The cover songs were typically accomplished, making this the strongest album of Baez's post-folk career. Diamonds & Rust in the Bullring is not to be confused with her 1975 studio album Diamonds & Rust, of course, and it is not a live recording of the songs from that album, either, even though the song 'Diamonds & Rust' itself does lead it off. But those who bought the disc for "Diamonds & Rust" also got to hear "Winds of the Old Days," in which Baez forgave Dylan for abandoning the protest movement, as well as the jazzy "Children and All That Jazz," a delightful song about motherhood, and the wordless vocals of "Dida," a duet with Joni Mitchell accompanied by Mitchell's backup band, Tom Scott and the L.A.
It was her finest moment as a songwriter and one of her finest performances, period, and when A&M finally released it on 45, it made the Top 40, propelling the album to gold status. Outdoing the current crop of confessional singer/songwriters at soul baring, Baez sang to Dylan, reminiscing about her '60s love affair with him intensely, affectionately, and unsentimentally. But the real hit was the title track, a self-penned masterpiece on the singer's favorite subject, her relationship with Bob Dylan. A&M, no doubt recalling the success of her cover of the Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," released her version of the Allmans' "Blue Sky" as a single, and it got halfway up the charts.
But she did it on her own terms, putting together a session band of contemporary jazz veterans like Larry Carlton, Wilton Felder, and Joe Sample, and mixing a wise selection from the work of current singer-songwriters like Jackson Browne and John Prine with pop covers of Stevie Wonder and the Allman Brothers Band, and an unusually high complement of her own writing. It is sired by the stallion Medaglia dOro out of. Diamonds & Rust in the Bullring smacks of being a placeholder in Baez's discography, which makes it an odd release for an artist willing to wait so long to return to making records.With the Vietnam War winding down, Joan Baez, who had devoted one side of her last album to her trip to Hanoi, delivered the kind of commercial album A&M Records must have wanted when it signed her three years earlier. Diamonds And Rust is a 5yo bay Mare from Australia trained by Symon Wilde, who is based at Warrnambool.
Actually, the Spanish side is more moving than the English one, in which Baez seems to be just running through some familiar material or turning in interpretations of such classics as Bob Marley's "No Woman No Cry," Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat," and the Beatles' "Let It Be" that have been done definitively by their originators. Also part of the Spanish side are a translation of Sting's "They Dance Alone (Gueca Solo)," called "Ellas Danzan Solas (Cueca Sola)." (Singing in Spanish always seems to remind Baez of the bloody Chilean military coup and its aftermath.) But the song that most moves the crowd is the pretty "Txoria Txori," a song in Basque with which they sing along. Half of the collection (side two of the LP and cassette, tracks seven through 12 of the CD) consists of songs sung in Spanish, recalling her 1974 all-Spanish album Gracias a la Vida and including that LP's title song, here performed as a duet with Mercedes Sosa, "El Preso Numero Nueve" (which was also on her debut album, Joan Baez, in 1960), "Llego con Tres Heridas," and "No Nos Moveran" (aka "We Shall Not Be Moved"). The album chronicles a show performed by Baez, in a bullring, naturally, in Bilbao, Spain, in 1988, and it demonstrates what makes her such a draw overseas. Diamonds & Rust in the Bullring is not to be confused with her 1975 studio album Diamonds & Rust, of course, and it is not a live recording of the songs from that album, either, even though the song "Diamonds & Rust" itself does lead it off. record stores, Joan Baez continued to be more of a force in Europe than in her homeland, and she followed Recently with what was actually her third live album to be recorded in Europe in the 1980s. Although she released a comeback album, Recently, in 1987 after eight years away from U.S. there really is no line in a song that makes me as angry as my poetry was lousy, you said in diamonds and rust bc like.