Lucy Kaplansky- The Revivalist
Disco had turned mainstream in 1978 with the smash release of Saturday Night Fever, and disco hits from the Commodores to Chic dominated the charts. But ‘78 was also the year Some Girls was released by the Stones – with touches of country (Far Away Eyes) and yes a bit of disco (Miss You, as Charlie Watts said with its “four-to-the-floor rhythm pattern and the Philadelphia-style drumming”), but generally Some Girls was top to bottom one of the best hard-edged, power albums the Stones ever did. 1978 also saw the continued rise of punk music, with the Clash’s second studio album Give ‘Em Enough Rope, and good air time for the Buzzcocks, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Devo. There’s never just one bucket of music and the late 1970’s was exploding in sound for all camps.
The New York Times got enamored with another type of music, a major folk revival in the Village led by the likes of the Roches, Steve Forbert, and Loudon Wainwright III, acoustic-led music a straight line from the likes of Phil Ochs and acoustic Dylan. (The Times was drawn not only to the Roches’ music but also to their sensibilities – fixated a bit on Suzzy Roches “gym shorts and sneakers over leotards, with flowers in her hair.” New York Times, Folk Music is Back with a Twang, Apr. 30, 1978.)
Perfect Pitch and an Easy Comfort on Stage
Drawn to the scene a year earlier in 1977 was Lucy Kaplansky, a 17 year old transplant who left Chicago with her then boyfriend, coming as a duo to hit whatever venue would give them a stage – Folk City, Kenny’s Castaway, Cornelia Street Café – a stage, a mic, eager to perform to people who liked the scene and the music. With a perfect pitch, and an easy comfort on the stage, Lucy killed it, with the New York Times literally predicting stardom. She was a member of a tribe, an easy fluence of like-minded musicians experiencing by and large what Hemingway had experienced in Paris in the 20s: struggling but young, happy (if not always knowing it), and doing exactly what they most enjoyed doing.
The Tide – Producer Shawn Colvin
A soon to be big-time but then relatively little known Shawn Colvin convinced Lucy to let her produce Lucy’s next album, this while Lucy was trying to “re-prioritize” her life away from music. The result: The Tide, the title track written by Lucy and her husband Richard Litvin (to this day a constant writing partner), subject to rave reviews, and with Lucy then signed by Red House Records and picked up by a booking agency, leading to a full-time return to Music.
At that time niche radio stations and independently minded DJs played what they wanted when they wanted without objection. Lucy: “I could put an album together, send it to a DJ and if they liked it they played it.” There may be more music playing today to more people but it all narrows into the same well, algorithms leading people to the same trough of music, Spotify Playlists all containing the same five or six songs that somewhere, show how you liked or played, and that are destined to follow you around, from platform playlist to platform playlist for years to come.
Music that Could Get Heard
Lucy explained how it is in so many ways so much harder today: “There was so much more available, more press because publications hadn’t been decimated by the internet; there was more radio for “non-commercial” [artists]. There were really influential stations like in New York and Philly, and you didn’t have to be on a major label and you just had to be good. And that stuff is just gone.”
Making a Dent – And Living in a Box
The hard part is “making a dent,” as Lucy describes it. Making a dent means rising above the constant noise that occupies all our lives, saturating our experience. Our time and attention is occupied by memes, viral events that for whatever reason – horror, sublime stupidity, the cutest damn cats you’ve ever seen – consume our attention, and serve as fortresses, jails constructed around us honing our experiences and ultimately our interests towards commonalities. We are trapped; artistically, culturally, intellectually trapped in tiny boxes that we adorn with money or trappings, if we have any, or violence or malevolence if we don’t, all equally vapid and shallow.
Lucy is in many respects part of a tribe, a group of people comfortable on stage, joyfully and fantastically creative in the recording studio (Lucy’s favorite place), musicians playing with like-minded musicians collaboratively, working with gifted song writers, gifted song writers themselves, people like Shawn Colvin, Richard Shindell, Dar Williams, Nanci Griffiths and John Gorka – folk musicians all, still playing to those able to navigate through the noise to nothing other than frigging awesome music and song writing.
Saved by the Power of her own Two Feet
There are some lines, magical lines from Lucy’s big 1996 album Ten Year Night that resonate. Songs like Five in the Morning with the lyrics of a girl lying in her bed, in the no-where hours of the way-too-early morning, “listening to the thunderstorm in her head.” And there, draped in the dead of night, in her door-closed room, in a “darkness that is out of control,” there she commits to a better life: “She's gonna hit the ground running from this dead end street/ Saved by the power of her own two feet.” This is great writing; the dichotomies. A young girl mentally and spiritually motivated but literally parked in a timeless hour, no one there to judge her, no one there to stop her, but never getting out of the bed.
Our Search for Beauty
We live in a time where most any song that has ever been written can be found on the phone we carry in our pockets. And maybe that’s the problem. It is harder and harder to find space, space for us to explore and dream and catch a ride on a crazy idea, like heading off to New York at the age of seventeen. Folk Music is alive; its roots too damn deep to ever die; but, it is harder to find in this crazy whacked world of ours. It takes some time to find beauty and you have to search for it, and that’s what makes it special.
About Lucy Kaplansky. A twenty-five year music veteran, still living in Greenwich Village, New York, then and always wonderfully creative and vital, she continues to write with her husband Richard Litvin, plays often with her talented drummer daughter, continues to perform and collaborate with old friends, and is working on her next album.