TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/60s/60folk

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 12.9 KB | 282 lines

                éâ                                                            Folk & Rock Music--Woodstock


  [Americans sang along with the folksies and danced to the ever
more ubiquitous rock 'n' roll--the whole country was grooving
to the driving beat of youth's music.]


(July 11, 1960)

  The Kingston Trio's Sold Out was anything but. With fond
backward glances at Billboard's bestseller chart, where Sold Out
last week led all the rest, Capitol Records was keeping all
music shops well supplied with the hottest album cut so far by
the hottest group in U.S. popular music.

  Hoisted to these heights by the noose that hung Tom
Dooley--the ballad was sleeping in an album they cut early in
1958--the Kingston Trio have added to the burgeoning U.S. folk
music boom a slick combination of near-perfect close harmony and
light blue humor. To help their predominantly collegiate and
post-collegiate audiences identify with them, the three do their
best to festoon themselves in Ivy, wear button-down shirts, even
chose the name Kingston because it had a ring of Princeton about
it as well as a suggestion of calypso.


(June 1, 1962)

  It is not absolutely essential to have hair hanging to the
waist--but it helps. Other aids: no lipstick, flat shoes, a
guitar.

  So equipped, almost any enterprising girl can begin a career
as a folk singer. Enough already have to make them a fixture of
current U.S. college life--like the "A" student and the
Goldwater button. What most of the singers have in common is
their age (early 20s) and their scorn of the "commercial."

  The most gifted of the newcomers is New York-born Joan Baez,
21, who has sold more records than any other girl folk singer
in history, and who last week had two albums perched high on the
pop charts. Songstress Baez boasts a pure, purling soprano
voice, an impeccable sense of dynamics and phrasing, and an
uncanny ability to dream her way into the emotional heart of a
song.


(May 31, 1963)

  There he stands, and who can believe him? Black corduroy cap,
green corduroy shirt, blue corduroy pants. Hard-lick guitar,
whooping harmonica, skinny little voice. Beardless chin, shaggy
sideburns, porcelain pussy-cat eyes. At 22, he looks 14, and his
accent belongs to a jive Nebraskan, or maybe a Brooklyn
hillbilly. He is a dime-store philosopher, a drugstore cowboy,
a men's room conversationalist. And when he describes his young
life, he declares himself dumbfounded at the spectacle. "With
my thumb out, my eyes asleep, my hat turned up an' my head
turned on," says Bob Dylan, "I's driftin' and learnin' new
lessons."

  Sometimes he lapses into a scrawny Presleyan growl, and
sometimes his voice simply sinks into silence beneath the
pile-drive chords he plays on his guitar. But he has something
unique to say, and he says it in songs of his own invention that
are the best songs of their style since Woody Guthrie's.


(July 19, 1963)

  All over the U.S., folk singers are doing what folk singers
are classically supposed to do--singing about current crises.
Not since the Civil War era have they done so in such numbers
or with such intensity. Instead of keening over the poor old
cowpoke who died in the streets of Laredo or chronicling the
life cycle of the blue-tailed fly (the sort of thing that fired
the great postwar revival of folk song), they are singing with
hot-eyed fervor about police dogs and racial murder. Sometimes
they use serviceable old tunes, but just as often they are
writing new ones about fresh heroes and villains, from Martin
Luther King to Bull Connor.

  The Peter, Paul and Mary recording of Bob Dylan's Blowin' in
the Wind is, according to Warner Bros. Records, the fastest
selling single the company has ever cut. Blowin' is young Dylan
at his lyrically honest best. It sounds as country-airy as
Turkey in the Straw, but it has a cutting edge.

  How many roads must a man walk down   Before you call him a
man?...   How many years can some people exist   Before they're
allowed to be free?   How many times can a man turn his head
And pretend he just doesn't see?   The answer, my friend, is
blowin' in the wind,   The answer is blowin' in the wind.


