She may have retired from active performing, but Joan Baez has hardly been out of the spotlight.
Since she stopped touring and recording in 2019, bringing the curtain down on a 60-year singing career, the 82-year-old folk music icon and social justice activist has fashioned a second career as a visual artist.
She’s had two exhibits of “Mischief Makers,” acrylic portraits of inspirational figures like Martin Luther King Jr., Greta Thunberg and Nelson Mandela. And last week marked the publication of a new book of her upside-down drawings, “Am I Pretty When I Fly?” (Godine, $45)
She is also the subject of a critically acclaimed new documentary, “Joan Baez I Am a Noise,” which is screening at 5 p.m. Tuesday at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that Baez and I have been friends for 25 years, beginning when I was the romantic partner of her younger sister, Mimi Fariña, founder of Marin’s Bread & Roses, who died of cancer in 2001. My wife, Donna Seager Liberatore, co-owner of Seager Gray Gallery in Mill Valley, represents Baez’s work as a fine art portrait painter.
One chilly San Francisco evening last week, I was honored to be part of the launch of her book tour, interviewing her in Jack Kerouac Alley beside City Lights bookstore, the historic North Beach shop founded by the late beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
The alley was packed with what must have been a couple hundred adoring fans, and they weren’t all boomers and ‘60s generation survivors. One 21-year-old college student traveled all the way from Washington state just to see Baez at this event. In a Q&A session after our interview, the young woman was literally quivering with nervous excitement when she asked Baez what life advice she would give someone like her who was just starting out.
“Your heart will tell you, if you listen, where you should go and what you should do and for whom,” Baez told her. “Just be true to yourself.”
A little explanation of upside-down drawing: I first saw Baez do it years ago when she was still performing. One day, I happened to be there when she pulled out piece of paper and a pen and began drawing a clever, cartoonish image upside-down. She’s right-handed, but in this instance she was drawing with her left hand, making the whole thing even more strange and mysterious to me. For this book, she drew with both her left and right hands, but always upside-down. I’m as astonished by it now as I was then.
“I started drawing when I was little,” she explained in our alley interview. “It was my way to prepare myself before I picked up the guitar and began singing. When I’m painting portraits, I want it to look like the person I’m painting. But this upside-down drawing is so freeing. Sometimes I’ll have an idea of what I’m doing when I start, sometimes I don’t. And the extraordinary thing for me is that I don’t really know what’s happening until I turn the drawing right side up and it tells me something, a joke or a phrase or a pun. Then, I turn the drawing upside-down again and write that out — backwards. It’s as interesting for me as it might be for anybody else. And I don’t take much credit for it. It’s the same as the singing. It’s some kind of gift. It’s channeling from somewhere. I don’t know where.”
A type of magic
She acknowledges that there surely is a neurological explanation for this peculiar talent, something to do with the left and right brain. But she couldn’t care less. She compares it to the time a magician friend offered to show her how he did a trick.
“I said, ‘No, I don’t want to know,’” she recalled. “The magic would have been gone.”
When she was growing up, her physicist father moved his family around a lot as he advanced in his career. So Baez was always “the new girl, different, brown, odd,” as she puts it in her introduction. Consequently, she felt like an outsider and hated school. Her favorite drawing, “Middle School,” is of a teenage girl cowering as a bird pecks at her head and her books go flying.
“It’s the chaos of being a certain age and going to a new place, and to me it was terrifying,” she said. “The ‘Middle School’ drawing reflects that shattered, lost, confused, wild, unhappy scene, which is also kind of beautiful to look at.”
Just as the book is divided into categories, our alley conversation was wide ranging, covering various stages in her life and career.
Her youthful love affair with Bob Dylan came up at one point. It turns out that painting his portrait helped heal the pain and hurt she had long held inside over their public breakup.
“When I was doing the acrylic portraits for ‘Mischief Makers,’ I painted Bob when he was really young,” she said. “He still had baby fat. He was like 20. Both of us were still so young. As I was painting, I put his music on and started to cry. All the resentment and the b.s. that had gone on before was absolutely drained away, so I wrote him and told him so. I didn’t include a return address because I didn’t want or expect something back. I said, ‘I’m sorry I wanted so much of you. I wanted you to be political and you weren’t.’ I was able to say that I’m sorry that I was tugging so hard at you and how grateful and thankful I am that I was there in those years that you wrote those songs and that we were friends.”
Asked by someone in the crowd to name her favorite artists to sing with during her career, she listed her sister, Mimi, first (“We knew each other our whole lives and had the same phrasing”) followed by Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt and Dylan.
“Bob had absolutely impossible phrasing which, he would change every night just to screw you up,” she said and laughed. “It was a challenge but he was brilliant.”
After our interview, Baez left the next day for Nashville, where she was in conversation with her friend Emmylou Harris. From there, it was on to New York for an interview with filmmaker Michael Moore and an appearance this week on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
On the flight from Nashville to New York, she happened to be on the same plane as Justin Jones, one of the two young Black Democrats expelled from the Tennessee legislature by a Republican super majority for leading a gun violence protest on the house floor.
When you get off the plane with the legendary Joan Baez you know it’s a movement of the spirit. She stands with us in our struggle in Tennessee and said she’s hopeful to see young voices leading.
“WE SHALL OVERCOME…”
Serendipitous, indeed. pic.twitter.com/f4bj5akUte
— Rep. Justin Jones (@brotherjones_) April 9, 2023
A video of Baez and Jones singing “We Shall Overcome” in the Newark Airport had 1.3 million views on Twitter earlier this week. Shortly after that video was posted, Jones was reinstated. He was sworn back into his seat on Monday.
“When you get off the plane with the legendary Joan Baez, you know it’s a movement of the spirit,” he wrote. “She stands with us in our struggle in Tennessee and said she’s hopeful to see young voices leading.”
Contact Paul Liberatore at [email protected]
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