In 1964 Paul Buff ran into financial trouble, and Zappa bought the studio, renaming it Studio Z, and promptly moved into the place. His life at the studio was a constant struggle, as Zappa, despite his genius, did not have much business savvy. He was rarely able to book recording sessions for other musicians, spending time instead recording his own music and eventually trying his hand at producing a cheap sci-fi movie.4 In an effort to interest investors in his movie project, Zappa fatefully arranged to have the local paper, the Cucamonga Daily Report, run a feature story on Studio Z and his project. The fact that the story described Zappa hyperbolically as “the Movie King of Cucamonga” and attached a photo of the young impresario, convinced local law officials that the studio was likely producing pornography. When Zappa put out a casting call for locals to act in his movie, one of the auditioners was a member of the San Bernardino County vice squad, sent to try to entrap Zappa. “The local political subtext to all this,” wrote Zappa later, “had something to do with an impending real estate development which required the removal of tenants before Archibald Avenue was widened.” While the police officer did not get a part in the movie, he returned later and offered Zappa one hundred dollars to produce some entertainment for a stag party. When Zappa handed over the half-hour tape of goofy faked sexual acts to the officer, he was arrested. And though courts later determined Zappa had been entrapped, it was little solace. After serving a ten-day sentence on a reduced charge, Zappa tried to retrieve his tapes and other belongings, but was rebuffed. He was broke and had no way to make money. “I had to get the wire cutters and yank all my equipment out of there and evacuate ‘Studio Z.’”5 He promptly left Cucamonga and moved to a little apartment in Echo Park, never returning to the area.
Though many of the corner shops described by Zappa still existed in 1978, there were now, a decade-plus later, more businesses on and around the corner. Directly behind the store, for example, separated by a nicely paved parking lot, was a paint store, somewhat larger than the building that Fallon owned. On Foothill Boulevard, meanwhile, connected by more paved land (and a plot of dirt), stood a Yamaha shop, a building supply company, and, farther down, an auto repair shop. Fallon surveyed the scene and calculated. Because Cucamonga Hardware was doing brisk business, it was outgrowing its street-front space. In the back parts of the corner block, to the east and north behind his store, was land just waiting for some sort of development. In the more immediate vicinity, to the south and east, several of the shops looked a little worse for the wear, perhaps struggling to stay competitive in the wake of the 1973 recession. The building supply store, in particular, was beaten down, and the paint store was not doing much better. Fallon found this odd. Building was going on all over town, with new tracts of homes popping up, it seemed, almost every week. Business opportunities were everywhere for anyone willing to take them.
Tom Fallon had never been thought lacking in his gift of gab. It was one of his great strengths. Unlike most of his children, who favored the self-contained propriety of his Germanic wife, Katherine, old Tom was the proverbial congenial Irishman who could talk to pretty much anyone, anywhere, anytime. With his gift of gab working full force from the moment he bought into the hardware store, Tom Fallon learned that the owners of the auto supply shop were considering calling it quits. Fallon also learned the same was essentially true of a building supply yard that spread to Foothill Boulevard to the south. Finally, and here’s where the plan really began to congeal, Tom learned that a group of local mover-shakers who owned large swaths of the local landscape, including the five-acre corner parcel of land on which Cucamonga Hardware, the auto supply shop, the building supply, and several other businesses were located, was interested in selling.
Even before the Dodgers lost the World Series to the Yankees in October 1977, Fallon had begun trying to convince his other three partners who owned Cucamonga Hardware—his sons Ken and Jim and accountant Nelson Hawley—that the key to success was expansion and growth. Now, with their environs booming, and with the recent merging of the three communities of Alta Loma, Cucamonga, and Etiwanda, Fallon knew it was a do-or-die situation.
