It was 1972, and I was 16 years old, and my parents took me on vacation. I picked up a book titled DAYBREAK by Joan Baez.
I read it on the plane and felt a deep connection with her. I too always felt like an outsider and lonely. When I got home I went to the Wherehouse record store. (remember those?) And I bought her double album The first Ten Years. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard her voice, my older sister had played a lot of her records. BUT It was the first time I heard it up close, in other words, not through a closed door.
I don’t think it was ONE song that changed me. Rather it was her voice; sad, beautiful, strong, and like a knife’s edge she could pierce through my defenses. It was her next record that changed me the most. There was a song she wrote called All The Weary Mothers, and it remains, in my opinion one of the most powerful songs that ever she wrote. It’s about the poor farmers of the world; I feel like it encompasses everything Joan Baez has stood for in her 60 years of singing. I wanted to do good in the world too. I wanted to be like Joan. She has written 75 songs, and most are heartfelt, some are somber like Three Horses, and some are fun and sweet like Gabriel and Me. Spoken word songs like Where are you now, my son, which she wrote about (Nixon’s attempt to kill her) the worst bombing of Hanoi for thirteen days, I recently listened to it in a car on a road trip, and oh my god, those bombs were INTENSE on today’s cd player! I really could FEEL them dropping.
She always kept her finger on the pulse of young people, for instance she wrote a rap song after hearing rap music at a high school in east Palo Alto. It was a a rag about TIME Magazine, and the stupid reporter they sent, who kept pushing her to talk about “Bobby” when the sixties had been over for several decades.
Songs by other people that she does or did back in the day, like some of Bob Dylan’s songs radicalized me further. Merle Haggard’s Sing me back home, in Joan’s hands, always makes me cry. It’s about a prisoner about to be executed and on the way they pass another man playing guitar and he asked him to sing him the old songs from home…. again that knife’s edge.
I began writing to Joan at 16, and her mother “big Joan” wrote back. It was something Joan Sr. would do for many decades to many hundreds of fans, so that was sweet. One day they wrote asking if I would record her records onto cassette tapes for a prisoner in Michigan. So I accepted the job, and with my dad’s assistance we ut many of her records on to tapes. Joan even sent me a check to cover the expense. The tape cassette had to be clear so the guards could see there wasn’t anything bad in them. I started writing to this prisoner, found out he was Jewish and trying to be kosher in a place like that is quite a task! I could not send him anything directly, so I sent him packages of fruit, nuts, etc from Harry & David’s. We corresponded for about six years, until I got busy with an eastern meditation ashram. One year the guy sent me a present of a big book of the history of Judaism. If I recall, he earned the money by teaching other prisoners to read and write.
Anyway, I am still passionate about helping others, and even though I can’t get to many protests, I sign hundreds of petitions every year. When things get tight in Sacramento, for the people with disabilities like me, who rely on In-Home Support Services and Regional Center funding for things IHSS doesn’t pay for, I go up and give them a piece of my mind.
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