Seasons They Change

Jeanette Leech

Description

In the late 60s and early 70s the inherent weirdness of folk met switched-on psychedelic rock and gave birth to new, strange forms of acoustic-based avant-garde music. Artists on both sides of the Atlantic, including The Incredible String Band, Vashti Bunyan, Pearls Before Swine and Comus, combined sweet melancholy and modal melody with shape-shifting experimentation to create sounds of unsettling oddness that sometimes go under the name acid or psych folk.

A few of these artists—notably the String Band, who actually made it to Woodstock—achieved mainstream success, while others remained resolutely entrenched underground. But by the mid-70s even the bigger artists found sales dwindling, and this peculiar hybrid musical genre fell profoundly out of favour. For 30 years it languished in obscurity, apparently beyond the reaches of cultural reassessment, until, in the mid-2000s a new generation of artists collectively tagged ‘New Weird America’ and spearheaded by Devendra Banhart, Espers and Joanna Newsom rediscovered acid and psych folk, revered it and from it, created something new.

Thanks partly to this new movement, many original acid and psych folk artists have re-emerged, and original copies of rare albums command high prices. Meanwhile, both Britain and America are home to intensely innovative artists continuing the tradition of delving simultaneously into contemporary and traditional styles to create something unique.

Seasons They Change tells the story of the birth, death and resurrection of acid and psych folk. It explores the careers of the original wave of artists and their contemporary equivalents, finding connections between both periods, and uncovering a previously hidden narrative of musical adventure.

Sujets

• Traditional
• Styles
• Genres
• Folk
• Music

Informations

• Publié par: Jawbone Press
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781906002794
• Langue: English

Extrait

Seasons They Change
The Story Of Acid And Psychedelic Folk
Jeanette Leech
A Genuine Jawbone Book
First Edition 2010
Published in the UK and the USA by Jawbone Press
2a Union Court,
20–22 Union Road,
London SW4 6JP,
England
www.jawbonepress.com
ISBN: 978-1-906002-79-4
Editor: Tom Seabrook
Volume copyright © 2010 Outline Press Ltd. Text copyright © Jeanette Leech. All rights reserved. No part of this book covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews where the source should be made clear. For more information contact the publishers.
The photographs used in this book came from the following sources. Collins sisters: Brian Shuel/Redferns. Holy Modal Rounders: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images. Incredible String Band: Keith Morris Estate/Redferns. Vashti Bunyan: Vashti Bunyan. Tim Buckley: Jan Persson/Redferns. Bonnie Dobson: Christopher Beaver. Tom Rapp: Tom Rapp. Dr Strangely Strange: Jay Myrdal. Comus: Tony Kite. Sun Also Rises: Ian A. Anderson. Mark Fry: Giorgio Cipriani. Mellow Candle: Alison O’Donnell. Collie Ryan: Collie Ryan. Bobb Trimble: Bobb Trimble. Current 93: Ruth Bayer. Sonja Kristina: Simon Ferguson. Iditarod: Carin Sloan. Erika Elder: pi. Matt Valentine: Erika Elder. Sharron Kraus: Barron Bixler. Vetiver: Alissa Anderson. Joanna Newsom: Alissa Anderson. Alasdair Roberts: Howie Reeve. Marissa Nadler: Daniel Daskivich. Espers: Alissa Anderson. Bunyan and Banhart: Alissa Anderson.

Contents
Foreword
Chapter 1: Hares On The Mountain
Chapter 2: Vibrations
Chapter 3: Waltz Of The New Moon
Chapter 4: Lepers And Roses
Chapter 5: Yesterday, Where’s My Mind?
Chapter 6: Chariots Of Silk
Chapter 7: Spirit Of Love
Chapter 8: Bitten
Chapter 9: Oeuvres
Chapter 10: The Furthest Point
Photographs
Chapter 11: Sanctuary Stone
Chapter 12: My Rose Has Left Me
Chapter 13: Black Sun, Bloody Moon
Chapter 14: Whither Thou Goest
Chapter 15: Wisdom On The Moth’s Wing
Chapter 16: A Place In Time
Chapter 17: Sum Of All Heaven
Chapter 18: There Was Sun
Chapter 19: Reality’s A Fantasy
Chapter 20: Hellical Rising
Chapter 21: Here Before
Endnotes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
About The Author



