Amid the oil crisis, Watergate disillusion, militants, cults, and faux-satanic rockers, the one thing both sides of the cultural divide share is nostalgia for ’50s rock. American Graffiti’s director George Lucas (and its triple-platinum soundtrack) preserve the rituals of an earlier, more wholesome adolescence in danger of expiring.
Jerusalem remembers in the days of her affliction and bitterness all the precious things that were hers from days of old.
—LAMENTATIONS
Well, it wasn’t supposed to go down that way.
NEIL YOUNG, “TIRED EYES”
When Merle Haggard asked his guitarist Roy Nichols how things were going with his wife, Nichols replied, “It’ll be fine if we make it through December.”1 The line inspired Haggard to write a song about a man struggling to keep a brave equanimity as he gets laid off at the factory while trying to save enough to buy his little girl presents for the holiday.
Released on October 27, it was the No. 1 country song for the last two weeks of the year. It was the kind of song you never heard in the wall-to-wall Christmas programming, a song for weary parents skidding through the sludge reminding themselves to love this time of year as they made their way to the stores after work.
This year the ordeal was compounded by OPEC’s oil embargo. The song kept you philosophical while sitting in your car for half an hour waiting to get to the pump, windshield wipers slapping the snow, watching your gas gauge go down while you waited to buy gas. Then you realized the price had increased more than once in the last twenty-four hours and got pissed off all over again. Or maybe it was playing as you sped toward the station, running on empty, only to find a sign waiting for you: SORRY, NO GAS TODAY.
It was Haggard’s sixteenth country No. 1, though none of his songs had broken the pop Top 50 before. This one, however, went to No. 28, his best showing ever on that chart. Critic Dave Marsh called it “the first record—perhaps the first meaningful piece of pop culture—to come to grips with the fears, frustrations, and hopes-against-hope of the workers thrown into disarray by the initial round of deprivation as the world economy cooled after three decades of post–World War II expansion.”2
Merle Haggard was more of an outlaw than the Outlaws Waylon and Willie. He lived out the Bakersfield version of The 400 Blows, breaking out of juvenile detention centers seventeen times by his own count, hopping trains, escaping to Oregon with a girl from juvie,3 acting out his future hit “I Am a Lonesome Fugitive.” When he tried to rob a roadhouse he landed in San Quentin. Johnny Cash performed for the prisoners and inspired Haggard to turn his life around. Years later when Haggard appeared on Cash’s show, Cash suggested they talk about it, but Haggard was worried about advertising his criminal past. “If you let me tell them in my way,” Cash assured him, “they’ll love you like we do. And no one will ever be able to harm you with it.”4 So on the air they reminisced about Cash’s San Quentin performance.
“That’s funny, Merle. I don’t remember you being on that show.”
“I wasn’t, John. I was in the audience.”5
Haggard knew the Nashville/Austin Outlaws but wasn’t in their scene, partly because he was from Bakersfield on the West Coast, which had already been rebelling against Nashville for a decade. Also, his gambling addiction alienated Jennings, who felt Haggard took advantage of him one night in 1969. Jennings’s bassist Chuck Conway had been killed in an auto accident en route to a gig in Peoria. Jennings had been traveling separately and soldiered through his live performance on booze and pills. Afterward, even though he was “wobbling,” he played poker with Haggard and his manager, and they won all the $5,000 in cash Jennings had on him. “We’ve never been close since that night,” Jennings wrote. “I can still remember their faces. When I was broke, they said their goodbyes and left. I never forgot that.”6 Haggard later owned up to his gambling addiction in his autobiography.
Also, Haggard stayed away from Willie Nelson’s Dripping Springs hippie-redneck festivals because he was the anti-hippie spokesman for Nixon’s Silent Majority. “Okie from Muskogee” praised the city’s residents for not burning their draft cards or smoking marijuana (even though band members were smoking it on the bus when the song was created7). “Fightin’ Side of Me” snarled, “If you don’t love it, leave it.”
Nixon’s wife, Pat, invited Haggard to play the White House for her birthday on March 17. Nixon had been shoring up his country music base since 1970 when he created Country Music Month. But Haggard wrote in his memoir that he was dismayed to find the president’s crowd as unresponsive as “a bunch of department store mannequins.”8 Chief of staff H. R. Haldeman wrote in his diary, “The ‘Evening’ was pretty much a flop because the audience had no appreciation for country/western music … except when Haggard did his ‘Okie from Muskogee.’”9
Later Haggard realized the White House had been trying to hide its anxiety. It was the same day that James McCord gave his letter to Judge Sirica stating that the Watergate burglars had been pressured to perjure themselves.
Eighty-five percent of the population watched the Watergate hearings in May and June, but then people started to tune out, bored … until John Dean testified that he believed Nixon could have been taping their conversations.
