Rock me on the water 1974 : the year Los Angeles transformed movies, music, television, and politics

It's a bold claim: in one year, 1974, Los Angeles shaped America's popular culture more than ever before (or since). But Brownstein, a CNN political analyst and journalist, backs up his claim with evidence. The films Chinatown, The Godfather Part II, and The Conversation were all released in that year. Joni Mitchell released her now-classic album Court and Spark. On the small screen, CBS became a ratings powerhouse when it put several of its hit comedies (including All in the Family and M*A*S*H ) on a single night. And, in politics, Jerry Brown was elected governor of California--a young and ambitious politician who would bring in sweeping changes. These examples barely scratch the surface: the depth of this book is quite impressive. Brownstein knits together the threads of history to show that, for the first time in 1974, politics and entertainment were not separate things, that the line between the two was blurred almost to the point of irrelevance. An insightful, expertly written book.

CNN political analyst Brownstein (The Second Civil War) argues in this sweeping cultural history that L.A. in 1974 exerted more influence over music, movies, and television "than it ever had before, or would again." Brownstein highlights Chinatown, Shampoo, and Nashville as examples of the edgier, more socially relevant films Hollywood made in the brief window between the collapse of the studio system and the rise of blockbusters. In music, the Eagles personified the "easy-riding, hard-partying soundtrack to Los Angeles's golden hour," Brownstein writes, while musicians such as Jackson Browne followed a circuitous path to success. Brownstein credits CBS for revolutionizing TV with shows (All in the Family, M*A*S*H, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show) that dealt with contemporary social issues and appealed to a wide demographic. Married couple Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda's anti--Vietnam War activism and Jerry Brown's rise to the governorship, meanwhile, illuminate the links between L.A.'s political and cultural scenes. Enriched by interviews with the period's luminaries, including Warren Beatty and Linda Ronstadt, this astute and wide-ranging account shows how L.A. led the U.S. into an era when the 1960s counterculture became mainstream. (Mar.)

Atlantic senior editor Brownstein recounts the annus mirabilis that produced some of the most memorable songs, films, and TV shows in pop-culture history. In a book that neatly brackets William McKeen's Everybody Had an Ocean (2017), Brownstein conjures up the Los Angeles of 1974. It was a time of endless possibility, marked by countless highlights: Chinatown, Linda Ronstadt's album Heart Like a Wheel, the completion of the first draft of the screenplay that would give birth to the Star Wars franchise, and the political rise of former seminarian Jerry Brown. In TV, Norman Lear had cornered the market on socially conscious, sometimes controversial comedy, as when the lead character of Maude got pregnant at age 47 and got an abortion. "Though the city was not yet the liberal political bastion it would grow into," writes the author, "Los Angeles emerged as the capital of cultural opposition to Nixon." Some of this opposition was seemingly innocent: The Mary Tyler Moore Show was funny, but it advanced the thesis that women could work, live single lives, and be happy while Jackson Browne proved himself a pioneer of painful self-introspection. But that innocence is illusory. As Brownstein writes, 1974 also saw a tidal wave of cocaine wash over LA, the favorite party appetizer of the film set, the music crowd, and celebrities alike. Brownstein also takes in a wide swath of the world outside LA, from the denouement of the Patty Hearst kidnapping to the emergence of Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda as a political power couple. There's some nice dish, too, as when Carroll O'Connor demanded artistic control of All in the Family because the Jewish writers wouldn't understand the mind of a working-class Christian; and shrewd cultural analysis, as when Brownstein chronicles the transition by Browne and his contemporaries "from celebrating the freedom that revolution unlocked to tabulating its cost in impermanence and instability." An endlessly engaging cultural history that will resonate with anyone alive in 1974. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.