(May 21, 1965)

  Rock 'n' roll was still dismissable among the sophisticates
as a curiously persistent fad. But then came the British. U.S.
parents had weathered Pat Boone's white-bucks period, the
histrionics of Johnnie Ray, and the off-key mewings of Fabian,
but this was something else again--four outrageous Beatles in
high-heeled boots, under-sized suits and enough hair between
them to stuff a sofa. When they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show
in February 1964, 68 million people, one of the largest TV
audiences in history, tuned in to see what all the ruckus was
about.

  What they saw was four young chaps having a jolly good bash.
By refusing to take themselves seriously, the Beatles made rock
'n' roll fun again.

  They also made it all right to be white. Beatle music and
even Beatle accents are actually Anglicized imitations of Negro
rhythm and blues once removed. Says Beatle John Lennon: "We can
sing more colored than Africans."

  The best brown sound is, of course, that sung by Negroes. Last
year 42 of the bestselling rock 'n' roll songs were produced by
one man: Berry Gordon Jr., 35, who as head of Detroit's Motown
Records, employs some 175 Negro artists. The prize fillies in
Gordy's stable are the Supremes, three girls who grew up
together in Detroit's squalid Brewster Housing Project. With
four consecutive No. 1 records, they are the reigning female
rock 'n' roll group, followed by Motown's Martha and the
Vandellas. Diana Ross, 21, the Supremes' lead singer, is greatly
envied for the torchy, come-hither purr in her voice. Her
secret: "I sing through my nose."

  District from the brown-sound school are the Beach Boys from
California: "We're not colored; we're white. And we sing white."
They made their big splash with the "surf sound"--clean, breezy
orchestration, a jerky, staccato beat and a high, falsetto
quaver reminiscent of the Four Freshmen. With hits like Surfin'
and Hang Ten (toes over the edge of the surf board), the Beach
Boys--three brothers, a cousin and a neighbor--have sold more
than 12 million records, grossed as much as $25,000 for one
concert in Sacramento. They write their own songs, following one
rule of thumb: "We picture the U.S. as one great big
California."


(April 28, 1967)

  A paternity suit here, a fine for urinating on a building
there, and pretty soon the London papers were asking: "Would you
want your daughter to marry a Rolling Stone?" With each blast
of adverse publicity, their recordings edged higher on the pop
charts, until the boys suddenly found themselves the champions
of the teeny-bopper revolt against adult authority.

  Perversity pays. The Stones have sold 40 million recordings
and currently have three albums on the U.S. bestseller charts.
Though they deny that they consciously play up their rebel
image, they bill themselves as "five reflections of today's
children," write songs about "trying to make some girl," with
supposedly coded allusions to menstruation, marijuana and
birth-control pills. For their appearance on the Ed Sullivan
Show in January, they reluctantly altered the words of their
recent hit, Let's Spend the Night Together.


(June 23, 1967)

  In its permutations, the San Francisco Sound encompasses
everything from bluegrass to Indian ragas, from Bach to jugband
music--often within the framework of a single song. Most of the
groups write their own songs and, unlike most rock 'n' rollers,
improvise freely, building climax upon climax in songs that run
on for 20 minutes or more.

  As the pile-driving beat thunders out of six speakers with
deafening insistence, blinding strobe lights flash in rhythm
with the music; the walls swim with projections of amoeba-like
patterns slithering through puddles of quivering color. Just as
in other psychedelic-lit joints, such as Andy Warhol's Gymnasium
in Manhattan, the aim is to immerse everybody in sound and
sight. When the spell takes hold, young mothers with sleeping
infants in their arms waltz dreamily around the floor; other
dancers drift into a private reverie, devising new ways to
contort their bodies.


(August 5, 1968)

  He hopped, twisted and rolled over side-ways without missing
a twang or a moan. He slung the guitar low over swiveling hips,
or raised it to pick the strings with his teeth: he thrust it
between his legs and did a bump and grind, crooning: "Oh, baby,
come on now, sock it to me!" Lest anybody miss his message, he
looked at a girl in the front row, cried: "I want you, you,
you!" and stuck his tongue out at her. For a symbolic finish,
he lifted the guitar and flung it against the amplifiers.

