Joan Baez and William’s tour de force at 22

Unique story on the back page of
The Malay Mail, Oct 19, 1979

By Lim Siang Jin

ONE DAY in October 1979, something unheard of happened at The Malay Mail. The back page lead, always the domain of sport, was stripped. In its place was a story, “GLORY B! This was something”. It was a memorable day for most of us at the production desk, seeing our irrepressible editor, Chua Huck Cheng, make another innovative and inspiring move.

As for the writer, the person who put this “critique” together, he lived one of the wildest dreams any young reporter could have. William de Cruz was 22 when Joan Baez came to town for her only concert in Southeast Asia. Dubbed the Lady with the Flowers, she had become world renowned and, around that particular time, she was also campaigning for the “boat people”, refugees from Kampuchea. What made chasing this story even more dramatic was that Baez had only one night in Kuala Lumpur in her ultra-tight schedule; she was due to fly off to Anambas Islands (Indonesia) the next morning at 8am.

Like many other enthusiastic professionals, William was there at the get-go, attending a press conference at the Subang International Airport, connecting well with Baez and making himself conspicuously known — so much so that at their next contact, at the backstage right after the concert, she gave him a peck on the cheek and a bunch of flowers. That would have been a heaven-sent for an ordinary fan. But it was not nearly quite adequate for a journalist sensing a gigantic scoop looming before him.

Joan Baez: “Disarming feminine charisma”
Source: Wikimedia Commons, 1973

Getting to the story proved to be a bit tricky though. After some niceties at the backstage, all requests for an interview were turned down, albeit politely. There would not be a post-concert party either. The principal rep of the organisers, Jack D’Silva of the Red Cross, even quipped “with tongue in both cheeks” that he would be going to a girlie joint.

Baez was then packed off into a car which headed away for her hotel. William’s deep desire for a scoop, however, couldn’t be satiated. He told me recently: “About an hour later, the journalist in me couldn’t rest. I happened to know at which hotel she was staying. I went there [The KL Regent], walked up to the reception with the flowers Baez had given me. I handed them over to the concierge, and said: ‘Please give these to Joan Baez. I know she’s staying here’.”

William then took a seat in some far off corner. It was late at night and the lobby was relatively empty. With him were Helen Heng and Sheila Natarajan, our colleagues at The Mail who had gone for the concert with him. Ardent professionals themselves, they realised this was William’s moment to relish and remember, and left all the initiative to him. 

Soon after, the scheme started to play out. “I watched the concierge, flowers in hand, take the lift, which only stopped at one floor, and came back to ground level. After a respectable wait, the three of us caught the lift, as discreetly as possible, and I hit the button for the floor the concierge got off at.”

At the floor, they headed for the only suite and rapped on the door. Anne, one of Baez’s assistants, opened it and William said: “If Joan Baez is staying here, please tell her the guy who sent up the flowers is at her door.” Anne excused herself and went back in.

“When the door opened again, there she was — Joan Baez herself,” said an excited William. He recounted that she greeted him like an Indian would, palms held together at her chest, followed by “Come in, Sahib”. Scanning the room, they could see that Baez was having her midnight supper of eggs Benedict and a glass of wine. Jack D’Silva was there too, sipping on a scotch. “I knew it would be you,” he remarked, to which William retorted: “Pretty exclusive girlie joint.”

They were let in for a two-minute chat but it stretched to many more, thanks also to Baez’s kind heartedness and obvious recognition of William’s sincerity, perseverance and knowledge of music — he is a musician and songwriter himself schooled in the respected tradition of buskers and gig performers of the 1960s. The full write-up of the interview, including references to Dylan, her campaign for refugees, etc, can be read here.

I was at the desk at 4.30am when an exhausted William submitted the story to Huck Cheng. Along with me and other colleagues, our editor had also attended Baez’s solo concert at Dewan Universiti Canselor. As the early hours wore on, I sensed something special was being done to the story. I cannot remember who was tasked with subbing it, however, at the paste-up floor, I saw the unusual headline on the back page.

