I
once sat at Joan Baez’s feet. Quite literally. And it was not my finest hour. It must have
been the summer of 1970. I was on
the staff of the old Chicago underground newspaper, the Seed. Baez was in town for a benefit for the outfit
known as Another Mother for Peace—nice
middle class ladies, many of them budding feminists who gave the shaggy, scruffy anti-Vietnam War movement a respectable
face. After all, what cop would split the skulls of the PTA? We received an unusually
elegant invitation to a press open house with Ms. Baez in the lofty digs of some very rich person occupying an aerie in the new John Hancock Building which was still largely unoccupied. I snatched it
up. I may not even have showed it to
other members of the staff
collective. I wanted to cover this
story as they say now in depth and personal.
I
had worshiped, there is no other
word for it, Joan Baez since my earliest years in high school—that exquisite soprano
of unbelievable purity, that soulfulness,
the Madonna-like iconography of her album covers. She was a genuine heroine—we still used those quaint
female forms then without shame or
embarrassment, of the causes I held
dear. She had, time and again, laid it on the line for real in the Civil Rights struggles and the anti-War
movement. She had been arrested. She had gone to jail—“I went to jail for eleven days for disturbing the peace. I
was trying to disturb the war,” she said.
And she married a draft resistor, like me. I was still hanging in a sort of limbo
awaiting trial and prison. I sometimes pretended that when she
sang David’s
Song she was singing to me.
One
evening, I took the Lincoln Avenue Bus,
which cruised down Michigan Avenue on
its way to the Loop and got off at
the massive new building. I don’t think
the lobby was even fully
finished. I had to take two elevators to reach a very high floor. A short distance from the doors was a sprawling apartment filled with modern furniture and expensive art. It was already crowed. Real reporters
in suites and ties, a scattering of local celebrities,
and several elegant ladies in cocktail dresses and pearls who I took to be members of
Another Mother. And me in my battered
old straw cowboy hat, a plaid shirt with sleeves rolled up just below the elbow, a fringed leather vest emblazoned
by my Wobbly button, a red kerchief knotted at the throat, threadbare jeans, and scuffed Dingo
boots.
Joan
was sitting casually on a couch with
her back to a huge window with a panoramic view of the lights of the
city. She was chatting comfortably with
one or two people at a time. She had cut
off those famous long black tresses
and was sporting short hair style. She had on a knotted scarf and some kind of jeweled
pin on a light colored summer
sweater with sleeves pushed up to feature her elegant arms and long
fingered hands, silver rings on
her fingers.
An efficient
young woman in business attire appeared beside me and asked my name. I told her.
She found it on the approved list
on her clipboard. Joan, she said, would find time to speak
personally with each of the media present for five minutes or so each.
Enough time to ask a question, maybe two, and harvest a quote that would differentiate my story
from any of the other filed that day.
And by the way, she said, here is a press
kit and a glossy photo with
everything you need to know about our event and cause. She explained that it would be a half hour or
more before my turn came. In the
meantime, I could feel free to bide my time with hors d’oeuvres and take
advantage of a well-stocked open bar.
This
was undoubtedly a good way to win the
hearts and minds of Chicago’s notoriously hard drinking press corps. I knew guys here—and gals—who could slug
it down all night hopping from the Billy
Goat, to Riccardo’s, to O’Rourke’s, and then on to some four
o’clock dive. But I was not in their
league, however much I aspired to be. I
could seldom afford anything but beer
and had not yet built up the tolerance
of the long term drunk. And I had arrived at this gathering after toking up some righteous weed, just to settle the butterflies in my stomach.
I
made a bee line for the bar where the bartender
did not blink an eye at my order of a glass of stout and Jameson’s, neat.
He free poured a generous glass. I wandered off to admire, or at least stare at
the artwork and to gape at the city spread out below me. I came back and ordered another. And again.
I was polishing off that third drink when the somewhat nervous looking
lady flack came over to bring me to
my rendezvous with Joan.
By
this time the room had thinned—the real reporters dispersing to either file
their stories or check into their bar of choice for the evening. The ladies of the Host Committee had mostly gone to the concert venue. I would not
have much time, I was told. Joan would
have to leave soon.
