A Dive Into The (Not So) Complete Unknown of Bob Dylan And Joan Baez
So, here’s the breakdown – your Gen Z guide to this iconic music breakup
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Before there was Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham and their iconic 1997 performance of “Silver Springs,” there was Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. This past Christmas Day, A Complete Unknown hit theaters. The film is a biopic that chronicles Bob Dylan’s life from 1961 to 1965, and stars Timotheé Chalamet and Monica Barbaro as Dylan and Baez.
Dylan, now 83, will forever live in infamy for his contributions to folk songwriting and rock music. Dylan’s early composition style was simple and understated, with his lyricism taking center stage. When he was known as Robert Zimmerman from Minnesota, he took a chance and moved to New York City with a harmonica, a guitar, and a dream. It was here that he would encounter muses of all different kinds – from counterculture to working class people and even some incredibly talented women he once loved.
Among them was Joan Baez, a Mexican-Scottish American woman who continues to be a powerhouse folk singer-songwriter and lifelong social justice activist. Baez brought attention to important social justice causes through her music during the counterculture era of the 1960s, and had already built a sizable following prior to Dylan, after her 1959 set at Newport Folk Festival.
Their collaboration on “With God On Our Side” elevated Dylan to prominence. Baez first took a stand by refusing to perform in segregated venues on her first tour, instead opting to play at solely Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) across the South. At only 22 years old, she captivated a crowd of approximately 250,000 at the March on Washington, at which Martin Luther King delivered the historic “I Have A Dream” speech.
How Baez And Dylan Met
Baez, already an established musician, heard buzz about a young Dylan’s burgeoning career, and went to see him perform live at Gerde’s Folk City in New York City’s Greenwich Village. In the 2023 documentary Joan Baez: I Am Noise, she recalls Dylan as a “tattered little shamble of a human being” who was transfixing her with his unique vocals and songwriting. She recalls being “stoned on that talent”, and feeling drawn to him based on their connection through folk music.
The pair first collaborated on “With God On Our Side”, and went on to perform the occasional duet on their respective tours throughout the early 1960s. At the time, Dylan was in a relationship with artist Suze Rotolo (renamed Sylvie Russo in A Complete Unknown, where she is played by Elle Fanning). Rotolo appears on the cover of Dylan’s 1963 album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Throughout this time period, Dylan and Baez developed a complicated creative relationship that would later turn romantic. For my Gen Z readers, they walked so Daisy and Billy from Daisy Jones & The Six could run.
The Breakup Heard Around The World
In a 2023 conversation with Rolling Stone, Baez revealed ahead of her documentary’s release that she left Dylan after his meteoric rise during his 1965 tour of the U.K. Until last year, Baez refrained from addressing their tumultuous relationship directly. “London was a nightmare. When Bob started to get more famous, he just moved away. In some ways he moved away from everybody,” Baez recounted in I Am Noise.
She would go on to compose “To Bobby” “Diamonds & Rust,” and “Winds of the Old Days” in homage to the relationship. Both remain profound writers who managed to capture the lightning in a bottle that was the 1960s counterculture while also penning timeless tracks that remain relevant to today’s listeners. It only makes sense that two of such artists would equally inspire one another, and that Baez’ steady hand and activist roots are what truly propelled Dylan to fame.
In an interview with The Independent, Baez detailed her advice to Barbaro ahead of biopic filming. “I just talked about my dependence on Bob, and how I always felt below him,” she says. “That he was ‘the dude’, and I was kind of…it’s true! I mean, I was so infatuated with him and the music that I was always looking up like that, so I thought she would probably benefit from that kind of explanation.”
Baez suspects that Dylan wrote “Like A Rolling Stone” and “Visions of Johanna” about her, and culture critics suspect that Baez left even more fingerprints on Dylan’s discography. While several of Dylan’s early hits, including “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe” are believed to reference Rotolo, his later duet performances of these songs with Baez gave them entirely new meanings.
Why We Can’t Stop Thinking About Iconic Music Breakups
A video of the last time Baez and Dylan interacted in person in the 1980s made the rounds on TikTok ahead of the release of A Complete Unknown. Among the thousands of comments were remarks about how “nothing has changed” for male musicians’ egos. While of course this is a generalization, Baez and Dylan really did set in motion the blueprint for countless critically acclaimed projects born out of high profile artist breakups in the decades to follow.
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Most notably, these were Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham in the 1970s, whose breakup is chronicled in their 1977 album Rumours. The 1990s saw Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins and Courtney Love of Hole break up and change the landscape of the grunge world, with Love’s later marriage to Kurt Cobain inspiring works from both her band and Nirvana that go down in history. The 2000s saw messy pop breakups that inspired Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me A River” and Britney Spears’ “Everytime.” The 2010s gave way to the Civil Wars’ meteoric rise and tumultuous band breakup, and Taylor Swift’s guitar-heavy “Dear John” that tries John Mayer’s strings on for size.
Dylan and Baez unintentionally set this phenomenon in motion. As time goes on, so do loves had and lost, rolling away like stones.