Going Silent as I head up to the holy mountain in retreat. It’s time to reflect on life and seek answers and inspiration from the divine. As I work on new material on the background I thought I would share my guide to Silent Records that came out on Igloo Magazine in the spring of 2025 for my readers here. Silent Records is the “ambient, drone, experimental, noise, glitch & beyond” label started by Kim Cascone in 1986. I’ve been a big fan of Cascone’s music for awhile, as well as the other artists he puts out on his label. I’ve also been a big fan of his writing. Cascone’s essay have appeared in lots of places, but I probably first read them in the book Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music edited by Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner. Just before the pandemic I started following Cascone’s Silent Records bandcamp site rather heavily. He used the community feature there to start a daily blog and has kept at it since at least 2019 if not before, picking up speed during the plague years. It’s been a major asset to my own thinking on culture and music, and I started digging around for his other essays. Now Silent Records has released their first book on Silent Editions and it is a collection of Cascone’s essays from 1999 to 2026. I have written a full review of Post-Digital Music for Igloo.

​As ever thanks for stopping by, and hopefully the music of Silent Records and the writings of Kim Cascone will do much to feed your creativity and imagination.

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Sometimes what comes in a flash unfolds over a long period of time. Such a flash came to Silent Records label founder Kim Cascone one winter night as a kid. “I remember sitting in a snowbank and looking up at the stars. I spotted the blue star in the Orion constellation and gazed at it for a long time. Suddenly I had a flash, like one of those speed-collages in a film where hundreds of events all race past in a split second. I call this ‘my download’ & have been unpacking its meaning ever since.”

One of the ways he seems to have been unpacking it is in his work as musician and composer across various genres of electronic music from the 1980s through the present. The medium of Silent Records also seems to be part of his process for decanting his download and disseminating the work of kindred artists, siphoning music out of the aether and releasing it into sleeves of sound, physical and digital.

Silent is now in its second incarnation. The first incarnation had a slow beginning with the 1985 release of the album Silence from PGR. The music could be classed as industrial, and the name came from the sign they affixed to the door of their practice space: Poison Gas Research. That part of Oakland was as rough as the music they made there, and they didn’t want to attract the attention of “dubious people.”

​The label didn’t have a name yet, but the following year saw him put out In the Shade of Fire by The Haters, the project of noise music legend GX Juppiter-Larsen, and the beginning of the use of the Silent Records name. These two early releases foreshadow the noisier end of things that Silent would start releasing again around 2017 through the present, yet noise and industrial were never the sole interests of Cascone. It wasn’t the only kind of material he wanted to make, or the only kind of material he wanted to put out into the culture.

All the same, there was a lot of energy in the world of DIY experimental music in the mid to late eighties and the issuing a split between Organum/Eddie Prevost followed in 1987. He was also active in the Colorado based Thessalonians and toured with them. The Architects Office LP was one result of this activity.
By that time Acid House was beginning to be a big thing. When the likes of Psychic TV got a hold of it, they cross fertilized that style of dance electronica with the lysergically-minded end of the industrial and experimental scenes.
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Meanwhile in 1988, Cascone set Silent Records aside to do work in the film and television business, where he had the opportunity to work with David Lynch on Twin Peaks and Wild At Heart. Lynch’s own influence on industrial and alternative music culture can’t be underestimated, from the howling factories that formed the sound bed of Eraserhead, to his Industrial Symphony No. 1, and the electrical ambiences and sound of the wind in the trees, Lynch knew how to use sound and silence to create his distinctive vision of American surreality.

Cascone met sound editor Jay Boekelheide, most famous for his work on The Right Stuff. The way Boekelheide was able to build up heavenly sounds for the industry became an inspiration to Cascone, and a direction to move his label towards. Ambient infused musical explorations began to follow in 1990 as underground and popular culture shifted towards the energy of the rave.

Expanding the reach of electronic music ::

That’s really when Cascone started working on using Silent Records as a vehicle for expanding the reach of electronic music, amplified by his creation of the Pulse Soniq company so he could get the releases into record stores and other places where the music could find the others. Based out of San Francisco, one of North Americas epicenters of electronic dance music, Cascone was in the right place at the right time to infuse his vision into the neon glowing membranes of the enhanced collective consciousness finding its way in the techno era. He refined the label by adding three imprints that bear witness to his alchemical interests: Flask, Furnace, and Sulphur.

Flask offered, “Flask is acid, electronica and ambient. This sub-label offers music that is closely related to the main label. Spacey, trippy and fantastic rave and chill-room style aesthetics.” Furnace provided “hard industrial” for those who craved the molten rivets of that style. Sulphur was an outlet for the experimental and improvisational works.
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All of this combined to create the quintessence, a universal panacea in the form of sublime music, the gold of the philosophers. The albums from his Heavenly Music Corporation remain essential listening, as are titles from Deeper Than Space, the Spice Barons and other artists whose signal he boosted above the noise through the labels efforts. Not to mention the great compilations including the From Here to Tranquility series. His wife Kathleen, helped mold the feel of the albums as the chief designer giving them their classic look.

Yet as the 1990s wore on Cascone turned his attention to other efforts, including time spent working as a sound designer for the company Headspace owned by Thomas Dolby. He eventually sold the label, and then moved into the emergent world of digital glitch music as exemplified in the oughts, the golden era of laptop music. Another label, Anechoic, was started at this point, named after the final Heavenly Music Corporation album, and hinting at the famous silent chamber at Bell Labs where John Cage was able to listen to the sound of his nervous system.

So that was the first version of Silent, but there was still more to unfold, to unpack from the stellar download.

Silent 2.0 ::

When the label rebooted in 2016, it underwent a miraculous transformation. Silent had gone from being the North American ambassadors of chill out and had instead turned into a purveyor of instrumental guitar music. Of the ambient variety anyway. And of the experimental, drone, dirgey, noisy end of guitar freakdom. They also went back to their original roots and started putting out music that could be considered industrial and experimental, though Cascone had never really abandoned this still anyway. And they did continue to release eclectic electronic delights that touched on the flavors produced in the nineties.
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So, no, it wasn’t just guitar music, but Cascone had picked up his guitar again and was starting to use that in a new series of compositions to be released under his moniker as Khem One. In addition, the label has put out three compilations in the Dark Indicator series of intense, noisy, drifting, granular, spacey and distorted “collection of guitar & string drones.”

Perhaps this interest in the tension of stretched strings should not come as a surprise. One of the albums that caught my eye when I first started exploring the reboot was The Celestial Monochord, a collaboration of Cascone with Tony Conrad. The thirty-six minute piece is a recording of a live performance from back in 2002 where Cascone used Max/MSP to process the sounds Conrad was making on his homemade monochord. The title recalls Robert Fludd’s famous picture that graces the cover of the Smithsonian Anthology of American Folk Music.

Fire, moon and star ::

As Silent continued put out new albums, they also shifted from their old logo of an alien with headphones, to a new one that relates to the “download” experience from Cascone’s childhood. It’s of a triangle with a blue star and a moon. “The upward pointing triangle is the symbol for FIRE (not physical but metaphysical fire) as used in ye olde tymes, the moon represents lunar energies (female in nature), & has always held a special place in my work (Lunar Phase, Lunadronus, etc).” The blue star referred to the one in the Orion constellation that he stared at as a kid. “So the combination of symbols for fire, moon and star seemed like it would make a good logo that Silent 2.0 should have for its new incarnation.”

The Blue Star Transmissions was another compilation released in reference to all this. On his Bandcamp Silent blog about this release Cascone wrote that, “A couple of years ago, during a period of intense ‘hypnagogic meditation,’ I had seen some of the childhood download I referred to… I have experienced brief intuitive flashes that unpacked some of the information in my download but these ‘hypnagogic flashes’ were more clear & defined. This period of meditation unpacked personal insights, it felt like a minor breakthrough, like I had climbed a ladder & found the next rung in the dark. … The Blue Star Transmissions comp on Silent came about during one intense meditation. I asked artists who I felt were kindred to contribute sound work received in a similar manner and this release is the result.”

This album features Khem One’s “Modal Gauze No. 1 – Guitar Study” that I immediately fell in love with. The plucked strings shimmer with an otherworldly frequency and create a field of calm that carries with it a pregnant intelligence. Mike Rooke’s “Mesosphere Transition” also features transcendent guitar frequencies. The other contributions are equally ethereal with Rag Dun’s “City of the Wind Kings” notable for its conjuration of abstract elemental vistas.

Later the “Modal Gauze No. 1 – guitar study” was released as a thirty-minute piece. This version is great for meditation, and something the listener can really get lost inside. It is also really good for decorating living space, ambient furniture made up of forwards and backwards playing, and mesmeric drifts that can tune a room and turn into a vehicle for extradimensional travel.
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Another Khem One release, Pollen & Fragments clocks in at 21 minutes. This sees Cascone engaging in a drone ensemble, and he is joined by other guitarists, tampura and euphonium players and other instrumentalists. The name for this work comes from a collection of writings in the tradition of philosophical romanticism by the German poet Novalis, originally published in 1798. The aphoristic texts drift across a range of subjects, showing how the Romantics, as much as they embraced the metaphysical and mystical, were still dedicated explorers of the new worlds opened up by advances in science. The dabs of pollen Khem One release into the air on this recording swirl with as much dreamlike fertility and inspiration.

​A number of other releases followed from a pool of artists dedicated to strange corners of sonic exploration. Simon Šerc’s CMBR uses data sonification to unpack the cosmic microwave background radiation, and information about it, provided by the Planck space telescope of the European Space Agency.

Vornths by Jared Sagar, sees the artist going back to electronic music basics by employing a razor blade and reel-to-reel tape machines to create a sonorous landscape of juxtaposed klangs. His Signatures and Fragments are equally abstract evocations in shorter snippets of aural abnormality.

