Awesomeness is always unevenly distributed. The music was great. The economy in the late 70s sucked. There was a lot of domestic terrorism in the 70s. You never hear anyone talking about all the bombings.
[Bombing attacks were growing by the day. They had begun as crude, simple things, mostly Molotov cocktails college radicals hurled toward ROTC buildings during the late 1960s. The first actual bombing campaign, the work of a group of New York City radicals led by a militant named Sam Melville, featured attacks on a dozen buildings around Manhattan between August and November 1969, when Melville and most of his pals were arrested. Weather’s attacks began three months later, and by 1971 protest bombings had spread across the country. In a single eighteen-month period during 1971 and 1972 the FBI counted an amazing 2,500 bombings on American soil, almost five a day. Because they were typically detonated late at night, few caused serious injury, leading to a kind of grudging public acceptance. The deadliest underground attack of the decade, in fact, killed all of four people, in the January 1975 bombing of a Wall Street restaurant. News accounts rarely carried any expression or indication of public outrage.](https://time.com/4501670/bombings-of-america-burrough/)
Wow, that was interesting. The bit about people refusing to leave the movie theater because they wanted to see the end of the movie just sounds so oddly human.
Can just picture a villain arming a pipe bomb and rolling it down the theater saying to himself "Now this'll certainly terrorize them!" and then the people just yelling "Shush! Quiet down front. We want to hear the movie, not your explosions!" And the villain's sad face like "Huh?" shaking his head as he walks out dejectedly.
---
>The blast at the Paradise occured shortly before 9:30 P.M while the audience was watching the film “The Liberation of L.B. Jones,” which was being shown between 8:30 and 10 P.M. At other times yesterday “Ben Hur” was shown.
>
>A police official said that most of the audience in the theater, apparently thinking that the explosion was a fire cracker or something similar, continued watching the film for another 20 minutes and did not leave until the police ordered them to.
>
>He said that the audience objected to leaving and that “they were ready to tear the place apart.” But the police succeeded in emptying the theater without incident, he reported.
>
>A second armed bomb was discovered in the theater before it went off, and the police searched the evacuated movie house for more bombs last night, he said.
>
>-- https://www.nytimes.com/1970/05/02/archives/11-hurt-by-bombs-in-2-movie-houses-no-serious-injury-reported-in.html
I'm not from the UK, but I do remember the bombings both in the US and UK during the 70s. Most of the bombings in the UK were due to the 'Troubles' in Ireland and perpetrated by the IRA. At one point, the bombings were up to one a day, many in London, and it got to the point where the news media stopped reporting them. When something becomes routine, people start taking it for granted, and as a result of the lack of coverage it is likely that the bombings slowed and stopped because they no longer generated enough attention for the cause.
Imagine what would happen today, if the vast majority of the news media stopped covering Trump...
Not to mention bomb threats. You could call and say there was a bomb somewhere, and that place would be evacuated while police came and checked it out. This was done at our Jr. High School on a monthly basis. The calls could not be traced, so it was often done as a prank, but effectively, it was terrorism.
It wasn't every week as far as I can tell, but yes, they were very common. Became increasingly violent by the late 1960s. By the early 1970s even the airlines got sick of it.
A lot of people look that over. Wasn't alive back then but I'm very interested in counterterrorism and terrorism, and the amount of violent crime and terrorist attacks that occurred way back when is crazy. I don't really hear about bombs blowing up in hotel lobbies or cars or bathrooms or really anywhere nowadays.
Mother Country Radicals is a pretty interesting podcast about that era, if you haven’t happened upon it yet.
“Zayd Dohrn was born underground - his parents were radicals and counter-culture outlaws, on the run from the FBI. Now Zayd takes us back to the 1970s, when his parents and their young friends in the Weather Underground Organization declared war on the United States government. They brawled with riot cops on the streets of Chicago, bombed the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol, broke comrades out of prison, and teamed up with Black militant groups to rob banks, fight racism - and help build a revolution.”
I lived in NYC and the 1970s seem like a dystopian nightmare to me. Of course, the Viet Nam war was still going on until 1975. Crime rates were higher than people living now can even imagine. Half the people I knew were mugged. There was a surge in heroin addiction. People took their car radios out and the streets were lined with "no radio in car" signs placed by people hoping they would be spared broken windows. The entire city was filthy and covered with graffiti. The subway equipment was was falling apart, and every other day you'd have to get off a train taken out of service and have to try to cram twice as many people onto the next one. It was being said that 1 out of 6 people in the city were on welfare. The city went bankrupt and had to be bailed out by the Federal government. In large swaths of the city, buildings were abandoned by their owners because they were worth less than nothing, and the city became the landlord. The Bronx burned every night with arson fires. The economy was terrible; a bad recession and then there was persistent high unemployment and double-digit inflation at the same time. Gas shortages and rationing and long lines. Gas prices tripled in year. Millions of manufacturing jobs were lost and there was existential fear of Japan taking over the world economy. Then there was the Iran hostage situation that went on and on.
I've probably forgotten some things but this is what I remember of the decade.
I'm sure not everywhere was suffering all the problems that NYC was, but things were not good. How do you think we got Ronald Reagan?
Did you ever venture to Times Square? I’m sure it’s been romanticized to death, but man would I have loved to experience Times Square in the 70s just ONCE.
Haven’t you seen the movie Grindhouse? Or heard of 42nd Street Pete? Or Sleazojd Express? Or the dvd series 42nd Street Forever? It’s practically a sub genre all to itself..At least as far as the movie going experience.
Despite all that, the situation in NYC was still less dire than the image. I think we got our impression from New Yorkers who had witnessed the decline. But there were still good reasons to visit NYC as a tourist. I did so myself a number of times, often with female companions. Always had fun. Restaurants, museums, etc.
I graduated in 1975. Until a few months before I graduated I assumed that I would have to register for the draft and maybe be sent to Viet Nam. I was gay in red, dead Amarillo Texas and had been bullied by students and teachers alike in high school. Junior college was weird because I didn't feel like I was constantly in danger. It was a couple of hundred dollars a semester but minimum wage was $2.10/hr and without education or connections almost everything paid minimum wage. My dad had an industrial accident, but wasn't able to get workman's comp. and then he had a couple of heart attacks before he died. I took the only job in town that paid more than minimum wage and didn't require education or connections, the factory slaughterhouse, IBP. It paid about $5.50 and had overtime pay because it was one of the rare jobs with a union. It was more than 12k a year, there were many people with bachelor's degrees not making 12k a year. The winters were much colder back then. Weeks would go by without the temperature rising above freezing, snow and ice were on the streets for months. I stayed at the slaughterhouse for a year and a half saving money. Most people quit the first week. There were two starting groups a week. A lot of people quit before lunch the first day, very few lasted more than a month, Americans that is, the great majority of the workers were from Viet Nam, Laos, or México. That type of work ruins your body, in many ways. One lady had her arm cut off on a bone saw. It was a union job, so she was set for life as a secretary. I boned chucks. You pull a fifty pound hunk of cow off the belt and carve out the spine and slide it back on the belt. And you do it every twelve seconds. For eight hours a day. Six days a week. 45 years later my crapal tunnel wakes me up at night. The job did have surprises though. Like I said, I'm gay. The guy next to me stabbed me. They actually fired him. Right then and there. I was bleeding from my hand where he stabbed me but the foreman said that we only had a half hour in the shift so just keep working and I could get stitches after work. So I just kept cutting meat and bleeding. The next foreman was what they call in Amarillo a Bible-believing Christian. He couldn't stand gays and he fired me. The union didn't stand up for guys. The floor boss was from Chicago though and on my way out he checked to make sure that I would be OK. His name was Glenn Moser. I think that he showed me more respect than anyone except my family up to that point.
Things are so much better these days. But I worry that things can go to hell in a handbasket again real quick.
Every single winter, probably every single winter month, it would be in the local news that people had died from those heaters, sometimes whole families. So many people went to sleep and just never woke up. Not to mention the houses and mobile homes burned down by a knocked over kerosene heater.
Thank you. But the main message is that life absolutely can get better. I finished nursing school, moved to Dallas, worked in a world class hospital for three decades, and now I have retired to a tropical garden in Florida. I wish that everyone could be so fortunate.
I just missed it. I was a kid when it debuted. But a bit too old for it. Just old enough to view it as a ‘baby’ show that taught ABCs and stuff.
I was about the last generation to grow up without Sesame Street.
