In Memoriam. Melanie Safka, 1947-2024

Best remembered for Brand New Key, she was, in some ways, a slightly earlier, and somewhat less known, version of the same sort of singer than Linda Ronstadt would become, even preforming some of the same songs.

She performed at Woodstock, still so young that her mother went with her.

What Have They Done to My Song Ma is one I recall from my childhood for some reason, dimly recalling that my mother liked it.

Tuesday, January 15, 1974. Happy Days.

Happy Days, the legendary sitcom, appeared to mixed reviews.

1974 Happy Days cast.

Clearly riffing off of 1950s nostalgia, less than 20 years after the end of the decade, the show had more or less been laid a path to success by the recent film American Graffiti, which also featured Ron Howard portraying a major character.  Even before that, however, nostalgia had seen the rise of the rise of the band Sha Na Na which appeared in 1969 in sufficient time in which to appear at Woodstock.

American Graffiti, as we've noted here before, actually takes place in 1962, not the 1950s, but its not recalled that way.  Howard, for his part, had grown up on television as Opie in The Andy Griffith Show, which had run from 1960 to 1968, but which is also commonly thought as taking place in the 1950s, even though there's no effort whatsoever to suggest that in the show, and contemporary audiences would not have taken it that way.

As the name of Happy Days implied, the American public, troubled by the news of the ear, or perhaps of the entire 1960s, conceived of the 50s as "happy days", irrespective of what they had actually been.  The series would run for a decade.  During that time, it had a pretty substantial impact on the pop culture of the era.  My family didn't regularly watch it, probably as they'd all lived through the 50s and weren't nostalgic about it, but I can recall the revival of 1950s rock and roll it caused. And at the junior high I was attending, there were dances called "sock hops", which was a revival of a term strongly associated with the 1950s.

College shock hop, 1948.  Sock hops were called that as students took off their shoes to dance on gym floors.

I was too shy to attend them.

On the same day, a panel of experts testified that the 18.5 minute gap in the now infamous Nixon tape conversation with H. R. Halderman of June 20, 1972, was made by serial erasures.

In Indonesia, a visit by Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka turned into a riot featuring an attack, oddly, on Chinese Indonesians.

The disappointing Comet Kohoutek made its closest pass by Earth.  I recall going outside to look for it and, like thousands of others, being disappointed by not really being able to see much in spite of predictions to the contrary.

John Wayne visited Harvard at the invitation of The Harvard Lampoon to debate students on his all but forgotten film, McQ.  He traveled to Harvard Square in an armored personnel carrier from Ft. Devens.  Native Americans interrupted his travels to protest events at Wounded Knee.  Wayne ignored a question about supporting the Hollywood blacklist.

All of which shows why people were nostalgic about the 1950s.

Wednesday, July 4, 1923. Boxing, Parades and Sabotogue.

Then, as now, it was the 4th of July holiday, and all the usual events occured, including parades and events of all sorts.

This event happened at Takoma Park, Maryland.

In the West, numerous rodeos were held, but in Shelby, Montana, something else was tried Jack Dempsey fought Tommy Gibbons.  

Shelby was a small oil town and only about 7,000 of the 20,000 spectators paid to see the fight, causing a large financial loss to the promoters.  Some of the deficit, like that of the much later major event of Woodstock, would be made up by promoting a movie of the event.

A crowd of up to 200,000 attended a Ku Klux Klan rally in Kokomo, Indiana in what may have been the largest rally in its history.

The Klan was very strong in Indiana at the time.

Stunt pilot B. H. DeLay died when his plane, later thought to be sabotaged, crashed.  Passenger R. I. Short also died in the event, which occured at Venice, California..  DeLay had been involved in a heated dispute over an airport, but no suspects were ever arrested for sabotage to his plane.

Movies In History: American Graffiti, and other filmed portrayals of the Cultural 1950s (1954-1965).

American Graffiti

Like The Wonder Years, I've made frequent reference to this film recently.  I was surprised, when I started doing that, that I'd never reviewed it.

