Inside Llewyn Davis (film)

Inside Llewyn Davis
Written and directed by Joel & Ethan Coen 
insidellewyndavis.com

As I noted in my review of the film’s soundtrack last month, “I’ve been looking forward to Inside Llewyn Davis, the new Coen Brothers film ever since I heard the rumor that it would be based on The Mayor of MacDougal Street, the posthumous memoir of my late friend Dave Van Ronk that was completed by Elijah Wald.”

The film covers a week or so in the life of Greenwich Village folksinger Llewyn Davis in early-1961.

Now, having seen the film, I can report mixed feelings. Although I was a decade or so too young to have experienced that scene at that time (I got to the folk scene in Montreal as a teenager in the late-1960s and first visited Greenwich Village folk clubs in 1974 when I would have been about the same age Bob Dylan was when he arrived in ‘61), I’ve known a lot of the musicians who were there at the time and many of them are friends I’ve had extensive conversations about that time with.

So, if I detach myself from what I know of that scene and of the people who were there, I can say that I enjoyed the movie as a dark exploration of a frustrated, self-centered folksinger suffering an existential crisis. God knows I’ve seen any number of musicians and non-musicians go through such crises over the past 40 years or so. That depiction, acted so well by Oscar Isaac as Llewyn Davis, was compelling to watch.

I also enjoyed the depictions of Folkways Records (Legacy Records in the movie) and its legendary founder Moe Asch (Mel Novikoff in the movie) and of Albert Grossman (Bud Grossman in the movie) who really did run a folk club called the Gate of Horn in Chicago before coming to New York. I also quite liked the scene where Llewyn shows up at the seamen’s union trying to ship out again with the Merchant Marine. I’ve heard stories directly from Dave Van Ronk that make those scenes seem very authentic.

But, early on, it becomes obvious that Llewyn Davis is not Dave Van Ronk and is no Dave Van Ronk. By 1961, Dave was already established on the Village folk scene as a central and influential artist. He did not bounce from couch to couch like Llewyn; rather he and his first wife Terri Thal provided indigent folksingers – like the young Bob Dylan – with a couch to sleep on. Dave also did not drive – which Llewyn does – and I can’t imagine him exploding at benefactors or at a fellow performer the way Llewyn does. Throughout the film, Llewyn has a chip on his shoulder that’s bigger than himself and that too wasn’t Dave.

Llewyn Davis explodes at a request to play a song in a social setting declaring he’s a professional; that he should only sing for payment. Most folksingers I’ve known have been people who are driven to sing and play music. It’s not just what they do or did on stage, it’s a way of life. They derive joy in playing music for the sake of playing music. Some of the best music I’ve ever heard has been off stage, late at night – including some of the best music I’ve ever heard Dave Van Ronk play.

This did not seem to be a folk scene that included the Sunday afternoon gatherings in Washington Square Park or at Izzy Young’s Folklore Center. Llewyn and the other musicians did not seem obsessed with the history of music and the musicians that came before them. Dave Van Ronk, Bob Dylan and so many others on that scene were intent on soaking those things up.

The character Troy Nelson – a soldier stationed at Fort Dix who came to the Village to play music when he could – was obviously inspired by the young Tom Paxton. Troy even sings “The Last Thing On My Mind,” Tom’s best-known song, as his own. But, just as Llewyn Davis is decidedly not my friend Dave Van Ronk, Troy Nelson bears little resemblance to my friend Tom Paxton. Tom is smart, witty, funny and generous. I just can’t imagine him as the dumb country bumpkin that the character Troy is.

I do think it is a good movie. I’m a fan of the Coen Brothers and really like what they do on film. However, as a portrayal of a scene and of people I know personally, too much of it doesn’t ring true for me. For more about that from someone who was there have a look at the article Terri Thal wrote for the Village Voice.

And for a really good description of the film’s time and place, read Dave’s memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street.

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--Mike Regenstreif

Inside Llewyn Davis (soundtrack)

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Inside Llewyn Davis (soundtrack)
Nonesuch 
insidellewyndavis.com

I’ve been looking forward to Inside Llewyn Davis, the new Coen Brothers film ever since I heard the rumor that it would be based on The Mayor of MacDougal Street, the posthumous memoir of my late friend Dave Van Ronk that was completed by Elijah Wald.

