The area that you show in the 1970's is when the US Dollar peg to Gold was abandoned by Nixon. Gold went from $35 an ounce to a spike high of $850 an ounce due to inflation issues when Carter was president.

Volcker started increasing interest rates which depressed the price of Gold for the next few decades. With the advancement in computers and HFT, the overall volatility has been somewhat diminished.

There have been massive selloff days in the bear market from 2011 to 2015 that I would classify as volitile.