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Written by Glenn BurnSilver
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Friday, 23 February 2007 |
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Folk music comes in two forms: upbeat and hopeful, or dreary and depressing.
John Gorka settled near the top of the depressing folk echelon long ago and though he seems to be trying, he hasn’t given up his roost there. His brand of folk music remains mired in darker tones and somber layers, with a minute glimmer of hope filtering about.
“For one reason or another my songs have that kind of underlying melancholia about them. Maybe it is the place that I write from, or maybe it just comes out that way. It is definitely an element of my sound,” he said during a phone interview. “It is melancholia, but I think it is hopeful melancholia. … I don’t know if it is the nature of folk music, but it is true for what I do.”
Yet, underneath his gruff exterior lurks an optimism that resembles folk’s lighter side, a sunny happiness that everything works out in the end, even if a song must travel through hell to get there. This, along with the genre’s unwavering ability to broach any subject, attracted him to the idea that folk was a viable musical outlet.
“I started to feel this was an honest path to making music,” he recalled of his early experiences watching folk singers in coffee shops. “The people who were my favorites there were uncompromising (in their approach). It seemed more like literature. I was discovering this world and it seemed like there was more possibilities for songs in this genre than any other I knew. … It was a chance for more expression.”
Inspired, Gorka picked up an acoustic guitar, established his distinctive, gravelly voice and quickly became one of the preeminent folk performers in the United States. His music is direct, honest, brutal at times, and occasionally depressing and painful, swirling like empty rain clouds over a barren desert.
“I am not saying, ‘Oh, woe is me.’ But I think there is a solitary spot in all humans. The times we are living in are lonelier than in the past. The post-Sept. 11 world is a lonelier place,” he said. “We maintain an illusion of control in order to get through a day. We need to make these assumptions that things are going to be the way we thought they would be, even though we have no way of knowing what’s going to happen.”
In reality, Gorka’s not an unhappy person. He just uses the folk platform like so many before him — Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seger — to exercise his rage and demons in order to invoke some justice, or at least find some semblance of inner peace.
“I’d probably be an unhappy person somewhere if I didn’t make a living playing music, he added. “Music has been the door to everything positive in my life. … Music is kind of my salvation, my way out.”
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TO GO TO THE SHOW
John Gorka
Friday, Feb. 23
Sunset Events Center
242 Linden St., Fort Collins
Doors 5:30 p.m., show 7:30 p.m.
$17, call 484.4604
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GETTING EVEN IS HALF THE FUN
At age 10, John Gorka got his first guitar as a Christmas present. But before he even had a chance to learn the instrument, his older brother snatched the guitar and carved his name in it, making it his. Undaunted, Gorka soon retaliated by getting a banjo.
WHAT ABOUT DISCO?
While attending Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pa., in the late 1970s, and still playing more banjo than guitar, Gorka formed his first group, the Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band, a nontraditional bluegrass, country, blues and folk outfit. They didn’t last long.
Glenn BurnSilver
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