FOLLOW US ON:
GET THE NEWSLETTER
CONTACT US
‘Bright Phoebus’: The stunning pagan Brit folk cult classic that you must hear before you die!*
10.11.2018
03:22 pm
Topics:
Tags:


 
*Sorry about the title, honest.

Despite the fact that I do tend to mostly post about music here, and that we are, editorially speaking, an outsider arts/music blog, of course, I do not, and never have considered myself a music journalist or like a “rock critic” or anything of the sort. We’re seldom very “critical” of anything on this blog. Instead the idea is to write about topics that we’re enthusiastic about. The philosophy more being “check out this hidden gem” and not “here this smells like shit, smell this.” We endeavor to call your attention to the good stuff. Things that we love. We’re fans, not critics.

I’m not really even sure that there is much room anymore for music criticism, that the time for it has passed. When all anyone has to do is dial up Spotify or YouTube and listen for themselves, there’s not much need for a digital age Lester Bangs or Nick Kent to convince you to plunk down the cash for an album you had few ways of sampling before you bought, because you can hear everything. Instantly. You can just hit play and you’re off to the races. My job is simply to get you to do just that: to write some words conveying my own enthusiasm for a given item that will then in turn convince you to HIT PLAY AND LISTEN. That’s it. No more, no less, that’s my only goal: “Check this out.” There is an overwhelming amount of stuff. My job is to help.

But I also know from 23 years of Internet content creation that if 100,000 people read a given post, only between 1% and 3% will actually watch the associated videoclip. Even fewer will listen to an embedded sound file. So the “this sucks” approach clearly needs rethinking as it’s simply self-defeating in a pageviews-seeking paradigm. The general public would like some help with sorting through the detritus of a century plus of pop culture, in a breezy, easily digestible context, not to step in something unpleasant. Still, very few of us ever play the media, the stats remain remarkably consistent.

But let me rein this in: If you tend to trust or agree with my musical enthusiasms as related on this blog, then pay close attention here and for sure, do not just take my word for it, press play and listen for yourself. Promise? You’re gonna be glad that you did.
 

Lal Waterson, John Harrison, Mike Waterson and Norma Waterson
 
The Watersons were a mid-60s “traditional” English folk group. They consisted of three siblings—Norma, Lal and Mike Waterson, who had been orphaned and raised by their grandmother—and their cousin John Harrison. The Watersons were from Hull and sang traditional English folk songs, unpolished and a cappella. Once you have heard their very distinctive, weather-beaten voices singing together you would never mistake them for anyone else. Although their rough-hewn harmonies were considered the epitome of authenticity, they themselves never thought of themselves as such. A truly traditional British folk singer wouldn’t have been singing in nightclubs, for instance, but singing as one did their farm chores or in church. They weren’t precious or devout about themselves, no—and this they made clear in humble, self-aware interviews—but the music itself was treated with the utmost respect. The Watersons were extremely influential in mid-60s English folk circles (there was even a BBC documentary made about them in 1965) but by the end of the decade, tired of the grind of traveling around the country in a van they also often slept in and of performing for sustenance wages, Lal and Mike returned to civilian life, regular jobs and raising families while big sister Norma worked as a radio DJ in Montserrat. 

By 1972 both Lal and Mike had amassed quite a catalog of original songs they’d demoed on a tape recorder at Lal’s house. Steeleye Span’s Martin Carthy visited Lal in Hull and she played him their tunes. Floored by what he’d heard, Carthy in turn played them for his bandmate Ashley Hutchings, who had formerly been in Fairport Convention. Hutchings felt similarly about the material and started the ball rolling, enlisting producer Bill Leader and his former Fairport bandmates Richard Thompson and Dave Mattacks to the task. A makeshift recording studio was set up in the basement of the Cecil Sharp House, the north London headquarters of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. 

The result was Bright Phoebus, one of the most striking, starkly observed and oddly beautiful albums ever recorded.
 

