Prog didn’t really go away. Just took a catnap in the late Seventies. A new generation of fans discovered it, and a whole new array of bands and solo artists took it on into the new millennium.
Everyone loves the seventies because that’s when movies were character-based, and you saw great characters and you saw very interesting filmmaking. There are interesting movies being made now, but it’s harder and harder to make them.
I saw Joseph Cornell’s lyrical work for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in the late seventies and have internalized many of his boxes.
That’s the way it was in New York City in the early Seventies, all the artists hung out together.
I’d often use a Leslie cabinet on its own in the studio because everyone in the late Sixties and Seventies was experimenting with them. We’d stick anything through a Leslie because it made everything sound so good.
Back in the Seventies, we had a romantic, poetic vision of the future, like it was in the movie ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.’ It felt as if everything was still ahead of us.
I was a huge Bowie fan since I was 12 years old. That was the first ‘punk’ rock I got into in the Seventies. I didn’t find out about a lot of the other stuff that was going on, like New York Dolls and Roxy Music, until a lot later.
In the Seventies and Eighties we all had our fun, and now and then we went really too far. But, ultimately, it required a certain amount of clear thinking, a lot of hard work and good make-up to be accepted as a freak.
To me, the Seventies were very inspirational and very influential… With my whole persona as Snoop Dogg, as a person, as a rapper. I just love the Seventies style, the way all the players dressed nice, you know, kept their hair looking good, drove sharp cars and they talked real slick.
In the early Seventies, I started writing a little autobiographical novel about my childhood – I made it into a mystery story.
I am very inspired by the Seventies.
Here’s the truth. Your teens and twenties are your Plan A. At 50, you’re assessing whether Plan B or Plan C or any of the other plans you hatched actually worked. Your sixties and seventies, they’re an improvisation.
I love the Nineties because more than any other period of time, there was such an eclectic mix of styles going on. More so than in the Sixties and Seventies, when there was an overriding look and sound.
As I grew older – collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five – poetry abandoned me.
I like characters with character, not just pretty faces. Anyway, I think people can be both grotesque and beautiful at the same time. Look at Mick Jagger in the seventies. Look at Angelina Jolie.
In the Seventies, album artwork became really beautiful items. The whole process of doing an album sleeve, it became a very artistic thing.
I tried the Atkins diet in the Seventies when pregnant with my son, as I didn’t want to pile on the pounds. Now, so long as I’m healthy, I don’t care what my scales say.
