The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: Can Folk Get Off Its High Horse?

October 1998

When people talk about folk music today, I don't think they're talking about the long night around the campfire Bob Dylan spent with the ghosts of old American music on last year's Time Out of Mind, or the ruined country music of Palace and Wilco, which in moments comes from as deep a mine. ("You sound like a hillbilly," sang Dylan in 1962, repeating a booker's response to his first attempts to get work in New York coffee­houses. "We want folksingers here.") The folk music you can trip over just about anywhere now is not trying to get you lost, as that other stuff is. It's trying to convince you of something: to get you to agree with it. It may want your money, but most of all it wants your vote.

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This music comes in a rattling basket of styles. There are Patti Smith's sermons and elegies, and Ani DiFranco's hectoring con­fessionals and secret hand­shakes, all orchestrated as a high-concept celebration of au­thenticity and autonomy—she's put out eleven albums in nine years on her own Righteous Babe label and won't sign with a major! There are the burgeoning revivals and tributes or­ganized around Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, from a pile of reissues on Smithsonian Folkways to Mermaid Avenue—a hard-nosed Billy Bragg-Wilco workup of unfinished Guthrie songs—to Steve Earle's putrid where have-all-the-lefties-gone lament "Christmas in Washington" to Bruce Springsteen's often heart-stopping The Ghost of Tom Joad. There are Dan Bern's dogged attempts to em­body both Bob Dylan and Mother Teresa, the Indigo Girls actually mixing sex, humor, rhythm, and pol­itics in a convincing manner with their hit "Shame on You," and the James Taylor-soundalike radio commercials for Lucky Supermarkets. There's something for everybody. But before one takes the possibly risky step of, say, listening to Nanci Grif­fith sing "If I Had a Hammer" on Where Have All the Flowers Gone: The Songs of Pete Seeger (Ap­pleseed), or Bern suffer over Monica Lewinsky and the Oklahoma City bombing, it's worth casting back to a scene from Animal House.

It's toga night at the lowest fraternity on cam­pus, somewhere on the East Coast sometime during the Kennedy administration, and John Belushi, dressed as a Roman senator and al­ready drunk, descends from his room to join the festivities. On the staircase he encounters a neatly dressed preppie (Stephen Bishop, more or less playing himself) charming several steps worth of sorority sisters with his rendition of "I Gave My Love a Cherry." Belushi pauses. A quizzi­cal expression falls over his face, as if he's con­templating a fundamental question of ontology, or about to deliver an address on the destruction of Carthage. His face darkens. You begin to hear this innocent little folk ditty as he does: as a contra­diction of all that is vital and true in the history of mankind. Thus Belushi calls upon the spirit of "Louie Louie": He grabs Bishop's guitar from his hands and smashes it with a single blow. "Sorry," he says, handing back the wreckage. Sometimes, he seems to be telling us as he stumbles down the stairs, you just have to do what's right.

There are thirty-nine performances in the opera of sententiousness, sentimentality, condescen­sion, and children's choruses that is Where Have All the Flowers Gone, and not all of them are bad, any more than all protest songs are bad. Roger McGuinn couldn't do a bad version of "The Bells of Rhymney," which is a great protest song, and John Stewart couldn't harm "Old Riley," which is about playing the banjo. But the purity of heart, the certainty of righteousness, the inexplicability of doubt, and the smooth, genteel, utterly harmless surfaces of the music, whatever the style, is like a disease. As one wades across this double CD— which has a lot less to say about the indomitability of the human soul than the recently released four-CD set Bird Call! The Twin City Stomp of the Trashmen, a band known only for its single hit, 1963's "Surfin' Bird"—one realizes that Pete Seeger's songs, whether sung by him or by Judy Collins, Richie Havens, Billy Bragg, Tim Robbins, Odetta, Ani DiFranco, Bruce Cockburn, or any number of others, really are about one world: his. "So I ask the killers, do you sleep at night?" Kim and Reggie Harris sing with deep concern and insufferable piety on "Those Three Are on My Mind," Seeger's tribute to civil rights workers murdered by po­lice and Klansmen in Mississippi in 1964, and in the real world there is a simple answer: "Yes."

Dan Bern isn't obvious about the fact that he belongs in this company; for that matter, he comes on as a sort of folkie John Belushi. A Midwesterner who knows he's going to be pegged as a New Dylan and figures he'll live through it, he wears his sense of humor on his sleeve. He has an exuberant grasp of broken rhythms that translates as an affirmation of radical individualism: A song is what he says it is, even if it sounds like a collec­tion of mistakes. He wants desperately to be an­noying: class clown, practical joker, fart champion, arsonist. Whatever it takes, he's game. He kicks off his second full-length album, Fifty Eggs (Work), with a half-crazed rant about how big his balls are; it's stupid and it's funny. But halfway through, even if you're laughing, the insistence that this is a satire of male bragging takes over. Bern doesn't want you to think he thinks his balls are as big as Jupiter. Call him an asshole, no problem; on the wrong side, never. It's the same with "Cure for AIDS," "Chick Singers," "Different Worlds," about sexual freedom, sexism, and racism; they aren't bad songs, they're fun to listen to, for a while, but they want so badly to please while pretending they want to get under your skin that before long you may not trust a sound out of Bern's mouth. He might be wonderful in concert; on record he sings and plays, he acts, as if he'd be the last guy on earth you'd want cornering you at a party.

Legend has it that John Belushi could be pretty horrible at a party himself, but it's too bad he's not here to take up the good fight once again. The whole way of being in the world that he smashed on that staircase long ago is with us still.

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Originally published in Interview Magazine, October 1998