#Joan Baez

[whatohgirlieplease]

joan baez performing 500 miles and harmonizing with the audience you will always be famous

#joan baez

[bobbydylandaily]

#bob dylan #joan baez

[thedickcavettshow]

Can you tell us a little more about Joan Baez's girlfriend Kimmie? I'm curious about who she was and you seem to be the expert

Hiiii sorry this took so long to answer lol. Turns out I have a lot to say on this subject. Kimmie is a fascinating person and has lived a pretty wild life.

I'll just preface this by saying firstly I'm not an expert, I've just done a lot of research out of curiosity. Secondly, there is an absolute TON of misinformation out there about Kimmie, so everything that I'll tell you is stuff I learned from quotes directly from Joan, Kimmie, and other people they knew. The majority of this information is coming from Joan's memoir And a Voice to Sing With (1987) and Kimmie's interviews in the book Pearl: The Obsessions and Passions of Janis Joplin by Ellis Amburn (1992).

Joan Baez met Kim Chappell in the early 60s, when Kim was 17 years old and just freshly graduated from high school. Kim was a California surfer girl and Joan describes her by saying she "blew in, fresh, tan, skittery, ragged, shy, rebellious" and describes having sex with her as being "superb and utterly natural".

in 1962 Joan bought Kim a motorcycle and they rented a house together and they both adopted Doberman pinscher puppies. They often appeared in public together pretending to just be platonic friends, and Joan brought Kim along with her on tour, and Kim served as Joan's assistant and took care of her records. Kim also wrote some songs for her. They broke up after Kim trashed their bedroom because she got jealous of Joan's interest in a man she met on tour, but they remained friends after breaking up and Kim continued to work as Joan's assistant for a while. The time they spent together was positive, definitely one of the most pleasant of Joan's relationships, and Joan has said that being together taught her a lot about herself and about love and sex. Kim said of Joan in 1992 "Joan Baez was my first lover and brought me out and I still haven't recovered from that woman".

In the mid 60s, Kim became a heavy drug user, and in 1965 at a party with Jerry Garcia she took a little too much acid and climbed to the roof with an axe and began chopping the roof apart, then got onto her motorcycle (the one Joan bought her) and drove 120 mph to Joan’s house, climbed in through a window, and passed out in the middle of Joan’s living room. Joan called Kim's mother and they brought Kim to the hospital, and unfortunately that event pretty much ended their friendship.

While in the hospital, Kim was introduced to heroin, and immediately became very addicted. After being released from the hospital, Kim met a woman named Peggy Casetra (a name that is probably familiar/infamous to anyone who knows a bit about Janis Joplin) and they fell very much in love with each other. Peggy owned a boutique in San Francisco called Mnasidika (Sappho reference) and was also a heavy drug user.

Kim met Janis Joplin backstage at a show at the very beginning of Janis' career, and Janis was instantly attracted to her and pursued her. Since Kim and Peggy were not monogamous, Kim accepted her advances, although she felt that Janis would get along better with Peggy and decided to introduce them the next day. Both Kim and Peggy became close friends with Janis, and Janis was extremely enamored with them specifically because of Kim's relationship with Joan Baez. Janis and Peggy became lovers, and Janis’ friend Sunshine Nichols says "When Janis described Peggy to me, the first thing she said was, 'Well, Peggy's lover was involved with Joan Baez.'" The fact that she dated Joan was one of the first things Kim had told Janis when they first met. Apparently she got a kick out of telling people about it. Peggy and Kim were still together during the entire time that Peggy was seeing Janis, which at first Kim was fine with, but Janis eventually came to wanting Peggy to leave Kim for her and that soured the friendship between Kim and Janis slightly.

Kim and Peggy did not break up, even though they had a lot of issues with their relationship, which were not all caused by Janis. Kim was apparently a terrible driver, which really angered Peggy and they fought about driving which frequently escaladed into full-on fistfights. Kim was always driving way too fast and at one point she drove straight through a brand new $1500 fence. The fact that they were both extremely addicted to heroin obviously didn't help. They both did a lot of stupid stuff while high. This is a quote from Kim about a time she broke several of her ribs in the late 60s because she was trying to go to the bathroom late at night but was so high that she ended up on the second floor balcony instead: "I sat down on what I thought was the toilet, but it was thin air and I fell off the second-story porch, landing in a forked sapling. It was easily a ten- or twelve-foot drop. I lay there in the tree, stone naked, and I remember seeing stars and saying to myself, 'Oh, what a beautiful night!' Then I passed out."