Mike and Lal Waterson
 
The ill-fated history of Bright Phoebus is a story by now well known to British music fans: The reviews, when there were any, were not generally positive. How could the esteemed Watersons, the very exemplars of authenticity have anything to do with this weird, non-trad music? Not only were there musical instruments involved, some of them were even electric. And there were sound effects. The conservative English folk music scene (mostly) rejected the album, or paid it no mind. Further compounding the album’s almost immediate obscurity was the fact that of the 2000 albums the record label had pressed, half had off center spindle holes drilled in them.

Over the years cassettes and CDrs of Bright Phoebus began to circulate, picking up fans like Jarvis Cocker, Richard Hawley, Fatima Mansions, Arcade Fire, Billy Bragg and others. From time to time one of the tracks might appear on a folk compilation, but the album was pretty much unavailable, with original copies selling for high prices. This was despite enough interest in the album that Lal and Mike Waterson tribute concerts (including Jarvis Cocker, younger Waterson family members, Norma and her husband Martin Carthy and others) were mounted, articles appeared in the Guardian about this unheard cult album, and there was even a Bright Phoebus BBC radio documentary. In 2017 Lal Waterson’s daughter Marry and David Suff remastered the album from the original master tapes and Domino Records released the album four ways, as a single CD with just the original album, as a double CD that also included Lal and Mike’s demo tapes and single and double vinyl versions.

When Bright Phoebus was reissued I asked for a review copy and although I liked it, it didn’t exactly wow me at first. I probably played it twice before putting it away. I didn’t stick it into the trade pile, but for 8-9 months I didn’t reach for it again either. Then I reread Joe Boyd’s book White Bicycles—in which Norma makes a brief appearance—and Electric Eden, Rob Young’s encyclopedic history of English visionary folk which also mentions the Watersons, and Bright Phoebus in particular. I needed something to play in the car one day and decided to give Bright Phoebus another chance. I’m glad I did. By the end of my errands I was hooked on the album’s singular beauty and it has become one of my top favorite albums. There’s really nothing else like it.

I’m now somewhat of an evangelist for Bright Phoebus. As most Americans would have no affiliation to the Watersons, I’ve noticed that my impassioned ranting and raving about this British cult folk album with a strong whiff of The Wicker Man tended to provoke no reaction whatsoever until I mention Richard Thompson being all over Bright Phoebus and then the beneficiary of my rock snob wisdom tends to perk up. True, Thompson’s involvement is reason enough for any serious music fan to be intrigued, but a comparison that might bridge the Anglo-American divide is to put Bright Phoebus in the same rarified uncategorizable category as The Basement Tapes, another singular collection of songs recorded by freaky folkie friends in a basement. Dylan and the Band were channeling the “old, weird America” in that Woodstock house, while a few years later the Watersons and their allies took the spirit of pagan campfire music and wedded it to a forward-thinking—alternately bone-chilling, sweet and sunny or emotionally devastating—British folk rock that took the world 45 years to catch up with.

Very simply summarized, the Waterson’s music won’t be for everyone reading this far, or even for everyone who takes me up on my advice and samples the album below. I know that will only be a small portion of you, but among that number—and yes, I am addressing YOU—expect to find something to obsess about for the rest of your life.
 

The glorious title track.
 
More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
|
10.11.2018
03:22 pm
|
Alan Arkin, folk singer
07.05.2018
10:59 am
Topics:
Tags:


 
Alan Arkin’s been one of my favorite actors ever since I saw Wait Until Dark sometime in my tween years. With the help of a switchblade hidden in a statuette of the Virgin Mary, his character, who calls himself Harry Roat Jr. or Sr. depending on the circumstance (the plot is very elaborate), was one of the most deeply sinister creations of “classic cinema” I had ever seen to that point. I can’t say I cared much for Little Miss Sunshine, the 2006 movie that finally won Arkin an Oscar, but in a wide range of movies including The In-Laws, Glengarry Glen Ross, Catch-22, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, and So I Married an Axe Murderer, Arkin has consistently supplied me (and countless others) with heaping doses of cinematic pleasure.

