I really didn’t need to see this 1970 magazine in my twitter stream. Really, I didn’t.
Those of you who weren’t even born in 1970…just shut up. Shhh. Hush. Go back to your video games and toys, the adults are talking now.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Man oh man, George Harrison has great hair in that photo.
Mick Jagger has great lips, not surrounded by wrinkles.
Janis Joplin is alive in my music collection.
Cash, Morrison, Joplin, Lennon, Hendrix, Lee, Presley, Harrison didn’t make it to now, but the rest not only survived the 70s, they made it to the 21st century.
Isn’t Mayall like a hundred years old now?
@PZ: Get off my lawn, whippersnapper!
Given the rock n’ roll life style, its amazing so many on that cover are still alive. Only 7 of the 20 are gone 43 years later.
Fixed that for you (the fixing by an even older fogie)
I count 8 dead. Didn’t Lee die just last year?
8 out of 20. I missed Alvin Lee.
It’s kind of eerie putting your mind back into 1970 and looking at those faces.
Anyway, if we knew then that disco was fast approaching, could we have done anything about it?
*sigh*
I need a drink.
Maybe some warm milk.
I like this. Lately I have been feeling old, my gf is much younger than I and sometimes it makes me feel that way. But since I was born in the 1982 PZ has given me license to feel young again.
rogerfirth#8
That would make a great time-travel story.
Never mind killing Hitler’s grandfather, what could have prevented disco?
The most amazing thing is not so much how many are dead but that Crosby’s still alive.
(They don’t seem to have been worried about Keef Richards back then.)
Even then, Richards was known to be so thoroughly saturated with exotic chemicals that he would never die, but persist forever in a state of unholy undeath.
This magazine was published the exact month in which I was born. Sigh. But! I’m still alive!
Does the article within list more names they hope to make it out of the 70’s? Keith Moon didn’t make the cut.
17 for 20, surviving the Seventies, by my count.
Of course *cough* I was a mere 13 when the Seventies ended, so I demand credit for knowing this as a faux youngster.
Actually quite a few did survive the 70s and most are still going, which given the lifestyles most of them lived must be testimony to something. Maybe there’s hope for us, PZ, given the tamer lives most of us live.
To me, the biggest surprise in that group is that David Crosby is not only still alive, but still performing.
Interesting that they included Jagger and Watts, but not Richards…maybe they thought there was no point.
There needs to be a term for this (other than pickled). Say, prebalmed?
No way was David Crosby ever that young.
I remember watching the Beatles the first time they were on the Ed Sullivan show. I never did get all of the screaming, but the music was fun.
But my own children, who are young because I got started late, listen to the 60s and 70s music. My 19 year old daughter loves that old music. She’s hooked on Randy Bachman’s Vinyl Tap (a CBC radio program that plays old music).
There is a lot of music from the 60s and 70s that still sounds so good. I don’t hear a lot of current music that can compare. Over production and autotune can make anyone sound like a singer. But back in the day when live was live, and not lip sync, they really could sing. I frequently go out and watch old videos on YouTube and the tunes are great. I often wince at the clothing, but that’s fixed by closing your eyes.
My kids greeted me at the breakfast table with a round of “Happy Birthday”. The Arrogant Worms version (“Happy birthday, what have you done that matters? Happy birthday, you’re starting to get fatter! Happy birthday, it’s downhill from now on. Try not to remind yourself your best years are all gone…”).
Thank you, for making me feel young again (born in ’71).
You mean he’s not a lich?
congenital cynic,
Vinyl Tap is awesome. While most of the music is a bit before my time, it is what I grew up with because it was what my father listened to and that has really rubbed off on me. Also, his stories are always very interesting.
Paul McCartney didn’t even survive the ’60s.
I was born in sixty-six, but looking at that line-up still leaves me feeling young. Yay!
Alvin Lee died earlier this year.
…and it shows Johnny Cash at 37, Grace Slick at 30, John Mayall at 36, and Elvis Presley at 35. Did “approaching” mean something different in the 1970s?
Whoa! Mayall is 79! And if the Ppppfff can be believed, he’s still working. That’s how I want to be. What’s retirement if you do work you love.
