Joan Baez’s protest music is front and center in star-studded tribute

In an evening devoted to her music, activist and artist Joan Baez shared the contents of a message she’d just received with a sold-out crowd at San Francisco’s Masonic Auditorium.

“I just got a text from one of my friends saying this is the best f—king rally I’ve been to in 65 years,” Baez proudly exclaimed on Saturday, Feb. 8. “Tonight, we’re celebrating our strengths in this hall because music, joy, and laughter have suddenly become acts of resistance.”

It was, all things considered, a bittersweet and beautiful stroke of timing to honor the 84-year-old Baez, who lives in Woodside, at a moment when her lifelong specialty — protest music — could not be needed more.

Indirectly acknowledging the tumultuous actions of President Donald Trump over the first month of his second term in office, Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello welcomed the audience to “the last big party before they cart us all off to jail.”

“This is a reminder,” he continued, “that while dark clouds are gathering, this land is your land” before launching into a cover of Woody Guthrie’s seminal folk protest ballad of the same name.

The evening also doubled as a benefit and 30th anniversary party for the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, which has provided ample support to musicians affected by last month’s devastating wildfires in Los Angeles.

Two more video’s here and here.

A staggering slew of talent turned up for the festivities, including Bonnie Raitt, Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams, Margo Price, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Rosanne Cash, Taj Mahal and Jackson Browne. Together, they managed to create an atmosphere akin to the magic formerly conjured by Neil Young’s annual Bridge School Benefit Concert, where the allure of joining one’s musical friends and heroes onstage often proved too much to resist for those waiting in the wings.

From bandleader Joe Henry calling upon Raitt, Cash, Harris and Price to provide backing vocals on a spirited cover of the Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” to a surprise appearance from Zoe Ellis and Glide Memorial Church’s Glide Ensemble, the night’s unpredictable nature was buoyed by a consistent stream of lofty praise for Baez from each new artist who appeared.

Harris credited Baez with “being the reason I picked up a guitar and learned three chords,” while Cash lauded Baez for teaching her that it was OK to cover songs without changing the pronouns.

“When I was 14, the first record I ever bought with my own money was a Joan Baez record,” acknowledged Browne before launching into a gorgeous, jam-filled rendition of his song “The Barricades of Heaven.”

By contrast, Morello admitted that he originally thought one of Baez’s songs was by British heavy metal band Judas Priest before learning that it was actually a cover (“Diamonds and Rust”). But Morello also gave a fitting nod to Baez’s lifelong support of immigrants by revealing a “F**K ICE” sign taped to the back of his guitar while singing a ferocious, decidedly electrified take on “The Ghost of Tom Joad.”

Baez was herself more than up for the occasion, frequently popping into sets without any formal announcement. 

During Morello’s cover of “This Land Is Your Land,” she emerged slapping a tambourine. Later, she lent her vocal talents to a performance of “Farewell, Angelina” with Cash and a duet of “Before the Deluge” while seated at a piano alongside Browne. Finally, to close out the nearly-three-hour jubilee, the night’s subject of honor delivered a breathtaking performance of “Diamonds and Rust” with a house band that included her son, Gabe Harris, on percussion.

“I’m still waiting on the diamonds,” Baez quipped after the final note of a song based on her difficult relationship with Bob Dylan, portrayed in the current Oscar-nominated film “A Complete Unknown.”

The woman who played Baez opposite Timothée Chalamet’s Dylan, Mill Valley-raised Monica Barbaro — both actors are nominated for Academy Awards — attended Saturday’s event as a guest of Baez.

Rarely does a concert provide so many memories as to make the prospect of ensuring you don’t forget a single second feel like such a necessity, but that was absolutely the case on Saturday night.

On a bus home following the concert, Arlo Boyle, 73, of San Francisco echoed familiar sentiments heard by departing attendees.

“My biggest takeaway is that Joan is truly a voice for the ages,” Boyle said. “Everything seems new again. With the current political climate, we need this dedication to resistance once again. We are all in this together and it feels exciting, not hopeless.”

From Raitt and Taj Mahal teaming up to perform as a formidable duo to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott spinning yarns about “meeting a kid named Bob (Dylan)” while Price sweetly attempted to help the 93-year-old legend with his Stetson hat, an abundance of joy, resilience and resolve seemed to seep from every pore at the Masonic, offering arguably the most fitting tribute possible to Baez’s ongoing, enduring legacy.