  Such scenes have not been uncommon during the past three weeks
on the latest U.S. tour by the Jimi Hendrix Experience--Hendrix
plus Englishmen Noel Redding on bass and Mitch Mitchell on
drums. Their music, when Jimi pauses to concentrate on it, is
a whirlpool where the currents of Negro blues and psychedelic
rock meet, and it churns with all but overwhelming power from
their nine amplifiers and 18 speakers. But it is no more than
a conveyor on which the high-riding Hendrix projects his
anti-personality: wild, woolly and wicked.


(August 9, 1968)

  "My message," Janis Joplin says, "is 'Get off your butt and
feel things!'" When she stomps, quivers, flails her arms, tosses
her mane of hair and swoops through a vocal chorus with hoarse
croons and piercing wails, few listeners fail to get the
message. Last week at the Newport Folk Festival, a crowd of
17,800 clapped and roared for encores until nearly 1 a.m.

  Janis is the lead singer with Big Brother and the Holding
Company, a hard-driving San Francisco rock group whose sound
somewhat resembles a busy sawmill. At 25, Janis is the most
distinctive female performer yet to emerge from the West Coast
rock movement.


(June 6, 1969)

  Youngsters begin lining up at the box office of Manhattan's
Biltmore Theatre before dawn. Sidewalk scalpers hustle tickets
for as much as $50 a pair. A year after its Broadway debut, the
rock musical Hair is not only a nightly sell-out in New York and
Los Angeles but an international hit as well. By any measure,
this electronically amplified paean to peace, pot and
permissiveness has become the My Fair Lady of the Now
Generation, and its success is even more striking on records.
Hair is the first Broadway musical since Man of La Mancha to win
a gold platter--the record industry's reward for selling
$1,000,000 worth of disks. RCA Victor's original-cast recording
has been the No. 1 album bestseller for seven weeks.


  [The youthful hopes of the decade were captured in the summer
of 1969 during a weekend of music--Woodstock.]

(August 29, 1969)

  What took place at Bethel, ostensibly, was the Woodstock Music
and Art Fair, which was billed by its youthful Manhattan
promoters as "An Aquarian Exposition" of music and peace. It was
that and more--much more. The festival turned out to be
history's largest happening. As the moment when the special
culture of U.S. youth of the '60s openly displayed its strength,
appeal and power, it may well rank as one of the significant
political and sociological events of the age.

  By a conservative estimate, more than 400,000 people--the
vast majority of them between the ages of 16 and 30--showed up
for the Woodstock festival. Thousands more would have come if
police had not blocked off access roads, which had become
ribbonlike parking lots choked with stalled cars. Had the
festival lasted much longer, as many as one million youths might
have made the pilgrimage to Bethel. The lure of the festival was
an all-star cast of top rock artists, including Janis Joplin,
Jimi Hendrix and the Jefferson Airplane. But the good vibrations
of good groups turned out to be the least of it. What the youth
of America--and their observing elders--saw at Bethel was the
potential power of a generation that in countless disturbing
ways has rejected the traditional values and goals of the U.S.
Thousands of young people, who had previously thought of
themselves as part of an isolated minority, experienced the
euphoric sense of discovering that they are, as the saying goes,
what's happening.

  To many adults, the festival was a squalid freakout, a
monstrous Dionysian revel, where a mob of crazies gathered to
drop acid and groove to hours of amplified cacophony. The real
significance of Woodstock can hardly be overestimated. Despite
the piles of litter and garbage, the hopelessly inadequate
sanitation, the lack of food and the two nights of rain that
turned Yasgur's farm into a sea of mud, the young people found
it all "beautiful." One long-haired teen-ager summed up the
significance of Woodstock quite simply: "People," he said "are
finally getting together."