Why I think this Bob Dylan song is all about Joan Baez

One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)

Bob Dylan

I didn't mean
To treat you so bad
You shouldn't take it so personal
I didn't mean
To make you so sad
You just happened to be there, that's all

When I saw you say "goodbye" to your friend and smile
I thought that it was well understood
That you'd be comin' back in a little while

I didn't know that you were sayin' "goodbye" for good

But, sooner or later, one of us must know
That you just did what you're supposed to do
Sooner or later, one of us must know
That I really did try to get close to you

I couldn't see
What you could show me
Your scarf had kept your mouth well hid
I couldn't see
How you could know me
But you said you knew me and I believed you did

When you whispered in my ear
And asked me if I was leavin' with you or her
I didn't realize just what I did hear
I didn't realize how young you were

But, sooner or later, one of us must know
That you're just doin' what you're supposed to do
Sooner or later, one of us must know
That I really did try to get close to you

I couldn't see
When it started snowin'
Your voice was all that I heard
I couldn't see
Where we were goin'
But you said you knew an' I took your word

And then you told me later, as I apologized
That you were just kiddin' me, you weren't really from the farm
An' I told you, as you clawed out my eyes that I
Never really meant to do you any harm

But, sooner or later, one of us must know
That you just did what you're supposed to do
Sooner or later, one of us must know
That I really did try to get close to you

This song appears on Dylan's second-to-best album, Blonde on Blonde (1966), the best (of course!) being Rough and Rowdy Ways, which he released only last year. My analysis of this song, line-by-line, attempts to prove my thesis:  though never recognized as such, it is a shockingly detailed, almost literal re-telling of his stormy, complicated and often sado-masochistic relationship with Joan Baez.

I didn't mean
To treat you so bad
You shouldn't take it so personal

The song starts off with this heartless and cynically dismissive assertion. In essence, he's saying to Joan, "Hey, I demolished you emotionally, but stop being so touchy about it. It didn't mean anything to me."

I didn't mean
To make you so sad
You just happened to be there, that's all

That glimmer of compassion ("I didn't mean to make you so sad") is then negated, if not stomped into the ground, by the cruelly casual "you just happened to be there, that's all". This is beyond dismissive - it borders on contempt, as if a figure as crucial to his career as Baez was just a bystander or a piece of furniture in his path (if not in his  way).

When I saw you say "goodbye" to your friend and smile
I thought that it was well understood
That you'd be comin' back in a little while

I didn't know that you were sayin' "goodbye" for good

Now, this MAY be related to a scene from the infamous 1966 documentary Dont Look Back (apostrophe omitted on purpose, for reasons unknown). Cameras followed Dylan around on his London tour, and though the concert performances are outstanding, the really fascinating part  takes place in Dylan's hotel room, filled with hangers-on (including a then-unknown Donovan, soon to eclipse Dylan on the hit parade) and media people hanging about like vultures. But one of these hangers-on was Baez, who came along with Dylan on tour (inviting herself, I believe) as a tag-along. Though Baez generously gave Bob's fledgling career a boost in 1961 by bringing him up onstage with her (when he was "a complete unknown" - sorry!), Dylan even more famously did NOT return the favor. It's as if she wasn't even considered. Was she asking too much, or did she have a hidden agenda all along, boosting her OWN career by giving the meteoric "unwashed phenomenon" a leg-up which he didn't actually need? 

In any case, the dynamics here are tangled and complex. The thwarted Joan was left strumming a stray guitar in the hotel room and singing in an ear-splitting voice that is really meant to be heard from  a distance. I don't remember the song, but it sure wasn't anything original. She was still singing archaic, traditional folk ballads like Mary Hamilton and Silver Dagger, with Dylan having long passed and surpassed her several years before.

"When I saw you say goodbye to your friend and smile" - that whole verse actually, literally happened. A particularly obnoxious sycophant named Bobby Neuwirth, supposedly Joan's good friend, attacked her verbally on-camera for no reason, claiming she was nothing but a flat-chested has-been (!). Joan tried to laugh it off, but you could see how devastated she was as she slipped out the door to catch the nearest plane home. Goodbye for good. But Dylan attempts to yank the yo-yo string by assuming she'd be "coming back in a little while" - an arrogant assertion if ever there was one.

