You left them behind, surprised they're here.

 

When everything is post modern and seperated a few of us may see that indeed nothing is.

 

South Africa was a very different place to many other countries and unless a person knew where to look a lot of music and other things were kind of unavailable. I remember asking for Rush on one occasion after the 2112 release at a record shop (not Hillbrow records) and being looked at like I was strange by the owner.

We were shown Partridge family movies in our school hall every Saturday morning in around 1970 as well as Voyage to the bottom of the sea and the Avengers and if we were caught holding a girls hand during those Saturday morning sessions there was a whole heap of trouble.

Trying not to be rude here, you're too young to make such generalisations Dave, and even though I'm 3 years older, I'm also a year or two too young aswell. Any kid in the 70s with Osmonds and Cassidy on their school bag would never have listened to The Stones, Beatles or Kiss ... as Bowie says in All The Young Dudes; "My Brother's back at home with his Beatles and his Stones, we never got it off on that revolution stuff, what a drag, too many snags" - there was an age gap, and younger siblings never listened to the music of their older brothers and sisters - the listening range was two to three years for each type of artist regardless of whether they were Pop, Rock or Underground. Access to music was similarily restricted to very narrow time spans, unless it was extremely sucessful an album released in 1969 would have been deleted from the catalogues by 1972, which made true underground music extremely difficult to obtain - take something like Capability Brown or Clouds - if you didn't buy it within 6 months of it being released then you'd never have seen it in the record shops. Even ELO's (very Prog) 1971 debut was nigh on impossible to find by the time they hit the big time with A New World Record in 1976

 

Similarily among kids that were into Progressive Rock (and yes, in England in 1970-76 that's exactly what we called it, just because it took the rest of the world 6 to 30 years to catch-up it's not our fault) and Underground music there was a hireachy of cool that would never have put Yes, Floyd, Sabbath and Heep into the same bag either. Groups of kids that were into one type of Underground music would never countenance their music being compared to another type of Underground music, just as they would never dream of doing that today.

 

Time has blurred our memories - then was no different to now.

 

Your categoraisations from that time are a little vague and not exactly accurate - we had heavy rock, progressive rock, blues rock, progressive blues, psychedelic rock, acid rock, space rock, country rock, techno-rock (I remember Yes being called this and techno-flash at one point), head music, jazz-rock, glam rock, funk-rock, electronic, bubble-rock, stomp rock, pub-rock, etc., etc., etc.