"Rock Me on the Water": Looking at L.A. in 1974

[erik]

A book on the culture of Los Angeles in 1974:

www.post-gazette.com/ae/books/2021/03/18/Rock-Me-On-Water-1974-Ronald-Brownstein-review/stories/202103180001

[Guest.]

Great read. Linda is interviewed and prominently featured.

[erik]

CBS Sunday Morning segment on the book (March 28, 2021):

[rick]

This book will be the subject of a panel at the online version of the Los Angeles Times' Festival of Books this weekend.

5 p.m. Pacific Time / 8 p.m. Eastern Time, Saturday, April 17


Here is the link --

events.latimes.com/festivalofbooks/project/2021-event-walter-mosley-ron-brownstein-david-ulin/


Registration is FREE.

[RobGNYC]

In tomorrow's NY Times Book Review, mentions of Linda in bold. The photo is in the print and online versions. 


Why Did Los Angeles Become a Cultural Mecca in the Early 1970s?
By Madeleine Brand
ROCK ME ON THE WATER
1974 — The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics
By Ronald Brownstein

In 1974, the most popular TV show in America was a comedy that put a racist, sexist homophobe center stage, then let him rant, impotently, against the churning social change all around him. Some 20 million households tuned in every Saturday night to watch Archie Bunker and his dysfunctional clan hash it out. After “All in the Family,” most of those TVs stayed tuned to CBS for “M*A*S*H,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “The Bob Newhart Show” and “The Carol Burnett Show” — a lineup of socially conscious shows that some critics have called the greatest night in television history.

It was also a singular year for movies and popular music; you could see “Chinatown,” “The Godfather Part II” and “The Conversation” at your local movie theater, and listen to new, career-defining albums from Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt or Bob Dylan. All of it was produced in Los Angeles. As Ronald Brownstein writes in “Rock Me on the Water,” his in-depth tour of the city’s pop culture in 1974, “Those 12 glittering months represented magic hour.” He paints Los Angeles then as a kind of patchouli-scented version of Florence during the Renaissance.

These are not new stories, of course — the brief window of early-1970s creative filmmaking, the Laurel Canyon music scene, the golden era of television. All have been relentlessly examined, artifacts of a once-mighty baby boomer civilization. What Brownstein has done is expertly knit the scenes together, giving the reader a plus-one invite to the heady world of Hollywood parties, jam sessions and pitch meetings, as well as a pointed demonstration of how culture can be made and unmade. By the time we approach the end of that fascinating year, it’s clear that the creative frenzy is about to come to a screeching halt.

What was it about Los Angeles in the early 1970s that attracted so many creative people? It had always been a mecca for film. But now it drew young musicians, who felt free to experiment. Some wanted to escape the dirty decay of New York, which was on the brink of bankruptcy. Los Angeles offered not just sunshine and cheap housing, but something more elusive, and more explosive: hope that the social and political activism of the previous decade was yielding fruit. The city’s first (and only) Black mayor, Tom Bradley, had just been elected in 1973.

Brownstein, a political analyst for The Atlantic and CNN, who also worked for The Los Angeles Times for many years, is the author of several well-regarded books about politics. He points out that Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974, just as 36-year-old Jerry Brown, promising a fresh vision, was elected California’s governor. (Brown went on to date Linda Ronstadt.) But this book is more interested in how politics and Hollywood ricocheted off each other. One chapter considers Jane Fonda and her left-wing political awakening during her marriage to the activist Tom Hayden. The earthquake they wanted to set off in Washington never came, while in the cultural realm, as Brownstein chronicles, America convulsed with change. More permissive attitudes about sex and drugs, a perception that the American dream was not only unattainable but rotten at the core — this new sensibility charged up the films, music and television that Los Angeles exported to the rest of the country, and the world.

Brownstein is at his most convincing when describing the film and TV worlds, which produced the most radical assault on mainstream culture. “Chinatown,” for example, which was nominated for 11 Oscars, recounts the original sin of Los Angeles, that the city exists only because a handful of powerful men conspired to steal water from people who were not powerful. It was obviously a metaphor for Watergate (the film came out two months before Nixon’s ignominious departure back home to California), among other government misdeeds, but it also served as a kind of gravestone for 1960s optimism and the hope that positive political change was possible.

Music responded by turning inward. The Laurel Canyon musicians weren’t interested in scoring a revolution. They focused on themselves. Some of them, notably Joni Mitchell, were achingly poetic. The more successful bands, like the Eagles, trailed behind them a constant drug-fueled party, and as Brownstein points out, presaged the drift from political activism to personal pleasure that enshrined the 1970s as the Me Decade.