But, sooner or later, one of us must know
That you just did what you're supposed to do
Sooner or later, one of us must know
That I really did try to get close to you

Again, this is so back-handed! "You just did what you're supposed to do" may be a reference to the way Baez proudly displayed the still-wet-behind-the-ears Dylan on stage during HER concert performances. After singing Masters of War or With God on Our Side, she'd get the audience all stirred up by asking the crowd, "Would you like to meet the young man who wrote  that song?", prompting screams of adulation.  And "I really did try to get close to you" can be taken at least two ways. It echoes the story of the disgusting sycophant Richard Farina, who, shockingly, married Joan's teenaged sister Mimi just to "get close to" Joan. For career reasons only.

I couldn't see
What you could show me
Your scarf had kept your mouth well hid
I couldn't see
How you could know me
But you said you knew me and I believed you did

More enigmatic statements, but "your scarf it kept your mouth well hid" may be a shockingly direct detail (in the way Dylan can throw in shockingly direct details, even in the middle of the most surrealistic song). In Dont Look Back, Joan attempts to attract some attention by covering her mouth with a gauzy scarf and doing a sort of seductive harem dance in the hotel room. For no apparent reason, Neuwirth casually, mockingly rips into her. She dances around like Mata Hari, trying  desperately to look as if she's just goofing around and having a good time, as Dylan coldly ignores her and Neuwirth gores her in her most vulnerable places. "Look, there's Fang Baez, wearing one of those see-through blouses that you don't even wanna!" Ignoring all this, Dylan is as self-absorbed as always.  "But you said you knew me and I believed you did" seems to hint that HE felt (bizarrely) betrayed by HER. Today we'd call that "gaslighting".

When you whispered in my ear
And asked me if I was leavin' with you or her
I didn't realize just what I did hear
I didn't realize how young you were

Oh, now THIS one! This is very direct. At the time of the London tour, Dylan  was secretly married to Sara Lownds, a figure who is  to this day mysterious because she has never spoken to the media about Dylan or anyone/anything else. Baez knew nothing of her or of his secret marriage, but was to find out in a shocking, hurtful way. She came to his hotel room after hearing a rumor that he was sick, bringing him a shirt she had picked out for him. Sara answered the door, took the shirt, thanked her nicely, and closed the door again. "You or her" is sung with such vitriol that it can only be for real. "I didn't realize just what I did hear/I didn't realize how young you were" is a bit mysterious, since Baez is half a year older. And why is he playing so innocent with that "I didn't realize" business? "How young you were" is a bit of a puzzle, but it's known that Dylan was attracted to the 17-year-old Mimi Baez (then still in high school) before he took up with Joan.

I couldn't see
When it started snowin'
Your voice was all that I heard
I couldn't see
Where we were goin'
But you said you knew an' I took your word

Am I reaching here? Not by much. In the lyrics of Baez' melancholy anthem to Dylan, Diamonds and Rust, there appear these lines: 

Now I see you standing

With brown leaves falling around
And snow in your hair
Now you're smiling out the window
Of that crummy hotel over Washington Square

Our breath comes out white clouds
Mingles and hangs in the air
Speaking strictly for me

We both could have died then and there

Yes, SNOW. But the snow falling all around them and lighting on his famous nimbus of hair was blinding his view. Can't see in front of me, Joanie, it's SNOWING outside. And "your voice was all that I heard" - well, that's a bit obvious. What else does he care about 'cept what she (meaning her voice) can do for his career? "Couldn't see where we were goin'" might be literal (Dylan is blind as a bat without his glasses, and too vain to wear them in public), but it can also mean where the relationship was going. It was inseparable from the complicated dynamics of their briefly-intertwining careers. It seems to me he  (at least initially) liked and admired her, but SHE was madly, passionately in love with him. "But you said you knew an' I took your word" seems to suggest  Baez wanted to retain sort of share in Dylan for "discovering" him, and the direction she was taking him in (a sort of creative partnership) wasn't what he wanted at all. He was too proud to receive help from anyone, and by that time he was already more famous than Baez would ever be. So, once again, the line has a flavour of accusation, as if he trusted HER and she somehow betrayed him.

