The scene: Rudi’s, the French restaurant and wine bar on Ashland, late on a weekday evening. Among the few diners, a couple, getting on in years, amiably celebrates the man’s birthday with what seems to be a smattering of adult children, in-laws, and an elderly mother. As the evening wanes, the restaurant nearly empties. Finally a heavyset man, his expressive face slightly covered by a lumpy hat, sits down to exchange greetings. A minute or two later he pulls out a guitar and begins playing.
When I’m feeling low
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The weary defiance of the song, the reflectiveness of the tiny audience, the silence of the restaurant–all combine for a memorable moment of emotional stillness. The singer, I find out later, is Fred Holstein, one of the most respected fixtures of the Chicago folk scene in the 60s and 70s. While never nationally renowned, he was the popular house act at the Earl of Old Town for years; later he ran bars as well, among them the much-loved Holsteins on Lincoln Avenue, with his brother Ed, another folksinger.
He started playing as a kid. “I always loved to hear the guitar,” he says. “The guitar was my thing. Some people heard trumpets; I heard guitars.” Pete Seeger, whom Holstein first saw as a teenager in Orchestra Hall in 1959, remains his hero. “One guy by himself captivating an entire audience–he had an incredible personality.”
Those who dismiss folk music for its rural heritage and sometimes hokey accoutrements should remember that it was certainly the most intellectually diverse of the several strains of music that came together to create the cataclysmic rock of the 1960s; specifically, folk’s advanced lyrics drew rock ‘n’ roll away from the moon-spoon-June variants of the time. “Most American pop music is about one thing: the relationship between men and women,” Holstein says. “Folk is about a lot of things: work songs, war songs, lullaby songs. There are songs of requited and unrequited love, but there’s such a rainbow there. I love the humanity and vision of it. I’m with what Pete Seeger said: ‘I’m a professional singer of unprofessional songs.’”
Afterward Holstein made no apologies for the sing-alongs–“I love to hear the audience sing”–nor for his voice, which while occasionally wavering was more often clear and strong and affecting. “I like it better than I did 20 years ago,” he says. “There’s a resonance and maturity to it. Pablo Casals once said that the best musicians know what not to play. Now that I’m in my 50s I think I know what to do and what not to do.”
