A Mighty Wind

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
Sunday, April 13, 2003
'A Mighty Wind': 'Spinal Tap' for Folkies?
By DAVID HAJDU

FOLK music, as Bob Dylan defined it in the mid-1960's,
when he was extricating himself from the genre to
pursue rock 'n' roll, is "a bunch of fat people." Four
decades later, the writer and director Christopher
Guest has provided an illustration to accompany that
definition: "A Mighty Wind," a mightily cutting film
parody of the folk scene, populated mainly by people
who are fat — or bald or old, or cosmetically doctored
to look so. Mr. Dylan and Mr. Guest have each made the
same satiric point, that the world of commercialized
acoustic music that culminated in the "folk boom" of
the Kennedy era is a pathetic joke.

They're not wrong, exactly; every kind of music
successful enough to become a national craze gets so
homogenized, ritualized and overdone that it's a
joke.... Still, there was more to the folk phenomenon
of the 60's than "A Mighty Wind," which opens on
Wednesday, suggests or satirizes. It was a pop fad,
yes, and a contradictory one, uncommonly serious and
comical, mannered and fixated on authenticity.

Like most of the comedies Mr. Guest has directed ...
"A Mighty Wind" is a fictional documentary about a
colorful entertainment subculture that, in the real
world, approaches self-parody. Mr. Guest, a remarkable
mimic and a skilled musician as well as an imaginative
filmmaker, has the comedic wisdom to play such
ridiculous material nearly straight. His new film is
dead-on, as far as it goes.

[...]

The reunited acts are standard models of commercial
folk: 

• The white males — a trio (usually, or a quartet, for
novelty value) of earnest, WASPy collegians, like the
Kingston Trio (who neutered a mournful Civil War song,
"Tom Dooley," and made it a No. 1 hit); the Chad
Mitchell Trio; and the Brothers Four. In "A Mighty
Wind," they're the Folksmen (Mr. Guest, Michael McKean
and Harry Shearer, the core of "Spinal Tap"). 

• The choir of Mitch Miller spawn — a huge, redundant
assemblage of singers, male and female, all uniformly
cheery (and cheerily uniformed), chirping sing-along
ditties about work and death in unison, like the New
Christy Minstrels and the Serendipity Singers. The
group in the movie is the New Main Street Singers
("new" because only one of the nine members was in the
original lineup).

• The dream couple — folksingers in love, onstage,
conspicuously, and off, like Ian and Sylvia Tyson and
Mimi and Richard Fariña. The long-estranged duo in "A
Mighty Wind," Mitch and Mickey (Mr. Levy and his old
Second City colleague Catherine O'Hara), end their
signature song, "A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow,"
with a kiss described as "the most momentous event in
humankind." 

[...]

Few of the most legitimate-seeming folk singers were
actually the poor, suffering rustics they acted and
dressed like, of course. Pete Seeger was a
Harvard-educated Northeasterner; Ramblin' Jack Elliott
was a Brooklyn physician's son born Elliott Adnopoz
(spoofed in "A Mighty Wind" by a character named
Ramblin' Sandy Pitnick); and nearly all the young
folksingers in Ms. Baez and Mr. Dylan's generation
were middle-class suburbanites. There is some irony in
their having adopted new identities in the name of
authenticity....

[...]

With folk so whitewashed, Mr. Dylan led an exodus of
the venturesome into rock — a move that goes unnoted
in the movie. They carried with them elements of
traditional folk that have been a part of popular
music ever since: a devotion to authenticity (or an
approximation thereof), an inclination to leftist
politics (or a vague liberalism), and, above all, a
faith in the folk ethic — the notion that music is a
democratic, amateur art, a mode of vernacular
expression available to anyone without formal
training. In the rock era, this idea has been the
great leveler, the force that drove punk, hip-hop and
grunge and will likely spark whatever comes next.

Ultimately, the greatest disappointment of "A Mighty
Wind" is the inexplicable absence of any hint of
politics....

The folk scene, in reality, was a strange coming
together of liberal ideals, rural traditions,
marketing and youth culture, and it was equally
effective at raising social consciousness, breaking
aesthetic ground, making money and pairing off its
participants. 

[...]

In the summer of 1963, during the heat of the civil
rights movement and the cold war, this group recorded
"Blowin' in the Wind," a song by Bob Dylan, a client
Grossman was trying to position as an important new
songwriter, and it became a No. 1 single. It was also
good, serious music, and it stirred innumerable young
minds at a crucial time in history. 

Was the wind too strong for Mr. Guest to face?   


David Hajdu's most recent book is "Positively 4th
Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Mimi Baez
Fariña and Richard Fariña."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/movies/13HAJD.html

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