Who Needed DJs? We had Garage Bands

During the first half of the 70s a disk jockey was somebody who announced music on the radio. The idea of paying money to hear somebody play records was about as absurd as buying bottled water. If you were throwing a high school dance or block party in our area, you hired a live band – and there were plenty to choose from. These garage groups (so designated because of their typical rehearsal spaces) typically were made up of teenagers who played covers of popular songs. None belonged to a union, and few made any money, especially after paying for their equipment. Some were really great. Some stank. Almost all were very loud.

As in most of the ways in which teenagers rebel and assert their individuality, there were strict unwritten rules and standards for garage bands, in terms of what songs they played (and didn’t), how they dressed (usually pretty trashy), and what instruments were acceptable (Fender or Gibson guitars and basses, Ludwig or Rogers drums), and so forth. The bass pictured here, a Fender Mustang, was similar to the model which I played, although mine had a sunburst color scheme. I bought it for $120 at Sam Ash in 1973.

Although lineups varied a bit, every garage band had at least one guitarist, a bass player and a drummer. A second (or even a third) guitar player was a common addition, as was an organist (nobody had synthesizers, and the electric pianos of the day usually sounded like toys). Occasionally you’d find a horn (usually a sax), but wind instruments weren’t very popular amongst kids who wanted to play rock and roll. Singers were often an afterthought, and not considered serious musicians. If one of your players could sing not too off-key, you gave them a mike. If not, you found some kid who could carry a tune. Almost all garage bands were exclusively male, although a female vocalist (usually the girlfriend of one of the players) might join them on a few tunes.

Learning to play serious rock and roll during the early seventies was a challenge, as many of the music publishers had yet to figure out that there was a big market for good teaching materials and sheet music, and good teachers were scarce. I took bass lessons for six months in 1972, and the teacher used a book written in 1957 that focused chiefly on “New Sounds” like boogie-woogie. If you wanted sheet music for a current hit, you typically got a piano arrangement often in a key different from the original, with basic guitar chords written above the words. This might have worked for Peter, Paul and Mary, but not Zeppelin. Then again, few of us could really read sheet music in the first place.

Despite their amateur appearances, garage bands were not punk groups, and savvy kids judged their musicianship as critically as the jocks analyzed the school basketball team. Being a good musician typically meant playing as close to the original record as you could; there wasn’t much emphasis upon experimentation. Almost every band did some Rolling Stones tunes, as they were simple and popular at dances, but the more respected outfits would delve into the repertoires of everyone from Zappa to the Allman Brothers. Since a school dance or block party gig often ran for at least two hours you had to have a lot of material under your belt, all memorized (only keyboard players were allowed to have sheet music).

Next time we’ll talk about some of the more popular tunes that the garage bands covered.

Classic Seventies Horror Cinema: "The Corpse Grinders"

During the earlier part of the Seventies we still had $1 theaters, sometimes showing double features. Amongst the cinematic masterpieces that many of us enjoyed on rainy Saturday afternoons, few could compete with "The Corpse Grinders," arguably one of the worst films of the decade.

Directed by Ted Mikels, the genius who also brought us "The Astro Zombies," "Bloody Orgy of the She Devils" and "Apartheid Slave Women's Revenge," the film depicts the ups and downs of the Lotus Cat Food Company. When the firm is in danger of going under, the owners get the novel idea of taking their slogan "For cats who like people" literally. Soon ghouls are digging up corpses and bringing them to the Lotus factory, where they are sent down a ramp into a big cardboard box (well, it's supposed to be a meat grinder) and turned into cat food. The stuff sells like crazy, and soon the owners find themselves reaching out to a local mortician for more raw product, which he infuses with meat-flavored embalming fluid in order to further satisfy our little friends. Ah, but of course there are complications, as once the cats of this world get a taste of human flesh, they aren't going to return readily to Nine Lives or Meow Mix. Soon pets are attacking their owners to consume them.

"The Corpse Grinders" is stupid, gross and poorly-made, like a lot of Seventies budget films. Still, for fans of bad movies, it's well worth renting.

