![]() ![]() The founding members of the infamous “ 27 club” succumbed to various vices, mainly flaming out in an onslaught of drugs and alcohol (including Rolling Stones co-founder Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison). The Beatles now seem lucky to have simply broken up in early 1970 – at least they got out alive. Yet, the facts speak: The end of the ’60s and the beginning of the ’70s were not great times for many rock and roll bands or musicians. Goodbye Utopian ’60s, Hello Nightmare ’70sĮxaggeration is easy when it comes to rock music history. This reconsideration will provide a deeper investigation into the album, its era(s), and why we should give a damn today. Both the record and band provide a lens for examining the era and how the Stones reflected and embodied the rise of its many impulses across a range of pop culture topics and ideas. The preceding is a longish way of setting up the exercise of reassessing Goats Head Soup, the 11th US album by the Rolling Stones (released 12 September 1973). The bonus (as with all studies of history and humanities) is that filtering these many data points creates the type of critical and contextual thinking skills that might lead people to become better community members and citizens. In other words, the more one digs into the ’70s, the more essential the decade becomes. Yet, as the later decades of the 20th century slip by and historians and observers start to analyze and reassess the ’70s, what’s emerging is a portrait of a decade that tells us more about our contemporary times than earlier imagined. Historians and critics don’t even agree on when the eras of the 1960s and 1970s begin and end. ![]() The snapshot is basically the person’s adaptation or rendering rather than something concretely factual (if that could even exist, even eyewitnesses inject opinion, bias, and perspective on allegedly firsthand accounts). ![]() The real and imagined fuse together to form something new, but not really “history”, more like a created or imagined picture of “the past”. These interpretations bounce all over the place. People constantly and subconsciously filter ideas and impulses through current lenses. For example, one person’s ’60s centers on living through the psychedelic rock and Flower Power emanating from San Francisco, while another’s is seeing parts of Forrest Gump 52 times on cable TV. ![]() For many, the real “picture” consists of the historical scraps from a lifetime of living in and then later recreating the mid-to-late decades of the 20th century. When people create memories of these different eras, there’s extensive event overlap and nostalgia mixed in with heavy doses of pop culture-infused memories. The list of events careens from Watergate and the awful end of the Vietnam debacle (those haunting images of helicopters lifting off from the American embassy in retreat) to skyrocketing inflation and gas lines stretching around the block in Jimmy Carter’s sad America. Unlike its free-loving counterpart, the 1960s filled with groovy tunes and happy kids smoking weed in sunny California, or the boisterous 1980s blasting off with new technology, MTV, and Ronald Reagan’s kick-ass, American aggression, the 1970s are remembered for negatives. Here’s something you don’t hear very often: “Yeah, the 1970s, now there’s a great decade.” The mental model doesn’t work. ![]()
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