A Complete Unknown and Baez Goes Baroque

Thoughts on the Dylan biopic and two classic Joan Baez albums from the late sixties

Welcome music lovers!

Over the holiday break, my wife and I went to see the new Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown. I am generally wary of biopics but found myself quite liking this one. I shared a brief note about my thoughts on Notes and in response, Brad Kyle of the wonderful Substack Front Row & Backstage encouraged me to expand what I wrote into a full-on essay. The below is not exactly that but does use the movie as a springboard to briefly discuss Pete Seeger and then, in more detail, Joan Baez.

I love Baez’s music and in particular, two albums she released on Vanguard in the late sixties, Joan and Baptism: A Journey Through Our Time. Both are very interesting exercises in baroque pop primarily and it was great to revisit them.

I hope you enjoy the below essay and will share your thoughts on A Complete Unknown as well as on Seeger and Baez.

Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

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That there is a sense of obligation to check out A Complete Unknown among Dylanphiles as well as those enchanted by the magic of Greenwich Village in the early sixties is a good thing. Moments of collective culture are rapidly fading to black so when there is a chance to engage in the monoculture, it’s best to join in and see for yourself what the fuss is all about. So there we were, my wife and I, heading to the movies over the holiday break to take part in the ritual.

I am generally not a fan of biopics. The act of reducing a life to the confines of a movie often involve the kind of choices that make the life being depicted about as two-dimensional as the image on the screen. Maestro, Bradley Cooper’s depiction of Leonard Bernstein, is so preoccupied with capturing how he looked and how he spoke that it barely gets beyond making Bernstein even one dimensional let alone trying to provide even an iota of insight into why he became a towering figure of mid-20th century cultural life. Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is equally flat, oriented to explicitly counter the charge that Presley appropriated Black music (a charge I don’t think bears scrutiny) that it neglects to show how he amalgamated the wide strands of American music and in so doing, fused them in a way no else would or could have.

In a way, the biopic is more suited to Bob Dylan. Concerns about historical accuracy or accurately capturing its subject are, as I have illustrated, iffy propositions for the biopic but when it comes to Dylan, what is truth and what is fiction—in other words, where do the facts end and the legend begin—is a line that he has blurred even since he came east in 1961 and is now simply beside the point. While A Complete Unknown does not sugarcoat that Dylan in the sixties could be a withering jerk, barely able to do anything other than write and perform the songs that were pouring out of him at the time, it does right by keeping its perspective on his effect on others; principally Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger who see him as nothing less than the Messiah they had been longing for.

Dylan had little interest in assuming that role, choosing to sully the Newport crowd with electricity and three-fifths of the Butterfield Blues Band plus Al Kooper and Barry Goldberg casting him apart from his contemporaries who saw the song and by extension music as a force that could topple the walls of Jericho, so to speak. His guise as a topical folk singer was just one of many that he has taken and continues to take—these days, he has taken to posting the occasional observational tweet sans picture or graphic on Twitter just like it once was circa 2013 or so.

In terms of whether Dylan was right to rebuff Seeger’s plea or that Seeger was blinded by idealism in believing Dylan could have been persuaded to not plug in by his analogy of a scale on which the side of justice had always been outweighed by injustice and that Dylan had the power to finally shift the balance to the side of justice, I don’t feel taking a side is required at all. Dylan had tapped into something more elemental and mystical than politics, protest music or what have you. Seeger’s belief, though, in the power of the song was well placed and one reason among many why he is surely one of the greatest Americans there ever was and why Edward Norton’s performance as him is so deeply immersive.

Seeger’s appearance on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in February 1968—the second time he was on the show and what ended his decade-plus blacklisting from television—is a good example of how he viewed the song. He sings a medley of songs tracing the history of disagreement about the wars that America has been involved with concluding with a performance of ‘Waist Deep in the Big Muddy’ which the CBS censors had forbidden him to sing the first time he was on Tom and Dick’s show.

