Tag: Joan Baez

Posted on

Buffy’s Identity Problem

It’s one thing to deny what now seems obvious. But to attack the journalists who exposed the truth about your ethnic identity as neo-colonialists and racist and sexist is beyond the pale. And given what Sainte-Marie has said previously about her ancestry, she cannot now claim, with sincerity, that she just “didn’t know”. She actively lied, and made up new lies to misdirect people from the old lies. Now she says, well, “I know who I am”, which is a nice way of refusing to take responsibility.

I have a mental hobby of pretending I’m the PR guy for whoever is embroiled in the latest scandal and have to come up with the best solution. In this case, I think she would have been better served with a line of “I admired indigenous culture so much that I wanted to be part of it, and I went too far, and did lie, and I am very sorry. And yes, it was terribly unfair to those of legitimate indigenous ancestry and if I haven’t already done enough to make up for it, I now wish to try.”

Instead, the stubborn denials and self-pity and claims of victimization leave a bad taste in the mouth.

She also claims to have been black-listed by the U.S. government, presidents Johnson and Nixon, and the FBI.  I can’t find any evidence of this other than her own assertion:

The former FBI director blacklisted Sainte-Marie as her protest songs gained more and more popularity. She didn’t know that it had happened for about 20 years until a deejay “told me that he had letters on White House stationery commending him for having suppressed my music.”  Toronto Star

What deejay?  From who in the White House?  Did she try to obtain the related documents through a Freedom of Information request?

It’s all beginning to sound a little pathetic.  And if it wasn’t pathetic enough, she now tosses out claims that she was sexually abused by her brother and someone else she won’t identify.  The brother is deceased– of course (like Joan Baez’  father)– but his daughter (Sainte-Marie’s niece) revealed letters that strongly suggest that Buffy Sainte-Marie threatened to publicly claim he sexually abused her to deter him from continuing to publicly challenge her claims of being born to an indigenous tribe in Saskatchewan when (as is now overwhelmingly clear) she was actually born to a white Christian family in Massachusetts.   He backed off.

She should want to be remembered instead for these lines:

Now that your big eyes are finally open
Now that you’re wondering, how must they feel?
Meaning them that you chased ‘cross America’s movie screens.

They are very good.  It’s a powerful song.  We can have both.  We can acknowledge her accomplishments and the weaknesses of character and dishonesty and leave it at that.

 

Posted on

Joan Baez’s Weird Homage to Slavery

Way back in 1971, Joan Baez released a double album called “Blessed Are”, which, in retrospect, may be one of the weirdest album releases of all time.

Blessed Are... (Joan Baez album - cover art).jpg

Joan Baez, in case you don’t remember or weren’t born yet, was a famous folk singer who became a prominent anti-war, anti-racism protest leader during the 1960’s, and an interpreter of Bob Dylan’s songs.  As a result, unsurprisingly, she pissed off a lot of patriotic war-loving Americans who regarded her, along with Jane Fonda, as treasonous dupes of the radical left.  They may not have liked John Lennon; they may have regarded Dylan with hostile indifference; they may have ignored Pete Seeger; but they hated Baez and Fonda with a toxic rage.

“Blessed Are” appears to be a peace offering of some kind, to southerners, patriots, farmers, and, perhaps, country music fans.    It featured a hit for Baez, “The Night They Drove old Dixie Down”, by Robbie Robertson of The Band (and subject of a bitter dispute between him and The Band’s drummer Levon Helm).

Levon Helm says in his autobiography:

“I remember taking him [Robertson] to the library so he could research the history and geography of the era and make General Robert E. Lee come out with all due respect.”

Helm was so bitterly annoyed by Baez’s version of “The Night They Drove old Dixie Down” that he refused afterwards to sing it in concert.  I wonder if he was more annoyed by her politics than anything else.  What musician gets upset when another artist makes a signature song more popular?

Anyway, to make General Lee come out with “all due respect”– all the respect due to a slave-owning General who led the war effort to preserve the institution of slavery– may strike some as a dubious cause.

