The Remnant Of The 1960s Folk Minute-With Scattered To The Wind Coffeehouses In Mind

The Remnant Of The 1960s Folk Minute-With Scattered To The Wind Coffeehouses In Mind

By Laura Perkins

Funny when I was a young girl, maybe in early high school in the very late 1960s, I gravitated to the then ebbing folk music minute of the earlier part of that decade. Previously I had been tied up with the Bobby Vee/Sandra Dee, as my companion Sam Lowell calls it, “bubblegum music” before the Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who and the rest broke the spell and revived rock and roll as it should have been and was meant to be back in the classic mid-1950s when it was youth rebellion music. (That folk drift also broke the George Jones/Loretta Lynn country twaddle spell which my father had been addicted to and would only allow on the farm house radio. Later some of that country sound, the early country sound of groups like the Carters and individuals like Hank William would be reprieved.) The most amazing thing though was that while I had grown up on that farm not ten miles from the place, from Café Lena in Saratoga Springs, one of the totem pole places of the folk music movement, I had never heard of it (and would actually not go there until many years later after owner Lena Spenser had passed away). Didn’t know either about the whole Greenwich Village/Harvard Square/North Beach explosion which produced a crop of folk singers, some of who are still at it like Bob Dylan, Dave Von Ronk, and Joan Baez and others like Eric Von Smidt, Geoff Muldaur and Jim Kweskin of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band who gave it up once they couldn’t stay with the pace (although the latter two have returned after a long hiatus), they developed other interests or there were dried up dough problems. How could I out in that isolated cold world of the farm and its eternal drudgery not aided by that tyrannical father.

Once I had heard Joni Mitchell on a friend’s radio (we were not allowed to have our own radios or record players since dear father did not want to hear the “noise” he called it) I think or maybe a young Rosalie Sorrels (who I found out later but then unknown to me had stayed at Lena’s for various periods of time as had her friend folksinger/songwriter/genial anarchist Utah Phillips) I was hooked and have paid attention to the ebbs and flows, mostly ebbs, since then. A lot of what kept me going on the folk jag once I shed my two ex-husbands who were both serious rockers of the Tom Petty (the late Tom Petty) type, I don’t know how many times I heard his Saving Grace around those respective marriage houses until I went crazy, was when I started hanging around with Sam Lowell who also writes here and who knows a million things, a million songs about folk music having a been a music critic here and at the Folk Almanac. (Sam in what under the previous regime was titled emeritus status when he retired but now just a vanilla occasional writer under the new regime which he had helped bring in. Every chance we got we would try to make folk performances in the area, especially of the aging artists who had names in the 1960s but who were starting to slip away into that good night, raging or otherwise. Checking out guys like Taj Majal, Dave Von Ronk, Tom Rush, and gals like that Rosalie Sorrels mentioned above, Anita Dolan, Etta James to see if they still had “it.” Some did, some didn’t.                

Over let’s say the past couple of decades though, almost as long as Sam and I have been companions, though except in old time coffeehouse hang-outs like Club Passim (the successor club to the legendary Club 47 over on Mount Auburn Street which I never got to hang out in), The Blue Note, and Café Algiers in Cambridge, a couple places like the Club Nana and Jimmy Swain’s in the Village, Hugo’s and the Be-bop Club in  North Beach the pickings have been pretty slim. You can travel through vast swaths of the country and be stymied in any effort to find such establishments. Although one time we found one in Joshua Tree in California run by a couple of not so ex-hippies who apparently didn’t get the news the folk minute was over but who were keeping the faith and who were able to draw second-tier acts like the late Jesse Winchester, Jesse Colin Young and Chris Smithers out to the palms and desert.

The real nut, the thing that still holds the “folk community” together if we can designate those still standing under that banner is a network of privately run labor of love coffeehouses like that Desert Bloom Coffeehouse out in Joshua Tree just mentioned. How much these places form a conscious network is up for debate since they are scattered around certain urban areas where the folkie remnant live, mainly on the Coasts or nearby. Attending one of these the other weekend Saturday got me thinking about a few things in my now long coffeehouse experiences and this little piece.