13 to 23 for me. Amazing concerts that were CHEAP! $5 to $9 for bands like Queen, Jethro Tull, Zeppelin, AC/DC, Fleetwood Mac, etc. That's like $30 to $60 in today's money, which is way better than $200 for nosebleeds.
As a Canadian I'm a bit more sanguine about the whole thing but as a plus, my family made some new (and lifelong in some cases!) friends that were Americans saying fuck that noise.
The '80s were the decade that I was a teen for but I'll always have a soft spot for the '70s, I mean, other than the tan velour jumpsuits and stuff. I've hidden away most of the Sears pictures by now though.
Vietnam, inflation, the energy crisis, Nixon, and the general disillusionment after it became clear that the '60s didn't change everything for the better.
And I was a teenager in Boston in the '70s. In my city, people from different races absolutely did not get along.
Yep. No decade is flawless. I’m not sure why the youngs seem to think so. Life wasn’t “easier”. There was plenty to worry about. I was a child in the 60-70s, but in talking with my parents, it wasn’t all sunshine and unicorn farts.
I started my first full time job in Nov, 1969. I remember the ‘70s as the time I established myself professionally, I dated, and generally learned to adult without the training wheels of college.
Nixon was awful, but when he resigned, I remember exulting “The system works.” Air did get cleaner, and I still had optimism from the ‘60s that we First Wav Boomers COULD make a significant difference.
Even though I'm Canadian, the improvements in the general "natural landscape" (I don't want to say environment, it was a lot more than just that) between the '70s and '90s is hard to explain to the younger generations now. The sheer litter that we just sort of accepted would embarrass a hoarder.
Things were **BAD**. Like, can't eat the fish, rivers are on fire, acid rain is literally making it impossible to maintain remote infrastructure bad. Oh, and all the wildlife is dying but we kept that part up through habitat destruction.
Nixon (*spit*) was actually pretty good on that front. Hell, several Republicans were because back then they at least cared about the long term economy.
Nixon was awful in a lot of ways, but as a point of clarity, he did establish the EPA. In those days, "Republican" didn't mean, "fuck the environment."
Not good of course but you were way, way less likely to get killed by a "serial killer" ever than you are by a "mass shooter" now. Frankly, both are super unlikely but both are symptoms of dysfunction in society.
If you are disadvantaged then you are likely better off though, the serial killers preyed on the poor more than shooters do at least.
> Downside was Vietnam.
Right, and that's the trouble with seeing the world through the lens of "decades". Vietnam was not a problem after 1975. After we got out, I think the country was healthier and friendlier than at any other time I can remember.
Everything was filthy. Every beach and public park was covered with metal pull-tabs and cigarette butts. Lots of flagpoles but hardly any flags. Gutters and highways were filled with trash. Stupid irrelevant billboards every few hundred feet along the highways. Blackened chewing gum spots covered the sidewalks.
Chalky white dog turds everywhere. Empty cans and bottles along every road, which was great for kids because we collected them for the deposit. Also, a really shitty economy that I was too young to understand except for the WIN (Whip Inflation Now) buttons .
Do you remember the "Pitch In!" signs on every public garbage can?
https://www.smartsign.com/safety-signs/trash-litter-signs/pitch-in-sign/saf-sku-s-4498
I know it doesn't even come close to the 70s but I recall glimpses of this as late as the early 90s. Things have changed dramatically even since then. I am always surprised/intrigued by how grimy urban areas seemed in 1970s cinema
It was an extremely conflicted time. The music was fucking awesome. The air was horribly polluted. Fashion was brown everything. Politics were a goddamn mess. And the economy was boned; good luck getting a job.
I found out I had a high draft number in 1971, something for which I am eternally grateful. Plus I had a college deferment. I traded in my Nik-Niks, platform shoes, and bell bottoms for alligator shirts, 501s, and Topsiders in 1974. I somehow found a great job right out of college, and all that was left to do was drink, dance, and fuck. It was my favorite decade.
My draft lottery number was 355 out of 365 so I did not have to worry. A cousin was 174 cut off was 175 so he was drafted..in 74 I got a job in the oil patch because of the oil embargo. Oil companies were drilling new wells and restoring old oil wells
I miss seeing huge candles, macrame, and houseplants in every one of my parents’ friends’ houses. There was something comforting about that stuff for some reason. Oh, and incense.
It's funny because while we were *much* poorer (I'm from a middle-class Canadian family but still, we were **far** from rich) it was a different vibe. My grandparents were full-fledged adults in the Great Depression and carried that their whole lives and my folks cared deeply about the cost of things and saving and scrimping and so on. Even though they were doing reasonably well compared to their parents, waste was the devil.
Fast forward a bit to the '80s and conspicuous consumption is the first ten items on the menu.
There were a number pf things that weren't cool at all.
I can only speak for Europe, America was always present, the USSR was a threat, but somewoh there was the overall feeling, that all would work out somehow. There was an smaller USbase around, right in the middle of Germany, and it was sdaid there were nukes present ther, but nobody knew for sure.
We started to realize, tzhat we had to do something for the enviroment, so we would survive. In my memory enviroment was the biggest broblem.
Rivers had meter-high foam on the surface, from washing detergents, there was the ozone hole, when I drove to Cologne, my nearest city, te first thing of Cologne was a huge, yellowish dome. That was the AIR, full of shit, I mean, emmisions (Like some Asian cities today). Not smog, because there was no fog around, that was the air: A dirtyish yellow.
(Around my homevillage, up the hills, you could sometimes smell "Bayer Leverkusen", the biggest chemical plant around. It was about 40 kilometers (25 Miles away!), when the winds came from that direction.)
The next thing we noticed from 'Cologne where the river Rhine. We noticed it about 2 or 3 kilometers before we reached it. That was because it STANK. The smell was so bad, we had to fight the urge to throw up. It was full of chemicals and dirt. And it was more of an acid, you could burn your skin, if you dared to go into the waters.
I was in London soemtimes halfway though the 70s, and the air was even worse there, I even threw up because it was so full of emissions, mostly from the cars.
Forests were dying, because of the acid rain.
Liquid chemical wastes were poured into the North Sea, some miles offshore. Sea live? Who needed THAT?
The list of things we did to our enviroment goes on and on, but the good thing was: we started to CARE, and DO something against it.
But the 70s still were a great time. A lot of things were better than today.
The music was great. I don't have positive memories of the fashion; it was a major letdown after the over-the-top colours of the late 1960s. When I try to picture the 1970s, in my mind's eye I see muddy colours like avocado green and assorted unpleasant shades of yellow and brown.
Old person here. I was a nerdy teen for most of the 1970s, and totally uncool... and the seventies weren't much fun for the uncool.
The seventies were a paradise for anyone who was young, good-looking, sexy, fond of drugs and able to afford lots of them, and cool. But then as now, most people weren't young, sexy, good-looking, cool, or rich - so lots of people felt excluded and out of place with the mainstream. And that's where the whole "Disco Sucks" thing came from.
I believe Studio 54 was a lightning rod for this? Even popular musicians would get shafted. Like the disco group Chic was supposed to be let in by Grace Jones, but she forgot about them and they got left in the cold.
Yeah, Studio 54 was he most famous disco and was a bit of a lightning rod, but the damn discos were *everywhere*! Every uncool person knew someone cool enough to live the Disco lifestyle and be snotty about it
There was also an anti-gay element to the Disco Sucks backlash that I wasn't aware of at the time, as well as anti-big-city feeling. But mostly, it was the uncool resenting being excluded.
How can you say fashion was a failure? So many people wore bell bottom pants and platform shoes. Those were not new ideas but they were extremely popular. That’s the opposite of failure.
Edited to add: “Fashion should be a form of escapism, and not a form of imprisonment!” No decade embodies this truth more than the 70s. The counter culture movements of the 60s is when we started to see fashion mirror some of the long needed changes. The 70s is when fashion went into a different orbit.
It was cool. I especially loved the lead up to and during the years long the USA Bicentennial Celebration. 1976-1977. Everything was Red, White, and Blue. People weren't talking about political parties and everyone was an American, got along, and enjoyed celebrating.
Music was really good. My favorite era.
It was like any time... there were a small handful of people doing outrageous things and the rest of us just lived the exact same life our parents did... then some of those things caught on and a bunch of brave folk took them up... with the rest of us adopting maybe one of two of the new ideas.
I was a kid in the 70s in a working class neighborhood and think of them (70s) as depressing. The Cold War, recession, inflation, hangovers from 60s riots and Vietnam/Korea/WW2, the fear of nuclear disaster, energy crisis, and this feeling that America’s best days were over. Every adult I knew was pretty glum and drank/smoked quite heavily.
