By 'Master Brakedown'

This article appeared in the Richmond Music Journal, January 2000

As soon as the clock struck midnight on December 31, l959, the '50's were history, but when did the sensibility, the aesthetic, and the cultural milieu that made the '60's unlike anything before or since really get rolling? And what was the spark that ignited it?

With the release of this CD, the answer is clear. It was in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1960 when a vibrant underground folk music scene existed with a perfectly formed alternative aesthetic that had nothing to do with the slick commercialism of the better known folk outfits of the time, like the Chad Mitchell Trio or Kingston Trio.

A full two years before Bob Dylan's first LP, his future girlfriend, then Boston University student Joan Baez, was performing her own composition about slain Negro Emmett Till, martyr to racial injustice.

That Dylan's Emmet Till ballad was more widely heard and had more of an impact on destroying the institutionalized brutality that led to Till's death and his killer's acquittal, does not alter the fact he would not have thought of the song without Baez's example.

Among an enlightened and appreciative, if small, audience, future stars and cult figures and now forgotten performers played and sang authentic American music as if they meant it, with no attempt to slick up the rough edges to please the Patti Page buying public.

Advocates and opponents of Parental Warning stickers, should note the inclusion of the controversial "Cocaine Round My Brain," sung by Eric von Schmidt, another of Dylan's favorite performers and influences. He recorded the song unofficially shortly after.

Tom Rush turns in beautiful versions of "Ramblin' on My Mind," "Walkin' Blues" and "Pretty Boy Floyd," the latter a Woody Guthrie song closely associated with Dylan. Any one is powerful enough to convert the listener to this kind of music.

The vocals are gorgeous and the guitar perfect and hypnotic in a way not matched until a decade later by doomed British troubadour Nick Drake.

Joan Baez never sounded more vital and alive than she does here at the beginning of her career. Debbie Green, Jackie Washington, and Jim Kweskin make convincing cases for bringing ancient folksong and/or blues traditions into the modern world, whole and unadulterated, with none of the sweetening that makes more commercially viable efforts of the time unlistenable today.

On the downside, a lot of this is low-fi and there are some bum notes, especially on harmonica and kazoo. Some of the artists whose names are unfamiliar deserve their obscurity.

Still, the spirit that was alive in each one of these performances is a powerful thing, an energy that reaches out of the coffeehouse, transforms and mutates into the reality of the '60's, while at the same time defining and shaping an entire segment of society that would become known as the counterculture and forever change America and the world.

This album is essential!