Love in Autumn Colours
Written by Gail Walter
The sixties was the official era of peace, love and understanding but that doesn’t mean that love wasn’t alive, well and living in the seventies. I know. I was there.
More specifically I was in a garage converted into a cool teenage pad. The floor was covered in brown shag carpet and the bed was a box directly on the shag carpet and covered in a fabric of geometric design in beige and brown. There was a record player on another box style table also covered in a fabric, this time a brown hessian that was mysteriously popular at this time. By now you’re probably remembering just how much brown there was in the seventies.
I was not alone in this room; with me was my boyfriend whose room this actually was. We were wrapped around each other and too absorbed in our teenage necking session to hear the record player’s needle repeatedly declaring that it had come to the end of the Elton John album we had been playing when we first got into a clinch.
This was love in the seventies. Pretty much like love in any other era except this time everything was shot through with flea market incense and the faithful orange, beige and brown of the dingy autumn color spectrum that had unfortunately taken the modern world by storm.
When you’re seventeen and you fall in love its generally with someone at school or with someone who knows someone at some other neighborhood school. When you’re seventeen in the seventies the world is more or less the size of your neighborhood. The music you listen to and the magazines you read hint at a larger world but youth has got you tethered to your family home… for the time being.
Falling in love in the seventies seems especially poignant to those of us who did it. There was a lack of cynicism, a kind of sentimental freshness that was reflected in the ballads of the day. David Cassidy was crooning Cherish, Seasons in the Sun was rendering thousands helpless and in tears in public places. Paul McCartney was newly wed and testifying to all the wonder of love with “Maybe I’m Amazed” while Stevie Wonder sang, “You are the Sunshine of my Life” and, in case you were wondering, Billy Joel was loving you “Just the Way You Are”.
It was before the punk culture reacted to all things mainstream and after the flower children had opened the way to concepts like free love and freedom in general.
Clothing was an endearing mix of alluring and innocent. Hot pants and mini skirts let it all hang out while flowing floral smocks hinted at romantic eras long past.
My husband tells me it was the rose on my long sleeved yellow cotton top that first made him pay attention. The rose was embroidered onto the center of my chest and was vaguely transparent in an opaque sort of way. My boyfriend wasn’t so much interested in the flower itself as he was in the hints of something that seventeen-year-old boys are very much interested in.
Perhaps love hasn’t changed much…
Our relationship blossomed through our mutual devotion to the music of the time. He had an enviable collection of albums that he carried around in a canvas satchel from house to house. In the seventies we were always in search of a party and on Fridays at school there was always several rumours of them.
We would spend the weekend nights, the ones we were allowed out, walking the streets looking for that elusive party where everything was said to be happening. Large military overcoats were in fashion then with padded shoulders that could transform slips of boys into men.
The greatest claim a girl could have on her boy in those days was to share the same gargantuan, heavy coat on a cold winter’s night out looking for that mythical party. Whole evenings could be spent in a fruitless search for a party but sometimes our long foot-weary searches were rewarded. Down some driveway we would hear strains of Led Zeppelin ascending a celestial Stairway to Heaven or The Who with Another brick in the Wall.
Inside the dark garage hulking shadows in overcoats would be clustered around cigarettes and bottles of beer and wine. There was the prerequisite ultra violet lighting that would expose all the lint on your outfit and in your hair. Your teeth would glow eerily and white bras that were supposed to be hidden floated suggestively before our innocent eyes. The air would be heavy with smoke, aftershave, Impulse and 21.
This was young love in the seventies, ballads that reduced you to tears, rock that made you bop in shared overcoats and long nights combing the neighbourhood for non-existent parties and all of this recorded in the yellowed pages of old rose scented journals.
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