The birth of metal & punk in the 70's

[Donny Doom]

What was the birth of metal & punk rock in the 70's like?

[rtbuck]

For me, I didn't get into music until around '76 so metal was already there. I was into Kiss,Aerosmith, AC/DC,BOC, & Nugent. Around '78 or so a friend played Sabbath's 'Master of Reality' & i traded my Beatles "Sgt. Pepper" album for it. I then learned of Judas Priest & the Scorpions. I do feel that although there were a lot of established metal acts in the 70's,the 80's metal scene is what really made Heavy Metal a household word.

Punk, I hated it. These snot nosed kids from England coming in to take over the world in music. I was 13 or 14 when the Sex Pistols notoriety was taking over & it was somewhere up north in Canada by Lake Nipissing where my parents went on a vacation for a week. My friend Spanky went with us & we were able to pull in one radio station that played rock. One night the DJ starts talking about how they're going to do something they probably shouldn't & the station will get in trouble for it. They finally went through with it & played 'God save the Queen" by the Sex Pistols. My first thoughts were that I can't like it which I didn't,especially the singing. I could probably get by the music but the vocals were awful.
By no means was that the start of Punk Rock. The Stooges & even the Velvet Underground should really be the Fathers of Punk. The whole NYC Scene with the NY Dolls, the Ramones, Dictators,Blondie, Talking Heads,Wayne County, Television, Richard Hell,Patti smith, the Heartbreakers,& Lou Reed were all Punk before it was Punk. I didn't care for this stuff until 1980 but if you read Rock Scene magazine you would have thought all these artists were the greatest thing to happen in music.

[Trexx]

Holy Crap! You've just released the wheel chocks on mighty juggernaut of memories... Let me collect my thoughts and get back to this! Wowie.

[Donny Doom]

Dec 17, 2008 5:29:32 GMT -5 @rtbuck said:

For me, I didn't get into music until around '76 so metal was already there. I was into Kiss,Aerosmith, AC/DC,BOC, & Nugent. Around '78 or so a friend played Sabbath's 'Master of Reality' & i traded my Beatles "Sgt. Pepper" album for it. I then learned of Judas Priest & the Scorpions. I do feel that although there were a lot of established metal acts in the 70's,the 80's metal scene is what really made Heavy Metal a household word.

Punk, I hated it. These snot nosed kids from England coming in to take over the world in music. I was 13 or 14 when the Sex Pistols notoriety was taking over & it was somewhere up north in Canada by Lake Nipissing where my parents went on a vacation for a week. My friend Spanky went with us & we were able to pull in one radio station that played rock. One night the DJ starts talking about how they're going to do something they probably shouldn't & the station will get in trouble for it. They finally went through with it & played 'God save the Queen" by the Sex Pistols. My first thoughts were that I can't like it which I didn't,especially the singing. I could probably get by the music but the vocals were awful.
By no means was that the start of Punk Rock. The Stooges & even the Velvet Underground should really be the Fathers of Punk. The whole NYC Scene with the NY Dolls, the Ramones, Dictators,Blondie, Talking Heads,Wayne County, Television, Richard Hell,Patti smith, the Heartbreakers,& Lou Reed were all Punk before it was Punk. I didn't care for this stuff until 1980 but if you read Rock Scene magazine you would have thought all these artists were the greatest thing to happen in music.

I never got the reason why some many people made such a big deal about the Sex Pistols. They were more attitude than play. Ramones had good catchy tunes. I'd take the Ramones over the Sex Pistols any day.

[Trexx]

