Folk-Rock

When folk-rockers first plugged in, their impulse — on songs like "For What It's Worth" — was to crank up the sirens of protest. Meanwhile, a very different type of siren (the kind with downy soft hair and a bewitching gaze) inspired the likes of Crosby, Stills & Nash ("Suite: Judy Blue Eyes") to set wistful affections to a folk-rock beat. Of course, Bob Dylan looms large here, as he supplies benchmark material for the Byrds and the Turtles. Open up your mind some more, with the Next Steps of our folk rock retrospective.

Although Simon & Garfunkel nailed the mainstream with songs like "Mrs. Robinson" — from the soundtrack to the Dustin Hoffman movie The Graduate — other artists stayed closer to the margins. When a mystic-crystal poet like Woody Guthrie's son, Arlo, dodged federales while "Coming Into Los Angeles," it's because the buttoned-down crowd was way too uptight to journey to the outer limits of music and the mind. Far out. You'll find more poetry and harmony — dusted with a sprinkling of jangle — in Deep Cuts.

Vulnerabilities are laid bare in our final batch of folk rock classics — befitting an age of uncertainty and self-reflection, the Beau Brummels urge us to ask the all-important question: "Are You Happy?" But don't think too hard, petal people, because when Tim Buckley's voice swoops and wheels like an eagle aloft in "Morning Glory," it's actually the sound of an invitation being dispatched from the greener pastures just beyond Woodstock, or the far side of a pink moon.

Was folk-rock merely Dylan's songs grafted onto the Beatles' beat? Yes . . . if you listened to it only during the jingle-jangle morning of the Byrds' early hits. Organic and endlessly changeable, the basic formula mutated a hundred different ways, with acid-tinted imagery, enraged assaults on the status quo, psychodramas between the sexes, and rose-coloured visions of utopia — sometimes all in the same song. Caught between a world they didn't make and the one they dared to dream, poets like Bob Dylan and Donovan, lovers like Judy Collins and Sonny & Cher, and activists like Phil Ochs spread the one true faith: that their three-minute sermons, delivered from the pulpit of the heart, could transform the future. And they did.