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Sunday, May 20, 2007

Sweet rainy seventies nostalgia

Idling away most of the day. Library closed and raining.. Downloaded music, watched a great DVD about WattStax 1973, the black Woodstock. Great Music and a look into the style of the day. A lot of Black power (100.000 people shouting "I am somebody, I am beautiful, I want to be respected!"), and rightly so, in those days. Chilling anyway, that people still had to learn to be 'somebody' in the early 70s. Funny interludes by Richard Pryor. And of course the hair styles, the clothes. Don't think any black funk artist today would try and get on stage in a stunning pink suit with shorts and white high boots..
Read some about the Seventies and Bubblegum music, the lightweight tunes that blocked the top10 for most 'deep' artist. Then found www.top40.nl, where they have every Dutch Top40 in history and spend the next few hours in nostalgia, looking at the hitparades I knew by heart then. Grew up in the glamrock-light version of The Sweet, Slade and Mud (I was a big Sweet fan for what I then thought was an eternity, but in reality turns out to be 3 years or so, with songs like Poppa Joe (my first ever single, together with, dare I say it?, Un Canto A Galicia from Julio Iglesias), Wig Wam Bam, Blockbuster, Ballroom Blitz and Fox On The Run, among many others. Strange I still can't find a book on them and The Middle Of The Road, for instance. But then again, they were nowhere as succesful as in Holland. Even my dad loved The Middle (or, to be more precise, the singer of the band, Sally, with her long blond hair and hot pants, singing number 1 hits like Sacramento, Talk Of All The USA, Soley Soley). So we watched Top Pop with the whole family, while my father remarked about The Sweet: "Well, their hair may be far too long, at least they've combed it..". Strange, I still remember that remark. Perhaps because my own hair fell to my shoulders then, too..

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