Hold on a moment. I know what you’re going to say. He’s off on one of his rampages about how life is unfair, twisted, mangled, or ruptured. I hate it when I get to be that predictable. OK, here is the riff:
Regular readers know I was a Pius Itinerant, ne’er-do-well folk singer and general gadabout for long periods of time in the 1960s. But it’s important for you to know that I claim no great call to fame. Few, if any, girls fell rapturously in love with me or swooned when I got on stage. The East Village paper never reviewed one of my appearances at local coffeehouses, and as part of the Boston folk scene, I was unremarkable. I am not unhappy with my role in the background, and I wouldn’t change it.
But perhaps I digress. The reason I rant today is that in Boston. They are having a symposium on the Folk Revival of 1958 – 1965. They are gathering together a bunch of geriatric former bigwigs on stage to pontificate on “who we were”.
My advice to them? ” don’t be so damn hung on yourself.”
Energy
There is always more under the surface going on in social movements than is visible on a stage. You may be a public-facing image of a movement, but you are not the movement. There are the rest of us. We do the heavy lifting in the background. Eventually, we propel things forward because true movements do not stay in one place; they evolve. The movement formerly known as the folk Revival evolved. Like a wave, some of its energy dissipated and was transferred to other causes and people. It was not just worship of big names.
Its energy is transferred even to other generations. In June, I traveled far into my state to listen to Lui Collins and Anand Nayak perform to a multigenerational audience. Folkies, everyone, regardless of generation. The so-called Revival was about keeping the traditions going. They are still doing exactly that. All you have to do is listen to many pieces of contemporary music and hear the folk traditions running through, or the interest that traditional musical styles still have with the young, old, and the in-between.
It may be for the best that the big names of the movement are now relegated to an antique status where they can get up on stage and mumble about the good old days, and how significant they were.
In a battle between who is most important, prominent faces, or the rank and file, I’ll always bet on the rankers. A movement doesn’t continue because it has loudly proclaimed leaders. It succeeds because people find its goals relevant, moving, and important.
On the comeback trail!
Now, please excuse me. I found this nifty guitar chord progression the other night that has real promise, and I want to try it out with some rhythmic variations. Who knows, maybe I can get some geriatric groupies to swoon over me. It’d be a first. Comebacks are so hard.
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A kind of old car show, then? They just had one in Alamosa. The cars were beautiful but mainly garage pets. That said…I recently read the obituary of a woman with whom I was close friends for more than 30 years. It left out all of the great things she’d done. It just said she was survived by the abusive douche bag who was her partner, her daughters, the grandkids and where her service was held. It has a photo, a bad photo. I don’t think it would have mattered to my friend but it mattered to me. Maybe that’s part of the old guys getting on stage. “Hey, I was a contender!”
In part I was being cranky. But I d0 feel that it gets forgotten that movements are more than the people with the bullhorns or up on stage.
Yep. It’s OK to be cranky.