We didn’t even know Joan Baez was still alive – always figured she was as dead as her career. Remarkably, though, Joan Baez is still alive, but considerably less than well after channeling her inner Julia “Butterfly” Hill and falling out of tree.
What’s that? You don’t remember Julia “Butterfly” Hill, either. Well, please allow us to jog your memory. She was the liberal lunatic who spent two years living in an old growth California redwood in an attempt to keep loggers from cutting it down. She named the tree Luna.
But we digress. The San Jose Mercury News has the Baez story:
1960s songbird Joan Baez had a treehouse built — without walls — 20 feet high in an oak tree behind her Woodside home because she wanted to sleep with birds.
The folksinging legend, who once performed the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” before a half-million people at Woodstock, fell from that treehouse Wednesday as she climbed down from the platform.
Paramedics drove the singer to Stanford Hospital, where she was treated and released after it was determined she had suffered only minor injuries.
Baez, 69, was “resting comfortably” Thursday, according to Nancy Lutzow, who runs Baez’s Menlo Park production company.
“I sleep in a tree all summer long,” Baez told an English blogger in 2008. “I climb up on a ladder, with ropes and things. The birds are right there in the morning. Sometimes they’re flying so close to my head I can feel the wind.”
“Those things are heaven to me.”
To quote Baez’ friend Bob Dylan, the lunatic folksinger is damn lucky she isn’t “knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door.”
Source: San Jose Mercury News, Wikipedia
