“We don’t play real blues,” confesses Bloomfield. “Now, Son House, he’s where it’s at. That’s real blues. You’ve got to be stepped on and shit on all your life to sing blues. You’ve got to feel it. Well, let’s face it man, I haven’t been shit on. My parents were rich, man, and like I’m Jewish. I’ve been Jewish for several years.”
Leathery, gold-toothed Son House tapping his fingers slowly on a banjo: “The blues ain’t all this jumpin. You go to jumpin, that ain’t the blues. The blues is when you locks yourself in your room and you don’t want to see no one. It ain’t that you mad with them, its just you want to be alone with your thoughts…”
Gene Youngblood, legendary reviewer and cultural theorist who died in April 2021, began a series of film reviews in the LA Free Press in 1967. Many of these reviews formed the basis of parts of his book ‘Expanded Cinema‘ which is now seen widely as a foundational document of post-psychedelic cinema. Blackmass Movies is proud to begin the process of collecting Youngblood’s reviews in one place for the first time. Youngblood’s TV interview with a young George Lucas is here.
GENE YOUNGBLOOD
“I could spend all day explaining why I’m not a folk singer but you still wouldn’t understand,” said Bob Dylan to the Time reporter in “Don’t Look Back.” He meant, of course, that the traditional notion of “folk” music as our ancestors understood it has changed.
A slow but dramatic metamorphosis in contemporary musical expression is transforming most “popular” music into “folk” music. The young generation is a generation of plug-in troubadors. Slung over their back is an electric fuzz bass instead of a home-made lute; the recorder they play is not the recorder Pretorius played; they ride Ford Mustangs instead of swaybacked mules — but they are troubadors. And because of them it is increasingly true: “pop” music is “folk” music, from Beatles to Baez to Dylan and Donovan.
Thus Murray Lerner’s extraordinary film, “Festival,” is a chronicle of an art in transition. It is a cinematic synthesis of four Newport Folk Festivals, from 1963 to 1966, in which the art of “folk. music is pictured — perhaps inadvertently — as a caterpillar about to spin its cocoon. That cocoon burst open this year at the Monterey Pop Festival, and out flew a giant paisley-winged butterfly which has come to be known as “the new music.”
This new music may have its roots more in technology than in turf, but because of our affluent and technological society, the Moog Synthesizer, the wah-wah peddle and the Vox amp are as accessible and intrinsic to the new troubador as the jug and Jew’s Harp were to the mountain moaner. And if the message has changed from dirt to dope it still is a message, still personal, still reflective of the attitudes of the “folk.”
Because “Festival” (at the Cinema) embraces folk music during four of its most crucial years, the picture is double-sided. There is the chief, traditional facet, described by pop critic Richard Goldstein as “not so much musical as religious… a liturgy chanted to the accompaniment of specifically prescribed instruments. You treated your guitar as though it were a church organ, embellishing its tonal purity at your own risk. A washtub bass was permissible when it was quiet. A harmonica was a possibility if it sat worn and rusted in your palm, and a mouth bow was chic if it was truly of the earth.”
“Bob Dylan came out of folk music but he could not have stayed there,” Goldstein observes, “because folksingers were pupils first and creators second. It was not the announcement of a new song which audiences cheered, but a patter that went something like: ‘Blind Pineapple taught me this one when I was just a kid.'”
In “Festival” this — the then dominant but quickly-fading facet of folk — is represented through down-home personalities like Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, Howlin Wolf, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, and backwoods groups like The Georgia Sea Island Singers, The Blue Ridge Mountain Dancers and Ed Young’s Fife and Drum Corps.
Then there’s the other side, less prominent within the time framework of “Festival” than it is now (how quickly the musical evolution has advanced and transmuted). This is represented through “folk-pop” artists such as Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, Dylan, Donovan, the Jim Kweskin Jug Band and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.
Translating the neo-religious aspect of folk music into cinematic terms, Lerner begins his film with a microphone test in the empty stadium (“… testing, one, two, three… “), then suddenly the gates are flung open to an endless sea of humanity that comes streaming onto the festival grounds to “Great Day in the Morning” by Peter, Paul and Mary. A modern pilgrimage.
