Tag Archives: 1970
Bye Bye Baby
45 years ago, October 4, 1970, Janis Joplin died of an overdose in a Hollywood hotel. On May 2, 20016 I published a review of the then-new Janis: Little Girl Blue DVD in The Contributor. On the anniversary of Joplin’s death, here’s another look at that review. The film is currently streaming on Netflix… Academy [...]
Jimi Jams
Over the weekend Open Culture pointed back to one of its own posts to remember Jimi Hendrix’ death in London on September 17, 1970. Here are a couple of great acoustic performances with some words from Open Culture… Solo acoustic recordings of Hendrix—film and audio—are incredibly rare. In fact, the only other footage may be [...]
Mod Rod
45 years ago, in 1970, Rod Stewart released this second solo record, Gasoline Alley. Classic tunes like “Cut Across Shorty,” “It’s All Over Now” and the title track make this Stewart’s first great solo record, delivering on the promise of 1969′s An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down and setting the stage for Every [...]
Early Ashby
In his early career Hal Ashby was an editor who won an Academy Award for In the Heat of the Night. Of course, Ashby is now known as the director of some of the best films of the New Hollywood Cinema of the late 1960′s through the early 1980′s including Coming Home, Harold and Maude [...]
The Future Circa 1972
It’s common for folks like myself and the readers of this blog to frequent sites and browse magazines filled with articles about leaps in information processing, advances in artificial intelligence and the future of human/machine interfacing. It’s the 21st century after all, and even though many of our institutions and officials are woefully culture-bound to [...]
The Kinks at 50
This year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of The Kinks debut album and we’re not the only ones. The band themselves have announced a major reissue project to celebrate their five decade birthday, and given the group’s famous inability to get along this news is like getting a gift you never even hoped for. Here’s [...]
Birth of Devo
Today we celebrate the birthday of Mark Mothersbaugh, lead singer and co-founder of Devo. While best known for one of the sexiest MTV videos of all time for “Whip It,” the band’s mission as absurdist satirists of mainstream culture is what secures them a place in the rock pantheon. Devo rejected hippie escapism as well [...]