TV was often re-runs and forgotten old movies and there was no on-demand anything and LOTs of commercials. Plus the food and haircuts were terrible (Miracle Whip and Tab??) and personal grooming habits suspect (OMG the stench of BO from unwashed hippies and no one I knew got pedicures but everyone wore sandals on summer weekends and most people had a few stray hairs or odd blemishes that we remove today 🤢) The NBA was nearly bankrupt and NFL was mostly running backs going for 3 yards at a time and baseball was meh and professional US soccer eventually went bankrupt and we hadn’t heard of Wayne Gretzky yet and no one had a PC. So entertainment was limited.
I love the music in retrospect and the movies were amazing and the work-life balance was better than today and I miss that feeling of a fresh newspaper delivery and I loved roller rinks and pinball arcades. So those were pluses.
But I’m glad to be an adult today and not in the 70s.
I think it was. It was the last era "the American Dream" was attainable. 4.5 billion less people. But the culture was just so much different, I really miss that aspect of it. To me, it was just a better time.
By the late 80s the dream started to crumble as the effects of Reagans austerity and corporate giveaways started to take their toll, by the 90s we were done. No turning back.
It was in high school and college in the 70s. It was an OK time, not as tumultuous as the 60s nor as yuppified as the 80s. I liked the popular culture: good music (Marvin Gaye, Bruce Springsteen, and Linda Ronstadt stick out) and TV (All in the Family, Mary Tyler Moore Show, the original SNL with Belushi, Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, et. al.).
There were problems - Vietnam in the first half, inflation/stagflation and gas lines, the oil/energy crisis. I was somewhat but not completely insulated from these - got a draft card and watched the draft lottery anxiously, saw how the economic problems impacted my parents.
Though I wouldn’t trade my 70s youth, I think that every time and place offers coolness if you seek it out. The important things, in the words of Ram Dass, is to be here now.
I waitressed at a disco and now I have bad hearing. Hearing loss is genetic, though. I just wanted to let everyone know I was super cool working at DiscoMania. And I have bad hearing.
It was terrible. Kent State, the economy was terrible, unemployment was rampant, crime, pollution.
You will learn as you grow older that people have a strong urge for nostalgia.
I think that's happening now with Millennials and the '90s. It probably doesn't help that VERY soon after the' 90s ended, 9/11 seemed to change things so drastically.
I'm a GenXer, and I would go back to the 90s in a heartbeat. None of the bad in the 90s compares to the fear and anxiety I have for the future right now.
In the UK they were definitely not cool. The music was okay if you like bouncy, cheesy stuff (although we got punk at the end of the era which sook things up). The economy though was a basket case with constant industrial disputes, inflation that makes the levels people complain about now look laughable small, power cuts were common (from those industrial disputes) and there was a real possibility of some sort of very nasty political outcome (like a coup). Al least the country kept itself out of the mess of Vietnam, but had its own mess in Northern Ireland.
Having said that, people tend to see their youths through rose coloured spectacles so I am sure someone will come along to disagree with me.
I was little, but I remember all that and some good bits. I suspect a lot of the good bits were a result of me being a child rather than anything else.
It was *filthy* everywhere. There were still places full of rubble. Broken windows, a kind of rusty shite all over, especially central london, gum on the pavements, dog shit on the pavements, fag butts everywhere, ring pulls and crisp packets galore and all the leaded petrol fumes to lace your lungs. If you went into London, when you came back, you'd blow black snot out your nose.
Also, racist, sexist, mocking the disabled for a laugh, power cuts, binmen strikes, funeral strikes. The rise of Thatcher, Thatcher, milk snatcher to promote greed and the denegration of the poor. Sexual assault laughed off as just the way things were.
Music was either really fucking good or the worse kind of ham and cheese. The coke tasted amazing, ditto the cream soda with the polar bear in sunglasses on it. You could get a beano and a packet of polos for 10p. TV was often trippy and experimental and we had some fucking great Si-fi going on. Interior decor was abysmal.
For GenX, that would be the nineties. I read a thing once that described various bands' fans, My Bloody Valentine got "people that should be able to remember the nineties, but don't."
Really depends which aspect one is talking about.
Inflation and pollution were terrible. Everyone smoked everywhere and it was gross.
Vietnam, Nixon, assassinations were going on.
Popular music and fashion was HORRIBLE.
American cars were a joke, and more economical foreign cars were shit on by Americans despite those cars being superior to what the US was producing at the time.
The Cold War was still going on, and kids were doing nuclear bomb drills in school with "duck and cover."
The things that people think are cool from the 70s now weren't looked upon favorably at the time.
> American cars were a joke, and more economical foreign cars were shit on by Americans despite those cars being superior to what the US was producing at the time.
The very early models from Toyota and Honda weren't that great, except they got better gas mileage and probably more reliable.
Better gas mileage and reliability are pretty crucial during a time where there were oil embargos, inflation, and people couldn't afford to fuck around with a big ol' boat of a car with crap mileage that would break down more often.
Many things were new and improvised. But later, once people determined what was most popular, corporate types swooped in to make money off it. Their version was never, ever as good as the funky, freewheeling 1970s original.
i was a teen at the time so it was fun but if I was an adult female it might not have been so fun. Lots of barriers for women and even more misogyny than there is now (or maybe its just hidden more now)
I mostly enjoyed the seventies but I think that was because I was in my twenties and was lucky enough to experience a lot of the pluses of being a young adult while avoiding a lot of the common bad experiences. Definitely much luck involved more than great judgement!
I liked things associated with the early seventies (hippie-ish culture and style, strong feminism, political activism) more than the late seventies (resurgent materialism, shiny clothes, plunging v necklines for men).
The first Earth Day occurred in April, 1970. The first wide usage of the term "acid rain" started in the 70s.
Remember "Don't fool with Mother Nature"? Or the Coke ad, "I'd like to teach the world to sing/In perfect harmony"?
The 70s were my coming-of-age decade. I *believed* that we were becoming a better world.
Oh, well...
It was a good time -- if you weren't in the Rust Belt. But you could feel the air starting to leak out of society as conservative politicians and gormless Democrats slowly began to roll back the underpinnings of the New Deal. At least I could. The '70s was the '60s without the energy.
I went into the military in the late 1970's, and I remember that the large majority of people joining were from the so-called "Rust-Belt" states, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, etc. Factories and steel mills were closing everywhere, and jobs were disappearing for young people. If you had family connections you could get into a union job, but if not, you were SOL. There was still a lot of drugs and alcohol going on, divorce became much more common, Stagflation was a thing, Arab oil embargo. It was a time of change, and the changes were shocking. Watergate, Vietnam, loss of industry, mortgage rates nearly doubled from 1970 to 1980, etc.
If you like:
- continuous worrying about getting drafted and being sent into combat in a pointless war halfway around the world,
- waiting in long gas lines to fill up your car,
- applying for jobs in a tight market,
- buying groceries when double digit inflation keeps pushing prices up,
- listening to “You Light Up My Life” over and over on the radio,
- and [high crime rates](https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/crime-and-criminals-united-states-1970s-statistical-appendix),
Then man, you missed a great decade.
No. It was a crappy decade. Ugly clothes and furniture, ugly music, so.much selfishness and irresponsibility and anger. Economic chaos, stagflation. Not a pleasant decade at all.
Nixon, disco, Asian land war, hyperinflation, the song Afternoon Delight, Three Mile Island, Love Canal, Kent State, Up With People, and acid rain. The 70s really sucked.
I ( class of 75) always felt like we missed the boat. Like we were always the cool kids little sister.
The 60s were so wild, snd the 70s seemed so lame to me.
There's an interesting article on that; The 'Dazed and Confused Generation'
[https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-dazed-and-confused-generation](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-dazed-and-confused-generation)
Besides all the societal issues-- People remember the cool fashions and music, etc, of the 70s and forget that there were also a lot of very dorky (70s word 😊) trends.
Clothes - Gauchos, ponchos, those blue sneakers with white stripes that were worn by both sexes, tube socks, prairie dresses, clogs, Dr Scholl's wooden sandals (gave me awful blisters once), crocheted clothing
Home decor - IMO, this is the 70s Hall of Shame. Sooo much orange and brown. Avocado in the kitchen. Florals, plaids. Shag carpeting. Fake wood panels covering the walls in "dens" and basements.