​The duo of Dreamcloud and Pacific2131 give a dense cybernetic vision of future city noise in the long-form Clog Time.

​Nico Guerro’s Streams of Oblivion returns us to the theme of guitar music and features, “Les Paul Studio guitar, others electric prepared guitars” as part of the sound material to create a dark, magisterial and melancholic album.

​“If you like your drone guitars tuned low, played slow and on the edge of tube-death then you are in the right place,” is how the label put it for the first Dark Indicator compilation. A lot of the artists were new to me. “De-orbiting Mir” by Tovarish and “Suns Corona Hull” by Lush Worker eviscerate amplifiers even as the mine outer space for inspiration. The second iteration featured some names I was familiar with like Rhys Chatham and Kawabata Makoto, the latter of Acid Mothers Temple fame.

Khem One appears with the track “Heliodronus” calling down the sun. These albums sound good on headphones, like all of the Silent catalog, but these are great with the stereo system cranked up to make the earth shake, in place of the Marshall stacks that might otherwise do the same. The third volume features Khem One’s “Lunadronus” and contributors from “Pere Ubu, Bongripper, Kowa Axis, Wizards Warlocks Angel Dust, Pelt & more contribute some dark, sputtering distorted drones.” If you want doom, listening to these is a better use of time than doom scrolling.
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The Khem One album Threshold of Eastern Octaves came out in 2022, and this is a more subtle affair than the heavy funereal riffs splattered across the Dark Indicator series.It’s suitable for meditation and inner voyaging in a calmer way. The other records are transportive by means of a loud blast, the explosion that knocks consciousness off-center and leaves the listener reeling as they try to hold on when heading into orbit. This one shows you the way to a hatch and allows you to gently open the door and ascend to a higher octave. The touchstone of pollen is referenced again in a few of the song titles.

On his latest album as Khem One, Subtle Immobilities, Kim Cascone continues to apply Captain Beefheart’s magic formula to bring out these compositions from the other side of the portal. For those who don’t know it, Beefheart famously gave his Ten Rules for Playing Guitar that are just a touch spicier and weirder than anything you’d find in Guitar Player magazine. Beefheart gives us the knowledge that “Your guitar is a divining rod. Use it to find spirits in the other world and bring them over. A guitar is also a fishing rod. If you’re good, you’ll land a big one.”

Subtle Immobilities is just more evidence that Khem One has become an adept at catching the big fish. Dedicated to the late Marian Zazeela, these pieces create a dreamhouse and ornamental lightyear tracery all their own, and prove that a guitar can be much more than just a guitar.
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Happy fishing.

American Psychogeography X: KPFT vs KKK, NASA and the Candy Man Killer

Only one radio station transmitter has ever been bombed in the United States. That station was in Houston, and that station was KPFT, bombed just two months after going on the air by the Ku Klux Klan. KPFT was the fourth station in the Pacifica network, a group of listener supported community radio stations run as a grassroots non-profit organization. The network had become an essential mouthpiece for the political left in the United States starting with the original flagship station KPFA in Berkeley, California and later expanding to include stations like WBAI in New York. Along with presenting news and views from the center left to the far left, and material well outside the mainstream, radio shows on the Pacifica network had long championed experimental music and alternative culture in the arts through their programming. The fact that the network had been founded by pacifists and conscientious objectors E. John Lewis and Lewis Hill probably didn’t win the new Houston affiliate any friends with members of the KKK.

The fact that Larry Lee of the Associated Press and his fellow journalist Don Gardner from the Houston Post had grown tired and became disenchanted with the way the media in the city routinely ignored the cities simmering racial issues meant they had a built-in enemy with the KKK.

The fact was that KPFT wanted to get real, get down to earth, and talk about real things that were happening to real people. In 1970 the media was obsessed with the upcoming Apollo 13 mission. The local media in Houston was particularly focused on what was going on with NASA, the aerospace industry, and the brave astronauts who would be making another attempt at landing on the moon.

The astronauts were real of course, but they weren’t down to earth. The space program was leaving its mark on the world and American psyche with its mythos of courageous exploration. It was also leaving its physical mark on the planet in terms of the amounts of resources consumed, and changes to the landscape where they parked their infrastructure.
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In 1961 NASA had opened the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. It was an event that ushered in another wave of wealth, professionals, managers and bosses into the city. This time, instead of oil executives, it was electrical engineers, rocket scientists, and astronauts who ruled the roost. The first moon landing had been a massive success. That one small step had stoked the fires of belief in technology and progress. True believers became hyper focused on continuing these missions that were going to allow humanity to seek out bold new worlds and turn America into a space faring civilization. Plenty of poor working people, minorities and average citizens felt differently. The federal government was spending huge amounts of money to send people into outer space, while others were suffering, hungry, looking for work, trying to make ends meet in blighted neighborhoods where the scent of urban decay had already permeated the air.

​That was partly why KPFT had wanted to focus on what was happening down on earth, on the planet. They took to the airwaves on March 1st, 1970 with the Beatles anthem of positivity, “Here Comes the Sun.” No sun, no life on earth. One of their shows was a 90-minute evening news show called Life On Earth. Whatever was going on with Apollo 13 wasn’t as pressing as what was going on with the drafted soldiers sent straight from high school to the killing fields in Vietnam. It wasn’t as important as the intense segregation at work in city neighborhoods and the efforts to desegregate school. Plenty of other issues were affecting everyday people. Sending more people back to the moon seemed frivolous when so many challenges, predicaments and problems were reaching boiling points on earth.

After the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969, Gil Scott Heron was wondering what the point of it all was. He was a poet, jazz musician, and writer. Expressing his experience as an African American, there didn’t seem much point. He wrote a poem in response to the landing called “Whitey on the Moon” and it also came out as recording where his recitation was accompanied by conga drums in 1970 on his debut album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. He laid down his lament with the following words:
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“The man just upped my rent last night
Cause whitey’s on the moon
No hot water, no toilets, no lights
But whitey’s on the moon
I wonder why he’s upping me?
Cause whitey’s on the moon?
Well I was already giving him fifty a week
With whitey on the moon
Taxes taking my whole damn check
Junkies making me a nervous wreck
The price of food is going up|
And as if all that shit wasn’t enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell
With whitey on the moon
Her face and arm began to swell
And whitey’s on the moon
Was all that money I made last year
For whitey on the moon?
How come I ain’t got no money here?
Hmm! Whitey’s on the moon
Y’know I just ‘bout had my fill
Of whitey on the moon
I think I’ll send these doctor bills
Airmail special
To whitey on the moon”

​As the price of living has gone up all across the board, poor and lower middle-class whites were wonder why so much effort was being expended to put whitey back on the moon. In the year of this writing, many were singing Heron’s song again after the recent Artemis mission. In the 1970s people were tired of getting moondoggled.

While some people were having the experience of getting bit by rats without recourse to being able to pay for a doctor, the Clear Lake was being transformed into yet another suburb in the Greater Houston conurbation. This was the home of the Space Center. With NASA in the loop other aerospace agencies, public and private, started flocking to the area, helping to diversify the economy, helping to create not just a massive highway system, but setting sight for the stars in the bid to eventually suburbs full of happy, well-adjusted nuclear families on the moon.

It wasn’t enough to have suburbs spread far and wide around the city, destroying critical wetlands, bulldozing essential forest, marring the stark beauty of the deserts with prefabricated visions of prefabricated happiness. Now America had to colonize space and put up orbital suburbs, suburbs on the moon, suburbs on mars, create new destinations for middle class vacations.

Just as the engines of war have often been the engines pushing for technological innovation, so too are the phallically focused rocket boys. In their desire for deep penetration of the womb of space, the enablers of the astronaut cowboy had to create all kinds of advanced prophylactics to protect them from the dangers of leaving earth. Along the way, some of that innovation did trickle down into the lives of the people in the form of memory foam and infrared thermometers.

KPFT was a critical voice in the earth centered conversation. What was happening to those left behind in the march towards progress was important to the people operating the station. Almost two and a half months after they went on the air on May 12, 1970, the stations transmitter was bombed by the KKK. They went off the air for three weeks before it got repaired and they could resume broadcasting. About five months later on October 6th, the stations transmitter was bombed again in the middle of airing Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant,” the singers satirical protest against the Vietnam War draft. This time around the damage to the station was much more extensive and KPFT was off the air for three months. When the station started broadcasting again on January 21st, 1971, Arlo Guthrie was in the studio and played his song live to commence transmissions.

The FBI didn’t do much of anything to investigate the bombing. Ditto the local police. In lieu of criminal investigators investigating crimes, Pacifica launched a media campaign to draw attention to the unsolved case. This led to the arrest of Ku Klux Klan member Jimmy Dale Hutton who was also plotting to blow up KPFA and KPFK. He was convicted in 1971, but his wasn’t the only madness swirling through the streets of Houston. Teenage boys and young men had started to go missing, but there was no coordinated investigation as to where they had gone. According to the police, they were probably just runaways, and in Texas, there was no law against running away. Only when the bodies were dug up did they have to admit a killer had been on the loose, and his prey had been young males primarily from the Houston Heights suburb which had fallen into squalor and blight.
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Houston had a serial killer problem and he went by the name Dean Corll. After his killings came to light, he was sometimes called the Candy Man. Corll worked in the family business, the Corll Candy Company started by his mom, and his talent for grooming young boys as a sexual predator started with his habit of standing outside his families candy factory, which happened to be right across the street from Helms Elementary School in Houston Heights, and give the sugary sweets away to kids. He was fond of offering kids candy, especially the boys. Corll had fitted out a room in the back of the factory with a pool table and he invited over teenage boys to play and listen to music. Corll liked cars and he had a Ford Econoline Van and Plymouth GTX muscle car. He would offer to take kids for rides in his vehicles, sometimes offering to take them to one of the beaches in the area.

