by Anybody lucky enough to have caught heavy metal parody band Spinal Tap live across the years is likely to have been treated to the gentle, very un-rock acoustic stylings of The Folksmen.
According to their biography, banjo player Alan Barrows and double bass expert Mark Shubb both met at the University of Vermont back in 1961, during the folk revival’s peak. Forming The Twobadors and heading to the heart of the action in New York’s Greenwich Village, a chance encounter with Jerry Palter’s baritone croon and mandolin skills presented their missing element. With The Folksmen, they’d score a Top 70 hit with ‘Old Joe’s Place’, released five odd albums across 26 months, before lapsing into obscurity and serving a footnote of folk history.
Of course, The Folksmen are another musical alter-ego from the team behind Spinal Tap. Dreamed up by Michael McKean, Christopher Guest, and Harry Shearer, their parody folk trio first debuted on Saturday Night Live in 1984, only a few months after the This Is Spinal Tap mockumentary was playing in theatres. Riffing off the recent reunions of The Weavers and The Kingston Trio, former Not the Nine O’Clock News member Pamela Stephenson similarly presented The Folksmen as a much-awaited comeback, treating the crowd to their ‘Old Joe’s Place’ number.
Eight years later, The Folksmen made a cameo in The Return of Spinal Tap TV movie quasi-sequel, and began playing live as the opening act on their metal day job’s headline shows. Reportedly, some of the audience didn’t get the joke, triggering boos from a section of the crowd during their support slots on Spinal Tap’s Back From the Dead Tour in 2001.
“So there we were in caps playing folk music, opening for Spinal Tap, and the audience looked completely bewildered, like ‘What the fuck is going on here?’, Guest recalled to Wired in 2009. “It was great. My son was at the show and asked, ‘Mom, when are the old guys getting off and loud guys coming on?’ That may have been a moment of weirdness for some people, but so what?”
Most people’s introduction to The Folksmen was their appearance in 2003’s A Mighty Wind. Directed by Guest and sharing writing duties with Eugene Levy, the trio joins other fictitious folk outfits, The New Main Street Singers and Mitch & Mickey, who all reunite for a specially filmed performance honouring the esteemed folk music producer Irving Steinbloom, a riff on real music manager Harold Leventhal.
As ever, what makes The Folksmen work is the trio’s incredible musicianship. Just as adept at nimble acoustic string picking and vocal harmonies as they are axe shredding, Guest, McKean, and Shearer all play with virtuosity, owing to their long history of musical comedy, and in Guest’s case, a background in classical training.
The real key to The Folksmen is their musical literacy, however. In the same way that Spinal Tap’s songs like ‘Stonehenge’ or ‘Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight’ straddle a line between lampoon and plausibility, The Folksmen’s repertoire similarly feels utterly authentic and studied, ‘Never Did No Wanderin’’ and the cover of The Rolling Stones’ ‘Start Me Up’ always anchored in a reality that makes the gig that much funnier.
Things have been a bit quiet for The Folksmen of late. Last seen playing their typical opening slot for their hard rock counterparts in 2009’s One-Night-Only World Tour in Wembley Arena, the recent release of Spinal Tap II: The End Continues hopefully may herald a return of the legendary folk trio.