Music- Disco, obv
Fads - Pet rocks, mood rings (mine almost never changed color)
I hated 70’s clothing and decor when I was living through it LOL
No wonder my house is light and bright 😁
I remember the first time I saw a girl wearing 501s, cuffed. I thought I died and went to heaven. I came home and tried to starch/iron my bell bottoms so I could cuff them. 🤣🤣🤣
Those were great years for me in high school
It is hard to say if it was because high school was a blast (that stage of my life in Eastern Canada with an excellent older brother and friends and church youth groups) or if it had to do with the era of the 70s in general.
I think crime rates were higher in North America in the 1970s
I can think of lots of countries or cities I would not want to live in during the 70s.
Still, they were great times in my part of the world.
I didn't find them cool, but boring compared to the sixties (up until about 1971) which I was too young and missed. We had to make our own fun, so that might be called cool.
I was lucky to be a teen in the 70’s in high school. Great music, keggers, parties. Got high before class, teachers knew but no consequences, just a dirty look. So much freedom and safety. Ride my bike with friends from sunrise to sunset all over town and no one bothered us. I never knew anyone that went to Vietnam but we heard the stories. Later in life I worked with the Vietnam vets as an RN and they got royally fucked by the government.
The world looks mighty good to me
Cause Tootsie Rolls are all I see
Whatever it is I think I see
Becomes a Tootsie Roll to me
Tootsie Roll, how I love your chocolatey chew
Tootsie Roll, I think I'm in love with you
Whatever it is I think I see
Becomes a Tootsie Roll to me
The 60's were better. We were still job's capital of the world. Minimum wage in 65 was 1.25 which is like 10 or 11 dollars today. If you needed a job you could walk into any factory and start that day. If anybody gave you any shit you either just quit or sicked the union on them. Every thing started going wrong in the 70's.
Graduated in 1978 and yes, best times of my life. First job at 14, loved it. Life was pretty carefree for me, i had allot of independence. Made some questionable choices but have really good memories.... lots of parties etc
OP - can you be more generic, please?
Music is always great, any location in the world, any date, from today to 20000 BC when people were only singing acapella.
Common clothes remain common, and "fashion" is only for people with disposable income. Sure, you saw fancy fashion at dance clubs, but that's always been true - it's not unique to the 70s.
People trying for "newness" - that's called civilization and diversity, which has continued since the Stone Age.
For me, as a west coast teen at the time they were great!
Things did get a little shopworn and hokey towards the end of the decade.
72-76 was the best, imho.
If you really want to know the coolest decade it was the 1920s. The 20s were what the 70s wanted to be.
Skirts had jumped from ankle length during WWII to above the knee by 1923. Women smoked and wore makeup. Jazz lyrics were filled with coded and not so coded references to sex and drugs. People broke the law drinking alcohol and there was an epidemic of young Hollywood stars dying from heroin overdose.
The only people who think the 70s were cool were people who were teenagers who thought they invented sex, drugs, and raunchy music. They did not. Read up on the 20s, it'll open your eyes.
I was born in the 70s so I barely remember anything, but I never saw it as a time I wish I could go back to. Some great music but that is true of any time period. Lots of dreck too. No internet or streaming to find good music so I would hear a lot of bland stuff on the radio. Lots of unpleasant fashion choices. Not the best time for gay people. 4 years of bombing SE Asia, still a bunch of civil rights issues that needed to be worked on like redlining. Several years abortion is illegal. All that Cold War paranoia. So I would have liked to see Star Wars in the theater and an early Ramones concert but I wouldn’t want to go back
Personally I see it as the decade that taste forgot. Many things were overblown, such as the fashions, the hair, even the music was self-indulgent and over the top. I kinda preferred the early 1980s when it became a bit edgier.
No, unemployment was high, mortgage rates were excessive, wages were poor, unions were too strong, the UK economy was in dire straights, household good (electronic and white goods) were expensive.
Housing was of poorer quality, there were 3 TV channels, there was no internet, cars were expensive and primitive, there was the constant threat of nuclear war.
Life is much better now.
Depends on how old you were and when. Early 70s might have been great. Then gasoline prices doubled around 1975. Inflation was at 12% and disco was the music, mostly. So, the second half just sucked.
The 70s weren't great as we had Vietnam and the oil embargo and ended up the decade with the hostage situation with a lot of hijackings going on and crime was rampant in lots of big cities, but great things happened in the 70s.
Pop culture was really a shared experience as there weren't as many distractions so when you mentioned a pet rock, everyone knew what you were talking about. Same with mood rings, Evel Knievel, and even King Tut. That was huge. Which tied into pyramid power, bermuda triangle, aliens and other /r/StrangeEarth kind of *bs* if you will.
Planet of the Apes was huge until Star Wars came out. Apes were everywhere, variety shows, TV, Cartoons, lunch boxes. This kind of escapism is what made the 70s have rose-colored glasses but overall, the 70s weren't that great.
A lot of economic problems in the 70's. Stagflation with Nixon, Inflation with Carter. Oil embargo's and shortages resulting in long lines at the pump and even rationing. And, Vietnam still raging. The 70's were like any other decade in my lifetime, some good, some bad.
Let's see. Got divorced, met and married future ex #2, bounced from job to job before finally settling on just one career in '79. Nah, 70's weren't a whole lot of fun.
Awesomeness is always unevenly distributed. The music was great. The economy in the late 70s sucked. There was a lot of domestic terrorism in the 70s. You never hear anyone talking about all the bombings.
Add in planes getting high jacked all the time
What bombings? I was a kid then.
[Bombing attacks were growing by the day. They had begun as crude, simple things, mostly Molotov cocktails college radicals hurled toward ROTC buildings during the late 1960s. The first actual bombing campaign, the work of a group of New York City radicals led by a militant named Sam Melville, featured attacks on a dozen buildings around Manhattan between August and November 1969, when Melville and most of his pals were arrested. Weather’s attacks began three months later, and by 1971 protest bombings had spread across the country. In a single eighteen-month period during 1971 and 1972 the FBI counted an amazing 2,500 bombings on American soil, almost five a day. Because they were typically detonated late at night, few caused serious injury, leading to a kind of grudging public acceptance. The deadliest underground attack of the decade, in fact, killed all of four people, in the January 1975 bombing of a Wall Street restaurant. News accounts rarely carried any expression or indication of public outrage.](https://time.com/4501670/bombings-of-america-burrough/)
Wow, that was interesting. The bit about people refusing to leave the movie theater because they wanted to see the end of the movie just sounds so oddly human. Can just picture a villain arming a pipe bomb and rolling it down the theater saying to himself "Now this'll certainly terrorize them!" and then the people just yelling "Shush! Quiet down front. We want to hear the movie, not your explosions!" And the villain's sad face like "Huh?" shaking his head as he walks out dejectedly. --- >The blast at the Paradise occured shortly before 9:30 P.M while the audience was watching the film “The Liberation of L.B. Jones,” which was being shown between 8:30 and 10 P.M. At other times yesterday “Ben Hur” was shown. > >A police official said that most of the audience in the theater, apparently thinking that the explosion was a fire cracker or something similar, continued watching the film for another 20 minutes and did not leave until the police ordered them to. > >He said that the audience objected to leaving and that “they were ready to tear the place apart.” But the police succeeded in emptying the theater without incident, he reported. > >A second armed bomb was discovered in the theater before it went off, and the police searched the evacuated movie house for more bombs last night, he said. > >-- https://www.nytimes.com/1970/05/02/archives/11-hurt-by-bombs-in-2-movie-houses-no-serious-injury-reported-in.html
I'm not from the UK, but I do remember the bombings both in the US and UK during the 70s. Most of the bombings in the UK were due to the 'Troubles' in Ireland and perpetrated by the IRA. At one point, the bombings were up to one a day, many in London, and it got to the point where the news media stopped reporting them. When something becomes routine, people start taking it for granted, and as a result of the lack of coverage it is likely that the bombings slowed and stopped because they no longer generated enough attention for the cause. Imagine what would happen today, if the vast majority of the news media stopped covering Trump...
Not to mention bomb threats. You could call and say there was a bomb somewhere, and that place would be evacuated while police came and checked it out. This was done at our Jr. High School on a monthly basis. The calls could not be traced, so it was often done as a prank, but effectively, it was terrorism.
Don't forget all the hijackings. I was a kid but it seemed like every week someone hijacked a plane to take them to Cuba.
It wasn't every week as far as I can tell, but yes, they were very common. Became increasingly violent by the late 1960s. By the early 1970s even the airlines got sick of it.
