Still a rebel woman
Protest singer Joan Baez is 77 and more of a fighter than ever. She tells Helen Brown why she’s full of paradoxes.
Not everybody emerges from an interview with Jeremy Paxman laughing, but for Joan Baez the experience was ‘‘a riot’’.
When we meet in a London hotel, the legendary protest singer tells me that the British TV interviewer had attempted to grill her on ‘‘the failure of pacifism. He said the non-violence movement had been a flop, and I just said, ‘Oh, not like violence then? Would you say that’s been a huge success?’ It was fun.’’
More bad... than ever at 77, Baez has always been up for a verbal scrap. The look in those brave, brown eyes that gazed deep into the American soul when she first found fame at the Newport Folk Festival in 1959 is playful. But the voice is lower, edgier and wiser than that of the ‘‘barefoot Madonna’’ legend.
Featuring heartfelt acoustic covers of songs by Tom Waits, Mary Chapin Carpenter and others, the record Whistle Down the Wind has made her ‘‘very, very happy’’. It might even secure her a new audience, coming hard on the heels of her anti-Trump song Nasty Man, an unexpected viral hit last year.
Set to her old-school fingerpicked guitar, it depicts the
45th president:
Hustlin’ and bustlin’ across the big green lawn stampin’ through the famous rose garden but every little rose turned up its pretty nose saying ‘‘You owe the earth a pardon."
‘‘I hadn’t written a song in 27 years,’’ she tells me. ‘‘But I was inspired. I don’t think it’s a great song but it’s funny and if we don’t have humour now then we’re all just gonna croak!’’
Baez’s bawdy, sweary humour is at odds with the image of ‘‘Saint Joan’’ whose earnest allegiance to righteous causes was once such a national joke that Saturday Night Live broadcast a long-running skit called: ‘‘Make Joan Baez Laugh’’.
In truth, the woman who introduced the world to Bob Dylan in the 1960s, snorted cocaine with the Grateful Dead in the 70s and spent two years in a ‘‘raging’’ relationship with Apple founder Steve Jobs in the 80s is no saint.
But she did march for civil rights alongside Martin Luther King in 1963, stand beneath the American bombs in Vietnam in
1972 and sing to the suffering in Sarajevo.
Today, she agrees she has always been something of a contradiction: ‘‘Yeah. Right. I’m the Virgin Mary and an outrageous flirt, a huge social conscience with an ego. It took me years to admit I had an ego because my family were dogooders.’’
Born in New York in 1941, Baez is the middle daughter of Mexican physicist Albert Baez and his Scottish wife ‘‘Big Joan’’. Rebellion came coiled into her DNA. ‘‘My father’s father rejected the Catholic Church in Mexico to become a Methodist minister,’’ she tells me, ‘‘and that’s about as radical as you can get. My dad preached in his late teens but struggled with the hypocrisy of the church.He went on to do a PhD in physics.’’
The big shift in the Baez lifestyle came when Albert quit his job with the military and embraced Quakerism. His daughters respected his new, pacifist ideals but found the lifestyle more challenging. ‘‘At eight years old,’’ Baez tells me, ‘‘I did not enjoy sitting though those long, silent meetings trying not to giggle.’’
And then there was the travel that came with Albert’s new teaching job. The family became ‘‘gypsies, criss-crossing the US in a station wagon’’. When she was 10, her father took his daughters with him on a job to Baghdad for Unesco and they witnessed real poverty for the first time. Young Joan made models of the mud huts she saw and read The Diary of Anne Frank, which fired her commitment to social justice.
Her first appearance in an American newspaper came in 1958, aged 16, after she refused to participate in an atom bomb evacuation drill at her Californian high school.
When the Baez family moved to Boston later that year, Joan began haunting local coffee shops, learning songs from the musicians she saw perform there and developing the vulnerable vibrato in her voice. Her academic career came to a stuttering halt.
‘‘I lasted about six weeks at Boston University,’’ she says. ‘‘I was too busy falling in love with a boy at Harvard, sneaking up to his room where I wasn’t supposed to be. Because I was such a flirt he assumed I was sleeping with everybody and he was outraged. But I wasn’t.
‘‘I was still a virgin when I recorded Silver Dagger for my first album [released in 1960]. I lost my virginity with that boy and we had a good couple of years.’’
