Sweet the Sound

It's been awhile since. I just watched a documentary about Joan Baez "So Sweet the Sound." We listened to Joan Baez records when I was growing up and her voice to hear it now reminds me of an old two-story in Spokane, Washington on Atlantic Street in 1982 or thereabouts. The vinyl collection then stored in the same piece of antique furniture in which my mom now keeps the tablecloths (I think it's the same one). Joan Baez and Bob Dylan were everything music to me, the height of cool - she was long dark hair and a guitar singing about frustrated love, about peace, impersonating Dylan with whom she was once in love - that guy on the album cover next to her's in the antique bureau - of the mad hair, dark glasses and the dangling cigarette. I was six years old.

I didn't know then that they were before my time. I would hear them later in life, as a teenager, a 20-something, now, and say I listened to them growing up, as though I were a child of the 60's. I was too young for Selma and MLK, the Vietnam war, the space race and the British Invasion. That was my parents' time, it belonged to them, 20-somethings playing the records that were their lifetime.

There is a distinct memory of sitting on the wooden floor with my little sister, under the dining room table, and we perhaps 4 and 5 are looking at album covers, splaying them out all around us on the floor. I clearly recall Jim Croce's moustache, a quartet of bearded men holding instruments, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Joan Baez in soft 70's yellow light and a v-neck sweater, Dylan in a flower covered fedora, a "mixed LP" (as it were) containing one of my favorite songs to listen to up through high school - White Room by Cream (I loved the syncopation and it made me think of Alice in Wonderland for some reason - white rabbit?), Aretha Franklin and Al Green, and this album which we thought was hilarious - Steve Martin in LIPSTICK!:

p.s. you can now get here by simply going to musemaria.com