Instead
of taking the proffered seat on the couch next to Joan, I plunked myself down on
the floor next to her trim, tanned legs,
propping my elbow on the cushion
beside her. I may, probably did, still
have a drink, in the other hand. When I
opened my mouth she was enveloped in a toxic fog of whiskey and stale Prince Albert smoke from the cigarettes I hand rolled. I immediately launched into a loud, slurred
introduction—big fan, Wobbly (pointing
to my red button) like Joe Hill,
and, oh, yea, a Draft Resister like David.
On and on I blathered.
Joan
nodded and smiled, her white teeth dazzling against her dark skin. When I finally drew a breath she asked me
gently if I had a question. I was sure I
had prepared one. But it had flown off
like the last robin on the winds of
the first blizzard. I stuttered and stammered. Don’t know if I got anything out.
The
young press person came over and gently tapped Joan on the shoulder. It was time to go. In a moment she was gone. The ride I had been promised to the concert pointedly
did not appear. I was soon in a room
with maids emptying ashtrays and clearing glasses.
I
staggered to the elevator and down to the street where I caught a bus
north. I got off at Fullerton and dashed into Consumer’s
Tap to refresh my buzz. Then to the IWW hall just down the street. I climbed the long stairs to the converted
bowling ally space. It was a Wednesday night so the big weekly community meeting was going on, folks
arranged in wide circle of wooden-seat folding chairs. At some point in the evening, I stood up and
gave a speech about “the hard arms of the working class.” It was not my finest hour.
I knocked
out some kind of story for the Seed
disguising my shame by recapitulating the press packet and caging accounts of the concert from
those who had seen it.
Almost
than 50 years later I was stunned to receive a facebook friend request from Joan Baez. Not that she remembered me. She had found a blog post I did about Richard
Fariña and her sister Mimi and
liked it. The link was to her professional
page, not a personal one, so it might not have come from her at all. Still, it was a thrill. I messaged her a much briefer account of our
meeting and my profoundest apology
for being such an enormous ass. If she got it, she never replied.
But
I was cleansed. Sort of.
***
The
occasion for this little walk down memory lane is Baez’s birthday. She was born on
January 9, 1941 on Staten Island, New
York. She was the granddaughter of a
Mexican born convert from Catholicism and Methodist minister. Her
father, Albert, was also born in
Mexico and was a distinguished physicist and mathematician. Her mother Joan—or Big Joan as she would come to be known to avoid confusion—was the Scottish born daughter of an Anglican priest with the soul of an artist and a love of traditional music. In her early
youth the family converted to Quakerism
and its pacifism and social justice traditions became second
nature to her.
Her
father took up service with the United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) working on public health issues as an extension of his Quaker beliefs. The family traveled and lived in Britain, France, Switzerland, Spain,
Canada, and even Iraq before
settling in Cambridge when her
father began teaching at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT). That was 1958 and teenage Joan found herself
an outcast in her new high school both for the brown skin and
black hair that betrayed her Mexican heritage and her pacifist ideas.
She
picked up first a ukulele and then a
guitar and was soon singing in the
thriving coffee house scene of
Cambridge and Boston performing a repertoire of mostly traditional Scottish folk songs and Appalachian Childe Ballads that she had
learned from her mother’s record
collection. Her incredibly pure
soprano voice and ethereal presentation
soon attracted attention.
Baez
enrolled at the University of Boston after
graduating from high school, but had little interest in classes and seldom attended
them. Instead she engaged in campus activism, especially in the Ban the Bomb peace movement and watched
with growing admiration the rise of the Civil
Rights Movement in the South and
its non-violent civil disobedience. Mostly she concentrated on her music and
a relationship with Michael New, a fellow student from Trinidad.
She
was quickly rising on the local music scene.
Along with two other coffee house musicians she recorded self-produced
album, Folksingers ‘Round Harvard Square that they peddled at their
gigs. She attracted the attention of two
of the mainstays of folk music—Bob
Gibson and Odetta. Odetta became an enormous influence on her
music, including broadening her song choices and infusing a soulful, gospel style. Gibson brought
her along with him to the Newport Folk
Festival in 1959 where she created something of a sensation. Her professional career was launched at the
highest levels of folk music.
Annual appearances at Newport
cemented her reputation. It also brought her under the tutelage and
encouragement of Pete Seeger who not
only boosted her career but helped her integrate her music with social action
where it counted. She was soon marching and singing in the Civil
Rights movement, not just cheering from the sidelines.