Look at the lyrics:

Like my father before me, I’m a working man
I’m like my brother before me, I took a rebel stand
Well, he was just eighteen, proud and brave
When a Yankee laid him in his grave
I swear by the blood below my feet,
You can’t raise a Cain back up with it’s in defeat

Some claim that the song is sympathetic to the Lost Cause ideology and defends slavery.  I think it does neither.  The fact that it was written by a Canadian should clue listeners in: this is an observational song, not propaganda for either side.  In fact, its observational qualities are acute and beautiful and tragic.

The album also has a song by Jagger and Richards, a paean to the “hard-working” average joe who always gets the short end of the stick.  And a tribute to a southern farmer friend with “the slowest drawl I’d ever heard” showing the narrator and friend around his beautiful farm.  There’s an intriguing song about apocalypse: Three Horses.

But let’s move on to “Lincoln Freed Me Today”.  If “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” seems ambiguous, “Lincoln Freed Me Today” is decidedly revisionist.

Been a slave most all my life
So’s my kids and so’s my wife
I been working on the Colonel’s farm
Aint been mistreated, aint done no harm…
The Colonel’s been right good to me
He’s taken care of my family

The Colonel rode his buggy in from town
Hitched his horse and called us all around
Said he couldn’t keep us here no more
I saw a tear as he walked toward the door

Wow!

I’m sure Baez did not have in mind the idea of rescuing slavery from the dustbin of history, or, giving us the positive side of antebellum culture.  I’m sure she thought, well, it’s a true picture of some slave-owners, and some slaves.  And one must be fair by presenting both sides of the issue.   But the “I saw a tear” is kind of repulsive.  That’s the image we’re supposed to take away from this kindly old slaveholder?

You see how convoluted we become.

The songwriter is variously credited as David Paton, David Patten, and David Paton.  It’s likely David Patton.  There’s very little information out there about him.

 

 

Ian and Sylvia do a just peachy version of this song.

 

Posted on

Joan Baez’s Vanity

Joan Baez: I am Noise was showing at the Princess Theatre this week so my wife and I went to see it.  Up until about half way through, it was not too annoying.  It was narcissistic and self-serving, of course, and Baez always sings as if the audience has an obligation to express convincing and polite approbation or else, but I found it tolerable until she began to relate how broken down she was for a period in her life.  It’s hard to describe what she meant because the whole thing was amorphous and, I think, purposely vague, but it emerged that her sister Mimi, who also experienced these disorders, claimed that her father had French-kissed her once in the back yard by the clothesline.  Then Joan Baez– also, of course, in therapy– began to recover her own memories of abuse about which she was decidedly vague.

Aside from the obvious controversies, one must immediately acknowledge that she admitted to being desperately addicted to quaaludes at the time.  One must also sadly note that her career was in decline and she was no longer as important or celebrated as she once had been and that can be, for someone admittedly addicted to public adoration, a tough pill to swallow.

Think about it:  she was massively doped up on quaaludes (so badly so that she approved the stupidest album cover photo of her career–in a space suit– during this period for the stupidest album of her career — a desperate attempt to maintain her relevance by embracing rap), depressed about the loss of her prominence on the activism circuit (the Viet Nam War had ended) and possibly even more depressed about her own failures as a mother (she continued to tour leaving Gabriel in the care of others).  The cover of Time Magazine (an awful, ugly graphic) must have seemed so long ago by then.  And David Harris didn’t turn out to be that great of a husband after all.

There was a reference to hypnosis in there but I’ll say no more about that because I can’t recover a memory of the details of context.  But some of the content of the tapes she played in the film reminded me of the suggestive tactics of the “therapists” involved in recovering memories of abuse by the victims of the Satanic Ritual Abuse hoax.

I remained puzzled by several things.  As is often the case, one allegation begets another and, sure enough, the zombie “recovered memories” reared it’s ugly, festering head and Joan claimed that she also had been abused.  Of course, there is no specific date or time or location, and of course her father is deceased and unable to defend himself.  Of course, she had been heavily into quaaludes for eight years– which, I suppose, offers an explanation of just how many layers of shit covered those hidden memories.  Of course.  What astonished me is that no editor or producer thought fit to either excise the questionable allegations or at least do a little more to acknowledge that recovered memories are “controversial”.  Because they are not “controversial” at all.   They are the product of junk psychology and have been thoroughly discredited and debunked.  They were promulgated by books like “Sybil” and “Satan Remembers” which have been convincingly shown to be hoaxes.

