As he says A Complete UnknownJames Mangold’s film dedicated to Bob Dylan and played by Timothée Chalamet (now in cinema), in 1961 the singer was just a nineteen-year-old who had just arrived in New York from Minnesota, with nothing but his guitar. Destiny had written the success and love that would become legend for the folk singer Joan Baez. While waiting for everything that would come next, the place we need to start from is the stage at Gerde’s Folk City.
On an April day in 1961, therefore, the unknown Bob Dylan was scheduled to perform. Also in the audience was Joan Baez, who was already only twenty years old known in the local folk music scene. She had gone to the concert because they had spoken well of the artist who had just arrived in the city: «Someone had told me: “You have to listen to this guy, he’s amazing”» he reminded Rolling Stone in 1983. «I went with my boyfriend, who was really very jealous. We saw this scruffy, pale little thing come up on stage and sing Song to Woody. It was beautiful and it shocked me but I couldn’t say anything because I was right next to my boyfriend, who he was watching me out of the corner of his eyeperhaps mentally preparing to say something to slaughter Dylan. At the end of the performance Bob arrived and greeted us: “’Uhhh, hi”. I thought he was a brilliant, exceptional guy.”
It didn’t take long for the two musicians to begin collaborating and performing duets together at her concerts, which was crucial to making Dylan known to the public. In the creative fervor of those moments, “they were truly a force”, an acquaintance recalls in a documentary: “I think she had a crush. I know he had it.”. In the documentary I Am a Noise Joan Baez recalled those times together: «He spent all his time typing like a madman on the typewriter. He needed me: he needed a mother, someone to prepare his bath, someone to sing with him. And I needed to be his mother.”
For about three years they were inseparable although it is difficult to understand how their love actually began, which perhaps cannot be completely distinguished from their commitment to music. Once Rolling Stone he asked Joan Baez how long they had loved each other and she replied: «You mean what three month period was it? Well, Bob and I spent some time together. I honestly don’t know what year it was».
Evidently not everything was so simple between them and if from an artistic point of view the union could be a paradise, on a personal level there were differences that perhaps separated them. For example, Baez would have liked Dylan to be more active in politics, beyond the messages he sent with his songs. It also seems that she felt spiritually distant from the world of drugs and the singers who used them, including Dylan himself.
If it’s not clear when the romantic relationship began, the end is quite clear. In 1965 Bob Dylan invited Joan Baez to follow him on a tour of Great Britain, but without asking her to perform with him. In the movie A Complete Unknown this fact does not exist but it was perhaps precisely the exact moment in which the romance crumbled. Baez herself said it: «I was basically trotting around, asking myself questions about why Bob didn’t invite me on stage, I was very sorry for myself, I had become neurotic and yet I couldn’t make up my mind and leave. That tour was kind of a waste of time». Bob Dylan also marks the end of their story in 1965: «I was trying to deal with the whirlwind that my career was having at that time. Unfortunately Joan was swept away and I felt very bad about it. I was sad to see our relationship end.” Baez openly stated: “Dylan broke my heart”. Relegated to a secondary role, almost as if she were a fan like the others, she had to listen to interviews in which he said: «Joan is a friend. I don’t have a girlfriend”. “It was horrible,” she recalled.
In 1965 Dylan married Sara Lownds but Joan Baez remained for years with that pain, which would later inspire her Diamonds & Rust: «The best things always come from deep inside. The relationship with Bob influenced me a lot. It would be foolish to pretend otherwise.” In I Am a Noise she remembered all the disappointment of the finished love: “I put on his music and I dissolved into tears.” So he began to paint at that moment a portrait of Dylan as a young man: «When I finished the painting, I no longer had any animosity. None. And so it was also afterwards.”
We still happened to see them on stage in the following years, at least until the 1980s, when, however, the artistic collaboration also ended abruptly. Joan Baez tells it in her autobiography And a Voice to Sing With: during some stops on a tour she felt that she was not sufficiently valued by her colleague and left. When she told him the decision, Dylan seemed tired and disoriented and simply told her: “It’s a shame”.
Since then the paths of the two musicians have no longer crossed: they ignored each other when they both attended a civil rights event at the White House in 2010. Now for her, meeting him only means “bringing out feelings that aren’t necessary.” And even though Dylan publicly praised her in 2015 when she received the Person of the Year award from MusiCares (“I learned many things from her. I will never be able to repay her love and devotion”), Joan Baez now seems to be done that chapter, without resentment: «I might never see him again. That would be fine too».
Source: Vanity Fair

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