Diamonds and Rust

October 15, 2023 11:55 PM

Queen Shit: The Case for Joan Baez
posted by Artw (29 comments total)

Thanks for posting this! I didn't know much about Joan Baez's long career. But just seeing the mention of Diamonds and Rust brought me right back to hearing the song as a kid. It's an extraordinary song, stops you right in your tracks.
posted by medusa at 1:11 AM on October 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

Wow that was interesting. I played the hell out of From Every Stage in my mid-teens, then I found punk and kind of forgot about her. That article brought back a ton of memories. I've not been a big Dylan follower and hadn't realised she was so intertwined with him -- if anything in my mind she's more like Leonard Cohen.

FWIW, I've heard local Welsh language punk band Mellt do a fantastic Suzanne.
posted by Rhedyn at 4:07 AM on October 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

"Diamonds and Rust" is my favorite Joan Baez song. Her voice is superb as are the lyrics. It does not hurt that she is backed by some great musicians too. She has admitted that Dylan broke her heart but she remains a whole human being with great fortitude.
posted by DJZouke at 5:05 AM on October 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

“Wish is the best Cure album” and this is where they lost me.
posted by pxe2000 at 5:09 AM on October 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

pxe2000, my husband said the same! He's like, "Aaaand I'm out."
posted by Kitteh at 5:10 AM on October 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

I love reading a passionate appeal to reconsider an artist like this. I mean, I remember Joan; that was a great song about Bob and all. But this makes me want to learn more, and reconsider her place in the pantheon. So many embedded videos to listen to while you read why you should care!
What really got me was the description of "Prison Trilogy (Billy Rose)," of how it uses the tropes of country music to subversively pretend to be something we might have heard before, a sad song about outlaws who gets what coming to them, but ends up having a much stronger message, "we’re gonna raze / raze the prisons to the ground."
posted by bitslayer at 5:39 AM on October 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

Wow, that was a journey--thank you so much for posting it.
posted by box at 6:13 AM on October 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Isn't it interesting how people will use one point of disagreement to completely dismiss a woman's perspective? Kind of like how people dismissed Joan Baez because of her activism.
posted by medusa at 6:30 AM on October 16, 2023 [10 favorites]

It’s funny. I haven’t really listened to her music since… 1980, but my mom had a couple of her albums that I played over and over as a child, and just seeing the names of the songs put them back in my head, although, as a kid and tween, I certainly didn’t get much of the deeper themes.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:46 AM on October 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

FYI, the musicians backing Joan Baez on "Diamonds and Rust" were most of what were once The Crusaders formerly known as The Jazz Crusaders.
posted by DJZouke at 7:13 AM on October 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

I didn't realize Joan Baez needed defending, she's definitely a legend to me. But this piece is directed at the particular audience of music critics who make best-of lists.
posted by subdee at 7:16 AM on October 16, 2023 [7 favorites]

Where Dylan is writing an unreliable narrator—someone far more hurt than his casual posture is meant to suggest—Baez is finding a narrator for whom the seeming contradictions all disappear—a sort of “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.”

this is my personal favorite example among this article's many, many excellent observations and notes. I'm not someone against whom Baez needed defending, but this is a delight to read all the same just to listen to these songs and get such great insightful readings of them. thanks for sharing this!
posted by Kybard at 7:37 AM on October 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'm off for a listen to some Joan Baez, whom I saw live once, sometime in the 90s-00s at a festival I used to go to. Which made an impression at the time mainly because I knew how prominent she used to be. She didn't have a great billing at the festival either, early in the day on the last day, kind of a warm-up at the stage that would be dominated by reggae for the rest of the day, with an audience of people who were showing up early for that.

Looking at her Wikipedia article, I'm struck by a fact about her early public performances:

In 1958, at the Club 47 in Cambridge, she gave her first concert... The audience consisted of her parents, her sister Mimi, her boyfriend, and a few friends, resulting in a total of eight patrons. She was paid ten dollars. Baez was later asked back and began performing twice a week for $25 per show.

The CPI inflation calculator says $10 in 1958 money would be like $106 and change today. $50/week was like $530/wk in today's money. I think there must be zero venues in all of America, where a first-time performer could be paid a Benjamin to sing for her friends and family, let alone $2K/mo to sing weekend nights.

