Joan Baez brings tour to Lowell
http://www.eagletribune.com/pulife/local_story_199171649.html?keyword=secondarystory
By Alan Sculley
July 19, 2009
Joan Baez may be one of the leading protest singers of the past 50
years and one of the most outspoken activists on behalf of enough
causes to fill a notebook, including peace, civil rights, women's
rights and human rights. But one thing she has traditionally declined
to do is endorse candidates for political office on any level.
Last year, she broke that tradition to throw her support behind Barack Obama.
"It's just that this was a statesman and a highly intelligent human
being," Baez said, explaining her decision. "I knew I would no longer
be embarrassed by our president. I think it's just odd for me,
feeling that the cohesiveness that we needed in the world at that
moment turned out was a black candidate for president, not a
songwriter, not somebody from the street, not a Martin Luther King,
but a man running for office . . . And it turned out to be this man."
The 2008 presidential election, of course, was historic on several
levels. It was seen by many as historic in terms of voter
participation and interest, and Baez said she, too, sensed a "sea
change" in the way Americans became engaged in the election and
issues. She hopes that this interest and involvement will continue.
One area where Baez is trying to effect some change herself is by
supporting the protests in Iran over the validity of recent elections
that returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to office.
"I'm realizing now that the first thing that has really interested me
in a big way (recently) and called me is Iran, doing their
demonstrations in the street," Baez, 68, said. "In fact, I'm going to
get my hands on a video camera and sing 'We Shall Overcome' in Farsi,
and put it on You Tube, anything to connect with that movement in the
appropriate way."
Aside from her political work, Baez has plenty of musical activities
to keep her busy, beginning with a summer tour of the United States
that brings her to Lowell on July 30.
Baez is touring in support of her latest CD, "Day After Tomorrow,"
which has received widespread acclaim as one of the finest works in a
career that stretches back to the early 1960s.
Baez said she usually does four or five songs from "Day After
Tomorrow" and there will be plenty of room for her to vary the set
list from night to night.
"I have a skeleton of a set list," Baez said, noting that her
guitarist, John Doyle, often suggests different songs to swap into
the set. "He'll be fishing around in my old stuff or finding
something he loves to just grab it. And often in the same night we'll
try to place it (in the set) and we'll throw something else out and
put it in. If it flies, then we'll make the switch."
"Day After Tomorrow," with its rootsy, mainly acoustic sound, is seen
as a return to the stripped-down folk sound that defined Baez's early
- and influential - albums, including her 1960 self-titled debut
album, her 1961 follow-up, "Joan Baez, Vol. 2" and 1962's "In
Concert, Part 1." The records made Baez and her one-time boyfriend,
Bob Dylan, key forces in the resurgence of folk music.
Some of the credit for the rootsy, primarily acoustic approach on
"Day After Tomorrow" can go to producer Steve Earle.
Baez has known Earle, an accomplished songwriter and performer
himself, for years. She also has toured with him, and knew the
partnership would work in the studio.
"I just knew his music and knew him enough to know that it just felt
like the right match," Baez said. "He was this earthy dude. I knew he
was as scratchy as I was pure, as far as the work went. And that was
a perfect combination."
Beyond the rootsy sound of the release, Earle's impact is felt in the
music itself. Baez recorded three songs by Earle ("God Is God," "I Am
A Wanderer" and "Jericho Road"), as well as songs from such
contemporary tunesmiths as Eliza Gilkyson ("Rose Of Sharon"), Patty
Griffin ("Mary) and Elvis Costello and T Bone Burnett ("Scarlet Tide").
Baez said working with Earle was one of the main reasons she looks
back at "Day After Tomorrow" as one of the most memorable album
projects of her long career.
"It has to be Steve (Earle)," she said. "It has to (also) be the
choice of songs, and I'm not really sure how that happens. We sensed
it (was special) as it was happening. We sensed it."
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Peace signs and trying times: The legendary Joan Baez perseveres through it all
http://www.thedailytimes.com/article/20090716/ENT/307169955/-1/FRONTPAGE
By Steve Wildsmith
July 16. 2009
She may not be the rabble-rouser and troublemaker she once was, but
every once in a while, an event plays out on the world stage that
fans the still-smoldering embers of Joan Baez's humanitarianism.
The eyes still shine bright and fierce in her publicity photos,
gracefully framed by the lines of age and she doles out her time
carefully, paying attention to things she so often took for granted
or placed on the back burner during a 50-plus-year career as a folk
singer and activist. But those embers still glow, and when injustice
and unfairness are put on public display, they crackle with passion.
"At the moment, what's fascinating me is what's happening in Iran,"
Baez told The Daily Times during a recent phone interview. "To me,
it's the most exciting thing that's happened in years. It's like what
happened all of the sudden in Ireland or Czechoslovakia -- here are 2
million people in one of the most violent, ghastly,
what-amounts-to-a-dictatorship in the world, carrying these little
green ribbons. You have to wonder, what the hell happened to cause this?