American Graffiti takes place on a single night in Modesto, California in 1962.  It's the late summer and the subject, all teenagers, are about to head back to school or already have, depending upon whether they're going to high school or college. Some are going to work or already working.  They're spending the summer night cruising the town.  That's used as a vehicle to get them into dramatic situations.

The story lines, and there are more than one, in the film are really simple.  One character, played by Richard Dreyfus, is about to leave for college and develops a mad crush, in a single night, for a young woman driving a T-bird played by a young Suzanne Summers.  Another plot involves a young couple, played by Ron Howard and Cindy Williams, who are struggling with his plan to leave for college while she has one more year of school.  Another involves an already graduated figure whose life is dedicated to cars, even though it's apparent that he knows that dedication can't last forever.  The cast, as some of these names would indicate, was excellent, with many actors and actresses making their first really notable appearances in the film.

What's of interest here is the films' portrayal of the automobile culture of American youth after World War Two. This has really passed now, but it's accurately portrayed in the film.  Gasoline was relatively cheap and access to automobiles was pretty wide, which created a culture in which adolescents spent a lot of time doing just what is depicted in this movie, driving around fairly aimlessly, with the opposite sex on their minds, on Friday and Saturday nights.  This really existed in the 1960s, when this film takes place, it dated back at least to the 1950s, and it continued on into the very early 1980s. At some point after that, gasoline prices, and car prices, basically forced it out of existence.

For those growing up in the era, this was a feature of Fridays and Saturdays, either to their amusement or irritation.  As a kid, coming into town on a Friday or Saturday evening from anything was bizarre and irritating, with racing automobiles packed with teenagers pretty much everywhere.  Grocery store parking lots were packed with parked cars belonging to them as well.  "Cruising" was a major feature of teenage life, and nearly every teenager participated in it at least a little big, even if they disavowed doing it.  While they did this, in later years they listened to FM radio somewhat, but more likely probably cassette tape players installed after market in their cars.  In the mid 1970s, it was 8 track tape players.  In the 50s and 60s, it was the radio.

So, as odd as it may seem to later generations, this movie is pretty accurate in terms of what it displays historically.  And, given that the film was released in 1973, a mere decade after the era it depicts, it should be.  The amazing thing here is that by 1973 American culture had changed so much that a 1973 film looking back on 1962 could actually invoke a sense of nostalgia and an era long past.

The music and clothing are certainly correct, as is the cruising culture.  I somewhat question the automobiles in the movie, as most of those driven by the protagonists are late 1950s cars that wouldn't have been terribly old at the time the movie portrays, but a person knowledgeable on that topic informed me once that vehicles wore out so fast at the time that people replaced them fairly rapidly, which meant that younger people were driving fairly recent models.  Indeed, looking back on myself, I was driving early 1970s vintage vehicles in the late 1970s.

The music, which is a big feature of the movie, is also correct, which ironically often causes people to view this as a movie about the 1950s, rather than the early 1960s.  The music of the early 60s was the same as that of the late 50s, and music from the 50s was still current in the early 1960s, so this too is correct.

This movie was a huge hit, and it remained very popular for a very long time.  It's justifiably regarded as a classic.  More than that, however, it's one of the few movies that influences its own times.

Already by the 1970s, there was some nostalgia regarding the 1950s.  Sha Na Na, the 50s reprisal do wop band, actually preformed at Woodstock, as amazing as that seems now.  By the late 1960s, seems felt like such a mess that people were looking back towards an earlier era which they regarded as safer, ignoring its problems.  American Graffiti tapped into that feeling intentionally, although it has some subtle dark elements suggesting that not all is right with the world it portrays (the film clearly hints that a returned college graduate student is involved with his teenage female students).  George Lucas, when he made the film, couldn't have guess however that it would fuel a nostalgia boom for the 1950s like none other.

Happy Days

The first filmed progeny of American Graffiti was televisions Happy Days, which even featured Ron Howard, who had featured in American Graffiti.  Happy Days took the nostalgia boosted by American Graffiti and really ran with it in a super sanitized fashion.  Set in the mid 1950s through the mid 1960s, that ran from 1974 until 1983.  It was hugely popular.

