Various Artists – The Best Of Broadside 1962-1988
Let’s not make any bones about it: this 5-CD set is the best lookin’, best feelin’, best readin’ boxed set I ever saw. Inside its handsome slipcase is a 158-page ringbound book, packed with fascinating stories, performer histories and updates, superb photos, newspaper clippings and illustrations. All this is reproduced in a touching facsimile of the original pages of Broadside, and the CDs are beautifully cased within the pages themselves.
It won’t fit in your CD case, but it will fit on your bookshelf, and that might be the point. For, although I dread to think how much it will cost, the packaging is almost certainly worth the price of admission. The question is whether you will actually want to listen to the music.
Broadside was begun in New York City in 1962 by Sis Cunningham and Gordon Freissen, refugees from the Oklahoma Communist witch hunts. It was a dark time of bans and blacklists. The idea of the magazine was to print the texts and tunes of emerging topical (read: left-wing protest) songs that were getting short shrift in other contemporary folk magazines, and thereby disseminate their message as widely as possible. Broadside filled a hole and nurtured the success of the burgeoning movement.
Gil Turner, the MC at Gerde’s Folk City, would bring new acts to the editors’ attention and then, literally, to their apartment, where tapes were made on Pete Seeger’s Revere tape recorder and subsequently transcribed by Cunningham. The original issues of Broadside were copied on the same model of mimeograph machine that Castro used in the Sierra Meastra (the booklet is full of great details). Copies were then smuggled out in a pram, since businesses were forbidden in the Frederick Douglass Project, where the Friessens lived. Honestly, it’s a Spielberg movie waiting to happen.
Within two years of the first issue, the world knew the answers were blowin’ in the wind, and that a hard rain was gonna fall. Topical song had an audience as never before. Nina Simone, when asked the source of one of her songs, answered: “From Broadside, of course, where else?” From civil rights to black power via Vietnam, the writers of Broadside covered it all. The magazine’s achievement was enormous, based on huge toil and hardship, and its legacy has been huge.
But the times they were a-changin’, and, despite printing “War Pigs” by Black Sabbath in #116, Broadside was not essentially interested in or able to keep up with developments in rock. And that is where the protest movement had moved. When you read Gordon Freissen’s remark that Thom Parrott’s “Pinkville Helicopter” was the “best song to come out of the Vietnam tragedy,” you know why Broadside didn’t last through the ’70s: It’s a plodding performance of an uninteresting song which includes the line “Get your chopper on out of here, buddy.”
The Best Of Broadside covers social issues thematically, rather than chronologically, and when you get to the Black Power section, all four songs are by the same two people. You can’t help thinking that, though the best songs of the Civil Rights movement were probably printed in Broadside, the best musical response to Black Power might not have been written by folkies.
Given the recent success of the Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, The Best Of Broadside might seem a logical release. But, ironically, Smith’s collection seems less dated and far more suited to contemporary tastes and, generally, riper to be sampled by Beck. That’s because of an inherent problem with topical music: These protest songs aspired to speak with urgency to their day, and that day is almost 40 years gone.
Songs about the cases of William Worthy, Benny Kid Paret, Inez Garcia and the Aberfan Coal Tip Tragedy must have been lent a certain punch by their timeliness, but today, with only yellowed clippings to fill us in on the details, one is left hearing only a singer and a song. And the worst of The Best Of Broadside is listenable only as social history.
Of course, there is some great music here. Broadside put out about 15 albums, and this collection is the pick of those, with a few unreleased items for good measure. As you might expect, Dylan’s is the voice on this set. Unfortunately, he’s not the only one using it. There is the voice itself, declaiming with the power and angry self-righteous belief that protest needs, and then there are the impressions of that voice by others who are not able to deliver with such biblical certainty.
The set includes his early protest classics “Donald White” and “John Brown” (neither versions available on official Dylan releases), though I feel Dylan must have stopped them from using more than two of his own performances, as I can’t believe they would have willingly omitted the other bits and Bobs available to them from those albums (“The Death Of Emmett Till” amongst five or six others). More famous Dylan songs are represented here but sung by others.
The Best Of Broadside features fine examples of sincere choral folk singing at its best, and some performers emerge with their voices and messages intact. Tom Paxton’s and Mark Spoelstra’s deliveries are full of self-deprecating humor, Pete Seeger is at his best and most playful, and Malvina Reynolds made me cry with this version of “What Have They Done To The Rain?” — so heartbreaking, so hopelessly cheery is her delivery.
There are the odd five minutes of tedium that make you yearn for Tom Lehrer, but this makes the most unexpected moments all the more welcome: The Fugs’ “Kill For Peace”, horrendously out-of-place, thereby retaining some of its power to shock, and all the better for it; Kirkpatrick & Collier’s “Laughing Fool” (I wish Ted Hawkins had recorded it; did he?); the ever-reliable Janis Ian’s teenage thoughts on old people (“Shady Acres”) and civil rights (“Society’s Child”); and Charlie Brown’s certifiably insane and hilariously endless “Ballad Of Earl Durand” (over seven minutes of autoharp and voice), which is obviously on loan from Harry Smith.
Other than that, it struck me how prettily some of the men sing their heavy and disturbing thoughts, and how odd that sounds today, when anger and angst is denoted through the tone of the singer’s voice, not by what the singer is saying. It also occurred to me that, in 1963, I might well have sided with those who carped, like the editors of Little Sandy Review who called it “P-For-Protest” and encouraged Dylan to move on. They complained about the doggerel that the “protesteers” wrote, and these pages are littered with real clunkers. For example, the true horror story of a Vietnamese child, bribed with candy by soldiers to show them where his rebel father is hiding underground, which he does, not realizing that they are going to kill him, is memorialized in the following lines:
The next day I go to visit my daddy
And I walk and I look across the rice paddies
But I can’t find my daddy, there’s no one around
And I can’t find the hole where he lives in the ground.
In the face of the noble sentiments that inspired some of these songs, it seems petty to complain about the words, but lines like this can’t bear the weight of the subjects they take on.
The prototypical Broadside artist is the great Phil Ochs, who is much represented. His career very much mirrors the magazine’s own, and you could consider his suicide (early 1976) as the end of Broadside proper. But his nine entries here don’t convey the sense of humor which was one of my favorite aspects of his work. It makes me wonder, in the context, whether I really only like my protest with a bit of smile.
As a record, this makes a superb book. I imagine that The Best Of Broadside will sell a lot of copies to libraries, so perhaps this is only appropriate. Broadside is an incredibly important magazine, arguably the birth of the ’60s underground press. I own a few original copies and handle them lightly as I would religious artifacts, so the above thoughts come from the perspective of a fan.
What is so interesting to me about this boxed set — which I have already spent more time with, reading, listening and thinking about, than I have any other boxed set (and not just because I was reviewing it) — is how great it is and how bad it is all at the same time. Some of the songs will speak to anyone anywhere at any time, while others sound horribly dated, but even these tell us about a time when singers thought they might actually change the world. If only as a time capsule, The Best Of Broadside is essential listening and reading.