What about Bob?
ANAHEIM, Calif. — At the start of the new documentary, “Joan Baez I Am a Noise,” there’s a quote from the writer Gabriel García Márquez that fills the screen for a moment: “Everyone has three lives: the public, the private, and the secret.”
It’s a signal that this film has stories to share about the 82-year-old folk singer and political activist that have never before been told.
That wasn’t the original intent, Baez says with a wry smile on a recent video call.
“It was going to be about the last tour,” Baez says of her 2018 farewell shows. “Then at a certain point, I realized I had to let them in farther than just that.
“I literally handed them the key, the three directors, to the storage unit,” she says. “In the film, when I walk into it, that’s the first time I I’ve ever been in there.”
With that key, co-directors Karen O’Conner, Miri Navasky and Maeve O’Boyle entered a chamber of treasures that Baez had forgotten existed.
“I knew my mom had kept some stuff,” Baez says. “In the back of my head, I knew that. I didn’t know that she kept everything. All of my father’s footage from moving pictures and stills. Every drawing from when I was five on. So we dipped into all of that and used that to make the film cohesive.”
The home movies show Baez, the middle child between sisters Pauline and Mimi, traveling the world on trips her parents took them on. The drawings are used beautifully in the film, her original work animated to illustrate different moments.
And there’s more: Diaries and letters and audio tapes that Baez recorded to send home from her travels.
“It’s different having a 21-year-old say to the mom, ‘I’m going to march tomorrow with probably 40,000 people and it’ll be with Dr. [Martin Luther] King,’” Baez says about how the audio letters gave voice to her thoughts. “Here’s this 21-year-old whose mind is blown by all this going on, instead of me retelling the tale.”
O’Conner was a longtime friend before she, Navasky and O’Boyle directed the film, and
Baez gave the trio free rein to use what they wanted and tell her story as they saw fit.
“I signed on for this, so there was nothing I could do about it,” Baez says, laughing. “They did the film. I wanted to leave an honest legacy, and I was serious about it. So it’s warts and all.”
Much of Baez’s public life is well known.
At 19, she exploded onto the folk music scene and quickly escaped the confines of genre to become one of the best-known singers of the 1960s. She was with Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington and at countless protests against the Vietnam War. She’s in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, a Grammy winner, a Kennedy Center honoree.
Her private life also at times broke into the public realm.
Baez’s romance with the then-little-known singer-songwriter Bob Dylan united the two biggest stars in folk in the early ’60s for a time. Her marriage to the anti-war activist David Harris produced her only child, Gabriel Harris, while David was in prison for refusing to report after he was drafted.