Many of the same themes portrayed in American Graffiti were again portrayed in Happy Days, but in a lighter manner.  The show picked up the nostalgia for cars and music and ran with it.  No really serious themes were portrayed, which isn't to say that American Graffiti did much with serious themes. They are different, however, in that American Graffiti is a warm, but somewhat sad, look back at a lost era with some longing, whereas Happy Days is an outright televised sock hop.  In American Graffiti, some characters really are edgy.  In Happy Days, none of them are, not even the leather clad motorcycle riding Arthur Fonzerelli, "the Fonz".

Happy Days was a beloved series, so I hate to criticize it too much, but it fails in terms of a realistic portrayal of its era.  If American Graffiti succeeds, it's because it portrays such a narrow slice of it. Even American Graffiti, however, brings home the era in its concluding shot, which summarizes the fates of the characters.  In contrast, we'd never know that Happy Days takes place during an era when concerns about a war with the Soviet Union were constant and that many of the male figures would have been drafted and served a hitch in the Army.  Where the series succeeds is probably in its minor material detail elements, such as in clothing and music.

Laverne and Shirley

Laverne and Shirley was a spinoff of Happy Days, which also featured one of the actors from American Graffiti, Penny Marshall.  Running from 1976 to 1983, thereby concluding in the same year that Happy Days did, it portrayed two single women working as blue-collar bottle cappers in Milwaukee.  

The interesting thing about Laverne and Shirley is that probably more accurately portrayed the lives of figures of the 50s than Happy Days did.  The two young women share an apartment, they hope to get married and leave their blue-collar lives, and they're working a blue-collar job.  The series, while set in the 50s, feels like it's set in the 1950s of Marty, not Happy Days, and not American Graffiti.  That's actually the world a lot of young people lived in.

Other Efforts

It's probably worth noting that the success of American Graffiti followed by Happy Days spawned a large number of filmed efforts, most of which were pretty bad.  Indeed, I can't think of any others that are actually worth mentioning, except for one, which was made much later and which clearly wasn't inspired by American Graffiti, that being That Thing You Do.  Among the worst is one that bills itself as a "Rock and Roll Fable", Streets Of Fire, which had some notable cast members who must wish that the film would be forever forgotten.

Woodstock, Day 4. August 18, 1969

By the early morning hours of the forth day of Woodstock, the crowd was tiring of the event and began to leave at first light.  Still, some remarkable acts played as the crowed dwindled.

Oddly enough, Roy Rogers was originally thought of to play the final number, which was to be Happy Trails, but he declined.

Johnny Winter.  I don't think very many remember the young Winter as performing at Woodstock, but he did, along with his brother Edgar.

Blood Sweat & Tears, who went on at 1:30 a.m.

Crosby Still, Nash & Young.  I've never cared for this band in any sense, and their Woodstock performance is no exception.

Paul Butterfield Blues Band. This band had been a blues band at one time but no longer was. Still, they opened with the blues number Born Under A Bad Sign which was most famously performed by Eric Clapton, who did not play at Woodstock.

Sha Na Na. This 50s revival band went on at 7:30 a.m.  It's odd to think of them even playing at Woodstock and its particularly odd if its considered that their hyped up nostalgic performance was revising music that was only a decade old.  Almost nothing about their performance seems to fit the era in which they were performing.  They preformed twelve songs in 30 fast minutes.

Jimi Hendrix.  Hendrix was the closing act as he insisted on the position, which unfortunately put his epic performance at the point at which the crowd had very much dispersed.  He played for two hours, playing nineteen songs, much longer than the few songs that are generally shown when Woodstock is recalled, and started off with his rendition of The Star Spangled Banner, one of fifty times he was recorded playing the national anthem.  A lot of his songs were played back to back with no interruption between them whatsoever.  His last song, Hey Joe, was played as an encore.

Hendrix had sought this position as it was the position of honor in a performance, the best band gong last.  He may well have deserved that honor in spite of the diminished crowd.  His rendition of
The Star Spangled Banner ended one of the newscasts nightly news that day, as I can recall watching it and asking my father what the event was.  The performance was genuinely epic, which is all the more amazing as Hendrix had been at Woodstock the entire time up until his performance and had not slept at all.