Even though they had their issues Kim and Peggy were very openly and proudly a lesbian couple, so everyone around them knew about it. They spoke about being gay pretty openly, and they had a classic butch/femme dynamic (Kim was butch) that they made no attempt to conceal. The members of Janis' band and the other people she worked with strongly disapproved of them, and Albert Grossman, Janis’ manager (and Bob Dylan’s), tried very hard to keep the two of them away from Janis, because he felt that they were a bad influence on her and didn’t want her to get involved with “the gay thing”. Obviously he was not successful with this. Unfortunately their openness about being gay had a pretty negative effect on the two of them after Janis’ death.

After Janis' death, a lot of the people Kim and Peggy knew blamed them because they already had negative feelings about them and they were a pretty easy target. This was exacerbated in 1973 when Going Down With Janis, a "biography" about Janis' life written by a ghostwriter named Dan Knapp under Peggy's name was published. Peggy had agreed to let Knapp write a biography about Janis and had told him many stories about their time together, but Knapp took those stories and twisted them into something unrecognizable that just existed to shock and scandalize readers. Going Down With Janis did garner a bit of a cult following for being notoriously depraved and shocking, but unfortunately it's mostly made up. The book was essentially just Knapp's degrading sex fantasies about Janis written as though they were true facts and written from Peggy’s perspective. When the book was released, Peggy was horrified by its contents because she loved Janis and had only told Knapp positive stories about their time together. The book painted Peggy and Kim as Janis’ abusers and implicitly blamed them for Janis’ death.

After the book was published, Kim and Peggy faced enormous backlash from pretty much everyone they knew which led to Kim almost being murdered in an attempt at revenge. One night in the mid 70s while Kim, Peggy, and some friends were at a lesbian bar in Los Angeles called Bacchanal-70, Janis' former heroin dealer assaulted Kim in the alley behind the bar and stabbed her three times in the chest, puncturing both her lungs, and then left her there to die. Luckily, Kim was able to make it back inside the bar and she was rushed to the hospital. She was in critical condition but she managed to pull through and made a full recovery. She and Peggy split up for good after that.

By the 1990s, Kim managed to get sober after a very long and debilitating addiction that almost killed her many times. She said in 1992, "I finally managed to get clean; though I still enjoy marijuana and a glass of wine with a meal, I'm careful not to abuse."

This is the most recent picture of her that exists in the public, taken in the early 90s. There isn't any information about her since then.

#sorry that this is so long winded and tbh not well written lmao #I just wanted to include all the relevant info about her and. theres a hell of a lot of relevant info about her #joan baez

[joanieebaez]

#shout out taylor swift for saying real shit like this #joan baez #phil ochs

[lisamarie-vee]

#joan baez #bob dylan #b&w #1960s

[dozydawn]

Folk singer and activist Joan Baez greets Palestinian children of Jalazone refugee camp, on May 12, 1988 near Ramallah, during her visit in the West Bank territory.

#palestine #joan baez #1988 #1980s

[eppysboys]

okay.

#jane fonda #joan baez

[cosmicsunday]

Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. 1964

#Bob Dylan #joan Baez #such a perfect photo I think

[heathened]

She looked like a religious icon, like somebody you’d sacrifice yourself for

joan baez, and a voice to sing with / “oh sister” / “simple twist of fate” / “shelter from the storm” / bob dylan on joan baez

#bob dylan #joan baez #idk just having fun i guess #for lovisa wutheringdyke in her baezdylan bag!!!! #w #; #1k

[bobdylan-n-jonimitchell]

Joan Baez “The Wild Mountain Thyme” Edinburgh, Scotland, October 5, 1965.

#Joan Baez #The Wild Mountain Thyme #Wild Mountain Thyme #Edinburgh #Scotland #1965 #1960s #Video #Folk #Spring #Farewell Angelina (1965)

[heartbreakire]

Don’t ask me how I’m doing

#the lore… my precious lore… #bob dylan #joan baez

[bobbydylandaily]

#bob dylan #joan baez

[thedickcavettshow]

So obsessed with Joan Baez saying that really the only negative thing to come out of her 70s quaalude addiction was that while high as hell she ended up creating a horrible album cover in which she’s posing weirdly dressed like a pilot that she describes as "the worst, ugliest cover, not just in my career but a lot of people's"

#joan baez

[cygnetcommitee]

#i wish time travel existed so i could go to the 60’s and give her a little kiss #or maybe i’ll just go on a quest and find her now #she’s so pretty #and cool #joan baez #1960s #folk #60’s music #bob dylan

[thegameoflovemindberries]

These photos have such an atmosphere...

#bob dylan #joan baez #60s music #60s icons #they're so cute

[murderballadeer]

#inspired by the joan baez posting by my mutuals this evening #soapbox #joan baez #swearing