Notes & Personnel Info |  | Personnel: Joan Baez (vocals, guitar); Mary Black (vocals); Mimi Farina, Dar Williams, Tish Hinojosa, Amy Ray, Emily Sailers, Mary-Chapin Carpenter (vocals, guitar); Kate McGarrigle (vocals, banjo); Paul Pesco (vocals, guitar, dobro); Anna McGarrigle (vocals, accordion); Janis Ian (vocals, piano); Fernando Saunders (vocals, bass); Carol Steele (vocals, percussion); Pat Crowley (piano). | | Recorded live at The Bottom Line, New York in April 1995. | | Personnel: Joan Baez (vocals, guitar); Paul Pesco (vocals, guitar, dobro); Dar Williams, Emily Saliers, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Mimi Fari¤a, Amy Ray, Tish Hinojosa (vocals, guitar); Kate McGarrigle (vocals, banjo); Anna McGarrigle (vocals, accordion); Janis Ian (vocals, piano); Carol Steele (vocals, percussion); Fernando Saunders, Mary Black (vocals); Pat Crowley (piano). | | Audio Mixers: John Mark Harris; Mark Spector; Brandon Mason. | | Liner Note Author: Arthur Levy . | | Recording information: The Bottom Line, New York, NY (04/1995). | | Photographer: Ken Regan. | | Arranger: Joan Baez. | | This live album, recorded at a 1995 performance at New York's legendary Bottom Line, finds folk godmother Joan Baez moving through some of the highlights from across her long career, but it's much more than just a retrospective. Baez was among Bob Dylan's first interpreters in the early '60s, and she never stopped seeking out great material. So in addition to returning to the likes of Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne" and the Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," Baez brings her distinctive touch to more contemporary fare, such as the Indigo Girls' "Welcome Me" and Dar Williams' "You're Aging Well." Not only that, she brings Williams, the Indigo Girls, and others onstage to chime in with her, effectively completing the conceptual circle. | | By the mid-'90s, Joan Baez had been around long enough to assume the mantle of grand matron of the folk scene. Ring Them Bells finds her freshening her sound by tapping into the revivified singer/songwriter genre of the mid-'90s, an especially strong time for women artists. For this live album (recorded at the Bottom Line in New York City) Baez enlisted an impressive roster of women, sharing the stage with the likes of Indigo Girls, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Mary Black. And while the collaborations tend to be casual and lack a certain finish, there's added interest in hearing Baez backed up by those who were undoubtedly influenced by her style. That's obviously the raison d'etre for this disc, which otherwise might have been just another throwaway live album. The strength of the album lies in the diverse set list. It spans Baez's career: the usual standards like "Diamonds & Rust" and "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" (sung a cappella), are bolstered by traditional folk songs like "Lily of the West." She peppers her own repertoire with an ample range of covers, including "Suzanne," Janis Ian's "Jesse," and more recent offerings from Dar Williams and Indigo Girls. Baez was still listening to Bob Dylan's work, as evidenced by her delicate treatment of "Ring Them Bells," a hymn-like gem from Oh Mercy. There's a gentle, unifying force in these performances -- as if Baez is tying up 30-plus years of folk and singer/songwriter tradition, sweeping across the land, and liking what she sees. ~ Jim Esch | | As annotator Arthur Levy points out in his newly written liner notes to this expanded version of Joan Baez's live album Ring Them Bells, things have changed since it was first released in September 1995. Guardian Records, the imprint of Capitol/EMI that released it, no longer exists. (Rights appear to have reverted to Baez, who licensed it to the British label Proper for this reissue.) The Bottom Line, the 400-seat nightclub in Greenwich Village where it was recorded, is gone, too. And worst of all, Baez's sister Mimi Fari¤a, who made her final recorded appearance on the album singing a duet on her late husband Richard Fari¤a's "Swallow Song," died in 2001. But the collection, boasting six extra tracks and stretched over two discs with a running time now exceeding 87 minutes, remains a good pr?cis of Baez's career over its first three-and-a-half decades, as rendered by the 54-year-old singer and a group of female guest stars representing the generations of women singer/songwriters influenced by folk music's premier interpreter. In a sense, the influences can be seen as flowing both ways, since Baez sings songs written by her guests, some of which have been part of her repertoire for years -- Janis Ian's "Jesse," Mary Chapin Carpenter's "Stones in the Road" (which Baez actually introduced on her 1992 Play Me Backwards album before Carpenter used it as the title song for one of her albums) -- as well as accompanying them on songs she has made her own, either because she actually wrote them ("Diamonds and Rust," sung with Carpenter), or because she has been singing them for so long ("The Water Is Wide," sung with Indigo Girls). From Baez's early days of performing traditional material such as "The Lily of the West" and "Geordie,"through her incorporation of the work of her singer/songwriter contemporaries (Bob Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright," Tim Hardin's "Don't Make Promises") to her own originals ("Love Song to a Stranger," "Sweet Sir Galahad") and her explorations of Latin music ("Gracias a la Vida," sung with Tish Hinojosa) and country (Dylan's "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere"), not to mention her fluke hit with the Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," Ring Them Bells provides a live summation of her career. There is even a smattering of songs she has not recorded before, such as Dar Williams' "You're Aging Well," sung with its author, and Indigo Girls' "Welcome Me." The album actually works better as a career retrospective than it does as a concert experience, because it has been edited in such a way that there are practically no stage remarks beyond the occasional count-off or "thank you." None of the guests is introduced, and there is no spoken interplay with them. They just sing their parts, some of them matching up with Baez better than others. (For example, Carpenter, with her contralto, makes a good duet partner, and Indigo Girls provide excellent, restrained accompaniment, while the trio of Baez with Kate & Anna McGarrigle on "Willie Moore" is just pleasantly odd.) The music-only restriction might have made more sense on the initial single-disc release, but there was plenty more room on the two CDs here to give a flavor of what it was like when Baez welcomed all of these younger female admirers to share the tiny stage of the much-missed Bottom Line with her for two nights in April 1995. ~ William Ruhlmann |
Producer: Mark Spector; Mitch Maketansky |
Engineer: John Harris; John Mark Harris; John Harris; Brian Faehndrich; John Bates; Brian Kingman |
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