Woodstock, day three

On day three of Woodstock, the following bands played:

Joe Cocker, whose With A Little Help From My Friends cover, is one of the best remembered numbers from the concert.  He went on at 2:00 p.m.

Country Joe and the Fish, who uniquely played twice during the concert.  Their first performance was not scheduled.

Ten Years After.  Ten Years After was one of the most notable of the British blues bands and some regard its performance at Woodstock as the best performance of the concert.

The Band

Woodstock, day two.

We've already noted the commencement of the giant Woodstock music festival in 1969. This day was day two.

On this day the music opened at 12:15, and the following acts played:

Quill

Country Joe and the Fish, whose performance is well known for the Vietnam Rag.

Santana, whose performance was one of the best and whose drummer, 20 year old Michael Shrieve, was the youngest musician to preform by some accounts.

John Sebastian, who was not on the bill but actually in attendance but who was asked to play to make up for dead space by the promoters.

Keef Hartley Band

The Incredible String Band, who had refused to play due to the rain the prior day.

Canned Heat

Mountain

The Grateful Dead

Creedance Clearwater Revival  CCR later wrote Who Stopped the Rain concerning the concert.

Janis Joplin

Sly and the Family Stone, who also had one of the best performances of the event.

The Who

Jefferson Airplane, who concluded at 9:40.

Woodstock. August 15 through 18, 1969

If, as we've defined it, the 1960s as a decade began on March 8, 1965, when the Marines waded ashore at Danang, Republic of Vietnam, and ended on August 9, 1974, with the resignation of President Richard Nixon, then the mid point, and the high point, in more than one way occurred on August 15 through 17, at Woodstock, New York.

Original anticipated Woodstock lineup, which proved to be somewhat inaccurate.

Woodstock was a giant undertaking, and one for which nothing whatsoever went right, by any measure.  It's both justifiably celebrated and somewhat inaccurately remembered, as any giant event of this sort would be.

Intended from the onset to be a very large music festival, of which the 1960s featured several, it grew totally out of control and the producers soon lost control of the event, making it a free concert in the end.  It became more than that, and in some ways came to define the 1960s counter culture movement.

It may very well also mark the high point in Rock and Roll music. At this point in time, Rock and Roll still very much showed its blues roots and the music, while not as serious as a rule as the blues, reached its high point in being serious music.  Outlandish clothing had already come in, but after this point Rock and Roll would start to be highly gimmicky, something it has never recovered from.  Within a few years it would no longer be as serious, or be taken as seriously, as it was at this point.

On this day, the following acts played:

Richie Havens, who went on at 5:07 p.m and played for nearly two hours, and who was early on stage as Sweetwater, the opening act, had been stopped and delayed by the police.  Havens was a folk musician.

Sweetwater.  This band was a large ensemble, which some Rock bands of this period were, and is little remembered today. Being omitted from the Woodstock movie and the band's sort career no doubt contributed to that.

Bert Sommer.  Sommer isn't well known today, but he received the first standing ovation at Woodstock for his cover of Simon and Garfunkel's America.

Tim Hardin

Ravi Shankar, who played through the rain.

Melanie, was 22 years old at the time and who went on after the Incredible String Band declined to play in the rain.  She was invited as Woodstock's producers had an office in the same building which she did and was better known in Europe than the United States at this time.  One of three female acts at Woodstock, she later wrote her first hit song, Lay Down, Candles In The Rain, based on the concert.  Her career would later be virtually defined by her 1972 song Brand New Key, which was a song that came to her when she broke a vegetarian fast to have a hamburger at McDonald's after a twenty seven day fast.

Arlo Guthrie

Joan Baez, who was six months pregnant at the time and who concluded the first day's acts at 12:25.

Label Appendix to Growing Up In the 1960s

This post only serves the odd feature, for this blog, for adding in Labels for Growing Up in the 1960s.

The reason is that the labels would otherwise exceed the allowable limit.