Super Seventies RockSite's Seventies Daily Music Chronicle

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September 1970

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Rolling Stone reports that the Bob Dylan bootleg Great White Wonder has sold over 350,000 copies and that the Dave Clark Five have broken up.

Also, at the Palermo Pop '70 Festival in Italy,
Arthur Brown (of the Crazy World of... and "Fire" fame) has been arrested and imprisoned for four days in solitary confinment, after he'd set fire to his helmet and stripped naked during his stage performance at the festival. The audience threw shoes, food and bottles at him. While in solitary, Brown was given a note signed by over 200 locals telling him to get out of Italy and stay out.

Singer/guitarist
Alan "Blind Owl" Wilson of Canned Heat is found dead beside an empty bottle of barbituates in fellow bandmember Bob Hite's garden in Topanga Canyon, Los Angeles. He was 27.

Legendary Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi dies of colon cancer in a Washington, D.C., hospital at age 57.

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In the Pennsylvania and New Jersey countrysides, members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War stage a reenactment of a brutal search-and- destroy mission as an antiwar protest.
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Derek and the Dominoes finish sessions for the seminal double-disc Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. Released in December, it features Eric Clapton's signature track "Layla," inspired by his affair with George Harrison's wife Patti Boyd, and other telling tracks like "Have You Ever Loved a Woman" and "It's Too Late." "Forget any indulgences and filler -- it's one hell of an album," writes Ed Leimbacher in Rolling Stone.
7
Time magazine publishes "The Waves of Morpheus," an article on the growing fad of waterbeds. Although technical problems often produce flooding in early models, sales of the water-filled vinyl bag mattresses have skyrocketed.
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Elvis Presley returns to the road for the first time since 1957, kicking off a six-date tour in Phoenix.
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A team of geologists introduces the "continental drift" theory, hypothesizing the existence, 225 million years ago, of a continent comprising all the earth's current continents.
11
Director Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, starring Jack Nicholson as conflicted oil rigger/piano virtuoso Robert Dupea, is released. More great films and multiple Oscar wins (including one for 1975's One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest) will follow for Nicholson, but even in a career filled with innumerable memorable performances and dozens of quotable lines, it's hard to top Dupea's attempt to order off-menu at a roadside diner.
12
Joan Baez, among others, performs at the Woody Guthrie Memorial Concert at L.A.'s Hollywood Bowl.

Josie and the Pussycats, a Saturday morning cartoon about an all-girl rock band, debuts on CBS-TV. It runs through Sept. 2, 1972.

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The publisher of the fashion trade paper Women's Wear Daily pushes the new look of the midi skirt, but women refuse to buy into it.
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Vice President Spiro Agnew says the youth of America are bing "brain-washed into a drug culture" by rock music, movies, books and underground newspapers.

The Baltimore Orioles defeat the Cincinnati Reds in five games, to win the 67th World Series.

16
A Melody Maker poll finds that Led Zeppelin has replaced the Beatles as Great Britain's most popular group -- the first time the Beatles haven't been Number One in eight years.
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The Flip Wilson Show debuts on NBC, and host Flip Wilson becomes the first African-American to headline a successful variety hour. In the years leading up to his own show, the comedian and his repertoire like Geraldine, Reverend Leroy, and Danny Danger have been all over TV in such shows as The Ed Sullivan Show, The Hollywood Palace, and Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. Two of his comedy albums have been Top 40 best-sellers. Flip's show is an immediate hit, and during its primetime run, the aforementioned Geraldine will popularize two catchphrases: "The devil made me do it!" and "What you see is what you get."
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Virtuoso guitarist and writer Jimi Hendrix dies in his London apartment at age 27. The brilliant, influential, temperamental and erratic musician had been spiraling out of control lately, and financial woes, feuds with managers and band members, regular drug and alcohol abuse, and poorly received concerts had been sapping his strength. A couple of weeks ago he strode off a stage, declaring "I've been dead for a long time." Early this morning he leaves a plea on his former manager's answering machine ("I need help bad, man"), takes nine sleeping pills, crawls into bed at his girlfriend's basement London apartment, and never wakes up. The death certificate lists the cause of death as "inhilation of vomit due to barbituate intoxication." Later, insufficient evidence of circumstances will lead to an open verdict on his demise. Nonetheless, some contend that if Hendrix had been put in an upright sitting position rather than left lying on his back, he might not have suffocated.

