Fifty years ago this summer, as the Watergate scandal careened toward its wrenching end, there was much anxiety on Main Street. Sound familiar? It was also a time of deep cultural ferment, and the music ads that appeared in the Voice chronicled the soundtrack for a national nightmare — which began with a botched burglary on Saturday, June 17, 1972, and ended on August 9, 1974, when Richard Nixon resigned from office in the face of near-certain impeachment, due to his self-dealing, corrupt practices, and obstruction of justice.
It was the headiest of times, it was the most accursed of times. The rock was classic — but we didn’t know that yet. And even as some bands were becoming canonical, others were progressing in eccentric directions. Or at least morphing into the technical virtuosity that would characterize prog rock.
Below we peruse a passel of ads from those summer days of 1972, when the scandal that eventually brought Nixon down was just budding, seemingly no more nefarious than the cherry blossoms in our nation’s capital.
Released one month before five men broke into the Democratic National headquarters, in the Watergate Complex, the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street set the musical tone for the coming national nightmare: two discs of warped blues, sandpaper rock, punk gospel, and dirty Americana.
In support of Exile, the Stones had embarked on a 50-date American tour that made headlines for all the wrong reasons. The week before the Watergate break-in, 60 Stones fans were arrested outside the band’s San Diego show, while police used tear gas on hundreds more. Two nights after the inept burglars were caught in the act, the Stones were trashing the Playboy Mansion in Chicago.
Although they were not as huge as the Stones, Argent had a major Top 10 hit around the globe with “Hold Your Head Up.” We’re not sure, though, just what those surrealistic objects beyond that particular Door of Perception in their ad might be. Not pillows, at least — Jefferson Airplane took care of that way back in 1967.
Bill Graham’s Fillmore East had a brief but storied history: Located at 105 Second Avenue, it hosted all the legends of the era — Hendrix, the Doors, Miles Davis, the Bonzo Dog Band — before closing its doors, in June 1971. Today, the space is home to a bank.
Hits don’t get much more massive than “Lean on Me”; the Bill Withers classic topped the charts in June 1972. Just months earlier, Withers had won a Grammy for “Ain’t No Sunshine,” and in July the R&B singer was scheduled to play a weeklong residency at the Bitter End, in the Village.
But if guitar rock was more your speed, you could pick up ZZ Top’s second album at Korvettes for $3.44.
Those with more highbrow tastes could attend a Mozart and Bach fest. (Nixon was a Bach fan, which writer Tom Carson touched on in his brilliant 1994 Voice obituary of the disgraced president: “‘Do you know why Bach is better than Brahms?’ the grizzled, not-a-crook former president demanded of a startled Gary Hart not too many years ago, when they were seated together at a state funeral. ‘Bach is tougher than Brahms.’”)
Or maybe you were looking for an evening of avant-garde inspiration; if so, the New School’s celebration of John Cage’s 60th birthday certainly fit the bill.
The Grateful Dead were also in town (well actually, across the Hudson, at Roosevelt Stadium). Nixon was gearing up for a final, typically dirty political campaign spearheaded by the minions of the CRP — Committee to Re-Elect the President — which became more popularly known as CREEP.
Jerry Garcia and the rest of the Dead wanted the youth of America to use their newly acquired right to vote, which had come about in large part because many Americans were upset with the fact that you could be drafted to fight in Vietnam at age 18 but couldn’t vote against the politicians who sent you there until you turned 21. The 26th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified on July 1, 1971:
The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.
Despite the Dead’s urging, it turned out that many of that newly empowered youth contingent voted just like their parents, and Nixon, a buttoned-down Quaker who was the antithesis of the counterculture that much of the era’s music celebrated, would win in a landslide in November.
Cheech & Chong were concerned with some very different numbers when they released their second album, Big Bambú, which reached No. 2 on the charts.
The biggest acts’ labels paid for full-page ads in the Voice — and mostly right-hand pages at that, because advertisers pay a premium to snag eyeballs on the side of a spread that readers see for a few extra nanoseconds as they flip through a periodical.
And we have to admit, half a century on, that we had forgotten some of this music, even though the record companies back in the day believed these albums were worth an expensive ad buy. So we’ve plunged down various streaming service rabbit holes to bring ourselves up to speed on some of this flea-market vinyl. Much of the archive-scanning work here was done while listening to the Latin-infused rock of Macondo, who, according to various record-collecting sites, was an East L.A. group discovered by Sergio Mendes in the early ’70s. Any album with a T-Rex in the ad deserves a listen, and we were not disappointed by Albert Hernandez’s fire-breathing guitar licks and Fred Ramirez’s roller-coaster organ riffs, especially on “Cayuco.”
One band you might not know the name of off the top of your head, Looking Glass, gave the world the massive single, “Brandy” — “a fine girl” who served whiskey and wine and whose eyes “could steal a sailor from the sea.” Not, however, the one seaman she really wanted, because, “Lord, he was an honest man / and Brandy does her best to understand” when he — most probably in a pillow-talk whisper — informs her, “my life, my love and my lady is the sea / It is, yes it is.”
At Sam Goody: 8-Track, $4.49.