Tom Fallon tried to convince his partners to make an offer on the land and the buildings. The cost to purchase all of this, of course, would be steep, but at the same time it would never be any cheaper than it was today. Financing would be tight, Nelson Hawley in particular pointed out, and making the mortgage payments would be dependent on growing the hardware store’s business quite a bit. It was very possibly too much debt load, Hawley added. Fallon paused to consider the impossible numbers, then he realized something. Although the auto and building supply companies were looking to close, there were still other businesses that would remain on the land. He did some quick math, and the numbers fell in line. The rent that these businesses paid, along with the growing business of the hardware store, would make the mortgage payments affordable. So it was decided. In the spring of 1978 Fallon had an offer drawn up. The partnership collectively held its breath, its future in the balance as the region entered the warm part of the year.
Months later, in the late summer of 1978, after Cucamonga Hardware had established itself in its new, larger space and the partnership had opened a new garden center where the building supply store had been, the atmosphere of Southern California was growing uncertain, like much of the rest of the country. On the one hand, local anger about the times was evident in the taxpayer-driven move to limit property taxes once and for all. On the other hand, however, guilty remnants of the region’s free-for-all hedonism and big-money daydreams struggled to come to terms with the era. The local dream purveyor, Hollywood, buoyed by its new blockbuster mentality, suddenly had regained its cultural and economic stature. Movies like Star Wars and Jaws, which had respectively become the number-one and -two box-office draws in 1977 and 1976, were at the center of the new activity. More than a year after Star Wars’ release, in fact, Twentieth Century Fox was still capitalizing on the success of George Lucas’s space adventure—so much so that in mid-July, the company announced a major “media blitz” ad campaign. “At the heart of this assault will be a television advertising schedule,” wrote an entertainment reporter in June, “in which at least one Star Wars commercial will be seen on every prime time show on all three networks the nights of July 19, 20, and 21, as well as on every network children’s program Saturday morning, July 22.” The strategy, which was deemed “unusually audacious, even for the flamboyant movie industry,” was meant to extend the buzz of the previous summer, when moviegoers made multiple cineplex visits to see the film. “It demonstrates the lengths to which film companies are prepared to go,” the reporter continued, “in order to milk the maximum possible profit from what every movie mogul dreams of: a genuine blockbuster.” As if to concur with this assessment, a movie executive was almost giddy about the campaign. “I know people who have seen it 70, 80 times,” he said. “Figuratively, the country should OD on Star Wars.”6
Of course, Star Wars wasn’t the only Hollywood product that the country was OD-ing on in the summer of 1978. In December 1977 Paramount Pictures released a dance film loosely based on a 1976 New York article by Tom Wolfe’s erstwhile colleague Nik Cohn.7 Called “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” the article purported to describe the working-class young people of wider New York City who were finding release in the city’s developing disco subculture. Cohn wrote of his subjects:
Kids of sixteen to twenty, full of energy, urgency, hunger. . . . They are not so chic, these kids. They don’t haunt press receptions or opening nights; they don’t pose as street punks in the style of Bruce Springsteen, or prate of rock & Rimbaud. Indeed, the cults of recent years seem to have passed them entirely. They know nothing flower power or meditation, pansexuality, or mind expansion. No waterbeds or Moroccan cushions, no hand thrown pottery for them. No hep jargon either, and no Pepsi revolutions. . . . Instead, this generation’s real roots lie further back, in the fifties, the golden age of Saturday nights.8
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Ironically, years later, despite the seeming vérité-like immersive style of his article, Cohn would admit that he had made up the entire thing. Having been given the juicy assignment to profile the burgeoning New York disco scene of the 1970s, Cohn, as a Brit, got bogged down in his attempts to understand the American working-class kids who frequented the nightclubs. To overcome the problem Cohn wrote a fictional account that was wholly based on “mod” club-goers he had known back in England in the 1960s. Despite this fact, the resulting film version of Cohn’s story was a gritty, stylish melodrama called Saturday Night Fever. Adapted by screenwriter Norman Wexler and starring John Travolta, an actor who had made his first splash on an ABC TV sitcom called Welcome Back, Kotter, the film was a success for Paramount, earning nearly $250 million in both domestic and international ticket sales. Even more impressive, however, was the popularity of the film’s official soundtrack album. The Saturday Night Fever original movie soundtrack featured music by many of the top disco acts of the era—K. C. and the Sunshine Band, Kool and the Gang, Yvonne Elliman, the Trammps, and, of course, the Bee Gees, whose songs were the most prominently featured. For much of 1978 the music from Saturday Night Fever was ubiquitous, blaring from car eight-track systems and on portable “boom box” tape decks, at nightclubs and roller rinks, and on radio stations and television. The album remained at the number-one spot on the U.S. Billboard charts for twenty-four straight weeks between January and July 1978, sold fifteen million copies in the United States alone (and more than twenty million copies overall), and won the Grammy Award for Best Album of the Year in 1979. It has been estimated that Saturday Night Fever ultimately generated, between box-office and album sales, more than $1.2 billion (in today’s dollars).
