The Rocking Life

1970's: Sucking it all in

I barely remember the early 1970's. I was only a young child back then. I grew up in a modest home, a son to a Dutch immigrant who was my father and a Puerto Rican transplant who was my mother. Both were hardworking and provided well for our family. My father worked as a cashier for a convenience store that his family-owned and my mother worked as a seamstress. As the saying goes, we didn't have much but we had all we needed.

Although I don't have many personal memories of those magical yet politically tumultuous timeså, I remember enough to know that I was happy and healthy and that I grew up in the greatest time in history. For me, it was rock music that made this time so. Thanks to my favorite rock music, I seem to remember it all. These classic songs draw me back to a time and place where life was simple, innocent, beautiful, and, if you will, groovy.

It was a time of The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, The Allman Brothers Band, the Doobie Brothers, Jefferson Airplane, the Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, and all other manner and types of classic monsters of rock arena bands. For the price of admission, you were taken into the world of the band and all that they were and would ever be. For those of us who grew up during this era, we remember not only the concert but the mid-length arm concert t-shirts that we would wear proudly the next day at our schools.

I remember my first arena rock concert. I was 16 years old at time. A young man innocent to the ways of the world. A good friend had been stood up by his girlfriend and wanted someone to go to the show with him. He invited me to come along and I said yes as I had never been to a rock show before. He told me that the band name was Kansas and that I might remember them from the song Carry On Wayward Son. Upon learning this, I jumped at the chance to go. And I'm glad I did.

The show was nothing short of incredible. The musicians and singers were highly skilled as they demonstrated by their performance. Their songs were classic, beautiful, and thought-provoking. The band took me back to a time and place that I had always wanted to go but never knew about. Each following orchestral rock song was better than the last. Members of the audience raised lit cigarette lighters high into the sky, illuminating the auditorium like the power of a million bright candles, to "voice" their approval. And it was good. Very good.

With their songs, the band took us down a path that we, the audience, gladly followed. A road filled with joys, thrills, and happiness like no other. We were over our heads in contentment and we were higher than any good stoner could or would be. Our parents told us that we were wasting our time with that "noise" but we just closed the doors to our rooms and turned our tunes up on our used stereos all the louder. Our speakers both whispered and shouted the music and stories of a new generation: our generation.

But our generation was far from perfect. Definitely and most assuredly far from perfect. It was a time of the horrors of the Vietnam war and all that it entailed, or political corruption and the Nixon Administration and other political discontents, of a drug culture that was killing our youth, of racism that was killing the innocents of the South and other areas, of poverty that was strangling the minorities who desperately needed the assistance of their government, and of the beginning of a loss of the innocence that gave birth in the 1950s and went through the psychedelic times of the 1960's and early 1970s. In all these matters, we began to sow the seeds of our discontentment that would grow to fruition in the 1980's and afterward.

Still, the music of the times held us all together as a glue that refused to yield. As we turned up our transistor radios and listened to both the music we enjoyed and the interesting DJs who presented this music to us, we knew that everything would be alright. That everything was going to be fine. That all of our problems would soon go away. That we lived in the greatest time ever. And that everything was, as we said at the time, groovy. And so it was.