​One of the kids Corll befriended was a bespectacled outsider named David Owen Brooks. He wore his hair long and wasn’t given much time of day by either of his divorced parents. His mother sent him to live with his father in the Houston Heights neighborhood. At the time Brooks was a twelve year old in the sixth grade at Helms and he was one of the people Corll gave the special praline candy. Brooks was lonely and liked the attention Corll had given him, playing pool and listening to music with him and other kids in the back room, and going on trips to the beach. Corll further groomed Brooks by giving him pocket money.

​Corll would have been around 28 when all this was happening, and two years later, when he was turning thirty, and Brooks, 14, he initiated a sexual relationship. Corll offered Brooks gifts and money in return for allowing him to give fellatio to the teenager. He soon became aware that he was just one of many teenagers who Corll paid to do oral sex.

Sometime in November of 1970, Brooks came unannounced to one of Corll’s apartments at 3300 Yorktown, just a five minute drive from the Galleria mall in normal traffic. Brooks probably wasn’t surprised to find him with naked teenagers, but he was surprised to find them strapped down to a board. Corll urged him to keep quiet. If he kept quiet, Corll would give him a big present for his sixteenth birthday coming up in February of 1971. He promised to give him a 1969 Chevrolet Corvette V8 muscle car, a promise he followed through on, and Brooks kept quiet about the assault he had seen. After the boys disappeared Corll concocted a story that he’d been paid to send the two boys to California to be photographed for a porno rag.

Later Corll admitted to Brooks that he hadn’t sold them off to child pornographers, but had actually murdered them after he was done with the rape and the torture. Knowing that Brooks was left to his own devices for the most part by his father, that he frequently had little money, he decided to offer Brooks $200 for any boy he could lure to his apartment, with the caveat that they should be kids whose families wouldn’t miss them. The down and out in Houston Heights were thus targeted, and Brooks became the older man’s accomplice in a murder spree that lasted until 1973.

The Heights had gone downhill following World War II. The writer James Conway described the area as being in 1976 a “seedy, lower-middle-class enclave with horizons limited to once-fashionable homes divided into low-rent apartments, and guarded by pickups on concrete blocks.”

It wasn’t all bad, as many of the inhabitants were just working and lower middle-class. They went to church, they tried to do right, and in the norm of the time, kids were often on their own out playing in the neighborhood, riding their bikes, running around being kids.

Those kids started going missing. In the early seventies Corll had an advantage over the teenagers and young men he brutalized. Runaways weren’t treated as missing people in Texas. Parents looking for children had no recourse, except to private investigators and their own searches. Ruanaways existed in a kind of legal gray zone and limbo. It wasn’t a crime to be a runaway in the state, and so police had little incentive to look for children. When parents reported their kids missing, instead of thinking they actually were missing, most of the time the police wrote them off as runaways. There were approximately 5,000 to 6,000 runaways a year during the time of Corll’s murders in Texas. Distraught parents felt abandoned by the police, by the federal government, and others who were supposed to have the interests of children at heart. In turn, police and government often felt that it was a family problem. And while Corll had certainly murdered some hitchhikers and runaways, many of the kids he plucked off the street were normal teens doing normal teenage things, going to the pool, hanging out, trying to sneak a beer or a joint, and got lured in with the promises of getting stoned, free booze and a place to party.

It’s hard not to wonder if the police might have looked harder if the alert to a pattern of missing kids and runaways had come from a more affluent place, such as the suburb of Clear Lake where many parents had jobs related to the space program.
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Brooks, for his part, didn’t participate in the torture and rape of the victims, or their killing. He had money, and above him a psychopath who had been subtly swaying him since their first encounter. He had been prey himself to this man, and through that manipulation had transformed into his willing accomplice. He wasn’t pulling the trigger or doing the stabbing, but he was actively luring people around his own age to their deaths.
Corll and Brooks soon picked up a third player in these sadistic activities starting in October, 1971. His name was Elmer Wayne Henley, a child of an alcoholic mother who couldn’t make ends meet. He skipped school with Brooks one day and wondered how Brooks had so much cash to run around with, when he didn’t even seem to work. Hunley worked at a gas station, and did other odd jobs. He tried to do what he could for his household because his mom couldn’t. He didn’t have running money, especially not after he gave what he had to his mom so they could eat, make rent, and her probably keeping some aside for her next bottle. Brooks introduced Henley to Corll and they all started partying together, though Henley wasn’t keen on Corll being gay, which was obvious to him. Hunley started to suspect that Brooks was getting his money from being a hustler.

​Yet Henley wanted to make more money, and he didn’t want to peddle his ass. Brooks had told him the lie that he and Corll were involved in robberies and organized theft, with initial plans to make Henley a victim. Yet the situation started to unravel, and they realized they somehow had to get him to think he was helping out on a crime job, only to kill him. Henley started hanging around in the hope of a pay off from participating in a robbery.

One day Corll and Henley were sitting in a car together at the corner of Eleventh and Heights Boulevard when the killer made a chilling remark. “You know, it’s too bad there’s not a market in people, they’re everywhere.”
He later modified his story that he Brooks were robbers, and told Henley that he was actually involved in a white slavery ring operating out of Dallas. Just like Brook’s he offered Henley $200 dollars a pop per young male. The possibility that Corll actually was involved in human trafficking outside of being a serial killer was breached by researcher Jacqueline Bynon in her two-part podcast The Candyman and the Clown.

Henley started luring young boys and teenagers into Corll’s Econoline Van or his Plymouth GTX. Where Brooks would often leave the room when the murders took place, Henley gradually started participating in the torture of the victims. Yet it all spiraled out of control, and after one last party, when Henley made the mistake of bringing a girl with him, his friend Rhonda Louise Williams, the killer threatened to kill his accomplice for having “ruined everything” by bringing a female.

To try and get out of this situation, as he and Williams begged for their lives, Henley said he would help him kill his friend. She begged him not to, and in a moment of mercy and conscience, he was able to grab Corll’s gun and shoot him.

Henley yelled “You’ve gone far enough, Dean! I can’t go on any longer ... I can’t have you kill all my friends!” The first shot hit Corll in the head, the next two in the shoulder, and the final three in his lower back and shoulder as Corll attempted to flee while he coughed up blood, tripping on the wire from a rotary telephone.

The Candy Man was dead. It was August 8th, 1973, four years to the date after the Tate and LaBianca murders had been committed by members of the Manson family.

Henley called the police, and the process of confession began. Brooks was brought in, and the pair started telling the authorities where all the bodies of the missing kids were buried. At least 28 had been murdered, and many of them had were in the ground and covered in lime at a rented boat shed in Southwest Houston. Others were at a beach on the Bolivar peninsula, at a beach in Jefferson County, and in the woodlands near a lake where the killer’s family owned a cabin.

In the aftermath of the murders suspicion fell on a possible connection between a man named John David Norman and the Candy Man. Norman would go on to accrue multiple convictions for pedophilia, child pornography and sex trafficking between 1960 and 1998. It is as sickening to think of how often he was able to get out of jail or trouble and have the chance to re-offend again across the course of his long sick life. The FBI had been tipped off about Norman a few days after Corll and had been killed and the news that a serial killer had full reign in a Houston neighborhood was hitting the media and a disgusted and sorrowful public. The tip had come in from 21-year-old Charles Brisendine, who was urged to do so by journalist Rob Shivers who worked as the Dallas correspondent for pioneering gay magazine The Advocate.

Brisendine had initially come to Dallas at the invitation of Norman’s group The Odyssey Foundation. They were operating under the cover story of being a support group for gay men. Membership in the group involved “fellows” and “sponsors.” Members would be solicited through gay magazines, small publications Norman put together himsefl, and other more direct means. The “fellows” were young men whose picture would be taken to put into pamphlets for the perusal of the “sponsors” who could then request one of the “fellows” to take home or to a hotel for a period of time before going transferred on to the next sponsor. These sponsors were willing to pay large sums of money for the service of the fellows. They were often wealthy enough to fly minors out of one state and into another.

The Odyssey Foundation made a practice of targeting male youths at Greyhound Stations. The Trailway station bus stop in Dallas was known as a hangout for runaway teens. Since there were so many runaways in the state, and since they weren’t considered missing from their families by police, it meant there was a steady supply of kids to groom. Many were already down on their luck, leaving homes where physical, sexual and verbal abuse was the norm.

When Brisendine came into Dallas, he was picked up by a sponsor who just happened to be the man who was organizing it all in the first place, John David Norman going under the unlikely alias of Alan Hitchcock. He went home with Norman and they had a one-night fling. Brisendine got creepy feelings from his sponsor pretty quick and started thinking that Norman was preying on the vulnerable to push them into prostitution. Somehow he managed to find and look through Norman’s files of the people he was pushing through the Odyssey Foundation. Several had been marked by Norman as missing persons. It chilled him when he saw the word “kill” stamped on the files of other young men.

Brisendine started to wonder if Norman was connected to the what had just hit the news that week in Houston and around the country: the Candy Man killer. The FBI and Shivers were of the opinion that the “kill” stamp Brisendine had seen on the files meant the files themselves were to be thrown in the trash, not that the fellow was someone they were going to kill. That opinion didn’t stop Dallas police from raiding Norman’s apartment to see if there was an actual connection.

Dallas police proceeded to seize voluminous booklets that had photographs and contact info for teenagers and young men. Norman also had 30,000 index cards that listed between between 50,000 and 100,000 clients across the United States.

