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Joan Of Art
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Fifty years after she began her career, Joan Baez releases an album of songs by contemporary writers produced by Steve Earle. By Brian Wise
“I’m not disillusioned because I don’t think I was very illusioned in the first place about anything to do with party politics. But to find ourselves back this close to repeating history is just more scary than anything else…..”
Sometimes it can be a bit daunting talking to a music legend about a new recording. Sure you want to talk to them about their new album but with the depth of history there you also want to talk about their past.
It is easy to see how the past can become a burden and I am determined that it would be impolite to immediately quiz Joan Baez about Bob Dylan. But he is a subject that will come up in conversation and they are inextricably linked.
Baez refers to Dylan as the ‘young scoundrel’ and it is incredible to think that forty-five years after she first introduced him to a New York audience they are both still going strong in their respective careers.
One important difference is, of course, that Baez actually gives interviews and eh is on line from her home near San Francisco to talk about her new album Day After Tomorrow, which has been produced by Steve Earle.
The association with Steve Earle goes back some years. Baez presented Earle with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the BBC2 Folk Awards in 2004 and later that year played a series of dates together in the U.S.
While her live album Bowery Songs (with Earle’s ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Christmas In Washington’) was her previous release this new recording is Baez’ first studio album in five years and features songs from an array of contemporary writers including Earle.
Recorded in Nashville in December last year and February this year the album’s musical line-up includes bluegrass veterans Tim O'Brien and Darrell Scott, along with Viktor Krauss and Kenny Malone.
The title song is the Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan composition that first appeared on Wait’s 2004 album Real Gone. There are three songs written by Steve Earle, including ‘God Is God,’ ‘I Am A Wanderer’ and ‘Jericho Road.
‘Scarlet Tide’ is provided by Elvis Costello and T-Bone Burnett while there are also songs from Eliza Gilkyson (‘Rose Of Sharon’), Patti Griffin (‘Mary’), Diana Jones (‘Henry Russell’s Last Words’) and Thea Gilmore (‘The Lower Road’).
It is hard to imagine that back in 1958, the 17-year old high school graduate Joan Chandos Baez entered the Boston University School Of Drama and began her singing career at a local venue, Club 47. A year later she appeared at the Newport Folk Festival and shortly after that recorded her first solo LP for Vanguard Records in 1960.
By 1963, Baez had met and begun touring with Bob Dylan and, while she recorded many of his songs, she also looked to a variety of writers for her material: Phil Ochs, Richard Fariña, Leonard Cohen, Tim Hardin, Paul Simon, Jacques Brel, Lennon-McCartney, Johnny Cash and others.
Baez was at the forefront of the protest movement – singing against the war in Vietnam and for Civil Rights in the mid-‘60s. While Dylan was soon to withdraw as a spokesman for the protest generation, Baez had no such trouble being out front of the movement.
Baez first recorded in Nashville as far back as the ’70s, when she recorded her last four LPs for Vanguard Records and her first two for A&M there, one of which included her biggest career single, a cover of the Band’s ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’ in 1971.
The career of Joan Baez over the past thirty years is almost impossible to adequately summarise, given her numerous recordings, tours, awards and causes. Her association with Dylan continued – she was on the Rolling Thunder Revues of late 1975 and ’76 – and co-starred in the resulting movie Renaldo & Clara, released in 1978.
Baez has been has politically as passionate as ever but she has also won plenty of awards for her albums and singing. Her recent career has been marked by groundbreaking concerts such as Live Aid, the revived Newport Folk Festival or the Amnesty International tour and recordings that have highlighted contemporary writers.
Baez’ Vanguard albums have been re-packaged and in 2003, her six complete A&M albums, originally released from 1972 to 1976, were re-released as a mini-boxed set of four CDs, with bonus material and extensive liner notes. If you want to get a sense of the power of her early recordings these are good places to start.
On February 11, 2007, at the 49th annual Grammy Awards, Baez received a Lifetime Achievement Award, the Recording Academy’s greatest honour. In June this year, she was seen with Nelson Mandela at the 46664 90th birthday celebration in his honour, at London’s Hyde Park.
So it is that just a few weeks ago I sat down to talk to this music legend about her new album and as much of her career as we could cram into 20 minutes. Baez was open, friendly and laughed frequently. Her voice and energy belie her 67 years and when you hear her talk you have to check her birth date in her biography.
