Joan Baez Interview form rec.music.dylan

Joan Baez Interview

Group: rec.music.dylan Date: Tue, Aug 26, 2003, 8:28pm (EDT-3) From:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Mad Dan)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1029819,00.html
It ain't me, babe - it's Madame Zinzanni!
She was the heroine of the counter-culture, marching, singing and going
to jail for peace. But when the times changed, Joan Baez went into
therapy - and ran off to join the circus. Nigel Williamson meets her
Wednesday August 27, 2003
The Guardian
"I've had a lot of fantasies about going back to jail," says Joan Baez.
"If my life has any real meaning, I'm not ruling it out. Things have got
so bad so quickly, it's time for people to stand up and take that risk."
She's meant to be in London on a rare visit to talk about her new album,
Dark Chords on a Big Guitar. But Baez doesn't do small talk and she has
never really been into promoting product when there's a world that needs
changing.
Exactly 40 summers ago, she was marching in Alabama with Martin Luther
King. She was also a few feet from his side in Washington when he made
his "I have a dream" speech. A few years after that, she was sitting in
a North Vietnamese bomb shelter in Hanoi, a one-woman human shield in
protest at US involvement in the war. And, as she reminds you, she has
been to prison twice before for her beliefs.
"When I look back, I can hardly believe some of the things she did,"
says Baez today. "I see that young girl and she seems very far away and
precocious. Frankly, I'm floored by what I did. Why didn't I go
screaming out of the bomb shelter in Hanoi or that prison cell and lose
my mind?"
Yet in all her decades of activism and civil disobedience, Baez does not
believe the world has ever been in worse shape: "It's the scariest time
in my experience. America is governed by a dictatorship that stole the
election and is bulldozing us with lies. This administration doesn't
care how many million people march against them. They just unplug the
TV."
Despite this, Baez remains the eternal optimist. "The first march I went
on in 1963 had 30 people," she says. "And I was undaunted. We had six
million marching against this war. It has to make some kind of cosmic
difference. We're disoriented and discouraged because it didn't make a
damned difference to the immediate course of events. But how many years
did it take us to get rid of Nixon? We can go down the tubes with Bush
and Cheney and their crew. Or we can struggle to stay afloat and learn
from it."
It's stirring talk, and when those lessons are learned and the battle is
eventually won - as she is convinced it will be - Baez is touchingly
certain that music will have played its part: "I've asked repeatedly
over the years why people aren't writing songs like Dylan's Blowin' in
the Wind any more. And the answer is that we were in a vacuum. Well, it
ain't no vacuum no more. I think with the times the way they are, there
will be a more radicalised kind of songwriting. People's eyes are being
opened to a reality about America that perhaps they didn't previously
see. And that's going to affect the songs they write."
Not that there's much that resembles a protest song on Baez's new album.
Instead, she has recorded compositions by such contemporary US writers
as Ryan Adams, Gillian Welch and Caitlin Cary, most of whom are less
than half her age. "It's nothing magnanimous," she says
self-deprecatingly. "It's just that I don't want to write any more.
Songwriting is like squeezing cement out of a toothpaste tube to me."
Adopting younger songwriters has resulted in a certain rejuvenation in
Baez herself. Five years ago, when I last interviewed her, she had been
fretful and irritated at being regarded as a "walking piece of history".
Today, at 62, she appears more comfortable in her skin. "It took a lot
of hard work and a lot of therapy," she says. "I look back and I can see
I was afraid of changes. There was a lot junk I had to clear out."
The therapy, she insists, "took more guts" than sitting in the bomb
shelter in Hanoi. "I'm not interested in being a legend. But I don't
resent my past any more since I started updating myself musically. I had
to do that for my own peace of mind. Now I fee proud to have been part
of those events in the 60s."
Baez was there to witness some of the decade's most momentous events. At
a recent US concert, she introduced a song by talking about a civil
rights demonstration in Mississippi that saw police dogs set on black
protesters. "Suddenly I realised I was giving a history class," she
recalls. "After the show people came up to me and asked if I was making
it up. Setting dogs on black folk wasn't in their history books and they
didn't know about it and they didn't believe it could be true. I was
shocked by that."