Lt. Harold Hancock of the Dallas PD, later told the Chicago Tribune in May 1977 that many federal employees and many public bigwigs were in Norman’s list. They sent the cards to the U.S. State Department. This was confirmed by State Department Counselor Matthew Nimetz. Nimetz who also said the State Department destroyed this massive contact list. They had been looking for proof about trafficking people across borders but didn’t find “any fraud involving a passport.” The federal government clearly didn’t like what was on those index cards. It makes a person wonder just how main oil executives and NASA employees and other titans of Texas industry might have been on them, along with the names of other government sickos and their lackeys.
Norman got off easy. He was charged with marijuana possession, conspiracy to commit sodomy, and contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile. He was released on bail and told to stay in the state, but he skipped out and went to the Homewood, Illinois suburb of Chicago where he remained during the same time as the John Wayne Gacy murders were taking place.
​
In the Candyman and the Clown, Bynon focuses on the connection of serial killer John Wayne Gayce to child pornographer Phillip Ronald Paske. Gayce had employed Paske briefly in his construction company. In the mid-1970s Paske was also the closest person on the inside to convicted sex trafficker John David Norman and his pedophilia operation. Dean Corll made numerous references to white slavery, a market for people, and selling kids to pornographers.

Two years after the end to killings and the confessions of Brooks and Hunley the Houston Police Department found a large stash of pornographic pictures and films. Some of the boys were as young as eight years old. It was confirmed that many of these victims were from the Houston Heights neighborhood. Eleven of those appeared to have been known and identified victims of the Candy Man.

This raised again the question of whether or not Corll actually had been involved in human trafficking. The material did lead to the arrest of five people in Santa Clara, California. Corll had told Brooks he was going to send the two teenagers he had initially discovered him with to California to be photographed. Another person who was uncovered by the discovery was Roy Ames. He owned the warehouse where the material had been found. The police had previously found the name Roy Ames on a card in Corll’s wallet. Yet nothing specific could be proved, and the police dropped pursuing a direct link to the murderers. They felt that the families of his victims had suffered enough, and this is certainly true. Yet truth is often inconvenient, and the fact that those links were not pursued in an official investigation is itself suspicious when the crimes themselves were so despicable and treacherous.
​
Deep in the heart of Texas.

Oil, gasoline, cars, highways, suburbs. All of it came to Houston and the state of Texas at large in a multi-decade ejaculatory gush of expansion and industrial strength decadence that marked the first big oil boom in the state, a spill that lasted from 1901 on into the 1940s.

It started on January 10, 1901 when the Lucas No. 1 well at Spindletop, near Beaumont, discharged its load in a spasm of pent-up fury. Copious amounts of oil flew one hundred feet up into the air. Workers couldn’t even get the well capped and regulate the flow until nine days later. They’d hit the jackpot and the state was forever transformed, fertilized by the crude.

​Just seven years before, when people had been drilling for water, they had discovered oil by accident at the Corsicana field in 1894. It was the precursor to what was to come.

The railroads had already laid their tracks across Texas in the latter decades of the 19th century. Speculators came in on the iron horses and established themselves on the ancient land. The land around the bay of what is now Galveston had once been the home of the Akokisa people, now believed to be gone forever, and the Karankawa tribe who almost shared the same fate.

Some of the early towns in Texas never made it either. Some just hadn’t been lucky enough to have a railroad line built near them when they were getting started. In those days there was a tendency for people to up and move their home base closer to the new railway lifelines. Texas was so big, there was plenty of room. The train service became a major boon to the ranchers, cowboys and farmers who could now ship their goods back to markets outside the state.

The plentiful stores of petroleum hidden underneath the ground, once tapped, wrought a massive tableau of change across Texas, effecting its destiny and the destiny of the nation in turn. Those who made their livings as prosperous ranchers and farmers were taken down a notch in the social hierarchy, as the prospectors, wildcatters, and oil industry men came to do a proverbial keg stand at their derricks, guzzling down the profits. They were now making more money than the meat men.

Corporate development, corporate wealth, corporate politics all came into the area once those dollar signs started popping up in their minds. Money making schemes abounded, and those schemes became incorporated. With the influx of capital small towns grew into gargantuan cities, and companies that had started off as mom-and-pop shops turned into multinational conglomerates. Fortunes were made and evens those who weren’t directly on the payroll had reason to prosper. Ample liquor and prolific prostitution came on to the scene to service money men who were working hard to get gasoline to the service stations.

As the prospect of becoming a high roller flashed inside the dollar bill part of the brain among those who were already at work in the oil industry for other firms in other parts of the country. Those who seized the opportunity quit the jobs that had given them there bread and butter to form new outfits in competition with the people who’d formerly had them on the payroll. Joseph S. Cullinan had worked as a manager for Standard Oil and had built the first modern refinery on the western side of the Mississippi River. When Spindletop started to gush he had the foresight to partner with Arnold Schlaet, a businessman from New York who put up some of the initial money to grease the wheels of economic salvation. They got some more money from former Texas governor James S. Hogg, whose surname, among whatever other qualities he had, fit him for the job. A governor named Governor Hogg is the kind of governor people are liable to elect in the state of Texas. A new company was formed and they planted themselves in Beaumont. As the company grew, they went to Houston, some 90 miles west. The company did so well that others in the oil business started flocking to the area. Houston became the center of the industry in Texas, and in many ways, in all of America. The Texas Fuel Company started by Cullinan got bought out by the Texas Company, and later renamed themselves Texaco. Janis Joplin ended up being the daughter of a Texaco engineer, and grew up in nearby Port Arthur.

Several companies could work the Spindletop well at once. Another few companies tapping into the earths natural wealth joined forces and became the Gulf Oil Corporation. They were later bought out and became Chevron. Another outfit that became known as the Humble Oil Company later became Exxon, and are now not humble at all. Shell, and what became Marathon, all got in on securing their various pipelines of plunder in Texas.

During this same period Houston exploded in population. Sam Houston had founded the city in 1836, the same year as Chicago. Just like the windy city, it had become a major railroad hub. In 1860 there were close to 6,000 inhabitants. Over a thousand of those didn’t have rights as citizens, weren’t even thought of as humans, but enslaved. Houston would go on to become the fourth most populous city in America. Between its important geographic location on Galveston and Trinity Bay, and between the spewing gushers, the population started to double, triple, quadruple, and finally quintuple.

In a lecture on the history of the city preservationist Anna Mod noted how “the idea for the city was a great center of commerce at the confluence of two bayous. This is the larger Buffalo Bayou, and then the smaller White Oak. And it was chosen because this is where a shallow draft steamship could turn around, so goods could be offloaded.” These bayous being two slow moving rivers. Spoking out from the center of the city, at that place where the rivers met, Houston had initially been organized into a series of six wards that spoked and spiraled out from the city. When the freeways came along, and they came quickly, the original pattern was diced up into disconnected bits, isolating different parts of the city from one another.

The coastal plane is flat. Expansion is easy. Wealth made the area showcase for glitz. As the population of Houston had grown rapidly in the same years as the growth of the automobile industry, and as they produced the oil necessary for the cars, Houston became a major city of motoring. The streets and grids were tailored to the car, and highways came in to allow the quick travel of the businessmen between their offices and the new suburban homes.

Houston Heights was one of the earliest planned communities in Texas. It was already in progress as neighborhood in the decade before Spindletop blew its top. Houston Heights had an advantage over the people in the denser urban core, closer to the rivers, closer to the flooding. It sat 23 feet above the city proper in elevation. The waterways were a breeding ground for mosquitoes and yellow fever outbreaks ran rampant. Those who could afford to get away, wanted to get away, and one of the burbs they moved into was the Heights. It had started as a streetcar suburb, so workers could commute back and forth. They had all their own infrastructure, parks, streets, alleys, and utilities. It was a suburban dream.
​
A sprawling suburban dream. Even as early as the 1920s traffic snarls had become a major problem in Houston. The people getting rich off the oil were buying the cars and encouraging others to buy cars. The oil industry itself had become bedfellows with the mavericks of the automotive world, stroking each other underneath the sheets of commerce. Before cars, the main use for commercial oil had been in kerosene lamps. Gasoline was too explosive, too flammable, too volatile a byproduct, and had been discarded in the commercial process of making kerosene. With cars there was finally a use for gas, and the oil barons were quick to form symbiotic partnerships with the auto world, get in league with the asphalt makers paving the planet.

Bill Schadewald of the Houston Business Journal said that Mitchell’s goal was to “entice city slickers looking for far-flung suburban quality of life.” To achieve this aim, he created The Woodlands Corporation as an extension of Mitchell Energy & Development. Corporations and the suburban vision of America had achieved another unity.

Progress and the Interstate Highway System were viewed by most Americans as going hand in hand. Trucking overtook the railways as the means of shipping goods and the highway became the arteries of the nation’s economy. It also continued to represent mobility. It was the free way, but there was always a cost. The cost for those living in Houston was how dependent on cars just living in the city made them, whether they wanted to be or not.

Interstate-45 was one of the earliest interstate highways in the system, though it doesn’t go between any states. It’s a stretch of road connecting just above Houston and down into Galveston. It’s the shortest interstate in the United States at just under 285 miles and was the first freeway in the state. Later came the beltways.

Where Boston got Route-128 as the first beltway in the nation, Houston has at least what can be considered four beltway loops going around the city, each further out, each encompassing more and more suburbs and sidereal communities. These loops, Beltway 8 and the 610 Loop, made it easier for suburbanites to go to work so they could come back home and then get in there cars again to go to malls and shopping centers where they spent the money earned at work so they could fill up their homes with consumer goods. It was all fine and dandy if you had a car, but if you didn’t drive, you were out of luck. The developers didn’t take into account that anyone might not want to drive, and with more and more people coming into Houston for oil, for aerospace, and for the other businesses that serviced the needs of each, more people came from across the country in search of their slice of the pie. The lack of public transport reinforced dependency on cars, which was good for the oil industry, and what was good for the oil industry was good for the car industry. It was like a self reinforcing beltway loop cinched around the citizens, strangling them.