Before WABC Became WKKK

The Seventies saw the beginning of the deterioration of AM radio. The station which all of us will remember as the greatest example of this was WABC. During the 60s and through the mid-70s WABC was the most popular "pop" radio station in the area, featuring colorful DJs who played Top 40 songs. Since Top 40 back then could mean anything from soul to metal to country, this made for quite a variety. True, the disk jockeys talked too much, and they blathered on well into the beginning of each tune, but at least they played a good variety of music. WABC was also infamous for its way of counting record sales in order to determine a song's place on the charts; no serious music fan took them seriously.

Why did people continue to listen to AM when there was so much great stuff happening on FM during the 70s? One major reason was that most car radios at the time only had AM radios, as did a fair number of the cheaper portables. And since kids spent a lot of their time hanging out in cars, they had little choice. In addition, AM signals, while of poorer quality, traveled further than FM. Finally, there really weren't any Top 40 FM stations for most of the decade, so if that was what you wanted to hear, you had little choice but to use AM and put up with the static, the mindless chatter of DJs speaking through simulated reverb and very limited playlists.

Talk radio had long been a feature in our town. WOR had an all-talk lineup that included everything from "Rambling with Gambling" in the morning to humorist Jean Shepherd in the evening. WPLJ FM had Alex Bennett's late night show through the middle of the decade, as well as Father Bill, a priest who was close friends with Harry Chapin, and who interviewed many celebrities on Sunday mornings. And of course we had the all-news stations. What just about all these guys had in common was that they were rarely offensive. Barry Farber may have been pretty conservative and Alex Bennett very liberal, but they were still tame, and usually polite. Farber liked to boast that he had been good friends with Malcolm X.

But it was WMCA that started the trend towards a format where listeners calling in were the major feature. For whatever reason, it was a hit. Then WOR started a late night show featuring Bob Grant, a rather crotchety man who would often yell at listeners. It was clear that a lot of people liked listening to extremists who not only voiced their opinions, but ridiculed others. When WABC went all-talk, their ratings, which were falling due to the increasing popularity of FM, soared. They tapped into a vast amount of anger and frustration which many mostly white, working class New Yorkers were feeling. But rather than discuss issues intelligently, WABC's hosts found that vulgarity and arrogance seemed to win the biggest shares of the audience. In time, some would dub the station "WKKK."

Why Did Americans Love Betty Ford?

Gerald Ford was often knocked as a klutz and criticized for pardoning Richard Nixon, the man who made him the first person to serve as President without being elected. But Betty Ford was considered a hero by millions. She was an iconoclast who shocked some people, but inspired millions more with her frank talk about sensitive subjects, making her one of the most admired women of the decade.


Elizabeth Ann Bloomer was born in Chicago, but grew up in Grand Rapids. A talented dancer, she studied under Martha Graham and eventually moved to Manhattan, where she worked briefly as a model before returning to her home town to teach dance and become a manager in a department store. This was not your typical career path for a respectable Midwestern girl born in 1918, but perhaps it says something about Betty’s sense of independence. In 1948 she married (for the second time) a Yale Law School graduate and college football star named Gerald Ford, who soon after made a successful run for Congress. Gerald rose to be the highest ranking Republican Congressman in America.


When looking at the political situation during the Seventies it helps to remember that the major parties were not ideological monoliths, and Ford could probably be considered a fairly moderate Republican by today'’s standards, one who drew little national attention. That was to change on October 10, 1973, when Spiro T. Agnew was forced to resign his position as Vice President following charges of tax evasion and bribery while he was Governor of Maryland. (This was the same Agnew who branded the press as an "“effete corps of impudent snobs."”) For whatever reason, Richard Nixon selected Ford to be his new Veep. As the Watergate scandal unfolded, many of us knew what was coming, and on August 9, 1974 Tricky Dick resigned, leaving Gerald and Betty in the White House.