But then again, this is a vanity project, not a documentary.  We saw nothing that was not approved of for us by Joan Baez herself.

Add to that the issue of hypnosis, which was also part of her therapy…  look, it’s 2023.  Wake up.

Things come to a crux when Mimi tells of being French kissed by her father, a recollection that leads Joan to pursue her own path of thrice-weekly therapy, including hypnotism, which has her remembering her own inappropriate experiences with her dad — which the film does not go into great detail on. The doc includes letters and voice messages from her father in which he accuses Joan of having fallen prey to false memory syndrome, but Baez tells the filmmakers today that if even 20% of what she remembers is true, that’s damning enough.

Twenty percent of nothing is still nothing.  This is throwing mud onto the wall and believing that some of it must stick.

I will not be polite about this issue under any circumstance.  A good deal of damage has been done by credulous individuals who don’t care about science or evidence or facts and are willing to believe something because they just “feel” it must be true– as Joan Baez suggests in this vanity piece.  She even suggests that her father might have “felt” that it wasn’t true.  And that both feelings are valid.

Really?

 

Posted on

Five Perfect Songs

There are five perfect songs. Here they are:

  • Sam Stone (John Prine)
  • All Along the Watchtower (Bob Dylan)
  • Anchorage (Michelle Shocked)
  • I Fought the Law (Bobby Fuller Four)
  • You Don’t Own Me (Leslie Gore)

That’s it.

About Sam Stone:
But life had lost its fun
And there was nothing to be done
But trade his house that he bought on the GI bill
For a flag-draped casket on a local heroe’s hill

“Suspicion” (Elvis Presley) comes close, but no cigar.

Other Honorable Mentions:

“Reelin’ in the Years” (Steely Dan) A truly awesome recording but I can’t overlook the pettiness of “the things that pass for knowledge I can’t understand…”

“Homeward Bound” (Simon and Garfunkel) a fine, fine song, but “all my words come back to me in shades of mediocrity” is a little precious.

“Four Strong Winds” (Ian & Sylvia) is a bit slight, so you have to repeat the chorus and that gives it a bit of a sense of aimlessness and repetition and violates the rule of economy.

The Beatles’ best song is “Girl”:

Was she told when she was young that pain would lead to pleasure?
Did she understand it when they said,
That a man must break his back to earn his day of leisure
Will she still believe it when he’s dead?

But “Eleanor Rigby” is also very nearly perfect.

“Go Your Own Way” (Fleetwood Mac) is too slight.

“Sultans of Swing” by Dire Straits is very, very good.

“Echo Beach” (Martha & the Muffins) Actually, this song is darn near perfect as well. Darn near.

“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” (The Band) Great, great song, but a bit murky, and the Band’s own recording of it is not as perfect as the song. As is “This Wheel’s on Fire” and “Tears of Rage”. I do actually like the cover version of “Dixie” by Joan Baez, featuring crack Nashville session musicians. It’s from an album that appeared to be an effort by Baez to reach out to the alienated silent majority of Americans who seemed to despise her.

Levon Helm (who wrote “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”) despised her version, but one suspects that that is because Levon Helm despised Joan Baez.

“Satisfaction” (Rolling Stones) Okay. So this one is perfect too. Six perfect songs. But it has to share with “Light My Fire” (Doors).

“Like a Rolling Stone” (Bob Dylan) Violates rule of economy, but also a great, great song. “Tangled up in Blue” might actually be a better song.

“Thunder Road” (Bruce Springsteen) Can’t sustain that great take-off, “you can hide ‘neath your covers and study your pain” though he tries, brilliantly. In the end, it’s just a trifle indulgent, a trifle too self-consciously monumental. A trifle. On some days I prefer “Jungleland”.

“Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” (Bob Dylan) is as good or better than any other song on the list. All right, seven.

“One of These Days” (Emmy Lou Harris) Lovely, enchanting piece, reminds me of “As I Went Out One Morning” (Bob Dylan): both are elegantly economical, tight, balanced.

“Someday Soon” (Judy Collins) Okay– another one. Eight.

