[2 articles] Credo: Joan Baez, folk singer, 67
http://www.independent.co.uk/extras/sunday-review/regulars/credo-joan-baez-folk-singer-67-942316.html Interview by Luiza Sauma Sunday, 28 September 2008 Being at home is more exhausting than being on tour. When I'm travelling I can put up a "Do Not Disturb" sign, unplug the phone and not worry that I'm responsible for everything. That I like. For a lot of people, the 1960s are too much of a dream. A lot of young people say, "Oh man, I wish I'd been there." It was an extraordinary time. And guess what? It's over. Martin Luther King was the most laid-back human being I've ever met. He had a marvellous sense of humour that people, on the whole, didn't get to see very much of. I knew history was happening when I heard him speak. It's an accident of birth that I happen to be American. But it's an accident of birth that people take so seriously that they go around killing each other for it. Barack Obama is a statesman and I know that if he was elected, he would not embarrass me. I know I would have differences with him. I mean, he would be the commander-in-chief of the army, navy and air force, and I'm a pacifist. Folk music was a perfect storm. I liked the honesty of it, and the stories. I showed up, Dylan showed up, the anti-war and civil-rights movements showed up. There was a community of people who worked together during that time. I managed to get a grip on my stage fright through therapy. It was so intensely unpleasant for so many years, and then I changed. I never really believed that people could make that big a change. I'm a natural dancer. Dancing moves the body in a way nothing else can. It loosens things up. I like samba and Latin dance. Nature is important to me. I sleep in a tree house actually, it's just a platform all summer long. I like to see the sky and the stars. Sometimes the birds are flying so close to my head I can feel the wind. Those things are heaven to me. n -- Joan Baez begins a UK tour tomorrow. For details, visit www.joanbaez.com -------- Joan Baez - Song for tomorrow http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/features/-Joan-Baez--.4536297.jp Published Date: 29 September 2008 Joan Baez has been a sweet-voiced champion of civil rights for 50 years. But ahead of a show in Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall tonight, Fiona MacGregor discovers even the heroine of the peace movement can sometimes succumb to grumpiness IT WAS a dismissal worthy of her notoriously recalcitrant ex, Bob Dylan, whose intolerance of journalists is legendary. But I really wasn't expecting it from Joan Baez, the sweet-voiced heroine of the peace movement a woman enshrined in public memory as the floaty-dressed, ebony-haired champion of love over conflict. So, Joan, as you celebrate 50 years of performing, has there been one song that's been a favourite above all others? That has really encapsulated what using lyrics and music to protest has mean for you? "You really can't do that, I don't think you can do that after 20 years, let alone 50, so I'm just going to leave that alone." Fair enough, but what about her new album, which she has described as representing "the essence" of herself? Is there a song on it that particularly sums up what she stands for? "The most powerful is Day after Tomorrow." What is it about that song in particular? "I think it's kind of clear if you listen to it, don't you?" Well, yes but it would be really nice if you could tell me in your own words so I can share it with my readers, many of whom will not have heard it. "No, I think I've done as many (answers] as I can do." And that was how a difficult interview ended. Dear God! Have I somehow managed to make the most peace-loving musician in the world turn grumpy? The interview, ahead of her performance in Glasgow tonight, has been punctuated with warnings from her that she doesn't have much time to answer questions. I have a feeling there may be specific questions she would have liked me to ask, but she's given me no clue what these might be. The whole experience is a horrible reminder of the adage about never meeting one's heroes lest it ends in disappointment. It's just a couple of months since I watched Baez entrance the crowdat Glastonbury as she performed the acoustic stage's closing act for a mix of straggly old hippies and partied-out revellers, ready for some nostalgic relaxation amid the dying embers of the festivities. She walked on stage dressed in light jacket and trousers and cream scarf and carrying her guitar and the most instantly striking thing about this woman, who is still so very striking in so many ways, was her grace. "You're beautiful Joan," shouted a forty-something man in the crowd behind me. And he was absolutely right, there is a rare luminosity about her. The beauty of 67-year-old women is not often recognised, but it seems a life spent pursuing peace has achieved what Botox and the scalpel never can. The dark curtains of hair have given way to a short silver crop and her voice has deepened, but the exotic cheekbones, glowing skin and sorrowful eyes have changed little since Baez first took up her legendary residency at Boston's Club 47 back in 1958. Her performance at Glastonbury was uplifting and inspiring, her songs still full of hope. While so many of her contemporaries became disillusioned Baez has retained into her seventh decade the air of innocent optimism which shone out from her as a 17-year-old girl in Boston. So, when given the chance to interview her, I jumped at it. Perhaps this would be a chance for some kind of enlightenment. How has she kept her faith in humanity all these years? "I have faith in people… but I don't have faith in human nature now as it behaves on the planet. I think that's always a test," she explains. "Witness our elections!" "I'm thinking now about what's going on in the United States and it's horrifying. It's group mentality. If Obama wins this election it will be an astounding step forward for this country and if he doesn't it will be status quo a nightmare!" She must be proud to have been part of the movement that made a black presidential