Boogieing on Back to ‘70s : The Ultra-Hip Embrace the Days of Gold Chains, Polyester, Platform Shoes and the Partridge Family

It’s roughly midnight here on Earth. That means two seriously tall men in extraterrestrial chic have arrived on the scene, ostensibly an undistinguished patch of industrial Highland Avenue in Los Angeles.

But deserted it is not. There are two things that have the joint jumping, despite the odds of a somnolent Sunday night. One is a long line of 20-ish people. Most of them are wearing the requisite black leather, but there are occasional sightings of those egregious fashion missteps of the ‘70s: platform shoes and merciless polyester.

And then there are the two unearthly gents, who measure roughly 6 feet, 7 inches tall from the soles of their glittery yellow, knee-high platform sneakers to the tippy tippy top of their poufy Afro wigs.

They are all waiting at the gates of the part-time nightclub 1970. And they all share a mission: They want to boogie down to “Disco Inferno.” They want to “Rock the Boat” and “Ring My Bell.” They want to, as one was wont to say, get down .

The decade of streaking, mood rings and shag rugs is rearing its tacky head again. Although most sensible people have been busy hating the ‘70s, the decade has been enjoying a second coming in fringe fashion, film and music.

The spacemen figure into that extremely select orbit. They have made a career out of getting down, and they are dressed for action. They are wearing hero-style terry jumpsuits in tutti-frutti stripes that Superman might have worn on, say, a bad acid trip. An “E” marks the spot where their belly buttons most probably are, signifying their collective name: Enrique.

The neo-’70s band has just gotten off work, having done its professional thing at the Coconut Teaszer. Being Enrique generally involves exhuming such ‘70s classics as the themes from “Charlie’s Angels” and “Maude,” funkifying timepieces like the Partridge Family tune “Heartbeat” and churning out new songs that sound suspiciously like old songs.

In fact, Enrique likes just about everything about the ‘70s, particularly “Charlie’s Angels.” The Bay Area duo, in their early 20s, have mounted a letter-writing campaign in an as-yet unconsummated effort to get the show back on San Francisco TV.

“It fills us with joy,” squeals D’arcy Drollinger, one portion of Enrique.

“And ‘Three’s Company’ isn’t on,” says his mirror image, Jason Mecier.

These voids are considered problems in only a very limited corner of the universe. But Enrique is convinced that anyone can learn to love the Partridge Family. Drollinger explains how he made the leap: “People are getting obsessed with trash culture. First you look at it and say, ‘Ugh, I hate it.’ Then you say, ‘Oh, it’s so funny.’ Then you wear bell-bottoms to a party.”

Then, apparently, you’re hooked. Enrique thinks enough people could be hooked in five years to make ‘70s mania come up from under ground. Enrique is asked when it will be clear that that moment has arrived.

Drollinger cocks his bewigged head a moment, then delivers his verdict: “I’m waiting for designers to do a Farrah feather.”

Bad taste is back in town. In midnight cinema, young audiences are screaming for characters in helmet-head dos and polyester shirts so shiny you can see your face in them. They’re sifting through mood ring collections at vintage stores and donning platforms so high they once made podiatrists wince.

In Los Angeles and San Francisco, the extremely camp movie “The Spirit of ‘76” opened and closed at shutter speed in March, only to be resurrected in April as a midnight cult film. The movie, starring aging teen screams David Cassidy and Leif Garrett, will be screened tonight at the Beverly Center.

In Chicago, “The Real Live Brady Bunch” is playing to giddy, sold-out houses at the aptly named Annoyance Theater. The cast faithfully re-enacts episodes from the vacuous family TV show that aired from 1969 to 1974.

Rhino Records is reissuing its paean to the decade, two series of pop and soul releases that the label says are selling briskly. And some contemporary dance bands, headed by Deee-Lite, are borrowing from ‘70s rhythms and fashions. Even that quintessential ‘70s group, the Village People, recently reunited to find that disco didn’t die. It was merely napping.

