Joan Baez Remembers High Times, High Stress

[Dave Monroe]

>From Peter Marks, "Joan Baez Remembers High Times,
High Stress," NY Times, Tuesday, April 9th, 2002 ...

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The voice from the audience echoed
in the hall like a shout across time. "Kumbaya!" it
called out from the dark.

At center stage, looking fit and petite, her
salt-and-pepper hair clipped short, Joan Baez let out
a giggle of surprise. She gazed at the sea of heads,
many of them silver-haired, filling Town Hall in
Manhattan, a stop on her recent tour of the Eastern
Seaboard. "The only places I'll sing that," she said
drily, "are places that are currently under siege."

Days later, at a gig here in Alexandria, the crowd
pleaded for more old stuff. " `Forever Young'!" they
cried. " `Diamonds and Rust'!" 

Ms. Baez, who is 61, smiled. "Soon," she said to the
last request, riffling the pages of a notebook on a
music stand. She didn't disappoint, remaining onstage
for the better part of two hours, singing a lot of new
material but making a much deeper impact every time
she reverted to one of her standards, like "Joe Hill"
or "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down."

It is clear that her fans, who grew up with her
clarion soprano on their stereos and tape decks and
who remember her as an era-defining presence at
antiwar demonstrations and civil rights marches, are
more nostalgic than she is. Even if she likes to
remind audiences of her activism — "Just remember, 40
years ago I was right" — Ms. Baez says she does not
recall the 1960's particularly fondly.

[...]

"I had accepted the 'peace queen' role," she says now.
"I felt I had to be promoting something, to be so
cause oriented. I had to do it and do it and do it."
Her memory of that period of her life was more that of
being a target than a star. "I wasn't respectable,"
she says, "until the war ended."

Four decades later, Ms. Baez is still at her
accustomed perch, with a microphone and an acoustic
guitar, singing songs she always sang, prison songs
and worker songs and protest songs....

[...] 

Yet these days Ms. Baez does not seem to carry the
weight of history so heavily. She is looser on a stage
now, more prone to wisecracks. A salty word or two
escapes her lips, prompting gasps. Even her wicked
impression of Mr. Dylan, with whom she was once so
famously romantically involved, now feels more playful
than bittersweet.

"I've gotten healthier, happier," she said at her
hotel after the Alexandria concert. "It is basically
fun, and it used to be basically work."

It is jarring to hear Ms. Baez speak so ambivalently
about the past, especially now, when her past is
getting more and more attention.

[...]

The story of her early success is under a spotlight
again, too, thanks to the success of a new book, David
Hadju's "Positively Fourth Street" (Farrar, Straus &
Giroux), which explores the lives and early careers of
Ms. Baez and Mr. Dylan, as well as those of Ms. Baez's
folk-singing younger sister Mimi and Mimi's husband,
the novelist Richard Fariña. It was a finalist this
year for a National Book Critics Circle award.

Ms. Baez, who cooperated with the book at the behest
of Mimi, she says, could not bring herself to finish
it. Mr. Hadju provides a portrait of Ms. Baez that is
more complex than her public persona usually
allows....

[...]

But it is the memories of Mimi that are most painful.
Her sister, whose struggles to emerge from Joan's
shadow are a recurring theme of the book, died last
year of lung cancer; Ms. Baez stopped traveling to
help take care of her at home in Woodside, Calif....

[...]

On the road these days, Ms. Baez doesn't leave her
activism at the door, but the give and take is
certainly muted. When she introduces a song called
"Reunion Hill" by Mr. Shindell, she calls it the best
antiwar song she has ever heard. Where once such a
declaration by her might have brought down the house,
it is now greeted by only a smattering of applause.
(Intriguingly, the 41-year-old Mr. Shindell says that
he never had thought of his song as antiwar.) Could it
be that the audience who came to hear Ms. Baez, a
passionate advocate of nonviolence, felt the United
States was participating in a just war? If so, the
times, they definitely have a-changed.

"On Sept. 11 I didn't feel anything," Ms. Baez said,
picking at a plate of fish backstage at the Birchmere,
a popular folk club in Alexandria, a few miles from
the Pentagon. "I was near my son's house. I went over
there, and I just exploded in tears. I told him: `I
did everything to try to make the world better. And
now, I wish I had stayed here with you.' "

The American military response further depressed
her.... 

[...]

How do aging folk singers, their music marginalized,
engage such a world? Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and
Mary, a friend of Ms. Baez since the glory days of the
protest movement, said in a telephone interview that
it might be time for the folk songs that he and Ms.
Baez helped popularize to find their way back to the
mainstream....

[...]

"After 9/11 people are reaching for something in their
lives, in their music, to connect to a deeper sense of
what's meaningful," Mr. Yarrow said. "It's a matter of
kids growing up with the tools to think about
nonviolent conflict resolution. So the sensibility
Joan represents is more important than ever."

Ms. Baez, too, is looking for meaning, which is why
she does not automatically break out into "Kumbaya."
...

[...] 

It was after midnight, and here was the folk idol,
shimmying in her bare feet to the rhythms of Cheikh
Lo, the Senegalese rocker. Everyone else was pooped.
Then George Javori, her drummer, grabbed a metal bowl
from the bus's kitchenette and added his beat. Ms.
Baez twirled and bounced into the night, her lean arms
swaying.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/09/arts/music/09BAEZ.html?todaysheadlines

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