Joan Baez (song lyrics)
Appearances
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
Well, I'll be damned Here comes your ghost again But that's not unusual It's just that the moon is full And you happen to call And here I sit And on the telephone Hearing a voice I'd known A couple of light years ago Heading straight for a fall As I remember your eyes were bluer than robin's eggs My poetry was lousy, you said Where are you calling from?
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
A booth in the Midwest Ten years ago I bought you some cufflinks You brought me something We both know what memories can bring. They bring diamonds and rust.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
Well, I think my courtship with ballads took maybe two years of my life in Cambridge in 59, 60. And then as soon as I had any relationship at all with the civil rights movement, and I started that in 61, I started picking up the songs that would really be relevant in those situations. So I would start with the early songs, the spirituals, and those things could connect me with that movement.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
And then... It was this odd situation of me being an interpretist of song never occurred to me to write. I probably couldn't have in those days anyway because I was convinced I couldn't. So that when Phil Oakes wrote There But For Fortune and then Dylan began writing those real gems that he gave us, that's when some of my thoughts and feelings and activism connected with the music, 63, 64, 65.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
Meet Bob. Somebody said, you've got to come to Greenwich Village. There's this incredible guy who writes music, and I had been told by a number of people the same thing. So I went to see him, and he was incredible. I mean, I was very impressed. He was this funny little guy with his guitar. The night I saw him, he was making up songs.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
He sang the song to Woody, and then he was just making up words, which I was in total awe of that, to just stand there and ad-lib and make up music. And then he was dragged over to the table to meet the Madonna, and it was all very awkward because, you know, I felt like some aging dowager at that point, and he seemed so young. And I didn't work with him for, I think, maybe a year or so after that.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
Yeah, I'd introduce him, and my audience, they're trained into absolute silence to listen to the Madonna singer, nubile folk songs, and on would come this little scruff ball, and he would sing, and his voice, they were not prepared for that, and sometimes they would boo, and I'd shake my little finger at them like a schoolmarm and say, now you listen to this boy, he's a genius, and so they'd be quiet and obedient, and then before very long, maybe a verse or two, they'd figure out.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
that in fact it was something quite astonishing going on with the songs he was writing.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
That's true. I don't really enjoy telling Dylan stories over the air, but I would say that in what I wrote about Bob, which is... I think has surprised people because it's very candid. I open myself up. I mean, I think you learn more about me than you do about Bob and tell the magnificence of the music and the times that we had together and really some glorious things about him.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
And then it's very unflattering and the dismal parts. and that was very difficult to figure out how to write that because he and the other people I've dealt with in the book are important to me, were important to me, and so I think you have to write some of the good and the bad. On the other hand, I don't think a book should be written to level accounts, and I really tried not to do that.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
I tried to just express what those times were like.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
I would talk about that in a grander sense in general. Somebody who came into an identity at age 18, as I said, and I thought I was pretty terrific to be the Madonna, and got lots and lots of attention and learned to sort of survive on that. And one of the things that happened was I couldn't stand having the show stolen from me.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
I was very ungraceful about that, and I simply couldn't believe that that was happening. About Bob's gracelessness, people can make their own assumptions why he did what he did, but the difficulty for me was my own reaction to that, that I kept going back to it and didn't use my head or didn't have one in that situation. Do you still sing songs by him? Sure, yeah. They're marvelous.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
They're the best that anybody wrote, in my opinion, for the things that we needed and the things that we did in the 60s. They are really a gold mine.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
Well, it's true for those of us who have almost as our partners that audience. So when people tease or accuse me of enjoying... The attention, I say, yeah. I mean, when I was 15, it's written in the book. When I was 15, we found this essay I wrote called What I Believe, and among other things, it's talking about when I show off at school and I say, I'm not a saint, I'm a noise.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
So it was already started way back then. That's how I... got my attention. We moved a lot, and I was always the new kid in the school. And though people weren't unkind to me, we always lived at the fringe. I didn't have whatever it took to sort of be instantly in the in crowd. So I was always at the edge of it.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
And the new kind of attention, namely people applauding and saying, gee whiz, you're wonderful, I began to feed on that.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
And then the part of saying that's the ego and then trying to keep my head straight or, quote, be a good person, go back to Quaker meeting and find out, try and just keep both feet on the ground and use the entire process, people's adulation, people's response, what I do, my voice, for a common good, for something good rather than something negative.