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What elevates the music in American Graffiti-and the film along with it-is what the audience hears.

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Song selection alone, however, would only have made the movie good. Williams would later appear on a Happy Days spin-off, Laverne & Shirley. Holly, several of whose songs appear in American Graffiti, died in the same “day the music died” 1959 plane flight as Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper. A few years on, in 1978, Smith played the bassist in the Crickets, the backing band in The Buddy Holly Story. As Jameson suggests, American Graffiti didn’t just provide a template for subsequent “nostalgia” trips it populated them, as well.

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The same song will serve the following year in the credits to the TV series Happy Days, starring Howard in a similar role, as Richie Cunningham. The very opening track of the movie sets the stage for such creative song selection: “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and His Comets announces from the start that the film will take place in under a day, beginning at dusk at a diner and ending after dawn at the airport. The Big Bopper performs his hit “Chantilly Lace” on stage in 1958.

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Soon after, Bobby Freeman’s “Do You Wanna Dance” plays just as Milner finally faces down the driver (played by Harrison Ford pre-Han Solo) who has been trying to challenge him all night. Toward the movie’s end, we hear “To the Aisle” by the Five Satins as American Graffiti’s central couple (Ron Howard’s Steve Bolander and Cindy Williams’ Laurie Henderson) stress-test the future of their relationship. A character nicknamed the Toad (Charles Martin Smith) looks up while trying to steal back a car, only to find the menacing thieves looming over him the Big Bopper’s exaggerated “ Helllllo baaaaaby,” from “Chantilly Lace,” kicks in. Lucas has a lot of fun with the song placements as the story unfolds. Arguments about music provide a proxy for his anxiety. Milner senses that his days as the valley’s fastest driver are drawing to a close. “I don’t like that surfin’ shit,” the hot-rodding John Milner (played by Paul Le Mat, in unapologetic James Dean mode) tells precocious twelve-year-old Carol (Mackenzie Phillips) while cruising around town. Not all the characters are on board with change. They appear later in the film and can be heard as evidence that the 1950s are transforming into the 1960s.

A couple of recent tracks were contemporary to the film’s story: the Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ Safari” and “Green Onions” by Booker T. American Graffiti didn’t just provide a template for subsequent ‘nostalgia’ trips it populated them.Īrriving four years after Woodstock, American Graffiti embraced its old-fashioned setting by featuring a nearly non-stop soundtrack of more than forty classic pop hits, most from the 1950s “Crying in the Chapel,” the earliest, by Sonny Till & the Orioles came out in 1953.

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