‘Diamonds and Rust’: Joan Baez’s revenge
“Joan Baez; she was the queen of folk music then and now,” Bob Dylan said of the singer he spent years dueting with. While always complimentary about the work and legacy of Baez in public, music fans have forever wondered what happened between the two folk stars behind the scenes as only small glimmers of their complex relationship have ever cut through. Shrouded by the poetry of their lyricism and Dylan’s ever-evasive public presence, what lies beneath appears to be a tempestuous love affair, with Baez’s song ‘Diamonds and Rust’ serving as her opus on Dylan and possibly even her revenge against him.
“She had that heart-stopping soprano voice, and I couldn’t get it out of my mind,” Dylan said in the documentary Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound, recalling his first introduction to Baez, who was dubbed the “madonna” of the folk circle. Later, in a 2015 speech, he talked about her again, making no secret of her vital role in his early career as he said, “She took a liking to my songs and brought me with her to play concerts where she had crowds of thousands of people enthralled with her beauty and voice. People would say, ‘What are you doing with that ragtag scrubby looking welk’ and she’d tell them in no uncertain terms, ‘You be quiet and listen to his songs.’”
Just as how Dylan seemed enamoured with Baez at the start, the feeling was mutual. “It was something pretty extraordinary, pretty special,” she told HuffPost of those early days hearing his early work. She brought him out on stage with her so more people could hear the talent that she had heard, but when they did, and when his fame grew fast, that’s when things seemed to get tricky.
Once again, both have spoken about this. “I was just trying to deal with the madness that had become my career, and unfortunately, she got swept up along, and I felt very bad about it,” Dylan said, adding, “I was sorry to ever see our relationship ever end.” Baez agreed with that, stating, “I think that his fame happened so fast, and it was so huge, that I kind of got lost in the shuffle.” But when digging deeper and considering the lyrics of ‘Diamonds and Rust’, which is considered to be Baez’s ultimate reflection on the relationship, it seems more complex than that, or at least that it hurt a lot more than she makes out.
“You burst on the scene, already a legend / the unwashed phenomenon / the original vagabond / You strayed into my arms,” Baez sings, seemingly reflecting on Dylan’s early fame and their initial connection. Despite already being famous in the folk circle and gracing the cover of Time long before meeting Dylan, there was a sudden switch when he broke out to a point where she existed only in his shadow. “I remember a kid came up to me – this was the worst of it, when I really didn’t exist to any of them – some kid came up to me in Germany in a lobby and said, ‘Oh, Miss Baez, can I have an interview with you? Bob wouldn’t give me one’. I said, ‘Fuck you!’ It was horrible. It was really awful,” she recalled, reflecting on how it felt to suddenly come second to the man she’s helped so much.
In the new biopic A Complete Unknown, the film isn’t shy about presenting Dylan as unlikable or daring to depict these relationships where people lay underappreciated in his wake as if he merely stepped on them on his way to the top. There’s the suggestion that once Dylan achieved success through Baez’s help, her talent always came second. There’s a scene where he wakes her up in the middle of the night, only to make her sit there and watch him write songs, like the folk equivalent of Ken playing guitar at Barbie. When talking about the origin of ‘Diamonds and Rust’, this moment feels recognisable.
“You’ve said when you began writing the song, it started as something else until Dylan phoned you. Then it became about him. That must have been one helluva call,” HuffPost asked Baez about the song, to which she replied, “He read me the entire lyrics to ‘Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts’ that he’d just finished from a phone booth in the Midwest.” Over a decade after meeting and beginning this complex affair, after secret marriages and betrayals, this final instance of Dylan seemingly just wanting Baez to be an audience to his talent seemed to be a final straw, prompting her to write the devastating track.
With the film, these lyrics and even insights from the people around him, it presents Dylan as too caught up in his own mind and own talent to ever fully appreciate hers or be able to truly love or give himself to someone who might overshadow him. That’s backed up by quotes from his own tour manager, who questioned Dylan when he married Sara Lowndes behind Baez’s back rather than marrying her. Victor Maymudes said, “I asked him about it. ‘Why Sara?! Why not Joan Baez?’ He responded with, ‘Because Sara will be home when I want her to be home, she’ll be there when I want her to be there, she’ll do it when I want her to do it. Joan won’t be there when I want her. She won’t do it when I want to do it.’”
But the worst of it all comes when Dylan seems to not only underappreciate but discredit Baez’s talent. In the film, Dylan says of Baez, “She’s pretty. Sings pretty. Maybe a little too pretty,” delivering this subtle, belittling dig. Later, he criticises her songwriting, telling her that her own compositions are “like an oil painting at the dentist’s office”, brushing them off as too ornate or cheap. Said within a private conversation in the film, there’s no way to know if those words were actually uttered. But as the film’s script was approved by Dylan, he clearly find the depiction to be truthful enough. It matches up to Baez’s account as she spits in her song, “My poetry was lousy, you said.”
So by 1975, after years of ever-evolving complexity in their creative and personal relationships, seeing them fall out for periods of time and then be reunited on a tour where they’d duet and appear as close as ever, it seemed like Baez had had enough. If this version of events is true, if Dylan did underappreciate or slyly discredit Baez’s talent while he had her, ‘Diamonds and Rust’ appears as her revenge. While previously seeing the most success for her covers of other artist’s songs rather than her own compositions, potentially fueling Dylan’s dissing of her songwriting skills, the success of ‘Diamonds and Rust’ was justice for “the Madonna”.
As she finally got to air her side of the relationship, recounting various images of gifts, hotels, memories and feeling cast off or discarded, rather than singing Dylan’s own takes on the relationship instead, such as her covers of ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ or ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright’, the song stands as an empowering and reclaiming move as she demanded the respect and recognition she deserved by pointing her most successful composition right at him.
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