TV tried to have it both ways: Push the boundaries but still appeal to a broad audience. “All in the Family,” which perhaps more than any other show transformed TV into an art form people could take seriously, paved the way for other groundbreaking, top-rated shows: “The Jeffersons,” “Maude,” “Sanford and Son” et al. These shows, along with “Mary Tyler Moore” and “M*A*S*H,” took on socially conscious themes like civil rights, women’s liberation and the toll of war.

And yet no one will be surprised to read that behind the scenes, these shows did not walk the walk. Even when they were specifically about women and Black families, these programs were written, directed and produced by white men. Brownstein details the fights that Black actors had with Norman Lear to hire Black writers and directors. The “Sanford and Son” star Redd Foxx often complained about the lack of Black talent offscreen, while the star of “Good Times,” Esther Rolle, was furious that the character of her son, J.J., was turned into a racist stereotype by the white writers.

In movies and music, Black people had more control. In the early 1970s, Hollywood released around 200 movies centered on Black characters, which, in their success, helped avert a financial crisis for the industry. These so-called Blaxploitation films, which though allowing some creative autonomy also trafficked in racial stereotypes, featured powerful funk music by artists like War, Isaac Hayes and Marvin Gaye — music that was produced in Los Angeles, but had nothing to do with the Laurel Canyon scene. Just a few miles away, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross and the Jackson Five were also recording massive hits at the Hollywood studios of Motown Records, which had moved from Detroit to Los Angeles. Yet, Brownstein notes, the white and Black music worlds rarely mixed. The Motown record label stayed, as he puts it, “defiantly disconnected from the white Los Angeles music scene.”

It’s unfortunate that Brownstein spends so little time exploring the Black film and music worlds. They’re discussed in just one chapter, into which he also stuffs the exclusion of women in Hollywood. Brownstein’s lens is focused squarely on what white men had to say in film, television and music, making the book itself a demonstration of that same problem. Even the stories of discrimination that the successful producers Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and Julia Phillips faced — plus Ronstadt’s uphill battle in music, which Brownstein presents with genuine outrage — feel like detours off the main freeway.

That freeway ends at the ocean, where a giant shark swims. A year after “Chinatown,” in 1975, Steven Spielberg released “Jaws,” featuring a policeman-as-everyman hero. The summer blockbuster was born, and the movie industry never looked back.

It was the beginning of the end for the idea that complicated movies commenting on society’s ills could be central to the culture, and even mainstream. The ’70s were morphing into long gas lines and inflation. Tired of confrontation, Americans just wanted to be entertained. TV obliged. After five years dominating the ratings, the Bunkers were displaced by another family, a happy family: the Cunninghams. And, just like that, we were back in the 1950s. “Happy Days” was the top-rated TV show in 1976.

Perhaps the most salient lesson of Brownstein’s engrossing book is that surely as day follows night, America devours its most provocative cultural expression and spits it back up, polished and unthreatening.

[rick]

Just finished watching the streaming presentation of Ron Brownstein talking about "Rock Me on the Water" (along with author Walter Mosley on his new book "Blood Grove") as part of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. If you want to watch it, it is on YouTube --





Here are a few quick takes.

Ron Brownstein, the author of "Rock Me on the Water," must have mentioned three times in the same breath -- "Linda Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, The Eagles" -- as part of what was special about the music scene in Los Angeles at this time/era.

Brownstein mentioned his interview with Linda Ronstadt and said that she said one of the main reasons she moved to Los Angeles was that "all different kinds of music were meshing" in L.A. at that time. There was an impression that L.A. was "more open, more receptive." Brownstein also talks about Jerry Brown and that Brown's sister said that Jerry had been cloistered in a seminary and when he left there he saw all of the social changes that were going on. Brown said he left San Francisco for Los Angeles because "there was more space" and L.A. "was more open."

[Deleted]

Pre-ordered.

[rick]

[rick]

Review from The Wall Street Journal --


‘Rock Me on the Water’ Review: Something New Came Along

America changed dramatically in the 1970s. The movies, music and television shows coming out of Los Angeles led the way.


By Frank Gannon
March 22, 2021

People of a certain age will remember—with embarrassment or nostalgia, or both—“Rock Me on the Water,” a seminal song from Jackson Browne’s 1972 debut album. Ron Brownstein borrows the title for his admiring, perhaps occasionally too admiring, cultural history of Los Angeles in the early 1970s. He believes that, in those few years, L.A. came to dominate America’s popular culture, transforming not only the music scene but movies, television and politics as well.