On Friday, July 13, the Senate Watergate Committee staff conducted a nonpublic background interview with deputy assistant to the president Alexander Butterfield. When they asked him if Dean was correct about being recorded, Butterfield replied, “I was wondering if someone would ask that. There is tape in the Oval Office.”10 Aaron Latham recounted in New York Magazine, “He paused to confess that he had hoped no one would ask him that question … [but] had decided he would have to respond truthfully and candidly if asked.”11
On July 23, Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and the Senate committee demanded the tapes from Nixon. Nixon refused, so they subpoenaed them. On August 29, Nixon addressed the nation on television, saying he was not going to turn over the tapes because they contained national security secrets. He asserted that he had the right to do so through executive privilege.
“This is kind of a strange country, isn’t it?” Johnny Carson asked. “Judges can see Deep Throat but they can’t listen to those tapes.”
Viewing the chaotic state of the US government, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries realized that the opportunity they had been hoping for had arrived.
After World War II the US mutated into a nation dependent on the car. Per The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power by Daniel Yergin, that period saw the population in cities rise by ten million while the population of suburbs rose by eighty-five million, enabled by the newly built freeways.12 Fast food chains and drive-in restaurants exploded. In 1946 there were eight shopping centers; by the early ’80s there were twenty thousand.13 The landscape transformed to one of strip malls, motels, and brutalist office buildings.
The Arab world wanted Israel out of the Middle East, and had long wanted to use its oil as leverage against the US to make it happen, but for decades the US had a surplus of its own oil. Then in the late ’60s the American surplus ran out (a state of affairs that would last until the fracking boom of the mid-2000s). By 1971, the country was forced to increase its imports and began rush-ordering nuclear power plants to try to offset its dependence on fossil fuels. The clock was ticking, as in the opening act of the disaster film The Poseidon Adventure, one of the year’s highest-grossing movies.
In the old days, the Western oil companies (Standard, Texaco, Gulf) told the Arab nations the price they were going to buy the oil for. Then OPEC managed to secure a veto. Gradually, they began to negotiate. Now OPEC wanted to dictate what they charged for their own oil.
Concurrently, Egypt’s Anwar Sadat planned an attack to regain the land his country lost to Israel in 1967’s Six-Day War. In Saudi Arabia, the people sympathized with Egypt, and King Faisal did not want to look too accommodating to the US. He issued a statement on August 30: “We are deeply concerned that if the United States does not change its policy in the Middle East and continues to side with Zionism, then, I am afraid, such course of action will affect our relations with our American friends because it will place us in an untenable position in the Arab world and vis-a-vis the countries which Zionism seeks to destroy.”14
Faisal gave half a billion to Sadat for war against Israel and told him to keep the war going long enough so that OPEC could use it as justification for an oil embargo. Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on October 6, Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, when the country was quiet. It was their own Pearl Harbor. Within three days, Israel lost five hundred tanks and forty-nine planes.
The Soviet Union resupplied Egypt and Syria, so the US began resupplying Israel with strategic airlifts. On October 16, the Arab nations of OPEC announced that in retaliation for US support of Israel, they would raise their prices from $3 a barrel to $3.65, a 21 percent increase. By the end of the year they would raise it up to $4.75–5.11 a barrel.15 They also embargoed Great Britain, the Netherlands, Canada, and Japan, the countries that—alongside the US—consumed half the world’s energy. In May gas had been 31 cents a gallon in the US. Now it jumped from 39 cents to 50 cents, to 70 cents by December. Cars averaged eight miles a gallon.
Saudi minister of petroleum Ahmed Zaki Yamani proclaimed, “This is a moment for which I have been waiting a long time. The moment has come. We are masters of our own commodity.”16
On October 10, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned after being indicted for taking bribes and pleading guilty to tax evasion. Nixon, meanwhile, responded to subpoenas for the tapes by sending in written summaries of their contents. Special Prosecutor Cox insisted they needed the actual tapes. Nixon countered that he would allow Senator John C. Stennis (a Democrat from Mississippi) to listen to the tapes and summarize them, leaving out parts that were important to keep secret for national security. The joke in town was that Stennis was hard of hearing. Again, Cox said no. So on October 20 Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson refused, as did Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus; both resigned. Robert Bork became the acting attorney general and fired Cox. Anchorman John Chancellor led off the NBC Nightly News with “Good evening. The country tonight is in the midst of what may be the most serious constitutional crisis in its history.” Two days later journalist David Broder wrote in The Washington Post that the event “is being called the ‘Saturday night massacre.’”