Arkin became truly famous around the time he appeared in Norman Jewison’s 1966 satire The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, but by then he’d packed a lifetime into his 30-odd years. In addition to being a standout member of Second City, one of the nation’s first comedy improv groups (an experience he discusses at some length in his 2011 memoir An Improvised Life), but he’d also spent several years as a participant of America’s thriving folk music scene.
 

 
In the mid-1950s, Arkin, then in his early twenties, was in a vocal/folk group called the Tarriers. That group had the good fortune to learn about a certain Jamaican folk song from a folk singer named Bob Gibson. The Tarriers had a significant hit with the song, which bears the title “The Banana Boat Song” but is more commonly known as “Day-O,” even though the song rapidly became more closely associated with a young African-American singer named Harry Belafonte. As Bob Leszczak writes in Who Did It First?: Great Pop Cover Songs and Their Original Artists, “The first single version was by the Tarriers very late in 1956 on the Glory Records label. They beat out RCA’s choice to release Belafonte’s version on a 45 by a matter of weeks. The Tarriers’ version boasts different writers—Carey, Darling, and Arkin. Indeed, the same Alan Arkin who became an Oscar winner years later.”

During the same period, Arkin released some material under his own name, including a 1955 10-inch with the convoluted title Folk Songs (And 2½ That Aren’t)—Once Over Lightly and a 1958 single with the Woody Guthrie classic “900 Miles.”

As Paul Colby observes in his memoir of his years at the Bitter End, an important folk nightclub in New York City,
 

Years later when Arkin and [Theodore] Bikel starred in the movie The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, I heard that in between takes, the movie set was very often turned into the stage of the Bitter End as both actors sang folk songs to pass the time. People like Bikel, Arkin, and Leon Bibb were very good actors, and whenever they doubled as folksingers, their performances were tremendously effective because they could really act out a song.

 
Hear Arkin’s vocal stylings after the jump…......
 

READ ON
Posted by Martin Schneider
|
07.05.2018
10:59 am
|
NYC’s Beatnik ‘riot’: How singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ kicked off the 60s revolution

04folkizzyriot.jpg
 
The protestors were peaceful. They didn’t look like revolutionaries. They were dressed in suits and ties. They were singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

But the cops still attacked them with billy clubs.

In the spring of 1961, Israel (“Izzy”) Young taped a sign to the window of his shop in Greenwich Village, New York. The handwritten sign announced a protest rally at the fountain in Washington Square Park at 2pm on Sunday April 9th .

Izzy was the proprietor of the Folklore Center at 110 MacDougal Street, a shop that sold books, records and everything else relating to folk music. Since it opened in 1957, the Folklore Center had been the focal point for young folk singers, beatniks and assorted musicians to gather together, hang out, talk, play and listen to music.

After the Second World War, Greenwich Village was the gathering point for all the disaffected youth who wanted to escape the conformity and boredom of suburbia. They were brought by the district’s association with the Beats and jazz musicians who had lived and played there during the 1940s and early 1950s. Often their first point of call was Izzy’s shop. Among the many youngsters who visited there was a young Bob Dylan. Izzy arranged Dylan’s first concert at Carnegie Hall. He “broke [his] ass to get people to come.” Tickets were two bucks apiece. Only 52 people turned up—though later hundreds would tell Izzy they were there.
 
03izzyshop3.jpg
Izzy Young in the Folklore Center circa 1960.
 
Since the late 1940s, folk musicians had gathered at the fountain in Washington Square Park. They brought their guitars and autoharps to play and sing songs. It was peaceable enough but some residents thought the Sunday gatherings brought “undesirables” to the neighborhood—by undesirables they meant African-Americans.

