By James
Ring Adams
Wall Street
Journal
January 17,
2000
Running late during a cold
First Night gig in New Jersey more than a year ago, the trio Cry, Cry, Cry drew
an insult from the Amazing Kreskin that has become part of its budding legend.
When the guitarist for the group
approached the psychic to say what a fan he was, Kreskin complained volubly
that his people had to wait 20 minutes in the snow for their time onstage.
Then, putting his hand to his forehead, he intoned, "I predict that Cry,
Cry, Cry will be no more in two years."
The joke on Kreskin was that this
was no surprise. The three singer-songwriters in Cry3, Dar Williams, Richard
Shindell and Lucy Kaplansky, had planned to play together for no more than one
year, pooling their solo reputations to spotlight the wealth of good writing in
the current folk scene.
But no one, not even Kreskin,
predicted the degree of their success. The three relatively obscure singers
consistently placed among the 50 top-grossing touring acts, as measured by the
Pollstar survey. At their farewell concert just two days into this new year,
under the mahogany beams of Harvard University's Sanders Theater, the sold-out
hall greeted them as cultural heroes, and such leading names in alternative
music as Cliff Eberhardt lined up to pay tribute.
Cry3 more than achieved its goal of
drawing attention to a bubbling music scene, loosely called "folk,"
that is producing some of the best-written songs to be heard anywhere these
days. But even its principals struggle to find the right label.
"It's a stupid word, `folk,'
but it's a great group of people," says Shindell. Kaplansky sometimes
dismisses the label as a record-store convention, saying the only difference
between her style and that of so-called pop singers Sarah MacLachlan and Jewel
is the volume of sales.
The founding Cry3 singer Dar
Williams, whom all say had the largest following before the project, may be the
closest in outlook to a '60s-style folkie. (She has toured with her childhood
hero, Joan Baez.) She describes the current folk scene as a network of clubs,
college-town venues, alternative radio shows and Internet Web sites. But she
finds her audience much more cynical about politics than the activists of the
"Great Folk Scare" of the Vietnam era. "You have to be more
sophisticated," she said.
Her topics, such as the ecology and
gender concerns of her adopted Northampton, center of the five-college region
of western Massachusetts, come from the '90s. Her songs are less likely to be
antiwar than anti-Wal-Mart.
"I'm trying to deconstruct
personal relationships, not attack the system," she said, adding, however,
that these relationships are the foundation of the system.
Her partners in Cry3 have personal
styles that mark the other corners of the genre. Shindell is a master of subtle
narrative; his "Fishing," which is on the 1994 album "Blue
Divide" (Shanachie), may be the best, if not the only, folk song ever
written about an interrogation from the viewpoint of the law officer. Kaplansky
focuses intensely on personal relationships, with scarcely a nod at politics --
as in last year's well-received CD titled "Ten Year Night" (Red
House).
All three folk singers in any other
country would be considered children of the intelligentsia. Williams, the
daughter of a writer, grew up in Chappaqua, in New York's Westchester County,
the town where the Clintons just set up housekeeping. Shindell, who lives
nearby in White Plains, is the son of a diplomat turned investment banker.
Kaplansky has an even more illustrious lineage. Her father is the noted
mathematician Irving Kaplansky, a former University of Chicago professor; she
was raised in Chicago's academic enclave of Hyde Park in a high-rise that at
one time or another housed five Nobel Prize laureates.
Kaplansky, a raven-haired beauty who
could have understudied Julia Louis-Dreyfus on "Seinfeld," has other
unusual credentials. Years earlier, she gave up a budding singing career to
take a doctorate in psychology. She was building up a professional practice
when an epiphany during her own therapy convinced her that she would really
rather be a singer.
The three longtime friends had
performed together in varying combinations when Williams and Shindell started
talking about putting out a cover album of their favorite new songs. "If I
had any dream for the project," said Williams, "it would be to take
our accumulated brownie points in terms of visibility and use them to spotlight
other writers." (Kaplansky was invited by the other two as soon as they
decided to do the project.)
They first planned only a limited
tour to promote the CD "Cry, Cry, Cry" (released by Razor & Tie
Entertainment in October 1998), but bookings started to pour in. To their
surprise, they began to sell out such large venues as New York City's Town
Hall, not just folk clubs.
One reason for their success was simply that they sounded terrific together. Although each singer has a strong, distinctive solo voice, they blended in a rich, seamless harmony. "We didn't know what kind of show we would be until our first gig, in Tucson," said Kaplansky, "and then the audience went wild."
Another was the strength of their
material. As a "cover band," they set out to perform lesser-known
gems by their peers, and wound up frustrated mainly that their sample was so
incomplete. Even so, the 12 selections on their album cover an impressive gamut
of regions and styles, even including the highly marketable work of R.E.M.'s
Michael Stipe and Nashville's Buddy Mondlock, a frequent writer for country
diva Reba McEntire.
The songs cover a wide range of
topics. One of the strongest is about a famous 1949 forest-fire disaster in
Montana, told as a death-bed confession by a survivor of the jump crew (written
by James Keelaghan and sung by Shindell). Another is Mary Magdalene's
torch-bearing for Jesus, written by former seminarian Shindell. Against type,
Williams does a highly passable country rendition of what she calls a
"good old down home post-modern gospel song" by Greg Brown. The
lyrics by Brown, son of an Iowa preacher, sum up the ambivalence of the modern
folkie toward this authentic form of "roots music":
"Oh
Lord, I have made you a place in my heart, and
I hope that you leave it alone."
Cry3's final concert gave a measure
of the gratitude the trio's colleagues have felt for this exposure. The special
guests included Cliff Eberhardt and Jim Armenti (who wrote songs for the album)
as well as Chris Smither, Catie Curtis and Buddy Miller. Standing ovations from
the audience of young- to middle-aged adults called the lineup back for
repeated encores. A festive spirit prevailed, buoyed perhaps by predictions of
many future Cry3 reunion concerts.
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