by Caroline Smith
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.”
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