Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.
As we all know, ever since LeBron James
left, the only thing significant about Cleveland is Todd Kwait, a
local lawyer who has turned into a quite capable documentarian on
American popular music. One can't quite call him a "rockumentarian"
as he has focused more on the rarely examined folk and jug-band
traditions. Maybe "washboardentarian" will do.
In his latest FOR THE LOVE OF THE
MUSIC: THE CLUB 47 FOLK REVIVAL, co-directed with Rob Stegman,
Kwait answered a question that was so obvious it had just never
occurred to me. Why did folk music, of all things, captivate the
eastern college-campus intelligentsia in the late 1950s? When I went
to college the craze was all reggae all the time - perfectly
understandable when you recognize that pot smoking came as part of
the cultural baggage. Yeah, world peace, Bob Marley, almighty Jah, -
blah blah blah. My university confederates, as I recall, would have
listened to marathons of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir if it gave them
cachet to be stoned all the time.
But why folk? As Kwait explains, the
inception can be traced to one club, the titular Club 47 in Boston.
Started by young students (including future author Joyce Chopra) as
coffeehouse-jazz venue, the place took a sudden turn when 17-year-old
Joan Baez showed up to audition and floored everyone with her
folk-traditional vocals. She was soon joined by other folk-a-holics,
notably an elder-figure (by undergrad standards), the late Eric Von
Schmidt, who was a walking encyclopedia of musicology; blues legend
Muddy Waters; Jackie Washington Landron (whose racial harassment by
Boston police became a portentious political issue); Jim Kweskin, who
would spearhead the jug-band movement; and Geoff and Maria Muldaur;
Judy Collins, among many others. Club 47 became a magnet and a jam
stage of contemporary and future music superstars, and it even
cultivated eastern tastes in bluegrass and Bob Dylan's electrified
folk-rock.
To Jackie Washington the irony was
especially sharp, that rich, privileged white kids were savoring
working-poor laments, union chants and chain-gang melodies. We're
told that for years the aspirations to be "authentic" folk
was such that being a singer-songwriter was a bit of a taboo. Artists
who wrote originals apparently would try to pass it off as some
obscure traditional tune they'd unearthed.
Though the filmmakers don't get Dylan
on camera, protest-folk goddess Joan Baez speaks. There's a great
Joan story about the Columbia Records scouts arriving to woo her away
from her original label, Vanguard, with a lucrative contract. Baez
refuses to sell out, sticking with the smaller, politically-tinted
Vanguard. Whoah! Rewind! She refused to sell out? These days selling
out to the beer companies, the made-in-China jeans companies or
BATTLESHIP whore-promos is the one reason musical “artists”
get into the game in the first place. What band can't wait to
showcase their repertoire on Glee (I think Kings of
Leon remain the only ones who have turned down the network)? Joan
Baez refused to sell out. Well, it was the 1960s, and everything was
strange.
The glory that was Club 47 lasted about
ten years, until 1968, though a successor, Club Passim, has sort of
picked up the mantle, apparently pretty much mandatory just for
occupying the same address. FOR THE LOVE OF THE MUSIC may be a
little light on the dramatic arc, but, as Harry Belfonte said in
another documentary I caught recently, “The music was delicious,”
as Kwait/Stegman depict how one little club in the right place at the
right time transformed a whole side of American culture. I guess
there’s room in here for a joke comparison about Cleveland’s new
multi-million dollar downtown casino that’s supposed to reverse
this region’s fortunes, but I’ll let you write that one yourself.
(3 out of 4 stars)
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