It’s nice to feel young again
The Mellow Monkey:
They’re from Vienne et Viennu Planet.
PZ Myers writes:
When he dies NASA will thin-section his liver to coat re-entry vehicles.
I would have given most of the others up for a few more years of Janis and Jimi
I was four in 1970.
I discovered most of these artists ca.1980 – 85.
Sad that some are dead. Happy that it is so few.
I tend to freak out when I see copies of AARP’s magazine and the people on the cover are people I think of as young. (If Gloria Estefan is 55, she doesn’t look it yet.)
I do love that the Tacoma campus of the University of Washington named their Husky mascot “Hendrix”. Maybe not a giant tribute, but nice to know Seattle legends make it into the everyday discourse.
and @33… Micheal J Fox was on the cover. Alex P. Keaton is NOT AARP age!!
I’m trying to imagine what their criteria was for picking these 20. My first thought was “rockers” but then Cash doesn’t fit that, and even Dylan and Presley are a bit of stretch. It’s certainly mostly white guys, though.
We’ll always have makeup and Photoshop.
That’s David Crosby, Mark II. Doctors keep replacing the parts of him that go bad.
Man. February 1970. The depressing bit: Joplin and Hendrix had months left, then. Morrison, a little more than a year. They barely made it into the 70s.
Kinda a shitty year, that way, at least.
Here’s a hoot: The 100 Oldest Living Rock Stars.
Not sure I would count all of them as “rock” stars (Doris Day!?…give me a break), but still an interesting list. The oldest on it is Herb Jeffries (jazz) at 100 and just a step down is Pete Seeger (94), one of the original folkies (for you yungins’ who don’t know your roots). And right behind him, Little Jimmy Dickens at 92…gosh, now there’s a name I haven’t run into in a million years. And he’s still working the Opry!
I was born in 1978 in working class suburbs in Sydney, I might not have been around at the time, but these figures provide the cultural background that shaped me. Very important people in their own way, all.
I hadn’t heard about Alvin Lee. Now I’ll break out my Alvin Lee and Mylon LeFerve album. I’d love to change the world…
@Robro Johnny Cash was a bit of a crossover star. And Elvis? The King? of Rock? He is solid in the category. It seems like a list of famous people known for excess. Not exclusively rock but heavily represented.
Well I’ve seen McCartney, Jagger & Charlie in the flesh this year. Still standing, not like those pix though. Saw John mayall a couple of years ago, he looks old.
But they all sounded great!! Rock on.
When I die, my last thought will likely be, “Fuck. Keith Richards outlived me too.”
I have seen every one of these folks in concert…in some cases I even remember what the concerts were like, where they occurred and what they sang. In some cases, can’t remember much. Depended mostly on imports from Mexico, Cambodia or Columbia at the time.
congenital cynic (#20) –
I see that the show was a replacement for Finkleman’s 45s, which isn’t a bad selection, but I loved what Finkleman played. I used to listen to CBC on Saturday regularly (from to Basic Black in the morning until Saturday Night Blues), and listened to Night Lines and Brave New Waves when I worked my way through college as a security guard.
I moved overseas more than a decade ago and miss having it. The time zone difference means they’re on at times I can’t listen to them.
perplexed #44
You probably should have a prize …
of some kind …
let me see if I can remember where …
what were we talking about?
um
wut
Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce are two other guys who by no means shouldn’t have made it into the 21st Century, but still did. Eric Burdon also is still around.
One cult hero who survived the 70’s but not the 90’s is Rory Gallagher.
So here’s a question: in spite of the fact that those listed are a small population, how did they do, compared to the rest of the population at large? It seems that it’s somewhat biased for the known addicts and hard partiers but what’s the death rate? 6 out of that list? And Lennon didn’t die of “natural causes” or an overdose or whatever.
It may be that being a rocker isn’t so bad.
I agree with Chas#47.
Presley are a bit of stretch.
One of the co-inventors of rock’n’roll (along with Chuck Berry) is not a rocker?
@36
Sure, Presley might have shamelessly taken credit for music that had long been rooted in African-American culture, but he is still one of the fathers of Rock. He was one the pioneers who first merged blues, country, and rhythm to make the mixture we call rock.