There won't be any more like Baez, or rather, the only people who will be able to be like Baez will be members of the lucky sperm club, who will not have to care if their art makes money.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 7:50 AM on October 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

I think the Cure thing was an intentional ploy to weed out the audience, the whole 'being cool' just to be seen as cool, - as was the length. And it is a bit contradictory to poke at the 'top ten list' bros and then go at great length to argue Baez should be included in those lists. Which is to say, it was directed at folks like me, who just simply haven't given Baez much consideration. But should.

I'm just a huge Phil Ochs fan, and I find the artists from that era that are celebrated today are often those that provide the easiest pablum to digest. It's not like Dylan is out here signing Masters of War for the current wars we are involved with, and he didn't bother much with the longest war of his life. The important part is that warm warm feeling his super fans get. Dylan may be very representative of a whole generation of people who have just slid into the most self serving and lazy politics possible, but it's just not the art I'm interested in.

So this Baez Diamonds and Rust is what I am spending my precious time with this morning.
posted by zenon at 7:53 AM on October 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

"Diamonds and Rust" is my favorite Joan Baez song

Judas Priest liked her too.
posted by Liquidwolf at 8:21 AM on October 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

I think it’s a great essay, I just came to MetaFilter to post it, but I’d like to nitpick Sandifer’s argument that Time Rag, a song I really like, is consciously a “rap song”. The earliest attested use of “rap” in the meaning of “rap music” is over a year after the song comes out. Now, I agree with Sandifer that Baez has incredibly fine-tuned antennae, but I find it incredible that she was among the very first people in the world to talk about “rap” in that sense.

Now, that I’ve got this petty bullshit out of the way, I’d like to join the chorus of people who’ve loved Joan Baez for a long time. My dad had one or two of her sixties albums, which I listened to quite a bit in my early teens. I love this essay because I never got into her later stuff, beyond a haphazard listen here and there, and there’s so much richness there that I’m really excited to have such an informative and incisive guide.
posted by Kattullus at 9:28 AM on October 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

This is a fantastic essay and superb overview of her work. I grew up listening to her on reel-to-reel mix tapes my dad had made in the late 70's and was always struck with her voice. I need to send this to him.


“Wish is the best Cure album” and this is where they lost me.

I'd probably have a better opinion of Wish if it wasn't so laced with high-school trauma for me. Seventeen Seconds will always be my favorite.
posted by Dr. Twist at 11:52 AM on October 16, 2023

Previously:
Farewell Angelina by Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Nana Mouskouri, among others
Missing therefrom:
Bob Dylan -- Farewell Angelina
And always worth noting from her eponymous -- and in my humble opinion one of her finest -- 1967 album Joan under an an arrangement by Peter Shickele of P.D.Q. Bach fame, a bit of Poetic license:
Joan Baez -- Annabelle Lee
Which song gave me then -- and indeed gives me still now -- a bit of goosebumps...
posted by y2karl at 12:42 PM on October 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

I feel like this is the kind of granular analysis that anyone whose career is so wide-ranging and influential deserves, whether you personally vibe with them or not. It's the kind of analysis male artists get all the time, God knows, which is definitely one of the points Sandifer is making.
My mom was a huge Joan Baez fan when I was growing up--we had one of her songbooks, even--and I've read her 1987 autobiography, which is plenty interesting if you care about the 60s and 70s folk scene at all. I got to see Baez play at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass about 20 years ago, too, and she definitely still had it. All of which is to say I was reasonably familiar, and there were still plenty of songs in this essay I'd never heard before.
posted by Nibbly Fang at 4:17 PM on October 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

Burt Sugarman decided to upload episodes of The Midnight Special to YouTube starting this past summer. Coincidentally, last week's upload was the episode originally broadcast July 20th, 1973, hosted by Joan Baez.
posted by ob1quixote at 4:53 PM on October 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

OMG that Midnight Special episode with Joan Baez is a mashup of what has got to be some of the worst and best music of the 70s. what the heck ever happened to Black Oak Arkansas?!?
posted by bluesky43 at 5:24 PM on October 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

You had me at "She repeats her trick of intensifying her vocal, only with the full might of a studio full of professionals behind her—the vocal track clips in the first chorus with an artfulness that Brian Eno would create overly elaborate microphone gadgets to get out of Bowie."
posted by PresidentOfDinosaurs at 8:48 PM on October 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

After reading other comments, I would add "Farewell Angelina" as one of my favorite Joan Baez songs.
posted by DJZouke at 7:02 AM on October 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Thank you so much for this post. It took me two days to get through it because, well, because.

