Category: 1975

Songs published in 1975

The First 3rd World Superstar

On 5 August 2022

In 1975, 70ies, Around The World

We’re going to stray a little bit from our “famous music videos” path today in order to go with just the right bit of music for the gorgeous weather we’re having these days.

Robert Nesta Marley, better known as “Bob Marley” grew up in tiny Nine Mile and later Trenchtown, the ghetto of Kingston, Jamaica. He formed a vocalist group with his childhood friends Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh, and was encouraged to learn the guitar by the local popular artist Joe Higgs. It would take another decade, a few name changes and a label change to Island Records before they would gain international success, but in the end they were fired as opening band for “Sly and the Family Stone” because they had become more popular than the main act. The international breakthrough came with the live version of “No Woman, No Cry” (which is Jamaican patois for “Woman, Don’t Cry”, not what many people think namely “There is no reason to cry when there’s no woman”) in 1975, their first big hit outside Jamaica.

There is a Zurich connection as well: It was after a Bob Marley concert at the Hallenstadion in the end of May 1980 when fans coming from the concert joined forces with young people protesting against the city’s decision to let the Opera house use the “Red Factory” during renovations. The youngsters had tried to secure a cultural space of their own there for a long time, and that night they clashed hard with police at the first of what is these days known as the “Opernhauskrawalle”.

Marley died a year later from cancer.

I wanted a video from back then, which is why you’re seeing a recording from the Rainbow Theatre, London – performed the day after the release of his probably most acclaimed album “Exodus” – instead of the better known breakthrough version that received a much newer video two years ago.

Just A Jump To The Left

By vanElden

On 21 July 2022

In 1975, 70ies, Must-See-Video

So far, we’ve been presenting music videos that were specifically created for the song they were accompanying. Today, we’re going to deviate from that just a bit and have a look at an important bit of pop-cultural history where it’s kind of the other way around:

“The Time Warp” is the most well-known of the songs that make up the 1973 musical Rocky Horror Show, a tribute to horror B movies and bad science fiction by Richard O’Brien that worked so well on the stages of London that it was transformed into a movie, appropriately named Rocky Horror Picture Show two years later.

Alas, test screenings didn’t go well in most places. It did get a very loyal fan base at cinemas with traditional Midnight screenings though, such as the Westwood Theatre in Los Angeles or the Waverly Theater in New York City. The same crowd started showing up time and again, occupying the same spaces every viewing. And as they knew the movie in-and-out they started their own little performances, first by shouting quips at the actors on screen, such as “Buy an Umbrella!” at a soaking wet Susan Sarandon standing in the rain. Then others actually brought said umbrella, to be opened just before the tempest hits hardest. Other props followed, like rice to toss during the wedding. Then people started to dress up as characters from the movie, standing at the right position in front of the theatre screen and lip-syncing their lines…

And so from then on to truly experience the movie you’d have to watch it in a crowd of collaborating viewers with know-how. Generations of faithful followers have been putting up elaborate choreographies during showings to this day, making it the longest-running theatrical release in film history. And while the movie sports a fair number of references to earlier pop-cultural phenomenons itself, the attics of these fans of course have been depicted in other movies as well, with “Fame” springing to mind, or, more recently “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”.

We haven’t even started about the tremendous influence the film had on the long road to acceptance for the LGBTQ+ community… Turns out it wasn’t “just” a jump to the left.

The Mock Opera

By vanElden

On 14 July 2022

In 1975, 70ies

Yes, I started this blog as a means to introduce the younger generation to the videos (and eventually just the music) of pop culture that you simply have to know. Which kind of implies that you might not yet know them (as was the case for so many catchy tunes I could no longer leave that unchallenged). But… come on. You do know Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”, don’t you? If only from Wayne’s World? Or the guy who sang it in it’s entirety being hideously plastered in the back of a police car? The 2009 Muppets Version? Wikipedia features a whole page dedicated to cover-versions of this brilliant song.

It took Freddie Mercury more than half of a decade to figure out the song in his head and it took the band months to actually record it, in five different studios and with hundreds of overdubs, as the technology of the time allowed for a maximum of 24 concurrent tracks – the final piece features hundreds of them, collected from tape that became see-through in the process, as they were used so often.

When it was finally finished they were told by various executives in no uncertain terms, that the song at almost six minutes was “much too long” (it was highly unusual for songs to skid over the three minutes mark at the time) and that there was “no hope of it ever being played on the radio“. Well, Mercury’s friend DJ Kenny Everett did play it on Capital Radio, 14 times over the span of a weekend, to be exact. The rest is pop history.

By the way: While our first blog-entry might have been The video that would define a genre this one, having been released a decade earlier, was the video that made the industry recognise the medium as a marketing instrument. Originally recorded so the band would not have to perform live on the BBC’s “Top of the Pops”, where they would have had a hard time mimicking playing the song, it became pivotal in selling the single and others would soon follow suit. Still not the first music video by far though, that honour officially goes to “The Little Lost Child“, a song by Joseph Stern and Edward Mark, who set their recording to a slide show back in 1894…