I've been absent from the blog for some time (last post: June, 2010) and it's time to return. Lately I've been recording old vinyl LP's and downloading them into my iTunes library. I can't actually remember the last time I purchased an LP, but I'm sure it was in the 1980's as CD's were just beginning to be popular and affordable. There was some Oregon, Joni Mitchell (Mingus, Wild Things Run Fast, Dog Eat Dog, Shadows and Light), a fusion group with Michael Brecker called Steps Ahead, a Paul Winter United Nations concert, some classical recordings of minimalists Steve Reich and John Adams. I was still buying non-digital records: Cage, Lou Harrison, and other off-label artists.
I'm still discovering the collection again. So far I've recorded two very early folk albums from the 1960's: one by Judy Collins (Golden Apples of the Sun) and what I believe is Joan Baez's first album. That music is still good and the voices young and strong. Judy Collins was always an alto, but as she matured she kept insisting that she could sing soprano. Her range becomes too thin in the upper register for me, but that's only my ears. On this early album she is a strong alto with occasional lovely moments in her upper register. She set the title song to a poem by William Butler Yeats, Golden Apples of Sun, and for me it is a stunning success. Simple, but beautiful, guitar and voice and the poetry of Yeats set to a gorgeous melody and harmony. It has to be one of the best songs of that year, much more sophisticated than anything Dylan and others were doing at the time, with the exception of Joni Mitchell. I was in love with that music from the beginning and followed it as it became part of the larger musical pop culture of the time. Baez was all folk, nothing of her own, but her voice is strong on songs like All My Trials and House of the Rising Sun (long before The Animals and Eric Burdon took Dylan's version, who had basically stolen it, I understand, from Dave Van Ronk). All of that 60's earnestness is touching, if a bit sad, today.
The idealism was lost along the way and the simplicity and hope was overwhelmed by drugs, rock 'n roll and the Vietnam war. Too much death: assassinations of the era's heroes and leaders and the final blow in Chicago with the Democratic National Convention, the nomination of Humphrey under Johnson's war shadow, and the carefully controlled and ballooned Republican National Convention with Nixon that became the model for future conventions: a spectacle, a moment of careful propaganda, cued music, and all the rest. The culture became noisy and angry, it seems to me, and the young crowd eventually discovered money. So to go back and listen to that relative innocence was refreshing.
When I was 18 I went with a friend one evening to have some awful 3.2 beer in Denver in a club that used to book Judy Collins and other popular folk acts, who were too popular for that venue in 1968-9. It was quiet, only a few people there, and it seemed nearly closed. All of that history and excitement had moved on. But it's still recorded and though the cultural context is gone, the music still captures the time in many ways, at least for me. These two albums, at least, are moody, poetic, idealistic, innocent, fresh, and the big plus is that the liner notes are full of history about each song and its origins. We've moved on, for sure, and certainly these artists moved on fairly quickly from these albums and started doing contemporary songs by Dylan and others, but the records are still there and it was fun to go back.
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