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Rob Young’s ‘Electric Eden’

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Special to the Los Angeles Times

Rob Young’s “Electric Eden” is a rich, overgrown garden of a book. Subtitled “Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music,” its ostensible purpose is to chronicle the late 1960s/early 1970s heyday of British folk rock: artists such as Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, Vashti Bunyan, Pentangle, Shirley Collins and Richard Thompson, who captured something powerful and strange even as they failed to dent the U.S. charts. Many of them came to tragic ends as well — suicide, sudden loss of voice, decades of wandering in the artistic wilderness.

But the book’s mission is far broader: Young connects these artists and others to Britain’s Celtic and pagan past, their relationship to its landscape, the English classical tradition and the anti-industrial Arts and Crafts movement. Over all of it is the struggle to find a distinctly British culture amid the onslaught of classical music from the Continent and rock and blues from the U.S.

Question: What drew you to writing about music that seems, today, so far away from the hit parade?

Rob Young: “The hit parade” — how quaint! I guess it was an attempt to fall in love with certain aspects of British culture that I had left on the sidelines in my own music exploration throughout the ‘90s. In my private listening zone, I kept coming back to the folk-rock records that are my desert island discs — Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, John Martyn, Fotheringay, Fairport Convention, Bert Jansch — and the more I realized that there wasn’t anything in print that told the stories of these artists and their times, the more I started to wonder what kind of undercurrents in 20th century music had created the conditions for these artists to jam their own take on “folk.”

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Q: “Electric Eden” provides quite an extensive artistic back story: We spend a lot of time with William Blake, William Morris and Vaughan Williams before we even get to Ewan MacColl and the beginning of the British folk revival. Why was that grounding important?

Young: Well, part of my argument is that the British folk revival did actually begin much earlier than MacColl and his mates in the 1950s: You have to look back at the late 19th century and the Victorian folk collectors — mostly amateurs at the time, but gradually becoming professionalized by characters like Cecil Sharp.

Morris is important because what you find in the 1880s and 1890s is a surge of conservation and preservation projects starting up, mainly by people who were horrified at the destructive effects of industrial progress.

Folk collecting — which Vaughan Williams, who knew Morris, began doing at exactly this time — for me is a part of this conservation impulse: saving an oral musical tradition just at the point where it was dying out. And so you find folk music linked to political imperatives, and I saw Blake’s earlier visionary poetry as connected too.

Q: How seriously did these artists resist American sources — not just the rock music of Buddy Holly and Elvis but the American folk of Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie?

Young: It wasn’t what you’d call “anti-American” in the modern sense. But at a certain point in the ‘60s, I think a lot of musicians who had, say, been influenced by Guthrie, Pete Seeger and especially Dylan realized that they were always going to sound like a pale imitation and began seeking inspiration on home turf. But it wasn’t always clear-cut — it was always an ongoing conversation.

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Q: Why did this flowering seem to wilt after about 1972?

Young: Several factors came into play, mainly economic ones. There are a whole raft of psychedelic folk bands, like Forest, Trees, Comus and others that follow a similar pattern: Form in 1969-70, release two albums in 1970 and ‘71, then split up. Glam rock was the new thing and those kinds of bands were too “underground” to have the earning power to keep going. The energy crisis of 1973 provided the last great culling, and record companies were dumping acts all over the place.

Q: Part of this book seems to recall Peter Guralnick’s “Sweet Soul Music” in its weaving of musical and social history; at least one reviewer has connected “Electric Eden” to Greil Marcus’ “The Old, Weird America” in its attempt to exhume a kind of lost world. What were your models for the book?

Young: Thanks, those are very hallowed forebears. Much as I admire those folks, my models were really people like Peter Ackroyd, who has analyzed many aspects of the English imagination; and the historian Ronald Hutton, who’s written extensively on British paganism, druidry and folklore.

There are many music writers I admire, but one particular guiding light was the late Ian MacDonald, who wrote the brilliant “Revolution in the Head,” a complete chronicle of the Beatles’ music. He got under the skin of music by unlocking its secret codes and attaching it to its historical context. That’s what I’ve always tried to do in my own work.

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