Pre-Punk

Remember about thirty years ago when Some Girls came out and we all called the Rolling Stones dinosaurs? Disco was big (and getting bigger), and punk hadn't been filtering into the hinterland for very long (I was still living in Nashville at the time). In terms of punk and new wave, by that point I only had the Stranglers, Elvis Costello, and Talking Heads, I think.

Mrs. Talk Talk Talk Talk Talk and I were discussing the other night what had preceded all that stuff and whether or not there was anything worth listening to. I have to admit that I didn't remember a whole lot. I recall some of the stuff I didn't especially like--Saturday Night Fever was huge, but I could never get excited about that (in fact, I was so unenthused that I never even saw the movie until after I was married). After "Piano Man," Billy Joel didn't really break nationally until "The Stranger," but he regularly came through Nashville and had a fairly large following, but I never cared for him, either. Fleetwood Mac was fine, but I could never get very excited about them. Eric Clapton had come out with Slowhand, and all I could wonder was where were those fabulous guitar solos we'd seen (and heard) with Cream and Derek and the Dominoes? Slowhanded out of existence, as far as I could tell.

So who did I like? Well, David Bowie was quite busy at the time (although later details about his biography suggest that he may not have exactly been aware of that). Station to Station was out in '76, and then he bookended '77 with Low and "Heroes," which was very powerful stuff. I was liking Queen at the time, although News of the World seemed a bit of a come down from A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races. I think I was into 10cc just about then, too, although for some reason I came to appreciate 1976's How Dare You much more in college (which started for me in '78). Steely Dan was pretty good, with Aja being their most recent at that point. I'd been a long-time fan of Jethro Tull, but I was somewhat disappointed with their folkier, English countryside direction (and, truth to tell, they never recovered from it). Even though I was only a Genesis fan in theory (I liked them well enough, but I didn't actually have any of their albums), I'd been enjoying Peter Gabriel's first solo record. And I'd recently started following Supertramp. (I was often accused of going against trends and disliking something merely because it was popular--one girlfriend even claimed that if I'd been older when the Beatles were together I wouldn't have liked them because everybody else did--but I'll proudly state that I was disappointed by Supertramp's 1979 Breakfast in America before "The Logical Song" became a hit.) So that was a handful of stuff, but what else was there? What am I forgetting? (And what am I not forgetting but just not bothering to mention it because I didn't like it much--Jackson Browne, I'm looking at you.)