'Dylan broke my heart:' Joan Baez on how she finally shed 'resentment' of 1965 breakup

Joan Baez is many things: singer, civil rights activist, mother, dog lover.

But hate it or love it, the 82-year-old icon is also inextricably linked to Bob Dylan, with whom she had a passionate three-year romance beginning when she was a teenage prodigy on the cover of Time magazine and he was a skinny, nasally nobody.

Then Dylan soared, and, in 1965, he dumped her. The memory of that split still lingers, Baez confesses in a complex new documentary, “I Am A Noise” (it premieres in New York theaters Oct. 6 before expanding regionally Oct. 13).

“Dylan broke my heart,” she says matter-of-factly. “I was just stoned on that talent.”

Later in the film she says the heartache is gone now, thanks in part to Baez, who is a lovely painter, doing a portrait of Dylan that in essence exorcized his ghost.

“I don’t see him or talk to him now, but the times we have chatted were nice,” Baez tells USA TODAY.

The watershed moment came when she looked at her emerging painting of the singer, “and he was that young face with baby fat, we both had baby fat then, and I put on his music and I started to cry.”

She gathers herself and continues.

“All that resentment completely washed away and all I was left with was gratitude that I’d met him, gratitude for all those songs, gratitude for the time period that we merged in,” she says, then laughs. “I might still make wisecracks about him, but all the unhappy, gritty (bulls---) is done.”

Dylan has not shied away from praising his onetime paramour.

“Joanie was at the forefront in a new dynamic in American music,” he said in the 2009 documentary “Bob Dylan & Joan Baez.” “That soprano voice, I couldn’t get it out of my mind.”

What Joan Baez family secret does 'I Am A Noise' reveal?

“Noise” could not skip a dive into Baez’s Dylan phase, but it is far from a standard music legend biography.

Call the film a mix of a soul-searing confessional, unvarnished family archeology mission, joyous recounting of big moments and lost loves, and, mostly, a meditative journey into the soul of a woman who had every reason to be happy and yet was not.

Why?

In a bit of a spoiler alert, the film reveals that while on the outside the handsome, California sun-drenched Baez clan – which included her parents and sisters, Mimi and Pauline – was joyous and talented, the darkness the sisters felt was, according to years of therapy, rooted in what the sisters contend was memories of their father, and possibly others, molesting them.

Though Baez did eventually marry (she and activist David Harris stayed together for five years and are parents to musician Gabriel Harris, who also appears in the movie), she says relationships were always a problem for her.

Today she lives with her dog on a compound near Silicon Valley and is by her account the happiest she has ever been.

“As I say in the film, I’m really good when it's one-on-2,000 people at a show,” she cracks. “I don’t want to go through more therapy to figure out how to live with someone now.”

Joan Baez is fine putting her memorabilia in a 'big bonfire'

“Noise,” expertly crafted by Miri Navasky, Karen O'Connor and Maeve O'Boyle, unfolds with a steady crescendo thanks to the expertly assembled mix of current interviews and archival source material.

And what material it is. Hidden in a storage locker for years, the material includes Baez drawings, letters, dictated letters on cassettes, home movie footage and tour videos. There are also audiotapes of the family’s various therapy sessions, including searing moments as the girls recall their trauma and their father, Albert, insisting nothing of the kind ever happened.

Baez’s mother, Joan, referred to as Big Joan or Joan Senior, stashed the trove in a storage locker and was a complete mystery to the singer. The entire Baez clan, other than Joan Jr., has died.

“I didn’t know it was there, but when I found it I turned it over to them, and I don’t know if it was a director’s dream or nightmare, but they did a great job using all that stuff,” she says.

She says the painful abuse revelations were included not to serve as a focal point but rather to show “there’s a whole life in there.” But, she says, "I have no interest in revisiting that stuff anymore.”

In fact, she insists that once the material comes back to California from the East Coast-based directors, she plans “to have a big bonfire” − which could horrify archivists.

Structurally, “Noise” cuts back and forth between the arc of Baez’s historic life and scenes from her final concert tour in 2019. These days, if she sings for a crowd, it’s either at a benefit, such as an occasion earlier this year at Sammy Hagar’s pediatric cancer fundraiser in San Francisco, or “at a memorial,” she says.

But there’s another place that voice – once an angelic soprano and now a rich and life-soaked contralto – rings out.

“I love singing in my house now, kicking off my shoes so I’m most comfortable,” she says. “I’ve let go of the notes I wanted but no longer have. There’s still enough down there that I enjoy.”