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Post by the Scribe on Jun 21, 2021 1:07:33 GMT
Rock Me on the Water: 1974-The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics
www.amazon.com/Rock-Water-1974-Transformed-Television/dp/006289921X
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Rock Me On The Water documents the high-octane storybook world of Los Angeles in 1974 with masterful intimacy and fearless cultural analysis. His well-rendered portraits of Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell, David Geffen and other luminaries of the time are sublime. This is an extremely kinetic historical document, and a testament to Brownstein's lasting importance as both a fact-driven journalist and elegant prose-stylist. A must read!" -- Douglas Brinkley, author of American Moonshot
“Brownstein’s kaleidoscopic account of a historic generational transformation that took place in American culture, American politics, and American life in the crucible of modern Los Angeles during the magical year of 1974. It encapsulates in compelling detail the moment when young people and young ideas were moving in on an older generation, based on the strength of new-found creativity and idealism. It documents the triumphs and failures of that new generation with vividness, humor, and, most of all, deep understanding. Running through every page is the author’s deep love for his adopted home. A beautiful ride through an unforgettable time." -- Jon Landau
“One of the sharpest analysts of American politics, Ron Brownstein in Rock Me on the Water offers a fresh, vivid and insightful look at how politics and popular culture intertwined to reshape American life at a moment of profound generational transition — LA in the early 1970s. It's an electric story filled with gripping personalities, compelling backstage histories, and a clear message for the divided America of today: the forces that fear change can win for a time, but in America the future always gets the last word. A lyrical recreation of a magical moment.” -- Jake Tapper
“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.” -- New York Times
“Ron Brownstein has written a truly terrific book! I moved to LA in Jan. 1974 when this story opens but it is about so much more than a city. It is insider scoops of pop culture leading us out of Nixon, as it will lead us out of Trump. I should be working but can’t stop reading.” -- John W. Dean, CNN contributor and former Nixon White House Counsel
“My friend and CNN colleague Ron Brownstein has written a terrific book. Rock Me on The Water tells the amazing story of 1974 and how it changed the U.S. If you’re old enough to have lived through 1974, it will bring back memories. If you’re too young, you will learn a lot.” -- Wolf Blitzer, anchor of The Situation Room, CNN
"Sweeping cultural history. . . . Enriched by interviews with the period’s luminaries, including Warren Beatty and Linda Ronstadt, this astute and wide-ranging account shows how L.A. led the U.S. into an era when the 1960s counterculture became mainstream." -- Publishers Weekly
"An endlessly engaging cultural history that will resonate with anyone alive in 1974." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Brownstein knits together the threads of history to show that, for the first time in 1974, politics and entertainment were not separate things, that the line between the two was blurred almost to the point of irrelevance. An insightful, expertly written book." -- Booklist
“Excellent.” -- Politico
“More than just summarizing or reviewing what such films and shows were about, the author dives deep into how they were created, financed, promoted and received. His many interviews with actors, writers, directors and executives of that era lend such renderings veracity and energy.” -- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“I’m absolutely loving Rock Me on the Water, Ron Brownstein’s riveting new book about L.A., circa ‘74, when the City of Angels was the hub of an extraordinary revolution in film, music, culture and politics. Really a fun read. Highly recommended!!” -- David Axelrod, Senior Political Commentator, CNN
“This is a terrific book about a pivot-point in US cultural history, which led to reshaping our political landscape. Ron Brownstein is a dadgum genius. Highly recommend this book.” -- Paul Begala, CNN contributor and former counselor to President Clinton
“One of the very best on 1974 — a hinge of cultural history for American TV, movies & music. All in his new book Rock Me on The Water.” -- Major Garrett, Chief Washington Correspondent, CBS News
“In his brilliant cultural history, Rock Me on the Water, Brownstein drops enough names to fill the once-massive Los Angeles phone book (remember those?), elicits memorable moments from several entertainment industries, and recalls political machinations across decades.” -- Los Angeles Review of Books
“Timely and relevant.” -- She Reads
“Brownstein paints Los Angeles in 1974 as a kind of patchouli-scented version of Florence during the Renaissance, bursting with creative energy in television, movies and music. From Joni Mitchell to Archie Bunker, a year of cultural ferment is presented here in all its richness.” -- New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice
“Convincing. . . . The book truly sparks to life.” -- PopMatters
“Brownstein’s chronological retelling of the intersections of art, politics and pop culture in a stormy year in American history is both nostalgic and entertaining.” -- Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
About the Author
Ronald Brownstein, a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of presidential campaigns, is a senior editor at The Atlantic, and a senior political analyst for CNN. He also served as the national political correspondent and national affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times and covered he White House and national politics for the National Journal. His is the author of six previous books, most recently, The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America.
