Star Wars opened May 25, 1977. It not only raised the technological stakes in the film industry to unprecedented heights, but also rewrote the definition of "blockbuster." On June 5, 1967 The Beatles' Sgt.
Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album was released. While not necessarily considered the Fab Four's best LP, it is universally recognized as the record that changed pop music forever by expanding the horizons of what could be achieved in a recording studio. June 16 to 18 is the 40th anniversary of the Monterey Pop Festival.
It may not be viewed today as the epochal sociological event that the Woodstock Music Arts Festival would become two years later, but this Northern California bash was more important from a strictly musical point of view. It really crystalized the sea change in pop music from the era of the teen idol and three-minute single to what was then starting to be called "underground" rock. Monterey introduced both Jimi Hendrix and The Who to American audiences.
In addition, it was where legendary Columbia Records exec Clive Davis discovered Janis Joplin, and where the seeds of the partnership of David Crosby, Graham Nash, Stephen Stills and Neil Young first took root. Aug. 5, 1957, marks the 50th anniversary of American Bandstand, the Philly-based daily dance-party show hosted by Dick Clark that presided over the marriage of rock music and television, a union that still sets much of the pop culture agenda.
West Side Story, a musical updating of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, opened on Broadway on Sept. 26, 1957. A collaboration between musical theater legends Leonard Bernstein (music), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics) and Jerome Robbins (choreography), the show helped revolutionize the book musical form with its score (which incorporated classical, jazz and Latino elements), its dancing (which melded ballet and jazz) and its subject matter (the violent youth gangs that were plaguing New York City at the time).
Oct. 6 is the 80th anniversary of The Jazz Singer, the movie that ushered in the era of the "talking picture." Rolling Stone magazine debuted on Nov.
9, 1967. Its appearance helped cement the legitimacy and influence of the burgeoning, music-and-drug-fueled counterculture; in its heyday, Rolling Stone was nothing less than the "bible" of the "Woodstock Generation." Dec.
16, 1977 saw the opening of Saturday Night Fever, a gritty drama about a young man from Brooklyn (John Travolta in a career-making turn) who sees his disco-dancing prowess as his ticket to a better life. The film -- especially its hit-laden soundtrack -- proved to be the linchpin in disco's transformation from the province of the gay underground to the pop culture mainstream (by mid-'78, three-piece white suits were all the rage and TV commercials for everything from fast food to cars had disco motifs). In his On the Loose column on Sundays, Chuck Darrow offers his takes on pop culture and the things, big and small, that color our lives.
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