For many of us OK Boomers, 1974 was a watershed of sorts. Think about it. Politically, it was the year a President resigned in disgrace and the Democrats ran the tables in Congress. For me in particular, it was the year I began a career that would keep the wolves from my door for the next 47 years.
But according to Ronald Brownstein, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist who writes for the Atlantic, 1974 was nothing short of a revolution in culture—from music to television to cinema. And the epicenter of this revolution was in the very unrevolutionary city of Los Angeles.
In “Rock Me on the Water,” Brownstein argues that movies like “Chinatown,” actors like Jack Nicholson, and screenwriters like Robert Towne, initially reviled by the old guard in Hollywood, would soon redefine what cinema meant. 1974 was also the year of “Jaws,” the first mega-movie, which redefined how movies would be marketed (like Cheerios or Burger King Value Meals). Television shows like “All in the Family,” “Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “MASH,” which reached their peak in 1974, sounded the death knell for formulaic laugh-track sitcoms like “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “Green Acres.” Musicians like Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, and the Eagles initiated a revolution in rock-and-roll that started in the mansions of Laurel Canyon but that spread like a California wildfire across the country. And, Brownstein theorizes, this fresh thinking fostered an environment that in 1974, also propelled Jerry Brown, a former Jesuit student, into the California governor’s mansion.
Yep the times they were a changing, all right. And all of it began in 1974. In LA.
When Tom Hayden surrendered his Far Left politics in favor of “working within the system,”was it, as Brownstein suggests, a case of “preserving sixties idealism as…life moved deeper into the bruising realities of the seventies?” Hell to the yeah. And did this Los Angeles-based cultural revolution suddenly disappear in 1975, when media executives suddenly did an about-face and started creating TV shows that reflected America’s nascent conservative backlash? Very plausible.
For anybody lucky enough (and old enough) to remember this most interesting of times, the book is an irresistible chronicle of the volcanic cultural changes brought about by us Baby Boomers back in the mid-70s: a more activist, liberated, honest, free-spirited, bigotry-hating, pro-feminist attitude that was reflected in everything from early Scorsese (“Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore”) to breakthrough Joni Mitchell (her “Court and Spark” album.)
But the book isn’t just a trip down Memory Lane or the 405. Nostalgia is what you catch on Hulu. This is waaaay better.
Wonderful review!!!