If ever there was a decade I’d enjoy being stuck in forever it’d be the 1970s. Watergate bothered me, of course, and Vietnam, drugs, and civil unrest were bummers, too. Never mind curfews, parental discipline, and hours of bad television. What redeemed the decade for me was the music, which reached its pinnacle in the era bracketed by the break-up of the Beatles and the third effort by the Clash. True, the era witnessed the advent of disco – but the choices on the radio dial were plentiful, rendering disco merely annoying for discerning listeners aware of the plentitude of options.
Radio formats of the 1970s were wide-ranging, bubblegum pop interspersed with everything from early heavy metal to soul, country, psychedelia, rhythm-and-blues and all sorts of hybrids and cross-pollinations right, left, and center of the dial. The exposure to the multi-various genres was certainly there, but what was missing for a kid like me growing up in rural, northern Michigan, was visual context. . . .
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