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lemonade kid
Old Love
USA
9876 Posts |
 Posted - 30/07/2013 : 12:18:46
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Many thanks to RW, my old folkie friend, and Sandi of course...lk
PROUD TO BE AN OLD FOLKIE
My lifelong love affair with folk music
by Sandi Bachom Monday, July 22, 2013
I was 15 years old in the summer of 1959, when my mother sent her wayward surfer girl daughter to sleep away camp for rehabilitation. It was called Desert Sun School — a mile above the playground to the stars, Palm Springs — in Idyllwild, California, where Elvis filmed “Kid Galahad.”
The air was crisp and thin and the harbinger of first love wafted through the High Sierra pines. The only real love I had known to that point was James Dean, or Troy Donahue in “Peyton Place.”
Bunk beds, bug juice, charred s’mores, pounded copper ashtrays and lanyards. The altitude and aerobic trail hikes kicked in a chronic asthmatic condition, and I was not a happy camper until ….
Memory is a fickle trickster. I have forgotten decades, but some things from 60 years ago are as clear as if they happened this morning. And so it was when I first saw Tom … and his guitar.
He was tall, dark and handsome, in a Richard Beymer “West Side Story” kind of way. The fingers of the campfire’s flame darted like fireflies as we snuggled in our hooded sweatshirts, the cool night air on our sunburned faces. All I heard was Tom’s beautiful deep voice accompanying himself on a Spanish guitar, leading us in “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” … and we all joined in at “Hallelujah.”
That was it! The guy. The guitar. I knew I had to grow my hair long and become a folk singer.
When I got home, I begged my mother for $35 to buy my first guitar — Tom’s guitar, from Guadalajara with pearl inlay — the one I learned to Travis and Cotton Pick on. The one I played 'til my fingers were raw, 'til I built up calluses. The one I wrote bad songs on. The one I played Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Mississippi John Hurt on, lifting the arm of the record player over and over, placing it on — and wearing out — the vinyl grooves. And the one that was stolen out of the back seat of my VW Bug. First-guitar stories never end well.
After high school, I started hanging out in the clubs “behind the Orange Curtain” in Southern California, with my friends Steve Noonan, Pamela Polland and Jackson Browne. Jackson was young, maybe 14 or 15, and they were all writing their own songs. I would sing for pitchers of beer in Newport Beach and sometimes Steve and I would sing at open mic nights at the Bear.
The temple where we worshipped this music was the Golden Bear, the smoky dive in Huntington Beach by the pier on Pacific Coast Highway, in the shadow of the oil derricks, chugging non-stop like some prehistoric monsters in the foggy California night. In the early '60s, everybody played there — before they were stars, before folk music became folk rock, and folk rock became sex, drugs and rock and roll.
We saw Janis Joplin, Linda Ronstadt, John Denver, Jose Feliciano, The Loving Spoonful, Judy Collins, Bob Dylan and local faves The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. It seems like we hung out there every night. Peter Tork was a friend and washed dishes and played the banjo there until he auditioned to become a Monkee.
Jackson wrote a wonderful homage to those days, called “The Barricades of Heaven.” I can’t hear it without crying:
Life became the Paradox, the Bear, the Rouge et Noir
And the stretch of road running to L.A.
Pages turning
Pages we were years from learning
Straight into the night our hearts were flung
Better bring your own redemption when you come
To the Barricades of Heaven where I'm from
When I finally landed in New York in 1966, I discovered a parallel universe of clubs in Greenwich Village — Café Wha?, The Gaslight, Café Au Go Go, Gerdes Folk City and later, The Bottom Line. They’re all gone now, except for, appropriately, The Bitter End.
I saw Jackson open for Randy Newman there in 1973. The very club where Mary Travers was a waitress and Peter, Paul and Mary recorded their first album. And the owner, Paul Colby, will be 95 in October!
But above it all, there was always Dylan. He was the reason we picked up guitars in the first place. He was the soundtrack to our lives. As a matter of fact, the greatest desert island album of all time, “Blood on the Tracks,” lends a title to this website, from “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go":
Purple Clover, Queen Anne’s Lace
Crimson hair across your face
The great mandala has come full circle. In the early '60s, folk was civil rights music; then it became anti-war protest music. There is a resurgence, they say, but for me, it never went anywhere.
Over the years, I’ve had the great honor to film some of my all-time folk heroes: Pete Seeger (whom I first met in 1963 as a member of SNCC), Peter Yarrow, Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Crosby and Nash, Jackson Browne, Patti Smith, Tom Paxton, and if you really want to reach, Tim Robbins, whose dad was in the Highwaymen (who recorded "Michael Row the Boat Ashore").
Each time I think about that song, I am moved to tears at the thought of that young girl with her guitar, all those years ago.
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The Barricades Of Heaven--Jackson live
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGNdpnYYEkQ
Proud to be an old folkie....
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Old hippies never die, they just ramble on.
-lk |
Edited by - lemonade kid on 30/07/2013 12:20:57 |
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PROUD TO BE AN OLD FOLKIE
