Joan Baez + Eliza Carthy and Saul Rose, Portsmouth Guildhall, 19/10/99
Transatlantic Session
Half the Isle of Wight was going to turn out for this one. Joan Baez hadn't ever played Portsmouth in her entire career but word was it was the closest large scale venue (2,300) that would mean her guitarists parents, brothers, aunties and uncles and friends would be able to get to.
    Portsmouth Guildhall is a big imposing looking building with two big lions either side of massive stone steps. At one time it stood proudly behind a long open paved area that lead to the town's railway station and on to the town's shopping area. Now it is hemmed in by tall ugly office blocks which choke its beauty. It's the kind of place for the Admiral's banquet and tonight it is host to Joan Baez who seems ageless.
    The Guildhall bar is the place to be spotting all the familiar faces from the Isle of Wight including a healthy contingent of Adam Kirk's entire family.
    The call for the gig comes at 7.30 and the bar empties. Different to a previous Baez show I've seen, tonight Eliza Carthy opens with Saul Rose on harmonium and Martin Green on accordian. Eliza is the daughter of Martin Carthy and Norma Waterstone. Carthy's arrangement of Scarborough Fair was ripped off by Paul Simon when he heard Carthy in English folks clubs in the sixties and taken home and turned into mega bucks. Don't think he even so much as acknowledged the influence.
    Eliza has a broad gutsy English folk voice, with an intonation of the North. Also a beautiful fiddle style. And the combination of fiddles and two squeeze boxes mixes Irish and English folk tunes into a back porch hoedown that might have been raised in the Appalacian mountains.
    After the break the auditorium was buzzing. Joan Baez came on stage to mass applause. Vic and I had been talking about what she might play. 'Will she do Long Bed From Kenya' he wonders. First off she does Dar Williams If I Wrote You. I look down at my Zandtanista shirt and smile.
    Dar Williams for me is one talented artist and I hold If I Wrote You as her greatest song thus far. In concert she dedicates to Texas songwriters and on her third album she dedicates it to the memory of Townes Van Zandt. She wrote it in an Austin motel room and when I've heard her sing it I generally freeze up.
    An evening with Joan Baez is kind of campfire gentle and the songs are given different blends of musicians and treatments. Mark Peterson is in the Steve Swallow class of bass players. His voice on Welcome Me To The City of Angels by the Indigo Girls always makes me take a deep breath.
    Carole Steele plays stunning percussion and tonight she takes a verse of I'll Be Your Baby Tonight which proves she can sing her backside off as well. Joan Baez does her wonderful Dylan mimic on that one and the whole audience laughs their heads off.
    Mikey Kirk has been overwhelming in his praise of Josh Segal. 'You wait till you hear him,' he enthuses at the bar. 'He's wonderful'. Wonderful? He's bloody stunning. Playing all kinds of instruments like mandolin, violin but in particular his work on soprano and tenor saxophone is just beautiful. On one delicate song its just Joan Baez and Josh Segal on stage. She delicately finger picking arpeggios and he behind her honeyed voice with a set of notes that tumble like water over rocks in a mountain stream.
    Adam Kirk is his usual unphased self. I've called him before the most selfless guitar player I know of. Never flashy, never showing off, just playing enough to fit the song or support the vocal. Yet he'll just put in a lick to stop you dead if he feels like it. He once told me that all solos are good for is to be the chorus between two verses of a song. So he keeps them short and to the point (wish I could write reviews like that . . .).
    Tonight when Joan Baez introduces the band, she says as she always does 'And from the Isle of Wight, young Adam Kirk.' Tonight half the Isle of Wight are here and the place erupts. Adam looks embarrassed, Joan Baez beams and asks all the Islanders to give him a wave of their hands above their heads. A great sea of arms come up and wave. Adam is stunned and steps back and goes red, then waves back.
    Joan Baez's set tonight has been superb. They did The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down with just her vocal, Josh's violin and the harmonies of Mark Peterson, Carole Steele, Adam Kirk and verses sung by Eliza Carthy.
    Joan Baez does There But Fortune which receives great applause. She also still does both of Betty Elders songs Crack In The Mirror (about child abuse) and her stunning Long Bed From Kenya.
    I think Betty Elders Peaceful Existence CD is one of the greatest unsung albums of OKOM currently in circulation. And her husband Gene Elders has got to be up there as one of the finest OKOM fiddle players around. As people they belong with many other fine Austin based musicians as being the real McCoy.
    Long Bed From Kenya was stunning. I pair it with what I think is Robert Earl Keen's finest song Leaving Tennessee because it expresses the same kind of sentiments. Eliza Carthy trades verses with Joan Baez.
    Baez is a bit of a wag and has started taking off Eliza's north country accent to a tee. Eliza grins, 'She's good, she's gradually getting all the band down to a tee . . .' laughs Eliza. 'Thankyou Honeychild you give me goosebumps,' smiles Joan Baez after hearing Eliza sing Long Bed From Kenya.
    Well we didn't get Suzanne tonight which was a pity because I would have loved to have heard it but we did get Play Me Backwards, Joe Hill, Hello In There, Lily of the West, Lily and Sinead Lohan's No Mermaid amongst others I can't recall right now except one about Mimi Farina and Richard Farina which starts about Sir Galahad, that was a corker of a song.
    What we did get was Joan Baez reflecting on stories in her life. She always tells the story about the time that her old Martin, which she paid 200 dollars for 30 years ago, when it went in for repair at Martin and they found that someone over the past thirty years who had done a previous repair had scrawled a message inside the sound box. It said 'Pity you're a communist'.
    This she followed with a delightful take on life and being able to co-exist with folks of different political viewpoints. She was on a first class trip somewhere, possibly from America to Europe and sat alongside a very austere and expensively dressed bloke. She said he looked very much like he was on the other side of the political spectrum. He was but it turned out in conversation that he was a great Joan Baez fan. 'So what about the politics?' she enquired. 'You didn't make it easy,' he smiled.
    Joan Baez has also taken to telling longer stories like snapshots from her life. One involved her trip to Brazil, Argentina and Chile in 1981. She was forbade to sing in any of these countries. In Brazil she was told by the authorities that if she sang on a stage she would be immediately arrested and deported.
    A Brazilian statesman and friend found a loophole in this and brought her to a Church full of people and the plan was that she would sing in the middle of these people at a given moment in their own songs. She did, sang Imagine by John Lennon and her freedom song and got away with it.
    Well almost, they tried tear gassing her hotel and the hotel leaned on her and said they had no rooms. But she's a very astute lady and got around that too. Then she sang her Freedom song.
    I remember someone criticising her for her money and for her decisions to go to Yugoslavia during the troubles as though she was capitalising on their misery and what they needed was money not folk songs. She said some people bring bread and others have to bring roses.
    Joan Baez also sang just about my favourite song of hers. Earlier when she spoke of Betty Elders Long Bed From Kenya she said it was a love song written after the event, like most love songs are and Diamonds and Rust I think it is one of the great love songs of the twentieth century.
    The image of Bob Dylan phoning from a booth in the midwest is stunning and when she sings 'here comes your ghost again' you can sense that those heady days in the early sixties can never be pushed under the carpet. And I love the waggish ending she puts on this live, 'and if you offer me diamonds and rust, I'll take the diamonds . . . (to howls of laughter and masses of applause).
Mike Plumbley