'Mighty Wind' Cast Honors Folkies
N E W Y O R K, Sept. 23 -- Folk music exploded onto the charts in the early 1960s — and disappeared almost as fast. But Christopher Guest and his cohorts are keeping the spirit alive and get more than a little hoot out of an old-fashioned hootenanny.
Guest and fellow comics Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Harry Shearer and Michael McKean satirized the folk fad earlier this year in A Mighty Wind in the same way they lampooned dog lovers in Best in Show and community theater in Waiting for Guffman.
But on Saturday, they stepped on stage at New York's Town Hall, where old-guard folkies got to decide if the music they make is anything more than a joke.
Guest, 55, clearly loves traditional music, though he's best known for thrashing through the most gruesome form of heavy metal as a member of Spinal Tap. The audience could tell he was one of them, and perhaps the spirit of the folk movement can be best conveyed with a little humor.
An Amusing Fall Into Oblivion
The folk boom was tucked between America's first taste of rock 'n' roll with Elvis and Chuck Berry, and the British invasion, when the Beatles took over the charts.
While performers such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Judy Collins went on to mainstream success, the performers in A Mighty Wind are the type who faded into oblivion, like Charlie in the Kingston Trio's fateful "MTA."
Guest, McKean and Shearer — the trio best known as the members of Spinal Tap — perform here as the Folksmen, and they mimic the Kingston Trio perfectly, down to the their matching mock turtleneck outfits. Their ballad of a doomed train in a coal mine, "Blood on the Coal," recalls the Trio's woeful "Tom Dooley."
Levy — who co-wrote A Mighty Wind — hadn't played guitar in years, and with his monotone delivery, hardly anyone believed he could sing. But he and all the other stars — who improvise most of their lines in Guest's movies — learned to sing and perform.
In the film, Levy and O'Hara play Mitch and Mickey, the darlings of the folk world, who end their signature tune "Kiss at the End of the Rainbow" with a smooch that defined an era — which ended when they broke up and he went crazy.
Related Stories
ABC News Live