http://www.insidebayarea.com/entertainment/ci_12743401
Angela Woodall
Oakland Tribune
Posted: 07/02/2009
As a Reagan-era teenager, the "Seventies" was a four-letter word in
my post-Watergate, post-bell bottoms, post-flower power psyche.
But an article I read recently ignited a spark of curiosity about
those days when the adults were out "finding themselves." (If only
they had Global Positioning System devices the years when the economy
tanked and Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, was
dating Gina Lollobrigida and Jill St. John, things might have been different.)
"One key difference between the '70s and today is that in the '70s
the tourists looked scared," recalled Vanity Fair's James Wolcott in
an article about New York City in the gritty decade. "Getting back to
the hotel alive was one of the main items on their (tourists') checklists."
He called New York "Mogadishu on the Hudson."
"Now they beam as if they find everything on display cute and flaunt
their bulging shopping bags like hunting trophies "...."
I see some of that going on in Oakland, a town on the verge of gentrification.
Even an adopted son like Ishmael Reed was afraid of Oakland before
moving here in 1979. This city in the Seventies was rough and run
down as it had a reputation for being but it was more fun than it
has been in years, old-timers told me with a classic Oakland
no-nonsense look mixed with Southern hospitality manners.
Social networking meant a backyard barbecue or concert at the Kaiser
Auditorium. There were no iPods or iPhones, just a lot of me, myself
and I, as in the song, "I've been to paradise but I've never been to me."
The recession was deep but the Raiders, A's and Warriors all won
championships. (The Raiders were wild enough for the entire city. New
York needed numerous people to do its crazy work.)
Oakland police were still old-school, but the city elected its first
black mayor, Lionel Wilson, marking the end of the white downtown
business elite that ran things for decades.
New York had John Lennon and Andy Warhol. San Francisco had Karl
Malden and Michael Douglas.
Oakland had the Black Panthers, who helped pave the way for Wilson.
They patrolled West Oakland and funded some of their programs like
free school lunches through night life ventures like Oakland and The
World Entertainment. The Party-run enterprise was supposed to become
the only concert-promoting outfit in Oakland.
The first act they booked was the Ike and Tina Turner Review. Ike
Turner nearly got his teeth knocked out at least that's the way
former Panther Elaine Brown told the story in "A Taste of Power."
Near showtime, he threatened to cancel over a money dispute, but then
told the audience the band was being forced to perform.
The party's other financial mainstay was the Lamp Post. Panthers and
civilians frequented the bar on 22nd Street and Telegraph Avenue,
just down the street from Villa Nova (widely rumored to be a mob-run
club that dealt in cocaine). Sweet Jimmy's moved in after the Lamp
Post shut down; today it is a new-agey business, Body Wisdom. Villa
Nova is now a Korean joint called Dan Sung Sa.
Of course, the decade was not all disco-funky groove-a-delic,
consciousness-raising good times. Huey Newton got paranoid and
cocaine-addicted in his Lake Merritt penthouse (1200 Lakeshore, No.
25A) and had to high-tail it to Cuba. A's owner Charlie Finley didn't
seem to miss his old neighbor.
Drug lord Felix Mitchell was running the streets of East Oakland with
the 6-9 MOB by dint of gun-barrel diplomacy. (He did not need a cell phone.)
Downtown was disintegrating into a skid row. The best shows going in
many cinemas were skin flicks, but nudie master Russ Meyer (a San
Leandro native born to an Oakland cop) was long gone along with the
Oakland movie house where he filmed burlesque queen Tempest Storm.
The El Rey housed a plaster cast of Ms. Storm's 48 "attributes"
before the theater was torn down to make way for the MacArthur Freeway.
No one knows what happened to the mold. But the Fox and Paramount were saved.
Other places made way for today's Oakland, which is cuddlier in
some districts. Downtown has artier art galleries, cuter cafes,
fancier restaurants and hipper clubs. But with all those
well-intentioned entrepreneurs, boosters and residents pulled in
through former Mayor Jerry Brown's 10K housing plan, I see the line
between "Us" and "Them" getting thicker.
All the fine new neighbors who have made Oakland their home are good
for the city.
They want to clean up downtown, build ballparks, bring in chic shops,
push out pimps and prostitutes, and "relocate" havens for the homeless.
I'm more inclined to share. I don't want to live in Baghdad by the Bay.
I also don't want to become some vague version of Seattle made to
please for the bridge-and-tunnel crowd.
Billy Joel summed it up best when he said "I need to know that you
will always be the same old someone that I knew."
But should those bell bottoms ever surface I am swearing for the
record my mother made me wear them.
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Reach Angela Woodall at 510-208-6413 or awoodall@bayareanewsgroup.com.
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