In marked contrast to the usually passive Patricia Nixon, Betty Ford showed herself to be probably the most outspoken First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt, although some of her statements would be considered fairly tame by today'’s standards. For example, during a televised tour of the White House, she shocked many Americans by mentioning that she and Gerald slept in the same bed. Soon afterwards, she made an appearance on "Sixty Minutes" in which she, while not exactly speaking in favor of premarital sex, indicated that she did not regard it so harshly. This, as well as her comments on marijuana, her acknowledgement that she had undergone psychiatric treatment and her support of the Equal Rights Amendment, generated some 30,000 letters to CBS regarding her appearance. Some people even called for her "“resignation," although how a President'’s wife can "“resign"” was not specified. (So much for Family Values).


While the reactionaries were fuming, Betty Ford'’s popularity was soaring. She arranged for Martha Graham to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Soon afterwards she underwent a mastectomy, and became an outspoken advocate for women with breast cancer at a time when the disease was not discussed much in the media. While many politicians regarded her as a liability to her husband'’s career, Jerry stood by her, and during the 1976 election (which Ford lost to Carter) there were even bumper stickers reading "“Betty Ford'’s Husband for President."”

In 1978, after she and Jerry had retired from public office, Betty entered a treatment program due to her addiction to alcohol and opiate drugs. As she did previously with cancer, she turned this event into an opportunity to educate and help others, and a few years later opened the Betty Ford Center, probably the most well-known addiction treatment facilities in the world. `

Betty Ford'’s popularity transcended political lines. In an era when most "“First Ladies" were little more than mouthpieces for their husbands and glorified corporate wives, she was a real hero.

The Day the Seventies Began

On September 18, 1970, Jimi Hendrix was found dead in London. He had essentially drowned in his own vomit after taking nine sleeping pills. I've selected this event as the unofficial start date for the 1970s on this site, not so much because it meant the beginning of something new, but the end of something old.

Hendrix was a truly unique individual who not only revolutionized music, but broke all the rules - mostly in a good way. He did things with an electric guitar nobody else could. His music defied classification. Nobody dressed like him. And he broke the Color Barrier in both directions, not only by making it in an overwhelmingly white genre, but refusing to act 'black' (whatever that meant). For these reasons, he truly personified his era.

The tragic way in which Hendrix died also said something about what was lying ahead for our world. Prior to this, few really famous rock stars had died, and those who did, such as Richie Vallens, mostly went because of accidents. Rock and Roll was part of the "youth culture," after all, and kids have trouble conceptualizing death. But Hendrix died because of drugs, another important part of the Sixties which some naive people actually romanticized. ("One pill makes you larger...") Choking to death on one's own puke, all alone, is a pretty disgusting way to go. This was nothing to romanticize, like Bette Midler's collapsing on stage while singing "Let Me Call You Sweetheart" in "The Rose" (an obvious ripoff of the Janis Joplin story).

Hendrix's death seemed to say "Welcome to the Real World" to many of us. Less than a month later Janis Joplin also died, this time from an overdose of heroin and alcohol. And less than a year after that Jim Morrison passed on, officially due to a heart attack, but under circumstances that many people continue to question. As these icons of the Sixties left us, Rock and Roll became more and more just one more product to be mass produced and marketed. The decade to come would have some good music, but no rule-breakers like Hendrix.

Sonia Johnson Battles the Mormon Church and John Birch Society

In 1972 Congress passed an amendment to the constitution which read as follows:

Sec. 1: Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

Sec. 2: The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Sec. 3: This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

Sounds harmless enough, and indeed the law was ratified, whereafter it went to the State legislatures for approval, as all Constitutional amendments must. Who'd be opposed to such an idea? Why, the "Family Values" people, of course, especially that vast tax-exempt business and influence-peddling empire known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons), who thought it would destroy our civilization, or at least the iron-clad grip that their hierarchy had on its members. In Mormonism, the leaders of the church are considered littoral prophets, and their word is law. Church President Spencer Kimball denounced the proposed amendment in 1976, stating it would would strike at the family, humankind's basic institution." (Kimball also was the one who announced he had a "Revelation from God" that blacks should be allowed to be ordained to the Mormon priesthood. Well, at least male blacks). The church soon threw itself full-tilt into fighting the ERA, organizing bands of its supposedly happy and contented women to lead the charge (of course, it was the men who coordinated things). And they had a powerful ally: the infamous John Birch Society. For years considered a far-right bunch of fanatics who saw a Communist on every street corner, the Birchers also decided to join the fight. Other big donors to the anti-ERA cause were brewer Adolph Coors and Phyllis Schlafly.