It was dang great and very different from it is today!
The hardest rock you could get on the radio was Aerosmith. Sweet Emotion flipped us out. In Sports School (summer school were we played team sports all summer) at the local high school, someone made a stencil of the Aerosmith logo and put black, two foot logos all over the place. Also, Heart was another hard rock band that was getting air play too. That was about it in the Central Valley of California around 1975. Our elders refered to it as "Acid Rock". Imagine! When I got to High School in 1978 the music scene was really blossoming as far as radio was concerned. On Sunday nights, the rock station would play entire albums after they promoted them all week long. Cassette tapes were the most amazing things to us. Tape decks up to that time were major pieces of stero equipment that had big, eight inch wheels with quarter inch magnetic tape to record on. Cassettes just were remarkable advancement. We'd make home made ones and trade 'em with each other at school. Most of these tapes were from the radio shows playing those albums. And dudes from other places with different radio stations would get stuff that we'd not yet heard. Also, the real rockers would go to the record stores and take a chance on the offerings there. Most cool record stores had a resident rocker that would turn us on to cool rock'n music that they knew we'd get fired up about. I discovered soooo many bands in these ways. My High School had a radio station that was just about out of control with music. We'd get the broadcast during lunch time. That's how I first heard Van Halen. The debut was the most stunning, outrageous, incredible thing any of us had ever heard. It was a WHOLE NEW THING in the Majorist-General way. Our minds were blown. There's just no way to convey the impact on us. Completely unprecedented and wild. We ate it up. It was OUR rock. Not sisters, not daddy's... OURS! Then a seemingly endless onslaught commenced. Ac/Dc we thought was a novelty act with TNT being the first thing we heard by them. My nerd neighbors won it on a radio contest. That singer, oh my gawd! We weren't sure if we liked it or not... until we heard "A Long Way To The Top" with bag pipes. It was soon adopted as a mainstay (the whole album)...other rockers at High School would talk and promote what they thought was cool. They'd make a tape to convince you. I found Rush this way, and many more too.
During this time it was a serious fashion statement to have Levi denim shirts with hand embrodiery on them. Us rockers dismissed the flowery motifs and put Van Halen logos on 'em and pot leaves and such. That was a major-general status symbol too! HA!
Then came Sony Walkmans (portable cassette tape decks with mini headphones). That marked a transformation into being able to take your rock skiing, windsurfing and walking the dog. It was a miracle. Then came the concerts. To see and hear our bands on stage was the next area of "growth". You'd wear your band's shirt to school. Having the latest tour on your shirt was also a status symbol as well as a conversation piece. This was another way to learn about bands that you didn't know. The other great resource for finding out cool bands was going to parties. Folks would bring their albums and we'd get an earful of new stuff this way too. I learned about -UFO- that way.
It was a different era. Nothing was at our finger tips. Our cassettes were like GOLD. We'd spend hours getting each side to fill up just right with as little dead air as possible. Skilled tape making was an art! We just wanted to ROCK! It was an adventure to find bands. Many of us would pick the brains of our elders as another way to be enlightened on what rocked. It was a never ending quest. And if you did find a band that your peers dug, you'd be elevated in esteem and status.

That's the core of my memory on the subject. Geeze louise... the olden days. Who'd of thunk?

...And "Punk"... that was sisters music. We certainly didn't get it. The English just don't look OK if they're not cleaned up and have matching outfits. HAAA! No. Seriously. We just didn't get it. Lacking melody and mighty riffs... there wasn't anything there. We had enough ammo to freak our parents out already. Ted Nugent and his wild hair telling us he could blow the balls off a charging rhino at 40 paces was just so much more fun than putting safety pins through our cheeks! My mom reviled plenty just looking at Ted's debut album jacket. (we used to call record containers "jackets" FYI.)

[Donny Doom]

Dec 18, 2008 0:56:18 GMT -5 Trexx said:

It was dang great and very different from it is today!
The hardest rock you could get on the radio was Aerosmith. Sweet Emotion flipped us out. In Sports School (summer school were we played team sports all summer) at the local high school, someone made a stencil of the Aerosmith logo and put black, two foot logos all over the place. Also, Heart was another hard rock band that was getting air play too. That was about it in the Central Valley of California around 1975. Our elders refered to it as "Acid Rock". Imagine! When I got to High School in 1978 the music scene was really blossoming as far as radio was concerned. On Sunday nights, the rock station would play entire albums after they promoted them all week long. Cassette tapes were the most amazing things to us. Tape decks up to that time were major pieces of stero equipment that had big, eight inch wheels with quarter inch magnetic tape to record on. Cassettes just were remarkable advancement. We'd make home made ones and trade 'em with each other at school. Most of these tapes were from the radio shows playing those albums. And dudes from other places with different radio stations would get stuff that we'd not yet heard. Also, the real rockers would go to the record stores and take a chance on the offerings there. Most cool record stores had a resident rocker that would turn us on to cool rock'n music that they knew we'd get fired up about. I discovered soooo many bands in these ways. My High School had a radio station that was just about out of control with music. We'd get the broadcast during lunch time. That's how I first heard Van Halen. The debut was the most stunning, outrageous, incredible thing any of us had ever heard. It was a WHOLE NEW THING in the Majorist-General way. Our minds were blown. There's just no way to convey the impact on us. Completely unprecedented and wild. We ate it up. It was OUR rock. Not sisters, not daddy's... OURS! Then a seemingly endless onslaught commenced. Ac/Dc we thought was a novelty act with TNT being the first thing we heard by them. My nerd neighbors won it on a radio contest. That singer, oh my gawd! We weren't sure if we liked it or not... until we heard "A Long Way To The Top" with bag pipes. It was soon adopted as a mainstay (the whole album)...other rockers at High School would talk and promote what they thought was cool. They'd make a tape to convince you. I found Rush this way, and many more too.
During this time it was a serious fashion statement to have Levi denim shirts with hand embrodiery on them. Us rockers dismissed the flowery motifs and put Van Halen logos on 'em and pot leaves and such. That was a major-general status symbol too! HA!
Then came Sony Walkmans (portable cassette tape decks with mini headphones). That marked a transformation into being able to take your rock skiing, windsurfing and walking the dog. It was a miracle. Then came the concerts. To see and hear our bands on stage was the next area of "growth". You'd wear your band's shirt to school. Having the latest tour on your shirt was also a status symbol as well as a conversation piece. This was another way to learn about bands that you didn't know. The other great resource for finding out cool bands was going to parties. Folks would bring their albums and we'd get an earful of new stuff this way too. I learned about -UFO- that way.
It was a different era. Nothing was at our finger tips. Our cassettes were like GOLD. We'd spend hours getting each side to fill up just right with as little dead air as possible. Skilled tape making was an art! We just wanted to ROCK! It was an adventure to find bands. Many of us would pick the brains of our elders as another way to be enlightened on what rocked. It was a never ending quest. And if you did find a band that your peers dug, you'd be elevated in esteem and status.

That's the core of my memory on the subject. Geeze louise... the olden days. Who'd of thunk?

...And "Punk"... that was sisters music. We certainly didn't get it. The English just don't look OK if they're not cleaned up and have matching outfits. HAAA! No. Seriously. We just didn't get it. Lacking melody and mighty riffs... there wasn't anything there. We had enough ammo to freak our parents out already. Ted Nugent and his wild hair telling us he could blow the balls off a charging rhino at 40 paces was just so much more fun than putting safety pins through our cheeks! My mom reviled plenty just looking at Ted's debut album jacket. (we used to call record containers "jackets" FYI.)

Music is my main passion. So I love picking some ones brain when it comes to music from that era. Thank you for taking the time to recall all of that. That was fucking cool. Don't get me wrong I love allot of the rock & metal from the 80's to now. But I believe I was born too late. My favorite music is from the late 60's through the 70's.

[rtbuck]

Dec 17, 2008 21:08:54 GMT -5 Donny Doom said:

Dec 17, 2008 5:29:32 GMT -5 @rtbuck said:

I never got the reason why some many people made such a big deal about the Sex Pistols. They were more attitude than play. Ramones had good catchy tunes. I'd take the Ramones over the Sex Pistols any day.

The Sex Pistols got over so well because they took it one step beyond. Even though Richard Hell sported the Sex Pistols look & style a few years previous,the Pistols & their entourage of fans took everything one step further & were making headlines. Hell, back then even the word Sex was a no no in the mainstream eyes & with the Pistols dropping the F bomb on the Bill Grundy TV show & all the other notorious headlines that followed including the ultra Punk icon Sid Vicious joining the band a whole new generation of rebellious fans joined in. Personally, I always felt the Pistols were fake & it was all a scheme by manager Malcolm Maclaren to line his pockets & I'm pretty sure Steve Jones & Paul Cook were in on the whole thing too. Maclaren failed when he tried taking over the NY Dolls in 75 by dressing them in red leather outfits with a huge Soviet Flag hanging behind their drum kit. He hoped to stir up controversy to get them over but the Dolls were too far gone & people could've cared less. In fact, when Maclaren was putting the Pistols together he was trying to get Dolls guitarist Sylvain Sylvain to join up & lead the Pistols but Sylvain was stuck in Japan with David Johansen finishing off some booking commitments that they had to adhere to even though the Dolls were split up. Actually the letters between Maclaren & Sylvain are on display at the R & R Hall of fame as is Sylvain's Creme colored Les Paul which he sent to England from Japan in good faith that he'd be there.
As far as their tunes, there has always been rumors that they actually used other musicians on their 'Never Mind the Bollocks' including guitarist Chris Spedding. I think they have some good tunes & instead of 'Never Mind the Bollocks' I prefer the 'Flogging a Dead Horse' compilation which not only features the right songs from 'Bollocks' but some other great tunes including great covers of "I'm Not Your Stepping Stone"(Monkees or Paul Revere) & "No Fun"(the Stooges). It also has a couple of great Eddie Cochran tunes covered by Sid("Something Else" & "C'mon Everybody") & the album has the classic "My Way" by Sid.