That’s why the crowd cheered so loud when Price and her husband, musician Jeremy Ivey, sang the lines “Come senators, congressmen / Please heed the call” in “The Times They Are a-Changin’” and why seeing Williams — now thankfully five years recovered from a massive stroke — power through a spine-tingling take on “Forever Young” were more than mere moments of music.

Instead, they represented the power and community beautiful songs and sharp minds can create when there’s a worthy cause to focus on. And while Baez was humble in acknowledging her role as the evening’s honoree (“I’m happy to be the excuse that’s brought these people together”), she didn’t waste her chance to rally her troops with an urgent call to action.

“Tomorrow, go out and find one thing you can do,” she advised. “Maybe that’s protecting your local library, or supporting your Latino gardener, but this is not the time to be comfortable.”

Perhaps the great Taj Mahal said it best. 

Asked by Raitt for his thoughts on Baez as they settled onto the stage, the recent Lifetime Grammy winner and longtime Berkeley resident kept it simple while getting it exactly right: “She is part ‘dear lord’ and part ‘thank you Jesus.’”

Setlist from Joan Baez Tribute Show, Jackson and Joan also performed ‘Before The Deluge’ as a duet – Masonic Auditorium, San Francisco – February 8, 2025

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Joan Baez, and Many Friends, Show Her Enduring Resonance at Tribute Concert

Before the three-hour, all-star Joan Baez tribute concert in San Francisco on Saturday, I conducted an informal survey of Gen Z about the singer.

Some knew her through A Complete Unknown, the new Bob Dylan flick starring Timothée Chalamet. Others knew her through the Joan Didion essay featured in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, “Where the Kissing Never Stops.”

For most, their mothers had shown them “Diamonds and Rust.” The song “slays,” said Anna Reagan, 24, who first heard it in college.

A TikTok about Baez and Bob Dylan’s “biblical situationship” captioned “I will never forgive him,” screenshotted with the caption “brb catching up on 60 year old drama,” has thousands of reposts. Presenting their discography as call-and-response, it interlaces Dylan’s alleged pseudonyms for Baez with Baez’s direct “To Bobby.”

It’s Baez’s perceived victimhood, at her caliber, that seems to endear her to the women “catching up.” She’s like them: she’s been led on, she met a man at her level and then he “went off and got married.” “She is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be,” wrote Didion of a 25-year-old Baez in 1966. “Above all, she is the girl who ‘feels’ things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young.”

In A Complete Unknown, Monica Barbaro’s Oscar-nominated performance refutes the narrative of Baez as the woman forever reeling from Dylan’s scorn. The film, for all its flaws, makes clear: She’s the one who’s famous first. He wants her, but he might just want her fame. And in small ways, she retains her agency — at one point privately flipping him off onstage at the Newport Folk Festival.

At a benefit concert for the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund at the Masonic on Saturday, titled “A Night to Honor Joan Baez,” the local legend, now 84, began her closing ceremony for the three-hour evening with a performance of “Diamonds and Rust.” After singing “my poetry was lousy, you said,” she interjected a “Ha!” intended for Dylan, to laughter.

“I’m still waiting on those diamonds,” she deadpanned. But if the hurt Dylan caused her still appears here and there, Baez’s life far exceeds one heartbreak. She followed the song with a rendition of “Gracias a la vida,” dancing while Margo Price, Bonnie Raitt and Tom Morello played maracas, invoking Baez’s own Spanish-language repertoire and activism and conveying gratitude for her life as a whole.

Baez’s son Gabriel Harris, serving as percussion for the house band, described trying to keep back tears while looking at the audience. Baez’s 1964 performance of “Birmingham Sunday,” according to Birmingham-born Emmylou Harris, “changed the heart of this country” — and in her own family. Along with that track, Harris covered “Deportee” with Price, who nodded to its renewed relevance.

Lucinda Williams hailed the union organizing-centered “Joe Hill” before covering it in Baez’s style. Two Progress Pride flags — the rainbow flag with a triangle indent of black, brown and trans pride stripes — hung on stage throughout the night. The audience clapped in rhythm to the GLIDE Ensemble’s two gospel tracks.

Morello, from Rage Against the Machine, flipped his guitar during a performance of “The Ghost of Tom Joad” to reveal “FUCK ICE” taped to its back. Bemoaning the censored version of “This Land is Your Land” he learned in third grade, Morello resurfaced the original verses from Woody Guthrie’s manuscript. When he asked the audience to rise for “America’s alternative national anthem,” Baez made her first appearance on stage, silently dancing along.

