by Paul
I associate the hard hitting “Black Betty” from Ram Jam with the year 1977*, when I was in my second year at university, and my first year flatting after being on campus in 1976.
This is actually the first time I have seen a video of it, I had no idea what Ram Jam looked like.
In this fun video out on the lawn in front of the house they definitely look VERY 1970s:
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by Paul
In early 1972 (summer in New Zealand), aged 14, I mowed my parents’ rather large lawn to get the NZ$14 required to buy the double album “Weird Scenes Inside The Goldmine” by a band called The Doors.
I had never heard of The Doors before, and at the time I don’t believe I realised that their iconic singer Jim Morrison had died just months before the previous year (3rd July 1971 in Paris).
Nor did I realise that “Weird Scenes Inside The Goldmine” was a compilation, I didn’t know any of the songs.
When school started I took the album with me to my boarding school. One of the guys in the dorm had a record player linked up to some lights that pulsated according to the music.
We turned off the dorm lights and I remember all these 14 years olds jumping up and down and dancing to “Break On Through” with the flashing lights.
Here’s the original:
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by Paul
When I came to write this, at first the only Kiss track I could think of was “I Was Made For Loving You”, but then I kept finding more and more that I recognised from the Seventies, when I was a big Kiss fan.
I had the Kiss double album “Alive!”, which unfortunately was among a number of my record collection that went missing, something I only discovered after I returned from a visit to New Zealand in 1982 and took all my records (at least I thougt thery were!) back to Europe.
Anyway, after I located “I Was Made For Loving You” I then found songs like “Black Diamond”, “Deuce”, “Strutter” and “100,000 Years and the memories came flooding back.
So first, here’s a studio version of “I Was Made For Loving You”. (The text at the end says it’s from the album “Dynasty” in 1997, but that’s wrong, it was 1979!)
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by Paul
The first Cheap Trick song I remember hearing, and one that has always stuck in my mind, was “Surrender”…
“Mommy’s all right, Daddy’s all right, they just seem a little weird, surrender, surrender, but don’t give yourself away”:
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by Paul
When I think of “Rocket Man” from Elton John I think of 1975.
Probably because it reminds me of a guy at (boarding) school I roomed with for part of that year, whose nickname was connected with a slightly adapted version…
The man himself, i.e. Elton John AKA Reginald Dwight, first came to my attention in 1973 with “Crocodile Rock”, and the following year I took in his “Yellow Brick Road” double album quite extensively, I even have the sheet music of the album.
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Tags: Bill Bartlett, Black Betty, Music of the Seventies, Ram Jam, Seventies Rock Bands, Starstruck
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