The Galleria, the third largest shopping mall in the United States, catered to this car crazy populace. Car culture, malls, suburbs all became synonymous with Houston’s identity. Too bad if you were a kid. Then you had to walk around the neighborhood, ride a bike, get a ride from parents or older siblings, or sometimes even hitchhike and get into a car with strangers. Some of those strangers didn’t have good intentions for a kid.

​Houston didn’t have any zoning laws, so sprawl was often unchecked. Expansion of roads or other infrastructure bifurcated low-income and minority community. Highways were also used as a means of segregation. Following World War II, the Second Ward had been a home to many Mexican-Americans. So-called urban renewal put a portion of I-69, the spur section down in Texas, right through it, clearing several blocks and forcing thousands of people out of their homes. The highway now blocked their ease of access to downtown.

The African-American’s who made up the majority of the Third Ward also felt the effects of similar displacements when freeways put their neighborhoods on the chopping block. Over 10,000 Black Americans were displaced in this area just for roadway construction. Many of those communities now exist within the various freeway loops, creating barriers to easy freedom of movement.

Freedmen’s Town, in the Fourth Ward, was a settlement for the first free black population in Houston. That town got split in the middle when I-45 was created. In the process close to a third of the buildings destroyed.
The Fifth Ward, also home to many African American and Mexican Americans was another community cleared in the name of progress, displacing its citizens, and cutting them off from downtown.

The downtown area itself suffered significant loss in the name of car culture. By the 1980s 35% of the area was used for parking lots.

If this sounds like a congested snarl, it is and it was. The suburbs enabled each area to be seemingly self-contained. Upper middle-class and affluent communities wouldn’t have to see or come in contact with the lower middle-class, the working class, and the working poor. Staying in the burbs allowed Texans to live the illusion of progress. The blight and slums were kept from spreading to the places where the good upstanding citizens lived. The downtrodden could be further ground down. This process was in its way, an essential, if unconscious, strategy towards keeping up the morale of the visionaries of technological progress who brought the space race to Texas in the 1960s.

While they were looking to the stars, a murderer spree went unnoticed in the dark underbelly of the oil barons blight.

.:. .:. .:.
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AMERICAN PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY... the story so far...
​
​Tail Pipe Fumes and the Limits to Oil: American Psychogeography Part VIII

Book End the Summer: American Hauntology Part VII (Modesto, California and American Graffiti)

O Superman, Where Art Thou? American Psychogeography part VI

THE SPRAWL (AMERICAN PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY IV)

ROADRUNNING THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL TEMPLATE (AMERICAN PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY III)

​THE NEW EXPLORATIONS OF A GEOTECHNICIAN

LOOKING BACKWARDS AT ROUTE 128: FROM SAINT BOTOLPH TO THE ROAD WARRIORS (AMERICAN PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY I)

American Psychogeography part 8: Dynamic Systems, The OPEC Embargo and Texas Oil

​One year before American Graffiti rolled into the drive-in movie theaters of the United States to celebrate cars and cruising, and to question the futures that awaited the assembled cast of characters, a major report was issued by a top world think tank that challenged the assumptions of the cult of progress.

The Limits to Growth was the brainchild of the Club of Rome, an informal group of intellectuals, business leaders, scientists and people from the political and economic spheres who banded together to help inform authorities and power holders around the world of the various dangers, problems, and predicaments facing humanity and the Earth.

It all started when an Italian industrialist named Aurelio Peccei gave a talk in 1965 about the rapid changes in science and technology happening around the globe. Alexander King was a British scientist who had worked as a government advisor. He wanted to meet up with Peccei and the two of them talked, later convening a group of individuals from various fields to discuss the possibility of creating “A tentative framework for initiating system wide planning of world scope.” After this meeting the Club of Rome was formed, named after the city where their first gathering had been held.

From the beginning the sciences of cybernetics and systems dynamics had a major influence on the work of the Club. Peccei knew that everything was connected. Poverty and ill-health often had correlations, as did urban blight with pollution and environmental degradation, which could be seen as connected to criminal behavior. Looking at these social problems as isolated from one another would not lead to lasting solutions. He noted that “It is this generalized meta-problem (or meta-system of problems) which we have called and shall continue to call the ‘problematic’ that inheres in our situation.”

In 1970 their first paper was issued, laying out a vision for the direction of their future work. This proposal was titled “The Predicament of Mankind: Quest for Structured Responses to Growing Worldwide Complexities and Uncertainties.”

The world had become more complex, and by that very complexity, much more fragile. One way to attempt to understand it all was through math. Systems dynamics had been founded by computer engineer, management theorists and systems scientists Jay Forrester Wright who had a long and storied career at M.I.T. His work tackled the way different objects in complex systems interacted with each other dynamically. He is also remembered for his work on developing the theoretical principles behind magnetic memory storage in computers. He applied his mathematical models to business in his first book Industrial Dynamics. He started work on his second book at the urging of Boston Mayor John F. Collins, who implored him to use his mathematical models to tackle social problems.

The result was a paper he titled “Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems” that he further developed in his book Urban Dynamics that came out in 1969. It showed something that the poor and dispossessed might have been able to tell him if he’d just asked: depressed economies were the result of shortages in job opportunities in relationship to the population. Yet his model also showed something of interest: low-income housing and lower property taxes might not solve the problem, but make it worse. Other things that would make the problem worse were getting rid of homes for industry and property redevelopment in general. Now, almost sixty years later it would interesting to run his experiments again. It seems that the popular policy around these issues have proven his point.

Forrester continued to tinker with his models, eerily reminiscent of the advanced mathematical equations used by Harry Seldon in Isaac Asimov’s science fiction series Foundation, that formed the basis for what Asimov termed psychohistory: the use of math to be able to determine future events. In 1971 Forrester’s next book World Dynamics came out, and the models used in this book became a major influence on the Club of Rome’s iconic project, The Limits of Growth.

Forrester’s model became the basis for the World3 computer simulation model used by Donella and Dennis Meadows for Limits to Growth. Donella Meadows was an environmental scientist who ended up working under Forrester as a research fellow. The man who would become her husband, Dennis Meadows, was another scientist deeply invested in systems theory. Dennis Meadows had a PhD in management from MIT and became the director for the Club of Rome there between 1970 and 1972. Two other co-authors worked on the book, Jørgen Randers, originally from Norway and William W. Behrens III. Randers was another product of the MIT Sloan School of Management and Behrens was an expert in energy who went to found a renewable energy company.

For the Limits to Growth report, the Club of Rome wanted to find out the following:
1. Gain insights into the limits of our world system and the constraints it puts on human numbers and activity.

2. Identify and study the dominant elements, and their interactions, that influence the long-term behavior of world systems.

3. To warn of the likely outcome of contemporary economic and industrial policies, with a view to influencing changes to a sustainable lifestyle.

​To gain these insights they used the World3 model to analyze food system, including agriculture and making of food products, the industrial system, population, non-renewable resources, and pollution. Each of these categories was looked at as a system that interacted with the other systems. When they did the work and ran the models on these systems, they came to the general conclusion that “in the absence of significant alterations in resource utilization and environmental destruction, it is highly likely that there will be an abrupt and unmanageable decrease in both population and industrial capacity.”

​At the time people scoffed at the idea of population decline. In the seventies the general public was more worried about a population explosion. The 1973 film Soylent Green played on these fears in its masterful dystopian take on what would happen when cities became overcrowded and people underfed. At the time of this writing it is starting to become apparent that the world population of humans is a declining.
American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused show how just eager teenagers were in the sixties and seventies to get it on with each other, to seek each other out, and make out. People hadn’t counted on the fact that there would be a sex drought among Millennials and Gen Z as one contributing factor to a lack of babies being born. The idea that people might forgo the experience of making love would have been unthinkable to many in the Boomer and Gen X cohorts. It would have been unthinkable to think their children would be using computers and computerized phones to find their partners instead of meeting them on the streets, at the library, at the bus stop, at a music show or being introduced by friends. As memories of the Great Depression were forgotten, and the Silent Generation parents who’d lived through it as children ignored, the notion that people would be unable to afford homes and children was a thought ignored as often as the elders. As were the crises foreshadowed by The Limits to Growth, crises in climate and pollution that would go on to form a contribute significant anxiety to large swathes of Millenials and members of Generation Z.
Limits to Growth charted among other things the point where non-renewable resources would peak and then peter out. The geologist M. King Hubbert had already shown how oil-production follows a bell shaped curve, and that after the maximum point of global oil extraction is hit, later called peak-oil, these stores of energy would thereafter decline forever. Hubbert worked at a research center in Houston, Texas for the Shell Oil Company and was paid to figure these kinds of things out for the big wigs with the big rigs.

As a caveat to the dire scenario of world resources actually being limited and that humans might want to cut back on consumption to save something for future generations, the authors of The Limits to Growth put the following three points in the introduction, as possible ways things could go:

1. If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.
2. It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future. The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential.
3. If the world’s people decide to strive for this second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chances of success.

