When the revered folksinger and author Woody Guthrie
passed away on October 3, 1967 – following a long, tragic battle with
Huntington’s disease – his friends and colleagues were moved to celebrate his
life and legacy with a tribute concert.The
manager of Guthrie’s business affairs, Harold Leventhal, commissioned the
blacklisted novelist and screenwriter Millard Lampell to re-work an old script
he had earlier fashioned from Guthrie’s bountiful catalog of songs and
prose.Lampell was well suited to the
task, not merely an outsider looking in.In 1941 Lampell would co-found the Almanac Singers, the agit-prop folk
music ensemble that featured Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lee Hays and several others.
That original program, Woody Guthrie’s California to the New York Island, first broadcast
on CBS-TV’s Camera 2 program in
December 1965, would serve as the template for the proposed memorial Tribute to
Woody Guthrie.The tribute concert would
be staged twice with afternoon and evening’s performances at New York City’s
Carnegie Hall on January 20, 1968.The
Carnegie tributes would have likely sold out quickly without any impetus beyond
the simple desire of celebrating Guthrie’s life and work.But when Leventhal announced that that the
reclusive Bob Dylan – not seen on a concert stage since May 1966 – would be included
on the tribute bill, both shows would sell out within hours of the ticket
on-sale. Even without Dylan’s
participation, the bill at Carnegie was formidable and featured the finest
folksingers from the New York City scene:Seeger, Judy Collins, Arlo Guthrie, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Odetta,
Richie Havens and Tom Paxton.The
evening program at Carnegie Hall was recorded from the venue’s house system and
shelved away for the possibility of a future LP release.Sadly, neither of these Carnegie Hall shows
was professionally filmed.
While this tribute was originally conceived as a standalone
memorial program, Guthrie’s colleagues and admirers on the west coast were
feeling, not without justification, slighted.Guthrie’s earliest successes were, after all, on radio station KFVD out
of Los Angeles.And Woody, a radical balladeer
and refugee from Oklahoma’s dust bowl, was quickly embraced by those in L.A.’s progressive
political circle.So much so that
Guthrie was offered a gig as an occasional columnist for the mostly doctrinaire
west coast Communist Party newspaper People’s
World.
Guthrie’s Manhattan-based heirs were sympathetic to their
west coast brethren’s disappointment.So
it was a relief when it was announced that on September 12, 1970, there would
be a Pacific coast Tribute to Woody Guthrie concert staged at the Hollywood
Bowl.Dylan, to the disappointment of
many, would not perform at this second concert.But several of Carnegie’s musical guests would return: Seeger, Havens,
Odetta, Arlo Guthrie, and Jack Elliott.At the Hollywood Bowl, folk-diva Joan Baez would replace Judy Collins.Also joining the cast for the first time were
Country Joe McDonald and an old colleague of Woody’s from the days of People’s Songs, Earl Robinson.
The actor and long-time friend of Guthrie’s, Will Geer
(later of “Grandpa Walton†TV fame), would serve as one of the evening’s two
principal narrators, just as he had at the Carnegie Hall program two years
earlier.In New York City Geer was
teamed with the blacklisted veteran actor Robert Ryan (The Wild Bunch) for the evening’s spoken-word recitations.In Los Angeles Geer was paired instead with actor
Peter Fonda, then enjoying great success for his role as “Wyatt†in Dennis
Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969).It was also decided that the Hollywood Bowl
concert would be captured in its entirety on celluloid for a possible future film
project.
Nearly fifty years hence, that film project has been
realized.Filmmaker Jim Brown is
credited as both Producer and Director of MVD Visual’s DVD issue of Woody Guthrie: All Star Tribute Concert 1970,
but such designation is somewhat misleading.Brown’s talent as a filmmaker is without question.Since 1981 he has served as the premier
documentarian of the legacies of the Weavers (Wasn’t That a Time!), Woody Guthrie (Hard Travelin’) and Pete Seeger (The Power of Song), perennial PBS favorites all.But the raw footage of the Hollywood Bowl
concert was supervised by Frederic Underhill (Neil Young’s Journey Through the Past (1973) and lead cameraman David Myers (Johnny Cash in San Quentin (1969) and Woodstock (1970) when Brown was a mere youngster
of twenty-one years.The timing was
never quite right.A few years following
the Hollywood Bowl event, the resulting footage combining backstage rehearsals
as well as an actual document of the concert, was unceremoniously put aside.United Artists was already readying Hal
Ashby’s big budget Woody Guthrie bio-pic Bound
for Glory (1976) for the big screen and the Guthrie family and Leventhal
were now primarily interested in protecting their emotional investment in that
future Oscar-winning project.
If you are an admirer of Woody Guthrie’s music, you’re
obviously going to want to add this DVD to your collection.It’s an essential visual companion to the masterfully
assembled and glorious book and music box set Woody Guthrie: The Tribute Concerts issued in 2017 by the Germany-based
Bear Family Productions.Of course, as
with any multi-artist tribute concert, one’s personal prejudices come to the
fore when appraising the worthiness of the performances.At the Hollywood Bowl Seeger, Odetta, Arlo
Guthrie, Jack Elliott and Richie Havens shine the brightest in my own
estimation.With the exception of
Havens, the former four musical artists had the most personal access to Guthrie.Perhaps it was due to this advantage that their
performances seem to ring most authentic.They didn’t need to learn Guthrie’s lyrics from a songbook.I’m always a bit wary of participants who
read from on-stage lyric sheets; it suggests they’re not terribly conversant
with the material and they’ve been added to the cast simply for their “star
power.â€
So while I don’t wish to call any of these performers out
– you can make up your own mind regarding the value of some of these musical
interpretations – I can’t say that I enjoyed every performance with equal
enthusiasm.Baez’s histrionic warbling
on “This Train is Bound for Glory†particularly rankles, proverbial fingernails
on the chalkboard.Make no mistake about
it; I’m of the opinion that Baez is both a great artist and an admirable
activist- citizen, but IMHO she’s sadly over-the-top in applying her shrill Soprano
to Guthrie’s rough-hewn music.Pete
Seeger, the Dean of American folk music, thought Guthrie’s vocal-style was
perfectly suited to the material he chose to sing as it was dry, un-melodramatic
and understated.I couldn’t help but
wonder what this ministerial folksinger with the 5-string banjo was thinking as
he watched Baez so theatrically over-emote.To be fair, Baez partly redeems herself later with a sensitive rendering
of Guthrie’s migrant anthem “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),†so I suppose
all is forgiven.
Broadcast on PBS in various markets in the early winter
of 2019, the DVD features the entirety of the tight 60 minute PBS edit.The DVD release also includes three bonus
tracks omitted from that broadcast: Ramblin’ Jack Elliott singing Guthrie’s
heart breaking “1913 Massacre,†Odetta performing “John Hardyâ€, and Baez singing
“Pastures of Plenty.â€The Jack Elliott
track, scissored from the PBS broadcast, might be the most stirring and
hypnotic performance of the entire program.One can only surmise that the programmers clipped the song from the
original broadcast due to the length of the song and its decidedly melancholic subject
matter.It might have been too much of a
challenge to the attention deficit shortfalls of its target PBS audience; those
who might prefer Peter, Paul & Mary’s warm and nostalgic re-warbling of “Puff,
the Magic Dragon†to Guthrie’s poignant documentation of a cruel, human
tragedy.If that is the case, it’s an unfortunate
one. Elliott’s uncompromising and riveting,
rough-edged performance was perhaps the most successful of the event in
conjuring the defiant spirit of Woody Guthrie.