Sad fads…

[DownRound]

When I was a kid, only service vets, longshoremen, and Merchant Marine sailors had tattoos. People get these things then wonder why they can't get hired. Happily, I'm old enough to where nothing needs to make sense any more, but I gotta say, if I'd have thought years ago that really beautiful women would today be covered in tattoos and wear Doc Martens and be considered beautiful, I'd have killed myself back then.

What a CFW.

There's a big, wide spectrum in tattoos, the phenomenon has clearly gone mainstream.
It's one thing if you go in for an EKG and the woman running the machine has a butterfly on her forearm.
At my age, I've learned you have to adjust to the changes.

But I've gotta admit, when they start to go up the neck and onto the face, especially when they are made up of things like demonic skulls, gaping mouths filled with fangs, and random jagged bones with flesh hanging off, it's not someone I want coming into my house to fix the plumbing.

Both of these have happened.

When I was working in the VA (Nashville), the patients ran the whole range of Desert Storm back to WW1 (!).
There were standard tattoos, particularly during the WW2. They would go into the shop, with pages of images, and pick the one they wanted.
They'd run in clusters during certain years, lots of swallows on the Navy vets. Blue ink.

 

[bass12]

When I was a kid, only service vets, longshoremen, and Merchant Marine sailors had tattoos. People get these things then wonder why they can't get hired. Happily, I'm old enough to where nothing needs to make sense any more, but I gotta say, if I'd have thought years ago that really beautiful women would today be covered in tattoos and wear Doc Martens and be considered beautiful, I'd have killed myself back then.

What a CFW.

These days I don't see most tattoos as being an issue where employment is concerned. I've seen tattoos on people in every line of work imaginable - they're everywhere. It's at the point where I'm genuinely surprised if I come across someone under the age of fifty who doesn't have any visible tattoos.

 

[DownRound]

Add to the list....New Age Religions.
The top two here are from my neck of the woods.
I used to run into lots of Rajneeshees back in the day.
They were all pretty nice, gotta say.
Just saw Oprah and Russell Brand listed on a website as two of the top 12 Spiritual Masters now living.
Listed their astrological signs, an important bit of reference for those shopping for a compatible teacher.
Russell is looking quite a bit like Rasputin here (there and everywhere?)

These people lived in a big house in Seattle.
I met the Enlightened Master during the course of my work, years after the heyday.
They had pretty much been run out of town and had a farm up north, and a bakery/restaurant.
A really nice guy, like a used car salesman that you can't help but like.
He invited me up the new restaurant.

I think it's a good policy in general not to go full-in on a religion that's less than ten years old.

 

[turf3]

Sadly, Disco was more than a fad.
It was a catastrophic, collective, tragic aberration.
Social historians now classify it with other instances of collective madness, along with similar manias.

Dancing mania - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

View attachment 7303473


The supporting evidence of it's horrible nature is clear, and is not a pretty sight.
Viewer Advisory. Many viewers may find the following scene disturbing.

Researchers are divided over whether the disease was psychogenic in origin, or organic, perhaps caused by a type of allergic reaction as a consequence of exposure to the acetates used in the bizarre fashions of the times.

Watching that gave me flashbacks. Flashbacks to being the schlubby doughy teenager who grew up expecting to reap the harvests of the Sexual Revolution, when even doughy schlubby guys with long hair had a chance of making it with hippie chicks who didn't wear brassieres...

and then by the time I got old enough for that, all the girls were wearing those long dresses and you had to be built like Rudolf Nureyev and have the moves of Travolta to even get them to talk to you.

I wuz robbed!

 

[turf3]

It's pretty much a given that ANY dance craze is not just sad but painful.
I think there are PTSD help groups still active for victims of The Macarena.

Someone once said "I'm not doing line dancing. Close order drill with someone screaming the moves at you in a hillbilly accent is no more appealing when you wear cowboy hats and boots, than it was in Basic Training."

 

[DownRound]

Watching that gave me flashbacks. Flashbacks to being the schlubby doughy teenager who grew up expecting to reap the harvests of the Sexual Revolution, when even doughy schlubby guys with long hair had a chance of making it with hippie chicks who didn't wear brassieres...

There was that little opportunity window (1970-71 in my case), when all it took was the dang hair.
Age 15 or whatever, it was just reaching toward my shoulders.
I was the runty skinny teenage guy, in the stupid shirt at a party when this really cute girl came up to me and actually talked with me.
We even got to make out for about 20 seconds.
Her friend explained "yah...she likes guys with long hair".

 

[FilterFunk]

I have to admit that I liked some of the music that fell sometimes fell into the broad era/category of disco at the time.
Brick, Ohio Players, Kool & The Gang, stuff like George McCrea's "Rock Your Baby", The Isley's work at that point....





This one....still sounds good.
The bass line!

My main beef with disco at the time was that some truly great funk bands and truly great funk jams were unfairly and inaccurately lumped in with disco. None of the songs in the videos above should have ever been considered "disco."

