Bringing Folk Back Home

AND SPEAKING OF FOLK MUSIC . . . Well, we weren’t, were we? Does anyone? Outside of Birkenstock dealerships, natural-food markets and the occasional bold bookseller who might risk putting a copy of Bound for Glory on the counter next to Vox, folk music — both traditional and the highly modified and individualized form practiced in the ’60s — has tumbled from the pop culture jet stream and gone to earth somewhere in the deep woods of nostalgia.

Until now. Until last Friday night in New York City, when a dazzling group of contemporaries, from Neil Young to George Harrison, from Eric Clapton to Stevie Wonder, took the stage at Madison Square Garden and paid joyous tribute to the music of Bob Dylan. The concert, which lasted well over three hours, was a loose-limbed, dynamic show that didn’t waste a second on sentiment or nostalgia. Instead, with Bob himself leading the pack, it trip-hammered through the Dylan songbook, setting free the wild spirit of some of the best tunes written in the past 30 years.

The concert began in overdrive and ended out in the ionosphere, with all the performers joining for a resounding Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door. If the occasion for the show remained a little undefined, the concert itself turned out to be a capstone of pop culture: one of the first rock concerts ever whose importance was not in signaling a change in music but in rerouting it and reconfirming the righteousness of a whole direction.

Pragmatically, the concert set up and launched Dylan’s new album, his 38th, Good as I Been to You, which will be released by Columbia on Nov. 3. It’s one of the best things he has ever done. And it is, entirely, a collection of classic folk songs, with a little blues done solo by Dylan with acoustic guitar and harmonica. It’s a bracing shot of unadorned, passionate music. He hasn’t recorded an album like this since his debut, released in 1962. So the circle will be unbroken, by and by.

Unbroken, but enlarged. Neil Young also has a record due out at the end of the month, a supple set of 10 ravishing songs called Harvest Moon (Reprise) that returns to the softer, folk-accented vein of earlier hits like Harvest. Lucinda Williams shows a bluesy heart and a folk spirit in her recent Sweet Old World (Chameleon/Elektra), and an intrepid small record company in New Jersey called Bar/None has a real comer in Freedy Johnson. His album, titled Can You Fly, features the idiosyncratic singer-songwriter stalking his own subconscious, sounding like a cross between Hank Williams (on The Mortician’s Daughter) and a skid-row Springsteen (on We Will Shine). John Prine had a wonderful new album a few months back, The Missing Years (Oh Boy), and Luka Bloom’s The Acoustic Motorbike (Reprise) is like Celine in high spirits. It’s all enough to make you believe that that staple of music-biz resurrection, the folk revival, is coming around again.

The Dylan record and concert, with all the attendant attention and ancillary activity from other performers, are not anything so focused — or, perhaps, so fleeting — as a revival. They are, however, a clear revivification and a reminder of the continuing pertinence of the genre. All folk needs is an occasional jump start to bring it back home, and who better to do that than someone who has already altered the music’s course, and its form, forever.

Good as I Been to You may hark back, in style, to Dylan’s debut album, but the performances have 30 years of rough roads and lively living to underscore them. His version of Stephen Foster’s Hard Times Come Again No More has a lifetime’s impacted melancholy and sense of fragile hope. Similarly, Neil Young’s From Hank to Hendrix, about a man who measures all the seminal events of his personal history against a pop panorama, has both a youthful brio and a hard-won autumnal perspective.

Maybe folk had to age a little to seem fresh again. Certainly everyone on the Garden stage wore his years well, but the music — in the concert and on all these new records — sounds particularly pertinent. The gifted Loudon Wainright III lays down a raucous, respectful tune called Talking New Bob Dylan on his fine album called History (Charisma). “You keep right on changin’ like you always do,” he sings to Dylan, “and what’s best is the old stuff still all sounds new.” The thought could stand for the classic material on Good as I Been to You, as well as for Lucinda Williams’ blues, or Luka Bloom’s more introspective turns.

It might be the prospect of political change in the wind that helps make this new folk sound so bracing. “It’s the perfect music for these times,” as Neil Young says. Or maybe it’s the prevailing staleness of pop and the relentless assaults of rap. In any case, there is as much to celebrate in the sudden multiplicity of folk talent as there was at the Garden. Eddie Vedder and Mike McCready from Pearl Jam performed a ferocious version of Masters of War that demonstrated that the hardest rock has a strong and still vital folk lineage. Folk now can comfortably encompass the salty sensitivity and social speculation of Willie Nile’s Hard Times in America (Polaris) as well as the rap-inflected rage of the Native American activist John Trudell on AKA/ Grafitti Man (Ryko). It has a newer, wider compass, and, as ever, Bob Dylan is magnetic north.