Category: Music

I had forgotten how good these old songs from Donovan Leitch's  initial folk phase sound, before he went 'psychedelic.'   Catch the Wind.  Colors.    Some have noticed a similarity between Catch the Wind and Dylan's Chimes of Freedom  (1964) which antedated it.  I just now discovered this version of Chimes which is the best I've heard.  It's a duet with a gal named Joan.  But is it Baez or Osbourne?  And that does sound like Al Kooper on organ.

Remember Dave van Ronk?  I haven't heard his version of "Cocaine" in maybe 45 years.  Enjoy it before it is pulled.  Last Saturday I reminded you of Fred Neil.  Here is another delightful tune of his, I've Got a Secret.  Based loosely on Elizabeth Cotten's  Shake Sugaree.  And then there was a young cat who named himself after a Welsh poet, a callow youth who in his early days played guitar and harmonica much better than in later days and sang better too as you can hear in his versions of Cocaine and Rocks and Gravel.  But the Zeitgeist chose the unlikely Jewish kid from Hibbing, Minnesota as its avatar, and you know the rest of the story

Mary Travers of the popular 1960's folk trio "Peter, Paul and Mary" passed away on Wednesday, from leukemia, at age 72.  Travers and Co. did perhaps as much as anyone to popularize the songs of the young Bob Dylan.  The best known of them is 'Blowin' in the Wind," which became an anthem of the civil rights movement. 

Here it is in a 1966 live performance.

Unlike Travers and Joan Baez, who knew how to make Dylan's songs sound beautiful — as witness this version of "Farewell Angelina" — Dylan soon distanced himself from the politics of the Left as he 'explains' in "My Back Pages" an electrified and electrifying version of which is here. "Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."

It would be a mistake to think that the Left owns Dylan.  The case for Dylan as conservative is argued at RightWingBob.com.

Though the news accounts don't mention it, Mary Travers was a red diaper baby.  Here is another red diaper baby, David Horowitz, on Travers and her fellow travelers:

At a Freedom Forum conference on 1968, Life magazine editor and former Sixties activist Robert Friedman claimed that most student protestors were not simply trying to avoid the draft (a thesis I have elsewhere maintained), but were "motivated by something beyond that was weighing on us." Folksinger (and former Sixties activist) Mary Travers explained the "something" as idealism. Then she said this:

"I think sometimes that that was the last generation who believed in the American dream and its myths. These kids had gotten involved in the civil-rights movement and they were on the side of the angels, they were going to make America the country that it’s always said it was."

Referring to oneself in the third person is a characteristic evasion, but it is only the beginning of the bullshit. Come off it Mary. Your diapers were red. Your father was a hack novelist for the Communist Party, USA. When other kids were going to Frank Sinatra concerts you were headed for the Party’s annual May Day parade to march against the Wall Street war-mongers and to show your solidarity with the peace-loving commissars of the Soviet police state and their beneficent leader Joe Stalin. In the Sixties, you didn’t believe in the American dream. You lusted after the vision of a Communist utopia, mid-wived by armies of bearded guerrillas or carried on the wings of a MIG-21. Why all the liberal fol-de-rol? Why can’t you just tell it like it was?

Although the music of the 1960's was great, the idealism was much of it tainted and misdirected.  Some sober reflection on what really 'went down' during those heady years is a salutary counterbalance to the misty-eyed nostalgia we '60s veterans are wont to indulge in as our heroes fall one by one into oblivion.