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Raffish? Raffable? The Sinatra of the Montessori set, Raffi wields a charisma utterly disarming and impossible to dislike, however much some of us would try. While Sunday's two Aladdin sets filled with the suburban doyennes of weaponized domesticity who'd instantly sold-out both shows, there were still smatterings of the luxe folkies and domesticated rockers ordinarily prowling the venue, and a few looked similarly aggrieved to be so spending their Super Bowl pre-game.
(The iconic horn-rims-and-bowling-shirt 90s hipster icon fades so seamlessly to a henpecked-husband 50s stereotype; save a prayer for the fellow madly quizzing cab companies about child safety seats.)
Lo, the children, though. There's something sorta eerie about a romper room collective suddenly rapt with attention. And something genuinely beautiful about massed toddlers, drilled to Broadway professionalism through endlessly repeated listenings of the call-and-response tunes, echoing the "swish, swish, swish" with such choral precision that their pied piper could weave around the mic as "the wiper on the bus" incarnate.
Raffi, if needs be said, is for children. Moms and dads should consider their responsibilities similar to Justin Bieber's handlers' whilst club-hopping—keep your charges awake, mop up the odd bits of drool, and whisk them away once sated. Raffi concerts should in no way be considered entertainment for the entire family, and all efforts insisting as much felt both condescending and creepily desperate.
Duly clapping along to the one and three beats as soon as a tune turned boisterous (and somehow deaf to the keening wrongness), the parents did their best to dampen momentum for gospel rave-up "This Little Light Of Mine." Moreover, they laughed after all the wrong bits, loosing faux-chuckles for the hoary patter while their brood gurgled drolly at the actual magic on stage.
Explanations of Raffi's appeal always feel couched within breathless testaments to the sexagenerian's unfailing energy and patience—the traits your average parent most envies, weirdly enough—but, while the plaudits aren't exactly wrong, pretending he's some sort of singularly gifted child-whisperer rather downplays the showmanship involved (and misses the real trick, anyhow). While Raffi might look sprightly and nimble compared with, say, grampa, this isn't the second coming of Sammy Davis, and any elfin qualities serve necessary counterweight to a ruddy, lived-in wryness of wit.
Divorced from performance, his recordings might come across as trite and reductive, antiseptic by association with the larger childcare-industrial complex. Live, the old folkie's tapping into an altogether different, far more rewarding tradition—the florid stagecraft of barroom poets and frontier thespians, that whiff of aristocratic shamelessness binding Jean Shepherd, Burl Ives and W. C. Fields.
The great storytellers share a charismatic spark inherently pre-verbal, a loving embrace of some cosmic punchline teased through lingering burr or hinted falsetto. Whatever oddball charms his songbook may hold, Raffi's repertoire seethes with glimpses of the anarchic id that proper kids' entertainment strives to corral. "Bananaphone" is baloney, but the little girls and boys understand.
All photos by Thomas Teal.
WWeek 2015