POP MUSIC REVIEW : Folk Springs Eternal at Festival

Although the “Lollapalooza” festival will come around later in the summer to entice the edgy, the musical season opened perfectly this past weekend with the “Troubadours of Folk” festival, a traditionalist alternative to the alternative, offering among its many attractions an atmosphere so infectiously laid-back they could’ve called it Lollygag-ooza.

“I think by coming here,” Peter Yarrow told the crowd gathered at UCLA’s Drake Stadium for the fest’s second day Sunday, “you’ve said that folk music is not only alive, it threatens to be eternal.”

To maintain such an optimistic attitude, it’s helpful to define folk in a fairly broad and inclusive sense. The festival organizers clearly did, packing Sunday’s bill with exceptional, genre-straddling young comers like Mary-Chapin Carpenter, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Syd Straw, Julianna Raye and Peter Case as well as purer veterans like Richie Havens, Taj Mahal and Peter, Paul & Mary. The balance proved as ideal as the day’s Midwest-like weather.

Providing the missing link between generations was Richard Thompson, one of the few figures in folk or rock to be equally renowned as a canny songwriter and a virtuosic picker of strings. That he was denied an encore after his too-short set because of time constraints was a disappointing result of a bill too jam-packed with talent.

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Case and Gilmore were especially impressive, if even briefer. But once again, the best-stage-presence award would have to go to Straw, who spoke dryly and sang emotionally of romantic mishaps, coming off like a cross between PJ Harvey and P.G. Wodehouse.

Speaking of dry, the comedy Tony had to go to Spinal Tap spinoff the Folksmen, doing a genre spoof of such hysterical proportions it deserves its own “Forever Plaid”-type time warp revue.

Following a jubilant, dance-athon Cajun excursion by Beausoleil, Carpenter and her band further galvanized the crowd: a country star playing rock ‘n’ roll at a folk fest, which made sense enough.

Subsequently, the climactic set of “classic folk” by Peter, Paul & Mary--which might have seemed unduly nostalgia-prone under other circumstances--seemed like a warm reaffirmation of roots after all the topical left turns that preceded it. May the festival prove annual, if not eternal.