An Interview with Rick Massimo: The World I Know
Last year, Rick Massimo’s I Got A Song: A History of The Newport Folk Festival was published. We had a great talk last fall about the book and the history of this special festival and thought we’d chat again about this year’s lineup, through an historical lens. If you have not yet read this book, please put it on your list. It’s thoughtful, accessible, and will make you think about your experience at Newport in a deeper way. Rick went to great lengths to interview artists, attendees, and festival organizers to get a variety of perspectives on the Festival and its place in history. And while there is probably stuff you know, there’s a lot more you think you know (but are wrong about), and even more that will be new to you. Get it. Read it. Pass it on.
Turning to 2018, this is a stacked lineup, with several spots that are unannounced or have the potential for many surprise guests. It’s going to be a great three days, friends. Here is Rick’s take on this year!
RLR: What jumps out to you from this lineup this year, as you think about the history of Newport and how this year might fit into that story?
RM: The first thing that strikes me is the set that Jon Batiste is going to be leading: “A Change Is Gonna Come.” We don’t know exactly what is going to happen, or exactly who is going to be participating, but that seems like a clear indication of something in the Newport activist tradition, or if not activist, [the tradition of] reacting to the world around you.
I’m also very curious about what Cheech and Chong will do. In addition to being comic guys, they’re very committed to legalization. So I have a feeling there will be something substantial done there as well.
RLR: You made a distinction between activism and reacting to the world; can you say more about that?
RM: They’re obviously related; they’re not completely different. But a lot of the songs that we think of as great protest songs are just about loving each other and thinking for yourself, but they were made at a time where that was a radical thing to say. We’re in this funny situation [now] where that’s a radical thing to say, and yet it’s not. We have this “minority government” going on, so we’re in this weird space where [loving each other] this radical opposition thing to say, and, yet, it’s also what the overwhelming majority of people in this country believe.
Newport has always been a place where there’s been argument over how things are defined as folk music, but there has always been a space for people who are singing songs about the world around them. That was one of the major steps in the evolution of folk music: from the people who said you had to sing the songs that the coal miners sang and the people who said: “The coal miners were singing about the world they knew, so I’m going to sing about the world I know.”
RLR: Right. One of the threads in I Got a Song is this expanding definition of what folk music actually means. As you think about this year, are there artists pushing that definition, or expanding it, from your perspective?
RM: Well, fifty years after Bob Dylan, you still have people who don’t necessarily think an electric guitar is a sacrilege, but do wish they’d turn it down a little bit. And there’s plenty of that. There are a number of bands that are really just straight rock bands, or something like that, in terms of musical style. But lyrically, they are smart and make great observations of the world around them. St. Vincent is a perfect example – just gorgeous, brilliant music – and I’m looking forward to Low Cut Connie – I didn’t know about them until they were announced, but they impress me. Moses Sumney as well.
RLR: Even like Toots and the Maytals, I thought, “Oh, they totally fit!” But I don’t know if they always would have fit, based on narrower definitions of folk.
RM: Well, they should have always fit. Reggae is as folk as you can get. And they’ve had the same schism [as folk music] as far as: “Is it really reggae if it’s popular?” But that music progresses in the same way that folk music progresses. Absolutely, Toots and the Maytals are a perfect example of what should be defined as folk. Whether it is or not is up to you, but if you don’t [consider it folk], it’s something you should think about.
RLR: There can sometimes be a strong intergenerational component to Newport that is missing from other festivals. John Prine performing last year with Margo Price, Jim James, and others; the Bill Withers tribute last year; Kristofferson performing with The Texas Gentlemen and Margo Price in 2016, and Charlie Musselwhite is performing this year with Ben Harper. What do you think contributes to that?
RM: That’s always happened; it’s always going to happen. The most obvious is Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. And it happens in the audience too. I hope I haven’t made the old people sound too awful, because you definitely find people with grey hair and tie-dyed shirts who find a band that’s half their age and love it.
The phrase of Jay Sweet’s that I keep coming back to is: “Let them know that you know where you are.” He tells new acts that they have to do that, and they can’t just do their normal thing. And I think the audience expects that as well. And I think there’s an interesting metahistorical thing, where everybody knows that they’re somewhere historical, and it’s an important part of what’s in the air there.
RLR: There’s a sense that you have a consistent opportunity that you may witness something that will be remembered for a long time.
RM: Yeah. And it breaks my heart whenever I have to break it to somebody that Fort Adams is not where Dylan went electric or where Mississippi John Hurt played. They think it is. But it doesn’t matter as much that it’s not the exact same stage: it is the same institution, and this is a festival that consciously plays on that and consciously emphasizes it. I think there’s something really smart about that. You look at other festivals and people say it’s an honor to play there, and I’m sure they mean it, but it’s just a different kind of thing, because they don’t have as many decades behind them. Maybe someday that will happen, but I’m not sure if it will, and for a lot of reasons, I’m not sure whether it can, and those reasons are not all musical. There is something about the history of Newport and the fact that it happened at the time that it did that is kind of enshrined in our culture.
RLR: Part of what it sounds like you’re saying is that those years are enshrined because of how those years in American history are so rich and provoke curiosity.
RM: I don’t want to be too strident about this, because lot of important stuff happened in the 1960s, but it’s also enshrined because it was the youth of a numerically-dominant generation, so that’s what gets talked about. History is not made by the people who make it, it’s made by the people who write about these events afterwards. There’s this dominance of what happened in the 1960s, so what I wanted to do in the book was to show a full history of the Festival and to show that a lot of stuff was happening after they packed up in 1969 and didn’t come back until 1985. And a lot of that informs what’s going on today, both in the Festival and outside of it.
A lot of these acts may not be expressly political in their music, but they are political in the sense that they are who they are and they expect to be taken seriously. Sometimes that’s a political act. Amy Ray told me that the biggest statement they could make in being at Newport was to go there and be The Indigo Girls and be themselves in front of thousands of people. And the fact that they were in a place where they accepted and it was just normal, that’s a big deal. And creating that space is a big deal.
RLR: Right. Looking at the line-up, it’s fairly diverse. And I can imagine in other lineups people feeling tokenized as a person of color or a woman or a queer person. So it feels like there’s a lot of intentionality here to have a diverse lineup without tokenization.
RM: I’m sure there is. There’s a quote from George Wein: “People think this stuff just happens.” And it really doesn’t. I’m sure this is consciously done. They build this festival, in terms of the acts, from scratch every year. So you have to make the conscious act of deciding who you’re going to have play, and it’s no accident. And it was no accident in 1963 either.
RLR: There is a lot of speculation about the headliner for Saturday. Any ideas?
RM: I have no ideas on that. A lot of people say they do, and they don’t. There’s always at least one thing that’s unannounced. That is something that has happened for years.
You think you can look around and see who’s on tour in the area and guess that’s who it’s going to be and guess that’s who it’s going to be, and it’s not that either. So it’s always interesting.
RLR: All the speculation cracks me up. I was on the water taxi and couple years ago and these folks were convinced that one of the boats in the harbor was Neil Young’s boat.
RM: Yeah, when they were doing the tribute to Dylan in 2015, a guy got a text from his friend backstage that Bob Dylan and Al Kooper were backstage. Number one, no; I was backstage and he wasn’t there. Number two, no; because, no. Number three, No, because can you actually think of anything Bob Dylan would less want to do than to get up there and play songs for the fiftieth anniversary? But these guys were so sure. I don’t know who texted them, but it’s remarkable and very entertaining to see people speculating.
Keep speculating, folks. It will be special, that we know. See you at The Fort!
Book Photo Credit: Robin Lubbock, WBUR