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Songs for the New Depression
Bette Midler’s album Songs for the New Depression was released in January 1975. Typical of its glum times was the sour humor of “Mr. Rockefeller”, about a delusional woman trying to reach the billionaire from her perch in a phone booth. Nobody’s idea of a great song, but it has a sting of truth; she’s been wiped out by the recession, says she’s broken down, not feeling so good, and is hanging on the line because she’s finally down to her last dime. For millions of people, the album’s provocative title was the bitter truth: The biggest, baddest recession since World War II left the country reeling. Few saw it coming. Inflation was out of control. Confidence in the future plunged lower than it had ever gone, even in the depths of the Great Depression. After postwar decades of so much mass prosperity that many of our “leading thinkers” had just about grown ashamed of it, the Great Invisible Guiding Hand of Capitalism gave America a merciless slap upside the head. And man, it hurt.
Only the year before, the leadership of the country united to dump the most hated Republican of his day, someone who had won great political victories only a few years before. The new president was widely derided as an ineffectual buffoon. His attempts to beat inflation by handing out Whip Inflation Now buttons became an instant joke, and helped make him a lasting punchline of ineptitude. Our luck overseas was no better. America’s seemingly endless war finally came to an end on his watch, the way we’d always dreaded it would: disastrously, humiliatingly. Images of US foreign policy failure filled every television screen in the electrified world.
I have a late 1974 paperback “coffee table” book, now a crumbling stack of pages, called “Better Times: The Indispensable Guide to Beating Hard Times.” It had some good, practical advice for people who’d never had to cut expenses. It had earnest introductions from Russell Baker, a humorist along the lines of Jean Shepard; Studs Terkel, an ancient lefty recycled as a colorful old labor union man; and Nicholas von Hoffman, one of the top liberal writers of his day, but also a nonconformist who did his own thinking. Averaged out, their advice amounted to: capitalism is entering its final stage of crisis. Stock some food and learn how to sew.
Inflation didn’t come out of nowhere. A distant regional conflict resulted in drastic increases in the price of oil. A combination of bad weather and poor planning raised the cost of food. It hadn’t happened quite this way before, but it would happen again.
Inflation had an especially devastating effect on the automobile industry. The new expression “sticker shock” conveyed a very unpleasant novelty. Conflicting new federal demands added greatly to the cost. Cars were required to be safer—which generally meant more weight; they were required to start shaping up, mileage-wise, which generally meant less weight; and by law, they had to burn fuel more cleanly, which required expensive materials like platinum. Taken individually, each of these measures was popular, but car prices were driven up inexorably.
That’s why cars began sprouting so many phony upper-class design cues, like “formal” squared-off rooflines, opera windows, fake plastic woodgrain on the instrument panel, and velour loose-pillow seats. These were cheap, tragicomic gestures towards the kind of luxury that might conceivably have justified these sharply higher new car prices.
Other than Jaws, a true phenomenon, the era’s movie hits were often cynical views of American life, like Robert Altman’s Nashville or the dystopian Rollerball. The year’s big foreign film, Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (outside of the US, The Twentieth Century) ended in what amounted to a singing commercial for Communism.
Fact is, a few things did seem to be better back then, like our relationship with Moscow. The final flight of Apollo hardware was officially called the Apollo Soyuz Test Program. Orbital rendezvous with the Soviets, and weightless televised handshakes, coincided with the new policy of détente. Moscow distributed millions of packs of a special edition cigarette, Soyuz-Apollo, to commemorate the occasion. It was the final hurrah of the Space Race, and it would be America’s last manned space flight for nearly six years.
The New York Times was far from the only newspaper running articles on the theme “Capitalism in Crisis.” Big business, almost the definition of conservatism at the time, said we needed to cut wages, create a synthetic fuels industry, and automate basic manufacturing. But the majority intellectual view was to accept that capitalism was washed up. With the Bicentennial only a year away, the consensus was the political future would soon go to socialism in bold colors, a stronger, left-ier program of income equalization. It just had to.
Looking back now, we see other glimpses of what the future looked like from there. NBC was putting together a weekly live comedy show, which one of its creators, Dick Ebersol, would call “A post-Watergate victory party for the Woodstock generation.” That spring, Lorne Michaels and Chevy Chase met for the first time in a ticket line for the Los Angeles Film Festival. Both young men were veterans of the kind of routine, inoffensive network variety shows that they’d later mock satirically. George Carlin delivered Saturday Night Live’s first monologue, telling SNL’s first joke, about hashish.