And Dylan pretty much sparked the 60s rock scene with “Like a Rolling Stone” and Highway 61 Revisited. Prior to Dylan’s switch from folk to electric rock, the Beatles were still playing sappy pop. McCartney and Lennon both acknowledged that Dylan pushed them into a heavier, more rock-oriented direction.
I remember the “never trust anyone over thirty” meme (we didn’t have the term meme then, but it fits here so well) from that time.
The hubby and I met in ’74. We celebrated our 37th wedding anniversary today – sigh.
magistramarla
Happy Anniversary to you and Hubby.
With my last breath, I will curse Zoidberg.
And…the Allmon Bros…Santana…Chicago…Clapton…Leslie West…Ian Anderson…Elton…Rod…Croce…Joe Cocker…I have to go find my bell bottoms and tie died shirts.
Can’t agree with you there. The Beatles had a very wide range, including sappy, but they were rockers at the core from the fifties on (think the Hamburg years).
I still have my 1970s bellbottoms.
Someday, I will finish embroidering them.
Along with Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash.
Of course, people like Ike Turner and Chuck Berry were also important; they just didn’t have (or need) the country part.
Mere accesory visual trappings. Music is auditory, and can be enoyed and appreciated completely out of the cultural context in which it was created.
My kid’s 17, and she and her friends go to shows of current bands I have never heard of. But she’s usually wearing a Pink Floyd or Beatles or Grateful Dead T-shirt when she does.
@16 – no credit. Only 16 survived the 70s. Janis, Jim, and Jimi died in ’70 and then Elvis in ’77.
If. I think you mean if.
My first reaction to the photos was that pang — a friend of mine, a sound man, was touring with Jimi when he died. And then Janis. And so on.
It’s hard to believe disco could get a foothold (so to speak) in a world that still included Zappa and Clapton. Would we have escaped that minor hell if Jimi, Janis, and Morrison had made it through the woods? Well, at least it would have been easier to avoid, I guess.
How fortunate that we still have John Mayall, who improves the world with his presence in a very large and robust way.
Um. Is there any grog left?
You’ve got to admire Elvis. At age 35, he was just approaching 30.
I would have given all of the others up for a few more years of John Lennon.
I wish Zimmerman had taken singing lessons.
and I’d like a pony.
I’m happy that you guys aren’t God, I like Bobby’s singing just fine, and I want a pony too.
Passed up a chance to see Elvis in Pittsburgh on New Year’s Eve 1976. He died months later. Ah, well. Speaking of being old, the most recent concert I went to was the 40th (now 41st) anniversary of JethronTull’s “Thick as a Brick.”
I enjoyed Keith Richards’ bio Life, and learned that his motto was pharmaceutical-grade substances only, ala Merck. Keith could afford the good stuff.
[Insert Depends joke h ere]
Of course, this too can be prevented by the appropriate gratuitous efforts.
Meanwhile, apparently Matchbox 20 is a “classics” now. >.>
Coincidentally, I just tonight happened across this pic of Keef in my current neighborhood. My ex enjoyed his book a lot, and has already warned me that it’s my xmas present.
There are some good interview clips of him @ youtube; he’s an intelligent and (slightly haltingly) articulate guy.
And of course he rocks hard.
@45 left0ver1under:
“Night Lines and Brave New Waves” – I was driving a taxi on night shift and listened every night. A lot of great and interesting stuff.
If you would like to hear CBC shows wherever you are, go to their website, cbc.ca . Just about every radio show is now available as a podcast.
I remember dancing around the living room to Beetles music…. after threading the giant reel to reel tapes onto our huge tape deck in the leviathan of a cabinet that held a record player, reel to reel tape recorder/player and stereo radio. My mother had put all the albums onto tape so that the albums wouldn’t be ruined. Smart woman. I still have the original White album… my favorite! As a plus, the tapes didn’t skip when we jumped around… though they did stretch and distort a bit on their own!
“You say you want a revolution…
well… you know…
We all want to save the world…
You tell me that it’s evolution
Well… you know….
We all want to change the world!
But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can
count me out
Don’t you know it’s gonna be…… all right
Don’t you know it’s gonna be…… all right
Don’t you know it’s gonna be…… all right
All right”
Great memories.