And then you told me later, as I apologized
That you were just kiddin' me, you weren't really from the farm
An' I told you, as you clawed out my eyes that I
Never really meant to do you any harm

This may just be a Dylanesque detail thrown in for drama. Hmmmm, did he really apologize to her, how sincerely, and exactly for what? For shooting down her floating hopes with a poisoned arrow? "Clawed out my eyes" and "never meant to do you  any harm" both seem like fiction to me. But years later, in answer to a sappy song Dylan recorded called Oh, Sister (which most felt was a sort of backhanded, even chastising love song for Baez - he  wasn't quite through with her yet), Baez wrote a song right back at him, called Oh, Brother! In it she clearly refers to the nasty triangle of Dylan, Baez and Sara Lowndes. But all this came much later. Could Dylan see (even with his blind eyes)  "where we were going", after all?

The line about "from the farm" makes no sense to me at all, unless it's a reference to Maggie's Farm. Upon which Dylan ain't going to work no more. Oh, or it could be this - on the same album, there's a line in Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands (known to be a paean to Sara): "They wish you'd accepted the blame for the farm." I can't make this one out either, except her "streetcar visions" may be a reference to A Streetcar Named Desire and Blanche Dubois losing the family plantation, Belle Rive. OK, I know, it's far-fetched, but so is Dylan, sometimes.

But, sooner or later, one of us must know
That you just did what you're supposed to do
Sooner or later, one of us must know
That I really did try to get close to you

Sooner or later, and he  doesn't seem to care too much if it IS sooner or later, "one of  us" must know (and in Diamonds and Rust, Baez talks about Dylan's talent for "keeping things vague") that she served her purpose - what she was "supposed to do", which is to make him famous. But did he really try to get close to her, and what exactly does that mean? In the Richard Farina sense? Though Dylan's famous, probably fictional "motorcycle accident" in 1966 gave him  the massive time-out he needed to survive, ironically, Farina died at the same time in an actual motorcycle accident. Richard Farina, who was married to Joan Baez's 17-year-old sister. Oh, what a tangled web, and how skillfully and ruthlessly Dylan weaves fiction and fact together! But this is one nasty song, and I can't  see how to read it any other way.

In subsequent years - MUCH later - Dylan praised Baez to the  skies, even rhapsodizing about her in a bizarre 30-minute award acceptance speech in the early 2000s. Too little, too late? Though  Baez generously and publicly congratulated Dylan for his 2020 masterpiece, Rough and Rowdy Ways, she has also said she has no desire to meet up with him again. Sooner or later, one of them (meaning HIM) must know just what he did to her, and how wounds that deep and devastating can never heal.

 

She don't look back

(So howcum I'm posting this-all? I got reading Positively 4th Street again, maybe due to taking the guitar out of its dusty case for the first time in a dozen years. Or not? Anyway, these were kind of cool books, reviewed for an internet publication so's I can rerun them any time I want. They do go back a few years, but I heard-tell that Bob Dylan just performed at the 2011 Grammys, so I looked at the clip. It wasn't good news. He sounds like Tom Waits on Draino, a growling monotone that bespeaks shredded vocal chords. Is it finally time to wind up the Never-Ending Tour?)

Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina by David Hajdu
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 328 pages ISBN: 0-374-28199-8

Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan by Howard Sounes
Grove Press 527 pages ISBN: 0-8021-1686-8

During a weekend retreat at a Benedictine monastery earlier this year, I reconnected with one of the idols of my youth in a setting which was both wildly unlikely and oddly appropriate. “I’d like to play you some of the most spiritual music ever written,” Father John told us as he switched on the CD player to the howling bark of the greatest visionary popular music has ever known, Bob Dylan.

Appropriate, because after all, Dylan the master trickster pops up everywhere these days – on TV commercial jingles, in an audience with the Pope (in which he sang “Blowin’ in the Wind”), at the Kennedy Center as an awkward but grateful honoree, and even at this year’s Academy Awards.

