This is part two of a series of notes on the bowling shirt and the culture around it. Part one is here, but you don’t need to have read it to enjoy this one.
There Is No Twenty-Year Cycle
I bowled on a computer before I bowled in real life. I spent hours on our Macintosh Performa playing “Alley 19,” a bowling simulator with a ‘50s motif—horn rimmed glasses on bowlers, a neon martini sign above the virtual lounge that held high scores, and of course, bowling shirts. Later, when I went to a bowling alley for the first time, it was the Bel-Air Bowl in Belleville, Illinois, an alley that matched the video game’s Googie aesthetic. When I started going to my hometown’s bowling alley, I fell in love with the Brunswick-made ball return, which was as Googie as the fins on a vintage Cadillac. The alleys were the genuine article, while the video game was part of a particular flavor of ‘50s nostalgia that was sweeping the country in the 1990s.
A typical conversation about nostalgia in the ‘90s focuses on the ‘70s revival that rolled in over the first half of the decade. Even though Dazed and Confused wasn’t meant as a nostalgic movie, it signaled a new appreciation for the era that Gen-X had been children in. The rock music of the ‘90s hearkened more to the punk and hard rock sounds of the ‘70s than the hair-metal glam of the ‘80s. Old TV shows remained popular in reruns, and in music videos from the Beastie Boys and ODB. But while the ‘70s were cool again, there was a palpable ‘50s nostalgia at the time as well.
There’s a pervasive idea that nostalgia moves in regular cycles, particularly cycles of about twenty years. There was a wave of ’50s nostalgia in the ‘70s. Angst over Watergate, disillusionment with ‘60s flower-power idealism, and the rise of Americana that presaged the Bicentennial brought about Grease, American Graffiti, andthe song “American Pie.” This would explain any ‘50s nostalgia in the ‘90s as something dredged up when the ‘70s returned. It’s like Weezer’s “Buddy Holly” video—a ‘90s band placed into a ‘70s show that was set in the ‘50s (directed by Spike Jonze, who’d also directed the “Sabotage” video).
But nostalgia doesn’t cycle as much as it stacks up. A generation entering adulthood looks back to childhood. A generation entering middle age longs for a time before they faced the responsibilities of career and family. The generation becoming empty nesters has warm memories of the era when their children were young. This is called the reminiscence bump.
Each group has a different target of their nostalgia and each group has a different level of accuracy of the memory. Each group also has a different level of influence on popular culture. These overlapping nostalgias lead to a melange of misplaced memories. The popular image of the past becomes increasingly imprecise.
Nostalgia for the ‘50s didn’t go away after the ‘70s, it just evolved and took on different meanings. It stuck around in the ‘80s, in Back to the Future (which paints the ‘50s as sex-crazed and violent) and the campaigns of Ronald Reagan (which paint the ‘50s as wholesome). There were a few different visions of the ‘50s in the culture of the mid-‘90s. One vision drew on the exotica, bowling alley, martini lounge side of the decade. In the video for Harvey Danger’s 1997 song “Flagpole Sitta,” the first subculture the band uncomfortably passes through is a bunch of martini-drinking neo-beatniks under Googie light fixtures. It’s an exaggeration, but as someone who was always looking for fashion cues at the time, I can safely say there really were people who looked and acted like this—mixing Kerouac with kitsch.
In another corner, “Elvis” was a type of guy you’d regularly encounter on TV. Quentin Tarantino, Nic Cage, Rob Schneider, John Stamos—they were all popular men of varying levels of cool who took aesthetic cues from Elvis (all of them played Elvis in some way, too—Tarantino in an episode of Golden Girls, Cage as “Tiny Elvis” on Saturday Night Live, Schneider in musical tributes, Stamos on Full House). The ‘90s were the decade of the Elvis stamp war (written about here). Elvis in a white jumpsuit in Las Vegas stood next to Elvis in an Aloha shirt in Blue Hawaii.
On top of that, Tarantino’sfilms brought back various aesthetics from the past, from surf (Dick Dale’s Miserlou in Pulp Fiction) to ‘70s cool (Jackie Brown). It all went into the same cultural stew.
The camp/bowling/guayabera shirt was part of this mixed-up ‘50s style in the ‘90s, often worn with a wry, ironic distance—again, think of Jon Waters on The Simpsons and Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites.
Too Many Shirts
The bowling shirt was an easy emblem of the past in large part because there were tons of them around. A league bowler might change uniforms every season. The shirts were built for performance—to be worn hard and washed hot. They lasted. They piled up in Goodwill. “Men and businesses come and go, but the bowling shirt lives on,” a columnist wrote in the Buffalo News in 1982.
