We very briefly thought it was a brilliant and important song. It wasn’t.
As for the anxiety of the 1970’s–the world changed a lot in just a few years. You could sit there talking to your grandparents about the horse and buggy era while you were surrounded by all manner of new high tech stuff and new attitudes about life. Your own parents had grown up in a completly different world from the one you grew up in. It was bound to make anyone a little confused and scared.
I was a teenager when it came out and have always kind of liked it. A bit cheesy and overdone but isn’t that the essence of rock and roll.
The song did get a brief writeup in "Time’ magazine which was a rare thing at the time for an establishment magazine to cover.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,901700,00.html
You also had people paying attention to the doomsday theories of Paul Ehrlich and the zero poplulation growth movement (“half of India will starve to death by 1980, US to close borders and limit population to 150 million”). People in my high school would breathlessly tell me how Thomas Malthus predicted people would always multiply faster than food. They were annoyed when I said Malthus hasn’t been proven right in 200 years and there was no Pill then, so why cite him as an expert.
But some weird stuff did become popular then. Lou Reed said he never thought “Walk on the Wild Side” would be a top 40 hit.
I like the way that after a while they ran out of rhymes for “five”, so they switched to years ending in ten.
Hmm, apparently Clear Channel thought the lyrics were “questionable.”
I love that song. It distills the Vietnam era into food-pill Soylent Green form. Dystopianism, technocracy, Jesus freaks… it’s all in there. This is a snapshot of a society that was waking up to the realization of its own inevitable mortality. The timeline device encourages the listener to examine the values of modern society in light of their long-term consequences. The future is coming, and you’re responsible for it, whether you like it or not. Plus the music is distinctively nonconformist yet catchy, what with the brassy intro and weird, ominous beat. I guess it’d be pretty tricky to dance to, though.
I always liked the solution offered by Joel on MST3K: “Guys, it’s a well-known fact that Timothy was a duck.”
Disturbingly, ‘Timothy’ songwriter Rupert Holmes’ younger son is named… Timothy.
I always thought the song was so laughably bad that the only emotion it created in me was amusement.
Well to tell you the truth, I liked the song. In a way, it is an apocalyptically, doom-laden, fear-ridden dirge of the futility of existence. 
Still, it was a hit around the summer of 1969, precisely when the first Moon landing had occurred. (July 20, 1969) So, technology didn’t have to be so creepy after all.
Also, I was a teenager at the time and the summer of 1969 was a *great * time for meeting and “making out” with members of the fairer gender. 
Perhaps the latter reason may be responsible for my not having such aversion to this song.
Aside from all the remarks, I just didn’t like the singing. It was irritating. One of them had a shlurpy sound to his words. It was the guy who sang without the harmony. Drove me up the wall then and still does