He has been nominated for a Nobel Prize for literature and booed off the stage by hostile audiences for the sin of “going electric”. Throughout his monumental career as a troubadour of conscience, Bob Dylan has not reflected the times so much as predicted them, keeping one eerie step ahead of whatever way the wind blows.

It’s not surprising that on the occasion of his 60th birthday, various writers would attempt to capture his enigmatic presence in biography. This is a nearly impossible task, like picking up a blob of mercury that scatters into a million glittering bits. The problem is that Dylan has lived so many lives in one, all of them radically intense: the idealistic young folkie visiting Woody Guthrie in the hospital, the jaded rocker crashing his motorbike, the family-oriented country squire, the born-again Christian zealot, the actor (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Dharma and Greg), the grizzled survivor on his famous Never-Ending Tour.

Just when critics were about to write him off as a has-been, he recorded the amazing 1997 Grammy-winner Time Out of Mind, followed up by the ultimate Dylan hurting-love song, Things Have Changed. Receiving his Oscar for best song, he looked frayed around the edges, exhausted by a life at the fringes of normalcy. But he still has those hypnotic, penetrating eyes – eyes that can see for a thousand miles, deep into the heart of life’s most fragile, compelling mysteries.

New York journalist David Hajdu has come as close as any writer to nailing Dylan’s mercurial soul to the page – a curious fact, given that POSITIVELY 4TH STREET does not center on him exclusively (but then, perhaps enigmas are best glimpsed out of the corner of your eye). The book recreates a charmed time, the era of the ‘60s folk boom with its burning idealism and compelling personalities. It was the perfect cultural milieu for a gifted, ambitious artist like Dylan to make his debut.
But as Hajdu points out, he wasn’t the only opportunist in the crowd. Joan Baez comes across as a curious mixture of brash confidence and quaking insecurity, using the ‘60s to her advantage in a way which in retrospect looks quite ruthless. “She just devoured everybody’s things,” a friend recalls of her ability to expropriate song material and make it her own. “I knew I could do what (the folk singers) were doing and a lot better than them,” Baez claimed.

Her Anglo-Mexican background made her a bit of an exotic, and she soon graduated from the coffeehouses of Cambridge to the Newport Folk Festival in 1959. Musician Bob Gibson gave her a push, but it was hardly necessary: “If I hadn’t ‘introduced’ Joan Baez, someone else would have. It was like ‘discovering’ the Grand Canyon.”

Such a force of nature seemed to be on a predestined collision-course with another astral body, a tightly-wound Minnesotan minstrel-boy newly renamed Bob Dylan. The former Bobby Zimmerman, a baby-faced Jewish rock musician from a small town, had remade himself in Woody Guthrie’s image and was busy charming the socks off people (particularly young women) all over New York’s Greenwich Village.

Dylan even mimicked Guthrie’s tics from Huntington’s chorea, causing fellow singer Eric von Schmidt to describe him as “a spastic little gnome”. But with all his charm, Dylan was paradoxically an extreme introvert; as Theodore Bikel reminisced, “He didn’t reach out to touch you. You had to come where he was.”

When these two supernatural beings joined forces, they immediately went supernova. Dylan’s embryonic talent to capture the political zeitgeist was cheered on by an enthralled, deeply infatuated Baez.
Meanwhile her little sister Mimi, still in high school, was developing a quieter but beautifully polished musical gift of her own. Destined to live forever in Joan’s giant shadow, she even ended up with a sort of faux Bob Dylan in the person of Cuban-Irish writer Richard Farina, whom she married at the tender age of seventeen.

The Farina of Hajdu’s account was not so much an original as a badly-smudged photocopy of Dylan’s blazing genius (“I could kind of see the strings,” one friend put it), a hanger-on who would stop at nothing to further his ambitions. While Dylan turned out such searing masterpieces as A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, Masters of War and The Times They Are A-Changin’, Farina fiddled with a dulcimer and rehashed traditional folk tunes, winning over a surprising number of people on charm alone.
“He walked and talked as if he had been born wearing a cape,” a friend remembers.

Many believed he went after Mimi just to get to Joan, and the ploy worked. For a time there was a strange sort of romantic formation, not a triangle so much as a rectangle, Bob and Joan on one side, Mimi and Richard on the other, with flirtations flying dangerously in all directions.

