Greenwich Village: Music That Defined a Generation

Narrator Susan Sarandon reading from the late Suze Rotolo's memoir A Freewheelin' Time serves as the opening for this nostalgic scrapbook tribute to the folk-protest and coffeehouse-music scene in New York's Greenwich Village during the 1950s and ‘60s. The community was a hotbed of left-progressive arts and music, heralding the upcoming counterculture and generation-gap upheavals (a watershed event was a 1961 protest against a city ban on Sunday music in Washington Square Park). Along the way, filmmaker Laura Archibald draws a direct (and approving) line from yesterday's Village tunesmiths to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Interviewees include Judy Collins, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Don McLean, John Sebastian, Kris Kristofferson, Carly Simon, and many other familiar singer-songwriters. Bob Dylan is not present, but much discussed, and over the closing credits, nonagenarian Pete Seeger offers details on the accepted lore that he tried to cut Dylan's amp cables at the Newport Folk Festival. One of the more interesting recollections: the commercial coffeehouse Café Bizarre catered to gawking tourists as a "beatnik" hangout, creating stereotypes of the Village—but also became a venue for what would become the Lovin' Spoonful. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (C. Cassady)