n+1 Magazine reviews several 70’s-based novels.

A wonderful look back at North America’s punk ground-zero – CBGB, via the nostalgia-focused website, Flashbak.

Each year, Earth Day — April 22 — marks the anniversary of what many consider the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970.

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.

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.

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.

Marie Claire highlights the greatest icons of 1970s fashion.

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.

Family is an American television drama series that aired on ABC from 1976 to 1980.

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.

Remembering the good old days of vinyl – when albums sometimes came with terrific, free extras.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

One of the earliest professional rock critics, Robert Christgau is known for his terse reviews, published from 1969 to 2013 in his Consumer Guide columns. He also spent 37 years as music editor for The Village Voice, during which time he created the annual Pazz & Jop poll.

His book, “Christgau’s Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies” was published in 1981 and contains a multitude of his brief and often sarcastic reviews of 70’s era albums.

Heavy Metal magazine, which made its début in 1977, is an American version of the French science-fantasy magazine Métal Hurlant, which began publishing two years earlier. It initially presented translated versions of the French edition’s illustrated stories.

La Vallée is a 1972 French film written and directed by Barbet Schroeder. The film stars Bulle Ogier as Viviane, a woman who goes on a strange and accidental voyage of self-discovery through the New Guinea bush. Pink Floyd recorded the album, Obscured by Clouds, as the soundtrack to the film.

A terrific Flickr album of photos from the 70’s Fort Walton Beach, Florida entertainment circuit.

Called “The Chosen One” by his peers, Jay Adams was a member of the legendary Zephyr Competition Team – better known as Z-Boys, a group of skateboarders in the mid-1970s from Santa Monica and Venice, California.

Apollo 17 was the final mission of the United States’ Apollo space program, the enterprise that landed the first humans on the Moon. Launched at 12:33 am Eastern Standard Time (EST) on December 7, 1972, with a three-member crew consisting of Commander Eugene Cernan, Command Module Pilot Ronald Evans, and Lunar Module Pilot Harrison Schmitt.

Best known for his work on posters, logos and album covers for musicians, Roger Dean’s images for such bands as Yes, Budgie, Uriah Heep, Gentle Giant and other bands, have become synonymous with early to mid-seventies progressive rock.

Many of the most colorful and fondly remembered children’s television series of the 1970s were Sid and Marty Krofft creations. Their innovative, live-action fantasy productions were enjoyed by countless pajamaed kids on countless Saturday mornings.

First offered to the public in 1975, Pop Rocks are, according the official Pop Rocks website – small pieces of hard candy that have been gasified with carbon dioxide under superatmospheric pressure. When these gasified sugar granules come in contact with moisture, in someone’s mouth or in water, milk, soft drinks, etc, the candy dissolves and the gas retained inside the carbon dioxide bubbles is released, causing characteristic crackling and fizzing sounds.

There’s a nice article on the Apartment Therapy website, touching on seventies interior style and design trends.

LimeGong tracked down a bunch of 70’s related Pinterest boards. Enjoy.

Written by Dominic Lutyens and Kirsty Hislop, and Published by Thames and Hudson, “70s Style & Design” is a 224 page book with over 400 illustrations. The authors have gone beyond the usual discussion of flares and platform shoes to address the design aesthetic of the decade as a whole.

Never heard of her, right? You’re not alone. In 1978, she became the first woman to run across the United States, from Los Angeles to New York City – at the notable age of 53. The route took her 2871 miles over 69 days, 2 hours and 40 minutes.

The Skycycle X-2 was the steam-powered rocket owned by Evel Knievel and flown during his infamous Snake River Canyon jump  near Twin Falls, Idaho on September 8, 1974.

A fixture on early 70’s radio, Jim Croce was an appealing, unpretentious singer-songwriter who only had time to record a few albums before dying tragically in a plane crash in September 1973.

After graduating from university, Canadian Doug Henning was awarded a Canada Council for the Arts grant for the purpose of studying magic. He went on to develop the magic-based stage show “Spellbound”, which ran successfully in Toronto before transitioning to Broadway as “The Magic Show”. Debuting in 1974, the show ran for four and a half years, and earned Henning a Tony Award nomination.

Some classic messages left on Jim Rockford’s answering machine – as heard at the top of every episode of The Rockford Files.

Essentially the first mainstream light beer, Miller Lite began as a product of the smaller Meister Brau brewery, which was later purchased by Miller, who then introduced the light beer concept to the masses in 1973.

Miller Lite’s famous “Great Taste…Less Filling!” ad campaign was ranked by Advertising Age magazine as the eighth best advertising campaign in history.

Future Shock is a book written by the futurist Alvin Toffler and published in 1970. Toffler defined the term “future shock” as a certain psychological state of individuals and entire societies. A short definition as stated by Toffler – a personal perception of “too much change in too short a period of time”. The book stemmed from an article “The Future as a Way of Life” in Horizon magazine’s Summer 1965 issue.

The Concert for Bangladesh was organized by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar and performed at 2:30 and 8:00 PM on Sunday, August 1st 1971 to a total of 40,000 people at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

The shows were organised to raise international awareness and finance relief efforts for refugees from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), following the Bangladesh Liberation War-related Bangladesh atrocities.

Directed by William Friedkin and released in the US on December 26, 1973, The Exorcist is an Oscar-winning psychological horror and drama, inspired by true events.

The film was notable for being one of the biggest box-office successes in film history – surpassing The Godfather (1972) as the biggest money-maker of its time. It is cited by many critics as the greatest horror film of all time.

The Sydney Opera House is a multi-venue performing arts centre in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia that officially opened in 1973 after 14 years of construction. The performance venues are among the busiest performing arts centres in the world — hosting over 1,500 performances each year attended by some 1.2 million people.

