Recent celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade ruling (you know, the one that gave women the right to decide whether they want to have children) were understandably subdued, given the Supreme Court’s decision to shit-can the whole thing last year. Nevertheless, there are plenty of less complicated reasons to celebrate the year 1973.
I’ve long been convinced that human civilization peaked in the early 1970s, and today’s pair of YouTube clips will demonstrate that theory quite vividly.
But first some background.
For those too young to remember, the 1970s were indeed a magical time. We were blessed with just the right amount of technology — enough to make life comfortable and interesting but not so much that it replaced our imagination and enslaved us. More to the point, pop culture was awash in a perfect storm of historical abundance — a weird and wonderful confluence of chronology when pillars of the establishment co-existed with the flamethrowers of the counterculture. People like Jack Benny and Bob Hope plied their trade alongside Richard Pryor and George Carlin; Lucille Ball’s Mame and Linda Lovelace’s Deep Throat both played on the big screen; Ed Sullivan shared ink with Hunter Thompson, and Frank Sinatra did battle on the pop charts with T. Rex and Led Zeppelin. (This pop-music serendipity reached its zenith in the second half of the decade, when Bing Crosby and David Bowie actually recorded a song together — and miraculously, it did not suck.
It was a time of anything goes, and something for everyone. The music of the 1970s was characterized above all by two things — dizzying eclecticism and boundless freedom and exuberance. The clips I’ve chosen reflect the rich tapestry that was the decade’s hallmark. The first one features the late, great albino guitar god Johnny Winter covering the Stones’ Jumpin’ Jack Flash on The Midnight Special TV show. Dig the juxtaposition of rock’s grungiest song performed by five guys wearing enough sequins to outfit an entire Little Miss pageant (the bass player’s ushanka is merely an added bonus).
The second clip is a nine-minute section of the legendary Wattstax concert at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum (that landmark celebration of Black music took place in 1972, but the documentary that supplies this clip came out the following year). The brainchild of Stax Records, Wattstax was a half-benefit, half-promotional event that marked the seventh anniversary of the Watts riot and provided a platform for the Stax roster of artists — hence the Watts and Stax in the name. Promotion was heavily weighted in favor of headliner Isaac Hayes, then at the height of his Shaft fame. But this clip features another Wattstax performer who deserved more praise than he got, the multitalented and always funktastic Rufus Thomas. The two songs below are funkier than Snoop’s proverbial old batch of collard greens, but the highlight comes in the second number, when Thomas beckons fans to flood the Coliseum field and dance to the Funky Chicken in a display of joyful abandon simply unimaginable in today’s world.
Happy 50th Anniversary, 1973. We won’t see your like again.
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