I Dream of Joni, page 12
Folkie? Jazzer? Pop star? She’s too polyrhythmic for the first, too pop for the second, and too multivarious for the third. As Mitchell would tell a reporter who asked her in 2013 about musical influences, “I’m a mutt. I belong to nothing.”
In a larger sense, too, Mitchell is someone who resists categorization and received wisdom. She once called free love “a ruse for guys.” She’s a feminist role model who doesn’t consider herself a feminist (“I don’t want to get a posse against men. I’d rather go toe to toe myself. Work it out”). Biographer David Yaffe told me that when he toured Mitchell’s alma mater, the Alberta College of Art, with her once, he asked, “Joni, did they have a humanities requirement here?”
“What’s that?”
“You know, literature, philosophy, history, religion.”
“Really,” Joni responded, “you call that humanity?”
Mitchell’s monolithic nature is also in evidence whenever the conversation turns to the radical idealism of the 1960s. Having wrongly designated Mitchell as a fragile hippie princess, the world has long assumed that she embodies a certain ethos and politics. After all, folk, the idiom she started out in, had a long history of political protest—back in the 1940s, Woody Guthrie had put on his guitar a sign reading “This machine kills fascists,” and Dylan had made his name by championing the little man and taking on the voice of the oppressed. Protest songs were so popular among folkies that in the program book for 1964’s Newport Folk Festival, singer-songwriter Phil Ochs wrote “I wouldn’t be surprised to see an album called Elvis Presley Sings Songs of the Spanish Civil War, or the Beatles with The Best of the Chinese-Indian Border Dispute Songs.”
But that wasn’t Joni’s way. During the Vietnam War, she gave a concert at Fort Bragg because she had uncles who had died in World War II and she thought it would be a shame to blame the young men who’d been drafted. When Joni appeared on the radio show Innerview in 1980—after having turned them down for six years—she said, “I didn’t feel a part of the sixties even though that’s the part I’m accredited. Mine was an internal revolution. In the sixties I was going through more what people were going through in the seventies in a certain way. You know what I mean? I was going through more of a personal revolution. I didn’t find a lot of the leadership in the sixties particularly inspiring in government or within our own peer group. I always felt that we were rather fleas on an elephant’s leg and much more powerless than we would want to trump one another up to believe.… I’m not a political person. My interest has always been in the spiritual, and they stand in direct opposition in a certain way. Mine has been a freeing of my own bigotry, you know. You need to be a bigot from time to time in order to have confines on your art. You have to prefer, which immediately makes you a bigot. So for me it’s been lack of identification with groups. I mean I have no religious affiliation, I have no national affiliation. I’m a Canadian living in America, but I don’t feel any more like a Canadian or an American or—you see what I mean?… It’s been a very kind of subjective, I guess you’d say, journey. Subjective but hopefully universal. That was always my optimism that if I described my own changes through whatever the decade was throwing at us, that there were others like me. And it turns out that there were.”
The great irony of refusing the easy consolations of group affiliation is that it often causes us to forge stronger one-on-one relationships with other individuals. One of the most surprising “others like me” that Joni found was her own mother. Referring to the emotional crisis that she was going through when she recorded Blue, Mitchell told her friend Malka Marom in 1973, “I got this illness—crying all the time. My mother thought I was being a wimp, and she was giving me buck-up advice. Later in life, she was walking through the supermarket and started crying for no reason. She also had it, milder than this. She called me up and apologized.”
Mitchell would elaborate in an Irish newspaper seven years later. “Papa was just proud,” she’d say to Western People of her fame. “For myself and my mother, it became almost like Joni Mitchell was an external creation, with all this attention being paid to ‘Joni Mitchell’—but what about the person? Is there room for the person or is there only this fascination with the phenomenon of success?” Joni had been thinking such thoughts since the age of sixteen, when, sympathetic to the plight of actress Sandra Dee, who was hounded by paparazzi while breaking up with her husband, Joan had written a poem called “The Fishbowl.”
Mitchell contends that the fans most likely to project ideas onto famous people are the ones who lack self-knowledge: once, at Studio 54, she met the fan who years earlier had yelled out during a performance the bizarre comment, “Joni, you have more class than Mick Jagger, Richard Nixon, and Gomer Pyle—combined!” (For the young people: Gomer Pyle was a wide-eyed, naive, Southern character on The Andy Griffith Show and Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.) So at Studio 54 Joni said to the fan, “I’ve always wanted to ask you: Are you just like Mick Jagger, Gomer Pyle, and Richard Nixon rolled into one?” The man replied yes, and Joni said, “I thought so.”