There was a disco compilation that included the O'Jays' "For the Love of Money" and EWF's "Shining Star." Even Parliament's "Flash Light" was called disco by some people.

FYI - there was plenty of danceable soul/R&B/funk long before disco and during the disco craze. Having said that, a lot of disco (Chic, Peter Brown, KC and the Sunshine Band, the Bee Gees) was pretty darn good.

 

[DownRound]

My main beef with disco at the time was that some truly great funk bands were unfairly and inaccurately lumped in with disco.

I was thinking about that very thing, mostly with respect to songs like Be Thankful for What You Got.
It was on a K-Tel disco compilation.
Yeah...it was played in dance venues, but was it really disco?
It's the condundrum of categorization - especially at the time something is happening.
A lot of things got lumped into the category.

- That O'Jays song was great.
By any name.
That opening by Anthony Jackson!

I remember the same thing happened during the advent of punk.
I remember Patti Smith and even Springsteen being included, I mean what, he had a leather jacket?
It was all still kind clarifying itself.

 

[DownRound]

Case in point.
George McCrae: Rock Your Baby. 1974.
On the same K-Tel compilation as Be Thankful for What You've Got.
The dilemma: disco or R&B?
It topped the Billboard R&B chart.
But....written and produced by Harry Wayne Casey and Richard Finch of KC and the Sunshine Band.
And that sound, gotta go with the disco call on this one.
The embryo stage.
McCrae was great on this.



Close in sound and feel to this one, two years later, Rose Royce.
Soul. Not disco.

 

[DownRound]

Case in point 2.

The Trammps. Disco Inferno.

1) Disco is in the name, and in sound, but....but the vocals are kind of funky. Even gutsy.
2) Platform shoes are clearly in evidence (maybe that's why the name? They make that tramping sound when you step?)

From the video: Trammp shoes.


And below, actual disco shoes and shirt (right) clown shoes and detail of clown shirt (left).




Now I'm having a flashback too, a bad one.
That shirt and shoes....they look just the ones that I had. Oh man, I feel terrible now.
.....Kenny was right at the Colleen's wedding reception...the future is going to laugh at us...it's Ginny's fault, she's the one who liked this stuff.
And then she dumps me.

I'm going back to the first theory of group madness.
But the vocals...pretty darn good on this.

 

[Winslow]

 

[WI Short Scaler]

Then covid hit, and all of a sudden, the "covid beard" fad was everywhere.

The last thing I want to be perceived as is someone who jumps on the latest bandwagon, so the chin shrubbery had to go.

I laughed reading that. I spent my whole life clean shaven because my facial hair had glacial growth. The face covers allowed me to not be publicly embarrassed while it took it's sweet time coming in. Total opposite of your experience.

"The only thing faster than the speed of light is the speed of stupid."

And remember......"when the going gets tough, the dumb get dumber."

 

[S-Bigbottom]

Don't get me started on funk footwear.
It's a darn shame people these days think they're lame.

 

[DownRound]

Don't get me started on funk footwear.
It's a darn shame people these days think they're lame.

Oh man...that actually made me laugh so hard it hurt.
Just coming down the steps with that music, Curtis Mayfield feel, but fish in the dam shoes.
Antonio Fargas!
First ten seconds, I thought that's got the be the Wayans.
Didn't see it, but I'm going to now.

 

[GregC]

I remember the same thing happened during the advent of punk.
I remember Patti Smith and even Springsteen being included, I mean what, he had a leather jacket?
It was all still kind clarifying itself.

Tom Petty, too, very briefly. By the mid/late '70s "rock" (tellingly, no longer "rock'n'roll") music had become so pompous and overblown--thus prompting the creation of punk as an antidote--that practically any act that played songs shorter than 4 minutes at that time was liable to get labeled as punk or new wave.

 

[Nuisance]

I have noticed in the past few years when playing gigs downtown that young girls are wearing lingerie as their going out clothes

I don't see the problem here...

 

[DownRound]

Tom Petty, too, very briefly. By the mid/late '70s "rock" (tellingly, no longer "rock'n'roll") music had become so pompous and overblown--thus prompting the creation of punk as an antidote--that practically any act that played songs shorter than 4 minutes at that time was liable to get labeled as punk or new wave.

An antidote...that's was it...and it came just in time.
I'm not naming specific bands here, but the late 70s were pretty much rock's nadir.
Pompous, overblown and...whatever it was bands like Foreigner and Styx were.

Wait...I just named them. Just my opinion. Okay, I'll add Boston and Starship to the list.

I can see the room I was in, my apartment in Seattle, when I first heard The Ramones.
Just like I can my cousin's family living room where I first heard Meet The Beatles and my basement bedroom when I heard Natty Dread on the radio from Portland.
New sounds.
Sometimes turns out to be a whole new river.

 

[DownRound]

Disco was a fad (and a mistake in judgment), funk is a Form.

 

[Smallmouth_Bass]

Disco was a fad (and a mistake in judgment), ...

And yet so fun to play and everybody loves to hear it!

 

[Smallmouth_Bass]

I don't see the problem here...

Distracting when your are trying to play the right notes!