The bowling shirt, specifically one meant for bowling, fit the irony of the ‘90s perfectly. A bowling shirt was a uniform for leisure, a mix of official garb and goof-off attire. Often, the shirts had the bowler’s name embroidered on the front and a local business that sponsored a long-ago league team on the back. For a person who loved irony and hated commercialism, what could be cooler than to wear an advertisement for an unknown business with someone else’s name sewn on the front? Plus, the shirts represented an era just before the ‘60s that Baby Boomers were becoming increasingly nostalgic for. Wearing a ‘50s-style bowling shirt was a way of indulging in nostalgia that countered the previous generation’s nostalgia.
It’s So Money
Nothing cool can stay that way. Anything with both appeal and edge will slowly have the edge sanded down until it appeals to the widest possible audience. As ‘90s hipsterdom went mainstream, the old nostalgic symbols took on a new meaning.
In TV and movies, the camp collar short-sleeve shirt became a sign that a character was slightly off from the mainstream. To me, the exemplar of this style is David Anthony Higgins’ character Joe on the Ellen sitcom. He’s a nerd who works at a coffee shop/bookstore well into his ‘30s. Joe had ‘50s throwback glasses and often wore loudly patterned camp shirts. It fit his character—a slacker with more wit than ambition and a deep knowledge of popular culture (I wonder why he inspired me so).
The movie Swingers brought the cocktail-sipping, Vegas-hopping lounge lizard to a wider audience (Las Vegas being a hub of the postmodernist Googie-style architecture). But the movie’s version of ‘50s nostalgia was blurry. This is clearest in the music. Swingers was essential to one of the strangest eras in modern popular culture, and the peak of the decade’s muddled nostalgia: the swing revival.
Swingers helped break the band Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, an act that played music from the ‘40s, dressed like they were from the ‘20s, and had a name that evoked the exotica era of the ‘50s. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy had roots in the ‘80s Southern California punk scene, and punk had long had an aesthetic connection to various ‘50s and ‘60s subcultures. The Ramones nodded to girl groups and bubblegum. The Clash veered into rockabilly. The Stray Cats camped out in it. In the ‘90s, Stray Cats leader Brian Setzer started a Louis Prima-inspired group and became central to swing revivalism. It’s Setzer whose song was in the Gap’s “Khakis Swing” ad.
The Gap used nostalgia freely in ads in the ‘90s. The brand ran an ad in 1993 saying “Kerouac wore khakis.” The year after “Khakis Swing,” Gap ads featured music from Donovan (“Mellow Yellow”) and Queen (“Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” as performed by Dwight Yoakam).
Meanwhile, punk acts inspired by the Clash (among others) brought in horn sections and joined the third wave of ska. None of this music sounded like anything from the ‘50s or the ‘30s. None of it was particularly good. But it was played and enjoyed by guys who wanted to have a retro look. Anything retro would do. It wasn’t uncommon in these years to go to the mall and see dudes in bowling shirts, fedoras, and checkerboard Vans.
It was a mess of vibes with no singular historical precedent; nostalgia, separated from its origins and reveling in an evocation of the generalized past. And the fact that it was now mass-market and mainstream meant it was no longer ironically cool, or even authentically cool. It was just popular. It was the post-modern aesthetics of the Las Vegas strip manifested in white suburban teenagers’ closets.
It All Happens at Once
I’m all over the place with the timeline. Swingers was 1996. “Flagpole Sitta” was 1997. Ellen debuted in 1994. It’s easy to imagine that Ethan Hawke’s character in 1995’s Before Sunrise would find Ethan Hawke’s character from 1994’s Reality Bites to be a pretentious jerk. Elvis guys and the bowling shirt crowd co-existed. Today, the path from outré to on trend to cringe takes only minutes to traverse. But people have always moved at their own pace, often slowly, through culture.
Every Nostalgia Thread in One Video
1997. Smash Mouth releases “Walkin’ on the Sun,” their first major single.
The video features the following:
* All four band members in bowling shirts
* A beach party scene with tiki statues
* A brief homage to Petticoat Junction
* A ‘50s style hot rod race
* A performance scene shot in a vinyl and chrome lounge that wouldn’t seem out of place in a suburban bowling alley.
Smash Mouth’s sound borrowed from ‘60s pop and exotica, like a more mainstream version of Stereolab (the thriving indie scene and counterculture of the ‘90s meant there was always a cooler alternative/antecedent to whatever was popular). “Walkin’ on the Sun” sounds similar to “Swan’s Splashdown,” from J.J. Perrey and Gershon Kingsley’s 1966 album The In Sound from Way
A cutting-edge bachelor pad would’ve had this record in rotation (it’s easy to imagine it playing in either version of Rock Hudon’s apartment in 1959’s Pillow Talk—either the cool modern songwriter’s den or the tacky jungle-themed pad Doris Day turns it into as revenge).
