Joan Baez

00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkin. Joan Baez has always used her voice as a tool for social change. Show me the Prison, show me the jan show me the Prisoners Lie. At the height of her career in the nineteen sixties, Joan was known the world over as the Queen of Folk. She used her fame to help spread the tenets of non violence and was a close ally to doctor Martin Luther King Junior. Joan also helped introduce Bob Dylan to the world by giving them stage time at her shows when she was the biggest ticket in town and he was a complete unknown. In this conversation with Rick Rubin, Joan explains why, after performing for over sixty years, she recently made the decision to stop singing. She also talks about the time she and Pete Seeger were run out of town by local cops after a performance, and how is a badge of honor? When the Brazilian government banned her music because they felt it made people too emotional. This is broken record liner notes for the digital age. I'm justin Richmontain. You're a Rick Rubin and Joan Bias. How are you hey, mountain man. Nice to see you, Nice to see you. Everything well, it's been a minute. It's been a minute. Everything's just as good as it can be, Beautiful, Tell what's been going on? What's been going on? Let me think. Well, I made the decision and quit touring, as you know, and on New Year's Eve, I made the decision to not sing at all. So people can't say it, would you just do this one? Just that's it. You know, I'm ready to do other things and don't want to put the effort into making this voice sound right, and it doesn't anyway, So so I'm free of that, which is wonderful, beautiful. What tell me a little bit about the work that would go into keeping your voice working in the way that you wanted at work? Well, first of all, I had was just hanging on to old recordings of the last teacher I had, and that went back about a year, and I was just doing a couple of hers just to get through. I didn't bother anything new. And then my granddaughter started studying with Max and Lewis. She was an I cat back in the day, and she teaches and she's wonderful and was working well for Jasmine, and I thought, well, I'd like to sing with Jasmine a little bit before I stop all this, and so I started working with Max Sam was totally different from anybody else, but one way or another, it involves conscientious work. You know, it should be five days of weeks, even if it's twenty minutes a sec. That concentrated takes you away from everything else. And honestly, if I if the voice sounded more like what I really wanted to sound like, I made a stuck with it. But it won't matter how hard I work. Now you know they're a muscle in there is not going to be what it was, and I'd rather let it all go interesting. It's I got to work with Johnny Cash at the end of his career and his voice was definitely failing at the end, and it was really it really impacted him emotionally in a great way, in a terrible way, exactly, and we found a way through the emotion of the words that he was singing to not have it being negative but be positive that it wasn't that his voice was failing. It's that the things that he was singing about were so difficult that it made sense for to have difficulty in the words coming out. So I don't know, it was at least there was a method that worked. If you ever decide to try it again, if you ever get the mood that you can make it work for you instead of against you. I think because my saying was this voice, you know, I mean, yeah, good wine and so on up to a certain point, and then you I mean, and Johnny because of the nature of himself and his work and his voice and his songs, he didn't have to do that stuff. He just bared his soul. And that's why those last albums were so gorgeous. He was apparently happy with what was coming out of him. Yeah, he was, but he during I will say, during the period, he was very uncomfortable with his voice, yeah, and really questioned it. And he would say that his voice was the one thing that he could always rely upon and now he couldn't rely upon that anymore, and it really it made him uncomfortable. And we all go through I mean, anybody who sings that. You don't know that when you're young, there's no way to know it. But it's a certain point. The muscles are like a tennis player just gonna start giving, you know, So at any rate, that was New Year's Eve, So yeah, tell me about the very what was the very last performance in front of an audience, your last concert? It was in Spain. It was in Madrid, and it was glorious. I mean there was a big concert hall. It was beautiful. It was filled with people. And I had Emanciato Prava, a guitar songwriter, singer, famous, you know the kind everybody goes ah when he walks on the stage. And he and I worked on a song together and sang it together and it was a big emotional moment for everybody. And then I sang and that was basically it. And I got an encore and I sang what I had been singing, which was if I had wings, and said goodbye that way. Yeah. What was the emotion of the feeling like this is it? Well, I was already feeling what was coming, and it was a relief. And I wondered, often, is this something I'm going to really