Consumed Nostalgia by Cross Gary

Author:Cross, Gary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC022000, Social Science/Popular Culture, HIS036060, History/United States/20th Century
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

FIRST REVIVAL OF RETRO ROCK

Given how fast rock came and went, it shouldn’t be surprising that the term “oldies” dates from as early as 1957, when the New York DJ Alan Fredericks played the not-so-old rock hits from 1954 to 1956. In 1959, the Los Angeles DJ Art Laboe released a compilation album, Oldies but Goodies, featuring popular rock and doowop songs of the fifties. But the idea of “oldies” as a longing for a retro style of music and with it a past youth and its memories matured at the end of the 1960s. Following on the heels of the turbulent 1960s, it isn’t surprising that the 1950s icon Elvis Presley would attract large crowds of the middle-aged middle class for a performance in Las Vegas in 1969. That same year, Sha Na Na wowed crowds of nostalgiacs with their leather jackets and pompadour hairdos (presumably in imitation of 1950s white working-class teen greasers). Although the group began as a glee club of Columbia University students, some of whose members later became professors and physicians, Sha Na Na became famous for their campy song-and-dance program of classic fifties-style rock and roll numbers. Oddly, Sha Na Na seemed to parody the greaser look, and the group offered satirical versions of 1950s songs rather than a true revival, appealing in part to an audience that was putting on the 1950s.35

Throughout the 1970s, long-eclipsed rock groups found new audiences for their old hits in free park and ticketed performing-hall concerts. For example, Chubby Checker and the Five Satins played in July 1973 in Central Park (sponsored by the oldies station WCBS) mostly to a curious teenage crowd, and WNEW sponsored an annual free Central Park concert featuring groups like Jefferson Airplane and the Beach Boys. But a paying crowd mostly in their forties and even fifties heard Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, the Four Tops, and Jay and the Americans in December 1972 in New York City. And even the bubblegum tunes of Neil Sedaka (“Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen”) drew crowds of the long-ago-sixteen-year-olds to Avery Fischer Hall in November 1978.36

Drawing on this nostalgic trend, Richard Nader organized a number of 1950s Rock and Roll Revivals, beginning in 1969 at Madison Square Garden with a program that included Sha Na Na, Chuck Berry, and Bill Haley but also the Platters (a black doo-wop group) and the Shirelles (a female vocal ensemble). Nader followed up with twenty-five more Madison Square Garden oldies shows in the next decade, eventually taking oldie revues to eighty cities and college campuses. In 1973, he produced a documentary film based on his concerts, Let the Good Times Roll. That year he told a New York Times reporter that his audiences “came not to cheer for the old hit makers, but their own memories and associations. … They were getting back into the irresponsibility, the carefreeness, the fun they had before they got married,” Nader claimed. “They were crawling into the womb at Madison Square Garden.”37

While the 1950s

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