VH-1

August 15 - 22, 1 9 9 6

[Cool]

Decade dance

VH-1 summons up the spirit of the '70s
by Matt Ashare

It started with Nixon making enemies lists in the White House, with Altamont, Watergate, the bombing of Cambodia. By the end there were 50 hostages in Iran, new-wave bands on the horizon, and a conservative coalition forming under the banner of Reaganism. And as if that weren't bad enough, the decade also brought us polyester leisure suits, coke spoons, gas lines, disco, cock rock, and some of the worst hair days in the history of humankind. It was the '70s, an era that seemed destined to be reviled, ridiculed, and roundly dismissed as a giant mistake till the end of time. But somehow irony sleazed its way into the '90s, through the back door of the cultural mainstream, and suddenly nostalgia for the '70s is cool, as long as you say that with a smirk on your face and your tongue in cheek.

That's right, Kiss are wearing make-up, drug-fueled all-night dance parties are the rage, and even the Sex Pistols are back, reminding us that "No Future" had a future after all. Hell, even John Travolta is cool again. And this week, VH-1 will jump aboard the nostalgia train with "7 Days of the '70s," a week of programming devoted to dredging up artifacts like The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, No Nukes, and, of course, Saturday Night Fever. But amid all the fluff -- and, yes, Sonny and Cher, for all their kitsch value, are fluff -- "7 Days of the '70s" will feature VH-1 Presents the '70s: five hours of hard reporting on what may be one of the most misunderstood decades of the 20th century, an original documentary series produced by Hart and Dana Heinz Perry.

"Why the '70s?" asks Hart Perry from his office in New York. "Well, we were asked to do the '70s by VH-1 -- at least that's the simple answer. I lived through the '70s. I made movies during that period. So I personally thought of it as a recent decade with nothing historical about it. It wasn't until we started thinking about the documentary that we realized it was really a very strange decade, with ramifications that are still relevant today. I think Nelson George sums it up best in the film when he says that the first part of the '70s was finishing the unfinished business of the '60s, and the latter part was the beginning of the '80s and Reaganism."

George, who's best known for his music history Where Did Our Love Go?, is one of several cultural critics who weighs in on the decade. Like the Robert Palmer-driven Rock 'n' Roll documentary that public television aired earlier this year, VH-1 Presents the '70s -- terrible title for such a fine show -- cuts back and forth among colorful archival footage, artists who survived the decade looking back on their experiences, and the perspectives of such experts as George, New York Times pop critic Jon Pareles, and Billboard editor Timothy White. Each installment tackles a different '70s subject -- the tensions between feminism and the sexual liberation of rock groupies ("The Sexes"), the corrupt corporate takeover of the Top 40 ("Taking Care of Business"), the hedonistic crash and burn of disco ("Disco Explosion").

"One choice we made," explains Hart, "was not to do the lava lamps/Sonny-and-Cher/ABBA side of the '70s. VH-1 had done that already. And there have been other histories that have taken an art-historical approach by asking who and what. We decided to ask why, and that drove us in a different direction.

"We also decided not to have a narrator. The interviews provide the narration and the content. I had certain ideas about what I thought happened in the '70s. But we'd do an interview with someone like Irving Azoff, John Lydon, Peter Gabriel, or Quincy Jones, and they would assess it in a different way and we'd go with that."

The Perrys and the 70-plus people who are interviewed don't try to sugarcoat the decade. With the benefit of hindsight, disco is revealed to have been a positive, integrated phenomenon in terms of bringing black and gay subcultures into the mainstream. But producer Nile Rodgers admits that the naked (or polyester-clothed) escapism of disco was at least partly a reaction to how bad things had gotten, and Timothy White says bluntly that "disco was dancing on tombstones," in reference to the generation that had been killed or maimed in Vietnam.

"It was great to have the opportunity to be critical," admits Hart. "I mean, here we are working for a music channel, interviewing Gladys Knight, and she's saying that when MTV started they wouldn't play videos by black artists. There was never any pressure on us to take that out. And we were definitely critical of some of the bloated excesses of the music in the decade. We tried to find some of the decade's buried bodies. I mean, Henry Louis Gates talks about the establishment's realizing that they could kill off the Panthers and the Weathermen but that they were going to have to let some of the people who were storming the gates inside. So the counterculture was assimilated by the mainstream and the music was marketed, and you ended up with the best of the best and the worst of the worst."

VH-1 Presents the '70s airs on VH-1 at 8 p.m. this Monday through Friday, August 19 through 23.