On October 23, Nixon handed over some of the tapes. Nevertheless, the Democrats in Congress introduced many new impeachment resolutions. The next day, Nixon got drunk, ranted (per Secretary of State Henry Kissinger), probably took some of his prescribed Valium, and went to sleep. It was then a telegram arrived from USSR general secretary Leonid Brezhnev. The tide of the war had turned, and it looked like Israel was on the verge of defeating Egypt and Syria. The US and USSR had helped broker a cease-fire, but both sides were ignoring it. Brezhnev was concerned Israel might end up with more land than it started with before the war. In the telegram he said both the US and USSR should send military to the region to make sure both sides maintained the cease-fire. “It is necessary to adhere without delay. I’ll say it straight. If you find it impossible to act jointly with us in this matter we should be faced with the necessity urgently to consider the question of taking appropriate steps unilaterally.”17
Kissinger tried to call Nixon to discuss it at 9:50 p.m. but chief of staff Alexander Haig insisted Nixon was asleep for the night and could not be awakened. So the two of them, along with three other military officials, held their own National Security Council meeting without the president (or vice president, as Gerald Ford would not be sworn in until December). They assumed Brezhnev was trying to bully them because he knew Nixon was falling apart, so they set the global nuclear alert level to DEFCON III, one step under nuclear war, the highest since the Cuban Missile Crisis. They sent three warships to the Mediterranean, called in sixty to seventy-five B-52 nuclear bombers from Guam, and put the 82nd Airborne on alert, mobilizing thousands of soldiers.18
The Soviets were shocked at the intensity of the US response, assuming it had been Nixon’s call. (He later took credit for it.) Neither the Soviets nor the US wanted to risk having their own war in the region, and the Soviets dropped the issue. The Yom Kippur War ended on October 25.
Israel would eventually return Sinai to Egypt, but that was years away. In the short term, Israel had won, so OPEC cut production by 25 percent on November 5. The embargo continued into the following year.
On November 17, Nixon appeared at the annual conference for Associated Press managing editors in Disney World. During a question-and-answer session he gave what became his most infamous sound bite: “I made my mistakes, but in all of my years of public life, I have never profited, never profited from public service—I earned every cent. And in all of my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice. And I think, too, that I could say that in my years of public life, that I welcome this kind of examination, because people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I am not a crook. I have earned everything I have got.”
Four days later, on November 21, Nixon’s lawyer admitted to US District Judge John Sirica that one of the relevant tapes had eighteen and a half minutes missing from it. Nixon’s chief of staff H. R. Haldeman’s notes indicated that at that time on June 20, 1972, they were discussing arrests at the Watergate hotel and how to manage public perception of the event.
On November 26, Nixon’s personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, testified that she was partially responsible. She had been transcribing the tapes when the phone rang. When she leaned over to answer it, she accidentally pushed down on the pedal of the transcription machine and hit the record button and taped over part of the tape. She agreed to pose for photos demonstrating how she stretched to reach the phone while keeping her foot on the pedal. The press dubbed it “the Rose Mary Stretch.”19 But she insisted she only accidentally taped over five minutes; she didn’t know how the other thirteen minutes got erased.
Carson cracked that Nixon’s favorite ice cream was “impeachment.” Outside the White House, demonstrators carried HONK TO IMPEACH signs. Dickie Goodman’s comedy record “Watergrate” made No. 42 on the charts. David Allan Coe released “How High’s the Watergate, Martha,” backed by “Tricky Dickey, the Only Son of Kung Fu.” Tom T. Hall released “Watergate Blues.”
Paul Simon’s “American Tune” debuted on the Hot 100 on December 1, eventually making it up to 35. To the melody of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion,20 Simon sang about dreaming that he was dying, with the Statue of Liberty sailing away to sea. “You can’t be forever blessed.”
“Are the good times really over for good?” Haggard asked years later in his song of the same name, in which he looked back to “when the country was strong … back before Nixon lied to us all on T.V.”
If you went to the movies you thought so. Serpico’s police force was racked with corruption. The James Dean–like protagonist of Badlands was a charismatic young psychopath. So was Harvey Keitel’s best friend Robert De Niro in Mean Streets; when Keitel tried to help him he got shot for his trouble. When Deliverance’s “Dueling Banjos” came across the airwaves (it made No. 2 in February), it was hard not to think about what happened to Ned Beatty in the movie. In Soylent Green, overpopulation reduced the poor in the slums to cannibalism. When Roman Polanski filmed Chinatown in the fall, he changed Robert Towne’s ending so the evil father wins, a truer resolution for someone whose wife had been murdered by Charles Manson.
The movies even looked different. They used to be shot in Technicolor on sound stages with bright floodlights, richly colorful. Now technology allowed them to be shot on location in low available light, making them look grainier and grittier.21
Comic books had unhappy endings now, too. In the June issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, the Green Goblin threw Spider Man’s girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, off the George Washington Bridge. When Spider-Man shot out his web to catch her, he inadvertently caused her death. The editors felt compelled to clarify on the letters page four issues later, “It saddens us to say that the whiplash effect she underwent when Spidey’s webbing stopped her so suddenly was, in fact, what killed her.”
On the news, former John Birch Society member Phyllis Schlafly argued that the Equal Rights Amendment threatened the very foundation of American womanhood. If the amendment was ratified, she insisted, housewives, widows, and divorcées would lose child support, alimony, and “dependent wife” Social Security benefits. Men would be able to leave their wives and not have to support them. Women would no longer be the preferred parent in divorce custody cases. Women would be eligible for the draft, bathrooms would become unisex, and all college dormitories would become coed.
