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THE TIMES THEY HAVE A'CHANGED
BLOWIN‘ IN THE WIND
The Folksmen - left to right, Harry Shearer (note the sandals ’n’ socks), Michael McKean and Christopher Guest - reunited 30 years on.
a mighty wind
If ever there was a period of popular music that demanded to be consigned to oblivion with the phrase, “That was then…”, it’s the sixties folk boom. The British slang word ‘naff’ doesn’t even begin to do it justice. There have been few periods in cultural history quite so cringe-making as the one which saw groups - anything from a trio to a mini-choir - of well-scrubbed, wholesome young men and women singing songs about love, mining disasters and medieval sexual misconduct.
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HE’S DONE AMATEUR DRAMATICS AND DOG SHOWS.
NOW CHRISTOPHER GUEST TURNS A JAUNDICED EYE ON THE FOLK REVIVAL CIRCUIT. SAM CONNOLLY DOES HIS BEST NOT TO SING ALONG WITH A MIGHTY WIND.
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True, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez came out of the mid-sixties folk boom, but they soon took their music somewhere new - and that is never likely to be said about the New Christie Minstrels. Besides, no one would ever have described Dylan or Baez as wholesome and well-scrubbed.
In fact, the vanilla end of the sixties folk movement was so downright awful, it’s surprising it’s taken Christopher Guest so long to get round to making a film about it. All the stranger, given that he actually quite liked the stuff. “I wanted to do a film with music,” says the actor-turned-director, “and I’d played a lot of folk music when I was a kid. Growing up, there was an explosion of folk music in my New York neighbourhood. So Eugene Levy and I started to work on a story that would encompass a number of different folk groups that had started in the sixties and were making a comeback in the form of this reunion at Town Hall.”
Guest, of course, first achieved prominence in another film-maker’s take on the music business: Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap, a hilarious spoof documentary about a heavy metal outfit on the downward road to becoming a footnote in rock history. But he has since gone on to spear a few ‘mockumentary’ specimens of his own: amateur dramatics in Waiting for Guffman (1996); the world of pedigree dog shows in Best in Show (2000); and now the folk business, with many of the performers from the first two films showing up again in the third (see box on page 47).
Actually, the new film is not about the sixties folk boom as such. It is about something far worse: an attempt to revive the sixties folk boom. In the film (co-written with regular collaborator Levy, who has become something of a cult figure himself as a result of playing Jason Biggs’ dad in the American Pie films), the son of a folk music icon makes it his mission to reunite all the largely forgotten groups who made his dad famous.
Jonathan Steinbloom (Bob Balaban) is the son of Irving Steinbloom, who managed such has-beens as The Folksmen, Mitch & Mickey and The Main Street Singers. Where Irving combined business acumen with a laissez-faire attitude (not unlike Albert Grossman, whose living room was immortalised on the cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘Highway 61 Revisited’), Jonathan is an obsessive organiser - and tone-deaf to boot. But he loved his dad and is so determined to put together the show that he manages to track down the surviving members of all three groups and bring them together for a final tribute concert.
The Folksmen - Alan Barrows (Guest), Jerry Palter (Michael McKean) and Mark Shubb (Harry Shearer) - split up decades ago, mainly over a conflict between Jerry, who wanted to cash in on the group’s one hit, ‘Old Joe’s Place’, and go commercial; and Alan and Mark, who were concerned with the integrity of their artistic vision (which meant continuing to record songs from the Spanish Civil War).
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