Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (56)

On a musical level, I had pretty much remained a fan and admirer of Joan Baez artistically between 1965 and the end of the 1970's. And insofar as I ever had any musical career goal or ambition or "dream" since 1965, it's always just been to become one of Joan Baez's protest folk song writers.

Yet on a political and philosophical level, I think it was only in the 1965 to early 1967 period that my politics and philosophical views were pretty much completely identical to Joan Baez's political and philosophical views. Once Baez became involved with David Harris in funding and promoting the politics of the Resist! anti-war group and I became involved in campus organization with Columbia Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] and Richmond College SDS in the late 1960's, my political and philosophical  views began to diverge from Baez's views; although we both were anti-war, both favored a pacifist U.S. foreign policy, both thought a non-commercial motivation was what determined whether or not a performer of folk songs should be categorized as an authentic folk singer (rather than as just a professional entertainer/rip-off artist who primarily sang folk songs for personal commercial gain), and both favored a radical or revolutionary transformation of militarized, U.S. capitalist society in the 1960's.

Baez's view, however, was that Resist!'s strategy and its emphasis on philosophical non-violence and Gandhi's philosophy made more sense than the kind of non-violent confrontational strategy and political emphasis that Columbia SDS and National SDS was promoting in the late 1960's. Also, when Baez, initially, made what I thought were unfair criticisms of certain aspects of the women's liberation movement of the late 1960's that emerged from the New Left anti-war and civil rights movements of the mid-1960's, I felt our politics and philosophical views were diverging even more.

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So it wasn't until I happened to discover Bob Fass's late night "Radio Unnameable" free form radio show on Pacifica's WBAI-FM radio station in New York City one late summer night in August 1965, when he aired Joan Baez's recording of "There But For Fortune," that I actually first heard how Baez sounded like when she sang. And, naturally, I immediately became a fan of hers, although--since Fass didn't announce the name of the person who was singing "There But For Fortune" so beautifully and intensely--I didn't actually realize that it was Joan Baez's voice until two or three months later. 

It was only after living in Columbia University's Livingston Hall dormitory in Manhattan for awhile and then visiting my parents' apartment in Whitestone, Queens, where I listened to Baez's "Farewell Angelina" vinyl album (that my older sister had brought there when she returned to Queens from the Bay Area) for the first time, that I made the connection in my mind that the person whose voice I had liked singing "There But For Fortune" was the same Joan Baez whose "Farewell Angelina" album I also liked.

And, from the middle 1960's until the end of the 1970's, I, naturally, began to purchase every Joan Baez album I could afford to buy when I had extra money to spare on vinyl records; and I also began to religiously read every article that I happened to notice in the U.S. newspapers and magazines about Joan Baez, as well as reading her first autobiographical book, Daybreak. 

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Although I had read about Joan Baez in the late Fall of 1964 in reference to the Berkeley Free Speech Student Revolt, it wasn't until the Summer of 1965 that I actually first heard how Baez sounded when she sang a folk song, a peace song, a protest song or a topical song.  Time magazine had apparently put her face on its cover very early in the 1960's. But prior to 1965, Baez was rarely seen on any of the television shows that I had watched; and although Vanguard Records "for the Connoisseur" had sold a lot of Joan Baez vinyl albums between 1960 and 1965, the AM radio stations in New York City like WMCA/"Good Guy Radio" and WABC (or the AM radio stations in Indiana) that played 45 rpm "hit" singles, apparently did not play either single cuts from Baez's early best-selling vinyl albums or any 45 rpm single records that Baez may have recorded (even after Baez's 45 rpm record of Phil Ochs' "There But For Fortune" began rising on Billboard magazine's hit record charts) between 1960 and 1965.

And even though I had watched portions of the August 1963 March for Jobs and Racial Equality in Washington, D.C. on television and had watched and heard Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech being broadcast live on the network television stations that day, I had not seen or heard on television the singing portion of the August 1963 March on Washington rally in which folk singers like Peter, Paul & Mary, Dylan and Baez had apparently sung civil rights movement-related songs from the rally stage. 

