The soundtrack success of "AG" was a foretaste of the Permanent Backwards Stare of the music industry; which started in earnest with "The Big Chill" in 1985. The money that soundtrack made was the foundation of the Nostalgia Industrial Complex that has blighted the prospects of two generations' worth of rock musicians ever since. My generation had to invent a whole "alternative" music industry just to have any space for our own music at all; which the bigger Industry bought up and destroyed around 1996 like Wal-Mart eating small town shoe stores throughout rural America.
Classic rock was a nice plant that should have been kept in its own pot rather than let loose in the garden to vine-strangle everything else.
First, (perhaps apocryphal) – legend has it that the town was originally going to be named after Leland Stanford, but that Stanford demurred. So they named the town Modesto – “the modest one.” Sounds fishy, but who knows?
Second, (definitely true) - I was in high school when AG was being filmed locally. Rumor had it that if you dressed in 60s clothes you could get free admission to the gym at Tamalpais High School where Sha Na Na was playing a concert. A bunch of us discussed it, and we wiser ones scoffed and skipped it. Every time I see the dance scene I get to look at my high school buddies having fun and living forever on the big screen. Damn!
"That’s because American Graffiti played an important role in launching classic rock as a genre."
What I find fascinating is how humans invent the past as very different from the way it actually was.
The fashion historian Karolina Żebrowska has described, in great detail, how, for instance the way most people actually dressed in the 1920s differs wildly from the way we imagine how people dressed back then.
"Happy Days" paints a somewhat different portrait of 1950's Milwaukee than the reality. "The Doors" can be seen as "a young persons retcon guide to the 1960s".
And few things get my back arched like when screenwriters put speeches with contemporary values into the mouths of historical characters, as if Henry VIII had modern mores indistinguishable from those of a, well, Hollywood screenwriter.
Great piece Ted! I always think of American Graffiti as part of a broader fetishisation of the late 50s/early 60s in the early 70s: everything from the success of Sha Na Na’s rock and roll revival routine at Woodstock to the lyrics of American Pie by Don McLean and Do It Again by The Beach Boys… something similar happened on this side of the Atlantic too - there was a huge rock and roll revival show at Wembley Stadium in 1972, with Little Richard et Al performing, old 50s hits started making the singles chart in re-released form etc. I’ve always figured it had something to do with the 60s drawing to a close and the 70s dawning in a bleak, complicated way - Altamont, Charles Manson, Kent State and so on. Under the circumstances, who wouldn’t want to escape, at least temporarily, into a seemingly more innocent, less fraught era of popular culture?
“You could create a whole theory of psychology and social theory based on dividing people into two groups: (1) Individuals who leave their home town at the end of their youth, and (2) those who stay.”
We could spend hours (if not days) unpacking this topic. And wouldn’t it be fun?
Thank you, Ted. This was a wonderful trip down memory lane!
Hawthorne! My dad and his brother, Joe, were born 11 months apart in age in Springfield, Ohio. After they both survived serious action in World War II, Joe eventually became a defense government auditor. In 1954, he moved his family to the promised land -- Hawthorne, near LAX! My aunt's bridge club sewed "the boys' " performance jackets at the Jardine home. Anyway, my cousins all grew up in Hawthorne. In the mid-1960s, they taught us about this new craze in Hawthorne - the taco!! Meat in a shell. They were obsessed with them! Great article, and thanks for the "nostlagia!"
Great piece! I've bugged you on this before, but I'd love to hear more about growing up in Hawthorne in the shadow of the Beach Boys. The three Wilsons plus Al Jardine attended or graduated Hawthorne HS. I'd be curious to hear more about that era, and what it was like to have a world famous band come out of a working class area that otherwise wasn't renowned.
I think one important reason why kids now know songs from the 1950s and 1960s and still listen to them is advancements in sound recording and reproduction technology. When I was a teenager in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we kids were aware of the hits from the 1940s, but few of us listened to them, because they had this hissy, muffled sound to them that reminded me of a head cold. Hits recorded in the 1950s and 1960s either already have clarity acceptable to kids now, or they can be remastered to decent sound quality. Some of the music from the era that I like best has not caught on, because the original recordings were primitive and they apparently can't be remastered effectively.
One thing that disturbs me is the bad job of remastering that's been done on some rock music from when I was in high school, mainly Detroit stuff. Somehow in the remastered version, the most exciting parts of the backup recede to the background, so that, for example, the lead guitar licks are barely audible.
One thing to consider is how Classic Rock got standardized. In the era we're talking about, Detroit had very different top 40 playlists from the rest of the country, because we had a lot of good bands, a distinctive local sound, and we had 50,000-watt CKLW blasting our local music over half of North America. Kids in other cities were startled when I told them who played at our high school dances. Today all oldies stations seem to base their playlists on the Billboard charts or whatever was popular in LA, so those stations hardly play any Detroit music in Detroit. They use Motown as a token, but we now almost never hear Mitch Ryder, early Bob Seger, the Amboy Dukes, SRC, and other groups that were extremely popular here. It's as if Detroit has vaporized even in Detroit.
