Not long ago, Joan Baez was at a club on a lark, soaking up a bit of underground rock.
She spent the evening watching a band whose singer ”dressed up in skintight black sheeny stuff and masturbated on the monitor . . . everything that every parent dreads their kids seeing.”
But when the 51-year-old Baez approached the singer after the show, his enthusiasm for her work was disarming. ”He looked at me and went, `Joan Baez! You`re my main influence! I used to get your records in the library,` ” Baez remembers with a chuckle. ”I`ve got to tell you, that floored me.”
Baez, of course, is more used to such salutations from other acoustic-guitar-toting women. And these days, the pop road seems to have led back to the singer-songwriter, thanks to a succession of female troubadours such as Tracy Chapman, Suzanne Vega, Natalie Merchant of 10,000 Maniacs, Shawn Colvin and Britain`s Polly Jean Harvey.
Folk has made a comeback, and Baez-the matriarch of that scene who played at Woodstock and opened Live Aid-is ready to join in. Her new album, ”Play Me Backwards,” is not only her first major-label release in 15 years but also her first attempt in quite some time to make ”a serious album, a serious contribution to the world of music.”
That claim comes as a surprise for anyone who`s even marginally familiar with Baez`s career. Since 1960, when she released her first album, the New York-born, California-raised Baez has been viewed as nothing if not serious, a performer of passion and conscience second only to her friend and former lover, Bob Dylan. (Baez has a son, Gabriel, 23, from her marriage to David Harris.)
Her extra-musical pursuits have been equally serious, including high-profile activism advocating nonviolence and civil and human rights.
But the key, Baez says, is that she was a maker of serious music, but not a serious music-maker.
”The way I`ve worked all my life musically is, if it works, fine, and if it doesn`t, so what?” Baez explains. ”I didn`t plan much, I didn`t collaborate . . . and a lot of times the music suffered because I didn`t give it enough time. If there was a chance to go to Northern Ireland, I`d get on a plane to go march with the peace movement. That was another three weeks of time that I might have given to a music project.”
Mark Spector, Baez`s manager for the past 3 1/2 years, is more succinct:
”She was not familiar with what I call the process of making records.”
So the making of ”Play Me Backwards” became the remaking of Joan Baez, an indoctrination into making records for the `90s rather than for the `60s.
Back then, she would ”just go in, turn the tape recorder on, do the song and put out a record.” She has learned to co-write, to collaborate, to accept criticism and to exhibit patience. She has learned not to give up on a song when it wasn`t working and to allow her own ideas to be altered.
”Time changes, music changes, legends grow old and so forth,” Baez says with another laugh. ”I`m redefining this whole time period in my life in relation to music. Unless I wanted to accept the idea that a legend was a fossil. . .I needed to refresh everything about my music.
”You do fossilize if you don`t get contemporary.”
Baez first recognized a problem during the late `80s. She released three albums between 1987 and `89 to an indifferent public. Toward the end of that period, her agent recommended she meet Spector, who in turn did his own investigation of Baez`s stature.
He found that, within the music community, she was still beloved. And from Baez, Spector sensed ”a real commitment to attempt to resuscitate her professional career, her music career.” He offered just one piece of advice: ”I told her two years ago that this was going to be a long and patient process, and she`d better get used to it. She kicked and screamed a little bit, but in general she was OK with it.”
Working with two Nashville-based songwriters and producers-Wally Wilson and Kenny Greenberg-Baez began a year-and-a-half process of writing songs and choosing outside material for ”Play Me Backwards.”
The last time she spent so much time working on an album was for 1975`s acclaimed ”Diamonds and Rust,” on which producer David Kershenbaum put Baez through rigorous paces.
Baez freely acknowledges things were often testy in the Nashville studios where she, Wilson and Greenberg worked.
”Co-writing was brand new to me,” she says. ”Listening to people`s criticism of my music is new to me, opening up to stuff I hadn`t been willing to hear. It was all adventuresome-and a lot of it was fighting.
”Wally`s most favorite comment to me was, `Just because you write poems doesn`t mean you know how to write songs.` And later on that day, with the most absolute snootiness I could muster, I said, `Have you guys ever heard of understatement in your lives?` Because most of the stuff they write is country-western, pretty direct stuff.
”I saw their point of view musically, and I saw my own rigidity. I understood how much I needed to bend and change. It wasn`t easy getting there, but when we put all that together and duked it out, we came up with viable music.”
Baez also received plenty of support from outside the Nashville enclave. Old friend Janis Ian offered line-by-line critiques of Baez`s new songs and contributed the sweet-tempered love song ”Amsterdam.” New buddy Mary-Chapin Carpenter donated the riveting ”Stones in the Road.”
Spector says the album almost had more contributions. ”I thought that when it came time for her to make a record, I could call the Stings and Bonos of the world, and they`d all line up outside my door to write songs for Joan,” Spector says. ”As time went by, those people expressed great fondness and a willingness to do so, but no one ever did. In the long run, that probably worked out better. In bringing her recording career back into a meaningful place, it`s a good thing to say that Joan stood on her own two feet.”
Baez and Spector also realize that improving the singer`s commercial standing will take the same kind of patience they displayed in making the album. They`re concentrating on word-of-mouth techniques-concerts, press interviews and radio play on modern-rock and adult-contemporary stations.
A harder sell will be made after the holidays, when Carpenter`s ”Stones in the Road” is released as a single and, they hope, a video for VH-1.
Baez laughs as she talks about how new the concept of marketing is to her. But she says she wants to draw people to her music.
”What I`m dealing with is whether I was going to do anything about my situation or sit quietly back on my legendary laurels,” she says. ”When I made the decision four years ago to hire management and go at this full-bore, a lot of things happened in my life. I realized I had to be more contemporary than I thought I was, and I set out to do that.
”So far, it ain`t been easy, but it has been fun.”
