I Dream of Joni, page 1
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PROLOGUE
1
In the presence of the great, we are sometimes very small.
It’s January 19, a Saturday night, and Joni Mitchell and her band are in Champaign, Illinois, where they are playing the 16,218-capacity Assembly Hall. The weather, as if in homage to the singer-songwriter whose most famous song, “Both Sides Now,” is sometimes incorrectly referred to as “Clouds,” is, appropriately, cloudy.
The crowd is a roiling swirl of bell-bottoms and political disaffection and hairstyles these people will later regret: it’s 1974. The Watergate scandal has cast a seamy yellow light on the presidency; Pringles have taught the world that potato chips are now stackable. We’re at peak Joni. Sure, her personal life at the moment is, per usual, zigzaggy like an EKG, but her professional life is groovy beyond measure. Even though Mitchell is someone who judges her work on artistic rather than commercial terms, it can’t be lost on her how spectacularly well her last three albums have gone. Let me mansplain for you.
Court and Spark, the album that she released just two days earlier, is being met with rhapsodic reviews and, spurred on by the hits “Help Me” and “Free Man in Paris,” will eventually go double platinum—a remarkable feat given that the album is (a) a densely layered suite of sophisticated, interconnecting songs and (b) backed by a jazz band. In a musical landscape rife with woozy nostalgia—Barbra Streisand cooing about “The Way We Were,” Jim Croce longing to capture “Time in a Bottle”—Mitchell’s blasts of thorny ambivalence are like a breathless wake-up call from your complicated and mystique-drenched older sister.
On the album before Court and Spark, 1972’s For the Roses, Mitchell pulled off a weird and highly uncharacteristic little victory. After David Geffen, her friend and agent, had repeatedly pointed out to her that her songs were hits for other singers but not for her—most famously, Judy Collins’s cover of “Both Sides Now,” but also Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young with “Woodstock,” and even the heavy metal band Nazareth with “This Flight Tonight”—Mitchell wrote a song for herself that she hoped would chart. Determining that deejays were an important part of the hit-making process, she cannily decided to celebrate their medium by writing a love song from the point of view of a radio, teasing out the similarities between these electronic appliances and lovestruck humans (e.g., both get turned on, both send out signals, both create static); then she gave the tune a long intro and a long outro so that deejays could talk over them. Her scheme worked: “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio” hit #25 on Billboard.
Meanwhile, the album Blue, Mitchell’s 1971 masterpiece that would forever mark her as a purveyor of searing self-disclosure, was performing its own quiet miracle: year after year it veritably toppled dormitories across the country via collective sobbing. Bob Dylan spent a weekend listening to Blue and then wrote the song “Tangled Up in Blue.” Four of the songs on Blue, each of them played on a droney Appalachian stringed instrument called a dulcimer, are so beguiling that, almost fifty years later, Joni superfan Harry Styles tracked down the woman who made and sold Mitchell her dulcimer and bought four of them himself; he gave his 2022 Album of the Year–winning Harry’s House the same title as a Joni song. Taylor Swift called Blue her favorite record ever and named her 2012 album Red in homage to it.
But performing at big arenas like tonight’s Assembly Hall: oof, Joni hates it. It’s hard to tune her guitars with this much amplification. Also, it’s a weird sensation to have thousands of people at your feet—when you look out into the darkened crowd, it feels like you are the intended meal for an ocean of teeth.
But the biggest hassle with arenas is the randomness that you get with an audience this big: Mitchell’s bracing authenticity as a performer (“I’m a Method actor,” she has said) wants silence—or, at least, relative calm. On various occasions over the past four or five years, restless audiences have caused her to stop mid-song to reprimand the audience, cut her set short, or even walk off stage—like the time she decided the crowd at the 1969 Atlantic City Pop Festival didn’t like her music, or when the guy at the Isle of Wight show in 1970 jumped up on stage and announced, “This is a hippie concentration camp!”