That debut album is full of oldfashioned ballads that appealed to her ‘‘intense, angsty, teenage heart. It wasn’t until midway into the next album I realised my roots and started up matching the music with the politics’’.
By the time Bob Dylan washed up in Greenwich Village in 1961, Baez was queen of the scene. Baez, initially unimpressed by this ‘‘unwashed phenomenon’’, soon fell for his literary charms and presented her ‘‘little vagabond’’ to the crowds at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963, fiercely defending him against those who felt his nasal yawp ruined her pristine vocal.
Their romance – crisply chronicled in Baez’s best original song, Diamonds and Rust – ran aground as the power dynamic shifted and Dylan’s star ascended.
By 1964 Dylan was two-timing Baez with his future wife Sara Lownds, a Playboy bunny. The pair were also pulling in different ideological directions.
Baez had put pressure on Dylan to hitch his music to her political causes and he wasn’t interested. Baez’s only marriage (lasting from 1968 until 1972) was to a man who shared her passion for activism. David Harris was in prison for resisting the Vietnam draft when she gave birth to their only child, Gabe, in 1969.
She says she doesn’t want to talk about him any more but I can’t help bringing up the 2016 Nobel Laureate again when we discuss Baez’s support for the recent women’s marches and the #MeToo movement.
She’s telling me how lucky she is never to have been a victim of sexual assault and I remind her of the passage in her memoir in which she claimed Dylan put his hand up her skirt in 1984. ‘‘Oh. Yes. Backstage,’’ she stiffens. ‘‘That was horrible.’’
‘‘But looking back to my early career, I think people were too frightened to try anything with me. I was this pure little thing. I was. I didn’t want limousines and money and that terrified people.’’
It’s worth remembering that, by this time, the idealistic folk scene was being mined for profit. ‘‘Columbia records were courting me: they had Dylan, Janis Joplin and Peter, Paul and Mary and they just assumed that I would go with them and I was mortified by it,’’ says Baez.
‘‘It all seemed sleazy to me. So I signed with what was basically a classical music label instead.’’ She pauses. ‘‘More people had problems with my politics than my gender. I remember telling the head of a record label – a Zionist Jew – that I was going to sing in ‘occupied territory’ and he blew his stack.’’ The label was CBS and they dropped her.
But she has done all right, financially. ‘‘Mother Teresa said don’t waste time engaging in voluntary poverty,’’ she says, ‘‘when you could be doing something more valuable.’’
Baez won’t be drawn on the political engagement of modern pop stars. I press her on the antiTrump statements of Pink and the current of feminism and racial reckoning in Beyonce’s recent music but all I get is: ‘‘There certainly are a lot of ballsy women out there. But I don’t listen to much new music.’’
She is more passionate about the students protesting against Trump’s call for armed teachers following the Florida school shooting. ‘‘What those kids are doing is amazing. They’re so levelheaded. It gives me hope. Because any change now has to come from the grassroots.’’
Does she feel that social media makes it easier to organise and publicise protests than it was in the 60s? ‘‘It’s all very well to get a million people together,’’ she says, ‘‘but you need to know what to do with them. You need a plan. There was a kind of alchemy that happened in the 60s and you can’t manufacture that. The closest we’ve come since was during the Obama election campaign.’’
The standout track on her new album is The President Sang Amazing Grace, Zoe Mulford’s stately ballad about Obama’s visit to the Charleston church where a white supremacist opened fire on the congregation in 2015.
Yet for all the sorrow in her music, there’s rarely anger and I’ve always found that strange. There she was in 1972, calm beneath the B-52s of Hanoi, and here she still is singing slow and low about a modern massacre.
‘‘I do get angry. Of course I do. I’ve been scared. But I think that when I was very young I had brains enough not to get ‘illusioned’ by things, so I couldn’t get disillusioned. The human race has behaved very badly, historically. If you go raging against the machine you can burn yourself out.’’ Baez has been doing this for six decades now. No sign of burnout. She knows she can only continue to fight the good fight if she looks after herself.
‘‘I think that when I was very young I had brains enough not to get ‘illusioned’ by things, so I couldn’t get disillusioned. If you go raging against the machine you can burn yourself out.’’