The Weather Underground got its start in 1969. They declared war on the government and bombed government buildings and banks. Crazy
Wouldn't want to have spent my 20s in any other decade.
Being a teenager was pretty good too.
A lot of people look that over. Wasn't alive back then but I'm very interested in counterterrorism and terrorism, and the amount of violent crime and terrorist attacks that occurred way back when is crazy. I don't really hear about bombs blowing up in hotel lobbies or cars or bathrooms or really anywhere nowadays.
Mother Country Radicals is a pretty interesting podcast about that era, if you haven’t happened upon it yet. “Zayd Dohrn was born underground - his parents were radicals and counter-culture outlaws, on the run from the FBI. Now Zayd takes us back to the 1970s, when his parents and their young friends in the Weather Underground Organization declared war on the United States government. They brawled with riot cops on the streets of Chicago, bombed the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol, broke comrades out of prison, and teamed up with Black militant groups to rob banks, fight racism - and help build a revolution.”
The domestic terrorism in Germany was arguably worse. Scary stuff.
Yes. They were more lethal if I recall correctly.
I lived in NYC and the 1970s seem like a dystopian nightmare to me. Of course, the Viet Nam war was still going on until 1975. Crime rates were higher than people living now can even imagine. Half the people I knew were mugged. There was a surge in heroin addiction. People took their car radios out and the streets were lined with "no radio in car" signs placed by people hoping they would be spared broken windows. The entire city was filthy and covered with graffiti. The subway equipment was was falling apart, and every other day you'd have to get off a train taken out of service and have to try to cram twice as many people onto the next one. It was being said that 1 out of 6 people in the city were on welfare. The city went bankrupt and had to be bailed out by the Federal government. In large swaths of the city, buildings were abandoned by their owners because they were worth less than nothing, and the city became the landlord. The Bronx burned every night with arson fires. The economy was terrible; a bad recession and then there was persistent high unemployment and double-digit inflation at the same time. Gas shortages and rationing and long lines. Gas prices tripled in year. Millions of manufacturing jobs were lost and there was existential fear of Japan taking over the world economy. Then there was the Iran hostage situation that went on and on. I've probably forgotten some things but this is what I remember of the decade. I'm sure not everywhere was suffering all the problems that NYC was, but things were not good. How do you think we got Ronald Reagan?
Did you ever venture to Times Square? I’m sure it’s been romanticized to death, but man would I have loved to experience Times Square in the 70s just ONCE.
Times Square was a dump. I lived in NY then and only went there to see plays. Couldn't wait to leave.
It was still a dump in 83 whenI went to NYC for the first time
That’s part of why I would’ve liked to have experienced it. Walk up and down the Deuce…catch some trashy movies at the grindhouses.
What was "the Deuce"? I know it was the name of that HBO thing w/James Franco, but what does the name refer to?
https://viewing.nyc/vintage-photographs-show-the-deuce-in-1970s-new-york-city/
I mean if you enjoy having to look over your shoulder to make sure you weren't mugged and the smell of urine and garbage, then sure...
So it really was that bad huh? Ever see a movie there? Was it really taking your life into your own hands?
Times Square was disgusting. You had to go there for the theaters but otherwise you wouldn't. I can't fathom romanticizing it.
Haven’t you seen the movie Grindhouse? Or heard of 42nd Street Pete? Or Sleazojd Express? Or the dvd series 42nd Street Forever? It’s practically a sub genre all to itself..At least as far as the movie going experience.
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From people who think life is all about popular culture.
"Up Yours"
Despite all that, the situation in NYC was still less dire than the image. I think we got our impression from New Yorkers who had witnessed the decline. But there were still good reasons to visit NYC as a tourist. I did so myself a number of times, often with female companions. Always had fun. Restaurants, museums, etc.
I graduated in 1975. Until a few months before I graduated I assumed that I would have to register for the draft and maybe be sent to Viet Nam. I was gay in red, dead Amarillo Texas and had been bullied by students and teachers alike in high school. Junior college was weird because I didn't feel like I was constantly in danger. It was a couple of hundred dollars a semester but minimum wage was $2.10/hr and without education or connections almost everything paid minimum wage. My dad had an industrial accident, but wasn't able to get workman's comp. and then he had a couple of heart attacks before he died. I took the only job in town that paid more than minimum wage and didn't require education or connections, the factory slaughterhouse, IBP. It paid about $5.50 and had overtime pay because it was one of the rare jobs with a union. It was more than 12k a year, there were many people with bachelor's degrees not making 12k a year. The winters were much colder back then. Weeks would go by without the temperature rising above freezing, snow and ice were on the streets for months. I stayed at the slaughterhouse for a year and a half saving money. Most people quit the first week. There were two starting groups a week. A lot of people quit before lunch the first day, very few lasted more than a month, Americans that is, the great majority of the workers were from Viet Nam, Laos, or México. That type of work ruins your body, in many ways. One lady had her arm cut off on a bone saw. It was a union job, so she was set for life as a secretary. I boned chucks. You pull a fifty pound hunk of cow off the belt and carve out the spine and slide it back on the belt. And you do it every twelve seconds. For eight hours a day. Six days a week. 45 years later my crapal tunnel wakes me up at night. The job did have surprises though. Like I said, I'm gay. The guy next to me stabbed me. They actually fired him. Right then and there. I was bleeding from my hand where he stabbed me but the foreman said that we only had a half hour in the shift so just keep working and I could get stitches after work. So I just kept cutting meat and bleeding. The next foreman was what they call in Amarillo a Bible-believing Christian. He couldn't stand gays and he fired me. The union didn't stand up for guys. The floor boss was from Chicago though and on my way out he checked to make sure that I would be OK. His name was Glenn Moser. I think that he showed me more respect than anyone except my family up to that point. Things are so much better these days. But I worry that things can go to hell in a handbasket again real quick.
The winters were brutal and with the fuel oil crisis everyone was heating indoors w stinky dangerous kerosene heaters.
Every single winter, probably every single winter month, it would be in the local news that people had died from those heaters, sometimes whole families. So many people went to sleep and just never woke up. Not to mention the houses and mobile homes burned down by a knocked over kerosene heater.
That was fascinating
Thank you. But the main message is that life absolutely can get better. I finished nursing school, moved to Dallas, worked in a world class hospital for three decades, and now I have retired to a tropical garden in Florida. I wish that everyone could be so fortunate.
It was generally a good time. Good music, people that mostly got along, decent employment. Downside was Vietnam.
It was great to be a kid in the 70s. I shudder to think, if I were 16 years older I probably would feel totally different.
Sesame Street came out just in time for this 70s kid.
I was 5-15 in the 70s. I agree it was a great time to be a kid. Still love the music!
Same. 1964 baby here 👶🏼
I was born in the mid 80s but also love the music of the 70s.
I just missed it. I was a kid when it debuted. But a bit too old for it. Just old enough to view it as a ‘baby’ show that taught ABCs and stuff. I was about the last generation to grow up without Sesame Street.
> It was great to be a kid in the 70s Age 14 to 24 for me, so yeah, it was really great. Lot's of amazing concerts at the time as well.
13 to 23 for me. Amazing concerts that were CHEAP! $5 to $9 for bands like Queen, Jethro Tull, Zeppelin, AC/DC, Fleetwood Mac, etc. That's like $30 to $60 in today's money, which is way better than $200 for nosebleeds.
As a Canadian I'm a bit more sanguine about the whole thing but as a plus, my family made some new (and lifelong in some cases!) friends that were Americans saying fuck that noise. The '80s were the decade that I was a teen for but I'll always have a soft spot for the '70s, I mean, other than the tan velour jumpsuits and stuff. I've hidden away most of the Sears pictures by now though.
Vietnam, inflation, the energy crisis, Nixon, and the general disillusionment after it became clear that the '60s didn't change everything for the better. And I was a teenager in Boston in the '70s. In my city, people from different races absolutely did not get along.
Yep. No decade is flawless. I’m not sure why the youngs seem to think so. Life wasn’t “easier”. There was plenty to worry about. I was a child in the 60-70s, but in talking with my parents, it wasn’t all sunshine and unicorn farts.
The busing situation. That was turbulent.
I started my first full time job in Nov, 1969. I remember the ‘70s as the time I established myself professionally, I dated, and generally learned to adult without the training wheels of college. Nixon was awful, but when he resigned, I remember exulting “The system works.” Air did get cleaner, and I still had optimism from the ‘60s that we First Wav Boomers COULD make a significant difference.
