Rockenspiel

In the 1960's a brand new genre emerges, and one that was directly aimed for the ever expanding youth market in both America and in Europe - the Rock film. This genre embraced documentaries on individual artists, or of major concert events, fictionalized vehicles for super-groups, movies set in the heady and seamy world of rock-n-roll and pop and, more loosely, films that relied for much of their drama on the excitement generated by the use of music on their soundtracks.

The Seventies were indeed a golden age for rock films. All the portents proved favorable ones. At the decade's start - Easy Rider (1969) and 1970's Woodstock proved quite lucrative at the box-office, and not to the chagrin of the once skeptical backers and record companies that funded the project and provided soundtrack rights. Technical improvements in sound recording would ensure that live concerts could be recorded and reproduced to nearly perfect clarity. Albeit, there were quite a few theaters that were equipped to take their liberties and enhance this effect themselves. Besides which, the Sixties pop-music explosion had enriched a large number of rock acts many of whom looked to the film industry either to invest their new wealth or to expend it.

1969's Easy Rider was easily the most seminal production of the genre.

The teenagers who had purchased pop records in the 1960's in such unprecedented quantities were now approaching their twentieth birthdays - the age range that was the most statistically significant in the composition of cinema audiences. They applied equally well to the filmmakers themselves and for the first time, films would actually be made by directors who had been first generation rock 'n' rollers themselves.

1970's The Strawberry Statement had no problem getting raspberried - featured : Bruce Davison, Kim Darby and Bud Cort.

It was a time of great promise, then; but such promise would be realized only fitfully. There were incontestable achievements in that virtually every noted contemporaneous musician be the center subject of a rock movie (Fleetwood Mac and The Beach Boys being of the exception), and that the films that were made spanned a range of territory that adequately reflected the variety of the music itself.

Dennis Patrick and Peter Boyle's respective oral fixations in Joe (1970)

Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider was surely the most commercial film up to that time to have pitted the ideals and aspirations of the counter-culture against cynicism and violence that was endemic in American society. The alternative society, drugs, warts and all was also none too shabby in the ching ching department otherwise referred to as the box-office. Thus cinema audiences suddenly had to endure a couple of effete student-protest films, Getting Straight and  Stuart Hagmann's counterculture battle-cry The Strawberry Statement, as well as Joe (all respectively 1970), a day in the life of an incorrigible backwoodsman. The depiction in Joe of the drug-obsessed young was patently absurd, but it was nearly redeemed by a performance of massive authority from Peter Boyle in the titular role.

I said there ain't no cure for the Steelyard Blues - Donald Sutherland, Jane Fonda and over the top boudoir star.

Boyle would later team with Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland in the Alan Myerson crime comedy Steelyard Blues (1973). The film boasted a winning musical score from Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield and Nick Gravenites - it concerned a gang of contemporary outcasts both sympathetically and plausibly, but by then traces of the alternative society was quickly dissipating.

Other films took their cue from Easy Rider, Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) with James Taylor and Dennis Wilson and Electra Guide in Blue (1973), for example as well as Cisco Pike (1971), an excellent thriller about drug-dealing starring an effectual Gene Hackman, and making his debut lead performance - Kris Kristofferson. The post-Easy Rider boom produced few films of indelible merit; and in the aftermath of the the collapse of Sixties idealism, the film that most astutely anticipated the mood of the young during the Seventies, and cast its long shadow over the events of the decade, was Stanley Kubrick's dystopian take on teenage angst and then some with the poster child of all cult films - A Clockwork Orange.

Rock 'n' roll never forgets in American Graffiti - even if its the wrong decade.

There was one crucial respect in which Easy Rider was a pioneer movie with it's surefire soundtrack that consisted almost entirely of previously released material. This was never accomplished prior in mainstream commercial films, filmmakers had adjudged the copyright difficulties to be insuperable, and usually played safe by commissioning an original score, often distinguished for its very lack of originality, Easy Rider changed the position completely, although it indeed paid the piper for that unforgivable act of breaking ground. Contractual problems proved labyrinthine, with the result that the film reached Great Britain several months in advance of its companion soundtrack album. Nevertheless recording and publishing companies subsequently came to this realization that by over-zealously defending their copyright songs, they were simply denying themselves a potentially prosperous source of extra income. In the long haul, the Easy Rider breakthrough was decisive, and such directors as George Lucas, in American Graffiti, and Martin Scorsese, in Mean Streets (both 1973), were able to use more or less the soundtrack material of their choice.

Jesus Christ...Superfly

The other major seminal film of the period was 1971's Shaft. A surprise success itself, it spawned an entire movie sub-genre of superspade thrillers, with original scores fashioned after Isaac Hayes brilliant tried and true archetype. To be fair - none were quite as memorable as their predecessor, and it would be only Curtis Mayfield's music for Superfly (1972) that could achieve an individual distinction.

Jimmy Cliff falls harder in Perry Henzell's 1972 anthem The Harder They Come

Far less influential, though holding much more credence, was Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come (1972), it marked the first Jamaican feature film. Jimmy Cliff offered himself as its main star and drew upon his own personal experiences, hustling for work in the island's seemingly unsavory music industry, as dramatic inspiration. Such authenticity was appropriately garnished with some of Jamaica's finest reggae sounds.

B. Goode Johnny and Let The Good Times Rolleth

The rock movie of the Seventies was re-routed by American Graffiti, a film that's focus was teenage traumas in small town California of 1962 - a time that was re-imagined to the tee - though much of the music used came from the decade before. The gravitas of the characterization was never belied by its lack of continuity, and the film successfully achieves an authentic taste of Fifties Americana.

Once the hippie dream had dissolved there had been a resurgence of interest in the unfettered sounds of rock 'n' roll's early days. Such films as D.A. Pennebaker's Keep on Rockin' (1972) and Sid Levin and Robert Abel's Let The Good Times Roll (1973) were testament to the shift in popular predilections. In the wake of American Graffiti, such tastes were not simply gratified, they were satiated. There was an American Graffiti -type film for blacks in Cooley High (1975), there was one for the Jewish audience in Eskimo Limon (Lemon Popsicle,1978).

Is it live or is it Stardust?

The British had their equivalent of American Graffiti with That'll Be the Day (1973), directed by Mancunian Claude Whatham from a lively original script by Ray Connolly. This was yet another evocative film, featuring two sharp central performances by Ringo Starr and David Essex. The Fifties music, however was used more indiscriminately than it had in American Graffiti. That'll Be The Day would come replete with a sequel; Stardust (1974), but this time the result was a hollow variant of its superior - The Beatles' story.