Movie review: Greenwich Village: The Music That Defined A ...

Greenwich Village: Music That Defined A Generation

Rating: 3 stars out of 5

Featuring: Pete Seeger, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Judy Collins, Ian Tyson

Directed by: Laura Archibald

Running time: 93 minutes

Parental guidance: No problems

The documentary Greenwich Village: Music That Defined A Generation is the kind of movie that, the minute it?s over, you want to run home and put on your copy of, say, the 1965 Fred Neil album Bleecker & MacDougal and listen to his song Another Side To This Life. There is archival footage of Neil singing a bit of it in the movie, but not nearly enough.

Indeed, there?s not nearly enough of most of the music in Greenwich Village: not enough of the impossibly young Joni Mitchell rising to her astonishing falsetto on Night In The City, or of Odetta?s hair-raising rendition of Muleskinner Blues, or of the rich blending of the early Ian Tyson and Sylvia Fricker on Four Strong Winds. (On the other hand, there?s more than you need of Buffy Sainte-Marie and Andy Williams singing Fixin? To Die Blues, a duet that shows how 1960s folk music had to get all dressed up in beige to visit the mainstream.)

There?s also an awful lot of old folkies ? unlike rock stars, folksingers don?t age that well ? fondly recalling the revolution they started at Caf? Wha? and Gerde?s Folk City and the many other Village clubs where a generation of singer-songwriters picked up their guitars. At first they sang about mule skinners and then they sang about civil rights and the war in Vietnam, and while it was a phenomenon, it?s difficult to fully buy into director Laura Archibald?s thesis that beyond the ageless Pete Seeger, there?s a direct line between Phil Ochs, say, and the Occupy movement.

That idea is part of another phenomenon, the self-congratulation of nostalgia. Greenwich Village feels inflated with politics rather than sweetened with music. Old footage of Eric Anderson singing Thirsty Boots says more than Judy Collins reminiscing about the influence of such songs. (Anderson tells how he wrote the last verse of Thirsty Boots on the subway on the way to Collins? apartment so he could present her with a completed song.)

The political content starts with a 1961 protest in Washington Square Park when the police declared that public singing would be illegal and started arresting people for warbling The Star-Spangled Banner. It extends into protest music, which, as Fricker points out, produced very good protest but not very good music, and thence to the dark days when many singers, including the estimable Seeger, were blacklisted from TV and radio because of their dangerously liberal politics.

The king of the era, Bob Dylan, is not interviewed, but his influence underscores the entire film. Tom Paxton recalls encouraging a young Dylan to turn the lyrics of A Hard Rain?s a-Gonna Fall into a song, then wondering why whenever he hears it entering its seventh minute.

Susan Sarandon reads unenlightening excerpts of the memoir A Freewheelin? Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village, by the late Suze Rotolo, famous as an early Dylan girlfriend (that?s her on the cover of his 1963 Freewheelin? album). Over the closing credits, Seeger straightens out the myth that he tried to cut a microphone cable with an axe when Dylan went electric at the 1965 Newport folk festival.

The movie takes as its theme song the founding anthem Creeque Alley by The Mamas and the Papas (?In a coffee house Sebastian sat / and after every number they passed the hat.?) Later, Sebastian recalls passing a hat and getting nothing because Richie Havens had been there half-an-hour earlier and cleaned everyone out. At times like this, Greenwich Village: The Music That Defined A Generation makes you wish you?d been there too, hearing it all for the first time.

Source: http://o.canada.com/2013/05/02/movie-review-greenwich-village-the-music-that-defined-a-generation/

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