But it’s the media, of course, that is the prime engine of mythos and generalization. Try to follow, if you can, this 1974 Toronto Star description of Mitchell and her career: “In swirling soprano self-portraits and worshipful press clippings, all cornsilk flashes and free-spirit poetry… she has emerged unscathed in portraits of enchanted dewdrop vulnerability… immaculate, preserved forever as the elusive pastel prairie wildflower, the misty wispy moonbeam princess lushly chording in her castle of bittersweet sorrows and stained-glass dreams.” Whuuuh?
In 2023, I interviewed performance artist John Kelly, who met Joni in 1996 when she came to one his performances in which he incarnates her. Kelly told me, “Maria Callas said, ‘Glory terrifies me.’ So much stuff was thrust upon Callas. But she was just trying to do the work. And do it well. She wasn’t aiming for celebrity and glory. But you’re nobody in this world unless you have some kind of identity.”
“Yes,” I said, “which is why we now have an entire generation of people who can’t watch things: they go with their camera to watch their favorite performer but spend the whole time taking selfies of themselves not watching their favorite performer.”
Kelly responded, “Joni calls it ‘ego puke.’ ”
As a public figure, you can’t fully control the narrative that people harbor about you—but you can limit people’s access to it. Whereupon you discover that this tactic often only causes fans to obsess even more. “Ziggy for me was a very simplistic thing,” David Bowie has said of Ziggy Stardust, the alter ego that he started developing during a trip to the U.S. in 1971. “What it seemed to be was an alien rock star. But other people reread him, and contributed more information about Ziggy than I’d put into him.”
Given only a few details about a charismatic person or alter ego or place, it seems only natural that our brain sometimes builds up a network of associations and suppositions that are more vivid than the actual person or place might have been had we had time to study or interact with them. It’s similar to how listening to the radio can be more intense than watching TV or a movie.
Or it’s like Joni and the song “Woodstock.” Though she made it to Woodstock to celebrate its twenty-ninth anniversary in 1998, Joni, famously, didn’t get to go to the epochal concert in 1969 because she had a talk show appearance the next day and her agent and manager worried that she wouldn’t be able to make it back in time. So she stayed away. And wrote the historic event’s theme song.
26
9130 West Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles. 1973 or thereabouts. David Geffen’s office at Asylum Records. The music potentate is schmoozing Robbie Robertson, the guitarist who played for Bob Dylan before going on to help form The Band and then to find or create music for many of Martin Scorsese’s films, from Raging Bull through Killers of the Flower Moon (which is dedicated to Robertson, who passed away in 2023). It is unclear to the casual observer whether Geffen is interested in signing the tall, faun-like, half-Jewish, half-Mohawk guitarist because Geffen likes (and thinks he can make money from) Robertson’s work, or whether he sees Robertson as a stepping stone to Geffen’s great white whale, client-wise: Dylan.
Geffen broke the ice by casually working into the conversation the fact that he was going to a therapist five days a week. Robertson was warmed by the admission’s disarming candor.
Then Geffen deployed a second arrow from his quiver: a name drop. “Your fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell is living with me,” he told Robertson. “We’re housemates. She’s a genius. It’s not easy living with a genius, but I love her.”
Geffen invited Robertson over for dinner that night—“I’ll ask some friends over, and you can say hello to Joni.”
Hours later, Robertson showed up at Geffen’s place—the aforementioned Blake Edwards/Julie Andrews rental—where Robertson discovered that “some friends” translated to two of Hollywood’s biggest players, Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty (“Joni’s trophies,” as John Lennon will call them behind her back).
“I soon noticed that everyone here was on a mission,” Robertson will later report of the gathering’s business-minded, darty-eyed participants. “All eyes in the room were casting about for what might be right for their next project.” (David Yaffe told an audience at the Leon Levy Center for Biography in 2017 that he once talked to Mitchell about being repeatedly hit on by Nicholson and Beatty over the years, asking her, “Was that fun?” Whereupon Mitchell took a drag of her cigarette and said, “Fun?! Celebrities are not fun. They’re neurotic, sick people.”)
After dinner, Joni announced that she had a new song. She picked up one of the acoustic guitars in the living room, tuned it up, and launched into her new offering. “I tried to follow her on guitar,” Robertson, a legendary guitarist, later confessed, “but between her unusual tunings and obscure fingering, I was a man in search of the lost chords.”