On the other side of the spectrum, Village Voice writer Jill Johnston advocated separatism in Lesbian Nation. “Feminists who still sleep with men are delivering their most vital energies to the oppressor.… Until all women are lesbians there will be no true political revolution.”22 The only thing the conservatives and radical feminists agreed on was that porn was a plague that was getting worse. Upon its release in December 1972, Behind the Green Door with Marilyn Chambers became the fourth highest grossing film worldwide for the year. Deep Throat director Gerard Damiano returned with The Devil in Miss Jones.
Militants were still out there, too, fighting for “the destruction of US imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world communism,” per the Weather Underground manifesto, though it was difficult to interest people in revolution now that the draft was over, amid a twenty-year rise in income with low unemployment. Where the Guess Who once sang “Share the Land,” their spin-off band Bachman-Turner Overdrive now sang “Takin’ Care of Business.” Nevertheless, on May 18 the Weather Underground protested the police shooting of ten-year-old, black Clifford Glover by setting off a bomb that hit three cruisers of the 103rd Police Precinct in Queens. An off-duty Transit Authority patrolman was injured. On September 28, they bombed an International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation building in New York because the company helped fund a coup in Chile.
In Berkeley a new twenty-one-person militant group, the Symbionese Liberation Army, formed, partially inspired by the movie The Spook Who Sat by the Door, about a black CIA agent who leads the black revolution.23 On November 6, they assassinated the first black superintendent of the Oakland Unified School District because they believed he planned to institute Orwellian student ID cards and station police officers in schools, though they were actually mistaken as to his position on those issues. In three months they would kidnap Patty Hearst.
Lyndon LaRouche plotted to take over trade unions to launch a Trotskyite revolution. After being expelled from the Socialist Workers Party, he became a teacher at the Free School in New York and built an organization (National Caucus of Labor Committees) of six hundred members in twenty-five cities. From April to September they carried out Operation Mop Up, rumbling with other communist organizations like the Socialist Workers Party and Communist Party to gain control of American Communism, fighting with chains, pipes, bats, and nunchucks.24 Inside his organization LaRouche used brainwashing and deprogramming techniques to “ego strip” members.25
By now there were so many cults that Esalen held a conference in December in San Francisco called “Spiritual and Therapeutic Tyranny: The Willingness to Submit.” Esalen’s founders were concerned about groups they had originally promoted, such as Oscar Ichazo’s Arica and Werner Erhard’s EST, and had stopped holding encounter sessions because they felt some group leaders abused their power. Across the country, kids who’d gotten deep into acid yearned for gurus to tell them what to do so they could be here now and not have to sweat the future; “Acid Fascism,” Rolling Stone dubbed it. The cults ran the gamut from the benign to the unspeakable, from evangelicals inspired by Hare Krishnas to rediscover speaking in tongues while utilizing guitar and drums, to Father Yod and the Source Family, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Reverend Moon, Scientology, Synanon, Jim Jones. Parents fretted over children who cut family ties and gave away their assets. In August the CBS Evening News followed deprogrammer Ted Patrick on a “rescue mission” as he abducted Kathy Crampton from the Love Israel Cult, a.k.a. Church of Jesus Christ at Armageddon, isolated her in a motel, and tried to get her to disavow the group’s teachings. She submitted for a few days, then went back shortly afterward.26
Patrick got his start as a deprogrammer attempting to rescue someone from the Children of God, the most infamous of the cults.27 In 1973, the organization began the practice of “flirty fishing,” wherein women slept with men outside the organization in order to convert them to the group, in reality funding their communes through prostitution. Most heinously, the cult encouraged the sexual abuse of its children. Actor River Phoenix, who grew up in the cult, stated he was abused at age four.28
“Are we rolling downhill like a snowball headed for hell?” Haggard asked in the song that lamented Nixon’s lies. If you listened to the kids’ favorite bands, it seemed so.
The Stones started the fashion for devil rock with Their Satanic Majesties Request and “Sympathy for the Devil.” Now Goats Head Soup featured Jagger in some Luciferian veil, like a head of flame à la Dr. Strange’s nemesis the dread Dormammu. Inside the gatefold the band all wore weird veils, like muggers trying to autoerotically asphyxiate themselves in plastic bags. On the back cover, Richards’s head seemed to be going up in black flame. The opening track sang of “Dancing with Mr. D.”
In 1969, an American band named Coven with a bassist named Oz Osbourne released a song called “Black Sabbath.” Shortly thereafter the English band Earth with the singer Ozzy Osbourne recorded a different song with the same name and received such a powerful response they renamed themselves Black Sabbath. Their song was inspired by the time bassist Geezer got into satanism, painted his room black with upside-down crosses, then one night woke up and thought he saw a black shape at the foot of the bed and got so freaked out he repainted the room and started wearing crosses. For the music Iommi employed the diminished triad or diminished fifth, called the “Devil’s tritone,” a sound used in medieval music to symbolize the devil or crucifixion, often heard in horror movies, The Twilight Zone and The Munsters.29 They cashed in with the morbid kids who bought scary comic books even though they knew the images would torment them at bedtime. Their audiences filled up with Hells Angels, witches, devil worshippers, and Jesus freaks. A famous tour story concerned the night the hallway of their hotel filled with weird hooded types chanting and holding black candles. The band called each other in their various hotel rooms to synchronize, then opened their doors at the same time and blew out the candles and sang “Happy Birthday” to the weirdos.30 All the members took to wearing crosses that Geezer’s father made.
