What was it like in the 60's and 70's?

What was it like in the 60's and 70's in Vineland N.J.?  George Dayner had built the "Palace of Depression" in Vineland N.J and it attracted witches and Satan worshippers to the town for decades. One sect in particular had revolted against Anton's Church of Satan on the west coast and they settled in Vineland. In 1971 police handcuffed kids in our classrooms who were brainwashed by the sect. A young man age 21 who tutored students in our school was sacrificed in a Satan ritual. Charles Pangburn conducted a 2 year investigation and found evidence of an underground sect. There was the brutal murder of Roger Carletto in 1957 by the hand of Juan Rivera Aponte who performed a Black Magic ritual on the boy. The 3rd generation Watchtower society was channeling demons through a young girl in Mill Woods. She later confessed that she was abused by the cult. Four doctors and one nurse gave the girl's father Rx's and she was drug induced for rituals. Satan cults held gatherings in wooded areas and if you were camping you could hear the sing song chanting which later developed into screams and cries. All through the 80's as well. Vampire cults, Satan cults, corrupted JW's and you name it. That is why I left for the road at age 18.

 

TODDLER wrote: Let's see if you remember this.........Playing clubs up and down the strip..sometimes Disco clubs would be on one side of the street and Rock clubs on the other. Rock audiences were angered about Disco and thought it would over throw the Rock music world and so they picked fights with each other in the street. Rock vs. Disco was what it was all about in the mid to late 70's.....man! and these kids would be beating the crap out of each other as I'd be walking into the venue. It's really strange thinking of it now. It seems ridiculous now, but back then it was the real world. They dressed with different codes and hated each other. Girls who were into Rock would get drunk and throw  whatever they could find....at them. In the 70's an audience that watched or danced to a cover band would give a standing ovation just for a decent guitar solo. By 1984 it was progressing the other way. Now it felt like the audience couldn't give a hoot if you were standing on stage playing like Larry Carlton or Steve Howe. Most people weren't interested anymore. Then there was this resurgence of Stevie Ray Vaughn bringing lead guitar back into the scene along with the speed demon players in Metal, but it didn't have the same magnitude of the early 70's when everyone it seemed was drinking, getting high and waiting to see a decent Rock guitarist. I can only speak for the east coast. It may have been different in the midwest or west coast. Nevertheless it would appear now that all of those realities did change.

or how about house parties, cool ones with tons of mellow people and good drugs, and after you left one you'd go to (crash) another

Great thread

Buncha old hippies, reminiscing!  Great stories, it is fun to read about how the experiences were different throughout the world!!  

In the 70's we almost all smoked pot and drank so our music taste reflected it.Here in the Seattle area we had AM radio and they played mostly pop rock,country rock and soft folk rock which if you think about it is sill much better than the pop music of today.Some of those Am ststions played funk,R&B and dance music for the city wimps and still that wasnt all bad.Most of us stoners and drinkers listened to FM radio for album oriented hard rock which included hard blues rock,metal,psycedelic rock and of course our favorite progressive rock.I grew up listening to my fathers country music like George Jones,Waylen Jennings,Johnny Cash and many others which I still love to this day.I started smoking weed and drinking in 1976 and I started listening to Tha Allman Brothers Band,Lynyrd Skynyrd and ZZ top first because of my country roots.My stoner friends started playing Pink Floyd and it blew my mind.I listened to side one of Wish You Where Here and I was never the same.Next thing you know I was listening to Yes,Jethro Tull,ELP,Nektar,Kansas,Styx,Early Genesis and Gentle Giant.My drinker buddies turned me on to Black Sabbath,Deep Purple,Led Zep,Aerosmith,Humble Pie,Judas Priest and that became my musical taste thank to the 70's which was a much more liberial time with no drug testing and sexual freedom.Ronald Regan ruined all this and the 1980's turned music into a plastic pop world.The only good music that prospered was metal.Prog rock was taken over by Neo Prog which wasnt all bad but Yes,Genesis and Roxy music all went pop.And of course the end of the 80's brought us Rap.What a freaken gift that was.