I haven’t seen the film yet, but from what I gather from several friends that have – including Elijah – the Llewyn Davis character is not so much Dave but a fictional folksinger partially inspired by him. Apparently it was the pre-Dylan Greenwich Village folk scene that Dave recalled so vividly in The Mayor of MacDougal Street that inspired the Coens, and some of the episodes in Llewyn Davis’ life are lifted from Dave’s story. Others, are not.

Although I arrived on the folk scene as a teenager about eight years after the time the film is set in, it’s a period I know more than a little something about through friends who were in the Village at the time like Dave, Tom Paxton (who was the obvious inspiration for the soldier-folksinger character in the film), Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (who apparently was the inspiration for the cowboy hat-wearing folksinger in the film) and the late Tex König, among others.

The soundtrack, most of which is new recordings featuring the folks in the film, came out in advance of the movie and it’s an enjoyable set of songs – most of which could or would have been heard back in the day.

Something I’ve always liked about albums like this that may be an introduction to folk music for many people is that they can point the way to deeper listening experiences. So, here’s a rundown of the songs along with my suggestions for alternative versions for most of them.

“Hang Me, Oh Hang Me,” is sung by Oscar Isaac, the actor who plays Llewyn Davis and the arrangement is a direct lift from Dave’s version on his Folksinger LP from 1963 – an LP that was later reissued with Inside Dave Van Ronk as a single CD also called Inside Dave Van Ronk. The LP cover from Inside Dave Van Ronk was the inspiration for the Llewn Davis character’s LP in the film. Dave’s version from the Inside Dave Van Ronk CD is my best suggestion for another version.

Isaac performs two versions of “Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song),” a beautiful, lonesome song collected by folklorist John Lomax from a woman named Dink more than a century ago. The first is done in harmony with Marcus Mumford, the second is solo. They’re both nice but I prefer the solo version. This was a song that Dave recorded several times, including a version on Van Ronk Sings, his second Folkways album from 1961 that is included on the recently released 3-CD set, Down in Washington Square: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection. I have dozens of other versions on my CD shelves but one I’ve been listening to a lot lately is by Anna McGarrigle, Chaim Tannenbaum, Rufus Wainwright and Martha Wainwright on Sing Me the Songs: Celebrating the Works of Kate McGarrigle.

Tom Paxton’s “The Last Thing On My Mind” is sung nicely by Stark Sands, the actor who plays the Paxton-inspired character in the film. Historically, it might be a little out of place in a film set in 1961 because I don’t think Tom had written it yet (he first recorded it in 1964). It’s probably the best known of Tom’s songs and he’s recorded it many times. Take your pick of his renditions, but one of my favorites of his version is on 1996 live album Live For the Record.

Hedy West’s “Five Hundred Miles” gets a nice folk trio treatment by Justin Timberlake, Carey Mulligan and Sands that is an obvious nod to Peter, Paul and Mary’s version on their 1962 debut album. Peter, Paul and Mary’s is also a nice version but more recently Rosanne Cash did it beautifully on The List.

“Please Mr. Kennedy,” on which Timberlake, Isaac and Adam Driver sound like the New Christy Minstrels, is the only song I didn’t previously know. It’s a commercial-folk novelty-protest tune that was apparently adapted for the film from an all-but-forgotten song by a group I never heard of called the Goldcoast Singers. This is one song I have no suggestions of further listening for.

There are two versions of “Green, Green Rocky Road,” one of Dave’s signature songs, on the soundtrack. Isaac does his suitably Van Ronkian version – I presume a performance piece during the film – and then there is one of Dave’s many great versions that runs during the end credits. Like “The Last Thing On My Mind,” the song may be slightly out of time for the movie as I don’t think Dave was performing it as early as 1961. His first recording of it was on In the Tradition, released in 1964. I’m not sure which version is used here but my favorite lately has been the one on …and the tin pan bended, and the story ended, the live recording of Dave’s final concert. Another version I really like is by Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Emmylou Harris and Loudon Wainwright III on The McGarrigle Hour – which I had a little something to do with. I was at home one night when Kate called me and said they were in the studio and wanted to record “Green, Green Rocky Road” but didn’t know the words. So I took out a Dave Van Ronk album, transcribed the lyrics and faxed them to Kate in the studio (that was before you could just Google such things).

Isaac does a passable version of the traditional ballad, “The Death of Queen Jane,” although it doesn’t really seem well suited to his range. Joan Baez did a good version on Joan Baez 5 released in 1964 but for a really fine recent version check out Scottish folksinger Karine Polwart’s recent version on Threshold.