After the expansion of the economy following World War II, America was on an upward ascent driving onwards into a bright and happy future of fully automated luxury capitalism. If there was ever a problem, scientists and engineers would come along and fix it, find a solution. Yet the first inkling that the factories would not churn out more and more and more, and that the fuels that kept the whole operation going, coal and oil, might not be subject to an eternally recurring top off, hit home with a fury in 1973 when countries in the Middle East decided to turn the screws on their enemies.
​
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had put the smack down on any countries that had supported Israel during the Yom Kippur war that lasted between October 6th to 25th 1973. They put the smack down on the United States. The OPEC Emargo meant that no petroleum exports were banned for the target nations. The countries involved also curbed their own oil production. This chess move precipitated the first major energy crisis faced by the United States. A time of reckoning ensued. The limits to growth were very real indeed.

One of the immediate results were the very long line of cars, all with their engines off, no idle fumes escaping into the atmosphere to fill the globe with greenhouse gases, all waiting to get whatever drop of gasoline they could.

The V8 engines that had been popular on the big bruiser cars of the American Graffiti era ate a lot of fuel. Even as shows like Happy Days, and later movies like Grease had kindled a way of nostalgia for a lost golden era in the postwar boom, drivers turned their attention to more economical vehicles such as Toyotas, Datsuns and Volkswagens. Plenty of car buffs remained, to be sure, but their muscle cars might have sat in driveways or garages until the weekend, unless they happened to be flush or already living from a silver spoon. Even for those with the means to buy gas at the more expensive prices, the gas wasn’t always there to be had.

America had its own sources of oil, with significant amounts in Texas, but by the early seventies they were already in decline. With the use of the “oil weapon” their was an immediate threat to national energy security. This precipitated a stock market crash in 1973-74. It wasn’t of the same caliber as the Great Depression but the cascading effects lasted for some years and continue to echo to the present day. It was the first oil crisis to face the world, but it would be far from the last. The oil crisis, in fact, would never again ever be over, even as the world of finance and market manipulation found ways to keep prices low.

The embargo was an opening salvo, a harbinger of the continuing mess fossil fuel would inflict across the land, to the detriment of the environmental from oil spills and practices like fracking, along with periodic bouts of economic uncertainty as the ups and downs of foreign relations dictated access to the crude. It’s a crisis that will continue to continue as the ever-dwindling flow gets slurped, good to the last drop in its final slurry.

With the ban in effect, the price of a barrel of oil quadrupled. Fuel rationings and stricter speed limits were just two immediate consequences as the government tried to grapple with the predicament. President Nixon thought a war might help things out. Just go over to the Middle East and get the stuff. The oil fields of Kuwait, Saudia Arabia, and Abu Dhabi were ripe for the plucking, if a last resort. Cooler heads and diplomacy won out, but meanwhile prices had already spiked and the average American was trying to make due.

If you happened to be in Texas though, and were an oil producer in Texas, the embargo could have been considered a boon. The next energy crisis of 1979 also played into the Texas hold’em hands of the state’s incipient oil barons. Previously they might have thought their wells were all tapped out, but now they had a reason to go back and keep on drilling for black gold, Texas tea.

Once again, the oilmen were happier than a tornado in a trailer park. Cowboys had put one major stamp on the culture of the state. The oil prospectors had put another. Texas was a big state and its big shots didn’t want to be limited. By 1976 when Dazed and Confused was set, a temporary reprieve was already underway. The OPEC Emargo had ended in 1974 and the crude had started to flow.

Refugees from the Rust Belt started pouring into Texas during the second half of the seventies and into the eighties. When the factories were closing up in the Midwest, there was still work to be found all around Houston.

The energy crisis would be revisited again in 1979 bringing even more wealth to Texas as they coaxed out the juice. So, in the meantime, why not party?
​
As the old song goes, “The oil wells / Are full of smells” deep in the dark heart of Texas.

.:. .:. .:.
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When Labor Day hits, Summer is in its final days. School is about to resume, or likely has already resumed. Getting sent back to school in the middle of August makes an atrocity out of the summer break, and it wasn’t always so. There was a time, some many decades ago now, in the sixties, seventies, and eighties when an endless summer stretched along in the days between its opening salvo when school let out the Friday before Memorial Day, and the kids and adolescents weren’t made to go back until the Tuesday morning following Labor Day.

Such a long proper summer is now a blurry memory, but it can be remembered, and one of the ways to remember it is through two films whose stories serve as fitting book ends the summer. There is only space to look at them one at a time, to see how they connect to culture at large, as well as the discontents of civilization. American Graffiti flows into Dazed and Cofused so well, they make a perfect pairing.

American Graffiti takes place over the course of a single night, Sunday, September 2, 1962. It was Labor Day weekend and after the festivities of the last weekend in summer, on the last full night of cruising on the strip, the kids at the heart of the story have to make peace with the idea that everything would be different in the morning. Relationships might end, some would be going off to college, others would be going back to school, and or for one older greaser, he would be going back to work.

Dazed and Confused also takes place over the course of a single night on the last day of school. May 28th, 1976, and the summer is spread before the teenagers in all of its glory. It’s set in a different era, but one that has been shaped by the ethos of the sixties. The main character in this film is just entering high school. Others have graduated and are just hanging about the younger crowd, like hot rodder John Milner does in American Graffiti. In the meantime there is plenty of partying to be done. Some of the characters are soul searching. Others are just searching for the next six pack and a bag of weed.

Both films are made up of episodic vignettes, monologues, dialogues, people talking. The plot is the activity of any group of teenagers and young adults. They are each slices of life that bookend what seems like an endless summer on the one hand, and the return to school, work and drudgery on the other.

American Graffiti is set in Modesto, California. Dazed and Confused takes place somewhere in Eastern Texas. Director Richad Linklater attended Huntsville Highschool growing up in the seventies, and the people he encountered in the halls inspired his characters, just as the culture of cruising and staying out all night driving around in cars during the late fifties and early sixties had made such a big impression on George Lucas.

Dazed and Confused was shot in Austin, the same place Linklater’s masterpiece of alternative street philosophy, Slacker, was filmed. American Graffiti was primarily shot in Petaluma and San Rafael, but Modesto was where Lucas had forged his drag racing memories. Both films have something of the dryness and heat of both the Texas and California landscape permeating their celluloid atmosphere.

Both films are saturated with such a strong sense of place, it is hard to ignore them. In the captured light of film they recreated these pivotal moments in each directors own coming-of-age story, and remain inseparable from the places they had lived, the people they had known. Teenage friends and pals and loves leave such deep impressions. They were able to transfer those impressions into stories that now live on in film, impressing in turn the lives and minds of so many people who have watched these movies across time. Each remain quintessential snap shots of crucial times in American life.

In American Graffiti viewers encounter a montage of story lines that showcase the way much of the boomer generation mated, met, and either stayed where they were, or moved on with their lives. It is also a homage to radio, rock and roll, and rods. Hot rods that is, and the cars and the music coming out of the radios in the cars are just as essential to the story as are the characters.

“Cruising was gone, and I felt compelled to document the whole experience and what my generation used as a way of meeting girls” Lucas explained.

Lucas considered the film a musical, but it was one where nobody had to sing. The title is a bit enigmatic, because even though the film has a gang of greasers known as The Pharaohs getting up to small time crime shenanigans, no one spray paints any walls or writes there name on anything. Lucas thought radio, and the rock and roll played over the airwaves, was America’s form of graffiti. It wasn’t scratches in the walls, but the colorful noise of tube amps and guitars, drums, and songs about summer and love that streamed into the tube amplified AM radios of the hot rods that was the way people communicated to each other. The DJ facilitated it all, a go between, who spun the right records, took call ins and dedications over the phone lines. These teen didn’t need dirty old walls. They had Wolfman Jack blasting the controls at border station XERB.

Lucas had long been fascinated with Wolfman Jack. He had even thought about making a documentary about him when he was college studying the cinematic arts, but it was one idea among many, and he didn’t follow through, but the voice of Wolfman and his appearance in the film is one of the quintessential glues making it a film of the ages.

Modesto, where the film is set and Lucas grew up, had another deep connection to rock and roll however, that made it primed to be a psychic reservoir for these modern American myths and legends. Modesto was the birthplace of rockabilly and the slap bass sound that resonated the leather clad souls of a generation of greasers, seeping into the collective American imagination.

​A brief look at what made it such a fertile place for one of the seeds of rock to be planted, can show the deep effects its geography has had on the psyche, and the roads that run through it.

Modesto, California sits in the rich farm land of the San Joaquin Valley. Once upon a time this had been the land of the Yokuts, a collective people made up of sixty-three different tribes who had been on the land anywhere from between 50,000 to 7,000 years ago. Three great rivers wound through the land making salmon fishing abundant for the many native villages tucked amid the trees and hills. Oaks were abundant and acorns were another food staple, along with elk and squirrel.

Meanwhile the Mono people lived along the upper part of Fresno County’s large rivers. In the San Joaquin Valley they were most fully established between Millerton Lake and Fullers Meadow, a thirty mile stretch, and again up further north along the Fine Gold and Willow creeks. The Mono also had places in the south along Kings river and its tributaries.

The Yokuts were, for the most part, peaceful. The valley was a paradise and their needs were met by natures simple abundance. Squabbles over resources were uncommon, though they did have to protect themselves from the big predator on the land, the grizzly bear. This Edenic existence began to erode when the Spaniards arrived in 1776 via two separate expeditions.

One of those expeditions was led by Franciscan missionary Father Francisco Garcés, who was sent into the area as a missionary when the Spanish King expelled the Jesuits. Even within the Christian faith their were turf wars and politics of zeal. Garcés was killed for his missionary efforts during an uprising of the Native Americans. He and the others who died became martyrs for the faith by the Catholic Church, and the Yokuts and Mono, for a time, held off enforced conversion.

