1974 - come and take me by the hand
Dec. 12th, 2014 07:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
melliciousSo the song representing 1974 ended up being the Doobie Brothers:
I was thinking of "Sweet Home Alabama" just because I remember it so vividly from that year, but the whole Neil Young business sticks in my craw and I couldn't bear to use it. (Wikipedia has a whole page on the song including a section on the controversy in case you don't know what I'm talking about.) The members of Lynyrd Skynyrd have apparently claimed at various times that they didn't mean to say they supported George Wallace, but if that's true they should've made that clearer. I do buy that they may well have meant the lyrics generally as a sort of "not all Southerners" thing, in a way, but still, it's not much of an excuse. So as a general representative of that kind of music, I give you the Doobie Brothers instead. They're a California band, as I understand it, but it's about the South, at least! And I loved this song at the time, although I'm not sure I really knew who sang it back when I was 14. The Doobie Brothers were not as famous then as they'd become later on.
(Plus if I was still waffling about SHA, there's the Confederate flag on the cover of the single. Ugh.)
This was also the year of "Hooked on a Feeling" - people went around going "oohga-oohga-oohga-chaka" all the time - but that's gotten so much airplay from Guardians of the Galaxy that I didn't feel like that would be that interesting a choice. (I do still love that song, though.) (Incidentally, I watched GotG the other night on iTunes - it's still awesome. I don't know why I love it so much, but I do. Also the HD picture AND the sound were surprisingly awesome on my 20" computer screen and dinky little Dell speakers.)
Wikipedia lists the #1 song of the year as "Kung Fu Fighting" which I find a bit surprising, though I do know that when people weren't going "oohga-chaka" they were doing fake kung fu chops, that year. (But actually kung fu & karate had been sort of a craze for several years, as I remember it.)
Of course this was also the year that Nixon resigned. I remember that the Watergate hearings were on the TV endlessly in the summer, and we were mad because by then we were in the habit of watching soap operas when we were home, and they weren't on, most of the time, because they were pre-empted by the news. ("All My Children" was the one we especially watched, at that time.)
Added: One thing about Guardians of the Galaxy that I apparently failed to take in the two times I saw it in the theater, and I'm sure many or most of you are ahead of me on this - I didn't really snap to the big gap between the time Peter Quill was abducted by aliens (1988, the movie says) and the time the songs on the Awesome Mix were from, in the 70s. In other words, they were not the songs that he would have chosen at the time, they were the songs his mother liked when she was his age, maybe. Meaning that his mother was probably somewhere in my general age range, maybe a little younger, if anything. (I was 28 in 1988, plenty old to have a kid.) I only figured this out because I was looking up the songs of 1973 the same night I was watching the movie - although actually I think it was the date of his abduction that I was a bit unclear on.
I was thinking of "Sweet Home Alabama" just because I remember it so vividly from that year, but the whole Neil Young business sticks in my craw and I couldn't bear to use it. (Wikipedia has a whole page on the song including a section on the controversy in case you don't know what I'm talking about.) The members of Lynyrd Skynyrd have apparently claimed at various times that they didn't mean to say they supported George Wallace, but if that's true they should've made that clearer. I do buy that they may well have meant the lyrics generally as a sort of "not all Southerners" thing, in a way, but still, it's not much of an excuse. So as a general representative of that kind of music, I give you the Doobie Brothers instead. They're a California band, as I understand it, but it's about the South, at least! And I loved this song at the time, although I'm not sure I really knew who sang it back when I was 14. The Doobie Brothers were not as famous then as they'd become later on.
(Plus if I was still waffling about SHA, there's the Confederate flag on the cover of the single. Ugh.)
This was also the year of "Hooked on a Feeling" - people went around going "oohga-oohga-oohga-chaka" all the time - but that's gotten so much airplay from Guardians of the Galaxy that I didn't feel like that would be that interesting a choice. (I do still love that song, though.) (Incidentally, I watched GotG the other night on iTunes - it's still awesome. I don't know why I love it so much, but I do. Also the HD picture AND the sound were surprisingly awesome on my 20" computer screen and dinky little Dell speakers.)
Wikipedia lists the #1 song of the year as "Kung Fu Fighting" which I find a bit surprising, though I do know that when people weren't going "oohga-chaka" they were doing fake kung fu chops, that year. (But actually kung fu & karate had been sort of a craze for several years, as I remember it.)
Of course this was also the year that Nixon resigned. I remember that the Watergate hearings were on the TV endlessly in the summer, and we were mad because by then we were in the habit of watching soap operas when we were home, and they weren't on, most of the time, because they were pre-empted by the news. ("All My Children" was the one we especially watched, at that time.)
Added: One thing about Guardians of the Galaxy that I apparently failed to take in the two times I saw it in the theater, and I'm sure many or most of you are ahead of me on this - I didn't really snap to the big gap between the time Peter Quill was abducted by aliens (1988, the movie says) and the time the songs on the Awesome Mix were from, in the 70s. In other words, they were not the songs that he would have chosen at the time, they were the songs his mother liked when she was his age, maybe. Meaning that his mother was probably somewhere in my general age range, maybe a little younger, if anything. (I was 28 in 1988, plenty old to have a kid.) I only figured this out because I was looking up the songs of 1973 the same night I was watching the movie - although actually I think it was the date of his abduction that I was a bit unclear on.
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