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Product details
Publisher : Harper (March 23, 2021)
Language : English
Hardcover : 448 pages
ISBN-10 : 006289921X
ISBN-13 : 978-0062899217
Item Weight : 1.31 pounds
Dimensions : 6 x 1.37 x 9 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #5,589 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#30 in Popular Culture in Social Sciences
#32 in History & Theory of Politics
#61 in Historical Study (Books)
Customer Reviews: 4.4 out of 5 stars 513 ratings |
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Post by the Scribe on Jun 21, 2021 1:07:41 GMT
Book Excerpt: When Linda Ronstadt Found Her Voice
gregmitchell.substack.com/p/book-excerpt-when-linda-ronstadt
Exclusive today from acclaimed new book by Ron Brownstein, longtime political writer now at The Atlantic--plus five vintage Ronstadt songs in concert.
Greg Mitchell
gregmitchell.substack.com/people/6166831-greg-mitchell
May 8
We’ve been running guest posts on the weekends from time to time and today here’s a real treat—with this narrative by Ronald Brownstein on how Ronstadt became a mega-star with the release of a chart-busting album near the end of 1974. It comes from his fine new book of cultural history, Rock Me on the Water: 1974—The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics (Harper). Of course, we covered Linda widely and favorably at Crawdaddy during that period. Enjoy, but first, the usual cartoon. Then comment, share or subscribe (it’s still free).
www.amazon.com/Rock-Water-1974-Transformed-Television/dp/006289921X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1ZRESAMA51VIB&dchild=1&keywords=ron+brownstein&qid=1620441717&sprefix=ron+brownstein%2Caps%2C160&sr=8-1
www.ronstadt-linda.com/artcrw74.htm
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Ronstadt Breaks Through
by Ronald Brownstein
Linda Ronstadt hoped for a fresh start when she left Capitol for David Geffen’s Asylum Records in 1972. But old problems followed her to the new label. Working again with producer (and former boyfriend) John Boylan, Ronstadt started recording the album that became Don’t Cry Now. She completed the two tracks that became the album’s first singles, the ballad “Love Has No Pride” and “Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” the Dusty Springfield song she had also included on her first solo album. But before long, Ronstadt and Boylan were clashing over her direction.
“We argued a lot, we competed enormously in the studio,” she recalled a few years later. “I just didn’t trust him, I didn’t trust anyone then, and I was always afraid that something was going to get pulled over me. I was punch-drunk from producers.”
Boylan developed an idea to break the rut. Ronstadt, with James Taylor, had contributed background vocals a few months earlier to Neil Young’s breakout single “Heart of Gold.” Now a mega-star, Young was beginning a tour that would carry him to arenas across America through early 1973. Boylan saw it as an opportunity to place Ronstadt before much larger audiences than she had ever attracted. “I said, ‘the album’s not finished, but this tour is great, let’s do this tour,’ Boylan remembered. He lobbied Elliot Roberts, Young’s long-time manager (and Geffen’s partner), to put Ronstadt on the tour as the opening act. [Below, “Love Has No Pride” and “Silver Threads and Golden Needles” live.]
Initially, Roberts refused because Young wanted to perform alone. But after a few weeks Young complained that was too tiring, and Roberts called Boylan offering to add Ronstadt as an opening act. Then Ronstadt hesitated. She had played mostly small clubs to that point and was afraid she could not command arena-sized audiences, especially those impatiently waiting for the headliner. “She didn’t really want to do it,” Boylan recalled. “She was scared.”
