Or are we?
OK, you old rockers, here’s one just for you. Harken back, if you can, to the year 1973. It was a jumble of a year with lots happening. For example, in the USA, the Watergate hearings began, which eventually sent US president Richard Nixon packing. Eventually, US Troops were withdrawn from the sad and pointless Vietnam war. On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court reached a decision in the case of Roe v. Wade, where a woman named Jane Roe challenged a law in Texas that made abortion mostly illegal. The Court ruled in favor of Jane Roe, stating that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to choose whether they can have an abortion or not. However, the the government acknowledged that, as it has an interest in protecting potential life and divided pregnancy into three stages (and this is still being fought in the US by women’s rights groups, fifty years later. WTF?)
It was a good year for Cinema: The Sting, William Friedkin’s Horror Classic The Exorcist, Paper Moon, Papillon, The Day Of The Jackal, Serpico, Terrence Malick’s Badlands, George Lucas’ American Graffiti, Martin Scorcese’s Mean Streets, Soylent Green, and Michael Michael Crichton’s Westworld were all films that landed. Westworld didn’t thrill audiences, so it quietly went away.
And, of course, 1973 featured rather good music, all around the world. That was when musicians used real instruments and played with real skills. Sigh, the good old days. One of the hundreds of bands that have made music over the years, but have still lingered in people’s memories are The Doobie Brothers. Most of you will remember their most popular tune, China Grove: it is still their hallmark tune. Well, to cut a long story short, your editor heard the tune on the radio recently and wondered where China Grove actually was and what as happened there since those heady days of 1973.
The song is based on a real small town in Texas. Written by Tom Johnston who thought he had created a fictional town called “China Grove” near San Antonio and later learned it really exists from his cab driver in Houston. Johnston later explained that the band had been on tour passing through the town of China Grove on the way to or from San Antonio, and he had seen a road sign with the name, but somehow had forgotten about it. So, in other words, it existed and then it didn’t and then it did. (Sounds like a song by Donovan.)
China Grove is a town in Bexar County, Texas, United States, located on the far east side of San Antonio. The population was 1,141 at the 2020 census. It is part of the San Antonio Metropolitan Statistical Area. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
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