You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Music: Five from the Seventies Part One - An @slobberchops challenge
A mere mention of the Bay City Rollers sends me in to convulsions, ughh.
There were some great bands in the 70's; they just weren't played on the Radio so no one knew of them, but overall I'd have to agree with you. From about 1977 to 1983 we saw a huge increase in the level of musicianship.
But of course in the late seventies, we had pubs with bands and we had masses of smaller concert venues. Town Halls etc mostly gone now and replaced by these modern mega-gigs. I was telling someone the other day that I 'almost' saw Greenday at a pub called the Duchy in Leeds in about 1995 and they thought I was telling lies!
But that's how bands started and grew in the 'old' days!! I'm not saying things were better then, although I have a feeling they were! but it was all very different from today both in music creation and consumption.
Agreed, the pub scene is but a fraction of what it was, but I was specifically referring to the fact that at some point around 1976-7 radio stations were holding Bee Gee Free weekends; allowing some other acts some room to get in. Southern rock bands like Skynnerd, Molly Hatchet, 38 Special, etc. had all been waiting in the wings to get some exposure. The mid seventies also produced some great rock bands like Boston, but having to wait for Disco to die, I never heard of them until I heard them on the Radio in 1978. By that time their debut album was 2 years old.
Ahh but we never had that huge range of radio stations in the UK. We had Radio 1, that was basically it. So we were stuck with their play lists and rarely got to hear anything that wasn't mainstream without going to the pub!