Who is Louise Brown? She was the world’s first “test tube baby”.

Louise Joy Brown (born 25 July 1978) is an English woman known for being the first human to have been born after conception by in vitro fertilisation, or IVF.

In 1972, ABC Television hired song publisher Don Kirshner as an executive producer and consultant for their new “In Concert” music series which ran every other week in The Dick Cavett Show slot. The show, featuring acts like Alice Cooper, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and The Steve Miller Band, was highly successful, even occasionally topping NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. The following year, Kirshner left “In Concert” to launch his own syndicated weekly rock program, “Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert.” On September 27, 1973, “Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert” premiered featuring The Rolling Stones first American television performance in over four years.

space.com says…

When the Viking 1 mission returned photos of the Martian surface in 1976, the image of a rocky face in the Cydonia region captured the public eye. Was it a trick of light and shadows? A remnant of an ancient civilization?

On Friday, January 28, 1977 the western New York and southern Ontario areas were pummelled by a fierce winter storm that continued for 3 days. Daily peak wind gusts ranging from 46 to 69 mph were recorded by the National Weather Service Buffalo Office, with snowfall as high as 100 inches recorded in some areas. The high winds created snow drifts of 30 to 40 ft. There were 23 total storm-related deaths in western New York, with 5 more in northern New York.

Shark Jaws was a video arcade game created by Atari and released in 1975, an obvious attempt to ride the massive popularity wave of Steven Spielberg’s film “Jaws”, while skirting licensing regulations.

Atari head Nolan Bushnell attempted to officially license the name Jaws for the game, but was unable to secure a deal with Universal Pictures. Undeterred, the company used the “Shark Jaws” name, using tiny print for “Shark” and large all-caps “JAWS” on the game cabinet.

Wikepedia says…

Jonathan Livingston Seagull, written by Richard Bach, is a fable in novella form about a seagull learning about life and flight, and a homily about self-perfection. It was first published in 1970 as “Jonathan Livingston Seagull — a story.” By the end of 1972, over a million copies were in print, Reader’s Digest had published a condensed version, and the book had reached the top of the New York Times Best Seller list, where it remained for 38 weeks. In 1972 and 1973, the book topped the Publishers Weekly list of bestselling novels in the United States.

Duel is a 1971 television (and later full-length theatrical) thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Richard Matheson, based on Matheson’s short story of the same name. It stars Dennis Weaver as a terrified motorist stalked on a remote and lonely road by the mostly unseen driver of a mysterious tanker truck.

The Bowmar 901B.

The first hand-held calculator manufactured in the U.S.A, it was introduced in 1971. Bowmar was a manufacturer of LED (Light Emitting Diode) displays which moved into calculator production in the early 1970s.

January 15, 1975: Space Mountain officially opens at Disney World’s Magic Kingdom.

The Space Mountain concept was a descendant of the first Disney “mountain” attraction, the Matterhorn Bobsleds at Disneyland, which opened in 1959. The Matterhorn’s success had convinced Walt Disney that thrilling rides did have a place in his park.

All Things Considered (ATC) is the flagship news program on the American network National Public Radio. It was the first news program on NPR and is broadcast live worldwide through several outlets. The first broadcast of ATC was fed to about 90 radio stations on May 3, 1971.

A lively look back at the era that gave us “Hooked on a Feeling”, “Dancing in the Moonlight”, “I Am Woman”, “Seasons in the Sun”, and more. The authors, true-blue ’70s fanatics, have lovingly crafted a creatively categorized overview of the pop music that drifted from countless transistor radios 40+ years ago.

Written by Canadian brothers, Don and Jeff Breithaupt (who’ve both maintained thriving, but somewhat under the radar music careers) and published in 1996, “Precious and Few: Pop Music of the Early ’70s” is an insightful look back at at era of pop that never gets enough credit.

Originally conceived in 1968 as a radio and television communication platform, Toronto’s CN Tower was constructed between 1973 and 1976. For 34 years, it stood as the world’s tallest free-standing structure and largest tower. In 1995, it was declared one of the modern Seven Wonders of the World by the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Now mostly forgotten, comedian Flip Wilson was a huge television star who Time magazine labelled “TV’s first black superstar”. During the early seventies, the hour-long Flip Wilson Show aired on NBC to huge audiences. During its first two seasons, it was the second most watched show in the US.

Although it first became available in 1965 and was awarded “Toy of the Year” in 1967, Spirograph is firmly planted in the memory banks of countless seventies kids.

Invented by British engineer Denys Fisher, the original US version consisted of two plastic rings, both with gear teeth on the inside and outside. Smaller plastic gear wheels, each with holes to accommodate a ballpoint pen, could be placed inside the larger rings and rotated with the pen, creating complex geometric patterns on the paper beneath.

Concorde, the supersonic passenger jet jointly developed and produced by Aérospatiale and the British Aircraft Corporation, made its first flight on January 21 1976.

For over 40 years, “Rainbow Gatherings” have taken place the first week of July throughout the world. Strongly associated with counterculture and hippie subculture, they serve as a sort of communal protest against consumerism, capitalism and mass media, while encouraging peace, love, respect, harmony, freedom and community. The first gathering took place in July 1972 at Strawberry Lake near Granby, Colorado.

The Summer Jam at Watkins Glen was a 1973 rock festival which once received the Guinness Book of World Records entry for “Largest audience at a pop festival.” An estimated 600,000 rock fans came to the Watkins Glen Grand Prix Raceway outside of Watkins Glen, New York on July 28, 1973, to see the Allman Brothers Band, Grateful Dead and The Band perform. (Wikipedia).