Yep, radio stations were way different then.  And let's not forget the huge influence of The King Biscuit Flower Hour.  I grew up in the heart of Appalachia, Clem.  Only had one local record store that thought outside the box.

Edited by ghost_of_morphy - August 29 2011 at 14:49

ghost_of_morphy wrote: I can't put enough stress on how different radio was back in the day.  Here in America, DJ's ruled.  If they liked it they played it.  If the owners didnt' like it, they got another DJ.  What that ended up meaning was that depending on your market, you might hear a lot prog mixed in with the hits of the day,  Or you might hear a lot of R&B or whatever.  It just depended on the market, the DJ and the station.  Anyhow, depending on where you lived, you could still get a strong prog station up until the very early '80's.  Nowadays, all radio stations (even ones that pupport to play randomly) follow a pre-approved playlist, and prog has a very minimal profile.   Of course that's just for America.  If you grew up in the UK, things were very very different.

octopus-4 wrote: lazland wrote: However, one of the sheer pleasures then was to walk into your local record shop, flick through the lovely vinyl covers, and discover some great music, or they would personally order it for you. Such shops are becoming a bit of a rarity these days, and that is a shame. This . Digging inside the covers was a great pleasure. I have bought a lot of good and crap albums just looking at the covers. Each shop was used to have a "discount" section with low price albums, just because they were trying to clear ouf their stock. I have found copies of Bo Hansson's Lord of The Rings, Black Sabbath's Sabotage and Waters-Geesin's Music from the Body and the mono vinyl of the Electric Prunes' debut in a shop like this, but also some "John Lodge" bought only because the cover was like a YES album that I've never been able to listen to a whole side. Got this album as a Moodies fan, Natural avenue,and sold it back after two weeks  None of the shops I was used to go still exists. A good moment was at the end of the 80s, when the market was converted to CD. Some lucky guys had the possibility to buy boxes full of vinyls (without looking inside the boxes) for few money. Imagine a box containing 100 discs, you throw 80 of them in the bin but you may find an original Thick as a Brick inside.....I have purchased the whole Private Parts and Pieces by Ant Phillips in that period. The bad...in my country (Italy) private networks started to be allowed at the end of the 70s, and the national network was ruled by politicians, so you couldn't expect to hear Aqualung on the radio because it was not liked by the Vatican. Knowing new bands and artists was a question of friends and home made tape copies.

Great topic!  We old farts do like to reminisce. 

I was in my late teens/early 20s in the 70s.  To echo someone else, back then FM radio would play albums in their entirety, and a lot of prog got played.   Pink Floyd (pre-Dark Side) was common. Zappa and Beefheart could be heard.

I was a bit luckier than most people I suppose, when it came to hearing and getting my hands on music, because I was closely connected to a rather well-known record store in Toronto that routinely stocked a lot of what we would call "prog" today*.  (It wasn't called progressive back then, I'm not sure it was called anything in particular but that could be failure of memory.  Genre distinctions were not so fine back then anyway.)   Most of the main prog bands had Canadian labels, and they always had a large selection of imports and odd stuff from everywhere.  So I could hear it, and then get it at a discount (I have to confess that when the orders came in, especially the imports, a lot of those albums never made it to the front of the store for the general public.....)

Along with easy access to the music was also easy access to concerts--I went to SO many free concerts back in the day, including VdGG in 1976....sigh.....

However, even at that, one often took a chance because there wasn't the opportunity to hear really new music as easily as today, even with the more adventurous radio stations.  I still have some dogs in my vinyl collection that I bought after hearing one or two cuts that never went beyond those one or two cuts.  There was also more of a tendency to buy new releases from favourite artists without hearing them first, on the strength of the catalogue.  That could be a mistake too, sometimes.

At any rate, it sure was a great time for music, but my experience was not typical I suspect.

I only bought based on cover if the cover was by Roger Dean.  Some notion of collecting all the Dean covers, I think. 

*One of the "interview questions" that would be asked of hopeful employees was "Who is the drummer for Magma?"





Edited by ergaster - August 29 2011 at 08:39