William deserved this very special treatment. He enriched and contextualised our experience of the night and made it so much more meaningful. The words he wrote speak for themselves: 

Hers [Baez’s] was not the long ways of the Streets of London, or the cries of Anak or even the grandiose hopes of Bringing In The Ship — hers was the voice of a generation gone by; one that had thrived on the essence of the Bob Dylans, the Pete Seegers, the Woody Guthries… Four and twenty ears ago, they had only their guitars. Today, she still sticks to hers while others have found an easier way out. 

Particularly, that was the feeling she radiated last night — in her simple midnight blue embroidered caftan, her 75-year-old Martin guitar, a pocketful of songs written so long ago they still apply today, and a disarming feminine charisma that brimmed with character and humanity. 

Bit by bit, the person in Baez kept creeping out — the mother, the lover, the sensitive, the forlorn, the human — and the songs spoke for her. As she sang The Weary Mothers Of The World Shall Rest, one felt almost palpably the experiences of the war-torn and the dislocated. It was powerful idiom delivered with the fondness of the feeling of care. But even for them she had her own ray of hope: “We may never be the poor, for no one owns us anymore...” 

And, yes, she had her less-than-reverential remembrance of Dylan in her rendition of his Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word — complete with her instantly recognisable mimicry of the slur and scraggly diction of the one-time high priest of youth.

Not one song escaped the injection of the message she wanted to put across — not The Beatles' Yesterday, not The Night That Drove Old Dixie Down, not Diamonds And Rust. They all had the Baez interpretation, the Baez cause — sung as if they were meant to be sung that way. No one noticed the greying hair; no one noticed the overpowering voice; no one noticed the absence of a back-up group. It was, simply Joan Chandos Baez, 38, singing her cause.

William enthused that the concert, which 3,000 attended, rivalled “the most mammoth of rock happenings… even if not in number, diminishing the electric parodies of the Today Era with the simplicity of yesterday's flower revolution.” Read his story in full here.

The making of GLORY B!, the story, was a special act in the play of Malaysian entertainment journalism, an interplay among its three protagonists: a passionate and driven writer, an open-minded editor who gave the story what it deserved notwithstanding the age and lack of seniority of the author and, most of all, a star brimming with warmth who, amidst “her unbelievably tight time schedule”, opened her heart to a near stranger.

                                                                 ****

1. William and I have been great friends since 1980-81, when I was seconded to head the entertainment desk of The Malay Mail while the section editor went on long leave. He and the other team members, like Aishah Ali and Lim Kim Bee, persuaded me to do a weekly series on veteran musicians in Malaysia. It ran for about two months and covered, among others, Frankie Cheah, Ahmad Nawab, Alfonso Soliano, Ooi Eow Jin, DJ Dave and Saloma. It was a memorable exercise, especially for me because I got to know the stories behind these music greats.
2. From then until now, there have been many milestones in his life. The following are two major ones: 
• Becoming the founding president of Global Bersih, leading and co-ordinating its activities from Sydney with a deeply-committed group of Malaysians from the diaspora. William gave me a short account at first but decided to expand it to give a better picture of “The Road to Global Bersih”.  It is certainly a story that needs telling. Read here. 
• 
  Writing Love is the Pill, “the biggest story of my life”, after his encounter with cancer. William’s experience with the disease was nothing short of dramatic, as can be read in his introduction to the blog-book or “blook”. Called “Gifts are for giving”, his comments to lend context to his project can be read here. He had been thinking about writing this “book of thanksgiving” for some time after his recovery. It was during an outing to Kuala Selangor with me and another friend in early 2019 that he finally made a firm commitment to do it. Our pictures from that trip are carried here.

• Lim Siang Jin is one of three people who manage this WPS blogsite. Read more about him here.