***Wasn’t That A Mighty Storm-The Life And Times Of Folksinger/Songwriter Tom Rush-No Regrets  

 

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Od Frank Jackman

No Regrets, a documentary starring Tom Rush, 2014

Several years ago I did a series entitled Not Bob Dylan: Other Male Voices Of The 1960s Folk Minute where I tried to highlight those male folksingers (and songwriters) who for whatever reason did not wind up doing Brother Dylan’s never-ending tour (and now never-ending bootleg series of CDs as well). Many like Jim Kweskin, Geoff Muldaur, David Bromberg just kind of faded out as the folk minute lost much of its allure, and its ability to sustain livelihoods (although the example above have resurfaced lately in the coffeehouse/folk festival circuit sounding very good by the way). Some were relatively one-hit wonders and we know what that means, they are now working some other career. Others, like the folksinger/songwriter under review. Tom Rush, in his latest documentary kept their fingers in but moved into a less heated, hectic environment that endlessly touring and trying to produce the next great folk song. This DVD, put out by the same producers who put out the anniversary documentary a few years back on the Club 47 in Cambridge when Bob, Joan Baez and Tom made musical history, hits the highlights of the career (really careers) of an important figure in that 1960s folk minute.   

As in any biographical documentary, the Tom Rush story starts out with a little material about his childhood, about his adopted childhood up in New Hampshire (with an interesting aside about his later discovered relationship with his birth father) with teacher parents who pushed Tom to educational excellence but also provided an environment where he could develop his musical skills. Skills that when the folk minute in Cambridge intersected his time as an undergraduate student at Harvard (and as a Harvard radio DJ) gave him an opportunity to become one of the then iconic folksingers of the time.     

Interestingly the road to musical success was as usual with lots of careers two steps forward, one step back as Tom tried to get a record contract (absolutely necessary then to get airplay, airplay on the local radio station, WBZ, that a lot of us listened to every Sunday night to see what the latest folk minute minute was about). Success at the Club 47 led to other engagements in the Boston area and Greenwich Village and steady work for a long period of time as he made, unlike some  others, the transition to the post- Bob Dylan electrified folk rock scene. Then some burn-out, some personal difficulties and a desire to not travel as much. That is the period when he began his very successful Boston Symphony Hall winter shows, his ventures into record production highlighting newer folk talent needing a start, writing, and, strangely, although not for a New Hampshire boy perhaps, a period as a gentleman-farmer. In all a useful life, a life that now includes periodic forays out into the now shrinking coffeehouse folk circuit that sustains the music (and where I saw him last year). A good one and one half hour documentary about what happened to one of the important, if lesser, lights of that folk minute when we thought we would turn the world upside down with our music, our counter-cultural experiment and our alternative politics, and make a gentler, more peaceful world to live in.