“Dance music is still disco no matter what they call it,” says avowed ‘70s aficionado Lance of the gossip duo the Hollywood Kids. “But the old had a melody and orchestration, and most of the singers back then were actually singing.”

Not everything about ‘70s pop culture is coming back--not ponderous Bob Dylan or Robert Altman or vintage Rolling Stones. It’s the really cheesy aspects of the cheesiest decade that are charming anew: crocheted vests, elephant bell-bottoms, bad perms, Partridge Family lunch boxes.

And even though the ‘70s are only dribbling back, at this point largely confined to the cutting edge, the prospect of the era’s return is not being universally welcomed. For most people who were old enough to drive back then, the ‘70s viewed through the retrospectoscope are distinctly, well, annoying.

“If you lived through them, you’re not that eager for them to come back unless you’re a sybarite or a shag carpet salesman or you have an AMC Pacer tucked away in a garage in the country,” says Graydon Carter, co-editor of Spy magazine, which dedicated a horrified issue to the decade a couple of years ago.

“For the baby boom, the ‘70s was the time when most of them bought their first thing, their first bentwood rocking chair and their first cheap crockery. It’s a very primitive form of the way they live now. They tasted wine for the first time with a screw-top cap. All these artifacts are horribly embarrassing in retrospect. It was a decade devoid of taste and full of impulse, sexually and culturally and apartmentally.”

“In the ‘70s, every strong image looked dumb at the time and dumber years later,” says Greil Marcus, author of “Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century.” “You didn’t have a sense that, ‘This may look stupid, but at least it’s a brave step into a new world.’ You had the sense, ‘It may look stupid, but what the hell?’ ”

It’s easier to appreciate the ‘70s in the ‘90s if you were fetal at some point during the time, although serious adherents do include people who were actually in elementary school. Most of the club 1970’s following are in their late teens or early 20s, people who barely remember the actual decade. This lack of hands-on experience can cause fashion chaos among those who dress retro.

“Sometimes they get their ‘60s confused with their ‘70s,” says club owner Mark Hundahl.

Resurrecting ‘70s culture this much later can be hazardous in other ways. 1970 deejay Billy Limbo recalls a recent incident involving crossed cultural wires:

“A bunch of guys were slam dancing. It looks violent, but it’s not, so the entire mob of the club is in a circle. One guy just bumped his nose and had a bloody nose, and the security guards got worried and threw three guys out the door.

“I got on the mike, and said, ‘This is the 1970s. We represent everything about the ‘70s, and if the security guards are uptight, they should get over it,’ and the crowd cheered, they got the guys and brought them back in.”

Some people find it hard to believe that anyone would want to slam dance anymore, much less disco. One Los Angeles radio station’s idea of an April Fools’ joke was to announce that it was going all disco. The station, KPWR (105.9-FM), was stunned by the positive reaction.

“We aired a fake commercial that talked about a big party at a big disco in West Hollywood,” says Duncan Payton, promotions director. “You had to have lots of gold chains and chest hair and polyester. Every light on the switchboard was lit up all day--and we have 14 lines. Our receptionist was pulling out her hair. We had to change the fax paper four times.” The station has since institutionalized playing a “classic dance song,” usually disco, every hour from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Thousands of such disco devotees have signed up for the ‘70s Preservation Society, formed by two ex-lawyers in New York. The society, which claims 80,000 members coast to coast--4,000 in California--jauntily promotes its own reissues of such unforgettable numbers as “Afternoon Delight” with parties and surveys.

Last December, for example, ‘70s fanatics descended on The Building in New York for the presentation of the first Lava Lamp Achievement Awards. The honors went to such decade notables as actor Robert Hegyes, whose portrayal of Juan Epstein on TV’s “Welcome Back Kotter” earned him the Lava Lamp for dramatic excellence. As things turned out, Epstein, who sported a humongous Afro, was also singled out for having the decade’s worst-looking hair by a members’ survey.