wish that I know? Everybody says, oh yeah, I'll be back on the road, and I thought, well, maybe to be fair, I should leave that open. But I had never a second. It was my people and the bus, my friends, my co workers, the engineer, sound likes. That's what I missed, but not being on the stage, not all that stuff. It just I mean, and partly I think is I walked right into the painting. You know, it was like shifting or shifting into another gear, and so I just something final and wonderful about it. We were all exhausted because it was the end of it was the end of our emotions too. I mean, we're all wiped out with that. Yeah. Interesting that so many people, we think of, so many artists, have a difficult time walking away from it. Yeah. But for some reason, I get the sense that you've always had as much of a life outside of performance, where so many artists that's all, that's all they have, So it seems like you've always had an inner life to come back to. I think that's true. I think partly at the very beginning, when I was so disciplined and stiff, and this is you know, traditional songs and everything else was commercial, it set me on a path where I had to I had to keep my spiritual life in order. I'd keep my body in order. But I didn't fall into a lot of stuff, but a lot of my friends did. I never did the drugs. I'm sure I missed out on a lot of stuff. I'm sure that I did. But yeah, I pretty much kept it together and there even though you know, I went through some heavy duty therapy and found out stuff I hadn't known that was causing different behaviors in me that I didn't have control of. That basically, there was a core there that stayed on track. When did you first start doing therapy, Hope? You know, I mean a lot of therapists. When I was fifteen, I started getting help from different doctors. Yeah, and that went right on through. And I started the deep stuff when I was fifty, and you know, that was a different kind of therapy that was saying, Okay, there's something in here, I'm going to dig it out. And you know, obviously I can't talk about the details, but the fact was there was therapy that helped me stay together, and there was therapy that helped me fall apart and put the pieces back together. So wow, beautiful, Yeah, beautiful. I'm glad. I'm glad that you found you found help through those through that work. It's it's it's a miracle when you find the right you know, the right connection and when you see where it can go, it's an amazing thing. And you know, I think I felt the way A lot of people, maybe most people feel that you can changes, you can switch that, but basically nothing ever changes, and that for me anyway, has not been true. I mean, the change was was just transformative. It tooks a long time and a lot of work, but I don't have to go through the stuff that I did. You know back then, do you have or have you ever had a spiritual practice? You know, I've always either invented my own or dipped into different people's for a while. And the one that makes the most sense to me, but also takes a discipline that I little short of, is just Buddhist practice, you know, just trying to be mindful and aware. And I always I mean parents were became Quakers when I was eight, and so that brought in the whole nonviolence and in the active part of Quakerism, which is American Friends Service Committee, you get involved in people in the world who need more than we have, and so that was a way way back seeing wherever the spirit wove in and out of that. I mean, my father, his father's father was Catholic, and my father's father was a Methodist minister, which means he left Catholicism in Mexico, and that was not exactly the thing to do in those days. And my father preached in his church. Oh, my father was eighteen. They were Presbyterian in New York. My mother's father was an Episcopalian minister who preached at that beautiful church in the middle. I didn't know this. I was visiting Edinburgh and that gorgeous little church that writes back in the middle of town. You can't get pictures of it because it's too big. You can't back off far enough. That's where he preached. So there was always a whole line of preachers. Amazing, amazing. Do you feel like that that the preaching in your blood worked its way into the music, both since it worked my way into by talking too much and people in the hall saying, why don't you shut up and sing? I mean I heard that more than once, really, and I get it, you know that. I was so intent on saying what I felt no people should hear, or what it was on my mind or politically or spiritually, and so I would just, you know, damn the torpedoes and say what I needed to say. Tell me more about the Quaker faith. I know very little. The only you're the first person to ever tell me about about Quakerism. And is it called Quakerism, Yeah, that's Quakerism. Basically, the Quakers are just about the only religion, formal religion that really will not condone violence. I mean, not World War two, the favorite wars. You really have to find another way to live, and it's pretty much a constant challenge, especially you know, in days like this and a world like this, a country like this, and so it's an attempt to live with through