FCC Commisioner
Nicholas Johnson says that Vice President Spiro Agnew, instead of attacking rock music for spreading "drug culture" among the nation's youth, should worry about the political contributions of corporations that manufacture and sell drugs, cigarettes and liquor.
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Diana Ross's "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" reaches #1 and becomes her first chart topper sans The Supremes. Produced by its writers, Valerie Simpson and Nick Ashford, it was originally a hit (#19) in 1967 for Tammi Terrell and Marvin Gaye. Diana will go on to a hugely successful solo career encompassing 41 hits through 1986.

Mary Tyler Moore's new sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show debuts on CBS-TV. The show will run for seven seasons, garnering almost universal acclaim and reach a peak of sophistication in theme, performance and subject matter that had never been attempted in television comedy before. It will rack up three Emmy Awards for best comedy, four for Moore, three apiece for the lovably gruff Mr. Grant (Ed Asner) and free-spirited neighbor Rhoda (Valerie Harper), and two each for blowhard anchorman Ted Baxter (Ted Knight) and the "Happy Homemaker," Sue Ann Nivens (Betty White).

The Top Five
1. "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" - Diana Ross
2. "War" - Eric Starr
3. "Lookin' Out My Back Door"/"Long as I Can See the Light" - Creedence Clearwater Revival
4. "Patches" - Clarence Carter
5. "Julie, Do Ya Love Me" - Bobby Sherman

20
In Miami, Jim Morrison of the Doors is acquitted on charges of "lewd and lascivious behavior" but is found guilty of indecent exposure and profanity.
21
Monday Night Football takes its bow (with the New York Jets vs. the Cleveland Browns) and strains U.S. marriages, but "dandy" Don Meredith, voluble Howard Cosell and steady play-by-play man Keith Jackson (later replaced by Frank Gifford) will boost ABC's ratings. NFL commissioner Pete Rozell had long wanted a regular primetime Monday night showcase, but couldn't find a network until third-place ABC agrees. Savvy, fast-rising producer Roone Arledge doubles the usual number of cameras, inserts slick graphics packages, and adds another announcer to the standard two-man setup. When a whopping 35 percent of TV homes tune in tonight to watch the Joe Namath-led Jets lose to the Browns 31-21, the advertisers paying $65,000 a minute realize that's a bargain. As the season progresses, movie attendance drops nationwide as fans flock for a post-Sunday football fix that will remain an ABC institution for the next three decades.
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Vice President Spiro Agnew responds to FCC Commissioner Nicholas Johnson's charges, accusing Johnson of "backing the kind of permissiveness and self-flagellation that has encouraged so many of our youth to burn to marijuana and worse."
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The Partridge Family TV show debuts on ABC. It will run for 96 episodes through Sept. 1974 and is modeled on the real-life '60s vocal group The Cowsills.
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Tamla-Motown Records reveals that the Jackson 5 have sold 10 million singles worldwide in nine months ("I Want You Back," "ABC," "The Love You Save") -- an unsurpassed record for a period.
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A unique new music show debuts on Hollywood TV station KCET, Channel 28. Boboquivari (a Hopi Indian word for the neck of an hourglass, "the place where time begins") presents rock, pop, folk and other performers in an informal, intimate studio setting -- but with no host, no format and no lip-synching. The first shows feature Tim Buckley, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Roberta Flack and Freddie King.
29
Eric Burdon and War's "Spill the Wine" and Dawn's debut single, "Candida," go gold.
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