Salut! Live

Andrew Curry writes: Over at our Facebook group, the first Album of the Month in our new Facebook series is Joan Baez’s Diamonds & Rust, released in 1975. It’s a fine album, of course, but the reason for choosing it this month is because of the connections between Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.

Baez connects the two halves of our Dylan season—last week, about A Complete Unknown, next week, about Blood on the Tracks.  Diamonds and Rust , in particular, represents a thread between these.

(Baez and Dylan at the March on Washington, 1963. Photo: Rowland Scherman, USIA, Public Domain.)

A Complete Unknown includes Dylan’s relationship with Baez, and without trawling through the detail it’s fair to say that she behaved a lot better than he did, as Bill Taylor discusses in his review of the film.

“There’s a scene in a club where Baez, already an established recording artist, is finishing a set and Dylan is a first-timer in the open-mic segment. As he takes her place on stage, he comments: “She’s pretty. Sings pretty. Maybe a little too pretty.’

“And in her apartment when their relationship has advanced somewhat, he describes her songs as ‘like an oil painting in a dentist’s office.’”

But a decade later, long after their affair was over, Dylan rang her out of the blue from a call box (kids, ask your parents) and read her the lyric for Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts. He must have had a big pile of coins.

Diamonds & Rust is her response to the emotions that the call surfaced:

Ten years ago I bought you some cufflinks

You brought me something

We both know what memories can bring

They bring diamonds and rust.

The whole record is among the strongest that Baez released, and definitely at the electric end of her range. The musicians include some of the best studio and session musicians then working in the US. The album came out a few months after Blood on the Tracks, and includes a clutch of her own songs beside the title track.

Listening to it, most of the first side is about the ending of relationships (excepting the quirky Children And All That Jazz). Diamonds & Rust is followed by a version of Jackson Browne’s Fountain of Sorrow, which gives way to Stevie Wonder’s Never Dreamed You’d Leave In Summer. Side 1 closes with Simple Twist of Fate, from Blood on the Tracks. Given that the recording sessions for Diamonds & Rust were in January 1975, this must have been one of the first covers of a song from the Dylan record.

Dylan’s also clearly the subject of the Joan Baez song Winds of the Old Days, on the second side of the LP. I’d say that Winds of the Old Days is a better and tighter lyric than Diamonds & Rust, although the tune is less memorable:

Singer or savior, it was his to choose

Which of us knows what was his to lose

Because idols are best when they're made of stone

A savior's a nuisance to live with at home

There’s a coda to this story. Later in 1975 Dylan invited Baez to join the Rolling Thunder Revue, the tour which snaked through smaller venues in the north eastern states of America. And he asked Baez to sing Diamonds & Rust as part of the set.

It’s not clear why Dylan asked Baez to join the Rolling Thunder Revue, although it might have been by way of reparation for the dismal way he treated her in 1965, when he invited her to join him on the English leg of the tour—she is seen in the D A Pennebaker film Don’t Look Back—but he didn’t, once, invite her onstage.

He also suggested that she sing Diamonds & Rust as part of the Rolling Thunder Revue set, as Baez recalls in her memoir, A Voice to Sing With:

"You gonna sing that song about robin's eggs and diamonds?" Bob had asked me on the first day of rehearsals.

"Which one?"

"You know, that one about blue eyes and diamonds..."

"Oh", I said, "you must mean 'Diamonds and Rust,' the song I wrote for my husband, David. I wrote it while he was in prison."

"For your husband?" Bob said.

"Yeah. Who did you think it was about?" I stonewalled.

"Oh, hey, what the f—k do I know?"

"Never mind. Yeah, I'll sing it, if you like."

It seems vanishingly unlikely that Dylan believed this bit of misdirection, given the lyric tells a very clear story, and Dylan has always been such a close student of other people’s songs. You can almost hear his disbelief in Baez’s account of the conversation.

Much later, when everyone knew that Diamonds & Rust was about Baez’s relationship with Dylan, Dylan was asked about the song on camera for the documentary Joan Baez: How Sweet The Sound. His response:

"I love that song 'Diamonds & Rust'. I mean, to be included in something that Joan had written, whew, I mean, to this day it still impresses me."

Incidentally, I hadn’t realised until I was researching this piece that Diamonds and Rust is a staple of live performances by the British heavy metal band Judas Priest. They don’t play it the way you might expect them to.

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