"So yes, that flame continues. I don't go out the way I did for years
and years, carrying the banner and being on the forefront of
everything. At a certain point, I made the decision that I'm not the
person to continue that. I want to spend time with my 96-year-old
mom, and with my son and his family. I think that's absolutely
appropriate for me. I've learned a lot about family and about getting
older from my mother -- a lot about dying -- and those are things I
didn't pay much attention to while I was circling the globe."
Introduced at the Newport Folk Festival in 1959, Baez was immediately
heralded as one of the torch-bearers for the then-burgeoning folk
movement. Four years later, she stood beside Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr. at the Lincoln Memorial while he gave his "I Have a Dream"
speech, and for the rest of that turbulent decade that was the 1960s,
she took part in almost every conceivable protest against injustice,
oppression and war. In 1964, she withheld 60 percent of her income
tax from the Internal Revenue Service to protest spending on the
Vietnam War ... she participated in the Free Speech Movement at the
University of California-Berkeley and co-founded the Institute for
the Study of Nonviolence ... she protested alongside Cesar Chavez and
migrant farm workers on behalf of fair wages in 1966 ... she traveled
to Hanoi in the early 1970s, meeting with starving North Vietnamese.
Later that decade, she turned her focus to the plight of residents of
Chile suffering under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, and she
would go on to protest violence in Spain and Northern Ireland. She's
rallied on behalf of the nuclear freeze movement and against
California's Proposition 6, and she's been credited by former
Czechoslovakian president Vaclav Havel with inspiring that nation's
move toward democracy. After the outbreak of hostilities in Sarajevo,
she was the first major artist to perform there.
Through it all, she built one of the most impressive folk careers of
the past 50 years. From her first solo album in 1960, she recorded
traditional ballads, the blues, lullabies, cowboy songs and folk
staples that mark her as a direct descendent of the legacy of Woody
Guthrie. Among the songs she introduced on her earliest albums that
would make their ways into the rock vernacular were "House Of The
Rising Sun" (The Animals), "John Riley" (The Byrds), "Babe, I'm Gonna
Leave You" (Led Zeppelin), "What Have They Done To The Rain" (the
Searchers) and "Jackaroe" (Grateful Dead). Her biggest career single,
however, was a cover song -- a recording of The Band's "The Night
They Drove Old Dixie Down."
Despite her own lack of chart success, however, she's been held in
high esteem since the beginning of her career by her peers -- from
Bob Dylan, who made her a fixture on his Rolling Thunder Revue tours
of the mid-1970s, to a generation of female singer-songwriters, from
the Indigo Girls to Mary Chapin Carpenter, who have followed in her wake.
Given that political and musical legacy, it hasn't been easy to
relinquish her role as a cultural freedom fighter. She still records
and performs, as she'll do Monday at The Bijou Theatre in downtown
Knoxville, but it's only been over the past year, since the election
of Barack Obama, that the left-leaning Baez has felt more capable of
relaxing. Needless to say, she wasn't a fan of George W. Bush or the
ongoing war in Iraq. And, she added, now that she's able to spend
more time with family, she can't help but think about all of the time
she didn't.
"I wish I'd spent more time with my son, and when I talked to him and
expressed that -- 'I feel crummy that I didn't spend more time with
you' -- he said, 'Look, mom, don't waste your time. You were present,
front-and-center, at a time in history when the world needed you. I
get that, so shut the f--- up about feeling guilty, because it's
silly!'" she said. "That was a wonderful little lecture to me, and
now he's traveling with me as my percussionist. And that's something
that I love."
Musically, she's riding high on the success of her most recent album
-- "Day After Tomorrow," released last year and nominated for a
Grammy. It's her 24th studio album, and her first on the Billboard
charts in 29 years. The liner notes reveal something even more
surprising -- not a single song written by Baez herself.
Not that it matters; after all, with fellow folk artist and
rabble-rouser Steve Earle as her producer, she rose to the occasion
and delivered angelic interpretations of all songs, written by Earle,
Patty Griffin, Tom Waits and others.
"Steve is an energizer, period," Baez said. "He moves fast -- his
brain is always going, and it's a good mind. With me, he was just a
sweetheart. We would meet in the studios, and he would have biscuits
and coffee waiting. It was a wonderful way to start a day in a
Southern studio."
Right now, Baez is wrapping up a book of poetry and exploring other
outlets for her art. These days, her voice is holding steady -- "It's
all tricks these days; there's no other way to do this stuff," she
said with a laugh. "I go to a vocal coach, and he gives me more
tricks, so as long as something dreadful doesn't happen to it, I'll
keep working on it so that it stays good and gets better." And with
her son by her side on this tour, Baez is content -- with who she is,
what she's done and where she fits into a world that, while still
crazy and chaotic, doesn't require her on the front lines like it once did.
