By TATIANA DIAZ
Staff writer
The great divide was November 22, 1963, and nothing was ever the same again. The teenagers in American Graffiti are, in a sense, like that cartoon character in the magazine ads, the one who gives the name of his insurance company, unaware that an avalanche is about to land on him. The options seemed so simple then: to go to college or to stay home and look for a job and cruise Main Street and make the scene. The options were simple, and so was the music that formed so much of the way we saw ourselves. American Graffiti‘s soundtrack is papered from one end to the other with Wolfman Jack’s nonstop disc jockey show, that’s crucial and absolutely right. The radio was on every waking moment. A character in the movie only realizes his car, parked nearby, has been stolen when he hears the music stop. He didn’t hear the car being driven away. The music was as innocent as the time. Songs like Sixteen Candles and Gonna Find Her and The Book of Love sound touchingly naive today, nothing prepared us for the decadence and the aggression of rock only a handful of years later. The Rolling Stones of 1972 would have blown WLS off the air in 1962.