Those Days: Rock Me on the Water: 1974—The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television and Politics by Ronald Brownstein

I thought this book was sensational – a well-written look at a pivotal year in American culture and politics that cleverly used the calendar as an organizational tool, with the focus on what had become the new center of it all, Los Angeles.

In June 1974, I turned nineteen, and in September returned to college for my sophomore year, making me one of the Baby Boomers that the author, Ron Brownstein, a respected journalist, mentioned so often in the text. While I certainly knew the music and TV shows he wrote about, and saw most of the movies, I was not as yet that attuned to politics, and I can't remember if back then I had ever heard of Governor Jerry Brown of California, though at some point I became aware that he was dating Linda Ronstadt, which certainly made him intriguing. I had never been to California, and had no plans at that point to go there. As a native of Philadelphia, I was East Coast-Centric, and California was the distant home of Disneyland, surfing and the Beach Boys, nothing more. New York had much more allure, though in the mid-'70s, it was crime-ridden and decaying, and going there could be a scary adventure at times (little did I know that New York would become my home less than five years later).

Over the years, I have become much more aware of the importance of Los Angeles to the music scene of that time period, but I didn't really know all that much about how the television and film industries interacted with the music world. I was also fairly hazy on the dates of the political rise of Brown, and his predecessor Ronald Reagan. I knew much more about the life and death of the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, and other key figures of the '60s, and had followed the news of Watergate and watched the hearings as they happened, but reading Brownstein's book gave me an overview that helped to put so much more of 1974 and the mostly hopeful years just before and after it in perspective. It made it abundantly clear how the country turned towards the conservatism and negative values of Reagan, leading to the nadir of the Trump presidency, and the circumstances of hate and division that were unleashed (with an interlude of overall optimism during the Clinton years, which now feels to me like some lost Nirvana).

I also found the book very entertaining and mostly positive, with so many insights from individuals such as Rob Reiner and Jackson Browne, that reminded me what it was like to be living in a time of youthful discovery, surrounded by the peers of my generation, knowing that we were just getting started, and still optimistic towards our future.