BETWEEN US
Robert Love EDITOR IN CHIEF
1973: A Year That Changed the World
Hip-hop is 50; NASCAR is 75; Jeff Bridges is still a superstar. Let’s celebrate
Clockwise from left: The father of hip-hop, DJ Kool Herc; Jeff bridges as Junior Jackson in The Last American Hero; NASCAR driver Junior Johnson
FIFTY YEARS AGO, Americans were worried about rising prices and a looming recession: In 1973, inflation more than doubled—from 3.7 percent to 8.7 percent—and effectively ended the post–World War II economic boom. But everything is relative. Let’s set the Wayback Machine for ’73, hop in the Chevy and go shopping. You could afford to take the long way—gasoline was just 39 cents a gallon, eggs were 78 cents a dozen, and you could get 10 pounds of potatoes for less than a buck. A first-class postage stamp cost 8 cents. Doesn’t sound that bad, does it? But the minimum wage was $1.60 an hour, and the median family income was $12,050.
Our parents were watching All in the Family, but young Americans were ready for something new. And on August 11, 1973, at a rec room party in an apartment complex at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, New York, a couple of music-mad teenagers changed the world. As you will read in the introduction to our story on the influence of hip-hop, a young DJ added a second turntable to extend the most danceable instrumental breaks in the music, set up the microphone, and voilà! A new culture was born.
Fifty years later, hip-hop is a global phenomenon with its own style, heroes and language. This music—a raw, youthful form of self-expression from the nation’s urban centers—never sought approval from the record companies or the establishment. Like rock ’n’ roll 20 years earlier, it just shook things up.
The same year, hundreds of miles to the south, another uniquely American subculture was ready to break into the mainstream. Like hip-hop, it came with its own heroes, language and values—heart-stopping speed and cars made from American steel. Oval track racing with stock cars—a.k.a. NASCAR—had begun in 1948, but it started to slowly break out of the Southeast to become a popular sport across the country in the early 1970s.
Which brings us to our cover subject, Jeff Bridges, son of Lloyd, brother of Beau, legend in his own laid-back right with more than 50 years of movies on his résumé—and his third magazine cover for AARP. That’s Jeff (above) in the racing suit at 22 years of age, on set for The Last American Hero, one of the first Hollywood treatments of Southern stock car culture. Dale Earnhardt Jr. called it the best of the NASCAR movies. In the 1973 film, Bridges plays Junior Jackson, a character based on real-life racing legend Junior Johnson—himself a hell-raising moonshiner who honed his driving skills outrunning revenuers on backwoods North Carolina roads. The movie grew from a story by Tom Wolfe, the great American author and journalist, our Mark Twain in faux spats, who had spotted the trend years before. “We were all in the middle of a wild new thing, the Southern car world,” Wolfe wrote, and Johnson was “a modern hero.” He was “not just an ace at the game itself, but a hero a whole people or class of people can identify with.”
Southern stock car racing culture, like hip-hop, grew organically from a regional thing until it was right up there with the NFL and NBA in terms of popularity. So, yes, young readers in your 50s, 1973 was a remarkable year. We’re all still living in the world it created.