and by non violence. Meaning the bottom line is that you are willing to accept suffering but not inflicted. So that really determines how you behave publicly and personally. And it's very challenging and there are times that I am just impossible that you lose track of that. Yeah, let's talk about the world that you came into as a musician. Tell me about what the world was like when you first started making music. We know I was already politicized. But what happened was I moved to came Bridge and I had heard Odetta and Pete Seeger and Harry Bellafonti, and those are my introduction, and I heard the Kingston Trio and I wouldn't admit that to anybody because they were supposed to be commercial, but I loved them. And then it moved to Cambridge and I the only school that accepted me because my grades were terrible and I had no interest in going to school, was Boston University Fine Arts. So I was kind of halfway there. And then I was fell in love with a guy from Harvard, and I wandered around Harvard Square and started playing in the coffee shops and so at that point the politics all kind of shriveled up for a while because I was just busy being in love. And that went on for two years, and that's where all those early Ballots came from. I mean, the political music didn't start showing up until it was think it was actually gone. On my side was probably the second or third album, but the first one was just strictly Ballots. So the scene around me was coffee shop, you know people. And I wasn't in New York. People think I was in New York. I was mostly in Cambridge at the club forty seven, and so I was in this I remember walking past one of these coffee shops. My father regretted it forever, but he had never seen coffee shop activity and students sitting around with somebody performing, So he took his three daughters and his wife to see this phenomenon. And I looked in one coffee shop, Tula's Coffee Shop, and I saw a guy sitting and was playing Plasier mur And that was it. I mean, that was just it. That's why I wanted to be and what I wanted to do. It was it mostly music or was there also poetry? And tell me about the coffee shop scene. Well, a coffee shop scene where I was in Cambridge was not so much poetry to my memory, it was music. The coffee shop Club forty seven, where I ended up singing a few days a week ten dollars a night to start with, it was a big money for me, had been a jazz club and the women who ran it were hip enough to see this folk boom coming into play, so they took two nights a week and made it a folk club, and eventually that's what it was completely And I was a steady I at the very beginning of that, I was I guess tuesdays. To begin with, I sang every Tuesday, and then pretty soon people songwriters came in, some known, some not known, Eric von Schmidt, very unknown types, a lot of them. That's where I got, you know, they were not famous people I learned the songs from. Was it hard finding songs back then? Well, because everywhere, because I'm a good robber, you know, And all I had to do is I mean for those ballots, because that's what I loved. They were everywhere and you could find Geane Ritchie give you a whole album's worth of gorgeous old ballots. After a quick break, we'll be right back with Joan Bayass. We're back with more from Joan Bayaz and Rick Ruby. So you're singing in the coffee shop world. And then when do protest songs make their appearance? Well, you know, before this little love affair I had with my Harvard boyfriend, I had already sung, say, I learned the first Emmett Till that came out, I mean I was already there in my head. And then there was a kind of a dip, and then I wanted desperately to have the songs that could express some of these feelings and the obviously when Dylan came along, it was pretty early in the game, but that feel that, you know, That's what was missing, was that kind of well. He generated so many of them, and they were so good and up till then I had sung that we shall overcomes, and I can't remember them right now, but I was certainly already known as a protest singer or protest type. What was the first song of his that you heard? Do you remember? I think it was hard Rain, he said of somebody's house, and I think that's what it was. And soon after that was Got on my Side. Got on my Side is the first one that I sang of his. And we were somewhere probably in the South. It was boiling hot, and I remember I don't sweat much, but the back of my legs it was dripping down from behind my knees, and I had the words out there because I've never sung it before. And I think Bob was off the side of the stage and wherever I sang God on my Side. And later at some point he and I were doing concerts together and we sang William z and Zinger killed Poor Hetty Carroll, The Lonesome Death of Hetty Carroll, And the story is about, you know, a rich guy basically kills his maid because he gets ticked off, it throws his cane across the room. Well, we sang it in the area where that guy lived, and we suddenly thought, you know, we better get out of here in a hurry. So that's apropos of not much except that those were extraordinary days musically. Have you ever had an issue with censorship? Like? Was where is your music