There’s a fine old-time version of the traditional standard, “The Roving Gambler,” performed by John Cohen with the Down Hill Strugglers a New York-based string band formerly known as the Dust Busters. They previously recorded the song on their album Old Man Below that I reviewed last year. (The New Lost City Ramblers, John's group with Mike Seeger and Tom Paley, were a prominent part of the 1961 Village folk scene.) There are lots and lots of versions of “The Roving Gambler,” but one that I’ve always been partial to was on a Ramblin’ Jack Elliott LP on Vanguard called Jack Elliott that’s been repackaged a couple of times with other material on CDs called The Essential Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Best of the Vanguard Years.

Isaac does a respectful, credible interpretation of Ewan MacColl’s fisherman’s ballad, “The Shoals of Herring.” There are a couple of good versions by the Clancy Brothers but the best version to seek out is by MacColl himself on Black and White: The Definitive Ewan MacColl Collection.

Speaking of the Clancy Brothers, they are the obvious models for the a cappella version of Brendan Behan’s “The Auld Triangle,” a prison song that is sung by Timberlake, Mumford and members of the Punch Brothers. This version seems a little weak to me. My favorite version of the song was recorded by Ian & Sylvia under the title “Royal Canal” on their second LP, Four Strong Winds.

Nancy Blake does a solid version of the Carter Family song, “The Storms are on the Ocean.” Check out the Carter Family’s version on Anchored In Love: Their Complete Victor Recordings 1927-1928. And for a great modern version, find Ollabelle’s self-titled debut album from 2004.

Along with Dave’s version of “Green, Green Rocky Road” that plays at the end, there’s a previously unreleased version of Bob Dylan singing “Farewell,” a song he adapted from the traditional song, “The Leaving of Liverpool.” My favorite version of “Farewell” is by Judy Collins on Judy Collins #3.

All in all, these are credible versions of familiar period folk and folk-like songs. I’m really looking forward to seeing the movie. In the meantime, I’ve been dosing myself with lots of Dave Van Ronk, Bob Dylan and Tom Paxton recordings.

Finally, special thanks to Christine Lavin, another great friend of Dave Van Ronk's, who thought I should listen to this soundtrack album before seeing the movie.

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--Mike Regenstreif

Dave Van Ronk – Down in Washington Square: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection

DAVE VAN RONK
Down in Washington Square: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection
Smithsonian Folkways 
folkways.si.edu

“Van Ronk could howl and whisper, turn blues into ballads and ballads into blues. I loved his style. He was what the city was all about. In Greenwich Village, Van Ronk was king of the street, he reigned supreme,” wrote Bob Dylan in his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One.

The late, great Dave Van Ronk (1936-2002) was one of my teachers. I never took a guitar lesson from him but I learned a lot from him about the history of music – about Bessie Smith, Jelly Roll Morton, Furry Lewis, Bertolt Brecht and many other seminal figures, and about a Greenwich Village scene that was happening about a dozen years or so before I first got there.

I first met Dave sometime around 1970 when he played at the short-lived Back Door Coffee House in Montreal. He was more than gracious in chatting with the teenaged me and in answering any and all the questions that this fascinated kid could throw at him. He also pointed me in some interesting directions in music to listen to.

A few years later, an actual friendship developed when we’d meet regularly at folk festivals, on trips that I took to New York City in the mid-‘70s to early-‘80s, and on his trips to Montreal to play at the Golem, the Montreal folk club I ran in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

I spent a few late nights sitting on Dave’s couch in New York, and a few more when he sat on my couch in Montreal, as we listened to music, talked about music and occasionally argued about politics.

More than the history of music, Dave taught me how to listen to music – I mean really listen to

music. How to give the music I was listening to the attention it deserved. I remember one night in the 1980s when he was staying with me during a visit to Montreal to play at the Golem, he made me listen to a Lester Young solo on an LP that I had over and over again until I fully understood and appreciated some point Dave wanted me to understand about the solo.

Dave’s last visit to Montreal was in 1998 to play the Montreal International Jazz Festival and we used that visit as an opportunity to sit down and do an extensive interview for the Folk Roots/Folk Branches radio program. I was very proud to see that interview credited as one of the sources Elijah Wald drew on when he completed The Mayor of MacDougal Street, Dave’s posthumously published memoir. The new Coen Brothers film, Inside Llewyn Davis, which comes out in December, is a fictional story inspired by the book.