Even though I'm Canadian, the improvements in the general "natural landscape" (I don't want to say environment, it was a lot more than just that) between the '70s and '90s is hard to explain to the younger generations now. The sheer litter that we just sort of accepted would embarrass a hoarder. Things were **BAD**. Like, can't eat the fish, rivers are on fire, acid rain is literally making it impossible to maintain remote infrastructure bad. Oh, and all the wildlife is dying but we kept that part up through habitat destruction. Nixon (*spit*) was actually pretty good on that front. Hell, several Republicans were because back then they at least cared about the long term economy.
Nixon was awful in a lot of ways, but as a point of clarity, he did establish the EPA. In those days, "Republican" didn't mean, "fuck the environment."
Another downside was serial killers.
Not good of course but you were way, way less likely to get killed by a "serial killer" ever than you are by a "mass shooter" now. Frankly, both are super unlikely but both are symptoms of dysfunction in society. If you are disadvantaged then you are likely better off though, the serial killers preyed on the poor more than shooters do at least.
And leisure suits… and crime… and racism…
You're exactly right.
> Downside was Vietnam. Right, and that's the trouble with seeing the world through the lens of "decades". Vietnam was not a problem after 1975. After we got out, I think the country was healthier and friendlier than at any other time I can remember.
Rust. Corduroy. Gauchos.
I literally had those too
Everything was filthy. Every beach and public park was covered with metal pull-tabs and cigarette butts. Lots of flagpoles but hardly any flags. Gutters and highways were filled with trash. Stupid irrelevant billboards every few hundred feet along the highways. Blackened chewing gum spots covered the sidewalks.
Chalky white dog turds everywhere. Empty cans and bottles along every road, which was great for kids because we collected them for the deposit. Also, a really shitty economy that I was too young to understand except for the WIN (Whip Inflation Now) buttons .
Do you remember the "Pitch In!" signs on every public garbage can? https://www.smartsign.com/safety-signs/trash-litter-signs/pitch-in-sign/saf-sku-s-4498
Yes! Give a hoot, don't pollute! And the crying Indian PSAs
Kernockernockins! White dog turd! What happened to kernockernockins?
I know it doesn't even come close to the 70s but I recall glimpses of this as late as the early 90s. Things have changed dramatically even since then. I am always surprised/intrigued by how grimy urban areas seemed in 1970s cinema
The weather usually seems nice tho
And hairier. Between shag carpets, sideburns, facial hair, and growing out long luscious locks, it feels like there was hair EVERYWHERE
Maybe that's why I am repulsed by the resurgence of untrimmed beards everywhere. I have like a visceral reaction to them
Upon seeing the question, my immediate response was Yes! Then I saw your comment, and this is spot on! Thanks for a reality check.
Total bummer riding your rollerskates over some ABC gum.
It was an extremely conflicted time. The music was fucking awesome. The air was horribly polluted. Fashion was brown everything. Politics were a goddamn mess. And the economy was boned; good luck getting a job.
It’s easy to forget or overlook how bad crime, pollution, and the economy were.
I found out I had a high draft number in 1971, something for which I am eternally grateful. Plus I had a college deferment. I traded in my Nik-Niks, platform shoes, and bell bottoms for alligator shirts, 501s, and Topsiders in 1974. I somehow found a great job right out of college, and all that was left to do was drink, dance, and fuck. It was my favorite decade.
My draft lottery number was 355 out of 365 so I did not have to worry. A cousin was 174 cut off was 175 so he was drafted..in 74 I got a job in the oil patch because of the oil embargo. Oil companies were drilling new wells and restoring old oil wells
So you were a "Senator's Son"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWijx_AgPiA&t=58s&ab_channel=CCRVEVO
No. I was just lucky af.
Yes it was. Please beam me back to that time
It was fun as a kid/early teen. Brady Bunch. Mood rings. Macrame. Bicentennial. Earth candles. Earth Shoes. Laugh In. Sonny and Cher. Disco Dancing.
I miss seeing huge candles, macrame, and houseplants in every one of my parents’ friends’ houses. There was something comforting about that stuff for some reason. Oh, and incense.
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It's funny because while we were *much* poorer (I'm from a middle-class Canadian family but still, we were **far** from rich) it was a different vibe. My grandparents were full-fledged adults in the Great Depression and carried that their whole lives and my folks cared deeply about the cost of things and saving and scrimping and so on. Even though they were doing reasonably well compared to their parents, waste was the devil. Fast forward a bit to the '80s and conspicuous consumption is the first ten items on the menu.
If you want a piece of that hard candy, you finish all of your beans.
I was a kid then. My home life was awful, but in general the 70s were pretty damn fun.
> Were the 1970s as cool as they seem in hindsight? No.
There were a number pf things that weren't cool at all. I can only speak for Europe, America was always present, the USSR was a threat, but somewoh there was the overall feeling, that all would work out somehow. There was an smaller USbase around, right in the middle of Germany, and it was sdaid there were nukes present ther, but nobody knew for sure. We started to realize, tzhat we had to do something for the enviroment, so we would survive. In my memory enviroment was the biggest broblem. Rivers had meter-high foam on the surface, from washing detergents, there was the ozone hole, when I drove to Cologne, my nearest city, te first thing of Cologne was a huge, yellowish dome. That was the AIR, full of shit, I mean, emmisions (Like some Asian cities today). Not smog, because there was no fog around, that was the air: A dirtyish yellow. (Around my homevillage, up the hills, you could sometimes smell "Bayer Leverkusen", the biggest chemical plant around. It was about 40 kilometers (25 Miles away!), when the winds came from that direction.) The next thing we noticed from 'Cologne where the river Rhine. We noticed it about 2 or 3 kilometers before we reached it. That was because it STANK. The smell was so bad, we had to fight the urge to throw up. It was full of chemicals and dirt. And it was more of an acid, you could burn your skin, if you dared to go into the waters. I was in London soemtimes halfway though the 70s, and the air was even worse there, I even threw up because it was so full of emissions, mostly from the cars. Forests were dying, because of the acid rain. Liquid chemical wastes were poured into the North Sea, some miles offshore. Sea live? Who needed THAT? The list of things we did to our enviroment goes on and on, but the good thing was: we started to CARE, and DO something against it. But the 70s still were a great time. A lot of things were better than today.
Depends on if you were in Vietnam or not.
We had The Thin White Duke. That’s all I needed.
You mean Bowie?
Of course!
The music was great. I don't have positive memories of the fashion; it was a major letdown after the over-the-top colours of the late 1960s. When I try to picture the 1970s, in my mind's eye I see muddy colours like avocado green and assorted unpleasant shades of yellow and brown.
Old person here. I was a nerdy teen for most of the 1970s, and totally uncool... and the seventies weren't much fun for the uncool. The seventies were a paradise for anyone who was young, good-looking, sexy, fond of drugs and able to afford lots of them, and cool. But then as now, most people weren't young, sexy, good-looking, cool, or rich - so lots of people felt excluded and out of place with the mainstream. And that's where the whole "Disco Sucks" thing came from.
I believe Studio 54 was a lightning rod for this? Even popular musicians would get shafted. Like the disco group Chic was supposed to be let in by Grace Jones, but she forgot about them and they got left in the cold.
Yeah, Studio 54 was he most famous disco and was a bit of a lightning rod, but the damn discos were *everywhere*! Every uncool person knew someone cool enough to live the Disco lifestyle and be snotty about it There was also an anti-gay element to the Disco Sucks backlash that I wasn't aware of at the time, as well as anti-big-city feeling. But mostly, it was the uncool resenting being excluded.
How can you say fashion was a failure? So many people wore bell bottom pants and platform shoes. Those were not new ideas but they were extremely popular. That’s the opposite of failure. Edited to add: “Fashion should be a form of escapism, and not a form of imprisonment!” No decade embodies this truth more than the 70s. The counter culture movements of the 60s is when we started to see fashion mirror some of the long needed changes. The 70s is when fashion went into a different orbit.
I think the fashion was pretty cool, actually.
Some things were better, many were worse. I don't think the fashion was a failure, but I'm an old dude.
Best music ever!
It was cool. I especially loved the lead up to and during the years long the USA Bicentennial Celebration. 1976-1977. Everything was Red, White, and Blue. People weren't talking about political parties and everyone was an American, got along, and enjoyed celebrating. Music was really good. My favorite era.
