How that sense of gravity has continued, or disappeared, is another question. As early as 1975, in a vast photo-essay called "The End of Rock" — a series of pictures of stadiums where the Rolling Stones played on their US tour of that year — Annie Liebovitz said "this medium" — rock and roll — "is no longer the medium for our message." That sense of malaise was real — but within two years, with the Sex Pistols, there was another story to tell: that of people who insisted both on their own ephemerality and their historical role. And catching that with a camera was an altogether new challenge.
Would you attribute the malaise of the mid-'70s to Watergate-era disillusion? I was reminded of your introductory note toMystery Train, where you note "The peculiar moods of those times, when the country came face to face with an obscene perversion of itself that could be neither accepted nor destroyed." Was this mood reflected in writing and photography, or did those acts themselves seem less relevant or impactful?
There are ways in which both Watergate and the cultural malaise of the early- and mid-'70s can both be seen as part of a sixties hangover. A lot came crashing down with, on the one hand, the election of Nixon and the terrible intensification of the Vietnam War, culminating in the nation wide student demonstrations and massacres of 1970 (at Kent but also Jackson State — Crosby Stills Nash and Young released "Ohio," but Steve Miller and no one else put out "Kent-Jackson Blues" — and the Jackson State killings, of black students in the south, are forgotten) and the dissolution of ties between art and life that one could feel by 1970. It wasn't that first-rate music (and fiction or movies) dried up in that time, but rather the sense that art and culture were intimately and directly connected to everything else — how you lived your daily life, the state of the nation, the news of the week, the fate of humanity, the shape of history — was gone. Nothing connected. In late 1969 the Rolling Stones' Let it Bleed seemed like both their finest album (or anyone's) and a coherent, original, multi-faceted rewrite of social reality, hopes and fears, possibilities and traps. By the time Rod Stewart released Every Picture Tells a Story in 1971 — as good an album, deep, warm, explosive, funny, and a huge hit, bringing about the first time a single performer had topped both the UK and US single and album charts at the same time — it was a great record, period.
So I wouldn't attribute any of this to Watergate — Pauline Kael argued convincingly that the wave of cynicism that washed through American movies after 1974 was a reaction to Watergate ("Everything's corrupt, so fuck it"), but it could also have to do with a kind of self-loathing or curdling of sensibility that came about with the concurrent collapse of censorship in movies after 1970. Art and politics are interdependent, but they also take place in the same world.
