The '70s Look And The Battle For My Soul

            It is said that a decade hasn’t truly started until the ‘1’ is added at New Year’s Day. According to that, 1970 wasn’t in the decade of the seventies. But, I’m sorry. Sorry, I know when the Seventies started, and it was in 1970. I know, because I was eight years old, and I was there. At a friend’s house at the end of the court, where he showed me the FM stereo that his parents had, flicked a switch, turned a knob, and there was Dionne Warwick, singing “Say a Little Prayer for You”. It sounded like she was right there in the box with a small orchestra. And, the song was just starting. (Aren’t memories just like that?) The seventies started for me there with the easy listening element.

            Easy Listening music from the ‘60s and ‘70s strikes a chord with me. Some say it’s soporific, and they’re right. What’s wrong with sleeping? I, like many, developed the easy listening receptor in my brain that links to some collective unconscious through The Carpenters, The Mamas And The Papas, and The Fifth Dimension. I’ve never had a brain scan, but I would guess that my easy listening receptor is still quite large. This receptor is located just behind the cerebral cortex, is shaped like Burt Bacharach, and is activated by tunes such as ‘Cherish’, ‘This Guy’s In Love With You’, and ‘The Look of Love’. Burt Bacharach and Hal David were their own genre. They personified. Being Burt Bacharach was something a boy could shoot for, with his salt and pepper hair and his lovely face, and didn’t he know it, above that turtleneck sweater. His was a lifestyle option. He was married to Angie Dickenson, so he had to be doing something right.

            Then there was the outright look. I found the colors nice in the early ‘60s, but they seemed a little muddy, like the color section of a Sunday newspaper. Then- Boom! There was color. Like on a Twister mat. And, in the seventies, they had the colors down.

            Just look at Laugh-In, with all of the hippie flowers on the set. I thought that the hippies invented all that color. I just imagined Tiny Tim in a lab coat, holding a test tube over a Bunsen burner, then shouting- “Eureka!”, which everyone knew was what you shouted when you discovered something. I was only eight years old. I didn’t know that hippies were more likely to shun synthetic dyes, but, dammit, I knew a phrase in Greek. Those colors were in everything. I betcha there are some smarty-people who have thoroughly studied the relationship between color technology and popular culture at that time, since each dynamic seemed to contribute to the other. I wouldn’t read the papers, though.

            They would be something like ‘Spectral Mute-Tones And Their Impact On The Mid Twentieth Century +/- Second Tier Cohort’… Nice title, but, no, thank you. I couldn’t read it. I must lack the brain power. Perhaps an effect from all the food dye.   

            Because I spent the advent of the seventies eating multi-colored breakfast cereal and Spaghetti O’s on the couch, watching television as it pretended to follow tradition when it was really leading popular culture. I ate Captain Crunch and Trix and watched everyone try to get married. But, according to the plot, even talking about new-fangled things got in their way. I paid close attention. This was a front in the battle for my soul. 

            Ken Berry lost me from the start, though. He was in ‘F Troop’, and later, ‘Mama’s Family’. Back then, I would look at him and practically shudder. I was expected to be like him when I grew up, and I knew that I wasn’t going to be. And, I knew that it wouldn’t be due to my situation, or my own failings, I just really really didn’t want to wind up to be anything like him. Problem being, the future was so far away, and it seemed plotted for me. It was waiting there in my school album, which I saw was ready for additions all the way to the twelfth grade. I couldn’t imagine it. It was kinda like looking into a big hole.

            I have nothing against Ken Berry himself. We’re from the same region. I guess there were designer jeans before they were ‘designer jeans’, since I always imagine him in a pair of nice ones, along with a gingham shirt. Or a flannel one, in a pinch. Looking all ‘ready’. Like a Boy Scout all grown up.

            I was repelled by Ken Berry like Gollum, but, there was another guy that I was of two minds about. He was Frazier Thomas, the host of the movie show “Family Classics”.

            He was a study. He would sit in a big ol’ puffy leather chair in a woody set, and went on about slightly esoteric trivia concerning the movie they were showing. The way he talked seemed to guarantee that the movie would also be boring. I was sure that he smoked cigars like my Uncle Joe, since I didn’t understand the nuances of style yet. It would’ve been a pipe, of course. I thought that he was talking to me right out of his house, but I already understood that most television wasn’t live. I knew it was recorded. I also imagined that he was surrounded by the smell of wood polish. Anyway, like Mister Berry, Frazier Thomas scared me a bit, because I knew that I would be expected to be like him, if I went to school for a very long time, then diligently did things with my money. I wasn’t sure if I was up for that.

