On his own new album, partnering with younger musicians, Arrington embraces a nouveau sound, while demonstrating how durable the old tools were: On “Love Knows,” the ropes of distorted guitar and the unswayable backbeat would be right at home on a Slave LP, but they sound just as timely today.

His base is unswayable, but it is far from the majority.

What I learned in there confirmed what I had found out in Ohio several months earlier – his supporters were unswayable.

Even when the momentum slows, performances by Rodriguez and Théodore Pellerin, Travis’ direct upline and an unswayable FAM zealot, grasp our attention until the story jumpstarts again.

The only man who could outweigh Greenberg in such matters was the utterly unswayable Alfred Barr, the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, a soft-spoken rebel who loved to tweak the status quo, including the pious doctrine of abstraction that he had helped establish.