ever banned? Or were you ever asked not to perform somewhere because of what you were saying? Now, the first incomes to mind was performing with Pizza or when I was really really young and we realized as we got into our cars to take off, we thought the police were escorting us, they were chasing us. I mean, they did not want us. I don't remember, somewhere in the East Coast because he was a pink o comy and I was his upstart, you know, so starting pretty young. The answer is yeah, and they're you know, they're countries where my songs have been banned and I've been banned, and it's sort of a badge of honor. Really. I mean I went to visit Latin America. It was Pinochet was still in control, but exiles my exile friends here said, you know, there's this chance that they're opening up down there. This is a good time to go and sing and do what it is you do. It was too early, and I was banned in Argentina, Chile and Brazil, and so, I mean to know, came to the hotel door and with a piece of paper saying listen, don't get any more than X number of feet from the microphone or you'll be arrested. So yeah, again, that's a badge of honor in one of those countries. Yeah, tell me about Pete Seeger. Pete Seeger first influence. So I don't remember this, but my aunt said that she took me to a Seeger concert and my parents were frantic because all I was listening to was rhythm and blues. I have a little plastic gray radio at night. I listened as late as I in the night, rhythm and blues, all the black groups. And they thought I'd never go beyond that. And so she took me to a Pete Seeger concert, and they said it took like a good vaccine. You know that I got it that he was my kind of guy, because I was already you know, socially conscious, and this guy was doing it both doing it all, you know. And I'm happy to say that when he was banned from radio and TV that I had a chance to do my bit for him when this Hoot and Nanny show invited me on and I said, I'll come on as soon as you have Pete back on, and they did. Said was there a particular song that he was banned for? I don't think so. I think it was the whole thing, you know. I'm not sure, but he was banned. He couldn't say anything anywhere. Do you think it was specifically for speaking out against war? He was at that time period when you were either a pink or you weren't, you know, were you a communist? And he wouldn't say one way or another. You don't so. No, it was during those years of McCarthy, just before, just after ording, and he wouldn't say the things you're supposed to say or name anybody else. Did you like being around him? Like spending time with him? He's a funny man. He was so shy. He was so shy when I sang for him at the Kennedy Center Awards and afterwards it was a big gathering and dinner and it's dancing and I went up to him. I said, hey, Pete, congratulations. He said, Joan, Joan, joan, and that's all I said, Pete, Pete, and I went off and danced with Walter Cronkite. Clearly Pete was not gonna dance. He was just shy. In his way of saying hello. Also was to put a banjo between you and him, and he say, I'm at a a meta guy in guatemal He started plunking on the on the banger. That way, he didn't have to deal with anybody. That's what I think beautiful. And it was a sweetheart. No, he was the big sweetheart. And he died in the wool to his dying day. Did not like having drums. Why do you have to have drums in your band? Why do you have to have percussion? And so he stayed. He hung in there as a you know, a diehard purist. Tell me about first you're The first record company round was Vanguard Records, which was known for folk music mainly would you say classical and then folk? Were you one of the early folk artists on the label. Pete Seeger was there and the Weavers were there, but I was the first major. Pete Seeger was a major artist, but this brought it on one level closer to culture as opposed to just counterculture. Yeah yeah, I mean that's a fun story too. I just I was well Albert Grossman, who was the guy who managed everybody back then eventually was Dylan and Peter Paul and Mary and Janice Joplin and so on, and so Albert wanted me to sign with Columbia, which had all these artists and which was the biggest and the place to go, and that always frightened me. You know, I was looking for something where I felt more at home, and classical music is what was played in my house. And al took me to New York City and he wanted me to go to Columbia first. And when we were in Columbia, he tried literally try to get me to sign a contract there on the spot. And then I said, well, you know, now I want to go to Vanguard. He really didn't want me to go there, but I did. I liked the guy I could. You know. It wasn't the showbiz stuff. They didn't have gold albums on the wall, they didn't have any gold albums, you know. And I was comfortable there and it was clear that. I mean, I spent a week trying to trying to figure it out because everybody except my parents said, you know, honey, you should really go with Columbia and and I didn't. And you know, I probably would have sold more albums and so on, but I've never regretted, you know, the decision I made. Tell me about Albert Albert Albert Grossman. Yes, Oh, he was