Boylan enlisted Geffen, who persuaded Ronstadt that the exposure of appearing with Young was worth the stress. She jumped into the deep end of the pool. With only a few days notice, Ronstadt flew east to open for Young at Madison Square Garden, the world’s most famous arena, on January 23, 1973. Ronstadt picked a propitious show to join the tour: that was the night Secretary of State Henry Kissinger reached the agreement in Paris officially ending American participation in the Vietnam War. (The formal documents were signed four days later.) Handed a notice during his set, Young, characteristically terse, simply declared “The war is over” to raucous applause.
That was a rare moment of celebration for Ronstadt. For the next few months, she found herself playing the nation’s largest arenas with a band, that as she often said, wasn’t “as loud as the air conditioning….It was one of those things where if you want to play with the big boys you’d better get your game up and my game wasn’t up very high,” she said looking back. “I was a club act. I got shoveled onto stage at Madison Square Garden…and it was pretty shocking. My naivete, I didn’t realize how different it was going to be on one of those big stages. It’s like jumping from a puddle into a huge lake where you are a mile from shore and it’s like 300 feet below you.”
Ronstadt liked Young and found him respectful when they interacted. But the dynamics of opening for such a huge star could not have been more perfectly designed to trigger her insecurity. On the road there was a clear caste system. “Everybody in Neil’s band had priority over everybody [in mine] in the sound check,” she remembered. “And you know you had to stay in your place. There was a pecking order and everybody obeyed it.” [Below, “You’re No Good” live.]
For all the stress, the tour served Boylan’s purpose. Performing for the huge crowds that gathered for Young greatly raised Ronstadt’s visibility. “It was tough for her, but she knocked them dead,” remembered Boylan. “She thought she was not powerful enough to be on the stage with these people…like Neil Young. In fact, she was. It took her a while to figure that out.”
After years mostly circling in place, the Young tour gave Ronstadt a burst of momentum. Another change in 1973 had an even greater effect. Ronstadt finally cemented her relationship with the man who would change her life, Peter Asher. An elfin, understated Englishman, Asher was a former child actor who had had pop success in the duo Peter and Gordon during the mid-1960s. After the band broke up, Asher worked for the Beatles as a producer and then as an executive at their Apple Records.
He briefly took a position at MGM records in New York to fund his move to America. That job didn’t last long and Asher relocated to Los Angeles to manage and produce James Taylor, who he had signed (at the recommendation of the guitarist Danny Kortchmar) at Apple.
When Ronstadt, at Boylan’s suggestion, first approached Asher about managing her around 1971, he was initially enthusiastic. “I first heard her at the Bitter End in New York,” Asher remembered. “Somebody told me, you have to go and see this girl, she’s an amazing singer, she’s incredible looking, sings barefoot and wears short shorts, and she is really hot and sings like an angel. All of which is true. Then I met her and discovered her to be one of the most remarkably articulate and clever, amazing women I ever met.” [Below, “When Will I Be Loved” live.]
Within a few weeks, though, Asher backed out because he decided that taking on Ronstadt could create a conflict with his other client, Kate Taylor, James’ sister. Ronstadt remained in contact with Asher, sometimes attending the cozy dinner parties he threw for the rock elite with his wife Betsy. The door to a wider relationship opened while Ronstadt was touring in 1973. Kate Taylor came backstage at one of her shows and confided that she no longer wanted to pursue a touring career in music. That freed Asher from his commitment to her. Ronstadt approached Asher to manage her again and this time he agreed.
Asher ‘s first job was to help her finish Don’t Cry Now. After clashing with Boylan, Ronstadt first brought in J.D. Souther, her boyfriend at the time, to produce a few more tracks. But they predictably argued in the studio as well. With Geffen growing impatient over the lengthening delay, Ronstadt finally turned to Asher to complete the record. The process of recording the album, Asher recalled with characteristic British reserve, “was in a bit of a muddle.”
Asher was different than Ronstadt’s earlier producers. For one thing, in contrast to Boylan and Souther, he was not sleeping with her. Whatever temptations arose, their relationship was strictly business. Asher was also much less volatile than most people she had worked with, and for that matter, most people in the music business anywhere. For Ronstadt, finding the steady, professional Asher was like reaching a placid bay after crossing a rolling sea. “Peter was an intelligent person I could talk to and he would talk back to me like a person, not like somebody he wanted to ball, or somebody he thought was silly and could push around,” she said at the time.
