Joan Baez & Loudon Wainwright III folk up Door County

Joan Baez, at age 70, was gracious & luminous in a Door County Auditorium concert July 16th. Her rendition of Woody Guthries's "Deportees," which she dedicated to the immigrants of Arizona, especially moved me. I enjoyed hearing her perform, with a fine 4-piece band, Robbie Robertson's brilliant "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" for an encore. Then she made an "I'm Sleepy" sign as if to apologize for a short show (it actually lasted over two hours).

Why did Ms. Baez only have one big hit in the Sixties anyway? Some of the audience applauded the opening notes of "There But for Fortune," a Phil Ochs song that she made famous circa 1966, among other favorites. "Diamonds & Rust" got some FM-radio airplay in the late Seventies, as I recall. She didn't play that one here.

Loudon Wainwright III, dressed in short pants - due, he said, to American Airlines having lost his luggage & CDs in Chicago - was professionally entertaining at Egg Harbor on July 18th. The outdoor crowd & I sang along to his early 70s novelty hit "Dead Skunk (in the Middle of the Road)." Head tilted back, tongue lolling & mouth distorted for comic effect, he played 40 years of his weird music, including a tender song ("Five Years Old") for his now famous daughter Martha Wainwright.

But then Loudon disappointed us by backing out of the traditional Peg Egan PAC post-concert reception. Oh well, I couldn't have bought his 2009 Grammy-winning CD "High, Wide & Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project" from him anyway. Still, I would've liked to get an autograph from that sometime actor. Son Rufus Wainwright may be an even better songwriter and performer than his father.

Where Have All the Weirdos Gone?

Bored by the ugly blandness of most contemporary mainstream American culture, I keep seeking signs of beautiful weirdness. God knows the universe itself is an odd phenomenon. So you think there'd be fewer dull people hanging around trying to suck you into their dreary talk. "Where have all the weirdos gone?" I wonder.

My mission with Muse of the Weird is primarily to share my weird discoveries, musical & otherwise, with the world - or, rather, the worldwide web. To those of you hip enough to have located & followed this web-log (a slightly more elegant neologism than its more widely used abbreviated form "blog"), I say thank you for joining my literary journey to the Weird Side of Life. Heeding Virginia Woolf's wise advice, I write only what I like to write. Life's too short to do otherwise if you're a real writer. I hope that you enjoy how I write it, hyperbole & all.

So what do I mean by "weird" anyway? Since Shakespeare wrote about three witchy "weird sisters" in that murderous Scottish tragedy Macbeth, the word has come to mean strange, unusual or eccentric, especially in an eerie or frightening way. Originally, the dictionaries tell me, "weird" connoted destiny. Its etymology traces the modern adjective back to the Old English word "wyrd," a noun meaning fate or luck (often bad). Over time, "weird" has drifted towards a less ominous denotation, albeit one that's no less loaded. By way of illustration, here's an example of weirdness, which I came across in Joan Baez's memoir "And a Voice to Sing With" (1987; 2008 edition).

While filming Bob Dylan's weird film "Renaldo & Clara" during the Rolling Thunder Revue tour of 1975-76, Joan once dressed up as Bob (complete with fake stubble) & improvised a scene at a hotel in which she confronts her male mirror-image about their breakup ten years earlier. "Why'd ya lie to me about Sara?" Joan-Bob boldly asks Bob-Bob. "What would our lives be like if we had married?" Sheepish & surprised, Bob says nothing.

Kudos to gutsy Joan Baez. It ain't easy to out-weird Bob Dylan. As the old falsetto-voiced dulcimer-strumming folk weirdo John Jacob Niles once said (about a concert latecomer who'd provoked him into halting his performance in order to embarrass the poor fan): "Attention follows motion, not sound."

Joan Baez , Birthday Gal: "Dixie," Dylan & The Band

Sensational soprano singer/songwriter & guitarist Joan Baez turned 69 on January 9th. She's still a beauty as well as an inspiring social & political activist. The first big - and youngest - star of the late-Fifties folk revival, Baez had just one pop-radio hit (a Billboard chart #3 in 1971) with Canadian-bred Robbie Robertson's Civil War-themed ballad "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down."

Baez's cover version might not have as great an arrangement as The Band's original 1969 recording, which features a creaky rustic lead vocal by Levon Helm, but it stills give me chills. Robertson was inspired to write that brilliant, poignant song after hearing several people in Dixieland claim that 'the South will rise again.' "There's a pain here, there is a sadness here. In Americana land, it's a kind of a beautiful sadness," Robertson has said about his timeless "Dixie Down."

By the way, Baez does a devastating impression of her ex-boyfriend Bob Dylan (see Scorcese's Dylan documentary "No Direction Home"), with whom she shared many stages from 1963 (Newport Folk Festival & the historic March on Washington) to 1975-76 (the Rolling Thunder Revue tour). Maybe it's her revenge for Dylan's wisecrack that "folk music is for fat people."