“I got a text from one of my friends that said, ‘This is the best fucking rally I’ve been to in the past 60 years,’” said Baez at the end of the night, before encouraging the audience to undertake one act of resistance the next day.

“Whether it’s defending your local library, defending your Latino gardener” — some audience members paid more than $3,000 for tickets — or “standing on a busy street corner, alone if necessary, wearing a T-shirt that says ‘We are all illegal immigrants on stolen land.’ This is not the time to be comfortable. But we can take comfort in our decision to be counted among the ones who care,” Baez said.

After the show, Lexie McNinch, 26, remarked that the singers on stage were much more openly political than younger artists she sees today in concert. McNinch first learned about Baez when Lana Del Rey, she of famously fuzzy politics, brought her onstage at Berkeley’s Greek Theatre in 2019. (Taylor Swift also brought Baez onstage in Santa Clara in 2015.)

Matthew Gilbert, 26, learned about Baez from his mother, but had a similar experience when Maggie Rogers sang “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” with Baez during Rogers’ San Francisco show last fall. Looking around, he realized his friends didn’t know the special guest or her significance.

“Joan Baez has been instrumental in fighting against the idea of folk music as a tool for nativism and nationalism and instead forging a connection between folk music and social movements,” said Gilbert, a Stanford PhD candidate in ethnomusicology researching California folk music, over text. “Baez is one of those people who not only stood up for what she believed in and fought for justice her entire life, but also shaped how so many of us think about popular culture (and counterculture) in the United States.”

The name Baez works like a spell for many above a certain age. It conjures images of either her youth or their own. Surprise guest Jackson Browne recounted how the first record he bought as a teen was one of Baez’s. Ron Artis II, one of the youngest artists on stage, admitted learning about Baez from a video game. But for the Gen Z attendees on Saturday, Baez functioned less as a symbol of nostalgia, and more as an example for what a single life can achieve through art and activism, despite occasional heartbreak.

Maya Klein, 20, said the concert impressed upon her the power of music, especially in confusing and lost times. Many of her friends learned about Baez from the Chalamet movie. She’s glad they did.

Baez is, in her words, “the voice of a generation.”

Bonnie Raitt, Emmylou Harris, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and More Honor Joan Baez with Retrospective Concert in San Francisco

On Saturday, Feb. 8, an elite lineup of artists turned up at the Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco for the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund’s celebration of folk icon Joan Baez. The occasion featured homages to the singer/ activist, including guests and admirers Emmylou Harris, Rosanne Cash, Margo Price, Bonnie Raitt, Tom Morello, Joe Henry, Lucinda Williams, Taj Mahal, and surprise addition Jackson Browne, the honoree’s longtime friend. 

The concert harkened back to Baez’s historic career and web of influence, culminating in associated covers and originals that permeated from her supporters and peers, supported by a house band led by Joe Henry and featuring Jason Crosby, Greg Leisz, Gabe Harris, and David Piltch. 

The show featured 27 songs that began at the helm of Margo Price, who offered the folk ballad/ Baez covered “Silver Dagger,” followed by Dylan’s “Time They Are a-Changin’,” a song the honoree often performed as a duet with her then-boyfriend in the mid-60s.

In time, Harris took the stage and led the house band through Baez’s 2008 Steve Earle-produced track, “God is God,” before all the ladies on the bill, including Roseanne Cash, Lucinda Williams, Bonnie Raitt, Price, and others, gave wings to “Birmingham Sunday.” Williams stuck around and offered a song that spoke to Baez’s spirit on “Forever Young” and “Joe Hill,” Baez’s Woodstock performed folk commentary on the labor activist.

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s arrival yielded a nod to his Greenwich days with Dylan and Baez. The 93-year-old sang “Don’t Think Twice” before another leading lady, Cash, took the stage and played “Long Black Veil” and “Farewell, Angelina.” Henry, Harris, and Price performed the aptly chosen “Deportees,” considering the current political climate.

Browne surprised his old friend, Baez, by playing his “Barricades of Heaven” before Baez’s son, Gabriel Harris, performed a hand pan medley. Fellow surprise guests, The Glide Ensemble, played through “Oh Freedom” and “Feel Your Spirit.” Henry took the stage and joined Glide on the folk song “The Water is Wide” before Henry and the ladies played through “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”

Taj Mahal and Bonnie Raitt teamed up on “Twelve Gates” and “(Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody) Turn Me Around.” Raitt saluted her sister in music during the Speaking of Dreams feature, “El Salvador,” ahead of the honoree’s delivery of her Top 40 hit, “Diamonds & Rust.” Everyone took the stage, joining Baez for the final song, with a fitting choice from her repertoire: “Gracias a la Vida.”

