“There was music in the cafes at night,
And
revolution in the air.”
B. Dylan
Critics are raving about “Inside Llewyn
Davis,” the new film by Joel and Ethan Coen evoking the Greenwich Village folk
scene of 1961. But the Coen brothers,
and most of the critics, weren’t there at the time. As one who was there, I’d say the Coens got it
wrong.
Not so much in the details. McDougal
Street looks a lot like it did in 1961, with the
coffee houses and the grimy Kettle of Fish tavern. The Gaslight Café, which in the film is a
mash-up of the Gaslight and Gerde’s Folk
City , looks like neither, but
enough like a typical folk club of the period. Oscar Isaac, as the title character, looks and sounds a little like Dave
Van Ronk, on whom he is “loosely based,” though both his beard and his voice
are neater, his guitar playing is nowhere as complex and sophisticated, and his
commitment to folk music is suspect. The
surrounding cast of characters – the sleazy bar owner, the dysfunctional folk-record
producer, the mumbling beat poet, the chick who sleeps with too many guys, the
kindly abortion doctor, the phony folkies who hope to cash in on their music, the
cynical talent manager who knows how to make that happen -- are all based on real types of the
period.
What’s missing is the spirit – the electric atmosphere that
made the Village a magnet for every kind of artistic rebel. Llewyn is a loser, a self-absorbed artist,
easily discouraged by failure. Dave Van Ronk was a musical genius and an indomitable force on the folk music
scene. He never made money from it, but
he never quit, and he never quit because he loved the material so completely
that he made it his own, his own identity.
To watch and hear him perform for small change in the Gaslight Café was
like a religious experience – he hovered over his guitar, savoring notes as he
bent them into blues, croaking out the old complaints in his untrained,
roughed-up but gentle high tenor voice.
Here was a man in love with an America
that had practically disappeared in the militarized, commercialized and
sanitized world of the forties and fifties.
In love, and able to express it in songs he’d copied and adapted
from obscure field recordings. And not
about to sell it out, or give it up, no matter what.