“You are old, Father William,” the young man said,
“And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head—
Do you think, at your age, it is right?”
Joni Mitchell is really missing from that cover.
Also Marvin Gaye. But maybe Circus was mostly about white music.
Anyway, it’s so disappointing how the generation that wanted to get their souls free has turned into a fat lump on the age pyramidthat begrudges resources to generations coming after.
This will be the sound made by the last sun in the universe, as it finally winks out of existence.
Maybe Keith has been around since the beginning, like Tom Bombadil. He is the demiurge?
Was John Lennon really Zaphod Beeblebrox?
I ONE IX HE ♦ DIE
I’ve always been a fan of the Paul is Dead conspiracy theory, not because it’s plausible, but because of the silly lengths people will go to to try to “prove” it. Cranberry Sauce.
Also, Ray Davies? One of these things is not like the others…
In Feb. 1970, she’d only released 2 albums, of purely acoustic folk music. Readers of Circus at the time had probably never heard of her, and if they had they probably considered her eye-rollingly fey.
In Feb. 1970, he was just another great singer on the Motown roster. Not Circus‘s purview.
What’s the problem? The Kinks were legit.
Paul is dead, man. Miss him, miss him.
That’s more depressing than anything else in this thread.
Oh, I love the Kinks (“Muswell Hillbillies” is possibly the most underrated album ever), it’s just when I think of rock star debauchery, I don’t necessarily think of the guy who wrote Village Green Preservation Society. Why wouldn’t he have survived the 70s?
@ 81, UnKnownEric the Apostate,
His brother would’ve knifed him in a fight.
Or vice versa.
@ 81, UnKnownEric the Apostate,
A guy in my dorm (early ’80s) was obsessed with the conspiracy. I was never sure if he was serious about it.
Um, that last one was @ 78.
I can’t handle these large numbers.
Saw Johnny Winter just recently in the UK. Excellend band and Johnny still has the skills, but he’s not looking well.
I hadn’t taken that into consideration. :)
I was totally fascinated by this at the age of 11 (1970, if you’re counting). My buddy’s hippyish parents had all the albums and knew all the rumors; there was much more to it than the 3 or 4 examples that have survived in public memory. It was actually plausible at the time, and turning up the volume to hear “I…buried…Paul” was positively chilling.
Which reminds me of this one. Few youngsters know that the original Magical Mystery Tour album had the most deluxe packaging yet seen, including not only a gatefold cover but an integrated full-color booklet. Here is p. 6 of that booklet. John Lennon is depicted, and a sign in the back reads “The best way to go is by M.D.C.”
spooky, or what?
ah, I see.
I’m not sure that was even the context or motivation for the cover. I interpreted it as purely age-related.
@73- Now I have TMBG’s version of that stuck in my head….
don1, Johnny Winter hasn’t looked well in 30 years.
Disco bashing? Aren’t most of you old enough to know better? Especially given the often questionable racial and sexual politics of the whole thing.
@robro #28:
He definitely is. The last time I saw him play was three years ago. It sort of worries me that he’s not been back this way since; there seemed to be a big UK tour every other year before that. He may have had to cut back.
@anuran #31:
Fuck yeah!
Shane MacGowan was only 13 in 1970, but I’d say he’s donw a fair job of catching up.
Chas @ 87:
Oh man, now you’ve got me going. :)
More MMT booklet goodness: Ringo’s drum head appears to say “Love the 3 Beatles”, McCartney sitting behind a desk with “I Was” on it, McCartney with a black carnation…
I must be getting a different vibe from this than other people. I read it as wondering how many of these young hot rock stars would survive the ’70s in terms of being hip, musically relevant, etc. Seeing as how Jimi, Jim, and Janis had not died yet, I don’t know if the “rock stars die young” trope was in effect yet.
But given that each of the Beatles are listed separately and they hadn’t formally broken up at that time, maybe I’m wrong.
Also, given that the oldest person on the list at 37 is at the very top left, it’s entirely possible that they were just taking the piss.
True. I’m looking at it with the knowledge of what happened next, rather than the spirit it may have been meant in at the time. It’s likely they weren’t saying “Who’s gonna overdose next?”
