The Folkie Apocalypse

Daily writing prompt

Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to.

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OKAY, This is your alert! He’s so off on a Greenwich Village roll again! You Have Been Warned.

I sat down to watch the movie ” A Mighty Wind” with some trepidation. Within moments, I was groaning at the portrayals of people who were almost like the folkies I had known. The movie cut, in a humorous way, just a little too close to the bone. The preoccupations of the performers opened to public view. The jealousies and innuendos were all there. We took it so seriously, and the movie exposed how mundane we were.

It was tough to watch because I know friends who either never picked up a guitar again after their last gig or those who practiced endlessly for a gig that will never come. Think of it; thousands of folkies, male and female, practicing in their basements, waiting for the Folkie Apocalypse to come. Do you think I’m joking? We may be getting old, but Folk Music is a powerful drug. When it takes hold of you, it doesn’t let go.

Flashbacks

I have not been able to watch the movie ” Inside Llewyn Davis.” Just watching the trailer gave me bad flashbacks. Don’t get me wrong. I loved Greenwich Village, and I loved my life there. I’m not sure that, in a way, I’ll ever get over it. But, to get shoved back inside it again. No. Much too much crazy stupidity. But oh for the beautiful afternoons, evenings, nights, and entire weeks of playing that music.

I say beautiful. But we lived in run-down fleabag hotels, and cheap rentals that you shared with all manner of critters. And after parties, the empties seemed to roll by themselves across the floors. You might need a glossary to decode the version of hipster English we spoke. It blended idioms from jazz, blues, the Bohemians, Eastern Europe, and just low-down New York City street argot.

About a year ago, they convened a symposium on the Folk Revival in a town near me. I stayed away from it. It focused on big names and their “significant” contributions.” Horse shit. The real contributions that were significant were made in the little coffeehouses. And the real contributors were the people who never got acknowledged in the “East Village Other, “Variety, or the Times. The real deal happened at the Rienzi, Kettle of Fish, or at four AM in that cafeteria on Sixth Avenue.

Onward

Where they dispersed to is unknown. No trips to the coast for record deals, no late lamented recognition by friends who made it. They were young girls with guitars, an unlikely Black and very conservative Jewish harmonica player, an offbeat Columbia philosophy professor making moves as a beat poet, and uptown hipsters looking for a new world.

No, they did not take the last train out to the coast. Every once in a while a few stumble together in a sort of conclave. The sparks flash, and the grandkids refer to dictionaries, glossaries, books like The Mayor of MacDougal Street, movies like A Mighty Wind, or Inside Llewyn Davis for clues to meanings. Then they are shuffled off to the assisted living they wandered from. You know the one with a sign saying “a memory care community.”

Memories. How appropriate. As that refugee philosophy professor cum beat poet, Mother Hibbard, said, “Be aware, traveler, you’ll never pass this way again.”