Some years ago, I was researching the Scotty Wiseman song "Remember Me (when the candlelights are gleaming)", and I hit upon a YouTube video of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and somebody else in a crappy hotel room in England. Dylan was working on something, and Baez and (whoever it was) were chatting while someone else ran a B&W camera. This was an exquisitely intimate scene. Somebody hummed a line from that song, and Dylan instantly finished the line--"Yeah, T. Texas Tyker did it."

So Dylan picked up his guitar and began to sing. His rendering began as a stark contrast to the Tyler version, making the song sweet and melancholy. Right away, Baez lent her voice to the refrain. I was transfixed. She transformed but did not dominate the song. The room, as I recall, seemed stunned. They did only a verse and a chorus, to my intense disappointment.

I was looking to find an interpretation other than Tyers, and I did. But it was months before I had the nerve to step out from the shadowy memory of the impromptu performance. I have not followed Baez's career, but the songs she gave us in the 60s and 70s are formatted in my musical soul. Diamond's and Rust isn't just about the Bobby thing.
posted by mule98J at 10:51 AM on October 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

mule98J: perhaps this is a version of that recording of Dylan and Baez.
posted by zenon at 11:54 AM on October 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

...It’s easy to idealize the ’60s, but I wonder how it compares to today, in terms of your ability to get things done as an activist?

Back then, there was glue. We did feel that we were with somebody, that we were together. The only thing I can think of for people who didn’t live through that was when Obama was running for office. There was such a good feeling, like people high-fiving on the subway, that was the glue.

Is America worse today?

Nobody could’ve written the scenario of what’s happening now [post-Trump]. It’s deadly. It’s evil. There’s no caring. It promotes the opposite of empathy. It promotes anger and belittling and bullying. On top of that, there’s climate change, which for me is the most heartbreaking.

How do you handle climate dread?

It’s a daily process of trying to live in the moment and accept what’s still there. There’s this beautiful creek at the bottom of the hill [from my home]. I spend a lot of time down there and I keep hearing it say, “Remember me like this. Remember me as I am now.” Instead of looking at it and thinking, “Oh, my God, it’s going to be dry one day.”

Joan Baez on facing trauma, her Bob Dylan epiphany and belonging to the ‘no facelift’ club
posted by y2karl at 4:52 PM on October 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

When you read about her and Dylan, in this article and elsewhere ( or maybe I missed something in this very long piece), she's always made to seem like the older woman who took young Bobby under her wing and taught him to fly. Yeah, she's older, but only by four months!

Thank you, zenon, for that link.
posted by mareli at 6:43 PM on October 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

It was when I was 7 or 8 that my parents first authorized me to gently set the needle down on the vinyl by myself, and one of the first albums I listened to incessantly was Baez's Come from the Shadows. I still clearly recall lying on the living room carpet listening to Prison Trilogy (Billy Rose), the first time lyrics / music / poetry moved me to tears. Every song on that album is engraved in my heart.

The Dylan songs of Any Day Now are not far behind. And Gracias a La Vida. Diamonds and Rust.

It wasn't until many years later that Baptism captivated me. "All in green went my love riding".

There is no question that her music helped shape my soul.

Other than those few albums, though, I am not among the most familiar with her repertoire. It will take me some time to go through this article. Thank you, Artw.
posted by brambleboy at 9:35 PM on October 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

Zeno, thanks for that link. Funny how her harmony is stapled into my recollection more firmly than Dylan's lead. Also, I "recollect" a longer cut of that song than the film seemed to have.

Meaning reigns where memory fails.
posted by mule98J at 9:59 AM on October 19, 2023