Enter Sonia Johnson, a practicing Mormon and housewife (although she did have an EdD). Johnson thought that the amendment wasn't such a bad idea, and organized Mormons for the Era. She quickly became a national celebrity, appearing on news and talk shows. Meanwhile, the leaders of her church were panicking. In 1979 Johnson made a stirring speech before the American Psychological Association about Mormonism and how it treats women that you can read here. That was the last straw. She was excommunicated. The ERA failed to be ratified, and fizzled out during the Reagan Revolution. As for Johnson, she divorced her husband, ran for President as the Citizens' Party candidate, and published some rather interesting theories on human relationships.

If you didn't want to risk half a grand or more on a quad set without knowing which format of LP would prevail, you could do what many of us did: use a "Hafler Hookup” to simulate four-channel sound in your home or car. All it took was that set of old speakers you had hanging around the basement, some wire, and maybe a cheap volume control from Radio Shack. I did it based upon a diagram I saw in Stereo Review. See my professional-looking commercial-quality drawing above. Note to you kids at home: try this at your own risk; I don’t want to hear from you if you short out your receiver.

The HH was named for the guy who came up with this elegantly simple idea. You set up a cheap set of speakers in the rear or side of your listening area. Since the rear speakers would mostly be used for ambiance and special effects you did not need to spend money on anything fancy. Then you ran wires from the front speakers to the rear ones in such a way that the signals reaching the back speakers canceled each other out. What you then heard coming from behind was the difference between the sound intended for the left speaker with that meant for the right. The volume control was intended to lower the sound of the rear speakers, which, because they were typically smaller, would otherwise sound louder than their front counterparts.

How did it sound? That depended upon the recording. In a conventional stereo recording you get a sense that the sound is coming from different directions in front of you; this occurs because the sound coming from the two speakers differs. If you listened to a solo guitarist recorded in a studio, there wasn’t much of a stereo effect in the first place, and a Hafler rig wouldn't have much signal difference to send to the rear speakers. Put on a classical album recorded in Carnegie Hall and the rear speakers would capture the ambiance and crowd sounds in such a way that you might think you were in the middle of the audience. It even worked with comedy albums; you’d hear the sounds of applause and laughter coming from all around you. But the most unusual sounds you could get from the HH were when you played a record in which multiple instruments were recorded separately and mixed together – as most rock, R and B and country albums are. You might suddenly hear a guitar coming from behind you, or a snare drum, or some strange sound effect. If the producer was really creative you might even hear the instruments moving about the room.

Hafler Hookups were ideal for cars, since it was usually fairly easy to put in rear speakers. There was also a variation for a single rear speaker that worked quite well in autos.

Some Vintage Quad Equipment

Quad stereo setups ran the gamut from cheap package deals to separate components costing well over a grand. (You can get a rough comparison between the price of something from the mid-Seventies in contemporary dollars by multiplying the price by four). The liner sleeve from my SQ copy of the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s “Birds of Fire” contained some photos of the assorted options, which you see here.



The Fischer brand is a throwback to the day when the manufacturer for whom the concert hall is named made serious audio products. However, by the mid-Seventies, Fischer stuff was getting a bit cheesy. I saw the receiver pictured here at the Abraham and Strauss audio department, which was located in their Annex building across the street from the main store in Brooklyn. Note the “joystick” balance control on the control panel. You could use it to adjust the relative volume levels of any of the four speakers quite simply, although the control looked like it would break easily. The wood cabinet was standard for audio components in the era before everything was uniform black.



