NO DIRECTION HOME: “I think the Bush administration has taken us a quantum leap away from anything civil.”
When I first get Joan Baez on the phone, my burning question is what she thinks of the upcoming presidential election. After all, she’s playing Boston this Sunday (the second of a two-night stint at the Berklee Performance Center), she has a new album called The Day After Tomorrow (a collaboration with country-folk rebel rouser Steve Earle), and on November 2, the “day after tomorrow” will be Election Day.
“Deciding to support a presidential candidate is uncomfortable for me,” she says, “because to me, the office of the presidency still has so many nasty things attached to it — like the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marines. But for me, Obama is reminiscent of King — he just touches people, and you can tell that his presence is backed up with an enormous intelligence and compassion. Plus he has a big picture of Gandhi hanging in his office.”
When Baez nonchalantly mentions “King,” she of course means Martin Luther Jr. — who invited her to accompany him on many of his marches, among them the 1963 March on Washington. That she continues to be linked with those historic times has to do not just with her singular voice (a force of nature that has moved audiences for five decades) but also with the power of her convictions, and the effortless way they mix with her self-depreciating wit. She too touches people, and she backs up her enormous presence in popular culture with intelligence and a compassion that seems to know no bounds. Baez’s local roots are well known: her first show was at Club 47 (now Club Passim) in Harvard Square in 1958, and without much delay, she became a “sort-of refugee wandering musician,” learning everything she could from everyone she met. “Singing just happened,” she explains, “and whatever would take me out of my old image of myself, which wasn’t a very happy one, being too skinny and too dark or whatever — slipping into the world of singing and music, little by little, was certainly preferable to where I had been.” When I ask how her approach to singing has changed over the years, she demurs: “My voice is lower, a lot of it I like a whole lot, and a lot of it is just fucking difficult! When people say to me, ‘Oh, I hope you sing forever!’, I think, ‘Are you kidding?’ Your voice only lasts just so long, and then I’ll, you know, go to the Bahamas or whatever one does at that point.” Baez’s transition from busking musician to international superstar began when she played the 1959 Newport Folk Festival: her Odetta-esque vibrato and intense presence were a hit, and her recording career started soon after. “At the beginning, people thought I was being very clever and saving myself because I didn’t do a lot of concerts, I didn’t really tour — but I just didn’t like traveling! So I’d do, you know, 20 concerts a year because I was terrified to get on a plane. But the whole thing happened quite quickly — if I were to make a graph of my career, at the time everything just went up and up and up. And when you’re up there, it never occurs to you that you’ll ever come down. That’s very difficult, and it happens to every performer.” Like a lot of non-folkies who came of age in the mid to late ’80s, I was first exposed to Baez through two pop-culture portals: heavy-metal tomfoolery (Stormtroopers of Death doing an abbreviated cover of Judas Priest’s cover of Baez’s classic “Diamonds and Rust”) and sketch comedy (SNL’s “Make Joan Baez Laugh,” a fake game show where Nora Dunn’s spot-on Baez is presented with comedian after comedian and they’re all rebuffed with plaintive dismissals like “I don’t think there’s anything funny about Ronald Reagan”). To many of the post-boomer generation, Joan Baez represented an overarching earnestness regarding the tenets of the early-’60s protest movement, which seemed increasingly anachronistic as the idealistic ’60s turned into the hedonistic 70s, the “greed is good” ’80s, whatever the ’90s were, and beyond. But my appreciation for Baez grew when I saw Murray Lerner’s documentary on the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, Message to Love. Her performance is terrific, if not exemplary of her three-octave range and her special talents as a guitarist. What’s more, in an interview at the festival, she weighs in on the then-younger generation and their rage against a society that would put guns in their hands and send them off to fight in a war of dubious moral value. “In this generation,” she said, referring to Woodstock Nation one year after, “these kids have been handed down an evil, stinking, rotten world. And they’re rebelling against it, they’re sick of it.”
I bring up this quote and ask her how it makes her feel a whopping 38 years later, now that those “kids” have had their own kids and grandkids. “You know, I fear for my granddaughter. Back then, as bad as it was, I didn’t feel the tangible fear that I feel with Bush. We’re feet away from martial law. Back then, I thought of the world in general and the suffering of other people, but now it really comes way, way closer to home. I think the Bush administration has taken us a quantum leap away from anything civil.”
Given a perspective like that, it makes sense that she hooked up with a kindred soul like Steve Earle for her new album. “I’m so flattered. You have no idea. Steve opened for me on a concert tour about 10 years ago, and I had met him in between a couple of times. And with ‘Christmas in Washington’ [an Earle-penned song that she sang on her 2003 album, Dark Chords on a Big Guitar], I’d already developed a different relationship with him, even though he wasn’t around. There’s another pocket of him that I didn’t see that clearly that really came out with ‘Christmas in Washington’ — which, by the way, of all the songs that I’ll do in an evening is probably in the top three best received in terms of the response I get from people, whether I’m playing a show in Holland or France or home. So that brought me closer — in my heart, at least — to him. My manager met with him and called me up and said, ‘What would you think of working with Steve?’, and I said, ‘Of course, it’s a natural.’ ”
Baez was herself a natural when she began, but she was also a child in unusual circumstances: her father was a physics professor who famously turned down working on the Manhattan Project (he wound up taking a job at MIT), and her family moved often, even living in Baghdad for a year in the early ’50s.
“Living there [in Baghdad] was something that I knew then that my classmates [back in the States] would never experience, and it was not a very happy time. But like so many of those things, I look back and I’m glad I went through it because of what I learned from it, what I got from it. You know, I don’t know if there’s that much difference, in terms of the general amount of heartache that I feel, looking at the war in Sarajevo and looking at the one in Baghdad. There is some wistfulness, because I remember things about living in Baghdad, like being able to go to Babylon — and way back then, you could still pick up a piece of hieroglyphics and take it home! Of course, now it’s probably been bombed enough times that there’s no hieroglyphics left; but you know, in general, just seeing man’s inhumanity, shall we say, toward each other, continues to leave me stumped.”
JOAN BAEZ | Berklee Performance Center, 136 Mass Ave, Boston | November 1-2 | 8 pm | $40-$50 | 617.747.2261 or www.berkleebpc.com