It was quite a transformation. As Mr. Brownstein nicely observes, in the mid-1960s Los Angeles was dismissed as “a vapid desert of silicone and sunburn.” While the rest of America was on the verge of exploding or imploding over civil rights, urban unrest and the war in Vietnam, American movies, records and TV shows were (in the words of Ronnie Milsap’s later song) “lost in the Fifties.”

In 1961, Newton Minow, the FCC chairman, described American television as “a vast wasteland.” Mr. Brownstein quips that it would have been equally accurate to call it “a vast cornfield.” He makes the point by listing the CBS schedule for May 4, 1970, the day Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on a crowd at Kent State University. Viewers that night could watch “Gunsmoke” (which had premiered in 1955), followed by “Here’s Lucy” (successor to 1951’s “I Love Lucy”), “Mayberry R.F.D.” (a spin-off of 1960’s “Andy Griffith Show”) and “The Doris Day Show.”

By 1972, CBS shows like “All in the Family” and “M*A*S*H*” were addressing topics like bigotry, the so-called generation gap and the war. Meanwhile, Mary Tyler Moore was bringing the challenge of second-wave feminism to the patriarchy of a Minneapolis newsroom. In 1974—the apogee year for L.A’.s influence, in Mr. Brownstein’s view—new sitcoms introduced an African-American family (“Good Times”) and a multicultural neighborhood (“Chico and the Man”).

Through the first stages of 1960s turmoil, Mr. Brownstein notes, the Hollywood studios continued to churn out formula flicks. Big changes began in 1967 with “Bonnie and Clyde” and its transgressive celebration of criminality, and “The Graduate,” which “condensed the generation gap into a single bedroom,” as Mr. Brownstein puts it. In 1970, the Oscar for best picture went to “Midnight Cowboy,” a kind of X-rated buddy film. “The Godfather,” “Chinatown” and “Blazing Saddles” followed, as well as the Vietnam documentary “Hearts and Minds.”

As for the music scene, it was reaching new levels of technical competence and expressive range. In addition to “career-redefining albums” by Linda Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell and Mr. Browne, there were records from other artists, including Neil Young, Frank Zappa, Tom Waits and Gram Parsons—refining the distinctive “SoCal sound.” Mr. Young’s “On the Beach” was an unexpectedly bleak ecological lament; Zappa moved engineering into the realm of art; Mr. Waits used his gravelly Sprechgesang to channel Jack Kerouac and Jack London; and Parsons explored his concept of “cosmic American” music on a haunting solo album that was recorded in 1973 and released posthumously the next year.

Mr. Brownstein, a veteran reporter and now a senior editor at the Atlantic, makes all this cultural history memorable by telling much of his story through profiles of figures like Jack Nicholson, Norman Lear, George Lucas, Ms. Ronstadt and Mr. Browne, and the Eagles’ Don Henley and Glenn Frey. Of Warren Beatty, he writes: “He drove down Sunset Boulevard in his black Lincoln Continental, a shark inside a whale, and flirted with women in the next lane.”

Some major culture-shapers were not so famous. Robert Wood, for instance, began running CBS’s Los Angeles affiliate in 1960. The station endorsed Richard Nixon for governor in 1962, and in 1964 Wood delivered an on-air editorial denouncing Berkeley’s Free Speech protesters as “witless agitators.” A few years later, now in New York and network president, he realized that change was inevitable if CBS were to remain profitable, and his outlook changed accordingly. He hit it off with writer-producer Norman Lear, defending his scripts from carping and interference. They were together in the control room on Jan. 12, 1971, when the first episode of “All in the Family” was broadcast. From that moment American TV—America itself—would never be quite the same.

Probably the most important figure in Mr. Brownstein’s portrait gallery is the agent-impresario-mogul David Geffen. He was 20 when he started out in the William Morris Agency’s mailroom, and he was 29 when he sold his Asylum record label to Warner Communications for $7 million. A brashly seductive operator who channeled Svengali and P.T. Barnum, Mr. Geffen created or curated American popular culture during the 1970s by discovering, befriending, bankrolling, counseling, recording and managing many of L.A.’s biggest talents and brightest stars.

What does all this popular history add up to? Mr. Brownstein argues that, thanks in no small part to L.A.’s cultural revolution, Americans became more suspicious of authority, more sensitive to women’s rights, more lenient toward premarital sex and more tolerant generally. He notes the irony that many of these changes were brought about by apparently chauvinistic white males. He notes as well that the music scene was somewhat behindhand. Male musicians refused to believe that “chicks” could really rock.

