When George Lucas’ “American Graffiti” hit theaters in August 1973, its September 1962 setting seemed a long time gone. The coming-of-age movie evoked a time of lost innocence, before the Kennedy assassination or Vietnam or even the Cuban Missile Crisis, and nostalgic Watergate-era audiences responded in droves.
The film, made for $770,000, grossed more than $55 million at the box office in its initial release. It boosted the careers of several of its stars, most notably Harrison Ford, and triggered a wave of nostalgia that led to “Happy Days,” “Grease” and Ronald Reagan.
The film is usually regarded as homage to the California cruising culture, and it remains popular among hotrodders to this day. But it’s even more a tribute to one particular feature of those vintage automobiles – the AM radio, embodied by legendary DJ Wolfman Jack.
Even before the credits open with the establishing shot of Mel’s Drive-In, we hear a radio skipping through stations and stopping on a promo for XERB, the 150,000-watt border blaster that carried the Wolfman. The soundtrack, uniquely at the time, didn’t merely feature a hit parade of early rock ‘n’ roll – it was entirely diegetic, the term for movie music heard not just by the audience but the characters in the film itself. In fact, Lucas wrote each vignette that makes up the screenplay with a particular song in mind.
So it’s significant that “Crying in the Chapel” plays as Curt (Richard Dreyfus) enters the radio station and wends his way to the disc jockey’s inner sanctum. It reinforces the idea of this as sacred ground. He finds the DJ, who denies being the Wolfman, eating a melting popsicle. At the time, Wolfman Jack wasn’t well-known, so most people didn’t recognize him. His advice to Curt – and what Curt sees as he leaves – forms the true climax of the film.
Despite the copious hijinks that laid the groundwork for all the teen comedies that followed, the film has a melancholy undercurrent even before the famous coda that reveals the fates of the main male characters. One reason is that the characters themselves, especially hot-rodder John Milner (Paul LeMat), are nostalgic, too. Early on he talks about how the strip isn’t what it used to be. Later he disparages the Beach Boys and “that surfing shit,” and laments that “rock and roll’s been going downhill ever since Buddy Holly died.”
In fact, only two of the 41 oldies on the soundtrack came out in 1962. Three-quarters of them were released in the ’50s. The oldest: Sonny Till and the Orioles’ cover of “Crying in the Chapel,” from 1953.
The double-LP soundtrack album was almost like a Greatest Hits of the ’50s package, except RCA wouldn’t license any of Elvis Presley’s music for the low fee Lucas’ budget would allow. It sold 3 million copies. Ironically, the most successful of the dozens of covers of “Crying in the Chapel” was by Presley, who scored a No. 1 hit with it in 1965.
