Little did I expect that 10 years later, when the decade was over, I would be a survivor of Martial Law and seven months in prison, married and a father to a six-year-old, a college dropout but already a government employee for six years, a playwright and screenwriter, and a recent returnee from his first trip abroad.
But all that serious business remained in the inscrutable future. On Jan. 31, 1969, Woodstock was still ringing in my ears; Neil Armstrong was my hero, the female body seemed stranger and more powerful and yet more distant than the moon, and – even as we had begun to march in the streets yelling "Student powah!" at anyone who cared to listen – a real crisis meant an acne attack two days before the prom.
The Seventies was actually when the boy became a man and when a whole lot of things both wondrous and horrible happened in my life. But looking back to 30 years ago, I can’t help thinking that God created that decade as a kind of elaborate, exuberant joke, a testimonial to human excess – in fashion as in sex and as in war. You had to have a sense of humor to give the world double-knit, Kung Fu Fighting, the bimbo salsa, and Alice Cooper. You also had to have a sense of irony to contrast all that airy mindlessness with the painful severity of Martial Law, Vietnam, and the killing fields.
Human memory being what it is, we prefer to remember the good things, the fun things. Even the discomforts and anxieties of growing up acquire a comic, affectionate sheen with age. "Oh, we were so stupid!" is a great thing to say, 30 years after the fact, when, presumably but not probably, we’ve left all idiocy behind.
From that perspective, how wonderfully, shamelessly silly the Seventies were. Whatever the Sixties represented, they got magnified, exploited, exploded in the next decade, which seemed devoted to testing the limits of taste, credulity, and self-love.
If the Sixties were in some ways innocent and natural, the Seventies were self-conscious and synthetic, as though everyone now knew or had some idea how things were supposed to look like and to be done. If you wanted good bedside manners, well, you studied for it years in advance, by reading The Joy of Sex or by imbibing Xaviera Hollander’s tried and tested technique, which she detailed with clinical precision in Penthouse’s "The Happy Hooker"; if you wanted to hustle your way to immortality, you followed Dance Fever, and aped Denny Terrio’s every shake and shimmy.
The Seventies were, in a way, the decade of narcissism and self-expression, and there was no better or sharper icon of the age in this respect than John Travolta’s white-suited, black-shirted Tony Manero, all by himself at the center of the dance floor and of the universe, one hand pointing to the earth and the other to the sky.
Manero was probably the coolest and the smoothest the Seventies ever got in a time that valued slinkiness. To be slinky you had to be thin, and we were scarecrow-skinny without really trying, a skill we all too obviously forgot as the years wore on. I think that the general profile we wanted to assume was that of a lizard – sleek and shiny, ever on the lookout for that hapless fly (or chick) to catch with your darting tongue.
Polyester did a pretty good job of suggesting sexiness, basically by emphasizing bulges in all the right places well before they turned into middle-age sag. Permapress was a godsend to lavanderas and planchadoras (although a few might have lost their jobs). But denims were popular as ever, and the street-sweeping, sayad flares and bell-bottoms that jeansmakers like Bang-Bang and Faded Glory made to go with your Nik-Nik shirt must have been a pain to wash and press (and, then as now, you’re no Pinoy if you don’t press your denims).
Our bodies were light as popsicle sticks, but, man, did we have hair – big, heavy hair that fell past your nape in curly locks and that framed your jowls in sideburns to rival those of Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck. Men took to sticking women’s combs in their butt pockets, and those whose hirsuteness overcame other parts of their anatomy flaunted that as well. The in thing was to be bare-chested (well, at least if you were a guy) and to wear a shiny red or purple shirt with collars the size of Paris, open down to your navel to reveal all that luxuriant bushiness, proof positive of your irrepressible machismo. (My chest, sadly, remained as barren as the Sahara.) It was, after all, the age of the bomba, and you were never too far away from the possibility of bumping into Scarlett Revilla or Yvonne (if your name was one Ricky Rogers) – maybe on the Love Bus, which cost you P1.50 from Escolta to Ayala.
For those assignations real or imagined, you soaked yourself in a tub of Jovan Musk Oil or Brut or (if you fancied yourself a touch more subtle, against the grain of the age) Old Spice or English Leather. You hid your fervid stares behind a pair of Polaroid sunglasses, and you bought just a little more nonchalance with a cigarette – Champions, Marlboros, or Philips – in hand, with all the yucky nicotine, which you never used to mind, captured and collected for you by Tar-Gard filters.
In that outfit and in that pose, you were ready to party, and the Seventies was party time, which could mean only one thing: disco, as in Disco Duck, TSOP, and Do the Hustle. Never mind that the decade began with something as plaintive as Carole King singing So Far Away or Yvonne Elliman wailing I Don’t Know How to Love Him. Never mind that the oil crisis of ’73 introduced Asyong Aksaya to remind us to turn off unnecessary lights and appliances to conserve energy; heck, we wasted all that energy on the dance floor, and no self-respecting disco (like, what else, Where Else?) was complete without a twirling, twinkling globe of mirrors.
If you had the cash to spare, like Peewee Leynes, you took your girl to listen to Kuh Ledesma at the Alibi Bar; if you espied someone as young and as pretty as Maryknoller Carla Pacis across the dance floor, you waited until they played Sparkling in the Sand to grab her and get the full benefit of its eight minutes; if you were as cool as Auggie Surtida, you stayed home and listened to Eumir Deodato play Baubles, Bangles and Beads on your radio-cassette player – or better yet, you went to the Araneta Coliseum to hear Deodato live. (Thanks for your memories, guys.)
And then again you might have missed all that because you were killing time in Martial-Law prison – a very un-cool place to be, believe you me, whatever the era.
More on the sexy, silly Seventies – OPM, Jingle Magazine, Farrah Fawcett, and Jonathan Livingston Seagull – some other time.