Or perhaps it does -- but these days, Baez is content to let others
take the lead.
"It's like when I was camping and tried to light the butane stove --
I lit it wrong, and it blew the hairs off of one arm," she said,
laughing. "That's the way it was with the war in Vietnam or Civil
Rights -- it just blew through my body, and it still ignites when I
see 2 million people in the streets of Iran. it's exciting, but I
don't feel like I have to fly there.
"If somebody called up and said, 'Can you come?,' it would be awfully
tempting to go, but I don't have that urge that I have to be
everywhere. It was nice to have been a part of it, to have laid the
groundwork. It's a comfort to know I was a part of all of that change
... and that I still am, just without the hyperactivity."
--------
Joan Baez: 'I've grown into my own skin'
http://www.accessatlanta.com/music/content/music/stories/2009/07/19/baez_concert_botanical.html
'60s folk icon performs Wednesday at Botanical Garden
By JEN CHRISTENSEN
Sunday, July 19, 2009
It's been 50 years since Joan Baez walked onstage at the Newport
(R.I.) Folk Festival as a nervous teenager and released her soaring
soprano to a generation still searching for its voice.
Since then, her voice has remained a beacon of purity through turbulent times.
She's used it to serenade the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to speak
out against war and to champion songwriters including her
then-unknown former protégé Bob Dylan, whose lyrics still slip into
her conversation.
The folk icon's storied past is being celebrated with the re-release
of her autobiography, "And a Voice to Sing With," and an "American
Masters" documentary that will air this fall.
Yet the forward-looking Baez titled her latest CD "Day After
Tomorrow." Produced by Steve Earle, the Grammy-nominated recording
includes material by Tom Waits, Elvis Costello and other contemporary
composers.
Before embarking on a tour that brings her to the Atlanta Botanical
Garden on Wednesday for a sold-out show, she spoke from her Woodside,
Calif., home about politics, performing and how she seems to stay
forever young.
Q: Is the atmosphere different at your concerts since President
Barack Obama's election?
A: Good Lord, yes. In the Bush administration there was a funny
dynamic that happened for me, sort of the Bush kickback. I mean, he
was the best publicity agent I've ever had in my life! Really, I
would go to a state that was known for being conservative, and
everybody from here to kingdom come would go to that show because
they needed some kind of pocket of sanity. (Laughs)
Q: After 50 years, how have you changed as a performer?
A: I've grown into my own skin in way that I certainly never thought
I would be able to when I was younger. It's a joy. When I was young
and had stage fright and also had on my mind so many things I had to
do or thought I had to do I really couldn't enjoy it the way I do now.
Q: You dedicated this CD to your 96-year-old mother. Living with her
must teach you important life lessons.
A: Well, I think you've got to learn them, especially about getting
old in a country that's so scared of it. I'm going to keep these
wrinkles if it kills me. (Laughs) I saw myself in this documentary
that was just made, and the producer said, "Now you're probably going
to wake up in the night, and your stomach's going to be churning
about something. You're going to see your childhood and everybody you
knew." And I thought, "Oh, god." So I was awake half the night, and I
didn't know what it was. And in the morning I thought, "Oh, geez,
it's the wrinkles!" But you know, you got to live with it.
Q: Well, I'd swear you've discovered the fountain of youth.
A: Well, I tell you, it's discipline. It's eating properly. It's
exercise. It's meditation. There's a posture discipline that I do, a
method that I'll probably write about on my Web page. So it's all that stuff.
Q: With your autobiography's rerelease, is there a chapter in your
life you'd like to rewrite?
A: No, I don't think that anybody can think that way, partly because
it's hypothetical stuff, so it's not worth thinking about like that.
But I find all my regrets are just these little things. There's
nothing big. I always think, I was at a barbecue where people were
selling lamb chops or something and there was a Mexican day laborer
standing there looking at it, and I wasn't paying attention to it. I
was just sort of daydreaming. Then he got on a bus and left and I
realized he was hungry. And in my lifetime I'll never be able to
forget that, that I could have bought him something to eat, and that
it was too late, and it was too late forever. And that's like a huge
regret. It's not something political that I was involved with that I
regret, you know? It's the little stuff like that.
Q: Are there public misconceptions about you?
A: Oh, sure, how could there not be? People don't know me.
Q: Well, here's a chance. Is there something you wish people knew?
A: (Laughs) Oh, I don't know. I'm probably funnier than they think I
am. I take things very seriously, but I don't take myself very seriously.
Q: You've got to laugh at yourself, right?
A: Yep, or you'll sink like a stone.
.
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