An Evening With Joan Baez @ Concert Hall Sydney Opera House

A very fine guitarist

There are mixed audiences and then there is the mix of 2500 people who come together on a warmish Spring night to hear a legend. AN EVENING WITH JOAN BAEZ called across generations. Oldies like me with faded jeans and lavender rinses to match the Opera House sails which are lit violet for Peace Day. Young people with hats on backwards and secreted ipads and phones sneakily recording the concert.

Baez has been around a really long time. She’s 74 now and been famous since the 1959 Newport Folk Festival. She knows her audience and her first three songs are solo and are a statement of intent.

With a brief intro about the famous Harvard Coffee Shop she launches into the brilliant guitar picking that reminds you that the poet standing alone front of you is also a fine guitarist. Eliza Cotton’s ‘Freight Train’ is classic folk but she follows with ‘God is God’ from the much misunderstood 2008 Day After Tomorrow album. The resonance of ‘Every day is another chance I get to get it right’ hits home to young and old. Then in ‘There But For Fortune’, her 1964 cover of the Phil Ochs anthem for humanity, her anti-war pacifism is front and centre.

Joined by Dirk Powell on a variety of instruments and her son Gabe Harris on percussion, and later by Grace Stumberg as backup singer, Baez holds the audience in the palm of her hand. It just takes a few chords of ‘Jerusalem’ and silence hits or ‘Diamond and Rust’ and people clap and cheer. And when she describes the “resounding show of bullshit” she experienced on Q & A the place goes nuts.

My favourite was ‘Silver Dagger’ from her 1960 debut album which she describes as being full of long, sad folk ballads about the dead or miserable. My idea of a good song, that! Accompanied by the Cajon drum, leg shaker, banjo and lit with 3 cold steel spots it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Which was easier to handle than the tears that rolled down for ‘And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda’ (Eric Bogle).

The politics is there in lefty standards like ‘Joe Hill’ (Hayes/Robinson) and Woody Guthrie’s ‘Deportee (Train Wreck at Los Gatos)’ which she avoids linking directly with the refugee crisis but this tone hangs in the air of the final plaintive note.

There is Dylan ( ‘Seven Curses’ ,’Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright’, ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ ) ; Paul Simon (‘The Boxer’); Lennon (‘Imagine’) . And Traditionals like ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’ and ‘House of the Rising Sun’; all in that unmistakeable voice.

The voice is different. But what do I know? It was the background to my youth through tinny trannies at the beach or single speaker record players in some stoner squat somewhere. I never heard it live before, and while pundits say the tops are missing, all the passion and belief that inspired me are still there, and that’s what I came for.

Yes, inspired I am, but a little sad also. This is an artist who has been part of our musical conscience for a generation. Why has nothing changed?!

Joan Baez performed just two concerts in Sydney, playing the Concert Hall on  Sunday 20th and Monday 21st September.