'MY FRIENDS SAID: MARRY STEVE JOBS. BUT I COULDN'T QUITE DO IT'Joan Baez has survived air raids in Hanoi, weeks in prison and turbulent love affairs with Bob Dylan and Steve Jobs. The queen of American folk music tells Ed Potton, Rock and Pop Editor, why her flag-waving days are finally over
WAITING for Joan Baez in a Central London hotel, I'm not sure whether to expect Joan of Arc or Zelig. The serene, solemn queen of protest music, Baez and her guitar were present at some of the flashpoints of post-war history. A passionate campaigner for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, she counted Martin Luther King and Vaclav Havel as friends, co-founded the American arm of Amnesty International and was one of only four acts to play both Woodstock and Live Aid. She is also almost certainly the only person to have seen both Bob Dylan and Steve Jobs naked.
Baez sweeps in and says hello. At 71, she is still strikingly beautiful: limpid brown eyes, coffee-coloured skin, hair cropped short, a tangerine silk scarf around her neck. Poised and warm in a measured way, she exudes a quiet sense of her own worth - though later she will also laugh at her big-headedness and discuss her hang-ups with unflinching honesty.
After decades of non-violent protest, including campaigning for gay rights, and against the death penalty, two spells in jail and being caught in an 11-night US bombing raid on Hanoi in 1972, she has retired from "the front line". Climate change, she thinks, is the most pressing issue today, and if she were younger she would certainly be active in the Occupy movement, "sleeping out in a tent, getting pneumonia". But her involvement these days is mainly limited to charity concerts and behind-the-scenes work with her human rights charity, Humanitas International.
This is the eve of her latest British tour - at 21 dates, it's not quite as long as the never-ending one favoured by her former boyfriend, Dylan. The lucid soprano of her youth is now a few registers lower, but she still has her distinctive vibrato and a canon of songs spanning 50 years; from God is God, the song written for her by the roots musician Steve Earle for her 2008 album, Day After Tomorrow, back to her famous 1975 hit Diamonds and Rust and We Shall Overcome, the song she sang in Washington, on the same day that King made his I Have a Dream speech.
"Friends say that when I call home I sound the happiest," she says of touring. She has struggled with a fear of intimacy, so in some ways her most successful connections have been with fans at her concerts: "I'm quite at home with 2,000 people. There's some kind of unburdening and openness that I just automatically do."
Baez's one-on-one relationships have been more turbulent. Her pairing with Jobs in the early Eighties was "an odd combin-ation". Jobs, at whose memorial she performed last year, was "totally left brain and I have none". She adds: "Mostly we argued about things. He said he could create with a computer a classical quintet that would be as magnificent as any there ever was. I said there couldn't be the soul in it. On the other hand, I guess you know his last words? 'Oh wow! Oh wow!' He was probably rearranging the Golden Gate."
Were they in love? "Maybe, or maybe I was just fascinated." Jobs said that he would have asked her to marry him had she been young enough to bear children. "I had friends who said: 'Marry him! You'll never have a financial problem in your life.' But I couldn't quite do it."
Born in New York in 1941 to Albert, a Mexican-born scientist turned lecturer, and his Scottish wife, also called Joan, Baez had the classic performer's itinerant childhood, living in America, the UK, France, Switzerland, Spain, Canada and Iraq. In Iraq, her dark complexion meant that she was often mistaken for a local, which gave her an inkling of how it might feel to be trampled on by a Western power. "It was the British, actually." she laughs. "Also, being a girl in that society. I remember going to the [boat club] races. I went down to the front row and they plucked me out in a hurry. I wasn't allowed there." It was around this time that her mother gave her a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank, which began a lifetime of empathy with the oppressed and imprisoned.
In 1958, Baez's father was posted to Massachusetts Institute of Technology and she made her first forays into music on the Boston coffee shop scene, finding a natural affinity with old folk songs about love and death. How Sweet the Sound, a 2009 documentary about Baez, shows ranks of earnest Brylcreemed young men, rapt at her beauty, singing and finger-picking guitar.
Another focus of male attention was her younger sister, Mimi, with whom Baez was both close and competitive. When Mimi asked whether she should follow her into music, Baez said no, "because she would always be in my shadow". Mimi did it anyway, but Baez proved to be right. "She always resented it, and it always made me feel guilty." Mimi died of cancer 11 years ago. Towards the end she pushed Joan away, "which in some ways made things easier, delayed the pain".
