55 f
down in New York City, the exuberant atmosphere heightened the night I was there by the presence of Bill and Hillary Clinton. As in the 1960s, she has taken to the streets to protest against the innumer- able iniquities of the Trump administration and a song, Nasty Man, went viral – just as she was poised to be inducted in to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in April 2017.
That was surely an honour the young Joan Baez would have refused. “I’m sure I would have! I was such a snoot,” she laughs heartily. “I’d have been appalled. But it was fun, and you can look at it either way: ‘What’s she doing in the Hall of Fame’ or ‘about time’. Accepting the award from Jackson Browne, she said: “I'm aware that I'm speaking to many young people who, without this induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, would have no clue who I am. My granddaughter had no clue who I was, until I took her back- stage at a Taylor Swift concert, where she got a selfie, an autograph, a T-shirt and newfound respect for her grandmother.”
More seriously, Baez spoke in the tra- dition of her folk forebears when she implored: “Let us together repeal and replace brutality and make compassion a priority. Together, let us build a bridge – a great bridge, a beautiful bridge – to once again welcome the tired and the poor. And we will pay for that bridge with our commitment.”
She regards this period as infinitely worse than the 1960s, with so many of the gains made in that tumultuous decade endangered by the current president and his followers. Action, she once famously said, is “the antidote to despair” and she still believes that to be the case. “It’s hard [in both America and Britain] but you bash on regardless. We couldn’t have scripted this, nobody could have scripted this. Nobody could have imagined it.” She’s not convinced that Trump is neces- sarily going to be dislodged. “People keep saying ‘this’ll get him’ but I’m not sure anything necessarily is going to get him because everyone around him is support- ing him and they’re all such yellow, spine- less people that, even though they know he’s defective – seriously defective – and causes tremendous damage, it doesn’t
Joan Baez will always stand at the crossroads of music and social activism, an interpretive singer more than a songwrit- er, though her writing deserves more cred- it than even she is willing to give it: Gulf Winds (1976), her only entirely self- penned album, is well worth exploring, as are the few songs released on Rare, Live & Classic which were recorded with the Grateful Dead, whose own roots lie in folk and bluegrass. (There are more in the can, though it’s not clear if they will ever be released.) Diamonds And Rust she regards as a happy fluke.
Live in 2007
matter to them. The whole conservative agenda has nothing to do with much except self-service. Money, and you teach your kids to go out and make more money. That’s all it is.”
B
aez was brought up with a very different ethic. Both grandpar- ents were ministers and her parents became Quakers. Her father, a noted physicist, was the co-inventor of the X-ray microscope and a teacher who took science to devel- oping countries, including Iraq, where the family spent a year when Joan was ten, an experience that gave a particular piquan- cy to the recent war. Social activism was part of the family DNA and when an aunt took her to see Pete Seeger, thirteen-year- old Baez was hooked. Folk music, she has said, was “like a vaccine, it took.”
At around the same time, a young preacher named Martin Luther King visit- ed her California high school. A few years later she was singing from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Wash- ington when King delivered his most cele- brated speech and over the next five years worked with him in the South, singing wherever she was needed.
These days, Baez writes poetry but not songs, but her creative energies are over- whelmingly channelled into painting. She has always drawn: cartoons, line drawings, watercolours – and now acrylics. Last year she had her first show in the Bay Area, its subject Mischief Makers, among them Malala, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Vaclav Havel, who liked to talk to her about “making mischief”. The collection has been bought by the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria for installation in the future Social Justice Learning Center at Sonoma State University but, until the Center is ready, Mischief Makers will tour, probably to Prague, Paris and London. Unsurprising- ly, she’s not planning a Bob Dylan-style painting-by-numbers roll-out. “And I’m not launching whisky with my sculpting around it!” she laughs, referring to his new line of Heaven’s Door bourbon. “You gotta hand it to him for living outside the box.” Not for Dylan, one imagines, the post-tour decompression that Baez favours – helping out on a farm or, following the Gerdes Folk City 25th anniversary celebration in New York, washing dishes in an Upper West Side restaurant where David Massengill, with whom she’d just performed, was supple- menting his income. “She posed for pic- tures with all the staff!”
Like anyone facing retirement, Joan Baez is not quite sure how she’ll feel. “I will miss the gang, so we’re making the most of this trip. The halls are all filled up and it’s double the excitement of any tour. I can understand that someone says ‘shit, I’m gonna go back out’. It’s been a golden time.”
joanbaez.com F Anti-Vietnam War March, London 1965. Front row Mark Feld (later Bolan), Tom Paxton, Joan Baez, Donovan, Vanessa Redgrave, Alex Campbell
Photo: Pascal Saez
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