Joan Baez: ‘I Am A Noise’: Reviewing A Life In Song

I don’t trust anybody who does not like Joan Baez’s voice. Joan’s voice has the same quality as a sky lark or a warbler at the window at dawn. She comes from a time when causes were pure, and right and wrong felt absolute and inviolable and so does the purity of that classic Joan Baez voice. Some people do not like sunshine and innocence, the classically beautiful and the devoted to ideals and mercy . . . and those people generally don’t like Joan Baez. She has none of the snark of her protege, Bobby Dylan, none of the wildflower Alice in Wonderland kind of insanity-that-touches-genius of Patti Smith. She is closer to an interpreter than a singer – she interpreted the fears and the desires of a generation. If anyone was the voice of a generation, it was Joan, not Bob. Bob didn’t want the title anyway, not once he had captured her audience and the imagination of the people they both sang to.

Joan is a folk singer, and a teller of oral history, through song and action. Bob is devoted to words and art for the sake of it, he rejected the label ‘protest singer’ and the genre of ‘protest songs’ as soon as he was able to do so. Joan, who was born into a Quaker family, used her voice to help effect change, devoted herself to civil rights and to pacifism, and in doing so she sang the pain and the desire and the stories of the revolution she so desperately wanted to plant into the minds of the Vietnam War generation. Thankfully, there was room for them both.

Joan’s voice comes from a simple time, a movement that was unsullied and uncomplicated. Civil rights and peace still were possible. non violent action showed promise. Baez is a pure pacifist, a noisy, dancing, grit in the oyster shell kind of girl, who has maintained her girlishness into old age. The visual and audio autobiographical movie I Am A Noise is pure kino. It is a brutal self-exploration of her past, her present, at the time, as an artist doing their farewell tour, who is saying goodbye to both her voice and her audience, and as a retired icon who is discovering what path lays forward for her in both life, activism and creativity. It is a deeply beautiful and complex record of a life, which exists as a dreamscape and a sharp reality that has clearly cut Joan to the core throughout her extraordinary time on this planet. Before watching I Am A Noise, I did not realize Baez was such a sensitive, troubled and tortured soul, who has faced her trauma with immense bravery. It is only after watching I Am A Noise, that I understand To Ramona and the conversation with a panicked and deeply unhappy Joan that it portrays. Baez was so devoted to her political causes that she was being drawn along with the tide of changes, that she saw as absolute and Dylan saw as doomed to an incomplete redemption. The revolution was never going to take things nearly far enough for Joanie. She bet it all on drastic and total change for the better, she bet on the essential kindness and decency of people, and when she was constantly frustrated and disappointed, the existential horror must have been a lot to bear on her slim shoulders and tender soul.

Joan Baez is like a high e string, that is strung a little too tight, tuned to breaking point, almost sounding like a G sharp, vibrating with every breeze, every harsh word, every indignity and injustice that the world exposes it too. Her voice is an expression also of love, it is calmed by love, calmed by peace, calmed by kindness and excited by the talent of those around her. The sheer joy in her voice when she talks about championing the young Dylan is transmitted through the screen. Joan Baez feels deeply and has the unique talent of making others feel deeply too. She is like a conch shell that amplifies feeling. She exists in the eye of an emotional storm, and occasionally, it seems, although she dances and tries to avoid being buffeted by the winds of life and cruelty, that she takes collateral emotional damage, along the way.

When she sings, when she dances, when she talks she transmits her desires, almost psychically. She says she was ‘born for’ non violent action, and the recordings of her spending time with Dr King are even more extraordinary than her recordings with a young and puppy-like Dylan. Dylan’s gratitude apparently faded fast. She broke him onto the scene and then, like the hurricane he is, or at least was, he went on blowing his own way. Her work for justice, peace and civil rights shines like a beacon for all that is good in this world. I don’t always agree with Joan. She exists in two colors – in black and white. The faded shades of the recordings of her on the road, in the past, are bleached into a comfortable palette of muted shades and flicking memories. Joan is no shades of grey girl, and I admire that immensely. As a grey-girl I wish I could have the strength of her devotion to ‘this’ or ‘that’. She exists in extremes, and others who appreciate her absolute devotion are attracted to her, like moths to a flame. She is immensely brave, and steadfast. It is a testament to the power of this cinematic record, that it transmits the essence of Joan and her absolute bravery. Unfortunately we do not live in a monochrome world, we do not get to deal in absolutes or simplify things to yes or no, right or wrong, devil or angel. This does not suit Ms. Baez who has apparently had to come to terms with a world where her absolutism is just not compatible with reality.

