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...singles were the thriving format back then, and that's where PP&M shone. They scored six Top 10 hits and placed seven others in the top 40. Travers' strong lead on "Lemon Tree," a Brazilian folk song for which Will Holt had written new lyrics, gave them their first hit. It was followed by Seeger and Lee Hays' "If I Had a Hammer." The group changed the phrase "all my brothers" to the more ecumenical "my brothers and my sisters" and helped make the number an anthem for the decade's civil-rights movement. Their rendition was a highlight...
Inevitably, one Grossman act inspired the other: PP&M recorded "Blowin' in the Wind," the first Bob Dylan song to become a hit, and lent a mellow rue to his "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," thus spurring a small industry of Dylan covers and easing the singer-songwriter's emergence as his own wiliest interpreter. They had hits with new compositions (John Denver's "Leaving on a Jet Plane") and reworked folk tunes (Hedy West's take on "500 Miles"). Other groups had recorded these songs, but PP&M sold them best, with artfully simple musical settings...
Like many folk groups, they found their material by scouring old songbooks and listening attentively to obscure albums on the Folkways and Vanguard labels. One Vanguard trio, the Greenbriar Boys, expressed resentment when PP&M used their arrangement of the English ballad "Stewball" for yet another hit single. But Seeger said he was pleased by PP&M's version of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," which he had adapted from a Cossack lyric (and to which folk singer Joe Hickerson added the final verses). Voilà! One more antiwar ballad to insinuate its thesis into the minds...
After losing the 2008 elections, several prominent PP insiders - including Angel Acebes, who was Interior Minister at the time of the attacks and served as Secretary General in the four years that followed - resigned their offices, and the acrimony began to dissipate. And the Socialist measures that the opposition found so objectionable a few years ago? "All those changes - the law against domestic violence, gay marriage - the majority of Spaniards have accepted them," says Savater...
...could argue that crispación did have a lasting impact in one arena: the question of ETA. When the group announced a permanent ceasefire in 2006, the PP initially, if tepidly, agreed to support the government's investigation into whether the separatists truly intended to abandon violence. But when the government began tentative talks with the group, the PP reverted to its rhetorical attacks, repeatedly accusing the government of "betrayal" and "negotiating with terrorists" and at one point, refusing for the first time in history to participate in a government-sponsored anti-ETA march. (Read a TIME story about...