Joan Baez is singing protest songs again claiming the Bush regime put her back in business. Now 67, she has lost none of her graceful fire
SHE CALLS HIM an idiot, a hypocrite, a sociopath, and a lying bastard, but Joan Baez admits that George Bush has made her relevant again. "I am a pacifist — that is my job — but for years I didn't sing protest songs because they'd just become nostalgic," she says. "That has changed now."
She's started to sing Dylan's With God on Our Side again. "Bush and his cohorts think they are going to heaven and they don't care about the rest of us," she says. "I think we came close to having martial law in America. I feared for my family. But people have started to see through him."
A lot of the new protest songs are, she says, "too preachy". However, the title song of her new album The Day After Tomorrow (originally a Tom Waits song) is a subtle and poignant ballad that could have been written for Baez. About a young American soldier in Iraq, it is implicitly anti-war. "It's about a soldier longing for home, but it is also about the human condition," she says.
She's on the road again, and her new songs include I Am a Wanderer, written for her by Steve Earle who produced this album as well as playing on it. Other songs include Scarlet Tide, written for the American Civil War film Cold Mountain by Elvis Costello and T-Bone Burnett.
"I love ballads," she says. "I started with them and now this album is like a bookend." She loves working with Earle, whose politics are, she says, considerably to the left of hers. "I call him Mr Pinko," she says. "He calls me Boss."
She's backing Barack Obama. "It is the first time I've not just voted against someone. I think he could make a community out of black kids in the ghetto and us. He's a statesman and we haven't had one of those in decades," she says. "It isn't that comfortable for me - after all, he'll be the commander in chief of the army." Back in 1969, Baez went to jail, along with her mother and sister, for organising draft resistance against the war in Vietnam.
The new album is her 24th and, astonishingly, marks the 50th year of her career. She's 67 and looking wonderful, with lean and glossy, short, silver hair swept back from a face dominated by those big, dazzling, brown eyes.
She speaks softly and I have to listen intently to hear her over the soaring Sinatra that's playing far too loudly in the lounge at the Clarence Hotel. "Wouldn't be my cup of tea," she murmurs. She drinks, as it happens, peppermint tea. "Boring, I know," she says.
Her father was Mexican, her mother Scottish, and her early years were spent in southern California. "There was a lot of prejudice. I was seen as a Mexican, an inferior being," she says. Then her father, a professor of physics, was sent to work in Baghdad by Unesco for a year. "I guess, it wasn't very considerate of him to move my mother and three young children there, but it gave us a social consciousness. My nature is very sensitive."
There were stints in France and Italy, too, before the family settled in Massachusetts. She was just 18 when she appeared at the Newport Folk Festival.
She was dubbed the Virgin Mary, and there was always a stern and rather puritan side to Baez. "I disappointed my son in that respect," she says. "I had to say to him at one point, 'We're going to have to do something about your drug taking'. And he said, 'You're a fine one to talk'. I said, 'No, I didn't do drugs'." She laughs. "I thought I was better than everyone else," she says. "I was just scared. I was snooty."
She was already famous when she introduced Bob Dylan to the world in the early 1960s. In her superb love song Diamonds and Rust, she sings, "You burst on the scene, already a legend; the unwashed phenomenon . . ." Yes, she admits, it is true, she did wash his sweaty vests. "Somebody had to." Did he wash yours? I ask. "Hell, no," she says. "I don't sweat that much."
In 1968 she married fellow activist David Harris. "I remember I was a wife and very proud of it," she says. "I had a visit from some women's libbers and everything I said was a faux pas. I offered tea. I didn't get it."
Men in the 1960s, she agrees, were not the best when it came to feminism. "But if you're an entertainer, people don't care about your sex. You can be man, woman or Michael Jackson."
HER PARENTS WERE Quakers. "What stayed with me was the meditation," she says. "I'm good friends now with some Buddhists who were monks and I practise Vipassana meditation. It is very important in my life." She believes in "a spirit out there", she says. "As we say in Al Anon, a power greater than myself."
Yes, she says, she was in Al Anon. "Twenty five years ago". There's been a lot of therapy, too. "I went for a thousand years to good therapists who pasted me together," she says. "Then about 10 years ago, I said I needed to go to the core, and I went to a therapist who suggested that maybe what I needed was to fall apart. So I did. I was never so frightened in my life. But if you are suffering a lot of pain, you need to do it," she says.
Things are easier now. "I don't want to go far from home," she says. "I didn't have much time with my family before. I'm spending serious time getting to know them now." She lives with her 96-year-old mother, Joan, back in California. Her son, Gabe, his partner and their five-year-old daughter live nearby.
She has regrets about putting her activism before spending time with Gabe when he was little. "I was bemoaning this to him the other day and he said, "Mom, you were to the forefront of your generation . . . you don't need to feel guilty."
She likes the idea of older people being regarded as "elders rather than the elderly". She hates being called grandma, and has taught her granddaughter to call her the Mexican name instead. "Grandma just sounds a little old, and everything that I am not," she says. "She greets me now, 'Hey, Abollita!'".
THE NEW ALBUM IS dedicated to her mother, who, until recently accompanied her on tour and danced in the audience under a spotlight. "Yes, and her memory is so bad now that I can show the dedication to her over and over and she is delighted," says Baez.
Her own memory isn't, it turns out, entirely reliable. At her recent Dublin concert, she had to rely on a fervent audience, many of its members silver-topped like herself, for the words of songs like Cohen's Suzanne and even Amazing Grace. She made light of it. "Have you heard of ginkgo biloba?" she asked the crowd. "Don't spend the money. If your brain wants to slough off those cells, it's going to do it."
There is no shortage, though, of great memories. Meeting Martin Luther King in 1956 changed her life, and she later "worked and prayed with him".
Others include: Woodstock, getting a lifetime achievement award at last year's Grammy awards and meeting Nelson Mandela at his 90th birthday celebrations earlier this year. She marched with the Peace People in the North in 1978, but didn't keep up a connection with Ireland. "That's what I do best — I go to a country and lend my notoriety in the best way I can figure," she says.
"But I don't maintain relationships. I think that's left over from my isolated days." She looks troubled. Baez sings her back catalogue, but not all of it. Diamonds and Rust is there, but with the last line given a cynical twist. It is obvious that the Dylan question bores her. She doesn't do We Shall Overcome. "It is too strongly associated with the civil rights movement," she says. And shall we? "We already have, in many ways," she says.
"I look at a black kid walking into a store in the south and being served by a white boy, to whom he says, 'See you later at practice'. People tend to forget the way things were."
• The Day after Tomorrowis on Proper Records