Tuesday, March 28, 2000 | 9:10 a.m.
"Saturday Night Fever" is on Broadway. Steely Dan just released its first studio album in 20 years. A feature film version of "Charlie's Angels," starring Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu, is scheduled for November release. Fox's prime-time schedule includes a sitcom called "That '70s Show." Last month ABC earned big ratings with "Mary and Rhoda" (and if you have to ask who Mary and Rhoda are, you might as well stop reading this right now).
Clearly, the 1970s, that most-derided of decades -- with its polyester and Pet Rocks, mood rings and malaise -- are back.
Actually, they never really left. Last year the Eagles' "Greatest Hits 1971-1975" surpassed Michael Jackson's "Thriller" as the all-time best-selling album. The biggest force in American comedy, as it has been since soon after debuting in 1975, is "Saturday Night Live" and its alumni association. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, the two most commercially significant filmmakers of the '70s, are the most commercially significant filmmakers of today.
Museum culture remains in thrall to the dual cults of blockbuster show and name-brand architecture, each of which originated in 1978: with the Metropolitan Museum's "Treasures of Tutankhamen" exhibition and the opening of the I.M. Pei-designed East Wing of the National Gallery. Even rap, that anti-soundtrack of the Reagan years, began in the '70s, with the release of the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" in 1979.
The '50s used to be the decade people loved to hate. Then "American Graffiti" came along, and people suddenly got nostalgic for it. "Boogie Nights" notwithstanding, that has yet to happen to the Me Decade (not the fairest of designations, we can now see, considering how the '80s and '90s turned out).
Perhaps only ABC, CBS, and NBC truly appreciate the '70s. Other than UHF channels and a nascent PBS, viewers then had no real alternative to the Big Three. The '70s were the last stand of broadcasting, which meant that a television event such as "Roots" or "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman" became very much a public event, too.
With Watergate, television event and public event became something greater: political psychodrama as supreme civics lesson. "Let me tell you," Richard Nixon reassured an aide as the Senate Watergate hearings got under way, "they're going to find that they're going to lose their audiences with that stuff. People will be looking for late, late shows." Nixon couldn't have been more mistaken. As a telegenic authority figure, Sam Ervin made Marcus Welby look like Eddie Haskell -- and Nixon look like, well, Nixon. In the end it wasn't so much the press or Congress or even the courts that made him resign, but the cathode-ray tube. Television has never been more powerful.
Now it's true that the '70s have a lot to answer for. They bear responsibility for, among a great many other things, jiggle television, glitter rock, black exploitation films, the miniseries, and big-haired male musicians. Indeed, without the '70s, "classic hits" radio would not be with us today.
How bad could it get back then? "Maude" was considered social commentary. So was "I Am Woman." (Would it have made any difference if Helen Reddy had starred in the one and Bea Arthur had sung the other?) Disaster movies ("The Poseidon Adventure," "The Towering Inferno," "Earthquake") were a genre. The Captain & Tennille won a Grammy. Andrew Lloyd Webber, Stevie Nicks, Suzanne Somers, Sylvester Stallone ... so many others ... first made their reputations.
Bad jazz age
Jazz offers the most extreme example of how wretched the '70s could be. No part of the culture suffered more. Armstrong, Ellington and Mingus died. Monk went into hiding, and so did Miles -- perhaps out of guilt over having foisted fusion on an unsuspecting world. The chirps and burps of Fender Rhodes keyboards and Fender basses were a plague upon the land, yet crossover dreams never quite panned out (something such as Herbie Hancock's "Head Hunters" or Weather Report notwithstanding). Neither accessible enough for widespread popularity nor prestigious enough for arts funding, jazz found itself caught between rock and the marketplace.
Yet the elements for the resurgence the music has since enjoyed were already falling into place. The World Saxophone Quartet was formed in 1977. A year later Jimmy Carter anticipated the institutional support that would be coming jazz's way with a South Lawn salute to the music; performers ranged from Eubie Blake and Mary Lou Williams to Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman (expect Bill Clinton, self-proclaimed jazzman manque, to invite Kenneth Starr to the White House before the latter two). A year after that Wynton Marsalis, for better or worse the most important figure in jazz over the past two decades, moved from New Orleans to New York and was about to be hired by Art Blakey.