candidate possible? "I think the civil rights movement in the States has been (the most important of all the protests she's been involved with]. That was one that made changes that would never change back, in terms of relations between blacks and whites. "It's stressful now, it still isn't anywhere you'd like it to be. When I went to the south with Dr King there was practically no way to share a black and a white (playground]. In fact that's why I went and did my concerts in black schools, because my fans were not black, but my fans would come on to the campus and that way we'd have a mixed audience and it was revolutionary. "It was the most useful thing I could possibly do and I'm glad I had the chance and the equipment to do that." The equipment. What a remarkably prosaic way to describe her extraordinary voice and her ability to interpret songs with such feeling that she has quite literally in the case of Czechoslovakia in 1989 helped prompt revolutions. "The concert I gave in Bratislava was on live television and I had met with Vaclav Havel (who would become the first president of the Czech Republic] and we had planned all sorts of wonderful, illegal things to do," she says, still clearly relishing the sense of "mischief", as she puts it. During the show Baez invited the dissident singer-songwriter Ivan Hoffman, banned from singing, on stage. Hoffman managed to get through a couple of verses of an anti-communist song which were broadcast before the authorities pulled the plug on his mic. "Later on, Havel put in his book that my concert there was the last drop before everything there overflowed. So something like that is tangible, usually it's not tangible," she says. Baez has used her life to sing out for freedom. But despite having a Scottish mother (Big Joan, the Edinburgh-born daughter of an Episcopalian minister), she doesn't ascribe her passion for folk music to her Celtic connections. She is certainly not one of these Americans who gets excited about her Scottish heritage. "Not really. (The folk tradition) is something I got from swanning around by myself, but I think it's in her. Something makes her the biggest fan I've ever had and she listens intently, always," says Baez of her mother, who is now 95. "She could sing, she could have sung, but the fact is I didn't sit around the living room singing with my mum." Of course, it is impossible to think of Baez and not associate her with Dylan. As a couple they represented the idealism of the early 60s folk revival and the protest movement. Their break-up would become something of a metaphor for the cynicism which, for many, elbowed out that optimistic era. Baez never fully got over the hurt. Their relationship would see her forever defined as a betrayed woman. Yet, not everyone saw it that way. Suze Rotolo, the fair-haired girl hunched under Dylan's protective arm on the cover of the album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, has suggested in a recent book that, far from being an innocent victim of Dylan's ambition, Baez knowingly used her success in the early 60s to seduce the at-the-time lesser known singer (who was still going out with Rotolo at the time). "I think she is an example of a woman who really knew what she wanted and how to get it, and to everybody else, the hell with you," said Rotolo. It's an assessment that Baez agrees with only in part: "I think politically I always knew where I was. Musically? I don't know. I didn't ever plan anything, I just did it I was always instinctive and sometimes impulsive, musically and otherwise." Impulsive in her relationships? Doesn't she recognise at all the young woman described by Rotolo, who was as determined to achieve success in her love life with Dylan as she was in her career? Her answer is as convoluted as their notoriously complex relationship. "I don't think they had much to do with each other, which they did have to do with each other, but I'd see them somewhat separately," she says, before falling silent. Confused? I think what she means is that a person can be in control in their work, but lack power when it comes to relationships. With her and Dylan, the music and the relationship became intertwined. And she never really untangled that. Today his songs still form a fundamental part of her repertoire. For a long time Baez moved away from the very traditional folk scene towards country music, recording in Nashville. But her latest studio album, her 24th, sees a return to her folk roots. Many of the songs, such as The Rose of Sharon, or The Scarlet Tide which was penned by Elvis Costello for the film Cold Mountain sound like old English traditional songs. She describes the album "as speaking to the essence of who I am". So what is the essence of Joan Baez? "The essence, and maybe the point of the essence, is to put a book-end at the end of 50 years. Part of it is conscious and part of it isn't when these projects get going. But it got started with Day After Tomorrow which was so simple and so beautiful and encouraged all of us to head in that direction of unplugged music, and contemporary (music). Hopefully one or two sound really like old folk songs. I think we captured that, specially in The Rose of Sharon." It sounds as if perhaps she's come full circle. Could this be her last album? "I don't know. At the moment I'm riding on it, I can never tell till months after or the next year what I'm going to want to do." But is she content now that she had done everything she wanted to musically, and fulfilled all her ambitions in terms of music? "Yes," she answers straightforwardly. Which is when I thought it would be interesting to find out which was the song she loved best. I don't know why she was short tempered. Perhaps the enlightenment she offered was that even the most peace-loving people have off days and heroines are still human. But, even if she does have her grumpy days, Baez's legacy, politically and musically, is a beautiful reminder of just how much individuals are capable of achieving when they're determined enough. . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. 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