As noted yesterday, my kid brother the Stinger was born on New Year's Day, 1976. He picked a very strange time to enter the world.
As you might remember if you were around at the time, the logo above was ubiquitous. It's also aged about as badly as the 70s have. You could count on a little history lesson/sermonette each night, courtesy of the Bicentennial Minute, as in this example, in which actress Jessica Tandy provides fulsome detail of the destruction of the Liberty Tree in Boston, with a surprise ending. Although overt signs of patriotism were encouraged, one of the best examples of patriotism happened on a baseball diamond, when Cubs outfielder Rick Monday rescued an American flag from a couple of yahoos who were about to set it aflame in the outfield at Dodger Stadium. The Bicentennial was a welcome thing after what had been a very difficult few years in American history, and I remember well sitting on the couch in my house that summer, giving my baby brother a bottle as I watched the tall ships entering New York harbor. It was pretty cool.
Musically, things were a little adrift. We were now a long ways away from the glory years of rock and roll and it was a time when a lot of schlock was on the radio, although there were a few classic bursts of cheese that still amuse me all these years later. But you never quite knew what you'd hear next.
It was a strange time. But Stinger seems to have survived it all pretty nicely. As have the rest of us.
3 comments:
one thing about the 70's: black musicians showed the rest of us how to pick out ridiculous wardrobes.
And a lot of us followed suit, Gino. Well, maybe not someone as fashion-forward as you, of course.
I remember the Bicentennial Minutes because they were sponsored by Shell Oil (all-American company that they were) and my father owned a Shell Station. I owned a pair of red, white and blue striped bell-bottoms with the word "VOTE" reversed out of the blue stripes and repeated over and over. Stylin' indeed.
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