I also love American Graffiti. Dazed and Confused by Linklater is the greatest homage to this concept in the last 30 years and your essay has captured a lot of why I feel this way about both films.
Great songs and great movie indeed. A good soundtrack companion to American Graffiti is the Big Chill soundtrack (both volumes) -- lots of good stuff from the mid-to-late 60s or so (also notably missing what they couldn’t get rights to).
The subtitle: "Every year, American culture on a massive project to carefully recreate the Christmases of Baby Boomers' childhoods."
My personal rebellion around Christmas is to push music from at latest the 18th century, often back to the 12th. I don't get asked to do the music for Christmas parties more than once, I find.
I remember seeing American Graffiti three times when it came out and was amazed that it was directed by the same person behind the sci-fi movie THX-1138 which i had also seen. In an inside joke, the license plate on the white T-Bird read THX-138.
I also listened to the soundtrack album and was surprised by how many songs I had never heard before. As Ted notes, radio only played what was current. With acts like the Beatles dropping 4 or more singles a year, their early songs like "She Loves You" and "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" taht exploded on the charts in 1964 weren't even being played by 1965. Once a song fell off the charts, it was off radio except for late night shows where DJs might spin the oldies.
At night AM radio travels farther and we could pick up stations from other states that we couldn't during the day. I remember my brother raving about hearing "Chantilly Lace" by the Big Bopper on a late night show from Rochester NY, over 300 miles from where we lived in CT. He was fascinated by the line "I know what I like" delivered in a leering tone.
I bought that Beach Boys album "Endless Summer" and by the mid 70s started seeking out other compilations of older rock music even while I was listening to King Crimson, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Miles Davis, Pharoah Sanders, Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa. Since then I've continued to search out older and older music, particularly blues, jazz and country from the 1930s to 1950s. It's funny to be taking a journey into the past and unearthing music that stood the test of time.
It's amazing that there are still stations out there playing rock music that's now over 60 years old.
Oh this was a great read. I grew up just north of San Diego and ended up in grad school at Berkeley. On trips back, I always knew I was “near home” when I came up over the top of the Grapevine, and there, suddenly, was KRTH101. Such a specific vibe, that somehow made it feel like you had properly got to SoCal.
The soundtrack success of "AG" was a foretaste of the Permanent Backwards Stare of the music industry; which started in earnest with "The Big Chill" in 1985. The money that soundtrack made was the foundation of the Nostalgia Industrial Complex that has blighted the prospects of two generations' worth of rock musicians ever since. My generation had to invent a whole "alternative" music industry just to have any space for our own music at all; which the bigger Industry bought up and destroyed around 1996 like Wal-Mart eating small town shoe stores throughout rural America.
Classic rock was a nice plant that should have been kept in its own pot rather than let loose in the garden to vine-strangle everything else.
Two items –
First, (perhaps apocryphal) – legend has it that the town was originally going to be named after Leland Stanford, but that Stanford demurred. So they named the town Modesto – “the modest one.” Sounds fishy, but who knows?
Second, (definitely true) - I was in high school when AG was being filmed locally. Rumor had it that if you dressed in 60s clothes you could get free admission to the gym at Tamalpais High School where Sha Na Na was playing a concert. A bunch of us discussed it, and we wiser ones scoffed and skipped it. Every time I see the dance scene I get to look at my high school buddies having fun and living forever on the big screen. Damn!
"That’s because American Graffiti played an important role in launching classic rock as a genre."
What I find fascinating is how humans invent the past as very different from the way it actually was.
The fashion historian Karolina Żebrowska has described, in great detail, how, for instance the way most people actually dressed in the 1920s differs wildly from the way we imagine how people dressed back then.
"Happy Days" paints a somewhat different portrait of 1950's Milwaukee than the reality. "The Doors" can be seen as "a young persons retcon guide to the 1960s".
And few things get my back arched like when screenwriters put speeches with contemporary values into the mouths of historical characters, as if Henry VIII had modern mores indistinguishable from those of a, well, Hollywood screenwriter.
Great piece Ted! I always think of American Graffiti as part of a broader fetishisation of the late 50s/early 60s in the early 70s: everything from the success of Sha Na Na’s rock and roll revival routine at Woodstock to the lyrics of American Pie by Don McLean and Do It Again by The Beach Boys… something similar happened on this side of the Atlantic too - there was a huge rock and roll revival show at Wembley Stadium in 1972, with Little Richard et Al performing, old 50s hits started making the singles chart in re-released form etc. I’ve always figured it had something to do with the 60s drawing to a close and the 70s dawning in a bleak, complicated way - Altamont, Charles Manson, Kent State and so on. Under the circumstances, who wouldn’t want to escape, at least temporarily, into a seemingly more innocent, less fraught era of popular culture?
“You could create a whole theory of psychology and social theory based on dividing people into two groups: (1) Individuals who leave their home town at the end of their youth, and (2) those who stay.”
