Rock Me on the Water Quotes

“Then the center of influence shifted to London, with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Cream, the Who, the Kinks, and all the bands that orbited them. San Francisco, with the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Santana, had its moment in a psychedelic spotlight around the Summer of Love and the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, but as the 1960s gave way to the '70s, the center of the musical universe shifted unmistakably to Los Angeles. "It was incredibly vital," said Jonathan Taplin, who first came to LA as the tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band and later relocated there to produce Martin Scorsese's breakthrough movie, Mean Streets. "The nexus of the music business had really moved from New York to Los Angeles. That had been a profound shift . . . It was very clear that something big had changed."'' For a breathtaking few years, the stars aligned to glittering effect in Los Angeles. The city attracted brilliant artists; skilled session musicians; soulful songwriters; shrewd managers, agents, and record executives; and buzz-building clubs. From this dense constellation of talent, a shimmering new sound emerged, a smooth blend of rock and folk with country influences. Talented young people from all over the country began descending on Los Angeles with their guitar cases or dreams of becoming the next Geffen. Irving Azoff, a hyper-ambitious young agent and manager who arrived in Los Angeles in 1972, remembered, "It was like the gold rush. You've never seen anything like it in the entertainment business. The place was exploding. I was here—right place, right time. I tell everybody, `If you're really good in this business, you only have to be right once,' so you kind of make your own luck, but it is luck, too. It was hard to be in LA in that time and have any talent whatsoever in the music business—whether you were a manager, an agent, an artist, a producer, or writer—[and] not to make it, because it was boom times. It was the gold rush, and it was fucking fun.”
― Ronald Brownstein, Rock Me on the Water: 1974—The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television and Politics

“Compared to all this, Ronstadt and Browne were still trying to graduate from the kids' table. Ronstadt had released her first album for Geffen, Don't Cry Now, in September 1973. Browne followed a few weeks later, in October, with his second album, For Everyman. Both albums sold respectably, but neither cracked the Top 40 on the Billboard album chart. And while Geffen had great expectations for both artists, in early 1974 each was still building an audience. Their tour itinerary reflected their transitional position. It brought them to big venues in Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, but also took them far from the bright lights to small community theaters and college campuses in Oxnard, San Luis Obispo, New Haven, and Cortland, New York. At either end, there wasn't much glamour in the experience. They had moved up from the lowest rung on the touring ladder, when they had lugged their gear in and out of station wagons, but had progressed only to a Continental Trailways bus without beds that both bands crammed into for the late-night drives between shows. "The first thing that happened is we were driving all night, and the next morning we were exhausted," Browne remembered. "Like, no one slept a wink. We were sitting up all night on a bus."' "Touring was misery," Ronstadt said, looking back. "Touring is just hard. You don't get to meet anybody. You are always in a bubble . . . You saw the world outside the bus window, and you did the sound check every day."9 The performances were uneven, too. "While Browne is much more assured and confident on stage than he was a year or two ago, he's still very much like a smart kid with a grown-up gift for songwriting," sniffed Judith Sims of Rolling Stone. She treated Ronstadt even more dismissively, describing her as peddling "country schmaltz."' The young rock journalist Cameron Crowe, catching the tour a few days later in Berkeley, described Browne's set as "painfully mediocre."" But Ronstadt and Browne found their footing as they progressed, each alternating lead billing depending on who had sold more records in each market. By the time the cavalcade rolled into Carnegie Hall, the reception for Browne and Ronstadt was strong enough that the promoters added a second show. In February 1974, Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt were still at the edge of the stardom they would soon achieve.”
― Ronald Brownstein, Rock Me on the Water: 1974—The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television and Politics

“Anyone comparing photos of Glenn Frey and Don Henley in 1972 and, say, 1977 could track the price of the years of drugs and high living. Julia Phillips's drug addiction incinerated her Hollywood career. Martin Scorsese barely survived his own cocaine addiction in the mid-seventies. Since the days of Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, Los Angeles had sold a vision of personal liberation. A decade later, liberation had curdled into license. The theme song for Los Angeles in the buoyant early 1970s could have been "Take It Easy" or "Rock Me on the Water." But by 1976, when the Eagles released Hotel California, the mood of lengthening shadows was more precisely captured by their rueful "Life in the Fast Lane.”
― Ronald Brownstein, Rock Me on the Water: 1974—The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television and Politics

“To this day, Huston seems less amazed that she found Polanski with a thirteen-year-old girl than that he was arrested for being so. "Those were the days where everybody thought that was just great," she remembered. "Everybody was operating with immunity. . . . Somebody takes the fall, and I think Roman probably took the fall for a lot of immunities. A lot of people I know at the time were going out with extremely young women, maybe not on a regular basis, but he certainly wasn't the only person around town who was sleeping with very young women.'97 It was a measure of how thoroughly the cloud of decadence had settled onto the Los Angeles scene by the mid-1970s that it didn't strike Huston as particularly unusual to find Polanski with a girl that young. Among the stars glittering in LA, the vices varied, but the costs were consistent.”
― Ronald Brownstein, Rock Me On the Water: 1974-The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television and Politics

“One clear lesson from American history is that while the voices resistant to change may win delaying battles in politics, they cannot indefinitely hold back the future.”
― Ronald Brownstein, Rock Me on the Water: 1974—The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television and Politics

“Jerry Brown in 1974 embodied both the best of the Baby Boom (its intelligence, creativity, and determination to rethink old assumptions) and the worst (self-absorption, a tendency to value theory over experience, and an aversion to discipline and focus).”
― Ronald Brownstein, Rock Me on the Water: 1974—The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television and Politics

“Schneider asked Ross to take Newton from Cozumel to Cuba in his trimaran, and Ross agreed. With Schneider’s money, Ross upgraded his boat, adding sonar, radar, and a diesel engine.101 But when he set out from Miami to Mexico, the boat snagged on a giant underwater statue of Jesus off Key West and sank.102 Ross barely made it back to shore.”
― Ronald Brownstein, Rock Me on the Water: 1974—The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television and Politics