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Not being either a red diaper baby who was part of the late 1950's and early 1960's red diaper youth subculture or heavily into listening to folk music until 1965, I only first became aware of Joan Baez's existence in the late Fall of 1964; when I read in some mainstream magazine that a "Mexican-American" folk singer named Joan Baez-- who also refused to pay all of her income taxes to the U.S. government because she was a "pacifist"--had been involved in the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Student Revolt in some way at the University of California.

I was still just a liberal anti-communist and non-pacifist at that time. But I was intrigued by the fact that in the early 1960's this Joan Baez seemed to be the only celebrity entertainer/celebrity singer mentioned by the mass media who was so openly a pacifist; and, although I was not then a pacifist, myself, or an advocate of a pacifist U.S. foreign policy of unilateral disarmament, I was impressed by the fact that Baez was so committed to her pacifist principles that she was willing to back up her pacifist views by refusing to pay that portion of her federal income taxes which went for U.S. government Pentagon war preparations and the U.S. military budget.

I was also impressed when I heard that Baez was, in the 1960's, refusing to charge more than $2 per ticket at her concerts, in order to allow folk music fans, who might not be able to afford a concert ticket if tickets were priced higher, an equal chance to hear her perform and attend her concerts; and because she seemed to feel that making money and being commercially successful were not her main philosophical priorities in the 1960's. 

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In 1969, I had first read Richard Farina's magazine article/essay from the early 1960's, which had been titled something like "Dylan and Baez: A Generation Singing Out," that was contained in an early 1960's paperback anthology about the early 1960's Folk Boom. But it was in the 1970's that I actually read both Richard Farina's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me novel and a second book of his collected writings that had been published after he was killed in a motorcycle accident in California in 1966. And the reading of those books in the 1970's inspired me to write, in the basement apartment in Jamaica, the "Richard Farina Is Gone" eulogistic folk song during that decade, which began with a chorus and first verse that continued to be included in the second version of that folk song that I put together in the 21st century:

(chorus)"Richard Farina is gone
There's not too much to say
Learn from what he saw
And fear not your own grave.

(verse 1) 

"A sudden bulletin
On the radio
Told of his accident
On a motorcycle." (chorus)

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After Barry moved from Queens to Israel/Palestine again, I inherited his prime tenancy possition in the basement apartment in Jamaica. And I decided to not immediately seek a roommate to pay the half of the apartment rent that Barry had been paying, although this meant that my monthly rent for the basement apartment would now be about $150 per month; or about double what I had been paying when I shared the apartment with Barry.

But the monthly wage that I was getting from my Council on International Educational Exchange [C.I.E.E.] travel season job provided enough money per month to pay the monthly rent alone, given how little I tended to spend on food, consumer goods or entertainment in the 1970's; and given the fact that I saved a lot of money by not owning a car (and, in the 1970's, not even having a driver's license).

It was in the Jamaica basement apartment that, after Barry had moved out, I wrote the first version in the 1970's of the "Richard Farina Is Gone" eulogistic folk song and folk songs inspired by Joan Baez's life up to that time, like "Joan Baez's Song," "Woman Inspired" and "Wise Woman" (a folk love song whose lyrics and melody I now no longer remember).

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While working at the Council on International Education Exchange [C.I.E.E.], I also wrote a folk love song for a white woman in her 20's with long dark hair whom I considered beautiful and felt drawn to, named Paula, after meeting her for lunch in Midtown one 1970's weekday in the Spring. She was from suburban New Jersey and had some kind of well-paying job that involved helping to keep track of the additional money that the Midtown Manhattan book publishing firm she worked for made from selling subsidiary rights for things like movie adaptations and tv adaptations of the books they published, etc.

But after meeting me for lunch, Paula apparently felt no reciprocal physical or romantic attraction for me; and by the third time I telephoned her to see if she wanted to get together again for a date, she made it clear that the reason she was unavailable for a date the first and second times I called her after our lunch hour together wasn't really just because she was busy that evening. The deeper reason was that she had decided after talking with me during our lunch hour together that she didn't want to have anything to do with me; and, after I telephoned her a second time, she had begun to consider me as some kind of pest.

So after feeling the hostile vibes of her voice's tone, following my third telephone call to her, I wrote off Paula as being too culturally straight to interest me, despite her physical beauty--although I did still sing the folk love song I had written for her after our first lunch hour together for a few years, because I liked that particular folk song's melody (which is a melody I now know longer remember).