Proving that there was always a cooler alternative to the mainstream in the ‘90s, in 1996, the Beastie Boys released an instrumental homage to the Perrey and Kingsley record, with the same title and a similar cover.
How the Sleaze Seeped In
There was an undercurrent of sex in the ‘90s version of the ‘50s. It was in the exotica strain (they embodied Hugh Hefner’s quote from part one of this essay and embraced the covers of exotica albums). And it was in the rockabilly side (vintage pin-up photos were popular). This was part of the nostalgia for the ‘50s, even among the most irony-obsessed Gen-Xers. It was this generation that revived interest in Bettie Page as a subversive fashion icon.
When the various subcultures of the old era were merged and mainstreamed in a time with less stringent social mores, the sex rose to the top. This explains bands like Lit and (I really hate typing this name) the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies—acts that foregrounded sleaze and sex over an incomprehensible mix of nostalgic aesthetics. We’ll leave the “Daddies” to the dustbin of also-ran rock history. Lit’s sound was a vaguely punkish pop metal that borrowed most heavily from the Sunset Strip acts of the ‘80s, while their aesthetics were pure ‘90s nostalgia-mining dirtbag—boxy shirts, slicked back hair, pin-up model album covers, gross goatees.
In 1999, Lit released “My Own Worst Enemy,” their first major single. (I’m not embedding the video, but you can watch it here.) The video for the song has two set pieces. In the first, the band is bowling. In the second, they’re playing the song. The bowling shots are a jumble of time-specific references. There’s Googie architecture in the bowling alley, ‘50s bowling shirts, and a general wardrobe of leisure suits from the ‘70s. In the performance shots, the band is in late-‘90s rock-guy gear—instruments slung low, hair gelled and spiked, the guitar player’s goatee braided into a long point. At the end of the video, the scenes merge. The bowlers follow a group of women to the bowling alley’s bar, where we see the band’s performance. A party ensues. The two aesthetics combine in a haze of sex and booze.
A Moment on Bowling
There’s a reading of the Lit video that places its direct inspiration one year earlier, in the Coen Brothers’ film The Big Lebowski. The movie has several scenes in a ‘50s-style bowling alley. Steve Buscemi’s character Donnie wears an array of bowling shirts, each embroidered with a different name. But it’s John Turturro’s character—The Jesus—who seems to be the most direct parallel to the guys from Lit.
Turturro drapes his character with a layer of comedic sleaze. He licks the ball before he bowls. He thrusts his pelvis in the air. He does a move where he holds the ball in a sling over his crotch and quickly lifts the sides of the sling to polish the ball, which stays just below his waist. While this was surely something bowlers had long thought to do as a goof, the guys from Lit do the same move in their video. Turturro’s character isn’t just a bowling shirt guy, he’s a bowling suit guy—he wears a jumpsuit that extends the bowling shirt to the floor. The character is also, notably, a convicted sex offender in the movie.
In both the Lit video and in The Big Lebowski, bowling is presented as a sport that’s retro in ways that extend beyond the design of the alleys. In Lebowski, it’s the out-of-the-way pastime for a group of losers. In the Lit video, it’s a decidedly vintage game. The twentysomethings in the band are cosplaying as lascivious members of their parents’ generation.
Out of Their League
Both the video and the film presented bowling as something it increasingly wasn’t in the ‘90s: organized. The movie and video are about league bowling, which was in decline at the time. In 1995, Robert Putnam published his essay “Bowling Alone,” which would grow into a bestselling book five years later. It’s about Americans’ waning civic involvement. In the passage that inspired his title, Putnam writes:
Between 1980 and 1993 the total number of bowlers in America increased by 10 percent, while league bowling decreased by 40 percent. (Lest this be thought a wholly trivial example, I should note that nearly 80 million Americans went bowling at least once during 1993, nearly a third more than voted in the 1994 congressional elections and roughly the same number as claim to attend church regularly. Even after the 1980s’ plunge in league bowling, nearly 3 percent of American adults regularly bowl in leagues.)
So bowling was still something people did with friends, but organized competition was becoming the stuff of fiction. Leagues, the source of the branded bowling shirt, were fading away. The ‘90s had seen the bowling shirt move from ironic cool to mainstream to vaguely off-putting. The shirt had many meanings. The actual reality was unmoored from its origins.
Next time: Irony dies on the lanes