And, of course, I also learned so much watching Dave perform and from listening to his recordings. I still go back and listen often to the recordings from across his career. The new 3-CD collection, Down in Washington Square: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection, includes all of the tracks from Dave’s Folkways albums from 1959 and 1961 as well as other rarities and unreleased recordings from that period, and before, and from other periods, including his full set from a 1997 Wolf Trap concert honoring the reissue of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, and some final studio recordings made shortly before he died while undergoing treatment for colon cancer.

Most of the first two discs are devoted to the songs that Dave recorded for Folkways back in the day – for his first two solo LPs, Dave Van Ronk Sings Ballads, Blues & a Spiritual (1959) and Dave Van Ronk Sings (1961), and three sea shanties he sang lead on as part of the Foc’sle Singers, a group organized by Paul Clayton to record Foc’sle Songs and Shanties (1959).

These Folkways recordings have been re-mastered and re-sequenced giving them a fresh, revitalized feel. Among the many highlights are Dave’s definitive versions of “Duncan and Brady,” a traditional murder ballad marking the real-life 1890 shooting of policeman James Brady by bartender Harry Duncan in a St. Louis saloon; Mississippi John Hurt’s “Spike Driver Blues,” a version of the John Henry legend; several tracks including “Gambler’s Blues (St. James Infirmary),” Jelly Roll Morton’s “Sweet Substitute” and “Winin’ Boy” and “Just a Closer Walk With Thee,” that show Dave’s facility for arranging New Orleans jazz tunes for voice and guitar; several folk classics like “John Henry,” “Tell Old Bill” and the beautiful “Dink’s Song.”

Although, Dave himself professed not to like the song, I still enjoy hearing Dave’s original composition, “River Come Down,” which became known as “Bamboo” on Peter, Paul and Mary’s first LP, and he acquits himself most credibly as an a cappella shanty man on “Haul On the Bowline,” “Santy Ano” and “Leave Her Johnny.”

Among the previously unreleased tracks on the second CD are concert versions of “Mean Old Frisco (1961), “Stackalee (1961), “Ain’t No Grave Can Hold My Body Down (1958)” and Dave’s impressive arrangement of “House of the Rising Sun (1961),” an arrangement Dylan lifted and famously recorded on his first LP before Dave had had a chance to record it himself.

Most of the third CD is devoted to previously unreleased or rare live recordings from the 1950s, ‘60s, ‘80s and ‘90s. Some of the earlier material, like the blues standard “Trouble in Mind (1958),” Reverend Gary Davis’ “Oh Lord, Search My Heart (1958)” and his beautiful interpretation of Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child (1963)” show a depth of arrangement at a young age that few artists ever achieve (and Dave’s depth of arrangement continued to deepen over the course of his career).

While Dave was never a prolific songwriter, he was a great one, and there are versions of some of my favorite Van Ronk originals including “Losers (1988),” a clever spoof of all who take themselves too seriously, and “Another Time and Place (1982),” one of the most beautiful love songs I’ve ever heard. I remember being stunned by it at the Golem – probably also sometime in 1982 – when Dave introduced it as a brand new song.

The third CD also includes the marvelous four-song set Dave performed in 1997 at the Wolf Trap concert honoring the reissue of the Anthology of American Folk Music. Compare those 1997 versions of “Spike Driver’s Blues” and “St. James Infirmary (Gambler’s Blues)” to the ones from almost four decades earlier to to see what I mean about the continuous deepening of his arrangements over the years.

And it’s a real treat to hear the final five songs in the set – previously unreleased solo studio tracks he recorded in 2001, just months before he passed away: “Ace in the Hole,” which he’d recorded in the early-‘60s with the Red Onion Jazz Band;” the blues standard “Going Down Slow”; “Jelly Jelly” and “Sometime (Whatcha Gonna Do),” which he drew from the singing of Josh White; and an exquisitely beautiful version Dylan’s “Buckets of Rain.”

Along with annotated song information, the album booklet includes a lovely introduction by Andrea

Vuocolo, Dave’s widow, and an essay by Jeff Place of Smithsonian Folkways, who compiled the set.

Although about two-thirds of the 54 tracks in this collection were already on my shelves, the fact that they’ve never sounded as good as they do here plus all the magnificent tracks that were previously unreleased, add up to making Down in Washington Square, one of the most essential releases of the year.

It’s been more than a decade now since Dave passed away and he’s missed greatly. I’m honored to say “he was a friend of mine.”

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--Mike Regenstreif