just you know, he was a big manager guy, and he would make fun of me for not, you know, for not having somebody cooler and more in the fast lane. And he says something like, who do you want? Who do you want? You want brando? I'll get your brando. I'd say, al You're not winning me over with this, you know. Then with his stuff. On the other hand, he was a generous man. He was generous with people with his money. But he was just in that fast lane where I was not going to be comfortable. Ever. Do you think that he really appreciated the music? Actually I do. Yeah. I think. So It's easy for that to get lost when you're starting to make the money at the same time, but I think he did. Yeah. When was the first time when you were performing and you thought, wow, this is really getting to be a big like this is a big deal. You know, when I was in high school and I was singing and I started singing of the you know, the talent shows and stuff, and my friends were saying, oh boy, you think you're going to be famous someday. I didn't know what they were talking about. My idea of the future was the following week. I mean, I didn't look ahead to that, and so it probably saved me a lot of trouble. And then I thought, when I was really seriously in the public eye, I wouldn't use the word famous. I'd say, well, I'm well known. I'm well known, but I mean by then, I mean the fuck I was internationally famous. But I just didn't want to get into that aura. But with their particular performances where you just felt like, I don't know, the first time you played Carnegie Hall or the first time you played any of those moments where it just felt like, wow, this is it's grown into something where you have to almost pinch yourself if this is happening. Did you have those moments along the way, you know, maybe early on Carnegie something like Carnegie Hall, I think it was probably too busy being nervous then thinking about how you know what level I've reached in the in the ladder of things. I remember certain certain concerts that will always stand out to me, like it's Stumble. It wasn't a stumble. It was south of a Stumble, but in an outdoor two thousand year old amphitheater, and it was just as far as the beauty. Around me was a whole city that had been underwater at one point, so it was all white stones, Ephesus, and I just was in heaven. They asked me back, and I said, I'll come back in a full moon if you'll get the city there to walk through there in the full moon, and they did. Yeah. It was a big wall that sounds in edible, so beautiful. When you would be on stage and when you'd be singing, are you thinking about the words? Are you thinking about the story of the song, are you thinking about what you're doing? Are you taking in what's around you? Are you hearing the audience? Do you disappear? What's the feeling that's going on inside during a concert? All of the above, Rick, All of the above. I mean sometimes I'm thinking about the words because I have to, because I don't know them that well, or they're in a foreign language. Sometimes I feel very much with the audience for doing a song together, and then I have to say that there were times when the audience is so lousy that I am planning what I'm going to wear to bed on the bus and I didn't want to tell people that, but I can now because it's all over. But there are those moments when you're doing your grocery list. But for the most part, like ninety eight percent of the time, you're there and watching and being with I had an un unfortunate characteristic of seeing everything, absolutely everything. If I see him, somebody tilt their wrist, I know they're looking at their watch, and I'm thinking, oaks. I wonder if I'm going on too long, you know, so I caught everything and somebody stifling a yawn, I would think the same thing, Oh dear, I've gone on long and so on. We'll be back with more from Joan Bayass. We're back with the rest of Rick Ruban's conversation with Joan Byass. How would you say activism has changed over the course of your life from how did you see it when you were fifteen and how do you see it now. Well, in some ways it's absolutely consistent. You know, when I was fifteen, was the first activism I did was on my own, and I stayed in school during an air raid. Drill was all, you know, sound goes off. Also was to run home or have your parents pick you up before the bomb gets here from Russia, you know. And I asked my father, who's a physicist, how long it would take a missile to get from Moscow to Palo alto high school. And it was clear to me that it was all just ridiculous. So as a you know, protest, I stayed in class. And it's pretty fascinating. I mean I went down to the office and pink slip or whatever and talked to the secretaries, the principle vice. Principally, I had no idea, you know, about what we were really doing on that day, So I started started early. And in some ways that the kind of protests you do on your own, and you know, and as some of the some of the things I admire so much, like you know, Gretta said Gretat Thumberg sitting in front of Parliament all by herself, Kaepernick taking a knee all by himself. You kind of cross your fingers and hope somebody will join you, but you do it anyway. So