Is that what’s happening tonight? During a break between songs, one audience member takes it upon himself to yell out a song request, but it’s not a Joni song this guy wants, it’s a song by someone who’s not even on the bill, Jefferson Airplane’s singer Grace Slick. The guy screams, “ ‘White Raaaaaabbit’!”
Dude. Are you trying to harsh Joni’s mellow?
Awkward.
Fortunately, Joni’s sense of composure kicks in.
“Sweetheart,” she says into the mic, “I’m slick but I’m not that Slick.”
2
November 14, 1993. Joni’s hometown, Saskatoon, in Saskatchewan, Canada, at a country club called the Willows Club. Mitchell is being presented a lifetime achievement award from the Saskatchewan Recording Industry.
The host and interviewer of the evening, trying to keep his introduction short, pares Mitchell’s many accolades down to a single one—not the group of immortal songs that she has written; not her having brought a new emotional candor to pop music or her having helped blur the divide between pop songs and art songs; not the illustrious people like Swift and Elton John and Prince who claim her as an influence; not the sky-high integrity that is the result of having self-produced her own albums and having almost always followed her muse rather than public taste; not the two lyrics of hers that have been included in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot” from “Big Yellow Taxi” and “We are stardust, we are golden/And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden” from “Woodstock”); not the fact that her illnesses over the course of her life—from the forceps, as Joni might put it, to the stone—have required her to learn how to walk three times; not the three-octave range or the five Grammys to that date or the fact that the covers of most of her studio albums have featured her own artwork; not the fact that she is so beloved that, in 1977, she was allowed to fill an entire album side with a largely improvised, sixteen-minute-long, Aaron Copland–esque orchestral suite, some of whose lyrics address the tenuous interface between Indigenous people in rural Canada and Joni’s childhood beach ball; not the fact that her nursery rhyme–ish song “The Circle Game” is so culturally ubiquitous—sung or referenced on seemingly any TV show peddling white, middle-class nostalgia, including The Brady Bunch, thirtysomething, The Wonder Years—that Mitchell has come to refer to it, in a heavy Brooklyn accent, as “Soycle Game”; but, rather, this: radio announcers don’t even need to say Joni’s name when they play her songs because her voice and musicianship and lyrics are so unique.
Mitchell is no fan of awards—they always seem to come at the wrong time, as if the presenters know that they should honor her, but not why they should. She can seem cool if not downright arctic when people celebrate her: in the middle of a tribute concert at the Hammerstein Ballroom in 2000, Mitchell, seated in the audience, ate a banana.
But coolness was not her tone at the Saskatchewan event. Here, surrounded by her parents and old friends and well-wishers, she was loose and gracious and utterly lovable. The more she talked, the more her Canadian accent and rounded vowels started to come oot, eh? Like, you were almost expecting to hear aboot something super-local like a salmon festival over in Medicine Hat, eh?
Radiant with sun-streaked hair and lots of silver jewelry, Mitchell apologized for her hoarse voice (“I was up last night being rowdy”) and alluded to her chronic insomnia (“I keep vampire hours”). She reminisced about the seventh-grade poetry teacher, Arthur Kratzmann, who inspired her to write poetry; she apologized to her high school art teacher for having dozed off during his class once after she’d stayed up all night listening to the radio. She referred to her “first husband”—she’s had two—and added, “I’m like the Elizabeth Taylor of rock here.”
Q and A time. A man in the audience raised his hand and said he had a stupid question; Joni joked that she loves stupid questions. The stupid question was “How did you become such a fabulous songwriter?” Joni launched into a spate of self-deprecation about the power of Irish blarney, but then she autocorrected, saying that she’d like to try to say something useful instead. The rest of her answer was indeed useful—she advocated finding a work that you admire and studying it intensely; then creating something of your own wherein you emulate the spirit of the work that inspired you; and then assessing how your work falls short of its inspiration. Finally: “Narrow the gap. Just keep narrowing the gap.”
