Joan Baez’s persistent ghost

Joan Baez cannot escape Bob Dylan, says Mick Brown in the London Daily Telegraph. When the two folk singers met in Greenwich Village in 1961, Baez was quickly drawn to Dylan’s anthems of disaffection and protest. “It was as if he was giving voice to the ideas I wanted to express,” she says, “but didn’t know how.” The two began touring together; soon, they were lovers. But Baez saw music as a means to changing the world, while the more cynical Dylan disdained what he called “finger-pointing songs” and refused to endorse causes. “He’s not in the business of changing things,” Baez says. “He never was. He doesn’t want to think about that sort of thing. He doesn’t want the responsibility. And that’s where my mistake was with him. I kept pushing him, wanting him to do that. Exhausting for him, and futile for me. Ridiculous.” They finally broke up in 1966. Baez, now 68, no longer has much contact with Dylan, and doesn’t dwell on the affair. But fans and interviewers invariably ask about that ancient relationship, for reasons that elude her. “I don’t really know the answer. That must be some sort of deficit in their lives. It’s like Woodstock. People measure their lives by it. He and I were not just two people—we were everybody else’s images of whatever we were, none of them true.”

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