With Asher’s help, Don’t Cry Now was released in September 1973. With Geffen’s promotional heft behind it, Don’t Cry Now sold considerably more records than its predecessors. But it remained short of a breakout hit. It peaked only at number 45 on the Billboard charts. Artistically Don’t Cry Now was another frustrating product, mixing her powerful voice with odd song choices. Though it contained some moving moments (including an inspired cover of the Eagles’ “Desperado” more compelling than the original), the best thing about Don’t Cry Now was completing it. With Asher now in her camp, Ronstadt looked forward with new optimism. “Let’s face it,” said Boylan looking back. “Peter was at the top of his game.”
Asher didn’t start with an answer to the question that so many people in LA were asking: Why hadn’t Ronstadt, with all her gifts, achieved more success? “I didn’t have a master plan in my head,” he recalled. But he knew that part of the answer was providing more space for her to express her own eclectic musical ideas. “A lot of it was no one was listening to Linda,” he said. “She had this reputation of being difficult which was completely unjustified, and some of this is now cliché but—if you’re a really good-looking woman people don’t take you seriously. I do think one of the things I did do that nobody was doing was sit down seriously and ask Linda ‘what do you think, what should we be doing?’” [Below, “Heart Like a Wheel.”]
Within a few months, the answer produced the album that established her as a superstar: Heart Like a Wheel. For years, Ronstadt had been frustrated by her inability to capture on vinyl the musical fusion she heard in her head. With Heart, she did something that none of the LA country rockers—not even the high-flying Eagles—had accomplished: produced a record that reached number one on both the country and pop charts, and almost simultaneously at that. Ronstadt looked at the success more as relief than validation. “I was happy it was a hit and I wanted to make another record,” she said. “I didn’t think ‘I told you so.’”
From Rock Me on the Water: 1974—The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics by Ronald Brownstein. www.amazon.com/Rock-Water-1974-Transformed-Television/dp/006289921X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1ZRESAMA51VIB&dchild=1&keywords=ron+brownstein&qid=1620441717&sprefix=ron+brownstein%2Caps%2C160&sr=8-1
Also: See interview with Ronstadt from early 1974 by my Crawdaddy colleague Peter Knobler.
www.ronstadt-linda.com/artcrw74.htm
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Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels (on escapes under the Berlin Wall), the current The Beginning or the End (on MGM’s wild atomic bomb movie), and The Campaign of the Century (on Upton Sinclair’s left-wing race for governor of California), which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. His new film, Atomic Cover-up, just had its world premiere and is drawing extraordinary acclaim. For nearly all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he served as longtime editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film, Following the Ninth, about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
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Post by the Scribe on Jun 21, 2021 1:20:28 GMT
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Post by the Scribe on Jun 22, 2021 10:09:18 GMT
L.A.'s 1970s cultural renaissance
CBS Sunday Morning
924K subscribers
It was a time when the worlds of movies, television and music were transformed by a creative explosion centered in Los Angeles. Ronald Brownstein, author of "Rock Me on the Water," talks with correspondent John Blackstone about the year Los Angeles transformed both entertainment and politics. Blackstone also talks with singer-songwriter Jackson Browne about creative collaborations in the mid-1970s that fostered a unique period in pop culture history.
"CBS Sunday Morning" features stories on the arts, music, nature, entertainment, sports, history, science and Americana, and highlights unique human accomplishments and achievements. Check local listings for CBS Sunday Morning broadcast times.
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Post by the Scribe on Jun 22, 2021 10:15:36 GMT
events.latimes.com/festivalofbooks/project/2021-event-walter-mosley-ron-brownstein-david-ulin/
SAT/4/17 :: 5:00p
California Dreamin': Walter Mosley, Ron Brownstein & David L. Ulin on Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s
Bookseller: Book Soup
Join us for this kaleidoscopic view of Los Angeles in the late 60s and early 70s looking at culture and politics across the Black and white communities. David L. Ulin, editor of the new Library of America release Joan Didion: The 1980s & 90s, steers the conversation with Walter Mosley, whose latest Easy Rawlins novel is Blood Grove, set in 1969 L.A., and Ron Brownstein, author of Rock Me on the Water: 1974-The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Televisio
on, and Politics.