European explorers and American trappers and gold miners were also making their way to the area, if not to convert the locals than to convert the local resources into filthy lucre. Continuing disturbances, displacements and disintegration of the original inhabitants ensued, sped up by the introduction of biologically unfamiliar diseases. It is estimated that by 1900 close to ninety percent of all the Native Americans in California were gone. The Gold Rush had mined their lands and the tree rush had left the land logged. Those Indians who remained were for the most part landless. In 1902 the Feds stepped in and created “Rancherias” these being different from Reservations, and usually had less than 300 acres.

During the late eighteen hundreds Modesto was founded at a beautiful spot in the San Joaquin Valley. The suffering and misery of the first peoples was pushed aside in favor of California dreaming. The town started as a railroad stop on the line connecting Sacramento to Los Angeles in 1870. It was founded by the Central Pacific Railroad, but wasn’t a company town. Railroad man Mark Hopkins Jr. suggested the name should come from his banker buddy William C. Ralston, capital being ever important. Yet Ralston was not quite sure he wanted the honor. Another railroad employee spoke up in Spanish and said that Ralston was a modest, humble man, modesto. Central Pacific Railroad co-founder, Charles Crocker thought Modesto was a fine name for a town, and Ralston still got honored for his modesty, and his finances.

​By 1884 the town had grown to over 1,000 residents. Tuolumne River was nearby allowing the transport of goods by combination of barge and train. Dams were put in to provide irrigation and it became vegetable producing powerhouse and bread basket. In 1900 the population had increased to 4,500 and by the time George Lucas was growing up there in the 1950s on a street named Ramona, it had reached close to 37,000.
But before Lucas had arrived on the scene, another force was at work in that small, far away corner of the galaxy. Hillbilly siblings and entertainers the Maddox Brothers and Rose had settled in the town during the Great Depression when it was as little known as Tatooine.

n 1937 KTRB had only been on the air for four years when a style that came to be known as the “Hillbilly Boogie” blasted out from its towers and into the receivers and speakers of people all across town. Those listeners might not have known they were witnessing a moment in the birth of the cool that would find a devout audience among the oil stained mechanics and white T-shirt wearing, working class misfits who would go on to become known as greasers. A defining moment for a crucial sound was transmitted through the aether, changing the trajectory of American futures forever.

The Maddox Brothers and their sister hadn’t been in town all that long before getting the chance to play their music on the air. The Maddox family found themselves a bit ahead of the Dust Bowl refugees, the Okies who fled the bitter wrath of dry drought and the deadly wind that kicked up the dirt driving people from their settled homes and on to California. Where the Okies had fled from the dust bowl in one of the many waves of internal migration North America is subject to, the Maddox family had come from the town of Boaz, Alabama. If you are going to be in a hillbilly band you might as well be from a city like Boaz, Alabama. The Biblical name, the location in Etowah County, former home of the Muscogee (Creek) tribes and then the Cherokee, the perception of southern humidity and sweat in the long summers. They had left this place for the western lands in 1933. They had fled from their harsh lives as sharecroppers after one particular flood destroyed a seasons worth of work.

They were a very musical family, and as they worked, so they sang and played. They might have left their home state behind, but they brought the hillbilly sound with them, though not quite to Beverly Hills. Out west they continued to work the land, the new land, as roving fruit and vegetable pickers. Along their way they passed through Arizona, they went up to Washington state, and settled down finally in Modesto after many dawn-to-dusk days of full hard work.

It’s one of the constants of American experience that relocation leads to a remixing of sound. The influence of something taken from one area finds a new home in another bioregion and grows into something else. The Maddox Brothers and Rose were in on the early growth of the hillbilly boogie genre. It cam from the fusion of the boogie-woogie piano style that had been making the rounds in the early twentieth century. By the 1930s the style had a reached a crescendo of popular mania, from there it started fusing into other styles, such as early country western music where it became the hillbilly boogie. The hillbilly boogie would in turn be one of the key elements for the emergence of rockabilly, and at the heart of rockabilly is the slap bass sound.

As early as that first radio appearance Fred Maddox had been using the “slap bass” technique on his upright. They were one of the many transmission points that fused the boogie woogie with the hillbilly music they had been steeped in down in Alabama. Another influence on their sound was the western swing that had just started getting popularized by Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys on the 50,000 watt KVOO radio station in Tulsa, Oklahoma where they had a regular gig. But the necessary ingredient for rockabilly and that driving propulsive rhythm from the slap bass. Fred is credited as the one who started jamming his thumb down on strings and snapping them hard with his fingers for a wild propulsive sound.

As with much of the best music, sometimes it’s the people who don’t really know how to play who make the best songs. Don Maddox explains his brother Fred’s technique. “The reason he did a slap bass is because he didn’t know how to play the bass, and all he was doing was playing rhythm anyhow, but he didn’t know the notes so he’d just slap the bass for the rhythm part and everybody thought he put on a great show and thought he was the best bass player there was.”

His bass is now displayed at the Experience Music Project in Seattle. In The Blue Moon Boys: The Story of Elvis Presley’s Band by Ken Burke and Dan Griffin, they quote Fred’s widow Kitty as saying that the museum “wanted his bass because they believe he might have hit the first note of rock ‘n’ roll on it.”

Don Maddox said that “maybe we did” invent rockabilly, “but back then we didn’t call it rockabilly music. We were just straight hillbilly. But we did all kinds of songs and Fred did that rockabilly bass. It wasn’t called rockabilly bass at the time. It was just something he done.”

Kitty further recalled how her late husband had “wanted to be in the limelight. He would kick his bass and holler and ride his bass across the stage. He’d do most anything. And it was funny.”
​
Sure sounds like the kind of antics associated with rock and roll, and Modesto and the San Joaquin was where they got their start in the limelight. In 1939, they entered a hillbilly band competition at the centennial California State Fair up in Sacramento, where they played “Sally Let Your Bangs Hang Down.” It was only a hop and skip from there that they went on to play one of the storied venues in the history of country music, the 97th Street Corral in LA. Nobody called it country back then, it was just hillbilly music.

Rose Maddox said, “We were called hillbilly singers–not country–then. No, none of this country music then. People just called us hillbilly... People tell me that I was one of the first women to sing what I sang–country boogie. I guess I was. There was no rock ‘n’ roll in those early days, before 1955. Only country boogie. My brothers also played that way. We called it country then.”
​
It was an essential ingredient in the stew that become rock and roll and rockabilly. The family band became stars throughout the 1940s and 1950s with record deals on 4 Star Records and Columbia. They had disbanded in 1956, but by 1958 George Lucas was in high school and Wolfman Jack was operating from the border blaster station XERB on 1090 kHz from Rosarito Beach, Baja California in Mexico. The station was parked on a clear channel. No other stations used that frequency. The signal was so strong it could reach all across North America and into Canada on a good night. Being in Mexico, the border stations didn’t have to follow the power limits and regulations of the FCC, and as the signal bounced across the ionosphere it sparked up the minds of teenagers hungry for rock music. DJ Wolfman Jack delivered, recording his programs on tape in San Diego and Los Angeles. Those tapes were then sent down across the border and played into the ionosphere on endless summer nights.

George Lucas was a teenager during Wolfman Jacks heyday, and he had no problem picking up XERB, forming a bass line/base line soundtrack of rhythm, blues and rock and roll as he souped up hot rods and dreamed of being a race car driver.

​During World War II the rationing of consumer goods was just another fact of life. The US Government was a bit hung up on the idea of rationing gasoline. Since the first Model T Ford rolled out the plant doors in 1908, on through the 1920s and 30s, the automobile had insinuated itself into American life and consciousness. Cutting off the gas supply that made for happy motoring would be bad for national morale, but soon it wouldn’t matter. Part of Germanys strategy in the war was to aim their weaponry at oil tankers on the US East Coast and in the Gulf of Mexico. The military effort was the priority, and as supplies dwindled, the rationing of gas for those at home ensued. Then there was the rubber shortage, contributing to a dearth of tires. The simplest way to get by with these restrictions was to drive less. People were encouraged to take the bus and use other public transportation. Driving just for fun would have to wait.

Commercial car production hit a major stop sign after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Civilian car production halted completely between February 1942 and late 1945. Factories had shifted gears to build military tanks, jeeps, and airplanes. Civilians were issued gas coupons and stickers in an elaborate fuel rationing scheme. People were given a class depending on how essential their job was, allotting critical workers more of the petroleum juice. Others were expected to carpool. Even with such efforts, by January 1944 a major shortage had hit the nation. In California there was not much gas at all. There was none in Sacramento, just seventy-five miles north of Modesto. If there was an emergency, people just had to tough it out and make do because there wasn’t even any gas for the emergency vehicles.

After the war was over, it didn’t take long for the trend to reverse. Americans wanted to drive again, and in the 1950s they shifted gears once again, going into overdrive. People were buying cars and they wanted to cruise, to drive just for the joy of it, doing nothing at all.

Hot rodding had started in earnest when soldiers coming back from the war needed something to do. Many had mechanical skills from working on the machines of death. With various kinds of Model T and Model A Fords available they turned their attention to customizing their cars, chopping the tops down, lowering the vehicles closer to the road by the cutting the springs, and putting on big chrome pipes that made the engines crackle and roar. As their sons and nephews came of age, new motorheads wanted in on the action. These teenagers had started to multiply after horny soldiers had returned home, after all, and when they were old enough to drive, they really wanted a taste of that notional freedom.

Purses had started filling up again in the post-war boom, and people wanted to put the harsh memories of the Great Depression and war years behind them. Purse strings tended to get looser. Gas was cheap, costing anywhere between twenty and thirty cents a gallon. Of course, people only made an average of between $3,300 and $4,200 a year. But considering the restrictions of the previous decade, it was a bonanza.
​
Drive-in movies, which had first appeared in the 1930s, started to proliferate in the fifties as did drive-in burger joints and diners. Fried foods, booming jukeboxes, and cute carhop waitresses, sometimes on roller skates, lured people in to hang out and spend money, all underneath the warm glow of neon lights. These drive-in restaurants became hubs for the gearheads, racers, and car buffs who wanted to show off their machines and hang out in between rolling up and down the main streets of America.