Back to that Bette Midler album. Today, Songs for the New Depression is remembered, if at all, for a song called “Buckets of Rain,” a high-spirited duet with Bob Dylan. As memories of the Seventies started to fade, people wanted to forget the hard times. Soon they would. Few lessons were learned. Here’s my lesson:
We’ve been here before.
Published in General
People who work for the government don’t see it that way. People that don’t work won’t see it that way.
This was the period when the terms “sunbelt” and “rust belt” came into vogue. They were sketchily defined, but you didn’t want to be on the rust belt side of things.
Citizen’s Band radio had been around since the dawn of the Sixties, but the OPEC boycott really brought it to much greater public attention. Radio Shack (remember them?) headlined ads, “CB Helps You Find Gas!” Truckers were popular heroes for maybe the first time, and families driving the Interstates listened, fascinated, as the truck drivers communicated with each other in a strange code, often with a Southern or Appalachian inflection in their voices.
We’ve got ourselves a convoy…
I suspect that’s where Joe received all his 18-wheeler experience…
The first time I ever visited your long-time workplace, Convoy was the only picture in progress in the entire (enormous!) back lot. Mighty MGM had come down a long way in the world.
Note something in the copyright line about the internationalization of film: It was an EMI production–that is, British. I’d like to have been a fly on the wall for that pitch meeting. “Well, guv, it’s about a group of lorry drivers on the US national motorways…”
On behalf of all white-haired, elderly Catholics from the northeast, I’d like to declare that Biden has never been anything but a blowhard, an embarrassment to his region, his religion, and his generation.
Two technical improvements that happened in movies in and around 1975:
“Platter” film feed and take-up systems automated film projection, making multiplexes possible. One projectionist could now run shows in two theaters, soon to be 4, eventually to be many more. The economics of multiplexes could never have penciled out if every screen needed its own operator.
Stereo sound came back to lots of neighborhood theaters, great for rock concert films and lavish spectacles. There’d been a stereo boom (literally) in the Fifties when Cinemascope was first competing with television, but it was expensive and a bit of a pain for studios and theaters. That’s because it was magnetic, thin strips of recording tape glued to the film. Each had to be recorded in real time, so a lab could only turn out a handful of finished film prints a day. Eventually it faded from use. The projection booths I first worked in often still had the old Fifties amplifiers, all tubes, of course. They hadn’t been used in maybe 15 years.
In 1975 Dolby marketed a method of using the usual optical soundtrack, the thing that looks like a squiggle, for stereo. It basically cost the studios nothing to add stereophonic sound. Theaters loved it.
Also, my favorite, “Beer.”
There’s a great scene in Repo Man satirizing that trend.
I graduated from high school in 1975 and this is the first time I’ve ever heard of it as far I can remember.
I’m not surprised. Midler was never really a rock star but a cabaret singer/pop star, a younger, brass-ier Streisand.
I’ve sometimes thought that some of the success of turn-of-the-Eighties shows like Dallas and Dynasty was due to audiences wanting to forget about recession-era penny-pinching, and celebrate dreams of pure decadent wealth.
Lifestyles of the Rich and Shameless.
In my neck of the woods where French wasn’t understood to well we used to call them Leeee Cars. We didn’t know the “e” was short. They always seemed exotic to me. From France! Ooohh, La, La… Weren’t they horribly made cars, always breaking down? Who would trust a Frog to manufacture a car? Not really known for their automotive prowess.
I remember generic “Beer” in the 70’s. They came in plain white cans. Saddest looking beer can ever. Unfortunately was too young to try it. That and Billy Beer.
If was very popular in Russia, I am told. Russia then produced at least one long-haul truck driving movie of its own, in response to Convoy I would guess.
By admittedly low USSR standards, the Seventies were pretty good to most Russians. The days of the communal apartment were over. Everyone had a TV, and by the end of the decade, a color TV. Car ownership became much more widespread. Mind you, it still wasn’t a society or a system that many Ricochet readers would find attractive, but Seventies Russians appreciated the absence of the dreaded two a.m. knock at the door. They’d known far worse.