Tom Paxton, Chicago, Elyse Weinberg: Schaefer Music Festival, Central Park, New York NY

This article originally appeared on Billboard on August 23rd, 1969

A Double Triumph For Elyse Weinberg

NEW YORK — The Schaefer Central Park Music Festival had one of its more professional, albeit unspectacular, evenings Aug. 8 pleasing an unusually amenable crowd.

Tetragrammatan Records' Elyse Weinberg was first. She is one of the better singer-songwriters around, one of the few who is talented in both areas and one who, happily does not compromise meaning for impact. Too elegant to be classified as a folk singer but accompanied only by herself on guitar, she falls into a small, relatively new class of artist. Although she prefixed her set with some meaningless remarks, it proved to be her only clichéd moment as she drove into her material with freshness and a mixture of pain and pleasure. She performed with kind of a nervous pride, a little scared of the audience but decidedly proud of what she was doing.

Columbia's Chicago on the other hand was a disappointment, turning in a competent but uninspiring set. The musical virtuosity of the septet is uncontestable but they were often like highly trained acrobats who have nothing to do, so they do calisthenics. They seemed to have arrived at smoothness as an end rather than a means. The result was a sometimes interesting but often a boring display of their musicianship.

Elektra's Tom Paxton was the star of the show, commanding more than half of time and creating by far the most excitement. He still performs in an unemotional manner but has developed into an exciting artist. Having abandoned his emphasis on message songs, he offered a set containing many new selections from his new album The Things I Notice Now, pacifying the crowd with his standard 'The Last Thing on My Mind' and throwing in an updated version of 'Daily News', to show that he still had a political conscience.