Berkeley -- Constantly touring, singer-songwriter Dar Williams usually has her concerts at clubs big and small scheduled months in advance. Then came the e- mail, so urgent and beseeching that it was in capital letters. It was from Joan Baez.
"Hey, you get an all-caps invitation from Joan Baez to be a part of history, " Williams says, laughing, "and you don't turn it down. So I wrote back an e- mail saying I was 95 percent certain I could do it. Five minutes later, the phone rings and Joan says, 'OK, so you will be in Berkeley.' "
That was two years ago, during public radio station KPFA's bitter and protracted fight against its parent company, the Pacifica Foundation. Baez and her folk friends staged a benefit show to gain funds and support for KPFA's struggle for broadcast freedom.
Monday night, Williams will return to Berkeley's Freight and Salvage for another benefit concert. This time, it is in support of Friends of Free Speech Radio (now fighting for autonomy for Pacifica-owned WBAI in New York City), the Nevada Desert Experience (a nuclear disarmament group) and the Freight's campaign for a new building.
"One could argue that all three of those causes have something in common," Williams says. "That is, giving voice to people who might not get it elsewhere. "
Throughout her career, Williams, 33, has raised her three-octave voice for an array of liberalminded movements, from the environment to women's rights.
But she says public radio is a cause close to her heart, because it helped mold her musical tastes as a teen in East Coast suburbia.
"That New York station, WBAI, totally radicalized my adolescence," she said. "I could tune in and find things no one else was playing. The Berkeley station serves the same function."
Scan the crowd at Williams' solo acoustic concert on Monday, and you likely will find the usual gaggle of folk-rock-loving undergrads. Look closer, and you also might spot their parents, aging Baby Boomers who relate more to Baez than Ani DiFranco.
Williams, too, is hard to categorize. Her work is a hybrid of the best of traditional '60s folk icons and the more thoughtful in the '90s riot grrl movement. Plugged in or acoustic, Williams has managed to bridge a generational gap and carve a small niche in the music business dominated by slickly produced bands.
"That's what I call the myth of the folk audience -- that it's a unified group of people," Williams says. "There's not a folk audience anymore and I say that to the credit of the audience. There are people who go out of their way to listen off the beaten track, who really love acoustic music. There are people who love Led Zeppelin and Joan Baez, who love Elvis Costello and Ani DiFranco. These are people who listen to a diverse group of music."
Diversity in subject matter long has been a staple of Williams' work. For instance, the most recent single off her 2000 CD, "The Green World," is the bouncy, upbeat "I Won't Be Your Yoko Ono (If You're Not Good Enough for Me)." The song both pays tribute to Ono as an artist in her own right and makes a statement that Williams won't subsume her career for any love.
Williams laughs and says that's as close to a straightforward love song as she'll write.
"My joke is that my pop songs range from Buddhism ('What Do You Love More Than Love') to psychotherapy ('What Do You Hear in These Sounds?') to a failed Messianic cult in 17th century Poland ('And a God Descends')," Williams says. "Yeah, those are Dar Williams love songs."
That's not exactly the recipe for stardom in the pop music world. But Williams, despite appearances on "Late Night With Conan O'Brien" and inclusion on the Lilith Fair Tour, says she does not court stardom. And the fact her albums have evolved from the spare, acoustic guitar-driven debut "The Honesty Room" in 1995 to the lush electric instrumentation on "The Green World" does not mean she's selling out.
"When I incorporated more production in my (recordings)," she says, "the question was: Was I presenting myself and my own growth or a studied facsimile of growth that conveniently was fitting commercial parameters in such a way that I was just doing it for the money? I don't think so.
"I mean, I have not turned myself into a sex object. I have not used my body to sell the albums. I do not sing simperingly about heterosexual relationships because that's what everyone else is doing in pop music."

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