All right: 9– “The Hammond Song”, by the Roches. Actually, this song is obviously flawed, but there are moments when it does sound just perfect to me. So 8. Wait — 9. I forgot about one of the most perfect, crystalline, renditions ever: “Wayfarin’ Stranger” by Emmy-Lou Harris with that absolutely wonderful lead by Tony Rice and mandolin by Albert Lee.

Posted on

Oh My But You Have a Pretty Face: Jesse Winchester’s “Brand New Tennessee Waltz”

Oh my but you have a pretty face,
You favor a girl that I knew.

Oh my.

Jesse Winchester’s lyrics starts out with that expression of startled awe: oh my!

It’s not “holy cow” or “my goodness” or “wow”. “Oh my” is that quick feint with polite astonishment, an involuntary gasp of amazement, too spontaneous to be refined or vulgarized: oh my.

Jesse Winchester was writing about his experience as a draft-dodger. He moved to Canada in 1967 to avoid service in the Viet Nam War. Obviously, he left someone behind. From “The Brand New Tennessee Waltz” (1970):

Well I left Tennessee in a hurry dear,
The same way that I’m leaving you
For love is mainly just memories
And everyone has him a few
When I’m gone, I’ll be glad to love you.

That line deserves a thought or two: love is mainly just memories? That’s not a shocking idea, really. It’s much the same as saying “you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone”. It’s certainly much easier to be in love with a memory than with the person who wants you to throw out the garbage and stop switching channels. It leaves aside the issue of whether that kind of love can be real. He’s feeling “like one of your photographs\caught while I’m putting on airs”.

I don’t mind the Joan Baez version of the song, though I find her generally harder and harder to enjoy the older I get. She’s really not a very good singer at all– she just has a lovely voice. Well, she has a voice that would be lovely if she weren’t so damn obsessed with trilling it. Her best work is her slightest: the vocals on “Diamonds and Rust” nicely get under the lyrics instead of on top of them, like thick creamy icing.

When I was about 14, I biked down to Queenston Heights one summer day and climbed up Brock’s Monument, a tall, narrow cement column that culminated in a series of viewports embedded in a coarse sculpture of General Isaac Brock, the hero of the Battle of Queenston Heights, who was shot by the Americans when they spotted him on his white horse in his scarlet tunic.

The stairs up the monument were very, very narrow. I was on my way down when I encountered a small group coming up, so I stopped and stood against the wall and waited to let them pass.

The first person in this group was a girl about my age. She stepped level with me and turned to look at my face. We were just inches away from each other. That was 40 years ago, and I still remember thinking, “oh my, but you have a pretty face”. Not exactly in the words of the Jesse Winchester song, but the sentiment was the same: oh my.

I can no longer actually remember what she looked like. What I remember– and this is true of a lot of our memories, I think– is the intensity of the feeling I had about that face. In my catalogue of a lifetime of memories, of all the pretty girls I’ve ever looked at, I still remember it as one of the most startlingly beautiful faces I have ever seen. She had red hair and freckles and green eyes and beautiful full lips. The average blonde may be more beautiful than the average red-head, but a really beautiful red-head with green eyes is peerless. Her skin seemed luminous. I was so taken aback that I couldn’t avert my eyes and she seemed so startled by my stare that she stared back. She stepped away, up the stairs, and looked back once.

I waited at the bottom for a long time for her to come down, just to see that face again. She emerged a time later, supremely indifferent to my existence. She walked by me and left my orbit forever.

“Diamonds and Rust” by Joan Baez deserves a mention somewhere, if only for these lines:

Now I see you standing with brown leaves falling around snow in your hair
Now you’re smiling out the window of that crummy hotel over Washington Square
Our breath comes out white clouds, mingles, and hangs in the air
Speaking strictly for me we both could have died then and there.

For me, autumn has always been the most “real” season– the cold winds, the warm coats, the sound of dried leaves under foot, the stilled conversations, the sense of diminished opportunity. Memories of summer can drift into haze, ennui, an indeterminate place and time.

And then, Baez sings,:

Now you’re telling me you’re not nostalgic/
then give me another word for it/
you were so good with words/
and at keeping things vague

Vague, I suppose, and non-committal. “You were so good with words” is both an accusation and a lacerating confession: I believed you. I may have been a fool, but I believed you, and even with the advantage of hindsight, yes, I’m nostalgic– I wish I could believe again.