And when the discussion turns to politics you get a sense of the incredible energy that Baez must have brought to the protest movement in the 1960s. But first we start with her new album.
I guess the groundwork for the new album was laid with the previous studio one Dark Chords On A Big Guitar which featured Steve Earle’s song 'Christmas In Washington.' Of course, Bowery Songs the live album featured 'Jerusalem.' Was that the impetus to get together with Steve for this new studio album?
I think so and knowing him a little. He worked with me some and I met him on various musical festivals or award situations. There's a pretty big mutual respect between us and it seemed like the natural, which it turned out to be.
He's an interesting character, isn't he?
He's a very interesting character and people always chuckle and say, 'Well did he treat you well?' And the fact is, yes. I understand there are all sorts of rumours about his behaviour with other people. He's a pretty volatile dude but he was very respectful with me and the record was made quickly and I'm very pleased with it.
While I would have thought you would have been very empathetic, politically at least, that you'd share a lot of views there anyway as a starting point.
Oh absolutely. It could be the starting point or it could be the finishing but it's there.
He's always seemed to me like chap who wears his heart on his sleeve.
Yes, he does. I think that's well put. He does and he also carries a chip on his shoulder a lot of the time. He has been around and done too much and as far as he's concerned I don't care what he does. He's earned a lot and he's given us now some really valuable music.
He was just a doll. He's a lunatic. He can't stop talking. I have this thing I worked out with him. I just sort of do a gesture with my hand like a stop sign, like 'give me a break.' He talks compulsively but it's all interesting and he's very knowledgeable.
He's also highly under-rated as a songwriter and singer, isn’t he?
I think he is and I think probably the reason is during the years when everyone was saying how come nobody’s writing music anymore, he was. During those years people weren’t really listening to those kind of important songs.
He has a sort of scraggly reputation and so he would do too many drugs and drank too much alcohol and so he needs a boot up but I think he’s got it by way of Grammys. I think also he is the only one, or certainly the foremost, in writing songs that have real social content. He writes political ones as well but the ones of social content are the ones that interest me more.
Well, he was writing those songs of social content when a lot of people were ignoring things like the war. He was still going on about it. He got a negative reaction from a lot of quarters in America.
Well, he’s used to that. This country is just…..[sigh]….oh, I don’t want to be too rude about it but somebody as valuable as Steve and songs as beautiful and as valuable as his ought to have been listened to all this time and I think that now they certainly will be more so.
Certainly ‘Jerusalem’ has got to be one of the greatest ones of the modern era and it brings a tingle to my spine every time I hear it.
And ‘Christmas In Washington’ gets a universal response from people who speak English or not. It’s just an enormous response every evening and for me it’s just a brilliant song to sing because I know how it builds, I know how people are going to respond and they inevitably do because it’s a brilliant song.
I notice that you’ve endorsed Barack Obama and I think it’s the first time you’ve made such an endorsement in your career. I was wondering how important the forthcoming American election is to you and to America in general.
Well, it’s frighteningly important and frightening because this American public has been willing somehow or other to go along with status quo, which has been just horrendous, and in my mind I think ‘Good God, we couldn’t possibly have another four years of this same kind of guy.’ But, you know, we could.
But I would say that more that voting against another republican lunatic I’m voting for somebody who I think is a statesman, I think is tremendously bright, I think he has qualities of diplomacy, I think he is empathetic to the things that I feel are important. Yes, he’s going to make compromises all over the place and that’s part of the game, part of why I never signed on to anybody but either I’m old and nuts or I’m willing to break my own pattern because I feel it’s that important, that I feel that strongly in my gut about him.
Well, it’s a pretty vital election not just for America but for the whole world, isn’t it?
You bet. There’s one joke which I tell people periodically, I think we’re on the verge of it right now, which is, A Turkish kurd said to me in the middle of a conversation, ‘Do you know what is the difference between the American people and yoghurt?’ And I said, ‘What?” and he said, ‘Yoghurt has a living culture.’ It’s too good to be true, that joke, really.
We don’t want to be too anti-American here.
Why not?
You never know who’s listening!
Well, if they’re listening, I congratulate myself on being that important.
It must bemuse you after fifty years in the industry to look at these political events that are happening and think, these were happening when I first started.