As far as Punk & Metal,In the late 80's I went to a show featuring Motorhead & Wendy O Williams & even though Williams was trying her hand with a more metal image at the time,her punk roots are the people she drew. There were a lot of battles between punkers & bikers that evening before,after, & during the show. I don't think Punk & Metal mixed well until the early 90's even though bands like Megadeth,Anthrax,& Metallica covered a few Punk tunes in the 80's

[Donny Doom]

Dec 18, 2008 3:50:02 GMT -5 @rtbuck said:

Dec 17, 2008 21:08:54 GMT -5 Donny Doom said:

Dec 17, 2008 5:29:32 GMT -5 @rtbuck said:

I never got the reason why some many people made such a big deal about the Sex Pistols. They were more attitude than play. Ramones had good catchy tunes. I'd take the Ramones over the Sex Pistols any day.

The Sex Pistols got over so well because they took it one step beyond. Even though Richard Hell sported the Sex Pistols look & style a few years previous,the Pistols & their entourage of fans took everything one step further & were making headlines. Hell, back then even the word Sex was a no no in the mainstream eyes & with the Pistols dropping the F bomb on the Bill Grundy TV show & all the other notorious headlines that followed including the ultra Punk icon Sid Vicious joining the band a whole new generation of rebellious fans joined in. Personally, I always felt the Pistols were fake & it was all a scheme by manager Malcolm Maclaren to line his pockets & I'm pretty sure Steve Jones & Paul Cook were in on the whole thing too. Maclaren failed when he tried taking over the NY Dolls in 75 by dressing them in red leather outfits with a huge Soviet Flag hanging behind their drum kit. He hoped to stir up controversy to get them over but the Dolls were too far gone & people could've cared less. In fact, when Maclaren was putting the Pistols together he was trying to get Dolls guitarist Sylvain Sylvain to join up & lead the Pistols but Sylvain was stuck in Japan with David Johansen finishing off some booking commitments that they had to adhere to even though the Dolls were split up. Actually the letters between Maclaren & Sylvain are on display at the R & R Hall of fame as is Sylvain's Creme colored Les Paul which he sent to England from Japan in good faith that he'd be there.
As far as their tunes, there has always been rumors that they actually used other musicians on their 'Never Mind the Bollocks' including guitarist Chris Spedding. I think they have some good tunes & instead of 'Never Mind the Bollocks' I prefer the 'Flogging a Dead Horse' compilation which not only features the right songs from 'Bollocks' but some other great tunes including great covers of "I'm Not Your Stepping Stone"(Monkees or Paul Revere) & "No Fun"(the Stooges). It also has a couple of great Eddie Cochran tunes covered by Sid("Something Else" & "C'mon Everybody") & the album has the classic "My Way" by Sid.

As far as Punk & Metal,In the late 80's I went to a show featuring Motorhead & Wendy O Williams & even though Williams was trying her hand with a more metal image at the time,her punk roots are the people she drew. There were a lot of battles between punkers & bikers that evening before,after, & during the show. I don't think Punk & Metal mixed well until the early 90's even though bands like Megadeth,Anthrax,& Metallica covered a few Punk tunes in the 80's

Yeah I got the Pistols were all about the shock gimmick.


I think punk was the best thing that happen to metal. I'm glad after some time passed bands were open minded enough to take their metal & punk influences an mix them. I think punk helped make metal become more aggressive & abrasive. It gave metal the kick in in the ass it needed at that time.

