JOAN BAEZ
important work underlined
1960: Joan Baez. 1961: Joan Baez, Vol. 2.
1963: In Concert/Part One * In Concert/Part Two. 1964: Joan Baez
5 * Farewell Angelina. 1966: Noel * Portrait. 1967: Joan. 1968: Baptism
* Any Day Now (Songs of Bob Dylan). 1969: David's
Album. 1970: The First Ten Years * One Day at a Time. 1971:
Blessed Are. 1972: Carry it On * Balladbook * Come From the
Shadows. 1973: Where Are You Now, My Son? * Hits, Greatest and
Others. 1974: Gracias a la Vida. 1975: Diamonds
and Rust * Live in Japan. 1976: Lovesong Album * From
Every Stage * Gulf Winds. 1977: Blowing Away. J 1979: Honest
Lullaby * Country Music Album * The Night They Drove Old Dixie
Down. 1982: Very Early Joan Baez. 1987: Contemporary Ballad Book.
1987: Recently. 1989: Speaking of Dreams * Diamonds and Rust in
the Bullring. 1991: Brothers in Arms.
Dave Marsh, the William F. Buckley, Jr. of rock criticism, has
characterized Joan Baez as an actress who "played the
pacifist radical - committed to civil rights, peace marches and
traditional ballad singing - perfectly, partly because she so
much looked the part." Marsh claimed "her approach to
political music is so sanctimonious it's nearly unbearable."
We have to call Marsh on his opinion of Baez's album, Gracias a
la Vida as "obnoxious" and a "smug attempt to
educate the masses politically;" after all, it's a
collection of love songs (did he listen to it?). Robert
Christgau's sole remark on Baez's work in his seventies' Consumer
Guide is, unfortunately, another one of his incoherent,
jocular parley's substituted for evaluation:
"How anyone whose concept of
beauty is so well-bred can pretend to visionary politics has
always baffled me, but for a start she could write songs in which
the object always follows the predicate. I don't know about The
People, but just plain people say `scattered upon the four
winds," not 'upon the four winds scattered.’ Actually
they don't say `scattered upon the four winds' either, but we'll
get to that next time."
That well-bred concepts of beauty have often gone hand in hand
with visionary politics is something Christgau ignores lest it
interferes wth his lighthearted, "of-the-people"
snideness. Even so, Baez has never been so distasteful as to
claim visionary art for herself. Instead, she provides social
consciousness in the liberal religious tradition - a tradition in
which words aren't as important as action (the exact opposite of
Dylan's and his progeny's armchair broadsides). In fact, to label
Baez’s politics as visionary would actually debase them.
Let’s call them "actionary" politics.
Joan Baez was a prodigy of sorts
whose artistic nature was formed pre-Dylan. As a late-fifties
folkster, she wasn't alone in becoming a purveyor of an art form
that would be popularly superseded by something so drastically
different it threatened to bury everything before it. Perhaps it
was an overdue assault on the id by the libido, but Baez's
dilemma was one shared equally by Phil Ochs, Tim Rose, Tim
Buckley, Dave Van Ronk, Tim Hardin, Buffy Saint Marie, Pete
Seegar, Spider John Koerner, Ian and Sylvia, Eric Anderson, Dave
Ray, and any number of folkies who found the transition to rock
and roll to be a largely insurmountable assault on their artistic
inclinations, strengths and weaknesses. As a survivor alone, Baez
deserves a lot of credit: surviving has gone hand in hand with
little sell-out and a practically saintly sense of the importance
of action over mere wordy art. She has ultimately, and rather
easily, become a more righteous performer than Dylan himself.
If Dylan's inclinations in the
late sixties - hiding out in Woodstock, watching the river flow,
reading the Old Testament and the New Testament, raising kids -
were reflected in his songwriting, it's only natural that Baez's
preoccupation was reflected in her material, as well. She marched
with Martin Luther King, Jr. and played concerts at black
churches in the Deep South when civil rights violence threatened;
she went to jail for supporting draft resistance and later
refused to pay a large percentage of her taxes in protest over
the Vietnam War and subsequently became a target of IRS
"justice;" she started both the Institute for the Study
of Non-Violence and the West Coast chapter of Amnesty
International; she spent 1972 in Hanoi as Nixon's bombs fell
close by, and, after the war, traveled to Cambodian refugee camps
to draw attention to their plight in an act not sanctioned by the
left; and with her presence, her voice and her money, she's
supported prisoner's rights in South America and Italy, as well
as dissidents’ rights in Russia, Czechoslovakia and Poland.