That‘s true. I mean, I’m not disillusioned because I don’t think I was very illusioned in the first place about anything to do with party politics. But to find ourselves back this close to repeating history is just more scary than anything else and yes, there are a lot of things that feel the same. Iraq feels like the civil rights movement, Bush feels like Hitler. We’ve got to be really careful with this anti-American stuff, don’t we? But I don’t know, the British have an expression: ‘bash on regardless.’
You said recently that you didn’t want to be the world’s oldest folksinger. But it’s still a pretty vital role.
[Laughs heartily]. I guess you know what I meant partly was ….when I said it what I meant was that I didn’t want to be encased in traditional interpretations of folk music which was pretty pure. I remember the first time, I think it was on the first album, the record company finally convinced me to put Freddy Hellerman playing a guitar, and I think he was one of the Weavers, but I thought that if I had any other instruments on there that I would be going ‘commercial.’ Anyway, it comes from puritanical roots.
I think people like Emmylou Harris have faced the same problem haven’t they, being locked into country music but really wanting to expand their career and do other things.
That’s right and she just keeps at it and she’s wonderful.
So the new album, teaming up with Steve Earle kind of marks, I won’t say a new direction but a different step in your career, doesn’t it?
Yes, I would say that and I would say the reason it’s exciting to me – and I suppose there’s always a reason a new album is exciting – this one is like a book stop, like a bookend to the original albums which were acoustic. Now this is as acoustic as you can get and keep it interesting, including ‘Day After Tomorrow’ which is myself on guitar. It is fifty years gone by and going back very much to my own roots.
But recorded in Nashville this time.
Yes, I used to record in Nashville. Over the years I’ve been there a number of times but I really prefer it because the atmosphere is just very relaxed and they have a country humour and I prefer it to LA or New York, for sure.
So how long did the album take you to record with Steve?
Oh, initially about five days and then I stayed over so I could re-sing some of the things. I re-did some of them, like I re-did ‘Day After Tomorrow.’ With the singing it’s very funny….Steve didn’t give a damn whether it was flat or sharp, he just liked the spirit of it and I said, ‘Well, I love the spirit of it and I can’t be that flat or that sharp and be happy.’ So I stayed and did what I needed to do vocally.
Talk about the band because you’ve got an incredible band on this album.
They’re just guys, you know. One time Darrell was wailing away on, I think it was lap steel or something, and he got into a groove that began sounding a bit Hawaiian and I got down from my microphone and I went over and said, ‘I could do without the hula’ and he knew immediately, he had a big laugh and that was the end of it, he didn’t ever do it again. They’re all like that. They’re all sweet guys, they sit around and eat together during the break and so forth. You can’t get any better than them.
Now how did you go about choosing the songs? I know that Steve wrote specifically a couple of songs for the album and there’s also an a capella version of ‘Jericho Road,’ but it’s an interesting song choice from a variety of contemporary songwriters.
Well, the songs that land in place are ones that somehow sit in the context of this album. So a lot of these songwriters…they’re good songwriters so what we tried to pick of theirs hopefully is something relatively new – even in the last ten years. I think that ‘Day After Tomorrow’ was kind of the centerpiece and we started working around that the things that felt right with it. There were a couple of songs that were wonderful songs but they didn’t quite fit. It’s not a political album. ‘Day After Tomorrow’ is so powerful that anything else in there that’s vaguely political gets accentuated I think.
So I mean you just choose them by what’s going to build a good record.
Well, that’s the Tom Waits’ song, ‘Day After Tomorrow,’ and it’s great to hear you take a Tom Waits song and do it because often Tom disguises his songs – and he writes beautiful ballads but he puts say so much bizarre instrumentation on them that you don’t quite appreciate how good the song is, do you, sometimes?
[Laughs] Yeah. When I think of Tom I always think of him and Dracula saying, ‘Master! Master!’ and eating flies! It was a song that my assistant, Nancy, found. I guess she’d been noodling around on the internet and she called me up and said, ‘You have to hear this’ and it took me one listening and I had it ready two nights later in concert.
You’ve got another couple of great songwriters there whom I always thought were a little bit under-rated in a sense that Steve is…Eliza Gilkyson, Patty Griffin and Thea Gilmore even. It’s great to hear you choosing these women’s songs for the album.
