Crank Up the Sound(track) : How Music Helps ‘Dazed’ Take an Evocative Trip to the ‘70s

I wanna rock & roll all night

And party every day. --Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley of KISS

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When Richard Linklater sat down to write a movie about his high school days in the post-Vietnam 1970s, all he had to do was slap a little Peter Frampton or Black Sabbath in his CD player and instantly, he said, he was transported back into a teen-age state of mind.

“These songs evoke this strong emotional memory for me,” Linklater said. “And I would often write to this music because it took me right back in time, and made it easy to get that teen-age perspective of just hating the time you grew up in and all the things you thought and did to get through it.”

From the opening credits, edited to the sexy strains of Aerosmith’s 1976 classic “Sweet Emotion,” the music that wallpapers just about every frame of Linklater’s new comedy “Dazed and Confused” serves to transport audiences back in time as well. Chart-topping “corporate rock” by such then-stars as Alice Cooper, Edgar Winter, Nazareth, Foghat, KISS, Rick Derringer, Black Sabbath, War, Thin Lizzy, Sweet and Deep Purple seem to conjure the aimless, meaningless, party-till-you-trip atmosphere of the last day of school 1976 even better than the skintight bell-bottoms, Farrah Fawcett ‘dos, roach clips and eight-track tape players. The film’s soundtrack is available on Giant Records.

“The music is definitely the most expressive element of the movie,” Linklater said. “I had a whole bunch of these songs in my head before I even started writing the script or remembering what anyone looked like.”

For Linklater, the white boogie blues of ZZ Top’s “Tush” flashed him back to a night driving around stoned in a ‘70s muscle car and smashing mailboxes with garbage cans tossed from the speeding vehicle. KISS’ “Rock & Roll All Night,” he said, recalled dozens of beer busts in the middle of an empty field. Both scenes, and the accompanying songs, ended up in his film.

Though Linklater concedes that some of the music of the period evokes groans and giggles today, he believes that many of the songs stand up better than many protest songs of the ‘60s or the disco and some punk that followed because of their “simple-minded unpretentiousness.”

Linklater deliberately set the film on May 28, 1976, to preclude the disco and punk music that have already been commemorated in film.

“It’s easy to say that a lot of this music was crap in comparison to music that actually had a political message of rebellion or whatever, just like it’s easy for me to dismiss some of the music of today’s teen-agers,” said Linklater, who is 31. “But when you are a teen-ager and you can’t express your feelings very well, the music speaks to you and so you project all your deepest feelings on it, even though it might not be that great.”

Frampton’s “Show Me the Way” became such an enormous phenomenon that a Frampton backlash was inevitable, Linklater said, but when he listened to the album “Frampton Comes Alive” again in preparation for the film, he found it to be pretty good. “It wasn’t his fault that he became such a huge thing. A lot of this music deserves to be remembered for what it is: good, authentic, pedal-to-the-metal rock ‘n’ roll.”

But as one self-aware character in the film says, “The ‘70s obviously suck,” and Linklater obviously employs some songs to punctuate that point. “Sure, I don’t mind if people laugh at the music or see that I’m using some of it ironically.”

The party songs, the driving songs, the love-thang songs also reflect this tiny window in history. Though some of the music helped usher in heavy metal and darker genres of rock that followed, most of it was sweet even when screamed at the top of the lungs.

“This was not a dark time. It was very innocent in a way,” Linklater said. “Things were confused and directionless, and after the nation got torn apart by Vietnam and Watergate there was this rejection of all that, and even having to think about it. It’s almost as if when you see the horrors of war and what society is capable of, society decides to heal itself by partying.”

Though many of these bands--Aerosmith excepted--have been long forgotten, their individual songs are worth big money. Linklater said he took a perverse pleasure in the fact that just 15 seconds into “Dazed and Confused” he had surpassed the entire budget for his first film, “Slacker,” simply with the rights money he paid for “Sweet Emotion.”

In fact, Linklater spent nearly one-sixth of his $6-million budget on music--though in at least one case even that wasn’t enough. Jimmy Page was willing to let Linklater use a Led Zeppelin tune, but Robert Plant nixed the deal even when offered $100,000 for the song “Rock and Roll.” “He said, ‘$100,000. That’s not much, especially when you have to split it in three,’ ” Linklater said. “That was a big disappointment. I never tried so hard and was willing to spend so much on something and didn’t get it.”

Linklater thinks that if “Dazed and Confused” spearheads a massive revival of ‘70s party anthems, it won’t be due strictly to baby boomers nostalgic for their youth. Younger viewers, in their teens and 20s, already embracing the platforms, bell-bottoms and crochet of the era, may latch onto it, too.

“A lot of my actors fell in love with this stuff,” Linklater said. “They see it as some great, forgotten era. I loaned the guy who played Slater (the stoner who claims in the film that George Washington cultivated marijuana at Mt. Vernon) my Black Sabbath CD--and I never saw it again.”