It's tempting to say they were exactly like the late 1960s, but I'd imagine they were similar and different, like the early-mid '00s are to the late 1990s.  You didn't have disco then, but you did have Motown and movies like Shaft.

Dunno...I was only a mere chitling at the time!

British colour TV was in its infancy, 'tower blocks' were all the rage...

...but we did have 'glam rock'!

...but we did have 'glam rock'!


Thank God for that!!!!

I was born in 1972, so I dont really remember the early 70's until 1974 (which is more mid 70's).

I can tell you that here in Australia we only had black and white TV until 1975. I actually have the first ever colour broadcast of Australia's Countdown music show. Got it from Rage a year or so ago.

Wish I could help with the early 70's memories...Id be interested in hearing what people remember as well.






AN

Hmmm, I have only an American teenager's perspective to give...  ::)

To me, the mood was odd back then, a little dark.  A lot of change going on - by the early 70's a lot of "hippie" types were burnouts, even though we still liked hippie idealism.  Race relations, though still strained, were improving by the day, and old walls were being breached everywhere, even though resistance was still strong.  Drugs were all over the place, as we saw so many of our huge Rock icons succumb then.  Drugs were also a problem in greater society.  A different reaction to the same issue is the Jesus Freak movement of the early 70's.

There was hope by the early 70's we'd be getting out of Vietnam but it dragged on and on, with increasing protest (remember Kent State).  That was also the first time I remember runaway inflation, worsening as we got hammered by gas shortages in '74 (before that the price was really cheap).  And of course when the Watergate scandal started taking over the news, it added to all of our disgust.  Some of us still liked NASA and outer space and what the astronauts were doing - fodder for dreams then.

We were still digesting the Beatles' breakup - that was in a way the end of the 60's musically, for me.  Music technology was improving at a rapid pace, especially the use of synthesizers.  But this was before computers, so the music was still pretty "real".  There was some lack of musical direction in the early 70's; if you listen to songs from 1972 (that year in particular) you'll find it's quite a mish-mash.  (Things improved by 73 and later.)  Even so, there was TONS of great music to be had in the early 70's - the competition level was FIERCE then, so the weak stuff didn't make it.

Hmmm, I have only an American teenager's perspective to give...   ::)

To me, the mood was odd back then, a little dark.  A lot of change going on - by the early 70's a lot of "hippie" types were burnouts, even though we still liked hippie idealism.  Race relations, though still strained, were improving by the day, and old walls were being breached everywhere, even though resistance was still strong.  Drugs were all over the place, as we saw so many of our huge Rock icons succumb then.  Drugs were also a problem in greater society.  A different reaction to the same issue is the Jesus Freak movement of the early 70's.

There was hope by the early 70's we'd be getting out of Vietnam but it dragged on and on, with increasing protest (remember Kent State).  That was also the first time I remember runaway inflation, worsening as we got hammered by gas shortages in '74 (before that the price was really cheap).  And of course when the Watergate scandal started taking over the news, it added to all of our disgust.  Some of us still liked NASA and outer space and what the astronauts were doing - fodder for dreams then.

We were still digesting the Beatles' breakup - that was in a way the end of the 60's musically, for me.  Music technology was improving at a rapid pace, especially the use of synthesizers.  But this was before computers, so the music was still pretty "real".  There was some lack of musical direction in the early 70's; if you listen to songs from 1972 (that year in particular) you'll find it's quite a mish-mash.  (Things improved by 73 and later.)  Even so, there was TONS of great music to be had in the early 70's - the competition level was FIERCE then, so the weak stuff didn't make it.



what did you think of  Evel Knievel back then?

what did you think of  Evel Knievel back then?


