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

Atavachron wrote: cstack3 wrote: Wish I could convert my memories into video!  The hippies in downtown Chicago selling underground newspapers, the head shops selling hash pipes, the record stores, the bra-less chicks!!  Loved it!   come to S.F., that's daily life  (well there are also bra-less men, but that's another story)

scandosch wrote: I'm 50. So I grew up listening to the music of the seventies. I must have been on another planet, because I dont agree with most of what I read hereby, really. Maybe US was another planet then (but I doubt it having seen several films about the era...) but here in Europe the situation was not that! First of all: in the seventies no TV show, no rock magazine was making choices. The market was! I mean, if a band or artist was selling hard, it was on display everywhere. And that happened because the record companies based band selection on the quality of the concerts, THEN a band was allowed to make records! So the ones who got into a studio were absolute quality bands. Talent selection was the key to every company. Today record companies just buy finished records, dont take risk, just put on the market everything, hoping that enough people will buy to cover the cost. Back then to record music cost millions. So as an adolescent I was happy to see every week end a concert of Yes, of Genesis, or Deep Purple, or Styx (you pick) and discover new music. The very same bands came in concert in near cities and venues of HUNDREDS of sitting places, for the price of a record. And the record were not expensive...If you consider the production cost of a vinyl and those of cds, the latter should cost MAX 10 dollars each new, situation reached only in the last 4-5 years. Was it difficult to get records of less known bands? Maybe, but not impossible. What was really difficult was to get bootlegs, usually japan ones, because illegal and very very expensive. But the most important thing: not every day you had new records coming out. So when a band was publishing a new LP it was an event. I remember many many evening spent with friends in my tiny room listening to the new Banco, tha last Santana or the magical double (DOUBLE) album of Genesis. So a record was playing for months, not days like today. This is probably the worst limit of Prog Archives: lack of historical sight. But hey, music is just music, so a matter of taste. Personally, having become a musician myself, I recall with the same pathos the first time I heard "Burn" , "Foxtrot", "Aqualung", "Atom heart mother", but also the first Asia, the first Dream Theater, not to mention when I saw at cinema show "The song remains the same" or singing all togheter Red on the beach with my girlfriend, and all other listening. I was lucky. 71 to 76 was the best music period ever for rock, and back then rack was only rock, against jazz, classic and country (for old people...) Scandy/Shakary

Nice thread. Here's my input. I'm 52 so the 70's were a huge part of musical development. The things I remember growing up in NYC:

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Great thread