Following the event, Aric Steinberg, Executive Director at Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, remarked: “We’re thrilled to celebrate 30 years of Sweet Relief while honoring the great Joan Baez and her amazing career. Joan has supported our charity for many years, and it was a privilege to honor her alongside so many incredible artists. It was  a night to remember and I’m so grateful to Joan and all of the performers who will help ensure that our music community continues to have Sweet Relief as a resource for emergency financial assistance.”

Sweet Relief Musicians Fund “Provides services and financial assistance for career musicians and music industry professionals. Grants are earmarked for medical and vital living expenses, including insurance premiums, prescriptions, medical treatment and operative procedures, housing costs, food costs, utilities, and other basic necessities.” 

Watch Joan Baez Perform an Emotional ‘Diamonds and Rust’ at All-Star Tribute Show

It was the culmination of a San Francisco charity concert that featured appearances by Tom Morello, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Emmylou Harris, and Margo Price

Monica Barbaro’s Academy Award-nominated portrayal of Joan Baez in the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown has introduced an entirely new generation of fans to the folk icon, even though Baez retired from the road following a 2019 farewell tour and rarely performs live these days. She made an exception Saturday night when she took the stage at a tribute concert held in her honor at San Francis’s Masonic, with all proceeds going to Sweet Relief Musicians Fund.

The roster for the show included Jackson Browne, Emmylou Harris, Roseanne Cash, Margo Price, Bonnie Raitt, and Tom Morello. Near the end of the night, Baez delivered a spellbinding rendition of her 1975 classic “Diamonds and Rust,” which chronicles her tumultuous relationship with Bob Dylan a decade prior. As she’s often done over the years, Baez updated the lyrics by singing, “60 years ago you bought my cufflinks.” She was unable to hold back a laugh that such an absurd amount of time has passed since the events of the songs took place. (Click here for a much better video than the one below.)

The studio version of “Diamonds and Rust” ends with the bitter line, “If you’re offering me diamonds and rust/I’ve already paid.” She’s often altered them in concert to “If you’re offering me diamonds and rust/I’ll take the Grammy.” At this show, however, she went with, “If you’re offering me diamonds and rust/I’ll take the diamonds.” After the audience erupted with applause, she returned to the mic and deadpanned, “I’m still waiting for the diamonds.” The night wrapped up with all of the performers of the night joining Baez on the Latin American standard “Gracias A La Vida,” which was the title track of her 1974 album.

Baez’s voice remains in extraordinary shape, considering that she recently celebrated her 84th birthday. When she walked away from the road in 2019, however, she said the state of her voice was one of the key considerations. “I don’t want to try and use it forever,” she told Rolling Stone. “I know some people strain to sing until they’re 100 and then drop dead on the stage, but that’s never been my vision of how I’d end the career. I like this voice. It’s nothing to do with the one I had 50 years ago, nothing at all, but I’m enjoying it and it’s also, at the same time, quite difficult to keep up.”

Barbaro worked extremely hard to sing like Baez while prepping for her role in A Complete Unknown. She even got a chance to speak with Baez on the phone. “I felt emotional hearing her voice on the phone because I had been studying her voice in her twenties so intensely,” Barbaro said. “And I felt like I had so much respect for her. But she was like, ‘Oh, I’m just in my garden listening to the birds.’ And I was like, oh, yeah, you don’t live or die by what we say about you in this movie. She’s lived her life…She was like, ‘I’m here, I’m open and available for any question you have.’ I was really appreciative that she was so generous with me.”

In a recent interview with the Marin Independent Journal, Baez shared her thoughts after seeing the movie with her granddaughter. “I loved what [Barbaro] did in the film,” Baez said. “If I didn’t think she was good at it, I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it in general. But she looked enough like me and she had my gestures down. You could tell who it was. She worked so hard. Kudos to her for taking the role on.”

That doesn’t mean it wasn’t strange to watch a fictionalized version of herself make out with Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan character. [The scene] was pleasantly brief,” Baez said. “[My granddaughter] said, ‘I don’t want to see my grandmother making out in a film.’”

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