Screening Date: Thu. Nov. 14, 2024
Time: Music at 7:00pm | Movie at 8:00pm
Venue: Parkway Theater
Cost: $30 advance | $35 door
Run Time/Year/Country: 98min, 2005, USA
Director: Don McGlynn

Featuring a pre-show performance by Charlie Parr and a post-screening Q&A with director Don McGlynn

Co-presented by The Current

Spider John Koerner and his pals Dave Ray and Tony Glover, along with their coffee house friend Bob Dylan, were a primary inspiration to the music scene in Minneapolis in the early 1960s. Band members from The Beatles, and many musicians from the British Invasion like The Kinks and David Bowie and Ian Anderson, and on the West Coast The Doors, were fascinated with Koerner, Ray and Glover’s part wild style and part reverence toward the Blues tradition. Bonnie Raitt covered his songs and became a lifelong friend. And more recent musicians like Beck loved his music.

This revealing documentary shows many sides of Koerner, and his philosophy, artistic ambitions and reflections about mortality. Sometimes, his pursuits are cosmic.

PRECEDED BY

Charlie Parr

In the music of Charlie Parr, there is a sincere conviction and earnest drive to create. The Minnesota-born guitarist, songwriter, and interpreter of traditional music has released 19 albums over two decades and has been known to perform up to 275 shows a year. Parr is a folk troubadour in the truest sense: taking to the road between shows, writing and rewriting songs as he plays, fueled by a belief that music is eternal and cannot be claimed or adequately explained. The bluesman poet pulls closely from the sights and sounds around him, his lyrical craftsmanship built by his influences. The sounds from his working-class upbringing—including Folkways legends such as Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie—imbue Parr’s music with stylistic echoes of blues and folk icons of decades past. Parr sees himself merely as a continuer of a folk tradition: “I feel like I stand on a lot of big shoulders,” he said in an interview. “I hope that I’ve brought a little bit of myself to the music.”