Five Minute History
Rock concerts and the changing musical scene in St. Louis in 1970.
By Trish MacEnulty
One of the most fun things to research for my novel Cinnamon Girl was rock concerts and the changing musical scene in St. Louis in 1970 where my protagonist, Eli Burnes, goes to live with her father when she is fifteen.
Some aspects of the book are based on my own life. When I was fifteen I lived with my older brother and his family for a year in Webster Groves, a satellite community in St. Louis County. At a Moody Blues Concert I met a really cute boy who worked at a headshop so of course, I had Eli meet her boyfriend (who works at a headshop) at a Moody Blues Concert. They go to several more concerts after that because the boyfriend gets free tickets through his work.
I found dates, venues, opening acts, and songlists for all those concerts on the Internet as well as reviews of the concerts. This helped a lot with my faulty memory. And I think it’s important to have specific songs to reference.
Here’s an excerpt from the book when Eli and her boyfriend go to a Jethro Tull concert:
The Jethro Tull concert was fabulous. First Procul Harem came on, and the audience went wild when they played “Whiter Shade of Pale.” I never understood what the words meant, but it didn’t matter. It was the mood that the music put you in, especially the electric organ as if you were in a psychedelic church service.
During the break Zen and I walked around, hand in hand, looking at the freaks and hippies. Both of us in our bell bottoms and head-shop gear, we fit in perfectly. We had seats in the fourth row and I felt like we were hippy royalty, which is what my English teacher would have called an oxymoron.
Then Ian Anderson bounded out on the stage, flute in hand. He was all bushy hair and red beard, wearing a long coat that looked like something out of a medieval fairy tale. The band mem-bers fiddled with their equipment and Ian paced like a tiger while the audience grew antsy. “Get it on!” a guy yelled impatiently. The band pretended not to hear them. Just when it felt like the ten-sion would explode, the music erupted — Ian Anderson’s deep voice telling us that “Nothing is easy.” He stood at the mic, blowing his flute, one leg up like a stork, bouncing his dangling foot to the beat of the music.
Thanks to my research I was able to combine YouTube videos, playlists, and my own memory to recreate the concert.
Another aspect of the music scene in that era was the advent of FM radio. In the 1960s, everyone listened to AM radio. AM radio had a specific formula: three-minute popular songs, boring news-casts, endless contests, and super-extroverted guys for DJs (I don’t ever remember hearing a fe-male DJ!). FM came along, and the quality of sound was better, the mellow DJs had more control over what they played, and there wasn’t a formula they had to follow. This was the beginning of album-oriented rock. For the first time you might hear someone like Joni Mitchell or a band like Crosby, Stills, and Nash on the radio.
In St. Louis, the cool FM station was KSHE, which debuted their rock ’n’ roll format in 1967 by playing Jefferson Airplane’s iconic “White Rabbit.” I remembered the switch from AM to FM in our listening habits, but I didn’t realize the importance of FM to the culture.
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| Jethro Tull |
After doing some research, I discovered the role of FM radio in protest and hippie culture. An arti-cle written by authors Chapple, Garofolo and Rogers in Mother Jones magazine explains: “FM stations established switchboards that provided listeners with rides, addresses of places to spend the night and news of concerts and demonstrations. San Francisco's KSAN was ‘information cen-tral,’ … ‘The station was just where people would call when they were in trouble. The classic was at KMPX where a kid called one day who'd been busted in Sacramento for grass. They allotted him one phone call, so he called us, ‘cause we were the only friend he had. You had a lot of that.’ Many FMs built radical news departments that did not simply ‘rip and read’ the wire service re-leases as AM did, but gathered their own news from a variety of sources.” This was especially im-portant to my story, as Eli’s dad is a DJ who is involved in the peace movement.
When you’re writing “history” that took place during your own lifetime, research becomes vital to your understanding of that history. Just because you lived it doesn’t mean you remember it accu-rately or fully. Research is about discovery. I think it’s one of the most fun parts of writing histori-cal fiction.
By Trish MacEnulty
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Thank you for featuring Trish MacEnulty today, with such a fascinating journey back to the 1970s.
ReplyDeleteTake care,
Cathie xx
The Coffee Pot Book Club