Born into a liberal Quaker family in New York in 1941 - her father was
Mexican, her mother Scottish - Baez recalls precisely the moment of the
inception of the political conscience and Gandhi-like belief in
non-violent resistance that has inspired her entire life: "This only
came back to me recently when I was watching the bombing of Baghdad. My
father took us to Baghdad when I was 10 and, while I was there, I read
The Dairy of Anne Frank. I read it over and over because I was so moved
by it."
She first came to attention at the age of 18 when she stole everyone's
heart at the Newport folk festival with her pure soprano voice in
1959. Her first album was released the following year, so that when a
grubby, unknown Woody Guthrie wannabe called Bob Dylan arrived in New
York's Greenwich Village in 1961, Baez was already an established star.
She became Dylan's mentor, introducing him as her guest at numerous
concerts, including his own Newport debut in 1963.
For a brief but magical few months, which to her irritation are still
the first thing interviewers ask her about to this day, Baez and Dylan
were the king and queen of the folk movement. There was talk of marriage
and babies. According to Baez, they even discussed children's names. But
by 1965, with Dylan's fame exploding, they had grown apart emotionally
and artistically. He embraced rock 'n' roll and told her he had only
ever written protest songs because there was money in it.
Was she hurt by his apparent betrayal of the causes she held most dear?
"No, because I knew it was nonsense. He was never a marcher himself but
he wrote the songs for us to march to and they moved and affected all
those people. So of course that was real. When he said he'd only done it
for money, I couldn't take him seriously. I told him he was full of
shit. It was piffle. Codswollop. I never believed him and still don't."
While Dylan made the transition from folk hero to electric messiah, Baez
remained wedded to protest. She married fellow Vietnam war refusenik
David Harris in 1968 and their resistance saw them both serve time in
jail. In between their sentences, they had a son, Gabe, but when they
divorced in 1972, he went to live mostly with his father. She even
missed his first Christmas because she was in Hanoi.
Yet as both musical tastes and the political climate changed, her
earnest folk songs began to make her sound like an anachronism; she
still spent most of her time on human rights issues in south America,
Africa, eastern Europe and wherever else repression and intolerance
raised their ugly heads. But by the 1980s, her career was in apparent
terminal decline and Ronald Reagan was heading a right-wing
administration that was rolling back everything for which she had
fought. She did what any self-respecting American would do. She headed
for the therapist's couch: "I know the English hate this word, but I
entered deep therapy. I was phobic and neurotic and nobody ever knew,
because I was always so in control on stage."
When she emerged from what she calls her "recovery work", she found her
hang-ups and fears had gone: "I thought a therapist was someone who
helped keep you together so that you could move on to the next crisis.
But what I needed to do was to fall apart and examine the pieces and put
them back where they should have been in the first place."
To her delight, she found that her core beliefs had stayed solid. But
for the first time, she found that life could be fun rather than an
endless struggle. Although he was now an adult, by her own admission she
became a mother to Gabe for the first time. She simply hadn't realised
how all-consuming her political activism had been and how that had
caused her to neglect her own happiness and that of those around her.
"When you're involved in great struggles for freedom and justice,
personal gratification seems an indulgence," she says. "I think that
came from my Quaker father. I had the giggles knocked out of me as a
kid. Words such as vacation, rest, relax, fun and horsing around weren't
part of our family's vocabulary. I've had to learn them."
Baez's mother, who lives with her in California, has been learning them,
too. In her 80s, she smoked her first joint. She's just turned 90 and
recently took up nude swimming. "She's just becoming aware of how lovely
she is," Baez says with obvious delight. "We're both re-educating
ourselves to enjoy being old."
Which perhaps explains her latest passion for the circus. "Three years
ago, I went to see this circus in a tent with a trapeze and jugglers and
musicians and I was enchanted. So I called the director the next day and
said I wanted to be in it." They gave her the lead role of Madame
Zinzanni, who is the hostess of the show. Every summer since, Baez has
spent two months on the road with the circus. "My manager is furious
about it and fought against it all the way," she says. "He thinks I
should have grown out of running away to join the circus 50 years ago."
She giggles like a schoolgirl.
Is there room in her life for circus and prison? "I don't know what form
the action will take, but I feel it's going to have to come. And prison
is an education. Anybody who wants to know anything about themselves or
their own country should spend at least 24 hours in the local jail.
Especially anybody who is running for office. They should do a week."
Then she laughs again. "And George Bush should be a lifer."
· Dark Chords on a Big Guitar is released on Sanctuary on September 8.