Whether or not you resonate with Joan, or not, I Am A Noise is a fascinating psychological portrait of a woman surviving and thriving within her own trauma and turning her suffering into compassion and empathy for others who suffer and struggle. Her outrage at her own pain, instead of becoming a catalyst for self-absorption, instead led her to make big connections with her audience and with bigger goals and quests for a better world.

In cataloguing her therapy and recovery from the abuse she suffered as a child, Joan heals some wider wound, that she no longer needed to be raw and bleeding. There is a time for everything, and at the age of 50 she decided that it and that it was time to heal from her deep-down childhood wounds. In showing a cruel and sarcastic young Dylan singing the newly minted It Ain’t Me Babe alongside Joan, reveling in telling her that it ‘was not him’ and that she was not his, despite her love for her, and not only that, cruelly getting her to participate in the brutal message of the song, clearly written for her, the audience is carried along with Joan in her journey of healing. Dylan was who he was, and is who he is, and as Joan says in the documentary, not who she wanted him to be. The world is not what she wanted it to be either, and clearly, neither was her family, as she details the abuse she suffered from her father and others around her as a child. Joan took that kernel of damage and used it to create a pearl – Dylan’s “girl on the half shell” created beauty from damage, abuse and pain, using it as fuel for her creative life.

Joan explaining how it broke her heart when her love affair with Dylan broke her heart, and then in showing Joan singing the song on her farewell tour, with an acceptance and a gentle understanding, illustrates a microcosm of her own healing. We watch Joan taking back of her own power through therapy and her art, perfectly encapsulated by her performance of her beautiful masterpiece, Diamonds and Rust, which functions as a reply to It Ain’t Me Babe. In telling Dylan, clearly, and with no attempt to hide the fact she is singing to and about him, that ‘Speaking strictly for me/
We both could have died then and there’ and accepting that she needs to be more like him, vaguer, and accepting that she has already paid. Joan puts her relationship with Dylan on her altar, makes it safe and takes the sting out of the tale and the telling.

This is a beautifully put-together document, detailing the life and the healing of a gentle soul who tried to do good with her life and the gift of her voice. I believe Joan, and I believe in Joanie. I believe her pain, I believe her healing, I believe her passion for peace and I believe in the way she weaves her body as she dances free. I believe she loved Dylan every bit as much as she said she did, and I believe it hurt her deeply. I believe she has healed from the pain of surviving the abuse she suffered, and from being told ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe”….I believe in the way her voice wavers in a pure vibrato and the way her hands trip over the silver strings of her guitar. I believe Joan loves and is loved and I want to offer my love to her, as a stranger who sees her and hears her and wishes that I could make the world somewhere that a young Ramona would feel comfortable living in. I offer my shades of grey up to her black and white polar world of absolutes in some kind of salve to her disappointment at the failure of the revolution that she gave so much up for in the 1960s and 1970s. I see her bird fly high and her deer roam. For now the wolves seem to be kept away from the door for our beloved Joanie.

I will never forget seeing her at Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s benefit gig in San Francisco, in all her cowgirl finery, and the way she effortlessly captured the audience and the stage alike. I Am A Noise is a deeply honest self portrait and I for one, am deeply grateful for getting to know the wonderful Diamond Joan a little better than I did. I might even come to terms with the fact that Dylan is not the hero I wanted him to be….after all if Joanie can, who am I to be disappointed in the old man who at one point stood alone in thrall to the muse, while the girl in the half shell, tried to keep him ‘safe from harm’. A voice settled on Joan Baez, much like a bird settles on a branch, and no one can ever see she took that voice for granted, nor that she didn’t do as much good with it as she possibly could. Thank you, Joan.

~Detroit Richards 2024