CLUB PASSIM

CLUB PASSIM'S FORTIETH ANNIVERSARY BENEFIT CONCERT

At the Sanders Theatre

Jan. 1

Drum starts; Katryna Nields strikes an akimbo pose in mid-jumping jack. She is beautiful. Her band, the Nields, something that just graduated from Yale, giddily rocks Sanders Theatre: thirty-and-up Cantabridgians stand to applaud. Where is Joan Baez, who came to Club Passim barefoot and left a star? She played last. And reuniting earlier in the show with their banjos and mandolins were the Charles River Valley Boys, Harvard alumni from the 60's. At its 40th Anniversary Concert, Club Passim looked back, looked forward, and its music squirmed between the weight of history and the multiple identities of folk in the nineties.

Club Passim? It's that sunken whitewashed place across from the Coop, below the map store. Tom Waits got his start there. In its heyday Club Passim (then Club 47) was a familiar nightspot for Harvard students: "It was the House of Blues without the booze," says co-founder Betsy Siggins Schmidt. Over the years though, student nightlife has fragmented as venues multiplied, and the Club's Americana format has become less immediate than it was when folk musicians were creating a vocal canon of protest in the days of Vietnam and the civil rights movement.

Just as folk has handled even its most disconnected moments, Club Passim quietly thrives in the Palmer Street alley, watching Harvard Square grow up and retaliate against itself. Its folk platform has become "Americana," a broad, historically oriented aesthetic that unfortunately seems neither to play to the young nor to exhort the masses. The emcee and speakers at Passim's 40th anniversary concert emphasized that the club was "as good as it ever was," yet this impulse to confirm folk's endurance suggests insecurity over the more insular, less underground but perhaps less relevant position of Americana folk music today.

That said, Club Passim threw an anniversary party that was both accessible--it was like going to church after a two year hiatus--and sometimes experimental. Sanders Theatre sold out to an audience that erred on the side of grown-up but was livelier for it. We all clapped to the beat as Joan Baez jigged and the Charles River Valley Boys covered the Beatles. The program became a kind of historiographic French smoke where the congregation pulled old records from the cabinet. Reassured by the immediacy of older artists like Baez and the Charles River Valley Boys, the audience proceeded to transform that sense of legacy into a sense of destiny as newer acts like the hard-boiled romantic Ellis Paul and bushy, lion-headed Pamela Means sang new songs, personal and bitterness-free.

So, while America has rolled around in dance clubs and hip-hop has taken the political torch, folk music has somehow maintained a high energy, doubtless made possible by clubs like Passim. Siggins Schmidt explains that the club is "one of the best places an artist can cut his or her own teeth...can find an attentive audience. Its nurturing quality has proved itself decade after decade." And Club Passim does have an "alumni" list for the past few decades twice as impressive as Harvard's: Baez, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, Taj Mahal, Shawn Colvin, Jackson Browne, Tracy Chapman, Tow Waits, Suzanne Vega, Nanci Griffith and Tom Rush all started out across the street from the Coop. So much for geography as destiny.

Siggins Schmidt described the anniversary concert as the ultimate introduction to folk music any Harvard undergraduate could hope for. Pamela Means began the show with a short set of soft-spoken, dark songs. Her hair, a square mass of dreads, sat on top of her head like an underground crown. After her, with far less hair, the Charles River Valley boys played a set that sounded more like the Ohio River Valley than the Charles, closing with a few Beatles covers that underlined the concert's sense of retrospective solidarity.

Ellis Paul, a critical favorite, followed, but his short passionate songs lacked the youthful honesty of Means or the twangy wisdom of the Charles River Valley Boys. The Silver Leaf Gospel choir took the show to intermission in overalls with an African fabric swatch reminiscent of a cummerbund under black suit coats. Their singing, deeper than Widener and friendlier too, inclusive of both Jesus and the "I just might take a nip" phenomenon, was authentically folk, seemingly grown on a stalk independent of any folk revivals or Newport festivals.

After intermission, the husky Joel Cage outshone the similarly styled Ellis Paul. The Nields, however, stole the concert from its stewards, pogo-ing from the mid-90's into a classy alternative stage presence. Half as well known as Baez or Patty Larkin, The Nields were good enough to accidentally give the rest of the concert a sober, if triumphant, denouement feel. Patty Larkin was glaringly down-to-earth by contrast, singing masterful songs that nonetheless seemed a bit long. Baez finished the concert, bringing her niece on for an encore, and in fact her entire set was focused on the future, expressing Baez's sense of humor and "you can never go back" attitude toward Harvard Square in the sixties.

Siggins Schmidt discusses a "vitality that doesn't seem to go away." With more folk festivals around the country now that five years before, Club Passim may be in position to facilitate another folk revival, but whatever the status of folk-Americana across the country, Club Passim seems content to go on, regardless.