As the audience contemplated the ways in which gap-narrowing might revolutionize their own lives—you could almost hear a roomful of people each forming the conclusion, “Maybe it’s not a random collection of chicken casserole recipes but a novel!”—a second man in the audience asked a variant of the songwriting question, but went broader focus, addressing creativity itself.
“My question is, Why do you do it?” he said. “Obviously, you’re good at it. You can do it. But are you driven by something you don
All eyes on Joni. As any committed Joni fan in the audience realized, there’s a really interesting possible answer to this question—a really interesting and juicy possible answer—but it’s not one that Mitchell talks about much, and even if she were to, it probably wouldn’t come out in a public setting, particularly a public setting that includes her parents.
Nervously glancing over at her mother and father seated in front of her, Mitchell made the split-second decision to punt. She told the question asker, “I really like doing it. I mean, uh…” She nodded her head twice. “… I really like doing it. All you have to do is give up a little television.”
As the audience laughed, Mitchell lit a consoling cigarette—she was a four-pack-a-day smoker until her aneurysm in 2015—and then turned to the host to say, “I guess that’s a wrap, eh?”
Though no one in the room acknowledged it, this moment may have been the most newsworthy part of the awards ceremony: one of the world’s most celebrated oversharers had opted to undershare.
The INCIDENT
3
Alberta and Saskatchewan. The 1940s and ’50s. We see a woman with sparkling, intense eyes: Joni’s mother.
Like a character in a Dickens novel, Joni’s mother was possessed of a first name that seemed to distill her essential traits—bourgeois aspiration and mild disappointment—into one adorable, easily digestible bundle.
Myrtle.
When Joni was young, Myrtle Anderson sniffed at her neighbors’ housekeeping habits and vacuumed the Andersons’ garage daily. Granted, the prairie is a dusty place. But the gentle and archetypical roar of your average Hoover? Let us collectively replace that soothing sound with a muffled tsk-tsk—because what exactly are you vacuuming when you vacuum daily? You’re not laying siege to an accumulation of particulates or dead skin lying beneath you. You’re not sucking up a deeper level of dust now that your infant vacuum cleaner is a day older and a day stronger. No, you’re making a powerful statement about the future of dust.
“I was a little afraid of Myrtle as a kid,” retired teacher Sharolyn Dickson, who has been friends with Mitchell since the sixth grade, told me. “She was that kind of straitlaced. She was quite disapproving of some of the things that Joni was interested in doing.”
Repressed but hot-blooded, as Joni would describe her years later, Myrtle was a former schoolteacher married to a grocer and bandleader/trumpet instructor with a strong competitive streak. Bill Anderson, the son of a violin maker, was from a Norwegian family with possible, though disputed, ancestry in the nomadic tribe known as the Sami (which would explain the high cheekbones). The Andersons, lower-middle-class Protestants, lived under infinite sky and endless wheat fields on the Canadian prairie—first in Fort Macleod, Alberta, where their only child, Roberta Joan, was born on November 7, 1943. Then the family moved on to two small towns, sometimes living without electricity or running water, before settling in the Saskatchewan city of Saskatoon when Joan was eleven.
Even today, Saskatoon, a city of about 285,000, bears vestiges of the prairie: while walking around the heart of its downtown one day in 2023, I stumbled on—just across the street from a glassy, eighteen-floor office building, and hard by a Cineplex with fifteen screens—two white hares munching grass in a parking lot. During my stay I spent a lot of time staring into dark, cavernous storefronts, trying to figure out if they were open. I formed the opinion, You’d definitely have to make your own fun here.
Joni’s friend Sharolyn Dickson drove me around Saskatoon one afternoon, showing me her and Joni’s childhood haunts, including the swimming pool on Avenue H, whose jukebox young Joan liked to dance to. (“One of the things you notice when you spend time with her,” Sharolyn told me, “is someone will put some music on”—here Sharolyn looked down at her shoulders, which she had started swaying to imagined music—“and this is where it starts.”)