             Anyway, what did Frazier talk us through? Bucolic tales set in the mountains, like Heidi, or something more adventurous set out west- a story about a horse, say. Pirate films. Sword and Sandal movies. Of course, the camera had to catch the splendor, the mountains, meadows, forests and the sea, even if it was only a stock shot, backdrop, or a painting. It also reflected a lot of job security for people in movie orchestras. 

            Either way, what struck me was that these people were square. This was something from the olden days. Shows like this were a kind of springboard of boredom that would take us to all that wild popular culture. Alice Cooper and ‘Streaking’ in a few short years.

            Ken Berry may have fit into other television worlds I watched, curious about what was happening and what was expected of me. I felt that some shows were positive models, even though I was a bit confused and rebellious. Ken would have fit well into the world of ‘The Bob Newhart Show’, for example. Bob played ‘Bob Hartley’, and Suzanne Pleshette played ‘Emily Hartley’. Bob had a small psychology clinic, and Emily taught grade school. It was set in Chicago. I thought the world of ‘The Bob Newhart Show’ was perfect, but not too perfect. It was quirky, but also ‘sanitized’, to use a strong word. It was television, after all. The show was also human. Humans in that cutting-edge '70s aesthetic. There wasn’t a simple wooden chair in Bob’s office, for example. There were more plastic-framed, streamlined chairs, with hard, shiny white, plastic backs and foam seats covered with polyester mesh. Everything was clean. Fluorescence (kudos to the lighting designer) and Formica. Would germs multiply on any surface seen on ‘The Bob Newhart Show’? The answer to the question, if pressed, would be ‘Yes’. But not near too many.

            I liked those clean, modern looks on television, and you may think that I’m a germophobe, but rarely in my life have I been very clean. Maybe it’s not so rare, someone expecting to see clean lives, but being slobs themselves.

            Television in the early ‘70s had its ‘curveballs’. In the living room or rec room, during that period, one of us would go- “A!” and point to the television, which was always on, and up there, holding a pine cone in a forest, was this slightly frazzled, healthy lookin’ guy named Ewell Gibbons, who would open a commercial for Grape Nuts by saying, “Ever eat a pine tree? Many parts are edible.” And, we would laugh! We would laugh and laugh. He ate trees. We ate Froot Loops. Later I learned (which means that I recently ‘Googled’ him,) that Ewell Gibbons was a cool guy, and that he didn’t mind a laugh, as long as it promoted his good, alternative food cause further. The humor in the ad was intentional. We didn’t eat pine cones, but we ate Honeycomb. Honeycomb is refined sugar with a bit of wheat dust in it, shaped like a honeycomb. Another example of manufacturing culture trying to look like it was getting back to tradition. But, in the ‘olden days’, Honeycomb would’ve been ‘candy’, and it would have been sold for a penny a peck. I remember adults telling me as much when I was young, but I didn’t believe them at the time.

            Grape Nuts, and Ewell Gibbons were way ‘out there’. In other words, I was deprived in my experience. We kids even drew the line at Life cereal, which was ‘hippie food’ to us. Life Cereal is some refined sugar, with a bit more wheat dust. It also tastes very good.

            Of course I’m nostalgic. I want to regain the feeling I had when I was ten. But, the popular culture in the seventies was tantalizingly intangible. There was little there.

            Either way, when I’m rich, the sixties style room in my mansion will have four sleep-pits connected by phones like the Beatles had in ‘Help’. But for the seventies, I wouldn’t take the typical route. I wouldn’t go with white walls and mirrors, I wouldn’t go with avocado or pumpkin wallpaper. I would have a 1970s ‘Spanish Style’ den.

            It would have dark wood-print plywood on the walls, and a kind of sparkly acoustic flocking on the ceiling. A wrought-iron-looking chandelier above a round, wooden table. With chairs to match. Oh! And, wall-to-wall carpet. Right to the damn walls. What we call ‘carpet’ now-a-days. And a painting of a ship in a storm that’s doing alright despite the forty-foot waves. Then I would sit at that table and drink a Fresca out of an amber dimpled glass tumbler. And I would dial up ‘The Mod Squad’ on the big ol’ Zenith console TV, which would ruin the effect.

            Or would it?