Perhaps, but Brians Jones and Epstein and Otis Redding had died recently, Bob Dylan had had a near-fatal motorcycle accident, and surely people still remembered Buddy Holly, Patsy Cline, Eddy Cochrane, Hank Williams, etc.
chigau @65
I agree. I like Dylan sung by anyone but Dylan.
Nobody sings Dylan like Dylan.
Thank the non-existent gods! There’s only one guy singing Dylan songs through his nose.
just for that I am going to play Blonde On Blonde real loud, and if my neighbors complain, it’s on you.
chigau @65
And harmonica lessons. It takes a kind of inverse talent to play that badly.
Loving the CBC drift. I liked the music Finkelman played on Finkelman’s 45s, but by the time I discovered the show he’d rarely stfu and play any of it, preferring to rant on like some cranky old conservative fart. Randy Bachman would probably disagree with a lot of people here on any number of things, but he doesn’t bloviate about Mormonism or whatever, he talks about music, so him I like.
(I was only 7 in 1970 and by the time I discovered rock magazines a decade later I was a Creem fan, not Circus.)
That does it. Now my neighbors are going to be subjected to Bringing It All Back Home turned up to 11. I hope you can live with yourself.
Chas
No problem. Mine have just been subjected to an hour or so of me trying to play as badly as Dylan, and failing. Mind, it’s probably a relief after my all-too-easily-successful attempts to sing as badly as Shane MacGowan…
My favorite stupid “Paul is dead” rumor was that the cover of the white album wasn’t the real cover. If you rubbed Vaseline into the cover, you could carefully peel it off and reveal the true cover which of course included confirmation that Paul was indeed dead.
A friend of my brother tried it with his copy. We were at his place and noticed that it had been stripped down to tatters and cardboard. He actually tried to claim that the real true cover was visible for a few minutes, then faded. We laughed at him very hard for that.
myeck waters: I never heard that one!
But what’s fascinating is that it’s very likely a mutated version of something that really happened with an earlier Beatles album, Yesterday and Today.
Long story short, thousands of covers were printed with the infamous Butcher cover* and then a replacement cover ws simply pasted over the top. (Of course, if you turn the replacement cover on its side it’s obvious that PAUL IS IN A COFFIN!!!!)
*they are so clearly so stoned in that pic!
btw, I still have my original copy of the white album, cover much the worse for wear but still bearing the embossed band name and the stamped serial number (in my case No. 2965720). Still have the four color photo portraits that came inside, too.
Not to mention an editor.
Musical taste is of course largely subjective and it just gets silly when discussions about it get phrased in terms of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, so I will just say that I disagree almost 100% (let’s say 96%) with all this Dylan-bashing. To my ear, his singing voices (he’s employed at least 5 distinct ones through his long career) and even his harmonica playing are perfectly complementary to his songs, and his songs, as a body of work and the occasional clinker notwithstanding, are inarguably among the very best of the last half-century. No other songwriter would argue with that assessment.
So, yeah, I like Bob’s records a lot, most of them, and that’s coming from a used-to-be jazz musician.
YMMV but if so I think you are ignorant. So there.
I’m sorry I said that.
I found Dylan’s earliest voice to be unpleasantly nasal and his phrasing to be jarring.
I still thought he was a genius.
Left0ver1under @45, I believe just about everyone has podcasts or audio clips these days, including Vinyl Tap.
Chas
I do like Dylan. One of the things I like about rock and folk music in particular is the fact that the song and the mood/feel of a piece can be more important than the technical ability of the performer.
What about a list of people who really shouldn’t have survived the 70es? *cough*PatRobertson*cough*cough*
People dissing Dylan? And not just specifically his Street Legal through Down in the Groove period (which was admittedly awful*)? Thems fightin’ words round these parts. ;)
*And yeah Self-Portrait through Billy the Kid wasn’t great shakes either.
It was a wonder that Keith Moon survived the 1960s:
http://youtu.be/q63XogYTIcc
Point taken, but you know, all of those records had at least one or two great songs on them. Except maybe Saved. And I frankly have no memory at all of Empire Burlesque or Down in the Groove.
But Infidels is one of my absolute favorites. Seriously.
I want DVDs of everything the Smothers Brothers ever did.