When it came time for Jimmy Page to pick a guru, as Harrison had picked the Maharishi or Townshend had picked Meher Baba, Page picked Aleister Crowley, a bisexual junkie who said a spirit dictated a new religion to him that boiled down to do whatever you want and freak out conservatives. Page inscribed Crowley’s phrases “Do what thou wilt” and “So mote it be” into the runout grooves of Led Zeppelin III and bought Crowley’s five-bedroom mansion on Loch Ness. Page appeared there in the opening segment of the film The Song Remains the Same, eyes glowing demonically red thanks to special effects. For their record label, Swan Song, Page picked an image of a winged man falling, maybe Icarus, probably Lucifer being cast out of Heaven. The most unsettling thing, though, was the cover of Houses of the Holy by the Hipgnosis design team. Young naked children climb ancient volcanic rocks in Northern Ireland (actually just two kids, brother and sister Stefan and Samantha Gates, superimposed a number of times).31 The Song Remains the Same featured Robert Plant’s kids frolicking nude in a stream, in “back to the garden” hippie freedom mode, with Plant and his wife, so maybe the cover was in that vein. But the inside gatefold showed a man holding a child up to the heavens in a Stonehenge-like setting, which was jarring in context of Page’s promotion of Crowley, who wrote about human sacrifice—though some writers maintain Crowley used the term as a tongue-in-cheek reference to masturbation.32
Alice Cooper developed his 1971 “Dead Babies” song (in which a drunken mother fails to notice when her kid overdoses on aspirin) into the Billion Dollar Babies album and stage show. He decapitated hundreds of baby dolls and mannequins with an ax, trying to top his shticks with electric chairs, guillotines, and boa constrictors. The album was a transatlantic No. 1, and the tour made more money than the Stones’ and Zeppelin’s.33 In the single “No More Mr. Nice Guy” he goes to church and the reverend punches him in the nose. In real life his father was a pastor. He appeared on Hollywood Squares in March with Sammy Davis Jr., Milton Berle, Bill Bixby, Janet Leigh, and Paul Lynde.
Meanwhile, Kiss’s Gene Simmons amped up his Demon performances: slavering DuPont fake blood like Christopher Lee in Horror of Dracula, stalking the stage like the Ymir from 20 Million Miles to Earth, learning from a magician how to spit fire.34 George Clinton used Luciferian imagery inspired by the Process Church of the Final Judgement in a number of his Funkadelic songs until he realized it was scaring off too many fans, particularly female ones.35
Even Sammy Davis Jr. got in on the act, following up “The Candy Man,” the fifth-bestselling pop song of 1972, with Poor Devil, a made-for-TV movie NBC aired on Valentine’s Day with an eye toward turning it into a TV series. It’s a Wonderful Life told the story of an angel helping to save a suicidal man, and this movie featured Davis as a demon charged with convincing Jack Klugman to sell his soul. Christopher Lee played Davis’s boss, Satan, giving the devil’s horn salute with an inverse pentagram in his office.36 In real life Davis had attended orgies at the Church of Satan, where he bumped into his hairstylist Jay Sebring in a hood, a year or two before Sebring was killed in the Manson murders. “It was a short lived interest, but I still have many friends in the Church of Satan,” Davis wrote in his memoir. Anton LaVey made him a Warlock II.
Infinitely more terrifying was The Exorcist, released the day after Christmas. Author William Peter Blatty had been inspired to write the novel after growing irate that Rosemary’s Baby did not confirm the existence of God. Director William Friedkin did not share Blatty’s fear of higher forces. To get the facial expression he wanted, he slapped real-life priest Father William O’Malley, who played Father Dyer. To make it look realistic when the possessed girl (Linda Blair) flings her mother (Ellen Burstyn) across the room, Friedkin told the stunt coordinator to yank the wire tied around Burstyn hard, and, unfortunately, permanently injured her spine.
People stood in the snow before dawn to line up for the movie. Variety quoted one attendee, “I wanted to see what everyone was throwing up about.”37 The film inspired a slate of demonic-children films like The Omen. It seemed particularly resonant to those parents tempted to call deprogrammers like Ted Patrick, the ones whose children had joined new religions, chanting words in foreign tongues.
Bowie sang of being “immersed in Crowley’s uniform of imagery” in the haunting “Quicksand,” then added the other favorite trope of would-be evil rock stars, Nazism, into the mix, singing that he lived “in a silent film portraying Himmler’s sacred realm of dream reality.” Himmler was the Nazi who brought occult rituals into the SS; Hitler put him in charge of the concentration camps.