[kim]

Dec 18, 2008 3:43:16 GMT -5 Donny Doom said:

Dec 18, 2008 0:56:18 GMT -5 Trexx said:

It was dang great and very different from it is today!
The hardest rock you could get on the radio was Aerosmith. Sweet Emotion flipped us out. In Sports School (summer school were we played team sports all summer) at the local high school, someone made a stencil of the Aerosmith logo and put black, two foot logos all over the place. Also, Heart was another hard rock band that was getting air play too. That was about it in the Central Valley of California around 1975. Our elders refered to it as "Acid Rock". Imagine! When I got to High School in 1978 the music scene was really blossoming as far as radio was concerned. On Sunday nights, the rock station would play entire albums after they promoted them all week long. Cassette tapes were the most amazing things to us. Tape decks up to that time were major pieces of stero equipment that had big, eight inch wheels with quarter inch magnetic tape to record on. Cassettes just were remarkable advancement. We'd make home made ones and trade 'em with each other at school. Most of these tapes were from the radio shows playing those albums. And dudes from other places with different radio stations would get stuff that we'd not yet heard. Also, the real rockers would go to the record stores and take a chance on the offerings there. Most cool record stores had a resident rocker that would turn us on to cool rock'n music that they knew we'd get fired up about. I discovered soooo many bands in these ways. My High School had a radio station that was just about out of control with music. We'd get the broadcast during lunch time. That's how I first heard Van Halen. The debut was the most stunning, outrageous, incredible thing any of us had ever heard. It was a WHOLE NEW THING in the Majorist-General way. Our minds were blown. There's just no way to convey the impact on us. Completely unprecedented and wild. We ate it up. It was OUR rock. Not sisters, not daddy's... OURS! Then a seemingly endless onslaught commenced. Ac/Dc we thought was a novelty act with TNT being the first thing we heard by them. My nerd neighbors won it on a radio contest. That singer, oh my gawd! We weren't sure if we liked it or not... until we heard "A Long Way To The Top" with bag pipes. It was soon adopted as a mainstay (the whole album)...other rockers at High School would talk and promote what they thought was cool. They'd make a tape to convince you. I found Rush this way, and many more too.
During this time it was a serious fashion statement to have Levi denim shirts with hand embrodiery on them. Us rockers dismissed the flowery motifs and put Van Halen logos on 'em and pot leaves and such. That was a major-general status symbol too! HA!
Then came Sony Walkmans (portable cassette tape decks with mini headphones). That marked a transformation into being able to take your rock skiing, windsurfing and walking the dog. It was a miracle. Then came the concerts. To see and hear our bands on stage was the next area of "growth". You'd wear your band's shirt to school. Having the latest tour on your shirt was also a status symbol as well as a conversation piece. This was another way to learn about bands that you didn't know. The other great resource for finding out cool bands was going to parties. Folks would bring their albums and we'd get an earful of new stuff this way too. I learned about -UFO- that way.
It was a different era. Nothing was at our finger tips. Our cassettes were like GOLD. We'd spend hours getting each side to fill up just right with as little dead air as possible. Skilled tape making was an art! We just wanted to ROCK! It was an adventure to find bands. Many of us would pick the brains of our elders as another way to be enlightened on what rocked. It was a never ending quest. And if you did find a band that your peers dug, you'd be elevated in esteem and status.

That's the core of my memory on the subject. Geeze louise... the olden days. Who'd of thunk?

...And "Punk"... that was sisters music. We certainly didn't get it. The English just don't look OK if they're not cleaned up and have matching outfits. HAAA! No. Seriously. We just didn't get it. Lacking melody and mighty riffs... there wasn't anything there. We had enough ammo to freak our parents out already. Ted Nugent and his wild hair telling us he could blow the balls off a charging rhino at 40 paces was just so much more fun than putting safety pins through our cheeks! My mom reviled plenty just looking at Ted's debut album jacket. (we used to call record containers "jackets" FYI.)

Music is my main passion. So I love picking some ones brain when it comes to music from that era. Thank you for taking the time to recall all of that. That was f*cking cool. Don't get me wrong I love allot of the rock & metal from the 80's to now. But I believe I was born too late. My favorite music is from the late 60's through the 70's.

Donnie, don't feel bad...there are some of us thinking the same thing.

I often think to myself, "what would it have been like being born in the late 40's...I would have relished the 50's music".
I have a brother that was born in 48' and I wonder what it must have been like for him? It's been over 15 years since we have spoke so I can't tell ya?

