Why isn’t the headline: “The long-overdue death of the sixties?”
This is pathetic and wonderful, via Wes Pruden:
Joanie plucked gamely at the strings of her guitar, if not necessarily the heartstrings in the audience, and sang the anthems of the wrinkled unwashed from our most dissolute decade: “Song of Peace” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.” She avoided what was arguably her greatest crowd-pleaser, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” an improbable tribute to the Confederacy. She clearly yearns for a reprise of the ’60s, when the war in Vietnam gave an exciting social life to the generation drugged on cheap sex and playing at make-believe revolution.
“This is huge,” she told the crowd of 200 or so spectators, wilting in the Texas heat and yearning only for a reprise of the air-conditioned comfort back at the motel. “In the first march I went to [during the war in Vietnam] there were 10 of us.”
Of course this is utter nonsense, and a further indication of how far these fools have fallen. Baez seems to have forgotten that there really were glory days for her career. Take the 1963 March on Washington, at which she was a headliner. The mid-point crowd estimate was 350,000; here’s an excerpt from a chronicle of that march:
The demonstrators gathered at the Washington Monument, where a stage had been set up for morning entertainment. Joan Baez [picture] opened the program with “Oh Freedom” and also led a rendition of “We Shall Overcome.” Other performers included Odetta; Josh White (Bayard Rustin had been his sideman thirty years earlier); the Albany Freedom Singers; Bob Dylan; and Peter, Paul and Mary, whose version of Dylan’s civil rights anthem “Blowin’ in the Wind” was then number two on the charts (after Martha and the Vandellas’ “Heat Wave”).
Before noon and ahead of schedule, impatient demonstrators began to march up Independence and Constitution Avenues to the Lincoln Memorial. The march leaders got word of this surprise development while lobbying on Capitol Hill, and they rushed to join the advancing throng. Enterprising march marshals opened a passageway for them so that they could be photographed arm in arm “leading” the march.
Press coverage was more extensive than for any previous political demonstration in U.S. history. A huge tent near the Lincoln Memorial held the march committee’s “News HQ.” The committee issued no fewer than 1,655 special press passes, augmenting the 1,220 members of the regular Washington press corps. News agencies sent large crews of reporters and photographers—some assigned to celebrities, others to everyday marchers, others to aerial coverage. Leading newspapers in many countries ran the march story on their front pages. It was also one of the first events to be broadcast live around the world, via the newly launched communications satellite Telstar. The three major television networks spent over three hundred thousand dollars (more than twice the march committee’s budget) to broadcast the event. CBS covered the rally “gavel to gavel,” from 1:30 to 4:30, canceling As the World Turns, Password, Art Linkletter’s House Party, To Tell the Truth, The Edge of Night, and Secret Storm.
No, Joanie Phonie, in 1963 or at any time during the sixties, you weren’t playing to 10 people or had an entourage that small. Joan Baez was 18 in 1959 when she performed at the first Newport Folk Festival, after receiving an invitation from Dylan. She played to a crowd estimated at 13,000 for that wonderful event. There were half a million people present when she played Woodstock a decade later.
Trying to pretend that 200 sad losers in a ditch in Texas is the beginning of something is just pathetic. It is, precisely, the end of something. It is a funeral for the sixties — that no one bothered to attend. (HT: Powerline)
Addendum
The fossilized remains of McGovern campaign chairman Gary Hart may be seen today in the Washington Post saying something like: “US out of Vietnam NOW! No negotiations! Smash ROTC! Off the pigs!” or some such. Sorry Senator and Joanie: the US may have its problems, but it has pretty well decided that you are not the solution.
August 24th, 2005 at 6:02 am
I remember mind-numbed followers saying they were voting for Gary Hart, because he had “new ideas” with Geraldine Ferrarro is was “electricity in the air” with John Kerry it was a “secret plan” and Hillary had her “listening tour.” They all speak passionately of the virtues of “choice.”
History has proven the folly of empty leftist cliches. They hide behind what they really believe:once they’re in power they – kill babies – tax workers to buy votes-steal from defense budgets they’ll never use – soak the productive job-creating class -shut down religion -it’s an opiate – tell minorities “we care” then ignore them between elections – their village is the deceptively authoritarian government Orwell warned about – stack the court with willing lawmaking judges to override the will of the people -morph education into indoctrination -reduce science to global politics -transfer sovereignity to one world institutions….degade us all with trash from the glitteri Hollywood set -make voting with clear info impossible with the distortions of their private press -load bureaucracies with leftists -destroy the structure of society by inverting the meaning of marriage – they censor out thoughts with pc-I could fill reams without trying of their clever deceptions. Their working motto remains “How can we fool them today! It seems that once again the war is nowhere but amonst ourselves and it may be that we will never get another chance to put away America’s real enemy:Godless , leftist, liberalism.
August 24th, 2005 at 4:37 pm
Amen, DL.
August 24th, 2005 at 4:38 pm
Amen, brothers DL and Wyck.
August 24th, 2005 at 4:39 pm
Amen brother DL
August 24th, 2005 at 5:38 pm
She didn’t get an invite from Dylan in 1959; it would be two or three years before she or anyone else would hear of Bob Dylan.
August 24th, 2005 at 6:50 pm
Joan Baez was 18 in 1959 when she performed at the first Newport Folk Festival, after receiving an invitation from Dylan.
Bob Dylan was 17 years old in 1959. I think that was the year he left Hibbing for a brief stab at college in Minneapolis before heading eventually for NYC and the Village.
The invitation extended to Baez to play at the ’59 Newport festival was from folk singer Bob Gibson. That’s what it says in the linked article at Vanguard Records. It looks like you confused Bob Gibson with Bob Dylan.
Though your Baez was already big star when she started covering Dylan’s songs. Dylan’s career was unquestionably helped by both her recordings of his songs and their personal relationship as lovers. Eventually, Dylan’s career eclipsed that of Baez as it does to this day.
It’s interesting that though Dylan performed at the 1963 Civil Rights march, and though some of his songs, particularly Blowin’ In The Wind and Masters Of War, are regarded as ‘protests’ songs, Dylan has always openly rejected the label of a writer of protests songs and he’s never really been outspoken politically. Blowin’ In The Wind may allude to the civil rights movement and Hard Rain Gonna Fall may use the imagery of nuclear war, but the songs are much broader and more timeless than a specific political point.
August 24th, 2005 at 7:49 pm
Joan Baez and the other folkies have been singing about the hammer of justice and the bell of freedom for years, but they don’t recognize it when they see it.