Ron Brownstein
Ronald Brownstein, a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of presidential campaigns, is a senior editor at The Atlantic, and a senior political analyst for CNN. He also served as the national political correspondent and national affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times and covered he White House and national politics for the National Journal. His is the author of six previous books, most recently, The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America, which was a finalist for an L.A. Times Book Prize in Current Interest. His newest release is Rock Me on the Water: 1974-The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics.
David L. Ulin
David L. Ulin is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, which was shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and The Lost Art of Reading: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The former book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times, he is an associate professor of English at the University of Southern California, where he edits the literary journal Air/Light. Most recently, he has edited Didion: The 1980s & 90s, for the Library of America.
Walter Mosley
Walter Mosley is the author of more than 60 critically-acclaimed books of fiction, nonfiction, memoir and plays. His work has been translated into 25 languages. From the first novel he published, Devil in a Blue Dress with its protagonist Easy Rawlins, Mosley’s work has explored the lives of Black men and women in America—past, present and future—in a rich exploration of genre with his latest including the short story collection, The Awkward Black Man. He has had several of his books adapted for film and tv including Devil in a Blue Dress, Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned and the forthcoming Apple TV+ production of The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey.
He is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, The Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award, a Grammy®, several NAACP Image awards, and PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2020 he was named the recipient of the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement from the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books and was awarded the Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Award from the National Book Foundation. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Mosley now lives in Brooklyn and Los Angeles.
Book Soup
Please support our local bookseller for this panel. Signed bookplates will be available from most authors. Stay tuned to this page for updates.
Order your books now here! www.booksoup.com/event/los-angeles-times-festival-books-2021-presents-california-dreamin-walter-mosley-ron-brownstein |
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Post by the Scribe on Jun 22, 2021 10:19:42 GMT
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. |
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Post by the Scribe on Jun 22, 2021 11:51:38 GMT
LA-LA Land's Pop Culture EXPLOSION
Michael Smerconish
8.88K subscribers
"All in the Family," "M*A*S*H*," and John Lennon...Journalist Ron Brownstein joins me to discuss the cultural revolution of LA in the 60s and 70s, and the impact the city had on reshaping societal phenomena. Featured is his new book, released, TODAY: "Rock Me on the Water: 1974-The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics."
(March 23, 2021)
NPC Book Event: Ron Brownstein, "Rock Me on the Water"
National Press Club Live
7.36K subscribers
The stars aligned in Los Angeles in 1974 as a diverse group of talents across film, music, and television hit a creative zenith, jolting American popular culture and in turn, American politics. Atlantic senior editor Ron Brownstein, who analyzes that pivotal year in his new book, “Rock Me on the Water: 1974-The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics” will discuss what we can discern about our political future from the current generational cultural divide at 2:00 p.m. on Thursday, May 20 at a National Press Club Virtual Book Event.
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Post by the Scribe on Jun 22, 2021 12:28:31 GMT
How LA Changed American Culture | NewsConference | NBCLA
NBCLA
130K subscribers
NBC4’s Conan Nolan talks with and political journalist Ronald Brownstein on his new book on a remarkable year in the history of Los Angeles. “Rock Me on the Water, 1974, The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television and Politics.”
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Post by the Scribe on Aug 28, 2022 14:32:50 GMT
LOS ANGELES
1974: The Year Los Angeles Changed Pop Culture Forever
176 views Aug 27, 2022 Ron Brownstein wrote "Rock Me on the Water," which analyzes how Los Angeles in 1974 changed TV, movies, music, and politics.
On "The Issue Is: with Elex Michaelson," Brownstein breaks down how the impact of that year is still being felt today.
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Post by the Scribe on May 29, 2023 19:08:25 GMT
New book explores cultural forces at play in the 1970's, and how they influenced America
Linda Ronstadt appearance at 2:30
PBS NewsHour
4,538 views May 5, 2021
A new book argues the 1970's was a moment when TV, movies, and music all shifted into a new gear, changing the cultural landscape in ways that continue to today. Jeffrey Brown has a conversation with author Ron Brownstein about his book "Rock Me on the Water: 1974-The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics." This segment is part of our arts and culture series, CANVAS.
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