Originally published in The Guardian, 22 June 1984

In 1959 Joan Baez walked out on stage at the Newport Folk Festival and touched off a wave of adulation that was to reach almost religious proportions. She became the first post-rock ‘n’ roll youth idol, the patron saint of the new folk music: Time magazine ran a rather bemused cover story on the Baez phenomenon, fans would ask for locks of her hair.

She joined the civil rights marches in the South, walking beside Martin Luther King, turned down vast financial offers, and presented a public image that was a fusion of purity and rebellion. As the ‘60s passed her music went out of fashion, but she remained venerated as a symbol of the anti-war movement. Now, 25 years later, she can’t get a record deal in America: both the music and the social conscience are out of fashion.

In Europe, Baez still commands large audiences. On Wednesday night she filled Hammersmith Odeon. It’s a popularity that owes something to ‘60s nostalgia and something to the political climate, where her anti-nuclear stand touches off a more passionate response. At Hammersmith the audience was made up of middle-aged couples and serious clean-cut young people who looked much like her earnest college-student followers of the early ‘60s. As the audience clapped and sang along to the old songs—“A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”, “Suzanne”, “Let It Be”—one could feel a longing for old ideals, for simple answers, and communality.

At 43, Baez is elegant—the sandals and long hair went years ago—witty and faintly intimidating. The aura of veneration still hangs in the dressing room, and she travels with a devoted and protective entourage. She does, however, look back at her young self with a critical eye. “I saw some footage of myself at 20 the other day, speaking to a room full of blacks in Mississippi. There I was lecturing them like an old school teacher, saying ‘Love thy neighbour—if you don’t accept the whites as your brothers and sisters then your movement’s gonna fail.’” She laughs and says, “I watched this and I was just aghast.”

She says now that she was prey to her own mythology in the early ‘60s. “I certainly bought the Virgin Mary image. But I was very much like that—I was in fact a virgin when all that was happening.”

As for her rigorous musical purity, which led her to refuse to appear on television with a band behind her, she says, “I wasn’t being hypocritical. I really believed that if I put a bass and drums with me then I’d go to hell—because rhythm is for the devil! I was brought up a Quaker, so I don’t know how I came up with that fundamentalist point of view.”

She later relented, and spent years recording in Nashville, not only with a rhythm section but working with the white Southerners who at that time were her political enemies. They got on fine.

Baez has been much satirised. In the ‘60s the American cartoonist Al Capp created a character, Joanie Phony, around her and there was a law suit. In fact, she is nothing if not sincere. Rather than a Madonna, the real archetype for a Joan Baez is one of those strong, 19th-century American women: the ones who pushed back the frontiers, campaigned from soap boxes, and brushed authority aside. “By the time I was 14, I had already formulated very strong feelings of what was right and wrong—that people were getting hurt when they shouldn’t be hurt.”

The simplicity of her views, and her absolute conviction, disarm arguments: people should be better; they can stop war if they want to. She is resolutely against party politics and movements. A few years ago, she spoke out against the abuse of human rights in the current Vietnam regime and attracted the wrath of the American Left—Jane Fonda included—as a traitor to the old cause.

She attracted similar hostility for supporting the Northern Ireland peace movement. Now the organisation she helped found, Humanitas, deals both with human-rights abuses and works for the anti-nuclear movement. Politically, it’s a difficult balancing act as she finds herself allied with both left and right—depending on which country she is protesting against. “We call it learning to see through both eyes: that’s why in concert I’ll sing a song for Sakharov and one for someone in Central America.”

As for the women’s movement, she says: “I don’t feel like a feminist, which comes as a shock to a lot of people. So I haven’t been very useful to them. I’m a strong woman in what I do, if that’s any help. I have disagreements with any group that excludes others, that’s my difficulty with all movements.” Her one meeting with Gloria Steinem was not a success.

Her one area of obvious bitterness is the way she has been dropped by the American music industry. In Britain, she is just about to appear at this weekend’s Glastonbury Festival, 15 years after Woodstock. She has been so long out of fashion that she has moved outside it, and may find a new young audience looking for a message.

It’s surprising how powerful the old legend is. The recent news that she was appearing on stage in Germany with her former lover and colleague, Bob Dylan, produced a flurry of press coverage. Baez comments acidly that Dylan didn’t want her onstage with him at all. “He’s a very strange person. I feel no animosity towards him at this point; he’s living on another planet. I have pleasant chats with him when he’s in a good mood.” Asked if they ever discuss social issues, she snorted with laughter: their political disagreements are well-known.

Her marriage to the anti-war activist, David Harris, broke up years ago. They have a 14-year-old son, Gabriel, who has started to rebel in his own way against his radical parents: he insisted on being sent away to prep school. She says she doesn’t mind: “If he’s gone to a ‘good’ school, at least he’ll read a couple of classics before he drops out.”

The first heroine of the ‘60s’ youth generation now looks with despair at the young generation’s current lack of commitment. Asked how she herself feels about being 43, she says, “For years, when people said to me, ‘It really gets better as you get older,’ I thought they were lying. I was so dreading getting older and then when I was 38, something just snapped and I made a decision to just give up and stop worrying about it. And now I wouldn’t go back and live through those years for anything. I’m proud of what I did, but those years were painful, and it’s not painful like that now.”

Watch: “Oh, Freedom” [at youtube.com]

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