GLORY B! That was something

By William de Cruz

JOAN BAEZ did not have the answers last night; her song was just that for as long as you are able to question, there Is hope. 

And 3.000 people at Dewan Tunku Chancellor heard the message strong and clear — we can, and shall, overcome.

Ms Baez’s tour-de-force had built itself up to rival the most mammoth of rock happenings — and it did, even if not in number, diminishing the electric parodies of the Today Era with the simplicity of yesterday's flower revolution.

Her 90-minute solo experience opened with Blowing In The Wind and ended with an Amazing Grace encore, within itself spanning so much and yet remaining timeless, taking in the best from the best of her peer group’s songs.

At her request, the best seats in the house were the privilege of children — people for whom she was raising funds under the name of the International Year of the Child.

And for the other people she was concerned about but who were not there — the refugees — she offered her song of hope in Michael Row The Boat Ashore.

But again the Baez stamp was there, indelible as ever, in a geographical shift in the lyrics:

Mekong River is chilly and wide, alleluia

I've got a home on the other side, alleluia

I don't know but I've been told, alleluia

They say the streets are lined with gold, alleluia

Hers was not the long ways of the Streets of London, or the cries of Anak or even the grandiose hopes of Bringing In The Ship — hers was the voice of a generation gone by; one that had thrived on the essence of the Bob Dylans, the Pete Seegers, the Woody Guthrie.

Four and twenty ears ago, they had only their guitars. Today, she still sticks to hers while others have found an easier way out. 

Particularly, that was the feeling she radiated last night — in her simple midnight blue embroidered caftan, her 75-year-old Martin guitar, a pocketful of songs written so long ago they still apply today, and a disarming feminine charisma that brimmed with character and humanity. 

Bit by bit, the person in Baez kept creeping out — the mother, the lover, the sensitive, the forlorn, the human — and the songs spoke for her.

As she sang The Weary Mothers Of The World Shall Rest, one felt almost palpably the experiences of the war-torn and the dislocated. It was powerful idiom delivered with the fondness of the feeling of care.

But even for them she had her own ray of hope: “We may never be the poor, for no one owns us anymore..."

And, yes, she had her less-than-reverential remembrance of Dylan in her rendition of his Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word — complete with her instantly recognisable mimicry of the slur and scraggly diction of the one-time high priest of youth.

Not one song escaped the injection of the message she wanted to put across — not The Beatles' Yesterday, not The Night That Drove Old Dixie Down, not Diamonds And Rust.

They all had the Baez interpretation, the Baez cause — sung as if they were meant to be sung that way. No one noticed the greying hair, no one noticed the overpowering voice; no on noticed the absence of a back-up group. It was, simply Joan Chandos Baez, 38, singing her cause.

Few in the audience, I thought, came away from the concert believing they did not owe this remarkable woman something for her pleadings for the joyousness of life and living.