Federico Fellini was directing La Città delle donne (City of Women).
Francis Ford Coppola finished directing Apocalypse Now.
Dusty Springfield released Living Without Your Love.
It bombed. Later in the year, she recorded the singles “Baby Blue” and “Your Love Still Brings Me to My Knees.”
E. L. Doctorow was preparing to publish Loon Lake (1980).
Earth, Wind & Fire released I Am.
Eddy Grant released Walking on Sunshine.
Elizabeth Bishop passed away (on 6 October).
Ella Fitzgerald and Count Basie released A Classy Pair and A Perfect Match.
Elton John was in something of a career slump, having broken two years prior with Bernie Taupin; he released the cover album Victim of Love.
Eric Clapton married model and photographer (and ex-wife of George Harrison) Pattie Boyd (on 27 March).
Fleetwood Mac released Tusk.
Foghat, whose sales were starting to slip, released Boogie Motel.
Frank Miller debuted as the penciller of Daredevil (issue #158), at the time one of Marvel Comics’s worst-selling titles.
Frank Zappa founded Zappa Records and released Sleep Dirt
…Orchestral Favorites
…his best-selling album Sheik Yerbouti
…and Joe’s Garage.
He also premiered his feature-length film Baby Snakes.
I was seeing my very first movie, Alien, in the theatre with my parents. (I was only one, but I was an unbelievably silent kid and they really wanted to see it and they couldn’t find a sitter, so they took me with them. I got to see lots of wildly-inappropriate-for-children-movies that way.)
John Wayne died in ’79, too. And production started on The Empire Strikes Back.
I was also an unbelievably silent kid — in ’79 my mom was probably checking on me to see if I were still alive…
John Barth published LETTERS, one of the four or five greatest American novels of the last 50 years, & a formal experiment well-nigh unmatched to date. Hailed as “genius” by Thomas R. Edwards in the NY Times & by William Gass in his later essay on Gertrude Stein (& in interview, & elsewhere), LETTERS then spends much of the next few decades getting slapped around as “too difficult.”
When Thomas Pynchon publishes MASON & DIXON, in 1997, he sends one of the first copies, signed, w/ a note: “To John Barth, who’s been there & done that.”
We’ll be getting to the J’s…