When we stopped in front of an imposing brick building that Sharolyn identified as Nutana, her and Joni’s high school, Sharolyn told me, “We weren’t allowed to go in the front door, that was for the teachers. We had to use the side door.”
“That’s crazy,” I said.
“There were a lot of things like that. Even for the teachers: there was a men’s staff room and a women’s staff room.”
O, the decorous 1950s. For a future renegade and visionary like Joni, maybe growing up in a city that had been founded by a temperance society—not to mention being reared by a mother who shared the same birthday as Queen Victoria—was the ideal cradle. When a childhood friend once asked Joni “Why do we have such square parents?” Joni, as if aping Marlon Brando in The Wild One, explained, “To have something to rebel against.”
Living amid an expanse of sky and grassland may have aided the process of rebellion: “If you go to Vancouver or Toronto and mention Saskatchewan or Manitoba, people say, ‘Oh, that’s kind of a wasteland.’ Which we’re trying to overcome,” Saskatoon’s young mayor, Charlie Clark, a longtime Joni fan, told me when I interviewed him at City Hall. “I moved from Vancouver to Winnipeg to Toronto to Saskatoon, and the idea of what kind of car I drive and what kind of house I live in was way less important here than it was in bigger cities. Maybe it does foster an ability for people to focus on who they are as opposed to trying to fit into some of those externally driven things.”
But figuring yourself out sometimes pits you against the people who raised you. As Mitchell’s biographer David Yaffe told me, “Sometimes she felt contempt for her parents, and sometimes she wanted to protect them.” After all, Myrtle’s squareness wasn’t wholly restrictive. She nurtured her young daughter’s artistic talents—she let Joan paint a tree on her bedroom wall, she taught Joan to press wildflowers in scrapbooks. Prone to quoting Shakespeare, Myrtle had Joan recite Shakespeare sonnets. She taught her daughter, as the song “Let the Wind Carry Me” on For the Roses would put it, the deeper meaning. It was not lost on either Myrtle or Joan that Myrtle’s own mother, Sadie, who played the organ in a Presbyterian church and wrote poetry, had come from a long line of classical musicians but, upon marrying, had been forced to bide her time as a resentful farmer’s wife. When Sadie was upset, she’d play her organ at home in a minor key, “so my mother grew up,” as Joni explained to an audience at Le Hibou Coffee House in Ottawa in March of 1968, “not being able to stand anything that had a minor key in it anywhere.” When Sadie and her husband had a fight one night, he threw all of Sadie’s gramophone records on the floor. Sadie, enraged, kicked a door off its hinge.
Though Irish blood flowed through Myrtle’s veins, too, her ministrations were gentler. Hers was the language of wary caution and faint disapproval, especially in the face of her impulsive, athletic daughter. A health nut, Myrtle preached nutrition and exercise, but disapproved of dancing and displays of emotion. She thought guitars were hillbillyish and that swearing was common. She hated makeup. She thought cats belonged outdoors. “You’re too sensitive,” she told her daughter. “You’ve got to learn to control your emotions.”
On this last score, Myrtle was probably onto something: when Joni saw the movie Bambi at age four or five, she was traumatized by the forest fire scene, as many children are. But Joni’s reaction lingered. “I couldn’t exorcise the vision,” she said years later. “For days, maybe a week afterwards, I was down on the floor drawing fire and deer running, day after day after day.”
Typically, though, Joan’s hypersensitive antennae took her to sunnier places. When, at a birthday party at age seven, Joan heard Edith Piaf for the first time, she got goose bumps and dropped her cake fork. When Joan saw the Kirk Douglas movie The Story of Three Loves a few years later, she was so struck by the film’s music, Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, that she went to a department store’s listening booth and started obsessively listening. (“Up until I was thirteen, comedy was all that mattered to me,” Joni has said. “Why didn’t I become a writer of funny songs? Because of that beautiful melody.”)