Foreword
Tradition holds that cultural movements are on the wane once published materials about them hit the mainstream (or the microstream, within which most musical movements are framed). This is certainly the case concerning the psychedelic folk revival of the early 21st century, which peaked in the public eye long after it reached critical mass in terms of cult currency. Longevity has never been pop culture’s strength, so it helps, when lamenting the relative obscurity of a critical artist or band – an act I am certainly guilty of – or when musing over the average three-to-five year lifespan of the psych-folk progenitors of the 60s and 70s, to be thankful that any artist that one loves is granted lodging in the semi-permanence of cultural memory.
It is unfortunate (and yet critical) that the inherent strengths of new musical movements lie within their generative qualities. Once we’ve figured out what’s actually going on within the music – the stuff that makes it fresh or exciting – the initial vitality turns regenerative, a quality resulting in far less palatable versions of what initially was so exciting.
David Bowie understood this fact better than any modern rock artist and acted accordingly, shifting his musical focus and visual aesthetic to mirror the shifting tastes of the times. It takes a particular skill and disposition to carry out that brand of constant reinvention (not to mention a questionable desire to want to). Such attempts destroyed many a classic rock or folk artist’s career as the 70s slipped into the 80s, illuminating the unforgiving nature of a fickle populace and the desperate moves artists are willing to make in order to maintain a viable career (one that keeps them eating and under a sound roof).
Ideally, musicianship and songwriting are crafts to be honed over decades. Folk music is largely about community. Music itself is about what came before. As your style of music falls out of favour the purity of your convictions are tested, which is an interesting thing. One of the nicest yet saddest aspects of the momentarily rejuvenated careers of psychedelic folk’s initial heralds is the fact that they had to be rediscovered at all. Most of us who followed in their wake will be lucky to meet a similar fate.
My focus may seem dour, but accepting that folk and psychedelic music, once driving cultural forces, have now been relegated to the periphery is perhaps the best way to illuminate the significance of a tome dedicated to understanding the deep connections between the form’s first and second wave artists. As technology continues to blur cultural boundaries, it is interesting to see an evocation of a musical movement that plucked inspiration from a largely forgotten form, built itself up through a true community of friends and artists, and was largely happy to remain under the shadow of obscurity from whence it originated. Perhaps obscurity is for the best.
Greg Weeks, August 2010



Chapter 1: Hares On The Mountain
In the winter of 1953, when Shirley Elizabeth Collins arrived in London at the age of 18, she had one thing in mind: “to get to Cecil Sharp House and look at as many books as I possibly could”.
After a false start at teacher training college in Tooting and a stint as a bus conductress in Hastings, it had become clear to Collins that she wanted to pursue what had been in her genes since her earliest memories: the singing of folk songs. “We sang at home a lot because there wasn’t much else going on in those days,” she recalls. “Singing was just part of everyday life. Three of my best songs came from home: ‘Just As The Tide Is Flowing’, which Aunt Grace taught us two verses of, a version of ‘The Cuckoo’ from my great granny, and ‘The Bonny Labouring Boy’, which granddad sang.”
Collins’s relocation to London was timely. She found herself at the tornado’s eye of a folk revolution that began at Cecil Sharp House and took root in the cities and suburbs of Britain. It diversified and redefined exactly what folk music was, and what it could become. Collins herself would be instrumental in helping folk open out into this space of possibility.
During the mid 50s, however, these gatherings were largely centred on two places: around the cellar at Cecil Sharp House, at events run by Peter Kennedy, the director of the English Folk Dance And Song Society; and at University College London, where they were organised by John Hasted, a physics professor and folk musician who took banjo and guitar lessons with Pete Seeger. The same crowd of 20 or 30 people would attend both sets of events. “They were youthful gatherings,” Collins recalls. “There we were, all milling around, not really knowing what we were doing, but being encouraged by these two blokes. We were all people who were really keen to sing.”
This small scene began to change when Ewan MacColl came to prominence. Born in Lancashire to Scottish parents, MacColl had felt his interest in folk music growing since the early 50s, while his enthusiasm for his first chosen career – acting – began to wane. He too had come to London and found in these ‘singarounds’ an outlet for his fascination with traditional music; unlike Collins, however, he was keen to steer the shape and direction of the gatherings to his own particular interpretations of the folk tradition. With his partner, Peggy Seeger, he formed the Critics Group, dedicated to both the preservation of folk songs and the provision of an appropriate forum for the songs’ serious exhibition.
In a 2002 editorial for The Living Tradition magazine, Seeger wrote that the intention of the Critics Group was to preserve songs within their original social and artistic parameters. The upshot of this was a policy that prohibited any singer from performing a song from a language or culture that he or she wasn’t born into. There was an associated rule that the songs should be performed without accompaniment of any sort – again, unless a singer was born into doing so. The idea was not to tell singers what – or how – to sing, Seeger added, although she did admit: “If we became evangelical and sounded dictatorial, well – that’s the way things go. The intentions were honourable.”
MacColl and Seeger’s prescriptive attitude annoyed Shirley Collins, following as it did the more intimate, democratic attitude of the earlier gatherings. “I didn’t like his singing and I didn’t like him,” she says of MacColl. “He was a bit hectoring, and the Critics Group was ruled with a rod of iron.” Collins felt that MacColl passed judgement both on the songs that were sung and the people who got up on stage. “It was like cloning people,” she says. “And I didn’t want to be part of that production line.”
Born a few years later than Collins was someone else who resolutely refused to be boxed. The young Davy Graham (sometimes ‘Davey’) had come to London with his parents as a child and had grown up in Ladbroke Grove. He became fascinated with the guitar in his early teens, and at the age of 18 left London to busk in Greece, Tangiers, and Paris, where he was spotted by Elizabeth Taylor and ended up performing at one of her star-studded parties on the French Riviera. Whenever he returned to London, he came to the coffee shops of Soho, displaying ever more impressive techniques that he had picked up firsthand from the likes of Steve Benbow, whose interpretation of ‘Miserlou’ was a very earl