Electrophonic was one of the many makers of “medium-fi” budget setups in both quad and conventional stereo. You’d typically find these in appliance stores, but almost never in serious audio shops, which had a certain snob appeal. Such rigs were popular with kids on budgets, or those who didn’t know serious sound when they heard it. You bought everything in one box – no matching components. The spherical speaker units were an example of the omidirectional style that enjoyed a brief popularity. Supposedly these did not require that you sit directly in line with the tweeters to hear high frequencies.



Philco was one of the makers of “compact” systems in which everything but the speakers was contained in a single unit. Compacts ranged in sound from poor to fairly good, although true audiophiles turned up their noses at anything other than separate components. Most had small speaker systems which had poor bass response, and featured cheap turntables which used what was termed a “ceramic phono cartridge,” that put excessive wear on LPs.



For those of us who already had conventional stereo sets, a variety of “decoders” existed which promised to extract the rear speaker sound from quad recordings, and feed them either through a second amplifier or directly to the loudspeakers. These were used extensively with the SQ format, and would also supposedly create a “simulated” quad sound from conventional stereo recordings.



My friend Russell, who worked in his father’s meat plant and actually had a few bucks to his name, first owned a compact quad system, but later upgraded to a component rig featuring a Pioneer receiver, four large JVC speaker systems, and a Garard turntable. One night I brought over a rare find: a German SQ edition of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” in SQ, which I found in the Imports bin at the old Alexander’s by Bloomingdales. If there was one album made for quad, we figured, it would be this one. Russell cranked it up, and we all took our positions in the center of the room. What we heard was a real disappointment; the engineers who had re-mixed the album for quad did not take advantage of any of the medium’s potential! Maybe this was one of the reasons for the downfall of quad that rarely gets discussed: few recordings were made that justified it.

The Quad Sound Format Wars

Quadraphonic sound! Many of us dreamed of owning a bona-fide "quad" stereo setup - with four speakers place around the room with which to really get into Pink Floyd or one of the other headier bands whom we thought would be cool in surround sound. But those of us who did want to get such rigs were faced with guessing which of the incompatible quad formats would eventually prevail. In the long run, none did. Still, quad was a great experiment.

The idea of quad was simple: surround sound, like you get at the movies, but for music recordings. A typical setup included two front speakers as well as two in the rear, either to the side of the listeners or behind them. Originally the purpose was to simulate the ambiance of a concert hall, but soon producers realized that there were many possibilities for placing and moving the sound of individual instruments and singers around the room. But there was a problem: how do you record and play back four channels of sound using technology only designed for two channels, and at the same time allow the quad recording to be used on conventional equipment? Of course there was reel-to-reel tape, which could handle the job very well, but never caught on except amongst serious audiophiles. There were few albums produced on reel tape, which frequently became tangled or snapped. Eight-track cartridges were sometimes used for quad as well, but they didn't have very good sound quality, and a 4-channel cart could only hold half as much material as a stereo one. Cassettes were out of the picture, due to patent restrictions.

For LP records, CBS developed a system called SQ, in which the four channels could be "encoded" into a standard recording which sounded fine on a conventional stereo, but which could be converted to quad via a special decoder. The Mahavishnu album above was one of two SQ albums I owned. SQ was probably the most popular format, and for a while we even had a radio station - WQIV - which broadcast using it. The problem was that the system was not too good at separating the material destined for the rear speakers from that intended for the front. Still, SQ was the most popular quad format. For years the King Biscuit Flour Hour concert program was broadcast in SQ.

JVC developed a more effective system known as CD-4, but this required a special turntable with a stylus, cartridge and cables capable of handling it. CD-4 was also very hard on vinyl, and discs wore out quickly. My friend Russell had a CD-4 setup, but only had a handful of albums in the format, including Jefferson Airplane's "Volunteers," which was re-mixed rather poorly.

There were a few more quad formats out there, including Sansui's QS system, which was similar to SQ, but these seldom caught on. Many quad setups had provisions for playing more than one format, which was a good idea. However, record companies never really agreed on which format to use, and as a result none won out.

Next time: a look at some quad equipment.