Of course “Festival” is one of those films that must be accepted on its own terms: not so much a cinematic experience as merely a mass-media vehicle for a specific content. Reviewing “Festival,” you wind up talking more about music than about cinema. That, in most cases, is a sad observation to make. Yet” Festival” is a perfect example in my view, of one of the few types of cinema in which filmic technique validly takes a secondary position to literary-musical content.
In a few subtle ways, however, Lerner attempts to orchestrate his simple cinematics with the subject. For example, there is much attention to the audience itself — the faces, both in conversation and rapt attention to concerts. Repeatedly, we see youthful members of the audience making their own music during breaks in the concert, or discussing folk music amongst themselves. Over this usually silent footage we hear music, and it is not clear who is making the music until the camera pans to the stage to reveal a performer. Thus Lerner makes a mute but incisive visual point: that true “Folk” music is the music of all people, and it doesn’t really matter who’s wielding the plectrum.
“We believe every man and woman can make music, and they don’t need a machine or voice lessons to do it,” says the leader of the Georgia Sea Island Singers, a bizarre chorus of Mrs. Millers and Ed Begleys in suspenders whose collective sound is not far removed from a Mother’s freak-out.
For me the high point of “festival” is the appearance of The Blue Ridge Mountain Dancers—four couples in denim and gingham who do something called a “Clog Dance.” Definitely not a squaredance, this outrageous, exhausting burst of frenetic energy can loosely be described as Rockettes with soul, It’s a mind-blower.
In fact, the lesser-known nitty-gritty personalities and groups virtually steal the show from the “pop” superstars like Dylan, Baez and Seeger. The film belongs to the crude earthiness of Son House and John Hurt rather than to the polished show biz of Peter, Paul and Mary. Entirely too much attention is given this trio which, albeit professional and “entertaining,” has no real roots in soul-folk singing.
There’s an extraordinary exchange of dialogue between young white Mike Bloomfield and old black Son House, which actually is two separate interviews inter-cut in the editing. The interviews may actually have taken place years apart, but it doesn’t matter.
“We don’t play real blues,” confesses Bloomfield. “Now, Son House, he’s where it’s at. That’s real blues. You’ve got to be stepped on and shit on all your life to sing blues. You’ve got to feel it. Well, let’s face it man, I haven’t been shit on. My parents were rich, man, and like I’m Jewish. I’ve been Jewish for several years.”
Leathery, gold-toothed Son House tapping his fingers slowly on a banjo: “The blues ain’t all this jumpin. You go to jumpin, that ain’t the blues. The blues is when you locks yourself in your room and you don’t want to see no one. It ain’t that you mad with them, its just you want to be alone with your thoughts…”
We are given two Dylans and two Donovans in “Festival.” The first Dylan is 1963, young, quiet, and requires an introduction. He sings “All I Really Want To Do.” The second Dylan is 1966, mature, sarcastic, a superstar. He asks if someone in the audience will throw him a harmonica, and then he sings “Maggie’s Farm.” He appears a few other times, talking, joking, as in “Don’t Look Back.”
Both Donovans are the same: The pre-acid, pre-Elizabethean neo-Dylan Donovan. He’s a protest singer. Quietly, and with Dylan’s harmonica holder, he sings “And The War Drags On” and “Vietnam, Your Latest Game.” But the phrasing portends the arabesques of the Donovan we know today:
“Vietnam, your latest game, you’re playing with your blackest queen False eagle, I don’t want your wings, I don’ t want your freedom in a lie…”
There’s a brilliant sequence in which Baez, riding away from the crowds in a car, tells the interviewer she is worried by the “silly idol-worship” of her fans but considers them “cute” anyway. The film then cuts to interviews of the fans saying it doesn’t matter to them who is singing the songs, the songs (messages, statements) are all that matters. “After all, Dylan is just a person. He isn’t God.”
One of the more memorable sequences is of Baez doing a frenetic, joyous stomp-dance onstage in pouring rain. There’s an accidental but hauntingly prophetic shot of Peter, Paul and Mary singing “Winds of Change” as a strong wind whips Mary’s hair over her face, obscuring her from the camera.
In one of the most touching but pertinent moments of this beautiful film, Jim Kweskin’s jug-player, in shoulder-length hair and purple granny spectacles, tells the interviewer: “You may look at me and say, ‘hey, he’s a freak.’ And you may be right. But when I’m playing my jug, man, I’m just a musician.” And aren’t we all, though we may dance to the beat of different drums?