that part remains the same. And I think trying to find a way to explain how it is we want to explain it, how we want people to hear us is just it's different now. And it's different partly in my mind because there was a period. There was a time period when, as one young kid told me after that period said, you know, you guys had everything. You had the political reason to be on the streets, you had the music, you had the songwriters, you had the glue. And what we're missing is the glue. I think that the feeling that we're all together in this. And I can say that for young people who never experienced that. We all got to experience it when Obama was running for office and it was a high five strangers on the subway. That can't continue. I don't think when you're in office it didn't. But everybody that I know was aware enough to say, oh my god, this is what it could feel like. And we don't have that feeling now. We have lots of good things happening, we have people taking risks. We don't have that cohesive stuff that makes us feel like a movement and be a movement. Have you seen protests any particular protest songs change in meaning over the years, Like when you first heard them, they meant one thing, and then over time either the meaning is changed or the context is change in a way where either the song becomes obsolete or it takes on a whole new interpretation. I have to tell you this is a fun story too. I was in Brazil and I was not allowed to sing anywhere officially. So I got into a big audience. This was the plan, or to friends, who got me in the middle of an audience and at a certain point the singer I was supposed to sing, but they wouldn't let me. So the person performing that night would stop and it would have said something, and I would stand up by myself in the middle of this auditorium and sing. So I sang a couple of songs, wonderful response. And then I sang a song. This probably the most famous song I've ever sung, but it's in Europe. It's Here's to You. It's about Saco and Vinzetti, and I sang this it's a little kind of a little chant and it's so popular in Spain and Italy and France. It's what they wait for at the end of the concert. And it's a protest song. And I sang this, there was this dead silence. It had been taken to be used as a recruiting song for the army. So yeah, that's exactly what you're talking about. And that's amazing. It's amazing how these things can happen, either with us watching them or without us knowing. We're just like, oh, the whole context just changed. That's amazing. You got to test it out ahead of time, is what I learned from that. So you were allowed to physically be in Brazil, you just weren't allowed to sing in front of an audience, you know. I was allowed to have a press conference every morning, which I did, but it was the singing. They didn't want me singing. And I talked to the press about it. I said, why is this going on? And they said something about, well, Brazilians are very emotional and that if they would be moved not by the words but by the music, that was the only explanation everybody gave me. That this is a country where the music is what moves people to do. One thing and another and that that would be not desirable by the government. Tell me how you see protest songs functioning in society, that, what they do, what they don't do that, how does it work? Do you mean? Now ever? Ever? Oh, I suppose it is the emotional factor. And I mean you can listen to somebody talk forever, speeches forever, but the music literally literally crosses the barriers one country to another from one. I mean, I remember when I was second album came out, and there was a guy. They told me about it later in the record stores. My records were all piled up like that, and this guy wanted to buy one, but he didn't want to buy one, but he did, and apparently he paced back and forth and then he said that bitch Shirken sing he was a Republican, couldn't stand my politics, and he bought the album. No, he does had Tony. That's ridiculous. So it crossed whatever that barrier. Unbelievable for a protest song to work. Does the song have to be great regardless of the content. I don't think so. I first of all, I think it's about context. I mean I used to saying green grass of Home, which has nothing to do with politics, and I would dedicate it to my husband who was in jail for draft resistance, and so it had we just take a song that hasn't nothing to do with politics, and you put it in that and then you've made your point and everybody's enjoyed the song, and it's kind of a win win. What do you think is the greatest protest song I've ever written? Or what's or should I say, what's your favorite protest song? Made better question? Oh? I think, um, well, there's the Italian when I was talking about, but that's not known. I would think that probably blowing in the Wind, because I've heard it in every language. I've heard boy scouts in Germany on the beach singing blowing in the wind, blowing as the wind, you know. And it's just partly because it's known most songs. You learn the hook and learn a bit of the course. People all around the world know every word to blowing in the wind, So it's a joy to sing beautiful. Can you I