The Sound of the Seventies

My recent reading material (Francis Wheen’s Strange Days Indeed, Alice Echols’ Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture, etc.) has all focused on the ’70s, which I guess makes sense since I recall very little about the decade of my birth. I recall it as a period of terrible browns and greens. Television was somehow simultaneously garish and muted. Something something Jimmy Carter energy hostages. And the soundtrack? Pure despair.

I mean, yes, there was disco (read that Echols book, it’s pretty solid), but for me the sound of the ’70s came out of a giant clock radio my dad had put in the bedroom I shared with my brother. He’d let us listen to music as we fell asleep, and I can remember watching the numbers on the clock flick over each minute while the radio played what seemed to be an endless procession of incredibly depressing music: Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” Rita Coolidge’s cover of Boz Scaggs’ “We’re All Alone” (which was also quite popular in the grocery, if I recall), and always, always Anne Murray’s “You Needed Me.” There was probably some Carpenters in there too. But ask me what the decade sounded like and my brain will immediately drop the needle on Anne Murray. (In this I am not alone.)

I was, to be sure, an unhappy child, but I am now an unhappy adult, so I don’t think my recollection is in any way colored by that unhappiness: It is a depressing fucking song. Even if that is not the intention, it is an auditory downer. But Anne Murray SELLS IT, man. She sells “Snowbird.” She sells “Danny’s Song.” She sells “I Just Fall In Love Again.” Anne Murray SELLS all those songs that make you want to kill yourself. And that is a talent that deserves a certain degree of admiration.

Morna Anne Murray turns 65 this Sunday. Happy birthday, Anne Murray. Thank you for all the misery. Sometimes it’s the only thing worth listening to.