high -camp, the Shirley Temple classic On the Good But what happened to folk? Madlyne Altschuler of Ship Lollypop. In November 1966, the electric Vanguard Records answers, "It's impossible to label wedding was pronounced legal -the great Pete a folk singer as such any more. It's gone beyond that. Seeger, Mr. Folk Music, recorded an album backed Joan Baez, in her album Joan, sings Paul Simon, by three members of the Blues Project, a rock Jacques Brel, Donovan, the Beatles, and her own combo. song. So how do you label that? Take the Doors. If sheltered folk was the blushing bride, rock was They leap casually from pop to folk poetry with the ogling bridegroom who already had a half -dozen perfect ease, and there is no sense of violation of wives. Today, as a result of all this lusty cross- ferti- form. They're creating a new form." lization of music, the feste Burg of rock includes jazz What hasn't been grasped by untrustworthy over - rock, Chassidic rock, Raga rock, crotch rock, and thirties is the fact that folk music has been kidnaped employs anything that can be blown, pounded, or (or raped) by .the Now generation. They raided ethnic structured, anything the kids can lay their hands on, folk for new sounds, new imagery (all those turned-on including, literally, The Kitchen Sink. Daniel Boone and camp costumes, yearnings for the What's happening today can best be described as a lost America, the good place). In the new subculture musical group -grope. Pro Musica lambs frolic and of youth, folk /rock is one of the badges of instant lay down with a satyr called Circus Maximus. More communication which makes a youngster often have sitars were sold in America than in India in 1967. more in common with his peers in Tokyo and Tel Harpsichords are standard equipment for rock -and- Aviv than he does with his parents. Folk /rock is roll. Far -out jazz musicians embrace rock as the true the wave -length of growing up absurd. The kids cause. Buffy Sainte-Marie cuts country singles in grew up in a sick, affluent society, don't remember Nashville. Something called the Electric Prunes be- Woodÿ s Dust Bowl or Pete Seeger's Spanish Civil gat a rock Mass in F minor. Yea, verily, here's War, but are desperately longing for values. The where it is, man. sociologists have a term for a situation in which old The intriguing thing is that it is all for real, sincere values have been destroyed, and nothing has replaced without quotation marks, and convincing in a way them: anomie, a social vacuum. We are an Age of that the pallid efforts of Third Stream Jazz (which Longing; there is a yearning for answers, a vision tried to shack up with symphonic form) never re- of life. There is the Playboy Advisor, and Dr. Rose motely attained. What must be stated now, rather Franzblau, our new Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and nervously, is the fact that many qualified observers there is the sardonic vision of Bob Dylan. consider the hydra- headed rock to be the most ex- Prince Dylan is unquestionably the spokesman of citing, original, expressive contribution to "serious" his generation and, for the young, perhaps the most music being made in the Western World today. influential personality in America today. He led the Musicologist Henry Pleasants states, "The Beatles is revolution for reality in folk song -"She's still sing- where music is right now"; Leonard Bernstein de- ing about Mary Hamilton. Where's that at ?" he clares that the Beatles' song She's Leaving Hone is sneered once at Joan Baez, before she converted to equal to any song Schubert wrote. Malvina Rey- him. nolds, the author of Little Boxes, considers folk /rock Folk will never be the same after Dylan, with his "a wonder and a delight." Scuba Duba playwright odes of anger and alienation, rasped out in a voice Bruce Friedmann calls rock "a new salted peanuts." that sounds as though it has been rusting for years Bobby Dylan's John Wesley Harding received the at the bottom of a well. Post -Dylan, the pop singer rapt critical attention once granted to major novelists, and the folk artist is a poet, and tries to write his and pop scholars expound on the inner meaning of own songs. Judy Collins, the poet's lady, was pre- Dylan's screed with a solemnity usually reserved for sented in her first album as A Maid of Constant a new Dead Sea Scroll. Sorrow; in her latest release, Wildflowers, Judy "It's a great time to be around, musically speak- sings Leonard Cohen, Jacques Brel, and three of her ing," says Danny Fields of Elektra Records, who own compositions. (Her short hairdo has been up- writes extensively about the pop scene. "I suppose dated as well -it's falling over her shoulders now.) the thrill of discovery was very exciting, in the tradi- "It's not that I don't believe in tradition anymore," tional period, finding treasures of folk songs that says Judy. "I just had to go beyond it." no one had ever collected. But that's played out. So Above all today, the folk singer-electrified or the is the labor protest bag. When you're born under old- fashioned hand model-must be a composer. In an H -bomb cloud, 47 Miners Trapped in a Shaft the Forties, John Jacob Niles, the doyen of balladeers, doesn't grab you." stepped forward and confessed that he himself had in "In the McLuhan era, the aural wrap -up is all fact written such "classics" as I Wonder as I Wander important, the 'sound picture, - Fields goes on to and Black Is the Color. He was nearly stoned in the say. "Gone is the day when a singer slung twelve market place. Buffy Sainte-Marie, one of the best of songs together on a record and hoped for the best." the new breed, is amused at such pedantry. "I have Jac Holzman goes further: "For years, we neglected always created my own songs," she says, "and if it's the potential of the studio. Now it is a fantastic lab- someone else's song, I can't do it unless I change it, oratory for musical experimentation. We have learned add to it, until I feel it's intrinsically mine." Buffy to play the studio as a superinstrument." (strikingly beautiful in life, despite those awful pia

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