Jazz is only the most extreme instance of a common pattern. The '70s produced more than its share of the artistic equivalent of Pintos and Pacers. Yet along with so much junk, the decade also saw either the creation of far more work of lasting merit than it's given credit for or, as with jazz, the forging of a template for the future of a genre or medium.
Movie mastery
The best example of how good '70s culture could be, as well as the extent of its ongoing influence, is the movies. These were great times for Hollywood, "a fertile chaos," as Pauline Kael approvingly noted. The studio system had finally collapsed, and just as the perfecting of that system coincided with the Golden Age of the '30s and early '40s, so did its final dissolution coincide with a Silver Age.
For a decade or so -- from the release of "Bonnie and Clyde" in 1967 to that of "Taxi Driver," just in time for the Bicentennial, in 1976 -- pretty much anything went in Hollywood, with results atrocious as well as entrancing. New directors came to the fore (Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Terence Malick, Paul Mazursky, Spielberg, Lucas), as did new stars (Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Gene Hackman) and landmark films (the first two "Godfather" movies, "Chinatown," "Nashville," "Mean Streets," "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Badlands," "M*A*S*H" and many more besides).
There was a heightened excitement attached to the movies, an atmosphere of consistent discovery and daring. (The discoveries could be past as well as present: Revival houses were as essential a part of college towns as head shops or rock clubs.) A powerful sense of anticipation surrounded the medium and, what is even more remarkable, often found itself justified. The movies mattered, or seemed to, as they had not before and have not since. Film in the first half of the '70s resembled politics in the latter half of the '60s: Anything could happen.
The resemblance to politics wasn't coincidence. Graphic violence, sexual openness and frank language were the most obvious elements in defining the new movie environment, but they were also the most superficial. Far more important was what Kael, whose concurrent emergence as America's foremost film critic played its own part in the making of the Silver Age, termed "a new, openminded interest in examining American experience." A quarter-century or more later it's hard to believe that the darkness, paranoia and distrust of authority in such films as "Chinatown," "Klute," "The Parallax View," "The Conversation," "Nashville" and, above all, "The Godfather" and its first sequel could be considered mass entertainment, but they were.
The reason for such disbelief is itself traceable to the '70s. For Hollywood today lives not just in the decade's artistic shadow but in its business shadow, too. On June 22, 1975, "Jaws" opened, and the marketing of motion pictures was transformed. The new approach had three basic elements: building interest through advance use of television advertising, exploiting the film's opening as fully as possible through saturation booking, and aiming the film primarily at the teenage audience. And if this sounds passe, it's simply because that's how movies have been sold since.
This new process had artistic consequences. It put a premium on artistic predictability (the formulaic being a far easier sell than the innovative or difficult); and, by inflating the cost of marketing, it raised the cost of filmmaking generally, thus making it substantially harder for the work of unestablished or provocative directors to get studio backing. What soon came to pass was the Hollywood dominated by Lucas and Spielberg's magic-industrial complex; the Hollywood of "Star Wars" and "Jurassic Park"; the Hollywood that once again abjured controversy and prided itself on providing escapism; the Hollywood whose loss of nerve would be most apparent in its mania for sequels, "Rocky" and "Rambo," "Superman" and "Indiana Jones," even (alas) "Godfather III."
This Hollywood, today's Hollywood, reorganized itself as part of a new world entertainment order that dwarfed anything even the most visionary mogul of the Studio Age might have imagined. It began to generate more income, and from more sources, than anyone could have previously thought possible. And, this, too, started in the '70s: HBO began operation in 1972 (in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., of all places), Sony introduced its first videocassette recorder for the consumer market in 1975.
The disco debate
If Hollywood is the acme of '70s culture, then disco is the nadir. It is as inextricably linked with the '70s as depression is with the '30s -- except that no one ever preceded disco with the word "great." Great? From the outset, disco was seen as epitomizing everything bad about popular music. It was written off as crass, mechanical, formulaic, unimaginative, mindless, unhip, frivolous, commercial.