I will admit this though, I consider myself lucky to be born in 59' so that I was able to enjoy the 60's and especially the glorious 70's era of rock and even pop music of the day. Even then, we, as far as late baby boomers went, had a chance and were able to make a choice with the music supplied.

That's why folks like Rik, Bucky and myself can relate to music on a "pop" level or a "rock" level...that we were so lucky to have back then.

Yet...keep in mind that we were constantly reminded of the music from the late 50's and early 60's...so it was not uncommon to hear the so called "golden oldies" of the day at a typical school dance, and therefore is good reaason why we respect the music of the day and in someways, can still call it our own.

A good example of this I can recall is going to a "church dance" when I was 12 years old. We were king then and knew everything there was to know at the time...needed the adults for food and shelter...but the social life was ours..."pot" was being introduced and beer cooling out in the parking lot snow bank was not uncommon then...(probably still the same as snow is a good insulator...hahaha).

I recall one dance where the elder teen sponsors put forth a "50's" theme and all of us 13 year olds pretty much rebelled and wanted to hear Deep Purple..."Smoke On The Water"...they didn't give in and they made damned sure we listened to Rock around the Clock and the sorts...haha.

A year or two later provided us with sooo much music and great times that it was hard to choose...just what direction a person wanted to go...and for the most part, depended on just what group it was that you hung with at the time.

Growing up in a small Northern Ontario town, some of us did have choices. I, myself was rather insulated because there was no such thing as cable in a town of 1200 people. We also were hampered by a 5000 watt AM radio staion. Take it from there.

Thankfully, I hung out with friends to a degree, that were up on Alice Cooper, Deep Purple, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Atomic Rooster and a whole whack of other groups that although I may know, never quite got into...hahaha.

At least these guys respected me for who I was, and turned me on to the stuff that I finally came to love.

When I was 16 in 1976, working for a furniture company, I got into ZZ Top, Queen, BTO, April Wine, Argent, Nazareth, Supertramp...just to name a few...and it was all good until I hit college in 78'.

It was at this time, 78 - 80, that I realized that the bands that I loved playing hockey to, such as Foreigner, Prism, Fleetwood Mac, STYX and WINGS had some competition.

At first, I rebelled. Then, and this is important...I heard the opening chords to an upstart group, in May of 1979...with a single that hit the radio waves...totally opening up my mind...it wasn't punk...wasn't new wave... it was Dire Straights..."Sultans Of Swing"...

It's a long story, and I won't go in to it, but it changed my whole pattern of musical acceptance and to this day...I live by it!

After that of course came The Cars, Cheap Trick, The Ramones, Dave Edmunds, B52's, Kate Bush, and yes, even a new found appreciation of Jethro Tull, Alan Parsons Project, AC/DC, Judas Preist...you name it.

There were also semi-quasi punk groups such as The Monks that influenced my listening pleasures...not to mention The Jim Caroll Band.

At the same time however, Preist's "British Steel" ruled during the weekends that I used to enjoy camping out with the gang after the bars closed...along with AC/DC. We'd always highball'er down the back road at 1:30 am and party till the sun came up listening to the music of the day.

Since then, over the many years, I'm quite open to music that "moves" me and makes me want to listen to it...but I have to admit, there isn't a helluva lot in the the terms of mainstream music of today that piques my interest???

I find it more interesting and involving to search out a Zellers promo tune using someone like the "Be Good Tanya's" as a source for my listening pleasure simply because I like the music.

Granted, this post has pretty much little to do with the birth of metal and punk rock, but may give you some insight as to the music of the day back then, and the influence it had on one of the older posters such as myself here...strangley enough......it doesn't seem like that long ago...yet I know that it is???



Thanks
Kim

[Donny Doom]

Dec 19, 2008 16:01:09 GMT -5 kim said:

Dec 18, 2008 3:43:16 GMT -5 Donny Doom said:

Music is my main passion. So I love picking some ones brain when it comes to music from that era. Thank you for taking the time to recall all of that. That was f*cking cool. Don't get me wrong I love allot of the rock & metal from the 80's to now. But I believe I was born too late. My favorite music is from the late 60's through the 70's.

Donnie, don't feel bad...there are some of us thinking the same thing.

I often think to myself, "what would it have been like being born in the late 40's...I would have relished the 50's music".
I have a brother that was born in 48' and I wonder what it must have been like for him? It's been over 15 years since we have spoke so I can't tell ya?