feel uncomfortable asking this, but I want to know the song that you're talking about that's not known. Is there a way you could demonstrate it without feeling like I'm asking for anything that goes against what you're doing. It just says it was written by Morticone. It was a film about Saco and Vinzetti, and they came to me. I was in my hotel room in Rome, and said will you write the music for this movie? And I said I couldn't possibly, but he gave me these gave me the music and they wanted three ballads written, and I did, wrote one a day and then that was done, and then he said, oh, this one more thing. I want to put a tag at the end of the song. It was just catchy, little brief melody and what I write the words, and I just said, here's to you, Nicola and Bart, rest forever in our hearts. The last and final moment is yours. This agony is your triumph. And I have to say that it was a combination of the words and the little melody and whatever happened happened. And if you'll find it under Nicola and Bart amazing, amazing, And that's and that has lived. It has taken on a life of its own forever, and every summer it comes out again in Italy. It's a big hit. And if I had taken the royalties for that, I wouldn't have had to ever do anything else. But I wouldn't because I figured Saco and Vinzetti is sacred territory. I didn't have any right taking money for that. We're just kind of ridiculous because the record company did. But it was my stuffy way of I'm turning down more money. You've been good at that over your career, I've been really good at that. Yeah. Yeah. Have you ever had a relationship with gospel music? Yeah? I have. First of all in the South fifty nine sixty well sixty two or sixty three, and the black churches down there and working with King and his people and all of us. And I would end up in gospel and the churches. And I remember that one of the churches that people had already it was a hot day, I think it was in Mississippi, and people were they called it getting happy, you know, they're going stiff and being carried out by the women in the white dresses. And I heard the preachers saying, a good friend from the north is here today to sing for us. I thought, oh my god, that means me. And I went and sang break bread together and a couple of people went got happy. I thought, you know what, I just got my strives. Wow, and everybody sang with me. Yeah. So that would be a genuine relationship with with gospel incredible. And then later on I had a producer, Alan Abrahams, who produced three albums and mostly what he does is gospel beautiful. Let's talk about when folk music and rock music joined together. What is the feeling in the air when that was going on. Well, I was still a snotty purist. So the famous time of Dylan coming to Newport and going electric, I was just like Pete Seeger, how can he do this to us, you know, our golden boy? And so I was really behind, you know, I was on the slow freight, as my mother would say. And then you know, sort of watching what Dylan meant to the Beatles and vice versa when they came to the States. I think whatever it was in me that had a problem sort of wore off because the music was good. You know, did you get to spend time with the Beatles at all? And a funny evening with I have these stories, you know, I guess that's what life is about. You're my age. It is mostly stories. M Yeah. When the first time they came to the States, I had sung in the Red Rocks Amphitheater and they were the the next night, and I had the next night off, so I stayed and I was in there. They have a labyrinth for the press down under the stage, and I was down there with I swear two hundred press and somebody came and said, the Beatles would like to meet you. And I went to their dressing room and I said, Hi, I'm Joan, and one by what was it, Hello, I'm Ringo, Hello, I'm John. I said, listen, you guys are in the cover of every newspaper magazine in the world. I know who you are. Yeah. And then I traveled with them out to California and watched some more of their shows, and it was It's something I'd never experienced before. I mean, when they came out on stage at Red Rocks, it would be like standing in back of a jet and the sky lit up with the cameras. It was bright, and there was just screaming. Was you didn't hear them at all. You didn't hear them unless your head was in one of the speakers. And a few years later, there is that Epstein was he still with them, their manager, whoever it was. They were playing somewhere in San Francisco, and I was there, and there was this little second of time when the screaming stopped. He said, this is our last tour in the States. That was their last show, that San Francisco is their last show. This is it, We're not coming back. Did you have any you talked about paying attention to the audience, always being with them, seeing, noticing if things were going well or not. Yeah, did you have any tricks if you felt like things were starting to go south at a show that you could do to get the audience back. Mostly what I did when it really got rough was because I've had something of a band for many, many years. We'd look at each other, you know, and just a little wink or a little cross eye meant we had