The midcentury modern aesthetic was also at work in car design. What can now be considered classic styles were modeled on the sleek look of airplanes and fighter jets. Chrome tailfins and powerful V8 engines made going up and down the strip in one of these beasts an exciting and stylish way to spend the evenings. The V8s also caused a ruckus by encouraging the illegal past time of street drag racing.

Hot rod and car cruising culture had spread throughout the US in those years and was in full swing when George Lucas was growing up. He got hit with the bug of Kustom Kulture that had a major hot spot in Southern California. Even though Modesto was in the central valley, it wasn’t insulated from these widely embraced pastimes.

When it came time for Lucas to make American Graffiti, his homage to Wolfman Jack, border radio, cruising and rock and roll, it made sense to set the coming-of-age film to be set in his own hometown. The loose storyline uses aspects of his own life and people from his life as the basis for the characters.

​The plot of the movie follows a group of teens and some maybe slightly-older hot rodders, as they spend the evening cruising the streets of Modesto from dusk till dawn. Steve Bolander, placed by Ron Howard, meets up with his friend Curt Henderson, played by Richard Dreyfus, at Mels Drive-In, the popular spot to a grab “a double Chubby Chuck, a Mexicali Chili Barb, two orders of French fries, and two cherry Cokes,” as the bespectacled nerd character, Toad, played by Charles Martin Smith, does while trying to impress the girl Debbie, played by Candy Clark.

​Steve goes out with Curt’s sister Laurie, played by Cindy Williams, and the three of them go to the sock hop, the first dance of the year at high school. Steve and Curt have graduated and are both due to take a plane out to the east coast and go to college in the morning. As such it is Laurie and Steve’s last night together before he leaves town. He puts his foot in his mouth time after time, talking about how he thinks they’ll be better off seeing other people, while at the same time he still tries to get laid when he takes her out to one of the towns make out spots. Laurie won’t have it.

Meanwhile Curt has caught a glimpse of a blonde haired “goddess” who mouthed the words “I love you” to him from her white Ford Thunderbird. He can’t stop thinking about her for the rest of the night and contemplates staying in town. As he goes around town after they had all split up after the sock hop, he gets unwittingly dragged into a night of hijinks and shenanigans with the local hoods, a greaser gang known as the Pharaohs.

Everywhere they go, the radio is on, and Wolfman Jack howls through the aether and into their cars, playing classic sets of genuine rock, doo wop, and R&B. After Curt is able to shake loose of the Pharaohs, he makes his way to a radio station on the edge of town where he hopes to be able to put a word in with the DJ and send a message to his mystery woman. He arrives at the place and is able to get. A DJ is in the booth and lets him come hang out. He is playing tapes and on the tapes is the voice of Wolfman Jack. Curt doesn’t know if the guy at the station is Wolfman Jack or not. The DJ says he just relays things and plays the tapes, mimicking the real practice Wolman used with XERB. He says he would do his best to get his message on before the end of the night. Curt is leaving when he turns around to look into the booth and sees the DJ talking into the mic for once, and it is the voice Wolfman Jack. His appearance in the film as himself, and with his constant chatter on the radios throughout the movie, makes him the real star of the show. It was a conceit on Lucas’s part to have him broadcasting from Modesto, but it is also fitting. Some remnant of the slap bass of Fred Maddox must have charged the city because the film and its radiocentric soundtrack became another key moment in the history of rock and roll, this time reviving music, well over a decade old at that point, as part of a wave of hauntological nostalgia the movie helped usher to fruition.

Another story line involves the boldest, baddest hot rodder in town, John Milner, played by Paul Le Mat. He is looking to pick up girls as he cruises up and down the streets in his yellow, chopped down, five-window deuce coupe. Early in the film a group of girls are in a car next to him, and give him a run for his money. One of them says her sister Carol, played by Mackenzie Phillips, will ride with him. He didn’t know who Carol was, but he was happy to get a girl in the car him. She manages to get in the passenger seat before he realizes he’s been duped. She’s a talkative twelve-year old who proceeds to manipulate him and make every effort to not get out of the car. He takes on a kind of a begrudging older brother babysitter approach, but by the end of the night, she’s grown on him, and they come to a truce.

Another hot rodder who doesn’t live in Modesto has cruised over to their town to try and find Milner for a drag race. This hot head is named Bob Falfa and is played by a young Harrison Ford wearing a cowboy hat. After an evening where the characters variously try to score hard liquor, try to score sex, try to score money by robbing an arcade at a mini golf place, and otherwise just wonder up and down the streets of Modesto in their cars, causing minor trouble, pranking each other, and doing whatever they can to have a cheap thrill, they gather on the outskirts of town to watch the showdown between Milner and Falfa. By this point Laurie has ditched and dumped Steve and is in Falfa’s car, hoping to make him jealous. It works and by the next day, after a near fatal accident, all their lives had changed.
​
Lucas had his own crash that turned him away from a life as a race car driver as he had dreamed of in his own high school days. His father had given him a yellow Autobianchi Bianchina, thinking it would be safer than the motorcycle his son liked to zip around on. But soon after the car was in his possession he put a racing belt in, and got the engine and souped up for higher speeds, and started taking it out to regional races, where he was able to make some wins. One speedy night when he was making into the ranch where he grew up, a Chevy Impala broadsided him, the racing belt snapped, he flew out, and his car hit a walnut tree. The wreck beat him up pretty bad and he was rushed to the hospital while still unconscious, later waking up to bruised lungs and several broken bones. The accident didn’t dissipate his love of cars, but when he came home from the hospital, his brush with death had turned him off from becoming a race car driver.

In a piece for ABC 10 news in Sacramento, reporter Eric Escalante talked to Modesto locals about all the things George Lucas got right about their town, even though it was filmed in Petaluma, North of San Francisco. Escalante quotes publisher Chris Murphy who said that, “The people hanging out, the walking, the coming up at the lights, the drag racing when the lights turn green - all of that was a very frequent common occurrence here.”

Escalante also reports on how the use of Mel’s Drive-in burger joint in the film was a tribute to the Burges Drive-in on Highway 99, formerly U.S. 99, the 452 mile south-to-north road that runs through the central valley. Highway 99 itself is sometimes called the Main Street of California.

The Dewey Highschool name used in the film was a sit in for the real Thomas Downey Highschool that Lucas attended, and the school colors were the same, blue and white. The director snuck in numerous other references to his hometown throughout the film, including the name of the street he grew up on, Ramona Avenue. This happens when Milner tricks Carol into telling her the name of the street she lives so he can try and take her home.

There is plenty of objectionable sexism in the movie itself, portrayed in full realism with the attitudes of the time. As a work of cinematic art, it has many striking moments. It’s a dark film showing the compromises the Boomer generation would be forced to face, like any generation faced with choices. In their time there wasn’t much to do but ride the streets in the evening, guzzling gas, guzzling alcohol, and court each other. The shadow of World War II and Korea continued to hang, coated over with a veneer of consumerism. The fight against communism would draw them all into its destructive orbit, leaving none of them untouched even if they dodged the draft as Vietnam loomed.

It idolizes the past, but when it shows the pictures of the four main male characters at the end, it showed the end game of drinking and the draft, its losers, and its dodgers. The vibrant graffiti of music painting the airwaves was still remembered, but the voices of those lost linger as the credits roll. What happened to the female protagonists? Lucas didn’t bother checking in with the future of Laurie, Carol or Debbie. Did they marry and divorce? Become home makers or join in on second wave feminism and go out to find careers of there own?

The premiere of American Graffiti happened just a few months before there was another major premiere that would leave a lasting impression on the 1970s. That “premiere” was of the OPEC oil embargo, and the precipitation of a major financial crisis deeply tied to the worlds dwindling stores of ancient sunlight in the form of fossil fuel energy.

It didn’t stop people from continuing to cruise. Only now, hanging over the cars that raced down the main drags of main street America was the sense that the happy days were over. If postwar America had represented some kind of simpler time, some kind of quixotic age of innocence, the notion that the juice that kept it all running might sometime run out, hung over people’s heads like the sword of Damocles. People had gotten all hopped up and hyped up about cars from the film Lucas made, but all the idling would have to come to a stop as the needle moved ever closer towards empty.

Wolfman Jack used to sign off his stints on the radio like with the catchphrase, “baby, keep your tail-lights blinkin’, and rev your engine every chance you get, ‘cause da Wolfman is always here to fill your tank and make your head feel goooooooood. Awww-wowowow ooooooooooooooooooooo!”

As the people lined up at the gas stations, the only thing they had left to believe in was the gospel of rock and roll. The songs he played were now oldies, as the American Graffiti soundtrack went triple platinum, helping usher in a wave of nostalgia as America looked backwards at what was lost. Ron Howard had graduated from his role as Opie in America’s own small town of the mind, Mayberry, to his fumbling towards adulthood in American Graffiti, and then reprised as a high school innocent in Happy Days, never quite attaining the stature of greaser cool achieved by the Fonz. John Travolta became a teenage heartthrob in Grease giving further allure to the fading celluloid dreams of drive in movies, car races and the magic of rock and roll.
​
Hippiedom was slowly slipping away, and the harder garage rock sounds of proto-punk were starting to surface. Drugs, sex and alcohol were easy to find and all three could be used as a Quaalude of the mind to forget the fading good ole days when the USA had reigned supreme. Broken soldiers had come home from a failed war and the seventies cruised into their daze of confusion.

.:. .:. .:.
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