Her
first professional album for Vanguard, the self-titled Joan
Baez, was produced by folk music royalty—Fred Hellerman of the Weavers—and
was released in 1960 when she was still only 19 years old. It was followed quickly by Joan
Baez, Vol. 2 in1961which went gold
for the first time, Joan Baez in Concert, Part 1 in 1962, and Joan Baez in Concert, Part 2
in 1963. The live albums departed from
the strictly traditional material on the first two and included all new and
contemporary material, including protest
songs. Part 2 included her first cover
a song by a rising singer-songwriter, Bob Dylan.
By
this time Baez was the undisputed reigning queen of the Folk Revival and playing successful concerts all across the
country. By November 1962 she was even
on the cover of Time Magazine, then one of the highest validations of pop culture status.
Baez
first met Dylan in Greenwich Village in
1961. Over time they grew close. By 1963 she invited him on tour with her, letting him do a short set and singing duets
with him. This boosted Dylan’s
reputation and career outside of the Village folk scene. It also ignited a passionate love affair. She
referred to the younger man as her “ragamuffin
and vagabond.” She cherished
his creativity and even his self-obsessed quirks. In return he said, “Joan looked like a religious icon, like somebody you’d sacrifice yourself for. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her.”
The
two were nearly inseparable for two
years. Photos of the two from the period
show them almost ecstatically sharing a microphone
and stage or in candid shots grinning happily or staring moodily into each other’s eyes. Baez introduced Dylan to the 1963 Newport
Festival audience which was as taken with him as they had been with her four
years earlier.
Trouble in paradise brewed as Dylan’s
star meteorically rose, spurred on
by boosts from Baez and Seeger and by covers
of his songs by Peter, Paul & Mary and
the folk-rock band The Byrds.
Things went disastrously
wrong on a trip to England in 1965 where Dylan was lionized and dragged Baez around almost as an accessory without sharing the stage with her in his concerts as
promised. Shortly after returning to the
States, Dylan unceremoniously dumped
her and quickly married former model Sara
Lownds who was already pregnant and
with whom he had been carrying on an affair
while still with Baez. Later Dylan
told his closest friend that he married Sara rather than Joan, because “Sara
would always be there for me. Joan
couldn’t be.”
Baez
was devastated by the break-up yet
the connection was never totally broken. They reunited on stage, most memorably for
Dylan’s epic Rolling Thunder tour in
1975 and the filming of Renaldo and Clara at the same
time. Sara was also along on the tour
and played Clara in the film. Baez
played the ethereal Lady in White. Baez later left a European tour with Dylan half way through paying a huge penalty for breaking
her contract. Bitterness surrounding that episode lingered and came out in her
song Diamonds
and Rust and in her in her 1987 memoir
A Voice to Sing With. But despite strains, the connection
remained. Even after the bitter European
tour episode she went to Nashville to
record a country-rock album of Dylan songs, Any Day Now in 1968. Today both of the famous performers speak fondly of the other in interviews.
Despite
her tumultuous love life, Baez was extremely busy in those years dividing her
time between recording and touring on one hand and activism on the others. She famously sang We Shall Overcome at the
1963 March for Jobs and Justice from
the steps of the Lincoln Monument. She became personally close to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and
spent hours with him in private
conversation about non-violence. In
1964 she co-founded the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence,
now part of the Resource Center for
Nonviolence with which she is still active.
After the bombing of a Birmingham, Alabama Black Church in
1964 she recorded the song written by her brother-in-law Richard Fariña, Birmingham
Sunday.
She
was also an early activist against the War
in Vietnam. In 1964 she endorsed income tax resistance to protest the
war and withheld 60% of her
substantial 1963 taxes—the percentage of the total due which would have gone to
Defense spending. She sang at anti-war rallies, but she also
marched. And she spoke advocating non-violent direct action against the
war including Draft resistance. In October 1997 Baez, her mother, and 70
other women blocked the entrance to
the Oakland Induction Center. All were arrested and she was sentenced
to jail, serving 11 days. It was in
connection with this action that she met anti-draft activist David Harris.
Upon
her release the two moved in together
and lived in a Northern California peace commune. They were wed in New York City on March 28, 1968. Shortly after the wedding David refused induction. He was arrested
at their commune home while Joan was pregnant. He was convicted
and began serving a 15 month sentence
in July of 1969. She told the story of
their relationship and separation in her bestselling memoir Daybreak
later that year and sung several songs about it in her second Nashville
release, David’s Album. The
period was also documented in the film Any
Day Now which was released in 1970.