In the Ziggy Stardust concert film from his final performance in July, Bowie hangs the lightning bolt from the cover of Aladdin Sane over the stage. The shape has mutated, a little closer to the SS symbol, not unlike Kiss’s logo, which resembled the SS symbol so much it was banned in Germany. Ace Frehley was a collector of Nazi memorabilia—even though Gene Simmons’s mother had survived the concentration camps. The ’73 Bowie film climaxes with lights flashing on and off over him and the symbol, as if to hypnotize the audience. For a moment it almost seems as if he’s heil-ing the audience as he impels them to give him their hands, which could be dismissed if a few years later Bowie hadn’t ranted to Rolling Stone that “Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.… I think he was quite as good as Jagger.… Music and lights would come on at strategic moments.… I think I might have been a bloody good Hitler. I’d be an excellent dictator. Very eccentric and quite mad.”38 Years later he disavowed his fascination with Nazis as naïve and married a Somali woman.
“It’s 10 p.m., do you know where your children are?” the television intoned as the Valley girls sneaked out of the house and clattered up the Strip in too-high heels and tube tops and hot pants, from the Rainbow to the Roxy to the Whisky to the Continental Hyatt House (Riot House), where bands like Zeppelin stayed, as immortalized in Almost Famous. And to glam’s western outpost, Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco.
Bingenheimer’s mother abandoned him when he was sixteen, and he scuffled homeless on the Sunset Strip until Sonny and Cher took him in to be their live-in publicist. He got a gig playing Davy Jones’s double on a Monkees episode (both were 5'3"), did publicity for Linda Ronstadt and Rod Stewart, wrote a music column.39 When Bowie first came to LA, Bingenheimer borrowed a Cadillac to chauffeur him to promo events. Bowie suggested he open a glitter club, so in October ’72 he opened the E Club, then two months later moved a mile east and renamed it the English Disco, with a door policy that had no age limit.40
There had always been a dark side to the Strip. Even before the Summer of Love, the Mamas and the Papas sang of “strange young girls” “offering their youth on the altar of acid” (written by John Phillips, one of Hollywood’s most twisted parents). But there had been the belief, delusion or not, that psychedelics led to enlightenment. Now the coins of the realm were Quaaludes, leading to oblivion or date rape, or the increasingly popular coke, or PCP, or amyl nitrate (poppers).
“The groupies were usually girls who did not have fathers, lived in disenfranchised homes, and had mothers who worked,” said record producer Kim Fowley,41 who preyed on them at the disco.
Iggy Pop, however, wrote in “Look Away” that the most well-known groupie of the era, Sable Starr (Sabel Hay Shields), had parents who were “too rich to do anything” in the same line he sang of sleeping with her when she was thirteen. He dated both her and her sister, Coral, while living at the Laurel Canyon home of the manager he shared with David Bowie.
Even if Starr wasn’t disenfranchised, she did have the requisite esteem issues, feeling she “didn’t get pretty” till getting her nose fixed at fifteen, a process chronicled in the local magazine Star, which arrived in February to cover the exploits of self-proclaimed teenage groupies like her and Lori Maddox. After five months, the wife of the publisher convinced him to stop printing the magazine.42 By then the groupies were were well-known enough that when NBC premiered a new program called The Tomorrow Show Starring Tom Snyder on October 15 Snyder’s first guests were Starr and her compatriot Queenie (along with double-amputee private eye Jay J. Armes). Newsweek ran a story on Rodney’s in January discussing its fourteen-year-old clientele, but the club continued for another year, unhindered.
Bowie originally met Starr and Maddox at Bingenheimer’s E Club, in late ’72. Bowie wanted Maddox to leave with him, but she was a virgin and scared, so she told him she was with Rodney. Five months later, Bowie’s huge black bodyguard Stuey called to invite Maddox to dinner on behalf of his boss. She agreed if she could bring Starr. They went to the Rainbow and got high. John and Yoko came by and said hello. A crazed man attacked Bowie, raving homophobic slurs and vowing to kill him, before Stuey dispatched him.
Bowie took the girls back to the Beverly Hilton, where he had a separate room from wife Angie. He changed to his kimono, asked Maddox to bathe him alone without Starr, and took her virginity.43 Afterward, she mentioned Starr wanted to join them, so he suggested, “Well, do you think we should go and get her?” At the concert a few days later he gave them seats with his publicist and shone a spotlight on them.44
“That’s when he thanked me for being there,” Maddox said in an interview in 2015, responding to the outrage on the blogosphere over her age, which was fourteen, as she was born on November 11, 1958, and his concert in Long Beach was on March 10, 1973. “Who cares what people said about me? I feel like I was very present. I saw the greatest music ever. I got to hang out with some of the most amazing, most beautiful, most charismatic men in the world. I went to concerts in limos with police escorts. Am I going to regret this? No.”45
Four years later, however, after the #MeToo movement, she told The Guardian, “I don’t think underage girls should sleep with guys. I wouldn’t want this for anybody’s daughter. My perspective is changing as I get older and more cynical.”46
Two months after the Bowie concert, Led Zeppelin arrived in Southern California for three shows. Michael Des Barres, the lead singer of English glam band Silverhead, showed pictures of Starr and Maddox to Jimmy Page.