each other. So it didn't matter so much about trying to get somebody if they weren't really gettable. But I mean, I would say that was so rare that we really wanted to chuck it in. Yeah, I feel like people would come to see you because they loved you. That seems like we always thought so too. Once in a while, you know, like a like a resort town or something. They're coming because that's the only game in town, and they've been out on the beach getting too much sun and drinking. So you know, there's just so much you can do in that situation. Yeah, tell me how you started painting. Well, all my life, I've sketched, you know. When I was in second grade, I I sketched a Mickey Mouse and sold it for three cents. And Bambi and then I sketched because they had an eye for likenesses like a draw. And then in junior high school, I started drawing Jimmy Deane and then members of the class, and I sold some of them, as I remember, that's very funny. And then just undisciplined different kinds of painting. During my recovery work, I did dreams of recovery painting, you know. But this the portrait started, I mean, this journey into portraiture started about nine years ago and I just all of a sudden, it was an all of a sudden, passed the frame shop and looked in. I thought, hmmm, I think I'll get my hands into this one. And I started and it never stopped that, you know, the first for the first year and a half. I think I did mostly collages and then I thought, you know what, I really would like to do a portrait. I'll bet that's really difficult. And guess what it wasn't And I didn't have to go to school. I get tricks from different people. How do you paint eyeglasses? So you know, somebody tells me a little trick. That's all I needed. I'm sure there's a lot that I could be learning, and I just don't want to leave my own studio and go to school. You know, how much time do you spend painting? Typically, well, in a time like when getting ready for that last show, and when I'm in the cycle of doing paintings, it could be a few hours a day, a few three or four hours a day. And like now, since the last painting, which was Stacey Abrams, that's a few months ago, I haven't done anything. I just started. This is the first day I've been back in the studio and I started painting. There was a photograph of one of the policemen who was being beaten. It's an extraordinary It's a profile of him and this panicky look and you can't see any of the details, just this face and I thought, well, you know, there's probably an entire exhibit from the insurrection. I would love to see those. Any relationship between interpretive singing and interpreting in paint, Oh my, I guess I don't know if there's a relationship. There are similarities, you know, they just sort of refusal to get any formal education about it that it just has to come. I know that it's as you know, it's a mystery to me where the voice came from and how it worked. And it's equally it's a mystery to me how these paintings are showing up. And then we talked a little bit on the show the other night about upside down drawings. They're just fascinating to me. I literally draw the thing upside down, and sometimes I know what I'm going to draw. Sometimes I don't. I just start in and then I turn it background, and I see what it looks like, and I see what it's saying to me, and usually a pun or something silly. Turn it background and I write what I you know, what came to my mind and all of that's insane, and I know that the something happens in the brain that allows that to happen. I don't know what it is. I don't really care. It's beautiful. I imagine. It's not so different than the way many people I know write songs, which is almost like a form of automatic writing. You know. It's it's not sitting down to write a particular thing. It's more almost through improvisation, words appear and then looking at what those words are, trying to say that the song reveals itself. That sounds like a good possibility. I haven't written anything for thirty years except that snarky song about Trump that I just quit. So my granddaughter writes. And she was sitting at the piano and she was singing this song and then it got quiet. I looked at her, she staring up at the ceiling, and when she stopped, I said, were you just writing? And she said, yeah, the word I was singing the words. Thank you so much for talking and it's great seeing you again. And I'm glad you're so well. You look great. Thanks Rick, cheers. Thanks to Joan Baiez for sharing so many fascinating stories from her life. You can hear all of our favorite Joan Baias songs on my playlist at Broken record podcast dot com and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast, where you can find extended cuts of new and old episodes, and you can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced with helpful Leah Rose, Jason Gambrel, Martin Gonzalez, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help from Nick Chafey. Our executive producer is Nei La Belle. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries and it's like a show. Please remember to share, rate, review us on your podcast at. Our theme music by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond, bas