Joan Baez – There’s always something mysterious about a song
ND: But that’s part of what you like about it, right? The strangeness is the attraction.
JB: Exactly. What I do like about all of them is that they are good songs in my book because they’re understatements. Ninety percent of what’s written by people who are not particularly gifted are overstatements. They just hit you over the head with something. They don’t mean to, but they don’t know how to do anything else. So these, no matter what they’re after, the way they tangle up their words for you — “shotgun bride” is another [anomaly], but it’s comfortable to sing.
ND: Why do you suppose they write songs like that?
JB: I don’t know! Songwriters are strange people. Artists are strange people. I’m working in this circus with Russians and French and Canadians who do the most bizarre things, magicians, and they are strange people. And I’m one of them! And I’m so delighted to be there.
ND: I don’t get “Wings” at all.
JB: I don’t understand “Wings”. Except that it feels like a border crossing. It feels like either exile or immigration. It seems to be about getting away from…I mean they certainly are running away: “to steal a mule and split.” It’s spooky and quirky and has wonderful images. He’s quirky. I don’t think he’s spooky, but he’s quirky. The image I wrote down was, “Underneath their jackets I saw wings.”
ND: You’ve been performing Steve Earle’s “Christmas In Washington” quite a bit. You sing it with a lot of heart. Of course there’s nothing confusing or obscure about that song.
JB: It’s just so beautiful, that song. His is the only song that comes out of that original Baez basin, but also makes it comfortably onto this record. It’s as though it were written for me, like “Jerusalem” [the title track of Earle’s latest album]. We have been ending the show with “Jerusalem”. It was the second to the last song and we were getting standing ovations after it, so we decided just to stop there. And that’s Steve and his heart, and all of that connects for me.
ND: How do you suppose he is connected with the other people on this record? What links him in your mind?
JB: How he fits on there? By sheer luck that song fits. It’s as though it’s way more me, way more comfortably me on first hearing. But, happily, it fits. Maybe because he’s Steve Earle. He’s battled with the radio stations and all the rest of it as well. I wanted to do “Jerusalem”, but I think the point was well made that it had been talked about a lot already and it was a main song on his CD and so forth, so we didn’t do it.
IV. RAM DASS! YOU’VE GOTTEN OLD!
ND: Did you make a point of choosing songwriters who were young?
JB: I picked them because they were fresh. The music sounds fresh. And because they’re gifted. And you know I love the youth. Like my drummer. I love the fact that he’s half my age. It gives me the false illusion that I’m younger than I am to be surrounded by youth.
On the other hand, I would like to take advantage of being an elder. There’s a story which is true. Remember Ram Dass? He’s a Buddhist mystic, New Age, very interesting guy. He’d gone back to one of the places he’d studied [after] he hadn’t been there for decades, and he saw a monk he’d known decades ago, and the guy said, “Ram Dass! You’ve gotten old!” And it was like, “Hurray!” And here we say, “Oh my gosh he’s getting old.” My life has gotten better for me, in just about every way. You know, when I was about to turn 40, someone was saying, “It gets better as you get older,” and I thought they were full of shit. I thought they were lying. But so far I’d say it’s gotten better.
ND: Why do you suppose that more of the elders of the form don’t do more of this kind of thing?
JB: It’s a fifty-fifty proposition for me. It’s where I get my music. I was not interested in recycling time after time and becoming the world’s oldest living folk singer. I think the key word is fresh. There was a point in my career when it was not fresh and I was unhappy. Late ’70s, ’80s, I think I had so much and everything came to me so easily, and then there comes a point in every single entertainer’s life, I don’t care who it is — Presley, the Beatles, Rolling Stones — where they go, “Oops! What are we going to do now? We’re not the youngest ones on the block.”
ND: My sense was that you kind of lost your compass after Vietnam. The social issues weren’t as clear and compelling somehow.
JB: You’re absolutely right. And I didn’t even understand that. But I was disoriented, and I got depressed quite quickly after that. You know I’ve heard that even Vietnamese who had known nothing but war started getting depressed, because it was, like, “What do I do now?” Bombs stopped falling. I experienced that. I was in a bomb shelter for eleven days; on the ninth day the bombs stopped falling. And I had the funny feeling of, “Well…when is it going to start up again?” That’s when I knew I was alive.
ND: The first record I bought with my own money was Joan Baez. It changed my life. But I’m afraid I don’t have the complete Joan Baez collection.
JB: I don’t either; you know, I can’t keep track of it. Some woman in Germany put together a book of all my CDs. She included everything from all the different countries and bootlegs and everything. In her book there were 350 CDs. I would say the farthest out thing I ever saw was when I was in Thailand, and we were going to the camps of the boat people, the Thai driver put on a CD and it was me singing “Dona Dona Dona” and I asked who that was. He handed me a tape and it had a beautiful picture of a Thai woman and some writing I didn’t understand!
ND: One last thing: Which biography should I read?
JB: Oh, the second one. First of all, the writing’s better, and then it goes much more in-depth. Actually, the real one? I’ll write it in about five years. That’s when I’ll understand the last 20 years of my life.