JOAN BAEZ

I saw Joan Baez this week with my friends Erin and Ben. I have seen her twice before, but this time was really special, not only because I got to share the experience with loved ones, but because we got to sit in the front row, where you can actually see every detail in the performer's face and body language and hear the band members interact with one another as they tune their instruments between songs. This was a new experience for me, at least with a performer of this caliber.

The thing that strikes me most about Baez is how she has this heart-breaking voice but is so damn humble about it. On so many songs she could really justify projecting her voice in a show-offy way and displaying her legendary range — and often you wish she would! — but mostly she avoids verbal acrobatics, or, when they're really called for, she performs them so effortlessly that it's like she's utterly unconscious that she's doing anything remarkable.

I also love her because she's always on the right side of history — and is always there before anyone else: with civil rights, war, the environment, poverty. She's famous for singing "We Shall Overcome" at Martin Luther King's 1963 march on Washington, but less well-known for fervently and very publicly supporting gay rights in 1970s San Francisco. What other celebrities were lending their voices to that cause? Even now.

True, it fits her role as the “Madonna of the disaffected,” but I’m nonetheless impressed when someone with advantages and talents who could easily have chosen a path of vast personal wealth and comfort — and a very different kind of career — opts for an alternative life. It's like in her adolescence it occurred to her that she had an exceptional voice and thought, not "Hey, I could be famous!" but "Hey, I could help some people!" (I read that when she was a kid she refused to take part in a Cold War air raid drill on the grounds that it was government propaganda. Thank God she never grew up.)

The other extremely cool thing about her is that after the show this week she wrapped herself in a flannel shirt and happily mingled on the sidewalk with fans, which is how we got the rockin’ photo above.