All summer long, then, you couldn’t avoid hearing the music from Saturday Night Fever. And while the disco music fad would begin to fade after a seminal event that would take place at Comiskey Park on July 12, 1979, that was still a year away.9 If you were in L.A., or elsewhere, in August 1978, you were hearing disco—with its falsetto and breathy singers, its “four-on-the-floor” beat and bouncy syncopated bass lines, and its soaring violins and synth sounds.
People across Los Angeles, and across the country, had distinctly different reactions to this lively background music, and the reactions both underscored and contradicted the prevailing mood of the time. For Tom Wolfe in New York, the music of the disco era must have hardly registered. Embroiled as he was in the scramble to finish his massive manuscript for The Right Stuff, not much of anything from the outside culture registered with Wolfe. He remained cloistered in his New York apartment, loath even to appear in public.
Tom Bradley, meanwhile, embattled in the continued negotiations over the Olympic Games, likely took solace from the music, realizing that life still existed beyond the frustrating walls of city hall—where the machinations and political games were pushing his dream to obtain the 1984 Olympics to the edge of a sharp precipice. The local political infighting, in fact, had begun to attract national attention. “Never have politics been played harder,” suggested a national sportswriter at the time, “than they have been in the infighting over Los Angeles’ bid for the Games of ’84 . . . in mano a mano contests among petty bureaucrats. The participants include city councilmen who want to be mayor, a mayor who may want to be governor, a governor who may want to be President.”10
Fortunately for Bradley, his decision to turn over the ongoing Olympics negotiations to others paid immediate dividends. “The seven-member citizens’ committee was an important step back toward sanity and away from illusion,” wrote William Johnson. “For the first time, there was true civic clout involved in the Los Angeles Olympic effort, for Bradley had selected powerful people from business and labor, both Republicans and Democrats. . . . As if by magic, a relative hush fell over city hall.”11
As a result in late June several members of Bradley’s citizens’ committee flew to Montreal to meet with representatives of the IOC, certain that they had the framework for a compromise deal at last. At the meeting Bradley’s citizens’ committee promoted the idea that, in order to protect the city of Los Angeles from financial liability for the Games, cost-control oversight would be made the purview of a private group, the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee. Unfortunately, the idea was met with skeptical silence from representatives of the IOC, and the group returned from Montreal no closer to an agreement. At this point, in late June, the situation around L.A.’s floundering Olympics bid seemed as dire as ever. And while Mayor Bradley, at a local press conference, vowed to keep fighting, his tone was one of resignation. Bradley’s chief Olympics adviser, Anton Calleia, meanwhile, was even more gloomy than his boss. “I am paid to be an optimistic man,” he said, “but in this matter I am most pessimistic. The bid is in trouble. What began as a wooing exercise from the City of Los Angeles toward the International Olympic Committee has turned into an adversary relationship. . . . The situation has polarized here and at IOC headquarters, . . . and all I see is conflict, constant conflict.”12
