Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/102692/1026440.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 6KB | 118 lines

                                                                                MUSIC, Page 73

Bringing Folk Back Home


An all-star tribute to Bob Dylan and a raft of albums invoke
the genre's wild, enduring spirit

By JAY COCKS


    And speaking of folk music . . . Well, we weren't, were
we? Does anyone? Outside of Birkenstock dealerships,
natural-food markets and the occasional bold bookseller who
might risk putting a copy of Bound for Glory on the counter next
to Vox, folk music -- both traditional and the highly modified
and individualized form practiced in the '60s -- has tumbled
from the pop culture jet stream and gone to earth somewhere in
the deep woods of nostalgia.

    Until now. Until last Friday night in New York City, when
a dazzling group of contemporaries, from Neil Young to George
Harrison, from Eric Clapton to Stevie Wonder, took the stage at
Madison Square Garden and paid joyous tribute to the music of
Bob Dylan. The concert, which lasted well over three hours, was
a loose-limbed, dynamic show that didn't waste a second on
sentiment or nostalgia. Instead, with Bob himself leading the
pack, it trip-hammered through the Dylan songbook, setting free
the wild spirit of some of the best tunes written in the past
30 years.

    The concert began in overdrive and ended out in the
ionosphere, with all the performers joining for a resounding
Knockin' on Heaven's Door. If the occasion for the show remained
a little undefined, the concert itself turned out to be a
capstone of pop culture: one of the first rock concerts ever
whose importance was not in signaling a change in music but in
rerouting it and reconfirming the righteousness of a whole
direction.

    Pragmatically, the concert set up and launched Dylan's new
album, his 38th, Good as I Been to You, which will be released
by Columbia on Nov. 3. It's one of the best things he has ever
done. And it is, entirely, a collection of classic folk songs,
with a little blues done solo by Dylan with acoustic guitar and
harmonica. It's a bracing shot of unadorned, passionate music.
He hasn't recorded an album like this since his debut, released
in 1962. So the circle will be unbroken, by and by.

    Unbroken, but enlarged. Neil Young also has a record due
out at the end of the month, a supple set of 10 ravishing songs
called Harvest Moon (Reprise) that returns to the softer,
folk-accented vein of earlier hits like Harvest. Lucinda
Williams shows a bluesy heart and a folk spirit in her recent
Sweet Old World (Chameleon/Elektra), and an intrepid small
record company in New Jersey called Bar/None has a real comer
in Freedy Johnson. His album, titled Can You Fly, features the
idiosyncratic singer-songwriter stalking his own subconscious,
sounding like a cross between Hank Williams (on The Mortician's
Daughter) and a skid-row Springsteen (on We Will Shine). John
Prine had a wonderful new album a few months back, The Missing
Years (Oh Boy), and Luka Bloom's The Acoustic Motorbike
(Reprise) is like Celine in high spirits. It's all enough to
make you believe that that staple of music-biz resurrection, the
folk revival, is coming around again.

    The Dylan record and concert, with all the attendant
attention and ancillary activity from other performers, are not
anything so focused -- or, perhaps, so fleeting -- as a revival.
They are, however, a clear revivification and a reminder of the
continuing pertinence of the genre. All folk needs is an
occasional jump start to bring it back home, and who better to
do that than someone who has already altered the music's course,
and its form, forever.

    Good as I Been to You may hark back, in style, to Dylan's
debut album, but the performances have 30 years of rough roads
and lively living to underscore them. His version of Stephen
Foster's Hard Times Come Again No More has a lifetime's impacted
melancholy and sense of fragile hope. Similarly, Neil Young's
From Hank to Hendrix, about a man who measures all the seminal
events of his personal history against a pop panorama, has both
a youthful brio and a hard-won autumnal perspective.

    Maybe folk had to age a little to seem fresh again.
Certainly everyone on the Garden stage wore his years well, but
the music -- in the concert and on all these new records --
sounds particularly pertinent. The gifted Loudon Wainright III
lays down a raucous, respectful tune called Talking New Bob
Dylan on his fine album called History (Charisma). "You keep
right on changin' like you always do," he sings to Dylan, "and
what's best is the old stuff still all sounds new." The thought
could stand for the classic material on Good as I Been to You,
as well as for Lucinda Williams' blues, or Luka Bloom's more
introspective turns.

    It might be the prospect of political change in the wind
that helps make this new folk sound so bracing. "It's the
perfect music for these times," as Neil Young says. Or maybe
it's the prevailing staleness of pop and the relentless assaults
of rap. In any case, there is as much to celebrate in the sudden
multiplicity of folk talent as there was at the Garden. Eddie
Vedder and Mike McCready from Pearl Jam performed a ferocious
version of Masters of War that demonstrated that the hardest
rock has a strong and still vital folk lineage. Folk now can
comfortably encompass the salty sensitivity and social
speculation of Willie Nile's Hard Times in America (Polaris) as
well as the rap-inflected rage of the Native American activist
John Trudell on AKA/Grafitti Man (Ryko). It has a newer, wider
compass, and, as ever, Bob Dylan is magnetic north.