In April 1961, the new Commissioner of Parks Newbold Morris decided to take action. He banned singing in Washington Square Park. As Ted White later reported the events of that fateful day in the park in Rogue magazine, August 1961:

For seventeen years folksingers had been congregating on warm Sunday afternoons at the fountain in the center of the small park, unslinging their guitars and banjos and quietly singing songs. There would be a varied number of groups—perhaps ten or more—rimming the fountain, each singing a particular variety of folk music, from Negro work songs and blues to Kentucky hillbilly bluegrass, with perhaps an Elizabethan ballad from the West Virginia hills thrown in occasionally. As the years passed, the city government began showing an increasing hostility to the use of public facilities by the public, and for the last fourteen years, permits have been required before “public performances” could be given in any park. What this means is that a group of kids singing to each other on a weekday evening would be forcibly silenced by the ever-patrolling police for failing to possess a “permit,” or a young man playing a harmonica to himself quietly while sitting on a park bench might be suddenly ordered, “Move on, you!” and find himself run out of the park.

...

And now the new Parks Commissioner has refused a permit to the folksingers for their Sunday afternoon gatherings. Why? The same old story: “The folksingers have been bringing too many undesirable elements into the park.”

“Undesirable elements?” Yes, healthy young kids, racially mixed and unprejudiced enough not to care, concerned only with having the chance to assemble in the open sun and air and to be able to enjoy themselves harmlessly and happily. Sam Schwartz, a Brooklyn father, told me “Sure I let my kid—he’s a teenager—come and sing here. Why not? It’s a good, healthy activity. What’s wrong with folksongs?”

Ron Archer, a young jazz critic who lives in the West Village (an apparently less troubled area), said “Why shouldn’t people sing in the Square? If Morris is so concerned about the safety of the parks, why doesn’t he clean out the muggers and rapists in Central Park, where it isn’t safe to walk at night? Why doesn’t he go after the local punks who prowl the edges of this park at night? Why take after a group which is as harmless as the old men who play chess here, and who are just about as ’undesirable’?”

“You know what ’undesirable’ means, don’t you?” a name jazz musician told me. “It means ’Negro’. A few of the folksingers are Negroes.”

“I came up here from Mississippi,” says Bob Stewart, a Realist cartoonist who lives in the Village, “to get away from the prejudice, and now I get complaints from my landlord whenever I have a Negro friend up in my apartment.”

“The racial bias is definitely behind the whole thing,” Izzy summed it up. “It’s part of the big squeeze on the Italians.”

In response to the ban, Izzy applied for a permit to sing in the park. It was rejected. He therefore organized a protest rally.
 
06izzypksun6.jpg
Izzy Young talks to a cop at the start of the demonstration.
 
On Sunday April 9th at 2pm, around 500 men and women—smartly dressed, some in suits and ties and carrying placards—peaceably approached the fountain at Washington Square Park. They were stopped by a cop. He wanted to know who was in charge. Izzy Young made his way to the front of the crowd and talked to the officer. He explained they were allowed to protest peaceably. It was within their constitutional rights to do so. The cop told Izzy they couldn’t sing, that singing was banned. They would be arrested if they broke the ban. Izzy countered by saying singing was a form of speech and they had a right to freedom of speech. He added:

It’s not up to Commissioner Morris to tell the people what kind of music is good or bad. He’s telling people folk music brings degenerates, but it’s not so.

The cops were not impressed. They began to move menacingly towards the demonstrators. Izzy thought if they started singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” the police would not hit them “on the head.” He was wrong. As the demonstrators sang the national anthem the cops started laying into them.
 
05sunbobpak5.jpg
 
Ten demonstrators were arrested. Dozens were injured. The press hyped the story up as a ‘Beatnik riot’ where some 3000 people attacked the cops. This story was quickly dropped as it was widely known not to be true.