To be sure, disco was all those things -- and less. So, too, however, is the vast majority of popular music. More to the point, disco was also a music wholly lacking in pretense and absolutely committed to inclusion. The latter, especially, was no small thing. At a time when radio playlists were becoming almost as segregated as they had been in the '50s, disco was music made both for and by blacks and whites. John Updike has Harry Angstrom marvel in "Rabbit Is Rich" over "the Bee Gees being white men who have done this wonderful thing of making themselves sound like black women." Amusing as that observation is, it also speaks to a value (in both senses of the word) that's central to the music. In addition, disco was music made openly for and by gays as well as straights. Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor became camp icons; the Village People and Sylvester were exactly what everyone suspected them to be.
It wasn't just aesthetic concerns that made "Disco sucks" such a mantra for arena-rock audiences (i.e., teenage boys from the suburbs). So did racial uneasiness, sexual insecurity and class snobbery (none of those Bay Ridge Italians in "Saturday Night Fever" was likely to be seen lighting a Zippo during a Foreigner concert at Nassau Coliseum). Was disco a joke? Yes it was, but that's not why people hated it. People hated it because it was also a threat.
In its capacity to unsettle, disco shared common ground with the other controversial '70s musical style, punk. To be sure, it would take the music department of Bob Jones University to mistake the Sex Pistols for KC and the Sunshine Band. But in their wildly different ways, both disco and punk predicated themselves on embracing excess. Where one was about dressing up and hedonism, the other was about dressing down and nihilism (white suits and sequins were just as much a uniform -- or statement -- as torn T-shirts and safety pins).
More important, both were forms of roots music. Postwar Anglo-American youth music -- a category that subsumes everything from Big Joe Turner to the Spice Girls -- is rooted in two things: rhythm and the beat (there's a reason John, Paul, George, and Ringo called themselves what they did). The people manning the booth at Studio 54 and the bands playing CBGB's had at least one thing in common: They knew where their music came from. At a time when the garish bloat of recordings such as "Bohemian Rhapsody" or "Dream Weaver" was deadening FM airwaves, disco, like punk, was getting back to basics. Not only could you dance to it, you had to dance to it -- otherwise why bother listening?
Beyond disco
Not that disco, or punk, was all there was to '70s music. Before grits and God put him out of secular commission, Al Green graced the top of the charts with a run of records during the first half of the decade whose still-stunning artistry offers a male counterpart to Aretha Franklin's during the second half of the '60s. The Space Age phantasmagoria of George Clinton's Parliament/Funkadelic seems, if anything, even more impressive, conceptually as well as musically, than it did back then (imagine what the last 30 years would have been like if the George who made "Star Wars" had been named Clinton rather than Lucas). Bruce Springsteen became a star in the '70s; and Bob Dylan, whose hand lies so heavy on Springsteen's first album, had a Silver Age to rival Hollywood's: the "Before the Flood" and Rolling Thunder Revue tours, "Blood on the Tracks" and "Desire."
"Blood on the Tracks" might even be Dylan's best album, although to suggest such a thing borders on heresy. The best has to be "Highway 61 Revisited" or "Blonde on Blonde" -- everyone knows that, right? -- because, above and beyond their own not-insignificant merits, those albums helped change a culture in a way that "Blood on the Tracks" couldn't, since the job had already been done. For good or ill, our culture places a lesser value on the artistry that comes after.
Give '70s a break
This may in fact be the underriding problem facing the '70s: They're the dutiful kid brother of decades. The '70s followed the '60s, and their work entailed (for the most part) consolidation rather than innovation. It was the '70s, after all, that popularized the values of the '60s, letting the whole society in on the attitudes -- not to mention the fun -- that had been monopolized by a countercultural elite. Yet because they were there first, the '60s (the Gallant of decades) get all the good press -- and the '70s (the Goofus) get all the bad.
Yet compared to the Sturm und Drang of the '60s, the feckless amiability of the '70s doesn't seem all that bad. And as the "Austin Powers" movies remind us, the '60s could look every bit as ghastly as the '70s -- only the '70s weren't self-righteous about it.
Of course, none of this is going to change the conventional wisdom. The '70s will still make people cringe, and soon enough people will be reviving the '80s: "Dallas" and "Dynasty," "Porky's" and "Police Academy," "Cats" and "Crocodile Dundee," and ... oh, so many names from the bulging Filofax of that sleek, elbows-out decade.
Maybe polyester doesn't look so bad after all.
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