And I think amongst them that ‘Rose of Sharon,’ to me, is so like the beginning. We were looking for ballad that was written now and sounds like then and this is surely it, it surely is. I’ve been singing it in countries where they don’t speak English particularly well or that many speak English and I don’t describe what’s happening in it I just say it sounds like one of the old folk songs I used to like but there’s something about it that gets a huge response from the public.
I suppose the trick is to choose some material that is sympathetic to your voice as well.
Absolutely and there are some very, very good songs that got chucked in with the ones for me to listen to and I knew they were good songs and I knew they didn’t quite work for me. It’s always been a combination of the words or it could be just the feeling or it could be the melody plus the words and all of these things and they’re often different. One of them could be because the melody’s so fantastic, another one – like ‘Carrickfergus’ - is a combination of a stupendous melody and heartbreaking words. I’m looking for something that moves me, I guess, because that’s the only way I’d be able to move other people.
It seems like there might be a batch of songs left over that you might record again with Steve.
Um…let’s see. We would have to look again to make it work right but I would love to do that.
Are we likely to see you in Australia at any stage on this tour?
Not on this tour but, you know, I have to think about places that I was in only once …..or twice in Australia but so long ago. So my manger and I have begun talking about places and Australia will be part of that conversation.
I think you are receiving an award next month at the Americana music awards, aren’t you?
I don’t know, am I?
I think you are. The Spirit of America award. It’s a sign that you’re truly a music legend now that you’ve received a number of lifetime achievement awards.
Fortunately while I’m still alive! [Laughs]
But it must be interesting to you – and we talked about some of the events being similar – the interest in that era of the 60s seems to be stronger than it’s been for decades.
I do know what you mean and I’m sure it’s because of the political atmosphere has turned into what it is. Also, during the times over the years that there has been this sort of ‘Obama connection’ - that’s where it all came together for whatever reasons – and people felt the glue, they didn’t feel they were isolated, they felt together.
A lot of young people are going back to that music or making music that is very simple and acoustic and that has all seemed to have returned.
Yes, it has and I think for a few years now people have been saying exactly what you’ve just said and I think it gets more and more so. And I think it’s the search for something back from the earth, something that is earthier and closer to nature and closer to kindness and closer to the people’s feelings – certainly than what’s being played on the radio.
Now after all these years when you release an album do you have any expectations?
I think the only time in life when we really get screwed up is when we have expectations. So over the years I have trained myself not expect much, so anything that comes my way is a treat. I would, of course, like this album to do very well – partly because it is the fiftieth [year in the industry] and partly because I think it’s special in its similarity to the earlier days. And that’s that.
Speaking of the early days, it is the forty-fifth anniversary of your introducing a young folk singer to a New York audience. A young guy called Bob Dylan.
A young scoundrel. [Laughs]. Well, you know, there it is. He was the best that we had.
It’s pretty astonishing, isn’t it, that someone of that era – like yourself and Bob – are still making this music. When you put it into a time context in terms of popular music, it’s astonishing.
I would say that these years we’ve been helped along by Bush. The only good thing that ever came out his administration for me was that he’s been a publicity agent. People are so revolted with him that they’ll come to my concerts even more so than they would ever before. It’s really true.
So what are your plans?
This year is the fiftieth anniversary of when I sang and started to make a name for myself in Cambridge, at Club 47. That really was the beginning. Then the next year would be the album and Newport. So next year is another 50th – probably the main one. I’ll tour a lot next year. The only thing that troubles me is my Mum and her age – she’s 95 – and I spend a lot of time and I don’t want her slipping away while I’m on tour.
I think your father, who not so long ago passed away, was in his nineties, wasn’t he?
He was ninety-four.
With that in mind we can expect you recording for about another 20 years, can’t we?
[Laughs] They can set up a microphone right next to my wheelchair.
It sounds like you’ve got a longer career in mind.
Whether people want it or not! Periodically I think ‘Why am I leaving my home to go off and do this? I love it around here.’ Then at the end of a tour I think, ‘Why are we ending this tour when we’ve just figured out how to get the songs really down?’
Touring has gotten easier because I’ve gotten healthier – my body, mind and spirit are healthier. We don’t have to be high maintenance, we can be no maintenance and then it’s just a joy. Then it’s exhausting – everything’s exhausting.
Day After Tomorrow is available through Planet Records.
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