With a book so rich in detail, it may be ungrateful to point out what isn’t there. Mr. Brownstein overlooks musicians like Harry Nilsson, Lori Lieberman and Patti Dahlstrom. There was also a lively comedy scene that was jump-started in 1972 when Johnny Carson moved “The Tonight Show” to Burbank and Mitzi Shore opened the Comedy Store, where a new brand of humor developed, more freewheeling and less neurotic than its East Coast counterpart.

L.A.’s cultural revolution ended with a whimper around 1975, Mr. Brownstein suggests, with Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” and the nascent punk scene in Manhattan’s East Village, among other harbingers of a shift eastward. But its effects are still with us, for better or worse. Mostly, it is hard not to think, for better.

Mr. Gannon was a special assistant in the Nixon White House.

Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Appeared in the March 23, 2021, print edition as 'Something New Came Along.'

[Deleted]

Ignoring Harry Nilsson... shameful!

[rick]

Apr 22, 2021 13:03:54 GMT -5 @heartbreaker said:

Ignoring Harry Nilsson... shameful!

Hello, heartbreaker (is that a Pat Benatar reference? ) --

Maybe it's because I was born and raised in Los Angeles County and here at the time all that Ron Brownstein writes about in "Rock Me on the Water," I never equated Harry Nilsson with the likes of that Laurel Canyon/Malibu/Palomino/Troubadour crowd that included Linda Ronstadt, Don Henley and Glenn Frey and the Eagles, J.D. Souther, Jackson Browne, Ry Cooder, Joni Mitchell, Graham Nash, David Crosby, Neil Young -- that whole folk / country rock scene. I know Harry Nilsson touched on standards but a song like "Without You" is a big symphonic number ... nothing like you'd find on the early Eagles albums, or Linda's early albums. Maybe because of "Midnight Cowboy" and "Everybody's Talkin' " I primarily think of Harry Nilsson as a New York-based artist. He doesn't have that folk / country rock sound like the artists above. There was very much a definite Southern California scene / vibe going on with J.D. Souther, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, etc. Berry Gordy had moved Motown mostly out to L.A. and Diana Ross and the Ross-less Supremes and other Motown acts were recording in L.A. at this same time but they don't typify that same Southern California sound that Ron Brownstein is writing about. I have my copy of the book "Rock Me on the Water" and look forward to reading it. He interviewed something like 160 people for the book.

Just curious if you were able to watch that two-part documentary "Laurel Canyon" that featured archive footage of Linda Ronstadt, Graham Nash, The Monkees, The Mamas & Papas, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, David Crosby, et. al? I think you would enjoy it. Cheers!

[Deleted]

Thanks Rick, I've added that to my must-watch list! 

[Guest]

The book was a most satisfying read. The television movement from The Beverly Hillbillies to All in the Family, Mary Tyler Moore, MASH and even Bob Newhart was especially well written. Then it was all gone replaced with Happy Days(how quickly we regress). As far as the Ronstadt insights go - she's on her game. It is very obvious, that Ron Brownstein had/has a big-time crush on Linda. He seems to advocate for her in a very chivalrous way.

[RobGNYC]

I didn't realize until today when I saw the actual book how prominent Linda is on the cover. ROnstadt works with ROck.

[Deleted]

Is that Grace Slick on the "E"?

Linda 1st, I like that!

[RobGNYC]

May 4, 2021 13:23:07 GMT -5 @heartbreaker said:

Is that Grace Slick on the "E"?

Linda 1st, I like that!

Jane Fonda (with her husband Tom Hayden)

[Deleted]

Aaaannnnd Amazon has delivered my new hardcover of RMOTW this morning. Nice big index chunk of Linda references & page numbers, no photos though.

[musedeva]

"L.A.'s 1970's Cultural Renaissance"

Who the F ever thought we'd be readin' that???!!!!!

[Deleted]

I always remember 1974 as the year of Watergate, and my GCE O'levels (in the UK).

[rick]

www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/there-was-a-cultural-shift-in-1974-and-los-angeles-played-a-starring-role/2021/06/10/0ce0c384-b997-11eb-96b9-e949d5397de9_story.html

[rick]

www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/book-review-rock-me-on-the-water-the-los-angeles-dream/

[rick]

ON BOOKS: 'Rock Me' details golden year of Los Angeles

[rick]

Ron Brownstein's book "Rock Me on the Water" has just been released in paperback. Brownstein was on "The Issue Is" discussing the book "Rock Me on the Water," and, in this video from yesterday (Aug. 27, 2022), at time 3 minutes and 35 seconds in, he starts to discuss the music of that era and, in particular, talks about Linda Ronstadt --

[rick]

Tony, thank you for “liking” this post. She is featured in this video as such a smart, pivotal person in music of this eta (again, the music segment starts at about 3 minutes, 35 seconds into the video above). Thank you.