Jack Nitzsche worked with everyone from Phil Spector to Neil Young to the Stones. He also contributed to the soundtrack of the film Performance, which featured Mick Jagger and James Fox as, respectively, a rocker and a gangster, who eventually meet on a higher plane. Perhaps writing the choral arrangement for “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” prepared Nitzsche for his collaboration with another breed of “long-haired friends,” when he recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra in an ancient London church with the sonorous name St. Giles Cripplegate.
Tina Turner leaps across the ad for Feel Good, and, with the exception of a cover of Lennon and McCartney’s “She Came In Through the Bathroom Window,” Turner also wrote all of the songs for her and then husband Ike’s 17th (!) studio album.
The Hollies had a Top 10 hit with “Long Cool Woman,” which pulled their album Distant Light to No. 21 on Billboard magazine’s charts. For fans of the Hipgnosis design studio, the gatefold album cover — featuring Boschlike grotesqueries in the depths of a bucolic pond — made the $3.77 tab go down easier.
According to Billboard, covering the 1972 release of Phoenix, “Grand Funk have by now attained an almost permanent place in rock’s hierarchy. They have legions of devoted, ready followers at every performance and lining up to buy their every album.” However, as the website superseventies.com notes, Lester Bangs, reviewing the album in Rolling Stone, was having none of it: “It’s not that there’s anything wrong with mediocrity or cliché — could you or I have written ‘Sugar, Sugar’? — but when mediocrity loses all its flair, all its panache, becomes this bland and this pompous at the same time … it’s time for some Chuck Berry.”
Down in Memphis, Herbie Mann’s flute (and David “Fathead” Newman’s sax) covered much musical terrain, beginning with the traditional spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and concluding with a rock standard for the ages, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” The ad’s illustration reinforces aspirations both high and low.
Prog rock was ascendant in the early ’70s, and it doesn’t get much more proggy than Curved Air’s synthesizer solos accompanying the Renaissance-festival-like vocals of lead singer Sonja Kristina on Phatasmagoria’s “Marie Antoinette.” The ad copy beneath the undulating logo reads “The one group that might be too good for America.” Indeed, these folky Brits hit No. 20 in the U.K., but Phantasmagoria didn’t chart in the States.
And speaking of the prog gods, Emerson, Lake & Palmer was promoting their third studio album, Trilogy, which featured, among other virtuosic instrumentals, the British trio’s take on an American classic, Aaron Copland’s “Hoedown.” The album hit No. 5 on the Billboard charts, though Voice music critic Robert Christgau bluntly disagreed: “The pomposities of Tarkus and the monstrosities of the Moussorgsky homage clinch it — these guys are as stupid as their most pretentious fans. Really, anybody who buys a record that divides a … composition called ‘The Endless Enigma’ into two discrete parts deserves it. C-”
Spokane, Washington, native Danny O’Keefe, on the other hand, hit it big with his single “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues,” which pulled his LP, O’Keefe, up to No. 87 on the album charts. The single has long since been etched into the pop pantheon, having been covered by artists from Waylon Jennings to Mel Torme to the King himself, Elvis Presley. The world-weariness of one particular verse has resonated with different singers; the original “Ya know my heart keeps tellin’ me / ‘You’re not a kid at thirty-three’ / Ya play around, ya lose your wife / Ya play too long, you lose your life’” gains a decade in Charlie Rich’s telling, the country maestro figuring he’s finally grown up at age 43.
Mixing glam, decadence, and vaudeville-level schtick, Alice Cooper had the drawing power to headline a show at Roosevelt Stadium, in Jersey City. The concert was a big deal — Cooper flaunted his sexuality in a solo ad as the big day drew near — but the venue’s greatest claim to fame might actually have come decades earlier, on April 18, 1946, when the home team, the Jersey City Giants, a farm club of the New York Giants across the river, hosted the Montreal Royals. The Royals trounced the Giants 14 to 1, but anyone who was there was undoubtedly impressed with the debut of the Brooklyn Dodger’s farm team’s second baseman, Jackie Robinson, who had four hits in five trips to the plate, including a three-run homer.
Another megastar coming to town was less abrasive than Alice Cooper: John Denver was promoting his album (and single) Rocky Mountain High. Carnegie Hall had probably never felt vaster.
And while all the above was happening, David Bowie was on his way to becoming the Man Who Fell to Earth. Released on the eve of the Watergate break-in, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars found Bowie — who’d reached No. 5 in the U.K. but only 124 on Billboard’s U.S. charts, with the 1969 single “Space Oddity” — on the verge of superstardom. As always, Bowie was ahead of everyone else’s curves, and one of the most compelling songs — “Five Years” — on that scintillating Ziggy album predicted our climate dilemma now:
News had just come over
We had five years left to cry in (Cry in)
News guy wept and told us
Earth was really dying (dying)
Cried so much his face was wet
Then I knew he was not lying (lying)
Well, the world’s made it a bit longer than that.
So far.
But the always prescient Bowie had Nixon’s number: Despite reelection in 1972, scandal would cut Tricky Dick’s second term short, reducing his White House reign down to only a little more than five years. ❖
