Summer, 2004–a hotel room after dark. Joanna Newsom weaves a plastic ribbon between the strings of her harp. She flicks a few chords that, muted as they are, sound like they’re coming from an 8-bit processor and not an instrument of the Baroque eighteenth century. She is slightly drunk, apparently in want of something to do for the camera. Beside the room’s furniture, the harp looks comically gargantuan.
Kevin Barker, the man holding the camera, hasn’t gotten much out of her so far. If she isn’t exactly shy, she hasn’t seemed interested in extroverting either, at least not beyond the muse-state that so animates her performances on stage. But here, whether by intuition or luck, Barker has gotten his timing right. From the other side of the room, a request–that new song, something “ultra cinematic.”
A jump cut, and it’s “Cosmia,” already sinuous and confident in wordless fragment. The folk-lyric trot that’s characterized Newsom’s work up to this point has drifted definitively away, enfolded in the vortex of something much richer: a canto, glimpsed here through the keyhole of a digital camera in bad lighting. Two years from now, a completed version of the song will anchor Ys, Newsom’s high modernist opus. Tonight, the bedside clock reads 3:42 AM. A moment of fleeting levitation. Somewhere in America.
It’s this scene, and a few others like it, that The Family Jams was made for. Barker’s documentary is a snapshot of the mid-aughts ‘freak folk’ movement in its nascence. Newsom, touring nationally for the first time, accompanies friends and sonic fellow travelers Vetiver and Devendra Banhart, just as critical attention and collective Internet fanfare is translating into sold-out venues for them all across the country.
That snapshot can feel sentimental or quaint, or both, depending on your perspective. Originally premiered in 2009, and now given the deluxe treatment by Factory25 this spring, The Family Jams reemerges at a time when the sound it celebrates is largely out of fashion. By now, groups with broader aspirations have drawn from the same well of influences and smoothed over the eccentricities. For those interested in anthems and arenas, the modesty and sometimes-painful intimacy of these artists (both then and now) has less appeal. Devoted followings notwithstanding, the movement’s major players languish in a middle-distance of cultural memory, their legacy for the most part unexamined.
Only Newsom’s star has continued to rise along with her ambitions. As much must have been clear to Barker while he was putting the film together: the impromptu hotel performance, with its wink of hindsight, provides a necessary jolt of immediacy amidst the fuzzy glow of The Family Jams’ prevailing nostalgia.
For Barker, nostalgia as a mode proved irresistible in shaping the film. Five years between the tour and the film’s release gave him plenty of time to muster elegiac feelings for those days. They must have come easy. Sweeping summer vistas shot from moving cars, and wistful song selections do well to hammer this home. Just in case we weren’t sure, tour manager Zach Cowie announces shortly before the conclusion that, “this could never happen again the way it did.”
For all this irrevocability, The Family Jams is populated with symbols of a re-circulated past. Spirits of bygone eras haunt the film at its margins. A visit from the wispy Linda Perhacs at one tour stop comes on like a benediction from the Flower Generation. Later on, Newsom speaks about an encounter with the wife and son of Skip Spence with the reverence of lost royalty.
Garb, instrumentation, and demeanor all feel faintly on loan as well. Banhart and Vetiver frontman Andy Cabic conduct a joint interview about the terminology that defines their music: Cabic bristles at being called ‘folk’, whereas Banhart sees himself rehabilitating the connotations of New Age. Rescuing the future from its own cliché: if his paradigm is one of the past, it’s a transcendental one.
One such strategy for transcendence, the “family jam,” finds the tour mates on stage together playing songs in the round. The nightly tradition becomes a refrain for Barker, who senses the supergroup appeal for fan- girls and boys. The nickname consciously evokes traveling folk bands like the Carter Family. As another friend notes, pointing to a spooked review in Crawdaddy, it also evokes another group of wide-eyed young hippies: the Manson Family.
A superficial comparison, and hardly fair, but Barker seems to jump at this symmetry. Banhart, as the family’s central shaker, is too much of a cinch for high priest. He’s prone to monopolizing the camera in between gigs, weaving doggedly between fascination and irritation, seemingly addicted to the attention in spite of a more profound, latent shyness. An anecdote about impersonating Jesus in a Brooklyn jail goes a step further, introducing a subtly dramatic thread: the appearance of Banhart’s stepfather, and the more tumultuous reappearance of his biological one. Less messiah, more little boy lost.
Banhart is Barker’s explicit subject, and there’s plenty of footage of him squatting and shimmying, bestowing awkward levels of affection, and even–at his most inspired–channeling a visionary, Buckleyesque emotional nakedness. But it’s in Newsom’s play and, eventually, her own moments of candor, that Barker finds the film’s unalloyed brightness. As a documentary about the real business of music, The Family Jams’ coup is in capturing this seemingly harmonious balance of genders (and egos) within a collective of young musicians in the early days of the new millennium.
Near the start of the film, Barker narrates some footage taken at a family reunion in Honolulu, a party for his grandmother’s 100th birthday that occurred shortly before he joined the tour. Beyond making explicit the bridge between his two families, the sequence frames the story in terms of Barker’s own personal stakes. He’s a close friend of Banhart’s, whom he credits, in the DVD’s extensive photobooklet, with introducing him to many of the movement’s artists. He’s also a musician, playing banjo as a stand-in when Newsom must briefly leave the tour, and as accompaniment for the eponymous closing number.
In these moments of observer-participation, for lack of a crew, Barker hands the camera to a stranger. The Family Jams is a diary film in the rawest sense, DIY verging on home-movie. Shot in standard-definition, sometimes-shaky prosumer video, it bears the fingerprints of Barker’s involvement with another, American underground movement–mumblecore.
As with freak folk, mumblecore’s founders have never fully shaken off its dubious moniker, nor fully adopted it as their own. Again like freak folk, the movement evolved around limited budgets, outsider contributions, and regional scenes. In both cases, the emergence of the Internet as a tool for bypassing established channels allowed these artists to thrive in their own idiom.
It also guaranteed their right to self-containment. Unlike the sixties folk revival or the New Hollywood, these young artists were not making political work except by implication. In 2004, the Internet’s true, motive potential wasn’t yet in full fruition; it was still a backwater, like college radio or the film festival circuit, where those alienated by the cultural and political moment could sequester themselves in self-selecting virtual communities. A great American introversion, an inward flowering was underway. For freak folk, it was an immersion in fantasia, vague spirituality, Dionysian naivety; for mumblecore, it was the blank charm of the film-school artisanal class, its economic security and its comic dread; for each, freedom from the hand-wringing of realities just a news-cycle away.
Another tour was underway in the summer of 2004. When it was over, George Bush’s victory over John Kerry would be within reach. In millions of homes all over America, television’s power to shape the national consciousness had never been so certain, or so bleak. It never would be again.
The Family Jams is a movie for the Internet. Though it enjoyed a brief theatrical run, the film’s low resolution and loose coverage philosophy make it more than a stretch for a multiplex “concert experience.” Anyway, most of those concerts are in galleries and backyards. It’s too passive, and at its core, too faithfully traditional for the art house either. Barker’s film was made to be accessed quickly and cheaply, to be enjoyed by its intended audience for what it is: a road movie, a lark, a love letter among friends. Here, its politics come into view. The Family Jams is a document of this new paradigm of communication in mid-stride: one that empowered its audience, without didacticism or condescension, and endowed them with a democracy of choice. It was the beginning of a new age. words / r meehan
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