Joan Baez savors rare times of relaxation;
she performs here Saturday
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2010310220019
Jeff Spevak
October 22, 2010
Joan Baez does not sleep outdoors out of solidarity with the
homeless. She simply likes to sleep in the backyard tree house at the
California home that she shares with her elderly mother. The bird
feeder is right by her head. "My contact with nature and the moon and
the birds and the trees, they mean so much to me," Baez says.
With that beautiful voice of hers, Baez has always gone out on a limb
in this life that has been equal parts music and activism. It's an
exhaustive list of human causes. Civil rights, human rights, gay and
lesbian rights, the Vietnam War, the environment, the invasion of
Iraq, the death penalty and poverty. But, at 69, she has maybe
realized that she can't fight all of the wars herself.
"At the moment, I'm saying no to just about everything that comes
across my desk," says Baez, who plays Saturday at the Auditorium
Theater. "For the first time, I'm spending time with my family, which
I never did in the '60s and '70s.
"Relaxing is hard for me after all these years, nonstop activism. I
have a house with this beautiful view, where I can sit, sipping tea,
looking at the Santa Cruz Mountains. There's a creek down there, and
I can go creek walking, knee scraping. Nobody else is ever walking in
that creek. I'll go down there collecting rocks. Or doing absolutely
pointless things, like pulling twigs out of the way so the creek can
flow through. Which makes absolutely no sense because it's just going
to get tangled up again a little further down the creek."
But it is symbolic of what Baez has been doing all of these years.
Untangling this messy world, trying to help things flow a little more smoothly.
Baez has written some wonderful songs, notably "Diamonds & Rust." Yet
she is probably better known for interpreting the words of others.
Like The Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" and, of a
more-recent vintage, music by Ryan Adams, Natalie Merchant and Steve
Earle. "I haven't written a song in over 20 years," Baez says. "I
wish it came back as fluently as it once did. I can't will it into
place, and I don't do drugs."
If you're not doing drugs, you might as well do Steve Earle. Baez has
been singing a handful of his songs for a few years now, and he
produced Baez's most-recent album, 2008's Day After Tomorrow. "He's
really the only outspoken, well-known writer of songs now, some of
which are clearly political," Baez says. "So it was sort of a
political match in a way. He was easy enough to work with. He works
the way that I do, which is very fast.
"And he gets grumpier than I do."
Truly great songs have a difficult time getting attention today, Baez
says. "And they're also not 'Blowin' in the Wind.'"
She means, they don't have history working for them. "The time period
that I came out of, is not going to be repeatable," Baez says. "And
people are waiting for it. What's going to have to move people now is
something that we can't imagine. In the '60s, we had a perfect storm.
Civil rights, Vietnam, young people. Music, brilliant music that
spanned the generations."
Since then, the response has never been as heroic. "People didn't
know what to do with themselves," Baez says. "Most people had come to
their activism by way of that war."
After Vietnam, she threw herself behind Amnesty International,
abolishing the death penalty and immigration rights, but the cast of
villains is always shifting. Today, Baez laments the demonizing
speech of the Tea Party, people who she refers to as "wound-up morons."
"It comes out of fear, the fear having those Mexicans come over and
take over everybody's work," says Baez, whose father was born in Mexico.
Now the country that promised Freedom of Religion cowers from a group
of peace-seeking Muslims wanting to build a mosque in New York City,
"as though they're all just one big Arab waving a saber and racing
across the desert to reach our shores," Baez says. "It's irrational."
Just like old times, Baez played the anti-war rallies as we stomped
through Iraq. "It's a little bit like a replay, and wondering if that
was what was needed at the time," she concedes. "To be honest, the
most valuable appearance for, quote, 'our side,' was Lady Gaga. She
was brilliant and she was young, and she was watched by the public.
Not that she's going to take any serious risks. Go to jail, practice
civil disobedience."
Not like the old days. Wasn't the time ripe for a reunion of the
legendary social icons? "Oh Jesus, no," Baez says. "You make your
friends, and they don't necessarily come out of where they think you
are. Nostalgia has always been a problem for me, and I didn't make
close friends back then."
Who is Baez? A creek walker. Someone who asks Merle Haggard for his
autograph. And sometimes, performing at a cabaret dinner theater in
San Francisco, she is the singing gypsy emcee with peacock plumes in
her hair, La Contessa ZinZanni. "It's a wonderful thing," Baez says,
"getting to not be me for 3½ hours."
.
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