The moment Joan Baez knew her and Bob Dylan were over: “Just wasted time”
Musical history is powered by great love, but perhaps even more so than that, it’s powered by grand heartbreak or by two people who simply could not figure it out, giving the world incredible art, born out of the creatively fruitful but emotionally torturous push-pull of feeling. Amongst them stand Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, two artists who seemed close enough to being soulmates but could never get it right.
At first, it seemed like a match made in heaven. Baez was folk’s new favourite voice. She’d already achieved major success by the time Dylan landed in New York and came crashing in, both her life and her industry. But as he seemed to be fighting the same fight, writing powerful, political songs with a mission to bring about change, she never saw him as competition but as a comrade for whom she quickly developed an affection.
The feeling was mutual. “She had that heart-stopping soprano voice, and I couldn’t get it out of my mind,” Dylan once said of Baez, and quickly, the pair were dueting around the country and around the world as she brought the new face into the folk world and introduced him onto some of the biggest stages around.
And that’s where the issues started to appear. Baez introduced Dylan to her world, and her world became obsessed with him. It was her spotlight he stepped into, but suddenly, it was all his and she was pushed out of it. “I think that his fame happened so fast, and it was so huge, that I kind of got lost in the shuffle,” said Baez and Dylan agreed, stating, “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,” adding, “I was sorry to ever see our relationship ever end.”
However, things were far more complex than a relationship ending. The tether between Dylan and Baez was more than just a love affair, more than just a musical admiration, more than both. Being a combination of it all, it made it both seemingly unbreakable but also utterly frayed and painful.
Part of that came down to politics, as Dylan turned his back on the protest music world and broke many hearts in the process, including Baez’s. But mostly, it came down to this enduring feeling that his fame was not only pulling him further away from Baez but also making him increasingly uncaring and ignorant towards her own talent and career. His 1965 dates in England proved that clearly.
Previously, it was always music that drew them back together. They’d fight and fall out, but then they’d sing a duet and be reminded of the old times and their love for each other. So Baez agreed to fly over to the UK with Dylan for a string of dates, and she thought that’s what would happen. Instead, she spent the whole time simply feeling like a fan or a groupie, watching from the sidelines as he never once asked her to sing. To her, that was the death knell.
“I just sort of trotted around, wondering why Bob wouldn’t invite me onstage, feeling very sorry for myself, getting very neurotic and not having the brains to leave and go home,” Baez told Rolling Stone. Suddenly, something was different. It was a further step up in the growing feeling that she was now living in his shadow and that even Dylan, a man who had always loved and celebrated her for her talent, seemed not to care anymore.
“That would be the best way to describe that tour. It was sort of just wasted time,” she said of that period when she eventually went home feeling like a fool, knowing with certainty that things had changed, and the end was here.
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