A few days later, in a seeming last-ditch effort to rescue the bid, Mayor Bradley went public, making a speech about the importance of “saving” the Olympics from their own “excesses.” He spoke about the “Spartan tradition” at the roots of the Olympics movement. But the words mostly fell on deaf ears. In mid-July the IOC countered Bradley’s statements by expressing its “concern” that L.A.’s plan could end up “commercializing” the Games. A day later, with polls continuing to show weakening support from local voters, and with the IOC’s drop-dead contract deadline of July 31 looming, Bradley decided to take charge with a final take-it-or-leave-it offer. Through his new secretary, Tom Sullivan, Mayor Bradley declared that if the IOC was unwilling to sign a contract with the LAOC, then the city would withdraw its bid for the Games. “If the I.O.C. does not accept the offer of the private Olympic committee,” said Sullivan, “then as far as the city is concerned it’s over. We will not pursue the Olympic Games any further.” Sullivan continued by saying that, despite his hard stand, Mayor Bradley was hopeful that the IOC would accept this bid, which he thought was the best terms the IOC could reasonably expect from any city. “Los Angeles is not alone in its desire to protect taxpayers,” Sullivan continued. “If Los Angeles cannot host the games and protect the taxpayers from a deficit, then I doubt there are many other cities that would want to put their taxpayers in that position. We feel it would be the I.O.C.’s own best interest to accept our offer at this point, in terms of carrying on the Olympic movement.”13
Not surprisingly, on July 18 International Olympic Committee president Lord Killanin rejected Los Angeles’s latest proposals, flatly stating that they “do not meet with the provisions of I.O.C. rules, particularly Rule 4,” regarding the fiscal responsibility of the Games, “and do not comply with the resolution adopted by the I.O.C. at Athens provisionally awarding the 1984 Games to the city of Los Angeles.”14 As a result of the rejection Mayor Bradley grimly announced, later that same day, that he would immediately recommend that the city council withdraw the city’s bid. As of July 18, after more than five years of trying, Bradley’s lifelong Olympic dreams appeared, at long last, to be dead.
In the summer of 1978 in Los Angeles, with the jubilant music of the Bee Gees bumping up against the confusion of the times, Angelenos everywhere wondered exactly what defined their city. Unlike New York, which had been coping with debilitating brownouts and other visible signs of urban decay, the Son of Sam serial murder case, a controversial mayoral election—and a host of other systemic problems—Los Angeles had always boasted of its laid-back, sunshine-addled positivity, and endless optimism. Now, in 1978, as the city was coping with its own string of murders, a nasty political squabble over taxes, and the seeming loss of the Olympics (and widespread ambivalence about the Games), more and more people in Los Angeles were asking: Are we as vital as we think? On August 17, 1978, a Los Angeles Times article called “L.A.’s Vitality: Is the Force with Us?” p
ointed out how conflicted had become the former “hustling, boostering” home of the great California Dream. Calling the Los Angeles of 1978 a place where “no two people live in the same city,” the story detailed the contradictory and confusing views people had of their home, of the times, and of the cultural and social issues of the later 1970s. Dave Smith, the article’s author, wrote:
In the early 1960s, the city of Los Angeles was zoned to accommodate an ultimate population of 10.5 millions people and could hardly wait until they were all present and accounted for. Old photographs . . . give the impression that local civic spirit reached a sort of apex in 1957 when the Dodgers forsook Brooklyn and moved to L.A. Photos of former Councilwoman Rosalind Wiener Wyman, youthful sparkplug of the drive to bring the Dodgers here, show her wearing an “L.A. Bums” cap, flashing a victory sign, clowning with then-Mayor Norris Poulson, being honored at a celebration dinner. Roses, roses, all the way, the photos seem to suggest, and one wonders what ever happened to that old spirit, the gangway-for-our-town feeling that brought the Dodgers here in the first place?15
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