Baez has lived a distinguished life that has provided a lot of
laughs to rock critics with questionable enthusiasms and to whom
political interaction begins and ends in proxy rock star
fantasies.
Baez is nothing if not a realist.
She has admitted that "it was easier for me politically in
the 60's than it was musically. Politics came more naturally to
me than music." She acknowledges that "I was the right
person in the right place at the right time. I could have popped
up in the 80's with this voice and nobody would have given it the
time of day." Her pure tonality was perfectly suited for the
formality of the traditional Appalachian and European ballads she
started with. Her first two albums are folk classics, and show a
flair for mimicry as she takes on country twangs and British
enunciation lifted from her musical influences. She's a natural
at singing gospel, and when singing in a foreign language the
pure beauty of her voice soars and sparkles. In Concert, Part
2 shares some of the spirit of the first two studio albums.
Then came Dylan and his electric
conversion. Forced into the usually easy-to-achieve
colloquialisms of populist folk-rock, Baez's voice wasn't suited.
She wasn't much of an interpreter; she seemed a bit outside of
the material in a way singer's with worse voices didn't. Baptism
was a good sidetrip - again her voice found a natural form of
beauty around real poetry and old ballad forms. Dave Marsh said Baptism
lacked humor; which is the same as saying Monty Python lack
seriousness - it misses the point of intention. Any Day Now
is perhaps the best Bob Dylan tribute album, Dylan's early
writing with it's wordy cataloguing and rigid declamations are
well-suited to Baez's strengths. If Baez plays down Dylan's
irony, an unnaturally dishonest approach to writing that Baez has
little feel for, it allows her to focus on the honesty in Dylan's
observations that Dylan with his hip ambiguity chooses to
disguise (Dylan gave up his effectiveness to the leftist cause
when he gave up poetic realism for poetic irony, or, perhaps we
should say when he betrayed "the cause" for a personal
world view. Even so, Dylan was canny, and may have realized he
would look increasingly hypocritical to continue to proselytize
while doing little more than raking in the dough.) Any Day Now
also boasts exquisite musicianship by Nashville's finest.
In the sixties and into the seventies, Baez continued to struggle with material unsuited to her talents. It's hard to sympathize with her versions of the Rolling Stone's "No Expectations," and "Salt of the Earth." Irony in the hands of Jagger/Richards was in many ways a repudiation of the stylized iconography of "the working man." Irony in rock and roll is often a common stance of the artful aristocracy; it keeps the plebes at bay; hell, they don't even know you're making fun of them. As such, Baez's continued shuttle diplomacy with the masses may be more of an aesthetic choice for this Quaker than critics have noticed. Even so, the Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" isn't the only tune that, given Baez's intransigence, she's managed to maim and trample.
Her worldview is decisively
selective, as if priority itself is the only choice. Her
self-written material is heavily and often prosaically
auto-biographical. Her writing is never whimsical. She's a
journalist of her life, like Joni Mitchell has been, but with
less sense of melody and fun, less resources, less imagination.
When the songs work - "Sweet Sir Galahad," "A Song
for David," "Blessed Are," "Last Lonely and
wretched," "Prison Trilogy,"
"Bangladesh," "Caruso," "Alter Boy and
the Thief," "Michael," - they're beautiful and
resonate with the sense of a sublimely empathetic life lived
immersed in spiritual waters; when they don't work -
"Warriors of the Sun," "Three Horses,"
"Outside the Nashville City Limits," "All the
Weary Mothers of the Earth," "Rider, Pass By,"
etc. - they tend towards the sententious and mundane.
Her records at the end of the seventies and into the eighties have revolved more and more around traditional pop songs that are better suited to her style. If her albums in general always seem a bit weak in totality, none of them have went by without a few gems and this has given her whole career an aesthetic effervescence. After thirty albums this may be an accomplished body of work. The boxed anthology released in 1993 is a disappointment. A careful anthology may do justice to a consciousness that deserves to be esteemed and a voice that deserves to be heard at its angelic best.
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