Seeger’s desire to see Dylan fulfil his dream is an explicit example of the parasocial relationship Dylan has had with his legion of fans. There is, however, a different, trickier dynamic between him and arguably the only singer at the time who had the complete goods as he did. That’s of course Joan Baez.

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The dramatization of the pair’s first meeting at Gerde’s Folk City seems seismic, Baez warily realizing that what Dylan would represent was not exactly a fellow singer but a rival, one who would eclipse her position in the Village. Even so, there is a poignancy to how she characterized her initial encounter with him in Martin Scorsese’s superb documentary No Direction Home. “I had been told about him, this guy’s a genius and he writes these incredible songs and sure enough, he was everything they said he was,” she said.

That admiring, nostalgia-tinged reminiscence is appealing, honing in as it does on the sheer exhilaration of what it must have been like to have been in New York in the early sixties. It certainly contrasts with how Baez characterized that moment in ‘Diamonds and Rust’ with lyrics like, “well, you burst on the scene already a legend / the unwashed phenomenon, the original vagabond, you strayed into my arms.” Here, as in A Complete Unknown, Dylan and Baez’s entanglement is fraught. There were moments of harmony but it was mostly tumultuous. The link they forged remains long after distance settled permanently between them.

It’s good to see Joan Baez back in the public consciousness and in A Complete Unknown, Monica Barbaro portrays her as a formidable force. Last year, during one of the calls that Brad Kyle of Front Row and Backstage organized bringing together the great gaggle of music writers here on Substack, a question was posed: if you had to choose a musician from the sixties and seventies still around to see in concert that you have never seen live before, who would you choose? I choose, without much hesitation, Joan Baez. While it was pointed out to me (and rightly so) that she has retired from touring, I stand by the choice.

It isn’t just that she has never lost her fiery sense of purpose, it’s also that Baez is about as direct a singer as there has been. By this I mean that she can take on a character and make you believe she is that person even when it is seemingly implausible.

By far, the most well-known example is her cover of the Band’s ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,’ her only hit and on which she directly takes on the character of Virgil Caine. It is a big production with many of the same Nashville musicians whom Dylan played with on John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline and a chorus as Baez’s sings Robbie Robertson’s big refrain. I like it, not only because it’s how I first heard the song but because it’s ballsy to sing a song from the perspective of a man and sing as that man when one is not a man and pull the whole enterprise off effortlessly.

A similar subversive touch underlines her recording of Tim Hardin’s ‘The Lady Came from Baltimore.’ Again, Baez sings it straight, taking on the role of Hardin in the autobiographical telling of him and his wife. It works magnificently. When she sings the song’s twist: “I was sent to steal her money / take her rings and run / but I fell in love with the lady / came away with none,” she glorifies in its irony. A full band accompanies her including an oboist playing a haunting line—all arranged by Peter Schickele. It’s not exactly going electric but still a fair deal away from the sparseness of folk.

Baez’s cover was included on Joan, released on Vanguard in 1967, her eighth album. It was the second time she had worked with Schickele, best known as a musical trickster supposedly unearthing the works of one P.D.Q. Bach, the least known of Johann Sebastian Bach's sons. Their first outing together was 1966’s Noel. What they created in Joan was a record of multiple dimensions, ranging over stylistic highs and lows in the same way Tim Buckley’s first two albums for Elektra do. At its heart, Joan is an exercise in baroque pop and folk, more muted than the pioneering exercises of the hybrid genre by the Left Banke but less complex than Judy Collins’ Wildflowers, released two months after Joan.

The piano on Baez’s take on ‘Eleanor Rigby’ mirrors the see saw of the strings in George Martin’s chart on the Beatles’ original recording. The refrain resolves into a steady pulse anchored by a celeste line. Baez’s vocal is slightly dispassionate, recounting the details as if a news anchor, only soaring with her trademark quaver while lamenting “look at all the lonely people.”