Starr warned Maddox, “You keep your hands off Jimmy. If you touch him, I will shoot you. He’s mine.”47
But again it was Maddox Zeppelin’s manager, Peter Grant, sought at the Rainbow. “You’re coming with me, young lady.”48 He hustled her into a limo and transported her to the Hyatt/Riot House, where Page waited in his candlelit room clutching a cane, hat over his eye like the gangsters in The Song Remains the Same.49
Soon Page asked her mother for permission to date her. “He had to be afraid of getting sued for being with such a young girl, so maybe he thought it would be better if he cleared it with my mother and told her he was in love with me. And I do think he was in love with me. He bought me beautiful maxi dresses to wear and wouldn’t let me do drugs or anything. At that point, I was 15 and totally in love with this man. I put him on a pedestal.”50
The idyll ended during one of Page’s stays at a Los Angeles hotel when Maddox “told my friend Bebe Buell that she could have the room next door. I didn’t know she would steal my man. I had a key to Jimmy’s suite, walked in, and saw them in bed together. I looked at him and said, ‘What did you do to me?’ I never trusted him again. He was like a god to me and instantly destroyed this whole image I had of him. I remember going to a party they had at Bel-Air Hotel that night. I probably took a Quaalude or something and wound up with a bloody nose. I wore a white dress and got blood all over it. That was an awful night.”51
Starr cut her wrists at Bowie’s manager’s house, where the Stooges stayed, floating facedown in the pool till someone pulled her out. Silverhead’s album that year was called Sixteen and Savaged (“blood on your arms, blood on your lip”). Starr ran off with Johnny Thunders and got pregnant, and he wanted to marry her, but he beat her, so she had an abortion and moved back home.52 Impresario Kim Fowley assembled the teenage female rock band the Runaways with English Disco regulars Joan Jett, Cherie Currie, and Lita Ford, and allegedly raped sixteen-year-old bassist Jackie Fox in front of other guests at a New Year’s party while she was incapacitated on Quaaludes.53 Originally, Currie had sought refuge in the glam scene to escape sexual violence. She told Spin, “My twin sister’s boyfriend had raped me and took my virginity. That’s why I was angry, that’s why I cut my hair to look like David Bowie’s.”
“I became really aware of the fact that the kids were really lost, the sort of heritage we built up since the war [World War II] had been wiped out by the ’60s, and it wasn’t groovy to act that way anymore, now you just sort of sat there and got stoned,” George Lucas said. “I wanted to preserve what a certain generation of Americans thought being a teenager was really about—from about 1945 to 1962.”54
Partially inspired by Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni (Laybouts), which focused on five friends in a small town, Lucas wrote about four friends on the last night of summer vacation who cruised around Modesto, California. Each was based on different stages of his life (nerdy youth, years spent racing hot rods, etc.).55 Set in September 1962, American Graffiti captured the era before the Kennedy assassination and the sex and drug revolutions. He came up with the scenes while listening to his old rock and roll singles, and the songs formed the “spine” of the movie.56 Throughout the film, deejay Wolfman Jack spins them and they echo out of car windows in the background as the kids pursue their adventures.
Lucas directed, and his mentor Francis Ford Coppola produced it for $777,000. At the test screening the audience loved it, but Universal executive Ned Tanen deemed it “un-releasable.” Coppola blew up at him. “You should go down on your knees and thank George for saving your job!”57 He offered to buy it off the studio, but Universal declined, figuring it could be edited into a TV movie. Then Coppola won the Oscar for Best Picture for The Godfather in March, so Universal eventually released Graffiti in August. Initially a “sleeper,” it slowly gained steam and became the year’s third-highest-grossing film behind The Sting and The Exorcist.
Lucas said, “We all know, as every movie in the last ten years has pointed out, how terrible we are, how wrong we were in Vietnam, how we have ruined the world, what schmucks we are and how rotten everything is. It had become depressing to go to the movies. I decided it was time to make a movie where people felt better coming out of the theatre than when they went in.”58
Before Lucas made American Graffiti, star Ron Howard acted in a ’50s-themed pilot for ABC called New Family in Town by creator Garry Marshall, alongside future Happy Days stars Marion Ross and Anson “Potsie” Williams. It didn’t sell and was instead included on the anthology show Love, American Style under the title “Love and the Happy Day.” Lucas had decided to cast Howard after viewing it. Now that Graffiti was a hit, ABC decided to rush the show into a series, complete with diner and classic cars, starting production in November for a January ’74 premiere.
For the role of the local rebel, they cast a supporting actor named Henry Winkler from The Lords of Flatbush, which had just wrapped that summer, about a gang of leather-jacket-wearing toughs; it also starred the unknowns Sylvester Stallone and Perry King. Winkler only had a few lines in the audition, but he used them to intimidate his scene partner into sitting down, then threw his script in the air and sauntered out of the room, scoring the part. “The Fonz was everybody I wasn’t. He was everybody I wanted to be.”59 Initially the network decreed that he could not wear a leather jacket because hoods weren’t appropriate for 8 p.m., but eventually relented, and Springsteen soon adopted the image himself. Suzi Quatro joined the cast as rocker Leather Tuscadero in 1977. In a few years, Howard’s girlfriend in Graffiti, Cindy Williams, would get her own Happy Days spin-off, Laverne and Shirley (with Marshall’s sister, Penny).