When
Baez took the stage in the wee small
hours of the morning at the Woodstock
festival in the summer of ’69 David had just begun serving his sentence and
she was visibly pregnant. The legendary festival is thought by many
to represent the end of the folk era
and launch of the post-British Invasion
Rock and Roll era. She scheduling of Baez, still a huge star, in
the middle of the night was
emblematic of that. But when the film of
the concert was released in 1972, Baez’s performance electrified audiences as much as any of the bands. Her rendition of I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last
Night became iconic.
When
David returned to the California commune after completing his sentence, the
marriage came under strain. Part of it was Baez’s busy touring and
recording schedule and frequent activist trips.
Part of it was Harris’s difficulty in adjusting to being “Mr. Baez.” And reportedly part of it was his lack of sensitivity to Baez’s growing feminism.
The couple had already been separated for some time when they were
granted a divorce in 1973. The separation was amicable and they shared custody of their son, Gabriel Harris who had been born in December, 1969. The boy lived mostly with his mother in a
California home she built. Afterward
Baez simply said, “I was meant to be alone.”
She
never had another long term committed
relationship, although enjoyed several brief affairs. Perhaps the most serious relationship she had was in the mid-80’s with Apple founder Steve Jobs, twenty years
her junior, who reportedly asked her to marry him.
Professionally,
Baez was expanding her horizons, adding strings
and orchestrations to some albums,
experimenting with spoken word, and
delving deeply into country-rock. Almost every new album embraced a new style or theme. In 1971 she left her
long time label Vanguard and signed with California based A&M Records owned by Herb
Alpert. In her six records for that
label in four years she continued experimenting. 1973’s Where Are You Now My Son contained a
23 minute long piece that combined a spoken word poem and sound of the Christmas bombing of Hanoi that Baez
endured for 11 days on a visit to
that war ravaged country. The next year she released her first Spanish language album featuring Chilean folk singer Violeta Parra’s Gracias a la Vida as the title track. In 1975 she had her biggest pop success with Diamonds & Rust.
Baez
has continued to produce new music and has released 60 albums over her long
career. And she remained ever the
activist, singing and marching with equal fervor at events ranging from the Vietnam Moratorium to Phil Ochs’s The War Is Over celebration in New York City in May 1975. As
the war wound down she turned her attention more and more to human rights issues, becoming a founding member of the American Section of Amnesty
International. By the late ‘70’s she
had become alarmed at the treatment of
dissidents, Catholics, and ethnic minorities in Vietnam,
especially the plight of the boat
people. In 1979 she broke with some former colleagues in the Anti-war
movement and printed full page ads in
major national newspapers to protest
the repressive policies of the Communist government. She founded her own human rights
organization, Humanitas International,
which speaks out equally against repression
by regimes of the right and the left.
She
condemned the Chinese suppression of
the Tiananmen Square protests on one
hand and took made a highly dangerous
visit to Chile, Brazil and Argentina in
1981, each then governed by highly repressive right wing military
dictatorships, on the other. On that
trip she could not publicly perform
and was under constant surveillance
and the subject of death threats. The film There But for Fortune documented the
experience and was shown on PBS
television stations.
Baez has gone seemingly everywhere there was war, oppression and injustice. That included a reconciliation concert in Sarajevo
and a return to war ravaged Iraq, where she had spent part of her
girlhood. Needless to say, she marched
against the Gulf War and the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
She
also participated in Earth Day events,
supported Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender
rights, and supported Occupy Wall
Street. In 2008 for the first time
in her long career Baez endorsed a
political candidate—Barack Obama.
When
she was not traveling Baez lives in her longtime
home in Woodside, California where
a back yard tree house is her private retreat for meditation and writing. She shared her home with her mom, Big Joan
since her father’s death in 2007 at the age of 94, until she died in 2013 at
age 100. With genes like that and healthy
living Joan may be with us as long as her old friend and mentor Pete
Seeger.
After
releasing her first new album in 10 years, Whistle Down the Wind, in 1918 Baez
announced her retirement after a farewell tour. Taking retirement philosophically, she
told the New York Times simply “I don’t make history. I am history.” Her farewell American concert was on May Day
1919 in New York and was followed by a month of European dates. Thankfully she continues to make occasional
special appearances for causes she continues to hold dear.
In
2021 Baez was feted at the Kennedy Center Honors, a fitting
tribute to an extraordinary life and career.
Super.
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