Its hard to argue the point. Fifty years ago, Seeger co-founded the legendary event with Wein while headlining a bill featuring artists like Odetta, Memphis Slim and the Stanley Brothers. Saturday, the 90-year-old Seeger was back onstage leading a 50th anniversary sing-along that included the Decemberists, Gillian Welch, Fleet Foxes and his grandson, Tao. He even played a few solos. Times have changed. Seeger hasnt.
One of Seegers clearest musical descendants, Billy Bragg began a Saturday set by dedicating two songs from his Wilco collaboration Mermaid Avenue to the late Jay Bennett, spinning an appropriate Woody Guthrie homage into a memorial. Characteristically, he fleshed the rest of the performance out with demagogic pleas for universal heath care, political oxymorons (military intelligence, democratic capitalism) and a promise to chase all the neo-conservatives out of this country. Not that the absurdity of the context was lost on him. Now I want to play a song for all the people who couldnt buy a ticket today, Bragg said, gazing out from the ramparts of Fort Adams over a busy Newport Harbor. For all the people who could only afford to pull their yachts up to hear us for free. It must be awful.
At 50, Newport Folk isnt without those kinds of ironies. Fittingly, then, the festivals standout performance came from the Avett Brothers, a band whose sound a mix of traditional bluegrass/folk signifiers, baby-faced sentiment, and punk abandon so aptly represents those tensions. Judging by tunes like Kick Drum Heart and A Perfect Space the quartet refined the formula nicely for their forthcoming major-label debut. Call it folk-punk or grunge-grass, the Avetts have stumbled upon one of the last untapped youth demographics in American music. Predictably, they also incited the most heated sit-stand conflicts with Newports lawn-chaired elite.
The fact that Newport Folk is an ostensibly anti-establishment festival with latently establishment pathology was clear enough from the infamous moment Bob Dylan went electric in 1965 a watershed event that even managed to memorialize Seeger (the classic anti-establishment hero) as a glowering, axe-wielding traditionalist. The Decemberists spiced up their typically vaudevillian set with a theatrical re-enactment of the controversy. Narrated by frontman Colin Meloy, the sketch cast guitarist Chris Funk as Seeger, drummer John Moen as producer Joe Boyd and special guest Shara Worden (of My Brightest Diamond) as a Cate Blanchett-styled Dylan. This was back in the day when the PA system was fueled entirely by burning wood, Meloy deadpanned. Pete was back there cutting the wood, and he became so overwhelmed with emotion that his hatchet almost slipped and severed the power cables. Fortunately Joe Boyd dove in and stopped him.
While artists like Bragg and Tom Morello took up the mantle of Seegers activism, others eschewed politics for the simpler folk tradition of character acting. Hes actually a local Rhode Island boy, Gillian Welch confessed about her fully denim-clad partner David Rawlings. You can tell by the way he dresses. To be fair, of course, Welch is the more glaring contradiction: an L.A.-born photography major whos styled herself, a la Dylan, into one of the hard-luck prairie girls she writes about in her songs. On Saturday, she laid out her haunting tales of hope and heart-wreck in the full on glare of a summer sun. Guaranteed to bring you down, she laughed. Welch and Rawlings have been sitting on a collection of great unreleased songs (like Throw Me a Rope) for years, but they managed to mix up their heavily road-worn material with a surprise, reverb-soaked take on Jefferson Airplanes White Rabbit. Anyone out there in the boats like banjo? Welch asked. Moments later, two resounding horn blasts blew in from off the water.
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