Keep reading after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
03.07.2016
02:13 pm
|
Bernie nooooooo!!! Bernie Sanders released a pretty terrible spoken word folk music album in 1987
08.20.2015
11:27 am
Topics:
Tags:


Cassette cover for Bernie’s album
 
Since Bernie Sanders announced his run for President of the United States of America, his lack of polish has been far more endearing to the public than his detractors ever imagined. He’s not a slick baby-kisser; the man talks serious social democratic policy and stays on message with a self-possessed intensity. However, if Bernie’s impersonal style has given the impression he’s completely devoid of sentimentality, “Brothers and Sisters,” let me assure you otherwise! In 1987, Bernie Sanders released a spoken word album of lefty folk standards, and it is bad—positively Shatneresque, if you will.

According to Vermont blog Seven Days, Burlington-based musician Todd Lockwood got in touch with Sanders out of the blue to pitch the idea—they had never met before. At this point Bernie was the Mayor of Burlington, so Lockwood just called the Mayor’s office and left a message with a secretary describing the project. To his surprise, Bernie set up a meeting, later telling Lockwood, “I have to admit to you this appeals to my ego.” Originally, Bernie was supposed to actually sing the songs, but they quickly realized he can’t carry a tune in a bucket, so they went with spoken word. You can hear samples of the results below; all I can say is that it’s good that he’s never run on anything but the issues, because he is not winning any votes with his musical talent.

If you’re just dying to hear the whole thing (for who doesn’t require a recording of an old Brooklyn Jew sternly intoning the words to “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”), you can actually purchase the entire album, We Shall Overcome, on Amazon.
 

 
Via Talking Points Memo

Posted by Amber Frost
|
08.20.2015
11:27 am
|
I Hate The Capitalist System: Barbara Dane, working class woman
07.08.2013
10:36 am
Topics:
Tags:


 
Founded by folk-blues singer and political activist Barbara Dane and Irwin Silber, Paredon Records intended to use protest music and records to promote left-wing political activism, Feminist empowerment, labor unions, Third World issues, the plight of Vietnam, communism and cause social change.

For fifteen years, between 1970 and 1985, Dane—a popular San Francisco-based performer who sang with both Louis Armstrong on TV and Bob Dylan in his coffeehouse days—and Silber released 50 albums produced with great care that often included lengthy booklets with essays by noted experts. Some of their records contained speeches by the likes of Fidel Castro, Black Panther Huey Newton and Puerto Rican independence movement leader Albizu Campos.

In 1991, Dane and Silber donated the Paredon Records archive to the Smithsonian Institution. Some of the fiercest political music Barbara Dane herself recorded can be heard on her 1973 album I Hate the Capitalist System. Here’s the title track:
 

 

 
The lady don’t mince words and she refused to sell out. If Dane wanted a career at the top of the hit parade, with a voice like hers, she could have had it, but instead she chose to sing at union rallies and raised her voice for causes that were meaningful to her. Barbara Dane’s still going strong at 86. Here she is below with Louis Armstrong on CBS’s Timex All-Star Jazz Show hosted by Jackie Gleason on January 7, 1959
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
07.08.2013
10:36 am
|
The Holy Modal Rounders, live 1972
05.17.2011
12:07 pm
Topics:
Tags:


 
Here’s something that doesn’t turn up often, nearly 30 minutes of vintage live concert footage of renegade psychedelic folkies, The Holy Modal Rounders:

A live concert in the Vondelpark in Amsterdam in the Summer of 1972. Shot by Videoheads who also organized the concert. The Holy Modal Rounders appeared frequently wherever the Grateful Dead were appearing. Electronically colorized using the Marcel Dupouy colorizer accesory for the Movicolor Video Synthesizer.

Courtesy of the fine folks at Videoheads, the same Dutch outfit who recently posted that amazing live footage of Mick Farren and the Deviants from 1969 on YouTube
 

 
Below, the trailer for the 2007 documentary on the Holy Modal Rounders, Bound to Lose.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
05.17.2011
12:07 pm
|