Graffiti opened with the first rock and roll hit to top the pop charts, Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock,” and Happy Days used it as its theme song for the first two seasons. Haley’s song climbed back up to No. 39. The movie soundtrack itself made it to No. 10 and went triple platinum. Its forty-one hits encapsulated its era, and it stands alongside The Harder They Fall, Nuggets, and The Anthology of American Folk Music in the canon of classic compilations. In the wake of its success, oldies radio stations proliferated across the country.
Many of the ’50s greatest artists enjoyed a second life on tour: Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Dion, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley. Presley’s “Raised on Rock” made it to No. 41, though it was strange to hear Elvis singing about growing up listening to rock and roll. (Actually, Billboard used the term as early as 1942 for artists like Sister Rosetta Tharpe.)
Lennon, Bowie, Bryan Ferry, the Band, and the Carpenters released cover albums. Mott the Hoople sang of “a rockabilly party on Saturday night” in “Roll Away the Stone.” David Essex celebrated James Dean in “Rock On.” Elton John, Bette Midler, Diana Ross, and Barbra Streisand all had nostalgic hits. The Statler Brothers won the Best Country Group Performance Grammy for “The Class of ’57.”
Ringo Starr scored a No. 1 with one of Graffiti’s oldies, “You’re Sixteen,” and acted in That’ll Be the Day, the soundtrack of which became a bestselling UK album, the British version of Graffiti. Some of the movie’s costumes came from the retro boutique Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die, run by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood.
On September 23, the Wigan Casino nightclub, northeast of Liverpool, held its first Northern Soul all-nighter. In a sense it revived the tradition Townshend celebrated in Quadrophenia, English kids dancing till dawn to black music from the States.
The twist was that Northern Soul deejays like Richard Searling traveled to Detroit and Philadelphia to hunt for soul singles that had never made it. Like DJ Kool Herc and the disco deejays, they wanted to find things no one had heard before. So they mined dusty warehouses for 45s that had languished for up to a decade, songs that Berry Gordy had deemed second tier and released without the full Motown treatment of strings and lush background vocals.60 Searing’s most famous discovery was Gloria Jones’s “Tainted Love,” later turned into technopop by Soft Cell.61
That was emblematic of the ’70s nostalgia for the ’50s, which created a new hybrid somewhere between both decades. The parents on Happy Days discussed “getting frisky” more frankly than their real-life ’50s counterparts ever would; the good girl in the Broadway show Grease met her greaser boyfriend halfway by donning tight black leather. It was about finding the healthy balance between repressed and decadent.
Gladys Knight once had the bestselling single at Motown, the original version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” but she always felt like a second-class citizen. So she left the label for Buddha Records; maybe that was one reason she related to “Midnight Train to Georgia,” about leaving a place where things hadn’t worked out.
The song was written by Jim Weatherly, who played football with up-and-coming actor Lee Majors (whose TV movie pilot for The Six Million Dollar Man aired in March). One day when Weatherly called Majors, his girlfriend Farrah Fawcett answered and said Majors had taken “a midnight plane to Houston,” and she was packing to go there as well.62
Weatherly wrote the song around her phrase as soon as he got off the phone. When Whitney Houston’s mother Cissy covered it, she changed the state and the mode of transport. “My people are originally from Georgia, and they didn’t take planes to Houston or anywhere else.”63 Knight and the Pips followed her template and knocked the Stones’ “Angie” out of the No. 1 spot on October 27.
Critic Dave Marsh projected an epic backdrop onto the song, as he did with Haggard’s “If We Make It Through December.” “The most dramatic change in the United States between the end of World War II and 1965 was not a generational shift but the massive migration off the land into the cities. In the weeks and months that ‘Midnight Train to Georgia’ lasted on the charts, the thoughts of a million transplanted Southerners, black and white, turned to the places they—or their parents—had come from. You can feel the weariness and the inability to fathom new customs and regulations that might drive a man back to his homeland … just as the bubble of economic prosperity on which the migration had been built was deflating.”64
“Goin’ back to find a simpler place in time,” the Pips sang. Americans could do that without leaving their couch with The Waltons, the new-ish show about a Norman Rockwell–esque household in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Watching the Waltons make it through the Great Depression helped put the present in perspective. Maybe things weren’t that bad now, even with the oil crisis.
After the show’s premiere in September 1972, CBS assumed it was only a matter of time before it died, but then it won five Emmys. Competitor NBC quickly shot a pilot for its own rural drama, Little House on the Prairie, more balm for families who needed some relief from the day’s grim headlines. They could always put on the Graffiti soundtrack as well, to be briefly transported by the uncomplicated positivity of songs like Bobby Freeman’s “Do You Wanna Dance.”