This piece brought to life after I convinced site manager Greg Green that this was not a nostalgia trip back to the 1960s but a look at a remnant of that movement that still exists, is still somewhat vibrant today. He rolled his eyes, looked at Sam who I made the mistake of taking with me since he is a hardened veteran, an actual participant in the early 1960s folk minute, which I thought might help my case. Not knowing that part of the change in regimes had been centered on breaking away from the 1960s nostalgia trips they were coming to define this space to the exclusion of the rest of the American left cultural and political historical experiences and hence the rolling eyes. That look at Sam as well as if to say he wanted no nonsense about who or what was in the firmament, folk, rock, hippies, beatniks, dope addicts, summers of love and that whole cartload of things he had come to detest about the 1960s before he took over fully from the previous regime. Only now coffeehouse stuff. Agreed. 

As Sam likes to say here is the hook. Here is the social reality too. Most of these private coffeehouses are housed in churches, church auditoria usually, and put on by church members and their friends. Sam calls the whole network ‘the U/U circuit” since a great number of them in New England at least are in Universalist-Unitarian churches, sometimes with both “Us,” sometimes singularly. Usually they are held once a month and have names like Second Street Coffeehouse, The Turks, Beautiful Day and so on. Everybody committed to these presentations, the volunteers, does “Jimmy Higgins” work turning on the lights, setting up tables and chairs, working the sound system where somehow there is always one technie grabbed from somewhere who rules the roost. Setting up a refreshment stand after all it is a coffeehouse and so you must provide coffee and…to the captive audience.

The question of performers at these events is a separate issue. Some of these are what are in what is called an “open mic” format simply meaning that anyone who wishes to sign up, after paying a nominal cover charge at the door to cover house expenses, can perform usually one or two songs and do so in some kind of order which varies with the venue. You would be surprised how many old folkies who I will discuss in a minute come out of the woodwork at the beck and call of an “open mic.” Some of the more venturesome venues like that Desert Bloom out in Joshua Tree try to lure whatever still standing professional folk singers can be corralled for cheap money (which also allows for higher cover charges-usually not too crazy like big ticket places). Iris Dement, Greg Brown, Tom Paxton, Tom Rush, Taj Mahal acts like that but that is the exception.

What usually takes place in these sites is what Sam and I saw that other week at the Second Coming Coffeehouse down in Carville about forty miles from Boston. The setting a U/U Church naturally. The set-up in the auditorium lights on, maybe fifteen tables four seats to each, sound system checked, coffee and… put out, a small table with CDs for sale, a standard set-up. This night there wa an “open mic” where one of our friends was performing, performing as the “feature” meaning that she got a half hour, maybe eight songs with an encore, for her set. She was sandwiched in between a few one song jacks and janies before her and a few afterward to make the evening complete.

What interests me every time I go to one of these things, and Sam and I have talked for hours about it afterward, is what road did these committed folkie performers take away from making a career out of doing folk venues and recordings. While there are a few duds overall the performance level is high amateur with many seemingly professionally trained voices, interesting lyrics by those who write and test out their own compositions and some virtuosity among the instrumentalist. We know some of the stories somebody like our feature friend Rosalita. We know Rosalita gave up the road after about ten years when her voice just gave out from overuse and so the “circuit” allows her to use it in more measured terms which she tends to her business as a graphic artist. Like every other musical genre, maybe more so as a sidebar genre folk music careers are a very tough dollar to make money at. No matter how good you are in a genre that is not mainstream enough to have more than a few making money at the venture.

Certainly a good number of performers are totally committed to their craft if not their profession. Sam and I during intermissions will ask that very question, asked their stories. The answers are as varied as the interviewees. Wanting to be stable which the road, especially the folk road in small clubs scattered all over forbids one to do, wanting a family, having been trained in another profession which allows for time and space to do this “volunteer” work, to flat out not motivated enough to go the distance. All good answers and true. True too I hope that this little slice of the American life gone a bit by the wayside now as the aficionados get greyer never grows extinct. That the U/U churches never close their doors to the music and to the aficionados.