![]() ![]() On her refrigerator, along with three Peanuts magnets, is a photo of Baez when she received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys in 2007. With its cozy rooms and maze of hallways, the interior feels like a lived-in but comfortable ship. A wood deck – a roofless treehouse – rests atop a tree in her front yard chickens squawk in coops in the backyard. When I got respectable, I got creeped out.”īaez has lived in her house, a rambling place hidden behind a gate, for 45 years. “Maybe I’m grateful for Trump, because otherwise it would seem very bland. “Whatever it has been in the past has lifted,” Baez says. She’s not sure she wants to release it – “It’s not a good song, but it will make people laugh, so I’ll probably just put it on YouTube” – but its mere existence is, for her, a hopeful sign after a decade or more of psychic turmoil. When she finishes, Baez grins sheepishly. “You’ve got some serious psychological disorders.” “Here’s what I think/You better talk to a shrink,” she sings. She starts singing – about a wall, lies, a missing wife. Sitting in her kitchen, she grabs a guitar and begins fingerpicking a Guthrie-esque melody. But with Trump in office, she’s cranked out five-and-counting verses of a tune somewhat in his honor. Until the 2016 presidential race, Baez hadn’t written a song in 25 years. “She’s been fiercely standing where she is her whole life.” When Henry told his sister-in-law Madonna he was working with Baez, he says, she texted him: “She’s a fucking warrior hero.” “So many people have said to me, out of the blue, ‘We need Joan Baez right now,’ ” says Joe Henry, who’s producing Baez’s next LP. In January, she participated in two Women’s Marches on the same day, one in Redwood City and another in San Francisco, and she’s helping to plan a show to benefit illegal immigrants (her father was born in Mexico and came to the U.S. Last fall, she performed at Standing Rock in North Dakota as part of the protest against the Dakota Pipeline. With Donald Trump in the White House, rock is entering a new protest era, and Baez is helping lead the way. On Friday, Baez will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “It took a lot of courage to be nonviolent,” says Neuwirth, “especially when people had clubs, dogs, handcuffs and all that shit.” “She has a kind of bravery that could just kick down the doors.” Baez was a fixture at marches and protests, especially in the Sixties, preaching a philosophy of nonviolence. “Joan has that rock & roll attitude toward life and freedom and love,” says singer-songwriter Bob Neuwirth, who has known Baez since her folk-club days in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the Sixties. “I told them, ‘If I had a hammer – I’d hit myself on the head. “But I said, ‘ Ooh, can I get one too?’ ” In 2010, when she was invited to perform at a White House celebration of music from the civil-rights era, Baez refused a request, from Michelle Obama, to sing “If I Had a Hammer.” “That is the most annoying song,” Baez says. ![]() “Most mothers would say, ‘Oh, honey, really?’ ” she says proudly. Resting her chin on her hand, she flashes her recent metal-chick tattoo: a series of circles and arrows that rings her right wrist, from a visit to New Zealand with her son, Gabe. Baez, 76, loves to play against her image as the serene, hyperserious matriarch of folk music.
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