for her Spanish language stuff. Say what you will about 1970s music or culture, I rather liked a lot of Spanish language music of that era. Here are some examples. Camilo Sesto sings Jamás.
Julio Iglesias sings Canto a Galicia [Song to Galicia. Sung in Gallego]
Mercedes Sosa sings Luna Tucumana. [Argentina] Though it might be difficult to pin this on the 1970s, as she sang this song for probably a half century. I became aware of her in the 1970s, in Tucuman, her hometown.
Oh well.
Well, Sipp, you seem to remember more of the seventies than I do. Looks like I didn't miss much. It's as if I went to sleep wearing a tie died t shirt and raggedy-ass jeans and woke up in polyester bell bottoms. Yikes.
Yeah, the only good thing about the '70s was the Chevrolet Vega.
For John Lennon only heroin could numb the pain, the embarrassment, the shame. If he was privy to this video I'm sure this helped to send him that direction.
I was up nights in the '70s, but I had to sit up with some birds; some were sick, most weren't
Yes, I'll wait for Puddles to come out with a better version
Cruel, even by your high standards, Mr. Sippican.
"Ironically ironically", Yes, that is what it was, and it didn't count. The 70's were in earnest. Frightening thought.
This was so darn funny.
I graduated from high school in 1972, and I watched Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman instead of looking for a job.
That's all I remember.
Actually, for me the 1980s were more of a blur, but I blame that on teaching grammar to ninth graders who thought "were" was a location as in "were you at?"
🙂
I used to wear my hair like that, but it was an accident.
The Beatles' music should not be done by anyone but Toru Takemitsu.
And that includes all attempts made by Wing (No relation to Paul McCartney)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovEASuIqVbY
I wanna know how that person could stand on a beetle in those heels and not fall through.
All those 70's beetles have been recycled into tinfoil hats.
The lesson I learned from the 70s was Rule 62: don't take yourself too damned seriously.
Sipp,
First time poster, long time lurker;
As a child of the seventies, your story rings WAY too true. You had me at 'You must be this tall to buy alcohol' but put me over the edge with the Javelin. I lost my virginity in a 1969 Jav. Mine was green with the white stripe, and a friend had an AMX in a similar tone. Led to some interesting interactions after some late night parties.I think I still have a set of his keys somewhere… Happy Trails!
Yup, that's about how I half remember it.
Elephant pants?
Pretty Cool
Don't know how I missed this when it was contemporary
yeah, pretty much.
there was pink floyd & neil young though. good for a couple hours out of a decade.
the rest just really really sucked big double yolk eggs. ostrich.
Oh my god and fashion really took a beating in the 70's too.
My god elephant pants??? Somebody burn my eyes out..