Rock Me on the Water
1974-The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In this exceptional cultural history, Atlantic Senior Editor Ronald Brownstein—“one of America's best political journalists (The Economist)—tells the kaleidoscopic story of one monumental year that marked the city of Los Angeles’ creative peak, a glittering moment when popular culture was ahead of politics in predicting what America would become.
Los Angeles in 1974 exerted more influence over popular culture than any other city in America. Los Angeles that year, in fact, dominated popular culture more than it ever had before, or would again. Working in film, recording, and television studios around Sunset Boulevard, living in Brentwood and Beverly Hills or amid the flickering lights of the Hollywood Hills, a cluster of transformative talents produced an explosion in popular culture which reflected the demographic, social, and cultural realities of a changing America. At a time when Richard Nixon won two presidential elections with a message of backlash against the social changes unleashed by the sixties, popular culture was ahead of politics in predicting what America would become. The early 1970s in Los Angeles was the time and the place where conservatives definitively lost the battle to control popular culture.
Rock Me on the Water traces the confluence of movies, music, television, and politics in Los Angeles month by month through that transformative, magical year. Ronald Brownstein reveals how 1974 represented a confrontation between a massive younger generation intent on change, and a political order rooted in the status quo. Today, we are again witnessing a generational cultural divide. Brownstein shows how the voices resistant to change may win the political battle for a time, but they cannot hold back the future.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Travel back to a pivotal year when just about everything exciting in popular culture happened in the city of Los Angeles. In the New Hollywood of Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, thoughtful movies were making bank at the box office and cleaning up on awards night. TV sitcoms like All in the Family and M*A*S*H were political lightning rods that everyone watched. And in pop music, Motown’s move from Detroit to Sunset Boulevard solidified the fact that all the labels were searching for that slick, mellow L.A. sound. Journalist and critic Ronald Brownstein gathers these disparate threads into one compelling story that focuses on the liberal-vs.-conservative undercurrents tying them together. That schism feels even more pronounced today, making Rock Me on the Water an incredibly timely—and fun to read—history book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
CNN political analyst Brownstein (The Second Civil War) argues in this sweeping cultural history that L.A. in 1974 exerted more influence over music, movies, and television "than it ever had before, or would again." Brownstein highlights Chinatown, Shampoo, and Nashville as examples of the edgier, more socially relevant films Hollywood made in the brief window between the collapse of the studio system and the rise of blockbusters. In music, the Eagles personified the "easy-riding, hard-partying soundtrack to Los Angeles's golden hour," Brownstein writes, while musicians such as Jackson Browne followed a circuitous path to success. Brownstein credits CBS for revolutionizing TV with shows (All in the Family, M*A*S*H, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show) that dealt with contemporary social issues and appealed to a wide demographic. Married couple Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda's anti–Vietnam War activism and Jerry Brown's rise to the governorship, meanwhile, illuminate the links between L.A.'s political and cultural scenes. 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.
