Book End the Summer

American Hauntology part 7: American Graffiti, Rockabilly and the End of Cheap Oil 

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.

FROM THE MONO TO MODESTO

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.

NATURAL BORN ROCKABILLERS

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.

CRUISIN' ON MAIN

​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.

AMERICAN HAUNTOLOGY

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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