Any Day Now

Sometimes music gets very intertwined with our memories of a certain time and place. And the friends you had then.

I wanted a nice quiet, tuneful album to grade essays to. So I came up with Any Day Now, a Joan Baez double LP from 1968, made up exclusively of Bob Dylan songs.

I have always loved her singing voice and Dylan's lyrics. And on the album, she has a low key but interesting back up band of Nashville session players, who went further into rock than she usually did, picking up the pace from some of Dylan's early songs, but slowing down some, like Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. That song brings up another interesting twist, that of listening to someone interpret songs that were sometimes about her. There have been lots of interpretations of Dylan, but some of these, like the versions of "Any Day Now," "Love is Just a Four Letter Word" and "One Too Many Mornings," are the best around, IMHO.

What surprised me, listening to these songs, for a very current purpose, grading graduate student papers, was how much they brought up a now distant seeming, but still curiously fresh past. I can close my eyes and see the dorm room where I first heard this album.

This was one of my favorite albums in the spring of 1971. I had just come back from two quarters of study abroad in Vienna, Austria. My girlfriend there, Debbie Maranville, had stayed on for another quarter. Some friends from there and from my freshman year were around, but it seemed like a very new time. After six months of trying to understand Austria in German and a startling three weeks of traveling in the USSR, it seemed odd to be back in California, doing all the normal student stuff, picking up a radio show at KZSU again, getting involved in the anti-war movement again as new demonstrations were picking up again against the Vietnam War, in what was beginning to seem like a regular seasonal riot against Vietnam policy.

I was living in a classy old dorm called Toyon. My room-mate was the wretchedly spoiled son of some elite landowner in Central America. (I have repressed his name.) So I went looking for friends elsewhere. One of the best was a woman from Washington, D.C. named Robin Spring. She introduced me to Any Day Now, which rapidly became the soundtrack for the whole quarter. It got me back into my quasi-idolatry of Dylan in a more ear-pleasing way.

Joan Baez herself appeared on campus several times that spring to sing and speak at rallies, appealing to people to burn their draft cards and resist the draft. I think I remember the scene in this photo, but I may be mistaken. This is pretty much what I remember it looking like, however.

I remember thinking that I liked her music a lot. David's Album had just come out, lionizing her then husband of that name, a former Standford student president, who had gone to jail for resisting the draft. However, I both admired and resented them, since I wasn't sure resisting the draft was worth the price to be paid, even though I opposed the war very deeply.