1975

Entertainment

Music

There were many new songs and albums that came out in ’75 but it was Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks album that connected with me more than any other album had in the past with the song “Tangle Up in Blue” seemingly telling my story with Elizabeth.  Other songs on the album also seem to tell part of the story, "Simple Twist of Fate", and from "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" ....

They say the darkest hour
Is right before the dawn
They say the darkest hour
Is right before the dawn
But you wouldn't know it by me
Every day's been darkness since you been gone

I also liked Harry Chapin "Cat's in the Cradle" about a father and son relationship and thought at the time that would never happen to me, forty years later I would think differently.

Electronic Music

Another form of music that was becoming more popular was electronic music.  Electric guitars had been around since the birth of rock-and-roll but electric guitars were originally just electric amplification of the sound, but soon the sounds were being modified by electronics.  But it was the Moog synthesizer that really changed the sound of music by being able to produce almost any sound electronically.  There were articles and projects about electronic music that I had read in Popular Electronics which even had an article on how to build a mini music synthesizer which they called the “Psych-Tone” which could: “generate 1728 different 63-note sequences that can be selected and combined with any of 63 pause combinations to produce 108,864 different melodic lines.”  How cool was that!  They even had a kit for it made by Southwest Technical Products which I immediately bought. After I assembled it, I spent many hours experimenting and, even though I had no talent for music, I had great fun playing with it.

The Southwest Technical Products Psych Tone Synthesizer

The Moog synthesizer was made popular by the album the 1968 “Switched-On Bach”, a bestselling album of Bach music all done with a Moog synthesizer by the then Walter Carlos.  Bach being one of my favorite classical music composers, I bought the album and then liked it so much that I bought Walter Carlos’s albums “The Well-Tempered Synthesizer”, “Sonic Seasonings” and the soundtrack album for the movie “Clockwork Orange”.   In the in the early ‘70’s Walter went through transgender treatments and he became a she, becoming Wendy Carlos.  An interesting side note, in 1988 the songwriter Momus wrote the song “Walter Carlos” which, like a science fiction movie, Wendy traveled back in time to marry her pre-transition self, Walter. Wendy sued Momus and the song was removed from later editions of the album.

I had other electronic music albums, “The age of Electronicicus” by Dick Hyman which Hyman used a Moog synthesizer for several Beatle songs like  "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" and “Blackbird”.  The first time I heard Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” was when I bought the album with the same name by Tomita in which he did all the songs electronically.  I later bought several other albums of “Pictures at an Exhibition” done by classical orchestras.

The August edition of Popular Electronics had an article titled “Will Audio go Digital?”  The article compared digital music to be like a paint-by-number painting as compared to a Rembrandt original, it just was not as good but the article ended saying, ”Is it worth all the trouble and expense? Again, perhaps not immediately, but it certainly will be someday.”   In a few years digital music would become the standard form for music.   

Movies

The movie “Jaws” was the number one movie of the year which I did go see. After seeing The Exorcist back in ’73 I had not gone to a horror movie since but I considered Jaws more of a action movie than a horror movie and went to see it.  I, like many others after seeing the movie, was a little scared of going into the surf at the beach for a few years.  Although not as popular as Jaws, I went to see “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest” with Jack Nicholson won Best Picture for the year and thought it was really good.

TV

Pretty much the same shows were on TV, All in the Family, Sanford and Son, The Six Million Dollar Man.  As a boost for women, The Bionic Woman came out and did better in ratings than The Six Million Dollar Man.