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NY Times May 12, 2011
Primordial Soup, a Musical Brew
By DWIGHT GARNER
ELECTRIC EDEN
Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music
By Rob Young
Illustrated. 664 pages. Faber & Faber. $25.
The brilliant and largely forgotten critic Seymour Krim
(1922-1989) grew up, as have so many American readers, worshiping
those writers who captured what he called “the unofficial seamy
side of American life.” The excitable Krim put it this way: “I
dreamed Southern accents, Okies, bourbon-and-branchwater, Gloria
Wandrous, jukejoints, Studs Lonigan, big trucks and speeding
highways, Bigger Thomas, U.S.A.!, U.S.A.!”
Krim’s ecstatic catalog suggested a sense of the “old, weird
America” that fed Greil Marcus’s essential 1997 book about
American folk culture and music, “Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s
Basement Tapes.” (That book has since been issued under the title
“The Old, Weird America.”) Mr. Marcus examined, through Dylan and
the Band, as if in Imax wide-angle, “how old stories turn into new
stories.”
The British rock critic Rob Young’s excellent new book, “Electric
Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music,” is a response of
sorts to Mr. Marcus’s volume, and to Krim’s longing for a
raw-boned alternative America. Mr. Young’s book, which is largely
about England’s amped-up folk music during the late 1960s and
early ’70s, is ardent and learned in its search for what the
author calls “a speculative Other Britain.”
Mr. Young is a former editor of The Wire, the eclectic British
music magazine. He originally conceived “Electric Eden,” he says,
as a group biography of artists including Nick Drake, Fairport
Convention, Sandy Denny, Pentangle, Vashti Bunyan and the
Incredible String Band. Collectively, this music means a lot to
him; it represents, he argues, “British folk-rock’s high-water mark.”
Gathering string for this project, he tripped into a sonic
wormhole. His book becomes an insinuating meditation on how
British music — and all British literature and art — “accumulates
a powerful charge when it deals with a sense of something
unrecoupable, a lost estate.”
England didn’t have a W.P.A. or a Leadbelly or a Jack Kerouac. It
has no tradition of the open road, so urgent an injection into
American culture. But Mr. Young, working his way through poets
like Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley; through William Morris’s novel
“News From Nowhere” (1890) and “Paradise Lost”; through films up
to and including “Withnail and I,” among many other cultural
artifacts, provides a sense of British music as “a primordial soup
waiting for an electrical spark.”
That spark arrived from musicians who glanced back in order to
rush forward. They intelligently plundered, Mr. Young writes,
“pagan chant and Christian hymns; medieval, Tudor and Restoration
secular sounds; the nature-worshiping verse of the revolutionary
Romantics.” They developed, he says, “an occult communion with the
British landscape.”
The resulting agrarian noise thrills Mr. Young. About an early
record by the band Steeleye Span, he observes the way acoustic and
amplified instruments “rub up against each other like a shedload
of rusted, notched and pitted farm implements.”
Mr. Young charts the history of Britain’s folk movement, through
the work of early song collectors like Cecil Sharp and Vaughan
Williams, and the songs (both original and traditional) of ruddy
midcentury performers like Ewan MacColl. He is quite hilarious
while dispatching effete, drawing-room folk singing. He quotes one
critic lambasting the championing of “clodhopping bumpkin
folderol” by, all too often, “prancing curate[s] in cricket flannels.”
The author is blissfully quotable. He calls Nick Drake “a lost,
inchoate genius that you sometimes wish you could grab by the
shoulders and shake.” Talking about Fairport Convention’s talented
drummer, Dave Mattacks, he doesn’t note just the “funky plod” of
his attack. He writes: “In his hands, the beats fall with a
heaviness that seems to gouge at the earth itself.”
These lines about the early years of the British psychedelic
movement are so terrific that they contain the seeds of a sour,
funny, lovely Philip Larkin-ish poem: “When Joni Mitchell sang of
getting back to the garden, you felt she pictured a host of naked
longhairs disporting themselves in love games on the cliffs of Big
Sur. For Brits, the image that springs to mind is a cheeky reefer
in the potting shed before getting back to work on the allotment.”
Artists like Van Morrison, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles and Pink
Floyd are considered in this volume. But Mr. Young is more
interested in the era’s crisscrossing undercurrents. He resurrects
and contemplates the work of many lesser-known musicians, among
them John Martyn, Mick Softley, Shirley Collins and Bill Fay.
The second half of “Electric Eden” grows, occasionally, mossy.
There’s an awful lot of earnest talk about Druids and Stonehenge
and Tarot cards. You may begin to hear the clotted chords of the
Spinal Tap song “Break Like the Wind” welling up in the background.
“The sonic wizardry made heads smoke,” he writes, feebly, about an
Incredible String Band album. “The pantheistic fusion flared like
a bonfire of religions.” At this and other moments you suspect
someone’s been having a cheeky reefer in the potting shed.
Mr. Young traces the way the current freak-folk movement has
picked up on much of this music. (Ms. Bunyan sang on a 2004
Devendra Banhart album). He is less convincing when arguing for
more recent performers, minor enthusiasms like Kate Bush, David
Sylvian and the band Talk Talk. Are these really the finest he can
come up with?
At its frequent best, though, “Electric Eden” is a lucid and
patriotic guided tour, as vigorous as one of Heathcliff’s strolls
across the moors. “Britain’s literature, poetry, art and music
abounds in secret gardens, wonderlands, paradises lost, postponed
or regained,” he writes, before announcing some of them: Avalon,
Xanadu, Arden, Narnia, Elidor, Utopia.
“Electrification comes in many forms,” Mr. Young says. His book
throws plenty of lightning, and it will have you scrambling to
download some of the music that’s filling his head.
Mr. Young’s book is a declaration: England is not just older than
America. It’s weirder, too.
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