"Troubadours: Carole King, James Taylor, And The Rise Of The Singer-Songwriter" debuts tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern/Pacific, 7 p.m. Central/Mountain in most markets as part of PBS' American Masters series. Check local listings.
Morgan Neville’s documentary Troubadours opens with the rowdy sounds of the late ‘60s rock revolution, which quickly fade to the more plaintive music of James Taylor and Carole King, from a recent reunion gig at LA’s famous nightclub The Troubadour. For some rock fans and cultural critics, that transition from hard to soft in the early ‘70s was a travesty—a betrayal of the hard truth-to-power ideals of an activist generation. But Troubadours has a different take. Where rock writers saw sellouts, Neville sees artists, working just as hard as their louder/faster predecessors to express what they saw of a world in crisis.
Drawing on new interviews and rare footage—including film of a young King working at the Brill Building, and Taylor debuting “Fire And Rain” at the Newport Folk Festival—Neville traces the roots of the singer-songwriter movement and the California soft-rock scene to Tin Pan Alley and the hootenannies, granting it more historical legitimacy. The New York folk and pop scenes ran parallel in the early ‘60s, with the former prizing stripped-down, socially engaged storytelling and the latter striving to appeal to young people by capturing their lives in code. Stalwarts of both moved west later in the decade and started dabbling in each other’s fields. The result was a musical revolution as dramatic as the acid-rock era that preceded it.
Neville pads out Troubadours with a few too many generational signifiers: shots of Vietnam protestors and twirling flower children, interviewees who boast of shaking up a rigidly stratified society, et cetera. There’s a “yeah man, the sixties” vibe to the documentary that’s hard to take at times, especially for anyone who grew up inundated with Baby Boomer propaganda about how wonderful everything used to be when hippies walked the earth. (Not that they don’t have reason to be proud of themselves, but still: The broadly sketched Legend Of The Love Generation has become a cliché, no matter how grounded it is in truth.)
What Troubadours does
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American Masters - "Troubadours: Carole King, James Taylor, And The Rise Of The Singer-Songwriter" | Other Shows | TV Club | TV | The A.V. Club
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