“I felt a little bad about that,” says society co-founder Cliff Chenfeld.

Why remember the Sweathogs? In part because of the sheer goofiness of it. In part because pop culture seems to have a built-in momentum to cannibalize itself.

“Decades now are just feeding upon themselves in a way,” says Spy’s Carter. “As soon as a generation becomes dissatisfied with their own culture, the first thing they do is look for a more primitive culture, which would lead you to the ‘70s. If that’s true, an ‘80s revival is 24 months off from now, and slicked-back hair and Cuban cigars and handmade suits will be the rage among 21-year-olds.”

But ‘70s nostalgia has a flavor all its own. Unlike the ‘60s revival, currently enjoying its 15 minutes of fashion fame, there’s no sense of yearning for a more optimistic time. Nostalgia for the ‘70s is somehow emptier than that--but it may be more fun. It’s nostalgia for being bad.

“I think we can say the ‘70s was a decadent, trashy decade--the drugs, the makeup, the androgyny, marijuana and the invention of the Quaalude, and the end of the ‘70s was hard-core disco and cocaine,” says 1970 deejay Limbo. “Everyone was wearing synthetics. You couldn’t sweat and they weren’t working out. I remember people with bad physiques wearing skintight clothes.”

“The ‘70s are such a slippery decade, nobody can get a handle on it,” says Lucas Reiner, who directed “The Spirit of ’76.” “We all sort of agree that it’s somewhat embarrassing to think about.”

But cultural embarrassments can be mined for fun and profit. Rap artists routinely sample snippets of music and lyrics from ‘70s artists. And house music, a successor of ‘70s Philadelphia soul, is busting out of the dance clubs.

Deee-Lite, whose lead vocalist, Lady Miss Kier, teeters atop 4-inch platforms, is the hottest band that borrows from the decade. The trio’s first single, “Groove Is in the Heart,” hit Billboard’s Top 10, and its album, “World Clique,” has gone gold. Deee-Lite is appearing at the Hollywood Palladium on Sunday.

Jellyfish, a campy band from San Francisco, borrows riffs from Supertramp and Wings. And although Redd Kross, a Los Angeles band that will play the Palladium May 17, is heavily inspired by the decade’s rock, being associated with that other ‘70s stuff gives even Redd Kross the heebie-jeebies. The band’s Steve McDonald says he was far more influenced by Patti Smith and Blondie than, ahem, by K. C. and the Sunshine Band.

“Good things came out of that period that were overlooked,” he says. “With the revival, they’re getting overlooked again. People are remembering the Bee Gees and not Black Sabbath. I’d hate for anybody to want to relive that time period, the disco era. It is the sort of cocaine mentality: open-shirt, hairy-chest coke-spoon-type ‘70s.”

Need a gold chain? A “Saturday Night Fever” polyester suit? A Qiana shirt with Joe Namath’s imprimatur? Try Monster or Retail Slut, vintage stores that sell the real, undiluted ‘70s thing.

Not upscale enough? How about contemporary designer interpretations of the period? Betsey Johnson does ‘70s for the ‘90s, and Norma Kamali has been showing bells so big they’re practically horizontal. John Fluevog, a shoe designer who calls his creations “sole food,” does towering platforms inspired by Herman Munster.

And how long must you live with all this cultural debris? Probably not very.

“I just don’t see it working,” says Rod Cummings, fashion editor of Details magazine. “Mini mini mini skirts will be accepted as what the ‘60s brought us and the reinvented answer for the ‘90s. I don’t think women will be wearing bell-bottoms and platform shoes.” And when the ‘70s finally breathes its last gasp--again--the nation will be forced to define the looming ‘90s.

Muses Carter: “In the ‘70s, acid and marijuana were supplanted by Chablis and cocaine. In the ‘80s, they were replaced by Chardonnay and money.

“The ‘90s are sparkling water and piety--far too much of that going around now. It’s the only thing that can make the ‘70s look good.”