Though Hajdu is very good at recreating all the fizz and spark of the folk era, he drops names at such a thick rate that it can make for hard going: “Carolyn and Richard had never met Mimi and Todd, and Mimi and Todd had not met Alex Campbell, a Scottish folk singer whom Carolyn , Richard and John knew.” There must be a less-awkward way to introduce the huge cast of players on the folk scene.

But like the magazine reporter he is, Hajdu just has to tell us who was there and what was said, giving some passages a distinct gossip-column flavor. Still, he does show us a Dylan bristling with paradox: stumblingly inarticulate in person, but a master communicator on stage; a protest-song writer par excellence who had virtually no interest in politics; a man both vicious (as in the slashing Positively 4th Street, a diatribe against all his old Greenwich Village friends: “I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes,/You’d know what a drag it is to see you”) and deeply compassionate, as in the Ballad of Hollis Brown and Chimes of Freedom.

And he traces the inevitable falling-out between the King and Queen of folk, as Baez comes to realize that Dylan “criticizes society, and I criticize it, but he ends up saying there is not a goddamned thing you can do about it, so screw it. And I say just the opposite.” Dylan’s scandalously poor treatment of Joan on his tour to London further undermined the romance, which was destined to blaze briefly, then collapse.

A far worse disaster struck Mimi Baez Farina when her husband was killed in a motorcycle crash on her 21st birthday in 1966. Suddenly it was all over. Dylan abandoned folk and went electric; Joan Baez remained glued in the ‘60s, forever associated with that all-too-brief time when anything seemed possible.

For a more blow-by-blow account of the life of Bob Dylan, you couldn’t do much better than British writer Howard Sounes’ DOWN THE HIGHWAY. This book is as detailed and relentless as one of Dylan’s marathon-length songs (say, Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands or Desolation Row) and seems to go on as long as the fabled Never-Ending Tour. For Dylan addicts hungry for trivia tidbits, this is fine fare, but there is a certain fineness missing from the writing, a subtlety which would have helped capture the mystery of the man.

Here we learn that Bob’s nickname in high school was Zimbo, and that he piled his hair on top of his head in deliberate imitation of Little Richard. We find out that the last thing his mother said when he left home was, “Don’t keep writing poetry, please don’t.”

Though Sounes does acknowledge the greatness of Dylan’s lyrics (citing such classic lines as “he not busy being born is busy dying” and “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”), he tends to focus more on his subject’s messy, convoluted personal life with its dozens of complicated love affairs. Though Dylan made a brave attempt at marriage to Sara Lowndes and has been a loving father to his six children, he is not good husband material, and can’t even seem to hang on to his friends for long.

What emerges in Sounes’ book is a portrait of a desperately lonely man, isolated by his genius and an almost pathological social awkwardness. In some ways Bob Dylan is a bit of an idiot savant, supremely gifted in his words and music but handicapped everywhere else. But as Sounes points out, his strange charisma is so strong that these flaws only add to his mystique. As one record executive put it, “Is he a regular guy? No. Why would you want him to be?”

The baffling way he has always played with the press reflects a deep shyness and a reluctance to share private details. It would be interesting to know what Dylan would make of a book that probes his personal life so deeply, sometimes at the expense of what should be the main focus, his art.

Still, I was intrigued to learn that “Lay, Lady, Lay” was originally written for Midnight Cowboy (typically, Dylan missed the deadline), and that Woodstock legend Wavy Gravy remains a close friend. And yes, the musicians really were stoned on the infamous Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 (which, like a lot of Dylan classics, was done in a single take).

But let the master have the last word. In preparing to write this piece, I plunged back into those songs again and was astounded at their freshness and power, even decades later. This is the real reason Dylan is worthy subject matter for books like these. The man still has the capacity to move me to tears, especially in my personal favorite, his ringing anthem of the dispossessed, Chimes of Freedom:

“Tolling for the aching, whose wounds cannot be nursed,
For the countless confused, accused, misused
Strung-out ones, and worse,
And for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe –
And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashin’.”

To that I say – amen, Bob; amen.