Joan Baez
We meet the ’60s legend at home in California to talk about her new album, her final full tour, The Beatles, Martin Luther, King… and a guy called Bob
Joan Baez sits forward in a straight-backed wooden chair in the airy kitchen of her north California home. She is telling us one of her excellent stories, this one involving an unexpected liaison with John Lennon. “It wasn’t really a love affair,” Baez demurs. “the Beatles invited me to go on the road with them for their final concerts, and since my tour had just ended I figured, ‘Why the hell not?’ We ended up in this big mansion in La, but the trouble was, there weren’t enough rooms. Since John had invited me, it was decided that I’d stay in John’s room. Mind you, there were girls all over the place, waiting around to see if one of the Beatles was going to drag them off to their room. after a while I got tired and went to sleep. about four o’clock in the morning, John tumbled in, and it was like he felt compelled to make some sort of overture to me. He started coming on to me, but in a rather half-hearted way, and I said to him, ‘John, you are probably as beat as I am. I’m not up for it, either.’ He looked so relieved. ‘I am so glad. You see, I’ve already been fucked downstairs. So if you wouldn’t have said that, we both would’ve been fucked.’ the two of us had a good laugh at that, and he went to sleep on the other side of this big bed.”
as it transpires, an afternoon with Baez involves a surprising amount of laughter. She doesn’t share such wicked anecdotes to impress – and there are others, too, about Janis Joplin, Elton John, Steve Jobs and more – but to amuse both the listener and herself. She is not only aware of her own status, she finds it all somewhat absurd, too. Her stories are sharply told, often self-deprecatory and pointedly honest. “She’s terribly bright and terribly funny,” says her longtime friend Emmylou Harris. “Everybody puts her up there as this goddess on a pedestal – and I did, too – but she’s so very real and down to earth. It was delightful to be around her. When she gets going she just takes the piss out of everyone.” But not only does Baez have a wicked way with an anecdote, she also reveals herself to be a canny impressionist. among her repertoire, she does a mean Bob Dylan. Did he ever tell you what he thought of your imitation of him? “nope,” she says, shaking her head firmly. “Just ignored it. For a lifetime.”
It is this kind of unnervingly forthright reply that channels into Baez’s more familiar public imagine – “Yeah, I can be a little scary sometimes,” she allows. as a performer, Baez has often seemed impervious to her audiences, never taking requests, stopping a show if she heard talking and refusing to continue until there was complete silence. She had, she explains now, a greater master to serve: the song itself. “I used to be awful,” Baez says, pulling at a printed scarf gathered loosely around her neck. “For years, I insisted that I’m not famous, I’m just well known. Who was I kidding? I was on the cover of Time. I didn’t want to deal with fame. I was afraid of being commercial. I wouldn’t go onstage until they took the american flag off stage. this is as obnoxious as the pop stars who say you can’t look them in the eye backstage. It was just as difficult dealing with me. But not so much now.” Why not? “Lots of deep therapy.” For the past 10 years, Baez and her son, percussionist Gabe Harris, have been going to see a psychologist together to deal with some of the fallout of celebrity. “His childhood wasn’t right, I wasn’t there enough,” she says simply. “But we
“I’m looking at 80. What does that mean for my decisions?” JOAN BAEZ
were in therapy together yesterday. Every few years something else comes up.”
Yesterday, however, there was something else on the agenda. “Gabe’s a little sad because I’m quitting,” she explains. “He’s been playing in my band. It’s not just financially that he’ll be hurt, but me stopping cuts into his life and dreams. He loves the bus, the travelling. I love being with him. But it’s time to say goodbye to all that. My whole family’s all gone. I’m looking at 80. What does that mean for my decisions now? What does that mean for the end of a career, basically?”
It is a cool yet sunny afternoon in Woodside, California. Baez has lived in this affluent suburb since the early 1970s. Despite her frequent and extensive touring commitments in the subsequent years, her house is appropriately rambling and a little old-fashioned. It has a charming, lived-in quality – a crumpled blanket is sprawled over an armchair, CDs are scattered on a table – but Baez maintains a pleasing attention to aesthetics, from the row of perfect orange persimmons that line the window sill to the turn-of-the-century nude painting mounted on a brick wall in the hearth in her kitchen. today, Baez is dressed in an oversized burgundy sweater, Ugg boots and jeans. a silver tibetan bell on a long chain is her only ornamentation, save her mother’s engagement ring and a wide band she bought in Greenwich Village years ago. She rings the small bell intermittently as she walks through the house so her blind nine-yearold Bouvier des Flandres dog knows where she is. “Come with your mama,” she says soothingly, as the oversized dog pads after her. “Don’t worry, I got you. Big step now.”
the dog follows her faithfully, collapsing in a pool of pale orange fur at her owner’s feet just as Baez explains the latest twist in her remarkable career. Her new studio album, Whistle Down The Wind, could be her last. at present she has no plans for more. on March 2, she will embark on a Fare thee Well tour in Stockholm that runs until august, taking in a 10-date residency at L’olympia in Paris along the way. “Fare thee Well is a greeting as well as goodbye,” Baez says. “I’m saying that it will be the last of my official touring, but if I get an invitation to go somewhere and take part in a festival or do some benefit, I’m sure I’d figure out how to show up.” She’s been threatening to stop making records and touring for the past 10 years, she says. Her mother, Joan Sr, who lived with Baez until her death aged 100 in 2013, successfully lobbied against this. “When my mom was about 90, I said, ‘I’m just going to quit.’ She said, ‘What will your fans think?’ a few years later, when I told her the same thing, she said, ‘oh, honey, you’ve done enough.’”
Have you? “I don’t know,” she says slowly. “at the moment, seeing beyond this one is hard to do. Mostly because it gets harder and harder to sing. People don’t factor that in, because there is no reason for them to understand it. It’s hard to make it sound the way I want it to. I can still manage it in a lower range, but it’s not easy. But I don’t really hate the way it sounds. It’s a gravelly reflection of a life well lived.”
“the change in her voice is part of her deciding that she’s going to bring down the tent,” confirms Joe Henry, who produced Whistle Down The Wind, named after the tom Waits song she covers here. “She’s not being overly dramatic about it. She’s not saying this is the last time she’ll walk into a studio, or step onto a stage. But she’s saying she’s ready to finish this and do something else with her time. But her voice is different… why wouldn’t it be? the soprano that she’s most famous for is less accessible to her day to day – but there are moments on the new record where the weather in her voice could not be more fundamentally powerful for me as a listener.”