I bought a pair of outdoor boots in 1971.
Actually, my parents bought the boots - I just shopped for them.
It was a northern Midwest winter and I was a teenager in high school. They cost $60 which was approximately the cost of a used car at the time and considered big bucks.
To put it into perspective…
Only five years before I saw The Beatles in concert and paid $5.50 for the highest priced ticket.
Actually, my parents bought the ticket - I just used it. But a lot of kids I knew didn't go because $5.50 in 1966 seemed like $60 in 1971. If I had to spend my own hard-earned bucks as a thirteen year old Beatlemaniac, I would've probably had to settle for a ticket costing $3 - which they had.
In an era when most kids were still wearing buckle-up rubber galoshes over their shoes for wet weather wear, a $60 pair of outdoor boots for a teenager was a major expenditure.
There was no other place to wear them since they didn't look as cool as Dingo Boots, light enough for a school dance, or a decent substitute for dress shoes when a relative got married or croaked (sometimes the same thing). If you weren't clearing out a swamp for a future
Duck Dynasty clan, digging a ditch or laying a highway, that was a lot of money to spend on boots. I didn’t even make enough to pay them back by shoveling driveways that winter since the going pay rate for that competitive job was a dollar per.
One neighbor even paid me fifty cents for my snowbound shoveling skills. If I'd only had the foresight to start my own company, I could've been the guy famously known as 50 Cent. But that's hindsight, which is the direction I'm booting this discussion in.
A lot has changed since 1971. Then again, a lot hasn't. The Rolling Stones are still on tour, Michael Jackson just performed at the Billboard Music Awards, and today I wore the same boots to mow the lawn. Yeah, they still aren't as cool as the Dingo Boots O.J. Simpson advertised in the 70's, but at least mine are free to walk around in the public eye.
As a tribute to my boots, shoes in general, and the people who love'em and save'em, I kicked open the vinyl archives to dig around for some Leather Soul music, as opposed to
Rubber Soul. After brushing away the dirt and grass (of the mowing type and not the rolling type) I morphed into our favorite shoe store salesman Al Bundy, and searched the "footwear" category.
What…? You don't have that category in your record collection? Get with the times… the decade… or whatever half century we're in now.
Without worrying about sizes, shapes and styles, since my tastes have been known to stagnate, I pulled out a few songs that made the best fashion statement about footwear. With a runner-up nod to George Harrison and The Beatles for
Old Brown Shoe, and also as a thank you for the best price my parents ever paid for a concert ticket, here are…
The Top Three Classic Rock Songs About Shoes
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