It had been Mimi who first caught the eye of the young Dylan. "Yes, and I was so big-headed I didn't even notice it!" Baez laughs. But it was Joan and Bob who ended up as an item, musically and romantically. "Our voices blended well," Dylan says in How Sweet the Sound. "We could sing about anything and it would make sense."
She has warm memories. Riding around Woodstock on Dylan's motorbike; her in front because he was a "terrible driver". She would watching him write while in the car. "He'd never stop. It was pouring like molten gold down his hand."
Songwriting was never Baez's forte: most of her famous ones were written by others. "There's only one song of mine that's universal and that's Diamonds and Rust," she says. "The rest are good poetry, but they don't reach people in the same way. I'd have liked to have written an anthem."
Her relationship with Dylan fizzled out while on a British tour in 1965. Baez was sidelined as Dylan went supersonic. "I was just trying to deal with the madness that had become my career," he says in How Sweet the Sound. "Unfortunately, she got swept along and I felt very bad about it."
"That was an apology, kinda," Baez smiles. Did she wish him a happy 70th birthday last year? "No, I was too obsessed with my own!" The last time she saw him was at a folk festival in England. He was "absolutely pleasant", they talked about Mimi, about her mum. "He always liked my mum, as did Harry Belafonte, who said she was nicer than I was."
Was Belafonte right? Baez nods. Big Joan, as her mother is known, is almost 99 now and lives with Baez in Woodside, near San Francisco. Big Joan has an "innate" sense of justice that rubbed off on her daughter. She joined Baez in protesting against the Vietnam draft and they ended up in jail together. "I loved jail," Baez says. "I gained eight pounds. It was very good food." It was there that Baez met David Harris, a leading anti-draft campaigner, who was in an adjoining men's prison. Three months later they married. It lasted only five years, until 1973, partly scuppered by another spell in prison for Harris and partly by Baez's promiscuity.
Baez's Casanova years might surprise those who see her as a totem of purity. "Each time, I thought: 'This is really it.' And of course it never was." On tour she was sometimes less sentimental about her conquests. "If you choose carefully, it's the last night (Friday) you're staying, then you move on to the next town."
Amid all this protest and passion, it was Baez and Harris's son, Gabriel, who suffered. "I never spent enough time with my son in the Sixties and Seventies," she says. She admits that she wasn't the most approachable of parents: "For a kid, I was the Empire State Building. One time he asked the kids down the street when their mums were going to leave on tour."
Now, she says, things are much better with Gabriel, who plays percussion with her on tour. "Now I have a chance to really be with him." She still feels guilty about the absences, but Gabriel will say: "Listen Mum, you're the only one who would do what you did then, at a very important time in our history, so quit worrying about it."
She doesn't believe in false modesty. I ask if she has ever been tempted to abandon her commitment to nonviolence and hit someone. She says that she came close with a zealous autograph hunter, or "trainspotter", as she calls him. "Jesus got fed up with the moneylenders, Gandhi got fed up with people who wanted to touch his robe, I got fed up with trainspotters."
If her ego can swell at times, her hair-shirt tendencies, partly a result of her Quaker upbringing, can edge into self-righteousness. After surviving the air raids in Hanoi, she said was "stricken with the fact that if I was spared somebody else was going to get that bomb". The pious young Baez must have been a bit of a drag at times. She once discovered a pound of marijuana that Harris and his friends had bought, and flushed the whole lot down the toilet.
These days, she says, she has loosened up: "I discovered what fun was like and decided I liked it." Key to her sunnier outlook was tackling the "childhood traumas" that led to her fear of intimacy and the stage fright that crippled her early in her career. She was in therapy for 30 years. It seems to have worked. She no longer gets stage fright, and she has good relationships with her mother, son and ex-husband. Is she happy? "I have the best shot at it that I've ever had," she says. There is no man in her life, "but that never brought happiness anyway".
Most of all, she has adjusted to a life on the margins. "It wasn't until fairly recently that I knew what it was like to walk out on a stage and not be worrying about everything else in the world I was supposed to be saving. Lo and behold, to my horror, the world just went on spinning when I stopped being front and centre."
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