We could spend hours (if not days) unpacking this topic. And wouldn’t it be fun?
Thank you, Ted. This was a wonderful trip down memory lane!
Hawthorne! My dad and his brother, Joe, were born 11 months apart in age in Springfield, Ohio. After they both survived serious action in World War II, Joe eventually became a defense government auditor. In 1954, he moved his family to the promised land -- Hawthorne, near LAX! My aunt's bridge club sewed "the boys' " performance jackets at the Jardine home. Anyway, my cousins all grew up in Hawthorne. In the mid-1960s, they taught us about this new craze in Hawthorne - the taco!! Meat in a shell. They were obsessed with them! Great article, and thanks for the "nostlagia!"
Great piece! I've bugged you on this before, but I'd love to hear more about growing up in Hawthorne in the shadow of the Beach Boys. The three Wilsons plus Al Jardine attended or graduated Hawthorne HS. I'd be curious to hear more about that era, and what it was like to have a world famous band come out of a working class area that otherwise wasn't renowned.
I think one important reason why kids now know songs from the 1950s and 1960s and still listen to them is advancements in sound recording and reproduction technology. When I was a teenager in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we kids were aware of the hits from the 1940s, but few of us listened to them, because they had this hissy, muffled sound to them that reminded me of a head cold. Hits recorded in the 1950s and 1960s either already have clarity acceptable to kids now, or they can be remastered to decent sound quality. Some of the music from the era that I like best has not caught on, because the original recordings were primitive and they apparently can't be remastered effectively.
One thing that disturbs me is the bad job of remastering that's been done on some rock music from when I was in high school, mainly Detroit stuff. Somehow in the remastered version, the most exciting parts of the backup recede to the background, so that, for example, the lead guitar licks are barely audible.
One thing to consider is how Classic Rock got standardized. In the era we're talking about, Detroit had very different top 40 playlists from the rest of the country, because we had a lot of good bands, a distinctive local sound, and we had 50,000-watt CKLW blasting our local music over half of North America. Kids in other cities were startled when I told them who played at our high school dances. Today all oldies stations seem to base their playlists on the Billboard charts or whatever was popular in LA, so those stations hardly play any Detroit music in Detroit. They use Motown as a token, but we now almost never hear Mitch Ryder, early Bob Seger, the Amboy Dukes, SRC, and other groups that were extremely popular here. It's as if Detroit has vaporized even in Detroit.
Die Hard is both Aristotelian and Christmasian. So should we call it Aquinian?
I also love American Graffiti. Dazed and Confused by Linklater is the greatest homage to this concept in the last 30 years and your essay has captured a lot of why I feel this way about both films.
Great songs and great movie indeed. A good soundtrack companion to American Graffiti is the Big Chill soundtrack (both volumes) -- lots of good stuff from the mid-to-late 60s or so (also notably missing what they couldn’t get rights to).
Calling the ambient musical culture a wee bit sluggish is perhaps an understatement. I love this histogram from xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/988/
The subtitle: "Every year, American culture on a massive project to carefully recreate the Christmases of Baby Boomers' childhoods."
My personal rebellion around Christmas is to push music from at latest the 18th century, often back to the 12th. I don't get asked to do the music for Christmas parties more than once, I find.
Great article. Thank you, Ted!
I remember seeing American Graffiti three times when it came out and was amazed that it was directed by the same person behind the sci-fi movie THX-1138 which i had also seen. In an inside joke, the license plate on the white T-Bird read THX-138.
I also listened to the soundtrack album and was surprised by how many songs I had never heard before. As Ted notes, radio only played what was current. With acts like the Beatles dropping 4 or more singles a year, their early songs like "She Loves You" and "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" taht exploded on the charts in 1964 weren't even being played by 1965. Once a song fell off the charts, it was off radio except for late night shows where DJs might spin the oldies.
At night AM radio travels farther and we could pick up stations from other states that we couldn't during the day. I remember my brother raving about hearing "Chantilly Lace" by the Big Bopper on a late night show from Rochester NY, over 300 miles from where we lived in CT. He was fascinated by the line "I know what I like" delivered in a leering tone.
I bought that Beach Boys album "Endless Summer" and by the mid 70s started seeking out other compilations of older rock music even while I was listening to King Crimson, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Miles Davis, Pharoah Sanders, Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa. Since then I've continued to search out older and older music, particularly blues, jazz and country from the 1930s to 1950s. It's funny to be taking a journey into the past and unearthing music that stood the test of time.
It's amazing that there are still stations out there playing rock music that's now over 60 years old.
First thing that popped into my head reading this: "And he'll have FUN FUN FUN till his daddy takes the T-Bird away...".
Oh this was a great read. I grew up just north of San Diego and ended up in grad school at Berkeley. On trips back, I always knew I was “near home” when I came up over the top of the Grapevine, and there, suddenly, was KRTH101. Such a specific vibe, that somehow made it feel like you had properly got to SoCal.