The Baez song also has a great opening: ”

Well I’ll be damned/
Here comes your ghost again…”

In case you didn’t know, the song is presumed to be about Bob Dylan. I believe she has confirmed that.

Posted on

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

One of the few advantages of having lived a few years is that you get actually find out which works of art, tv shows, dramas, movies, and songs really stand up over time. Sometimes you find out that a brilliant piece of music or drama is far more rare than you had ever imagined.

Sometimes something you once thought was brilliant turns out to be pedestrian.

“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” (first released in September 1969) is simply a terrific song, whether you prefer the raucous version by the Band, or Joan Baez’s cool, crisp, symmetrical rendering. I almost always prefer the versions performed by the composer, and I love the Band, but in this case I like the version by Baez more. For one thing, it’s tight construction prevents Baez from indulging in too much warbling or emoting– makes her sound like she really does have a good voice. For another thing, it’s a damn fine arrangement of guitar, bass, and drums.

The hardest element of music to describe, teach, or duplicate is rhythm. Sometimes people even call it “feel”, as if it was something you can’t see or taste, or even hear in a literal sense. Baez’s version has the same intangible as Dire Straits “Sultans of Swing” and Dylan’s entire “John Wesley Harding” album. At the time of it’s recording, you heard this kind of crisp, tight rhythm more often in Nashville recordings than you did in Los Angeles or New York. These are cracker-jack musicians.

Virgil Caine is the narrator. His rustic “voice” dryly recounts how he worked on the Danville train until the tracks were torn up by Stoneman’s (Union) Calvary. Then he took the train to Richmond just before it fell and the Confederacy surrendered. “It was a time I remembered oh so well”. Robertson’s clever lyric then has the people singing nothing more specific than “na na na na na na, na na na na, na na na na na”, as if life goes on no matter what disasters befall us, and the disaster is too great for words.

Many have commented on the fact that the song takes the voice of a southerner, at a time when many people regarded the South as an embarrassment of bigotry and repressiveness. It’s a brilliant stroke and almost everyone who hears the song immediately realizes how right and true it is. Not a few attribute this unique perspective to the fact that Robbie Robertson was a Canadian, who saw the South without jaundiced eyes, and fell in love with the mystique, the cadences, and the culture of the South.

There is another angle to this song that is a bit disturbing. Levon Helm claims that he “helped” Robertson write the song. Helm is from Arkansas, a Southerner, and some commentators on the Band think that there is some bitterness between him and Robertson over the song. Does the song belittle the South? That would be totally contrary to almost everyone’s impression of the song, which is the opposite. Or is it something to do with the credits? Who knows?

One oddity. Why does “Robert E. Lee” in the Band’s version become “the Robert E. Lee”, a steamboat in the Baez version? Turns out that it could be because Robert E. Lee never passed through Tennessee after the war, but the Robert E. Lee did. Less forgivable is “I took the train to Richmond, it fell” for “On May the 10th, Richmond had fell”. I don’t know what problem Baez had with that– other than the fact that Richmond did not fall on the 10th– the entire confederacy did. Richmond “fell” on April 2. And utterly contemptible is the “so much cavalry came” for “Stoneman’s calvary came”. Joan Baez, do you think your audience is too stupid to accept the name of an obscure Union officer who was responsible for executing Grant’s scorched earth policy instead of “so much”? Geez!

Doesn’t matter. If you read the website at the link above, you will notice two thing: endless, obsessive fussiness over the details of the song, and boundless admiration for it. A typical comment: it is easily the best popular song ever about the Civil War. And that it is.

On The Band

There was a horrible tendency of bands of this era to indulge in long, utterly incomprehensible overtone-laden guitar-solo driven codas, in the mistaken belief that something “deep” would reach out and contact them.  You have to keep that in mind to appreciate just how stunning “Music From the Big Pink” was.

There is a lengthy and somewhat bizarre dissection of the lyrics here.  Is it “mud” below Virgil’s feet or “blood”?  Did Robert E. Lee actually pass through Tennessee after the war? 

Update 2022-05-02

In performances, Joan Baez has corrected the lyrics.  It wasn’t malice: just carelessness.  Now that she knows the right lyrics, she sings the words Robbie Robertson wrote.