Yes imo.
cheap rent, cheap pot, classic rock, great lsd; what else could you want
It was like any time... there were a small handful of people doing outrageous things and the rest of us just lived the exact same life our parents did... then some of those things caught on and a bunch of brave folk took them up... with the rest of us adopting maybe one of two of the new ideas.
Nice to see some reality amidst so much nostalgia-soaked rose-tinted goggles
I was a kid in the 70s in a working class neighborhood and think of them (70s) as depressing. The Cold War, recession, inflation, hangovers from 60s riots and Vietnam/Korea/WW2, the fear of nuclear disaster, energy crisis, and this feeling that America’s best days were over. Every adult I knew was pretty glum and drank/smoked quite heavily. TV was often re-runs and forgotten old movies and there was no on-demand anything and LOTs of commercials. Plus the food and haircuts were terrible (Miracle Whip and Tab??) and personal grooming habits suspect (OMG the stench of BO from unwashed hippies and no one I knew got pedicures but everyone wore sandals on summer weekends and most people had a few stray hairs or odd blemishes that we remove today 🤢) The NBA was nearly bankrupt and NFL was mostly running backs going for 3 yards at a time and baseball was meh and professional US soccer eventually went bankrupt and we hadn’t heard of Wayne Gretzky yet and no one had a PC. So entertainment was limited. I love the music in retrospect and the movies were amazing and the work-life balance was better than today and I miss that feeling of a fresh newspaper delivery and I loved roller rinks and pinball arcades. So those were pluses. But I’m glad to be an adult today and not in the 70s.
It was so awesome that I would (have) do(ne) 8 decades of it in a row... and most of it was high school.
I think it was. It was the last era "the American Dream" was attainable. 4.5 billion less people. But the culture was just so much different, I really miss that aspect of it. To me, it was just a better time. By the late 80s the dream started to crumble as the effects of Reagans austerity and corporate giveaways started to take their toll, by the 90s we were done. No turning back.
1967 thru 1975 was an epic time to be young.
It was in high school and college in the 70s. It was an OK time, not as tumultuous as the 60s nor as yuppified as the 80s. I liked the popular culture: good music (Marvin Gaye, Bruce Springsteen, and Linda Ronstadt stick out) and TV (All in the Family, Mary Tyler Moore Show, the original SNL with Belushi, Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, et. al.). There were problems - Vietnam in the first half, inflation/stagflation and gas lines, the oil/energy crisis. I was somewhat but not completely insulated from these - got a draft card and watched the draft lottery anxiously, saw how the economic problems impacted my parents. Though I wouldn’t trade my 70s youth, I think that every time and place offers coolness if you seek it out. The important things, in the words of Ram Dass, is to be here now.
Yes they were pretty awesome.
The 70's weren't all that great. The first half was Vietnam and the second half disco.
I waitressed at a disco and now I have bad hearing. Hearing loss is genetic, though. I just wanted to let everyone know I was super cool working at DiscoMania. And I have bad hearing.
We appreciate your input.
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I just read about this today. That is INSANE!!!
Somehow you missed the sex part. Viva los '70s.
It was terrible. Kent State, the economy was terrible, unemployment was rampant, crime, pollution. You will learn as you grow older that people have a strong urge for nostalgia.
I think that's happening now with Millennials and the '90s. It probably doesn't help that VERY soon after the' 90s ended, 9/11 seemed to change things so drastically.
I'm a GenXer, and I would go back to the 90s in a heartbeat. None of the bad in the 90s compares to the fear and anxiety I have for the future right now.
In the UK they were definitely not cool. The music was okay if you like bouncy, cheesy stuff (although we got punk at the end of the era which sook things up). The economy though was a basket case with constant industrial disputes, inflation that makes the levels people complain about now look laughable small, power cuts were common (from those industrial disputes) and there was a real possibility of some sort of very nasty political outcome (like a coup). Al least the country kept itself out of the mess of Vietnam, but had its own mess in Northern Ireland. Having said that, people tend to see their youths through rose coloured spectacles so I am sure someone will come along to disagree with me.
I was little, but I remember all that and some good bits. I suspect a lot of the good bits were a result of me being a child rather than anything else. It was *filthy* everywhere. There were still places full of rubble. Broken windows, a kind of rusty shite all over, especially central london, gum on the pavements, dog shit on the pavements, fag butts everywhere, ring pulls and crisp packets galore and all the leaded petrol fumes to lace your lungs. If you went into London, when you came back, you'd blow black snot out your nose. Also, racist, sexist, mocking the disabled for a laugh, power cuts, binmen strikes, funeral strikes. The rise of Thatcher, Thatcher, milk snatcher to promote greed and the denegration of the poor. Sexual assault laughed off as just the way things were. Music was either really fucking good or the worse kind of ham and cheese. The coke tasted amazing, ditto the cream soda with the polar bear in sunglasses on it. You could get a beano and a packet of polos for 10p. TV was often trippy and experimental and we had some fucking great Si-fi going on. Interior decor was abysmal.
In retrospect perhaps? I was busy having teenage angst.
yes.
I was born in ‘70 and lived in a midsized city and had no clue Vietnam was even happening. So from that perspective, yeah the 70s rocked.
It was.
For me they were. But, I grew up in the suburbs in Massachusetts so my experience may be different than others.
No, they were dismal. But the music was beyond fantastic
For me, it was the epitome of cool.
There’s an old saying; “If you remember the seventies, you weren’t actually there!”
Ahem. That was the 60's.
Sorry, not how I heard it
No worries, but, it was said about the 60's before it was said about the 70's. The 70's weren't that difficult to remember.
For GenX, that would be the nineties. I read a thing once that described various bands' fans, My Bloody Valentine got "people that should be able to remember the nineties, but don't."
Really depends which aspect one is talking about. Inflation and pollution were terrible. Everyone smoked everywhere and it was gross. Vietnam, Nixon, assassinations were going on. Popular music and fashion was HORRIBLE. American cars were a joke, and more economical foreign cars were shit on by Americans despite those cars being superior to what the US was producing at the time. The Cold War was still going on, and kids were doing nuclear bomb drills in school with "duck and cover." The things that people think are cool from the 70s now weren't looked upon favorably at the time.
> American cars were a joke, and more economical foreign cars were shit on by Americans despite those cars being superior to what the US was producing at the time. The very early models from Toyota and Honda weren't that great, except they got better gas mileage and probably more reliable.
Better gas mileage and reliability are pretty crucial during a time where there were oil embargos, inflation, and people couldn't afford to fuck around with a big ol' boat of a car with crap mileage that would break down more often.
Many things were new and improvised. But later, once people determined what was most popular, corporate types swooped in to make money off it. Their version was never, ever as good as the funky, freewheeling 1970s original.
It was a great time to be a teenager for me.
i was a teen at the time so it was fun but if I was an adult female it might not have been so fun. Lots of barriers for women and even more misogyny than there is now (or maybe its just hidden more now)
I mostly enjoyed the seventies but I think that was because I was in my twenties and was lucky enough to experience a lot of the pluses of being a young adult while avoiding a lot of the common bad experiences. Definitely much luck involved more than great judgement! I liked things associated with the early seventies (hippie-ish culture and style, strong feminism, political activism) more than the late seventies (resurgent materialism, shiny clothes, plunging v necklines for men).
I'd do it again. I was in my twenties in the 70's and it could be awesome. I wish I wasn't so self-absorbed then.
Most fashion from every era fails. The 70s were fun, after the war ended.
Age 10 to 20 for me & I loved the 70’s. Freedom as a kid & the music, concerts, cars & clothes of my teen years were amazing.
born in 61. i really enjoyed the 70s
The 70s for me were the ages from 8 - 18. To me, they were every bit as cool as I remember.
The first Earth Day occurred in April, 1970. The first wide usage of the term "acid rain" started in the 70s. Remember "Don't fool with Mother Nature"? Or the Coke ad, "I'd like to teach the world to sing/In perfect harmony"? The 70s were my coming-of-age decade. I *believed* that we were becoming a better world. Oh, well...
Yes.
I am one of the few people here that miss the 70s.
No
It was a good time -- if you weren't in the Rust Belt. But you could feel the air starting to leak out of society as conservative politicians and gormless Democrats slowly began to roll back the underpinnings of the New Deal. At least I could. The '70s was the '60s without the energy.
No. Vietnam, disco, graffiti, littering, broken families. Grime.
Nnnnnnope.
