When Joan Baez Met...Phil Spector? And Monday's Cartoons

Plus Richard Thompson, Judy Collins, and a scary ICE arrest.

Greg Mitchell is the author of more than a dozen books and now writer/director of three award-winning films aired via PBS, including “Atomic Cover-up” and “Memorial Day Massacre.” Now watch trailer for acclaimed 2025 film “The Atomic Bowl.” Before all that, he was a longtime editor of the legendary Crawdaddy. At Blue Sky and Twitter: as @gregmitch. You can still subscribe to this newsletter for FREE. Sustain this newsletter by ordering one of his books.

A major story today is the ICE arrest, under orders from Trump henchmen, of Columbia University pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil. He had not been charged with any illegal action—and he has a green card. The details, including that he was seized without explanation in front of his wife who is eight months pregnant—and that he has now disappeared in the system—are horrid. A CBS report. The campus is now on lockdown. The ACLU has slammed but the ADL supported. Consider this comment on X by Megan Stack, the longtime foreign correspondent and now New York Times opinion writer:

ICE took a permanent U.S. resident out of student housing and locked him up in a detention center for exercising First Amendment rights. Everything is wrong with that, and nobody who cares about this country should be OK with it. The natural end result of systematic smearing, bad faith grandstanding, and cowardice from both major political parties & public intellectuals: Conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, pretending that students protesting a US-funded war are terrorist agents.

In a statement, the Student Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers, a union representing over 3,000 graduate and undergraduate student workers, called on students, faculty, staff, postdocs, and other workers to stand against Columbia’s “cooperation with the Trump administration.”

A revealing Gallup poll released just last week showed American public support for Israel at lowest ebb ever. Asked who they sympathized with more, 46% chose Israel and 33% the Palestinians, due to strong support from Republicans—but look at the results for Democrats: 59-21. I would guess: a generational shift.

News this morning: Ruth Marcus, not exactly a flaming liberal, has resigned from the Washington Post as longtime columnist and associate editor, citing publisher Will Lewis' decision to kill her column over owner Jeff Bezos's plans to overhaul the opinion pages to focus on his libertarian priorities.

Now, thankfully, on to music. If you follow this newsletter, you are bound to see almost anything eventually, and here is something I didn’t know happened or existed until last night: Joan Baez in 1965, for the “Big T.N.T. Show,” introduced by Donovan, singing both voices in the Righteous Brothers’ mega-hit “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling,” with the song’s producer, dangerous but not yet murderous Phil Spector, sitting beside her at the piano….Shot in L.A. with Spector as overall producer, and released to theaters, a sequel to the now-revered “T.A.M.I.” show. Others on the show: Ray Charles, The Byrds, Lovin’ Spoonful and more. There’s a shot of Frank Zappa at one point…sitting in the audience.

There was a tribute to Judy Collins at Town Hall in NYC on Saturday, and streaming, with a highlight (from my mind) being Richard Thompson presenting her with the lyrics to her pivotal early hit “Who Knows Where the Time Goes”—handwritten by the writer, the great Sandy Denny. Then he sang the song with Judy. Of course, Richard was in Fairport Convention in the 1960s when Sandy first recorded it with them. Here is his solo version of it (in image below he is on left, at age 19, with Sandy).

As for Judy herself, much could be said but I will simply recall how I was introduced to her a couple years before that song, with her recording of this mashup of four songs from the wild new play “Marat/Sade,” which had been performed at my college, and many others. A lyric that resonates today:

Why do they have the gold?
Why do they have the power?
Why, why, why, why, why?
Do they have the friends at the top?
Why do they have the jobs at the top?

We've got nothing, always had nothing
Nothing but holes and millions of them
Living in holes, dying in holes
Holes in our bellies and holes in our clothes

Marat, we're poor
And the poor stay poor
Marat, don't make us wait any more
We want our rights and we don't care how
We want a revolution…now!

From Tunes to Toons

Even the Wall Street Journal….