Her approach works, its icy and cold veneer dovetailing with the unsettling and disturbing song. She takes the same tact for Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘The Dangling Conversation’ and it doesn’t come off quite as well although it must be said that the duo’s original recording is more memorable for its rich, orchestral sound than Simon’s overly literate and unsubtle lyrics. The album’s other Hardin cover, ‘If I Were a Carpenter,’ has Baez actually take on the role of the woman in the song (on Joan, it’s retitled as ‘If You Were a Carpenter’) and does so with a hard-edged toughness. Sure, Baez seems to say, you can become a carpenter and she’ll be your lady, but when she asks the question, “if you worked your hands in wood, would you still love me?,” she follows with “answer me, babe, yes you would, I’d put you above me,” there’s an expectation that is impossible to miss.

A version of Donovan’s ‘Turquoise’ stresses a brittle chart for the brass which blends nicely with Baez. It’s one of the performances on Joan that functions as a kind of time capsule, capturing the moment when pop music was in a golden era of ambition and sophistication. A setting by Don Dilworth of Edgar Allen Poe’s poem ‘Annabel Lee’ is forceful, both in terms of the horns and in how Baez stretches her voice. It is daring and adventurous. Even more so is the French and Spanish tinge of Baez interpreting Jacques Brel’s ‘La Colombe (The Dove).’ Here, everything is at full tilt, probably in an over-the-top way but with it following ‘Turquoise’ and preceding ‘The Dangling Conversation,’ it is a vital part of Joan’s melting-pot charm as are the overt politics of ‘Saigon Bride’—one of the first songs Baez both sung and wrote—and a martial cover of once brother-in-law and gone-far-too-soon Richard Fariña’s ‘Children of Darkness.’

All of the album’s filigree is scaled back for two performances that keep the thorough line of Baez’s astonishing immediacy as a folk singer very much intact. ‘Be Not Too Hard,’ a poem by Christopher Logue set to music by Donovan, begins Joan and lays out some basic principles for life ending with “be not too hard, for life is short / and nothing is given to man.” Baez both sings and speaks the words with conviction and sincerity—words that she has surely backed up with action. There is a deep-seated and wondrous pleasure to a Joan Baez recording like this. It strikes a balance between the two dominant approaches to folk music in the sixties: traditionalism and popularization—Baez may have been the ultimate folk singer, able to sit in both camps without any diminishment to her art.

With ‘Be Not Too Hard’ is ‘The Greenwood Side,’ an English murder ballad also known as ‘The Cruel Mother.’ It’s a grisly tale of infanticide and Baez makes its 12 verses mesmerizing. On each, her voice rises on the line, “oh, the rose and the linsey, oh” and touches down as each verse ends. There is little to the arrangement other than Baez and her guitar and it stretches to just over seven-and-a-half minutes but she makes it feel as if time has stopped, creating a world that is paradoxically enchanting while telling a tale that is anything but. Notably, both of Joan’s most explicitly folk tracks do not involve Schickele.

They did team up again in 1968 for Baptism: A Journey Through Our Time which took the more ornate parts of Joan and built an album out of them. There are 22 poems (Henry Treece’s ‘Old Welsh Song’ is used as both the opener and closer) that Schickele puts to music, a conceit Maynard Solomon, the co-founder of Vanguard, is credited with conceiving.

There is a heavy air of dystopia—a familiar feeling these days—through a series of suites in which Baez both sings and speaks, especially the psychedelic fuzz freak out that accompanies Arthur Waley’s ‘Minister of War.’ Death hovers in the grooves. A moment of transcendent grace lifts the setting for James Joyce’s ‘Of the Dark Past’ with its echoing electric piano and a solemn Baez vocal. It’s arguably the best part of Baptism: A Journey Through Our Time. It’s a record with a less-then-stellar reputation (understandably) but I find it absorbing, a noble experiment from a time full of them.

It’s probably not the album I would suggest those wishing to learn more about Joan Baez after seeing A Complete Unknown should start with but it reminds that she has always been an uncompromising and important artist.