Happy New Year from The Nields
Jan 3-4 Caffe Lena shows in Saratoga Springs!!!
Happy New Year, Dears!
We miss you and love you and are so grateful you are reading this. We all need some music for the new year, and so we Nields are doing our part by playing a grown-up show at Caffe Lena at 8pm this Friday January 3 and then a family show the next day, Saturday January 4 at 1pm for Lena’s Little Folks series! Why not spend the weekend in beautiful Saratoga Springs?
AND the Iron Horse show with our full band is coming up on February 1. Then on February 15 we’re at the Rosendale Theatre in the western Hudson Valley. And then on to the midwest, including The Ark! But we’ll send another newsletter before then.
OK, I’ve done my job per Patty who always wants the “lead” to be about our gigs. Whatever! Now I get to write about seeing A Complete Unknown last night at the Palace Theatre in Lake Placid.
The Palace Theatre is one of those old, gorgeous Art Deco halls from an age when going to see a movie felt decadent.
As to the Dylan movie, well. I was entranced from minute one. In tears at the portrayals of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger (Ed Norton, who should win an Oscar for his uncanny and moving performance). I was a Timothée Chalamet doubter (I mean, I’ve always liked him, but I couldn’t see him as Dylan), but glad to say I was proved WRONG. He was perfectly enigmatic and captured Dylan’s innocence, hunger, genius and frustrating cluelessness about his fellow human beings and their feelings.
Also, guitarists—did Dylan really play so many of those early Freewheelin’ songs in drop D? If so, thank you, Chalamet, for showing me exactly how to play them!
Yes, I know there were many factual liberties taken. Who cares? The gestalt was exactly right. It’s an act of incredible generosity for a movie maker to take such care with getting the details right for a period piece like this one. The very New York City street signs were that old schoolbus-yellow they used to be! The view from the GW Bridge! How did they do that? Not to mention reproducing the old Viking Hotel at Newport instead of the swanky upgraded one we stayed in, back in the 90s. And how did Monica Barbaro (Joan Baez) completely GET Joan’s voice? I mean, THAT is hard to do.
My family loved the movie too. As the resident Dylanologist, I got asked a lot of questions, but the most interesting one was from Tom. Why, he said, was it such a big deal that Dylan went electric in ‘65 at Newport? Were people really that mad? What were the stakes in that moment for the likes of Alan Lomax, Peter Yarrow and Pete Seeger? What did they think would happen to folk music if Dylan plugged in? If folk music is meant to be “pure,” shouldn’t it, by definition, remain obscure? If so, why the worry about Dylan defecting from the genre? Well, because regardless of his questionable personality and obviously shabby treatment of others, everyone somehow loved him in a possessive way. There was something so irresistible about this cranky, obfuscating kid that made everyone want to say, “He’s mine. He’s on our side.”
I’m dying to know what you all think, since you are fans of folk music, clearly, and also at least tolerant of electric music—in fact, many of you may prefer pop and rock to folk. Here we are, a hybrid ourselves, after all, and you seem to be reading this newsletter. I had this thought, as the camera panned out above the stage at Newport, that Mangold the director was saying to us, Can you believe this silly tempest in a teapot? Why can’t people just let the times a’change? Clearly, the times were doing just that, anyway. And in the end, this is just the artistic journey of one person, who, contrary to what he says half-jokingly to “Sylvie Russo,” was not God.
But maybe that was just my thought.
All right, enough out of me. Katryna will weigh in next time.
Happy new year!
Love, Nerissa
Where We Are Playing in 2025
January 3 Caffé Lena, 8pm show, 47 Phila Street Saratoga Springs, NY
January 4 Caffé Lena, 1pm Family Show, 47 Phila Street Saratoga Springs, NY
Feb 1 The Iron Horse, FULL BAND SHOW! Northampton, MA 7pm
Feb 15 The Rosendale Theatre, Rosendale NY
February 20-24 Folk Alliance Montreal Canada
March 8 Oswego Music Hall, Oswego NY with Crys Matthews
March 10 The Ark Ann Arbor, MI
March 20 City Vineyard, Manhattan, NYC
April 26 Jonathan’s Ogunquit ME, o/f Dar Williams
PS Come to my January Writing Retreat!
The movie may or may not get the feel of things right, but an awful lot of details aren't correct. Did the Newport audience object to Dylan going electric? There may have been some objectors, but they were vastly outweighed by the fans who had no problem with the electrified tracks on _Bringing It All Back Home_, or the new hit single, or the earlier electrified set by the Fariñas, or the many bands that had already played the festival, like the Butterfield Blues Band. And other, mostly blues bands. The fight Alan Lomax was in wasn't over electrification, and it was a day or two earlier, it was because an electric blues band was fronted by white guys, and he felt that they were stealing African American music. Nothing to do with Dylan. Pete Seeger repeatedly denied that he objected to electrified music--though not his preference--but he felt that "Maggie's Farm" was a great song and the sound was so bad that no one could make out the words, and his remark "If I had an axe, I'd cut the cables," was not a serious proposition. Sylvia Tyson said everyone in the folk community was intensely interested in this new avenue or approach to their music, and that people were booing--only later in the set, which she said was poorly rehearsed and badly amplified--they really didn't know how to amplify things very well, yet--"the dog's breakfast," she called the sound of it, but mainly the booing was over Dylan leaving the stage after only 3 songs. Some people had been waiting for his set for most of the day. Albert Grossman apparently thought that the controversy was something to be exploited, to make Dylan look like a revolutionary and get more media attention. Nobody yelled "Judas" at the Newport set, that came more than a year later, when it became a thing for a--hole guys to follow the concert around and heckle Dylan and his band. (Any chance they were paid something by Grossman?).