I will admit this though, I consider myself lucky to be born in 59' so that I was able to enjoy the 60's and especially the glorious 70's era of rock and even pop music of the day. Even then, we, as far as late baby boomers went, had a chance and were able to make a choice with the music supplied.

That's why folks like Rik, Bucky and myself can relate to music on a "pop" level or a "rock" level...that we were so lucky to have back then.

Yet...keep in mind that we were constantly reminded of the music from the late 50's and early 60's...so it was not uncommon to hear the so called "golden oldies" of the day at a typical school dance, and therefore is good reaason why we respect the music of the day and in someways, can still call it our own.

A good example of this I can recall is going to a "church dance" when I was 12 years old. We were king then and knew everything there was to know at the time...needed the adults for food and shelter...but the social life was ours..."pot" was being introduced and beer cooling out in the parking lot snow bank was not uncommon then...(probably still the same as snow is a good insulator...hahaha).

I recall one dance where the elder teen sponsors put forth a "50's" theme and all of us 13 year olds pretty much rebelled and wanted to hear Deep Purple..."Smoke On The Water"...they didn't give in and they made damned sure we listened to Rock around the Clock and the sorts...haha.

A year or two later provided us with sooo much music and great times that it was hard to choose...just what direction a person wanted to go...and for the most part, depended on just what group it was that you hung with at the time.

Growing up in a small Northern Ontario town, some of us did have choices. I, myself was rather insulated because there was no such thing as cable in a town of 1200 people. We also were hampered by a 5000 watt AM radio staion. Take it from there.

Thankfully, I hung out with friends to a degree, that were up on Alice Cooper, Deep Purple, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Atomic Rooster and a whole whack of other groups that although I may know, never quite got into...hahaha.

At least these guys respected me for who I was, and turned me on to the stuff that I finally came to love.

When I was 16 in 1976, working for a furniture company, I got into ZZ Top, Queen, BTO, April Wine, Argent, Nazareth, Supertramp...just to name a few...and it was all good until I hit college in 78'.

It was at this time, 78 - 80, that I realized that the bands that I loved playing hockey to, such as Foreigner, Prism, Fleetwood Mac, STYX and WINGS had some competition.

At first, I rebelled. Then, and this is important...I heard the opening chords to an upstart group, in May of 1979...with a single that hit the radio waves...totally opening up my mind...it wasn't punk...wasn't new wave... it was Dire Straights..."Sultans Of Swing"...

It's a long story, and I won't go in to it, but it changed my whole pattern of musical acceptance and to this day...I live by it!

After that of course came The Cars, Cheap Trick, The Ramones, Dave Edmunds, B52's, Kate Bush, and yes, even a new found appreciation of Jethro Tull, Alan Parsons Project, AC/DC, Judas Preist...you name it.

There were also semi-quasi punk groups such as The Monks that influenced my listening pleasures...not to mention The Jim Caroll Band.

At the same time however, Preist's "British Steel" ruled during the weekends that I used to enjoy camping out with the gang after the bars closed...along with AC/DC. We'd always highball'er down the back road at 1:30 am and party till the sun came up listening to the music of the day.

Since then, over the many years, I'm quite open to music that "moves" me and makes me want to listen to it...but I have to admit, there isn't a helluva lot in the the terms of mainstream music of today that piques my interest???

I find it more interesting and involving to search out a Zellers promo tune using someone like the "Be Good Tanya's" as a source for my listening pleasure simply because I like the music.

Granted, this post has pretty much little to do with the birth of metal and punk rock, but may give you some insight as to the music of the day back then, and the influence it had on one of the older posters such as myself here...strangley enough......it doesn't seem like that long ago...yet I know that it is???



Thanks
Kim

No it doesn't have much to do with the birth of metal and punk rock. But just the same your post was helpful with describing the music of that era. Yes my main interest is in heavy music. But that is not my only interest musically. There is too much music out there for me to limit myself to only listening to or play only one kind of music. I wish I wish I could find more musicians or people in general close to my age that are open minded to 60's 70's or even 40's 50's music. Don't get me wrong I love playing heavy music. But I get bored with just playing one type of music for too long. I like to mix it up an do Improvised jamming. Here I go again going on an on. Any ways thank you Kim your post was helpful.