For my friend Ryan, the 70’s started (at least musically) when Led Zeppelin II took over Abbey Road in 1969; for my sister they started, I think, with Bill Withers’s “Aint No Sunshine.”
The 70’s never started for me, not really, not musically, and before all you Pink Floyd, The Who, Janis Joplin (for those who think something starts when something else dies), etc. fans pity my sheltered existence, let me assure you my lack of origin doesn’t stem from a lack of exposure.
The first tropical storm of the season, Alberto, traveled by my neck of the woods this past week, and for me that’s when the 70’s started, in the middle of wind and rain and no moonlight or crickets or bats in the trees outside my doorstep.
That’s when I heard Sibylle Baier’s “Tonight.” I turned the volume up and basked in the crackle of a crude recording captured with the gain set too high. The purist in me cringed, the lo-fi junkie orgasmed.
I sat in my room, listening, feeling slightly like a rapist. I thought to myself, “This song wasn’t meant to be heard” even if the Elf Powered folks at the Orange Twin record label assured me otherwise. I knew this because if it had, back when it was recorded in the flourishing heyday of female minimalist folk singers, Sibylle Baier’s album, Colour Green, would have a Wikipedia entry somewhere between Vashti Bunyan’s Just Another Diamond Day (1970) and Joni Mitchell’s Blue (1971).
But there is no such entry, and somehow I find this a testament to those who’ve heard Sibylle’s music thus far. I don’t know how much longer this will be the case, but for the time being I’m grateful.
I can’t count the number of occasions I’ve closed my eyes and said to myself, “There’s something about this song….” Perhaps most impressive and confounding is its aforementioned simultaneity, its alive/dead nature certainly on par with anything Schrödinger could dream up. In short, its ability to be timeless and so thoroughly grounded in a specific decade.
This is when the 70’s started for me, with a voice, a guitar, and the ambience of the storms and hurricanes that have come to mean home.
[buy stuff here]