;D

I thought he was a nutcase!  I honestly didn't think he'd survive all his antics.  Hats off to him for pulling it off...  ::)

Hmmm, I have only an American teenager's perspective to give...   ::)

To me, the mood was odd back then, a little dark.  A lot of change going on - by the early 70's a lot of "hippie" types were burnouts, even though we still liked hippie idealism.  Race relations, though still strained, were improving by the day, and old walls were being breached everywhere, even though resistance was still strong.  Drugs were all over the place, as we saw so many of our huge Rock icons succumb then.  Drugs were also a problem in greater society.  A different reaction to the same issue is the Jesus Freak movement of the early 70's.

There was hope by the early 70's we'd be getting out of Vietnam but it dragged on and on, with increasing protest (remember Kent State).  That was also the first time I remember runaway inflation, worsening as we got hammered by gas shortages in '74 (before that the price was really cheap).  And of course when the Watergate scandal started taking over the news, it added to all of our disgust.  Some of us still liked NASA and outer space and what the astronauts were doing - fodder for dreams then.

We were still digesting the Beatles' breakup - that was in a way the end of the 60's musically, for me.  Music technology was improving at a rapid pace, especially the use of synthesizers.  But this was before computers, so the music was still pretty "real".  There was some lack of musical direction in the early 70's; if you listen to songs from 1972 (that year in particular) you'll find it's quite a mish-mash.  (Things improved by 73 and later.)  Even so, there was TONS of great music to be had in the early 70's - the competition level was FIERCE then, so the weak stuff didn't make it.



Good post. From all I know, I have to agree.

IMO 1970, and to a lesser extent, '71 were still like the late 60's.

It was 1972-75 that was a period unto itself. It wasn't the "hippie styled" 60's anymore, and it was definitely advanced from a few years earlier, both with technology and entertainment. Politically and socially, it was a little more "stable" perhaps than the late 60's (widespread racism and colored water fountains for instance, were a thing of the past). However, there still was a "60's lifestyle" to it (crusing, smoking weed - everything else from Dazed and Confused).

1976 and up is the "Disco 70s" to me. 76-77 was the peak. Even by '78, things were slowly becoming the 80's (VCR's, Atari and New Wave were in their infancy).

Wow, that means there was only three years between the very last "60s like" year and the very first "80s like" year! ;)

Lots of plaid and big collars. Bell bottoms were still popular. Kids were taught to respect others(strange concept, I know). In November everybody looked forward to the Montgomery Ward, Sears, JC Penny, and other Christmas catalogs. Trick-or-Treating was actually done after sunset. Inflation was higher. It was financially advantageous to trade autos every two years or so. Home improvement stores, Mega stores didn't exist. Malls were the cool place to go. Small town businesses could actually thrive. Biking, skateboarding, sledding, and baseball were the popular outdoor activities. People were more neighborly and helpful.

I think in many ways the early 70s were the most interesting part of the decade (especially in the US) with Vietnam ending, and reverberations of the psycadelic sixties movement. In Australia, the hippie movement was several years late (like everything else) with such events as the Nimbin music festival and the Sunbury Music Festival in 1972. As Alright Now pointed out, colour TV was only introduced in 1975.

Of the better known movies, Love Story (1970), The French Connection (1971), Shaft (1971), Superfly (1972) and lots of others give a look at life in that period. Midnight Cowboy, though released in 1969, is a good look of life in the streets of New York in the period. Probably most similar to the late 60s with a kind of psuedo-hippy ethos in comparison to the late 70s.

I showed up in my family in summer 74, but by 78 I can tell you i remember having little courduroy pant sets and I wore vests a little, and my mom sewed my clothing, usually dresses or skirts in the latest polyester fabric I picked out. I still own my favorite blue /light blue and pink stripe skirt and vest combo with a blue shirt we bought to match. 
We used to run home, do our homework and watch Scooby Doo at 5 pm just when it was getting dark outside.  Of course Scooby had been around at least since 65 I believe or maybe 68 so, I didn't know we weren't watching "new" shows, but it was as much "mystery" as a little kid could take.  And I loved watching the Muppet Show and Disney presents on sunday nights.
 

