https://ch.headtopics.com/news/tea-time-with-joan-baez-45163332
~~ recommended by emil karpo ~~
Tea Time with Joan Baez
The singer explains how an unknown bounty of archival material in a storage unit led to a documentary about her life, and discusses why Bob Dylan wanted to be mothered.
Joan Baez was in a corner banquette at the Russian Tea Room the other day, plucking finger sandwiches from a tiered serving dish. “Joan Baez: I Am a Noise,” a deep and meditative documentary about the eighty-two-year-old singer’s life and work, will première in New York next month.
The film features a bounty of archival material, including cassette recordings in which a young Baez narrates her experiences in the civil-rights movement and the folk revival. The tapes were found in a storage unit that Baez had turned over to the filmmakers Miri Navasky, Maeve O’Boyle, and Karen O’Connor seven years ago. “The big act of total trust was just giving them the key,” Baez said. “I really thought it was lampshades and old plates. I didn’t know that my father and mother kept everything. All the tapes I’d ever sent them, all the letters I’d ever written, all the drawings.” The film is a meditation on both the fallibility and the power of memory. As a child, Baez suffered panic attacks and extreme anxiety, which she later came to attribute, in part, to abuse by her father, a physicist. Her recollection of the trauma is hazy and fragmented, more feeling than narrative. She began discussing it with a therapist at the suggestion of her sister, Mimi Fariña, who, Baez said, had an “intuitive sense” that something ghastly had happened in the family. Baez made peace with not knowing the particulars. “I have no proof,” she said, pouring tea. “I have no interest in trying to prove it. It’s not provable. If twenty per cent of what I remember happening took place, that’s enough.” The abuse revelation would be enough to anchor a less poetic film, but “I Am a Noise” also includes a frank discussion of Baez’s romantic and creative relationships, including with Bob Dylan, whom she met in the early sixties, when she was already a star and he was an awkward upstart with a funny voice. The courtship fizzled by 1965, at which point Dylan’s career had begun to accelerate. “He needed a mother, he needed someone to give him a bath, he needed someone to sing his songs,” she says in the film. Baez has made peace with that experience, too. A large portrait of Dylan, painted by Baez in 2018, can be seen hanging on the wall of her living room in Woodside, California, over a piano. “Whatever I’ve just painted, I put up there,” she said. “The day they were filming, Dylan was watching. I call him Ol’ Happy Face.” In 1968, Baez married the activist David Harris; she gave birth to a son, Gabriel, in 1969, while Harris was serving twenty months in federal prison for refusing to report for military duty. They divorced in 1973. Baez never fell in love again after that. “I remember my therapist trying to get me to take the next step, which was being open to finding a partner,” she recalled. “I said, ‘I’ve worked too hard to get to where I have peace of mind. Why fuck it up?’ ” She has found rewatching the documentary to be strangely edifying. “It’s true, the film,” she said. “There’s nothing fake about it. It gets more difficult, in a way, because, each time, I see more of the depth of Gabe’s sorrow when he was little.” She paused, thinking about the years of trying to balance being a mother and being on the road. “It was pretty fucking complicated. When he was younger, it was tense. That was really my inability to just be with him, to be content and enjoy him. Those are the moments that I miss.” She is proud of the film, but she doesn’t have any plans to continue poking at her past. Asked what might happen to the rest of the storage unit’s personal contents, she said, “I’m probably going to have a bonfire. My assistant, Nancy, was sitting next to me saying, ‘Well, the Smithsonian might want this,’ and I said, ‘Nancy, I don’t give a fuck, just throw it over the cliff.’ I’ve heard all I want to know.” ♦
No comments:
Post a Comment