Seventies Throwback Fiction
n+1 Magazine reviews several 70’s-based novels.
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CBGB Portraits
A wonderful look back at North America’s punk ground-zero – CBGB, via the nostalgia-focused website, Flashbak.
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Earth Day 1970
Each year, Earth Day — April 22 — marks the anniversary of what many consider the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970.
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Charleston West Virginia in the Seventies
Jerry Waters is a long-time resident of Charleston, WV who created and maintains My West Virginia Home – a website featuring photos of his hometown spanning several decades, including some great seventies-era shots.
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Capt. Fantastic Pinball Machine
Captain Fantastic is an arcade pinball machine designed by Greg Kmiec and produced by Bally in 1976. A semi-sequel to Bally’s earlier Wizard!, and named after the chart-topping album by Elton John, it features John dressed as the Local Lad from the rock opera movie Tommy.
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Hudson & Landry
Hudson & Landry were a very underrated American comedy team who wrote and recorded four gold albums in the 1970s: Hanging In There (1971), Losing Their Heads (1972), Right-Off! (1972), and The Weird Kingdom (1974). Their “Ajax Liquor Store” sketch from 1971 is a comedy classic and was nominated for a Grammy Award.
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23 Style Moments That Defined The Decade
Marie Claire highlights the greatest icons of 1970s fashion.
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Summer in the Seventies with Andy Warhol
Eothen – the Long Island estate which served as Andy Warhol’s summer home in the seventies, is currently on the market for a cool $85,000,000. Back in the day, It became a welcoming haven for Andy’s rich and famous friends, including The Rolling Stones, who spent time there during the summer of 1975, planning a tour and casually enjoying the Montauk scene.
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Carrie – Stephen King’s First Published Novel
Carrie is author Stephen King’s first published novel, released on April 5, 1974. Set primarily in the then-future year of 1979, it’s focused on Carrie White, an outcast, bullied high school girl who uses telekinetic powers to take revenge on her tormentors.
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Goodies in Albums
Remembering the good old days of vinyl – when albums sometimes came with terrific, free extras.
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Stephen Biko
Anti-apartheid activist Stephen Biko died on September 12 1977, after 22 hours of interrogation and torture, following his arrest at a police roadblock in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Since his death, he is viewed as a martyr of the anti-apartheid movement.
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Silver Jubilee
The 1977 Silver Jubilee of Elizabeth II was a celebration of the 25th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II’s accession to the throne. It featured large-scale parties and parades throughout the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth throughout the year, peaking in June with “Jubilee Days,” coinciding with the Queen’s official birthday.
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REMEMBER DUANE ALLMAN
Duane Allman, guitarist for the Allman Brothers Band, died October 29, 1971, from injuries in a motorcycle accident on Hillcrest Avenue in Macon, Georgia. In 1973, four fans carved a seven foot high “REMEMBER DUANE ALLMAN” in a dirt embankment along Interstate Highway 20 near Vicksburg, Mississippi. It remained visible for ten years.
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The Who Cincinnati Concert Tragedy
On December 3rd, 1979, 18,500 fans had gathered outside the Coliseum in Cincinnati for a much anticipated concert by The Who. The show was general admission, which meant the best seats were up for grabs. The festive and energetic pre-show gathering outside the venue soon turned to tragedy.
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Space Fidgit
The Space Fidgit was an interesting 70’s toy that consisted of a colored, creamy gel-like liquid encased in a transparent plastic half-bubble. When the user slid their fingers over the flat back of the bubble, the movement and body heat would generate a kind of morphing liquid light show.
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Frank Wills
Frank Wills was the security guard who alerted the police to a possible break-in at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., leading to the now-historical scandal and resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974.
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Kolchak: The Night Stalker
Kolchak: The Night Stalker is an American television series that aired on ABC during the 1974–1975 season. It starred Darren McGavin as Chicago newspaper reporter Carl Kolchak, who investigated mysterious crimes which the local police normally chose not to follow up on. The cases usually entailed supernatural or science-fiction elements.
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Taylor Camp
In 1969 Howard Taylor, brother of Elizabeth, bailed out a motley group of thirteen young Hawaiians jailed for vagrancy and invited them to camp on his ocean front land. It wasn’t long before word spread and scores of hippies, surfers and troubled Vietnam vets migrated to Taylor Camp and built a clothing-optional, pot-hazed treehouse village at the end of a road on Kauai’s North Shore.
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Mark Fidrych
Nicknamed “The Bird”, Mark Fidrych was an eccentric right-handed major league baseball pitcher who had a brief but memorable career with the Detroit Tigers between 1976 and 1980.
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NYC Blackout 1977
On July 13, 1977, a series of lightning strikes at Buchanan South, a substation on the Hudson River, resulted in a 2 day electricity blackout covering all five boroughs of New York City.
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Canada’s Largest Art Theft
Canada’s largest art theft occurred on Labor Day in 1972 when three armed bandits broke into the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts through a skylight under repair and stole 18 paintings and 37 objects of decorative arts and jewellery. All but one of the stolen paintings – a small Jan Breughel painting – remain missing today.
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Left Coast 70s
SomaFM is an independent internet-only streaming group of radio channels, supported entirely with donations from listeners. They’ve recently introduced the new channel, “Left Coast 70s”, which they define as “Mellow album rock from the Seventies. Yacht friendly.”
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Love Canal
Love Canal is an aborted canal project branching off of the Niagara River about four miles south of Niagara Falls, NY. It is also the name of a fifteen-acre, neighborhood built directly adjacent to the canal. From 1942 to 1953, the Hooker Chemical Company, with government sanction, began using the partially dug canal as a chemical waste dump. At the end of this period, the canal contained approx 21,000 tons of toxic chemicals, including at least twelve that are known carcinogens. Hooker covered the 16-acre hazardous waste landfill in clay and sold the land to the Niagara Falls School Board, attempting to absolve itself of any future liability by including a warning in the property deed.
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Ripping Yarns
Created by Michael Palin and Terry Jones following the end of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Ripping Yarns was a British television series featuring tales of adventure, mystery, suspense and drama – a BBC production that ran for two seasons. Each episode had a different setting and characters, all focused on a different aspect of British culture and parodying pre-World War II literature aimed at schoolboys.
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