I can recall the news was on all the time on our house, 70 on.  But New york was amazing. I know its good that it's clean and family friendly now. but I really am sentimentally missing the dirty 70s NYC.  the music really reflected the times. and new york was putting out good music. after 1981 that never happened again.  we had a new wave burst and then commercialism took over.
the clothes were goofy, and there was TONS OF CRIME. 
I miss my nyc.

I can recall the news was on all the time on our house, 70 on.  But New york was amazing. I know its good that it's clean and family friendly now. but I really am sentimentally missing the dirty 70s NYC.  the music really reflected the times. and new york was putting out good music. after 1981 that never happened again.  we had a new wave burst and then commercialism took over.
the clothes were goofy, and there was TONS OF CRIME. 
I miss my nyc.


You could've lived in Philadelphia at the time, lol!

I found this article from TIME from February 1971 discussing the confused state of the counterculture at the time. The main point is while the late '60s are about free love and peace of a counterculture put together, the early '70s is about confusion and what to do next; in other words, 1971 is found to be much more apathetic than 1967. Definately a case against 1971 as still being "'60s-like'.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,902802,00.html

The wrong people, the wrong drugs have taken over. English majors (ugh), fraternity boys and the down-and-outers who would have been bums anywhere are joining the culture. The aggressive psychotic drunk has sprung up now in the drug culture. Heroin and speed have replaced marijuana and LSD. Hippie violence against hippie has become commonplace. It is numbers: too many hippies. We can only afford so many people alienated from society.

These are the words of Charlie Whitman, hippie lawyer from Lawrence, Kans., a 27-year-old veteran of the counterculture who has seen it all. What Whitman sees happening in Lawrence is going on all over America: the counterculture losing its primal energy, which was, back in 1967, a beautiful, frightening thing to feel.

The counterculture began as an attitude, a radically new way of seeing life. Except on its political fringe, it was never translated into consciously conceived doctrine. It existed, in fact, mainly on the subconscious level, not so much a culture as a mass mental condition, a careless, peaceful state of arrested movement and introspection.

The culture sprang more than anything else from rock-'n'-roll music. The new awareness took its energy from the shattering, obliterating volume of electrically amplified music, so awesomely loud it made pant legs flap and ears go numb for days. This volume, so enormous it was more movement than sound, amounted to a new form of violence, and when it coupled with the anarchic, brute-sexual rhythm and lyrics of rock-'n'-roll music, it produced a mass catharsis.

The sound helped shape a generation whose aggressive urges were so effectively cauterized that they had little appetite for physical, intellectual or economic competition, and none for war. "Upward mobility" came to seem absurd, as did the educational system. With marijuana and LSD prolonging and deepening the disorienting effects of the music, the rock culture grew, so that today it is a predominant life-style among the 40 million Americans aged 15 to 25.

Paradoxically, as the movement waxed, the music waned. This began to happen in the spring of 1967 at the Monterey Pop Festival, at a time when it seemed the movement would ensnare the whole country in its spirit. "It's hard to describe the feeling we had," recalls John Sinclair, chairman of the radical White Panther Party. "Everybody was taking all that acid and dancing and screaming in the music and uniting on every level with everybody else around him . . . We had a whole new vision of the world, and we knew that everything would be all right once the masses got the message we were sending out through our music, our frenzied dancing, our outrageous clothes and manners and speech, our mind-blowing, consciousness-expanding, earthshaking dope."

But at Monterey, in the warm spring sun, the hard-driving energy of the new music was exposed not only to the young people, but also to the commercial visionaries of the big record companies. "The musicians were bought off," says Sinclair. "The music was adulterated and repackaged and sold to us like hamburgers." Instead of reproducing the spontaneous violence and energy of a live performance, recording studios began to "simulate" performances, recording one instrument, one singer at a time, then "mixing down" eight or 16 separate tracks of tape into a final record.

With the music transformed into a neat consumer product, the record companies and promoters deluged the market with records and "festivals," making the counterculture suddenly accessible to anyone willing to grow his hair long and take drugs. As the culture swelled, reaching down to the twelve-year-olds and out to relative "straights," it underwent a basic change.