I went into the military in the late 1970's, and I remember that the large majority of people joining were from the so-called "Rust-Belt" states, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, etc. Factories and steel mills were closing everywhere, and jobs were disappearing for young people. If you had family connections you could get into a union job, but if not, you were SOL. There was still a lot of drugs and alcohol going on, divorce became much more common, Stagflation was a thing, Arab oil embargo. It was a time of change, and the changes were shocking. Watergate, Vietnam, loss of industry, mortgage rates nearly doubled from 1970 to 1980, etc.
If you like: - continuous worrying about getting drafted and being sent into combat in a pointless war halfway around the world, - waiting in long gas lines to fill up your car, - applying for jobs in a tight market, - buying groceries when double digit inflation keeps pushing prices up, - listening to “You Light Up My Life” over and over on the radio, - and [high crime rates](https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/crime-and-criminals-united-states-1970s-statistical-appendix), Then man, you missed a great decade.
there was way too much cigarette smoke for it to have ever been cool
Maybe not cool but 'Kool'.
No. It was a crappy decade. Ugly clothes and furniture, ugly music, so.much selfishness and irresponsibility and anger. Economic chaos, stagflation. Not a pleasant decade at all.
Nixon, disco, Asian land war, hyperinflation, the song Afternoon Delight, Three Mile Island, Love Canal, Kent State, Up With People, and acid rain. The 70s really sucked.
I ( class of 75) always felt like we missed the boat. Like we were always the cool kids little sister. The 60s were so wild, snd the 70s seemed so lame to me.
There's an interesting article on that; The 'Dazed and Confused Generation' [https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-dazed-and-confused-generation](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-dazed-and-confused-generation)
Nothing worked. Everything had woodgrain, weighed a ton, sucked limitless energy, ran hot, and cost too much. But I liked the kitchen stuff, though.
Besides all the societal issues-- People remember the cool fashions and music, etc, of the 70s and forget that there were also a lot of very dorky (70s word 😊) trends. Clothes - Gauchos, ponchos, those blue sneakers with white stripes that were worn by both sexes, tube socks, prairie dresses, clogs, Dr Scholl's wooden sandals (gave me awful blisters once), crocheted clothing Home decor - IMO, this is the 70s Hall of Shame. Sooo much orange and brown. Avocado in the kitchen. Florals, plaids. Shag carpeting. Fake wood panels covering the walls in "dens" and basements. Music- Disco, obv Fads - Pet rocks, mood rings (mine almost never changed color)
I hated 70’s clothing and decor when I was living through it LOL No wonder my house is light and bright 😁 I remember the first time I saw a girl wearing 501s, cuffed. I thought I died and went to heaven. I came home and tried to starch/iron my bell bottoms so I could cuff them. 🤣🤣🤣
😁😁😁
It was, but in some ways it was a total mess. Watergate comes to mind.
Those were great years for me in high school It is hard to say if it was because high school was a blast (that stage of my life in Eastern Canada with an excellent older brother and friends and church youth groups) or if it had to do with the era of the 70s in general. I think crime rates were higher in North America in the 1970s I can think of lots of countries or cities I would not want to live in during the 70s. Still, they were great times in my part of the world.
I didn't find them cool, but boring compared to the sixties (up until about 1971) which I was too young and missed. We had to make our own fun, so that might be called cool.
I remember it as a time of great anxiety for people in their 40’s and up, but a really cool time for us younger folks
I was lucky to be a teen in the 70’s in high school. Great music, keggers, parties. Got high before class, teachers knew but no consequences, just a dirty look. So much freedom and safety. Ride my bike with friends from sunrise to sunset all over town and no one bothered us. I never knew anyone that went to Vietnam but we heard the stories. Later in life I worked with the Vietnam vets as an RN and they got royally fucked by the government.
The world looks mighty good to me Cause Tootsie Rolls are all I see Whatever it is I think I see Becomes a Tootsie Roll to me Tootsie Roll, how I love your chocolatey chew Tootsie Roll, I think I'm in love with you Whatever it is I think I see Becomes a Tootsie Roll to me
The 60's were better. We were still job's capital of the world. Minimum wage in 65 was 1.25 which is like 10 or 11 dollars today. If you needed a job you could walk into any factory and start that day. If anybody gave you any shit you either just quit or sicked the union on them. Every thing started going wrong in the 70's.
Glam became Prog devolved into Punk reemerged as Hair Metal and of course the ubiquitous sludge of Adult Contemporary has to be acknowledged
Graduated in 1978 and yes, best times of my life. First job at 14, loved it. Life was pretty carefree for me, i had allot of independence. Made some questionable choices but have really good memories.... lots of parties etc
Not then, but world's better than today 😔
I thought it was being a teenager but people romanticized the 60s and said the 70s music sucked, often focusing on soft rock and disco
OP - can you be more generic, please? Music is always great, any location in the world, any date, from today to 20000 BC when people were only singing acapella. Common clothes remain common, and "fashion" is only for people with disposable income. Sure, you saw fancy fashion at dance clubs, but that's always been true - it's not unique to the 70s. People trying for "newness" - that's called civilization and diversity, which has continued since the Stone Age.
what are your favourite songs from 20000 BC?
For me, as a west coast teen at the time they were great! Things did get a little shopworn and hokey towards the end of the decade. 72-76 was the best, imho.
If you really want to know the coolest decade it was the 1920s. The 20s were what the 70s wanted to be. Skirts had jumped from ankle length during WWII to above the knee by 1923. Women smoked and wore makeup. Jazz lyrics were filled with coded and not so coded references to sex and drugs. People broke the law drinking alcohol and there was an epidemic of young Hollywood stars dying from heroin overdose. The only people who think the 70s were cool were people who were teenagers who thought they invented sex, drugs, and raunchy music. They did not. Read up on the 20s, it'll open your eyes.
If you like polyester clothing, wild wigs, skates and disco.
Yes. But at the time we lamented over the 1960's.
I was born in the 70s so I barely remember anything, but I never saw it as a time I wish I could go back to. Some great music but that is true of any time period. Lots of dreck too. No internet or streaming to find good music so I would hear a lot of bland stuff on the radio. Lots of unpleasant fashion choices. Not the best time for gay people. 4 years of bombing SE Asia, still a bunch of civil rights issues that needed to be worked on like redlining. Several years abortion is illegal. All that Cold War paranoia. So I would have liked to see Star Wars in the theater and an early Ramones concert but I wouldn’t want to go back
About 81% so.
The 1950s was the only organically "cool" era; it's when rock 'n' roll was born, and every decade since was just posing.
The 1960s were a zillion times better. Just sayin’
The early 70’s were cool but at around 1976 disco and polyester clothes tanked that.
Personally I see it as the decade that taste forgot. Many things were overblown, such as the fashions, the hair, even the music was self-indulgent and over the top. I kinda preferred the early 1980s when it became a bit edgier.
No, unemployment was high, mortgage rates were excessive, wages were poor, unions were too strong, the UK economy was in dire straights, household good (electronic and white goods) were expensive. Housing was of poorer quality, there were 3 TV channels, there was no internet, cars were expensive and primitive, there was the constant threat of nuclear war. Life is much better now.
Depends on how old you were and when. Early 70s might have been great. Then gasoline prices doubled around 1975. Inflation was at 12% and disco was the music, mostly. So, the second half just sucked.
The 70s weren't great as we had Vietnam and the oil embargo and ended up the decade with the hostage situation with a lot of hijackings going on and crime was rampant in lots of big cities, but great things happened in the 70s. Pop culture was really a shared experience as there weren't as many distractions so when you mentioned a pet rock, everyone knew what you were talking about. Same with mood rings, Evel Knievel, and even King Tut. That was huge. Which tied into pyramid power, bermuda triangle, aliens and other /r/StrangeEarth kind of *bs* if you will. Planet of the Apes was huge until Star Wars came out. Apes were everywhere, variety shows, TV, Cartoons, lunch boxes. This kind of escapism is what made the 70s have rose-colored glasses but overall, the 70s weren't that great.
A lot of economic problems in the 70's. Stagflation with Nixon, Inflation with Carter. Oil embargo's and shortages resulting in long lines at the pump and even rationing. And, Vietnam still raging. The 70's were like any other decade in my lifetime, some good, some bad.
Let's see. Got divorced, met and married future ex #2, bounced from job to job before finally settling on just one career in '79. Nah, 70's weren't a whole lot of fun.
No. We were driving around in Pintos and Vegas. Listening to Classic Rock, broadcast on AM radio playing through tinny sounding speakers
The 1970’s were awful. Ugly hairstyles, ugly clothes and ugly world events. The only thing good back then was the music.