Instead of an earthshaking shift in consciousness, it became for many merely a change in superficial values. Once there was safety in numbers; growing long hair and wearing bell-bottoms became more a matter of fashion than a statement of any revolutionary attitudes. Whole chains of hip clothing stores—led by Los Angeles-based Jeans West, 46 stores strong—sprang up and flourished. Movies that pretended to be hip but spoke only to "plastic hippies" (Getting Straight, The Strawberry Statement) overwhelmed earlier, more truly radical pictures like Easy Rider. The most successful of the underground newspapers —Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Free Press, the Village Voice—became such large operations they were forced to depend more and more on straight advertising to survive, and thus rose approximately to ground level.

The communal movement has suffered too. Communes began when the movement was small, when hippies had such a tenuous hold on existence they were almost forced to band together in self-sufficient units. But when so-called hippies came swarming in millions over the land, the rigors of the true agrarian commune came to seem unnecessary. Many of the original experiments dried up; what remain are mostly semi-communes, work groups that are more or less directly dependent on the country's economic system for survival.

In the midst of all this "co-optation," came the onslaught of hard drugs. In the wake of the Government's Operation Intercept, which slowed the flow of marijuana out of Mexico, grass became expensive and hard to get. When rumors linked LSD with chromosomal damage, the counterculture also turned away from that No. 1 mind tripper. In 1969, the culture switched in large numbers to Methedrine or speed, a drug that led many to chaotic, aggressive behavior. Then last year the heroin pushers moved in, and the damage was complete. The drug deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin were symbolic; across the country, thousands were dying of overdoses, needle infections and drug-related accidents. Terrorized by the influx of debilitating drugs, diluted by Woolworth hippies, the movement limped through the past two years a paranoid, fragmented version of its former self. Its political wing, which served mainly as theater, degenerated into bad theater, then the insane violence of the Weatherman. No longer buoyed by hope of a gradual takeover of the System, the culture finally faced up to the fact that General Motors was not going to go away and that some accommodation would have to be made with the larger society.

Now, as the masses of the movement's first generation leave school, they are faced with a grim choice of 1) continuing to exist outside the economy by a combination of panhandling, peddling their handicrafts and occasionally dealing dope; 2) becoming true outlaws and dealing dope on a large scale; 3) taking a straight job.

None of these alternatives is especially palatable for the members of the counterculture. In fact, they represent the end of much of the movement's dream. In that dilemma, some straight jobs have become acceptable. "Driving cabs is the In thing for hippies right now in New York," says the underground cartoonist Mad John Peck. In Berkeley, the freaks have formed their own cab company, and the cabs are psychedelically painted bombs navigated solely by longhairs. Being a letter carrier is also acceptable, and mailmen with Prince Valiant cuts abound. Some straight newspapers like the Boston Globe have allowed invasions of freak reporters, and "a lot of freaks are into cybernetics," according to Peck. But the acceptable straight fields are few, and most of them are near the bottom of the economic ladder.

All this means that the counterculture, the world's first (and probably last) socio-political movement to grow out of the force of electrically amplified music, has reached a grudging, melancholy truce with the straight world it set out to save. Surrounded, ensnared by a modern industrialized economic system, the movement has become fragmented, confused. That immaculate peaceful energy with which it began has been transmuted into a vast, yawning sense of futility, and there seems no way out.

I know that its pop culture was 100X better than today!

I found this article from TIME from February 1971

You could have started a new topic on it ::)

I found this article from TIME from February 1971 discussing the confused state of the counterculture at the time. The main point is while the late '60s are about free love and peace of a counterculture put together, the early '70s is about confusion and what to do next; in other words, 1971 is found to be much more apathetic than 1967. Definately a case against 1971 as still being "'60s-like'.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,902802,00.html
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Cool article!  As someone who was there, sorta (I was eleven then), I concur with that sentiment.  :)