That Joni lived for a time with power broker David Geffen—her agent and the head of her record label—bespeaks either ambition or the ability to find the humanity in anyone, or some combination of the two. It’s easy to see how the friendship worked when it did—for her, here was someone who not only loved her music, but had a financial and professional incentive in its propagation; for him, here was a sensitive soul with whom he could talk about his closeted homosexuality (after dating Cher and Marlo Thomas, Geffen announced in 1992 that he is gay), as well as her own troubled love life. But given that Mitchell tends to be honest to a fault, it’s surprising that she would find shelter with the man who gleefully admits that he once forged a letter in order to keep his job in the William Morris Agency’s mail room.
Brash and fast-talking and witty in a way that feels earthy rather than haughty—in Geffen’s Brooklyn tones, the word “song” always comes out “sawng”—the physically slight Geffen would come to have a stranglehold on the singer-songwriter movement of the 1970s by dint of his working relationships with Joni, Bob Dylan, Linda Ronstadt, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Tom Waits, Jackson Browne, and the Eagles. Though he dressed conservatively and hardly did drugs, he was seen at first as his clients’ contemporary and protector; but by 1983, infamously, he’d sue his artist Neil Young for turning in “musically uncharacteristic” material, forever branding Geffen as uncool, if not The Man.
He’d grown up the son of a woman who, when buying a blouse at Bloomingdale’s, would try to negotiate the price with the salesperson. She called her son King David. Geffen started his career in the William Morris mail room; as he has told it, when he found out that one of the other trainees at the agency had gotten fired for lying on his résumé, Geffen, nervous about having lied himself about going to UCLA, hawk-eyed the mail coming into William Morris daily, then steamed open a letter from UCLA to the talent agency, had a stationer duplicate the letterhead, and rewrote the letter saying he’d graduated. His ruthlessness as a negotiator will earn him enemies both in the music industry, where he starts, and in film and theater, where he ends up before becoming a philanthropist. A record executive once screamed at him, “You’d jump into a pool of pus to come up with a nickel between your teeth!”—decades before reality television made the exchange of dignity for cash a tinselly badge of honor.
But two qualities—besides his tenacity and his eye for talent—save Geffen from being the full monster. Firstly, his sense of humor. It’s awful that on driving to the hospital to see his dying mother, whom he adored, Geffen had the thought “When your mother dies, you can sell the house—you’ll get 1.3 million.” But the fact that we know this about Geffen means that he told someone about it, which suggests… a touch of self-awareness? An ability to self-deprecate? Secondly, you expect Sammy Glick to have either horrible taste or highly situational taste. But Geffen (though, yes, he would later pony up a lot of money for Broadway’s Cats) fought hard for great offbeat artists who weren’t necessarily the easiest sells, like Joni and the filmmaker Albert Brooks. (“I only sell about 300,000 records. It takes about 600,000 to break even,” Mitchell, who makes a living from songwriting royalties, not record deals or touring, explained in 1997.) Too, he spent the early part of his career devotedly representing one of the very few living (at the time) female singer-songwriters that Joni has acknowledged as an influence, the underappreciated Laura Nyro, who wrote “It’s Gonna Take a Miracle” and “And When I Die” and made the heartbreaking record Eli and the Thirteenth Confession.
“David was always very ambitious for himself,” David Crosby told the New Yorker when Geffen was profiled by the magazine in 1998, “but there was one interesting, unprotected place in him—he really loved Laura Nyro. That was a window into something in him that was not primarily about money.” Geffen believed so strongly in Nyro—a Goth oddball who had hair down to her thighs and sometimes wore Christmas bulbs as earrings—that he even got her label to agree to her request that Eli’s lyrics be printed on the album’s cover in lilac-scented ink.
But the tireless dynamo—one acquaintance called Geffen “the elf on roller skates”—also managed to get a half share of Nyro’s publishing, an unusual, and perhaps unethical, arrangement for a manager or agent.
Which, by 1971, may have netted Geffen $2 million.
* * *
In February and March of 1972, Joni toured thirteen cities. Her opening act was Geffen’s latest “find,” Jackson Browne, a dashing-verging-on-beautiful singer-songwriter loaded down with hummable, fine-grained songs. (Browne will repay the favor of Geffen’s devotion to him early on in his career by introducing Geffen to a group that will make Geffen another boatload of money, the Eagles.) Musician and songwriter Jimmy Webb writes about Jackson and Joni in one of his memoirs, saying that he watched Browne “fall in love with her. I remember him coming to me, very nervous, and saying, ‘So, how should I talk to her?’ And I smiled, moved yet deeply amused at the same time. ‘You just talk to her like you would talk to… a really nice person,’ I said.”
Mitchell had probably first become aware of Browne in November 1971. Come with me now to a car that is rocketing from Los Angeles to Redwood City, en route to Thanksgiving dinner at the home of Neil Young and his girlfriend, actress Carrie Snodgress. In the car are Joni, Graham Nash, David Crosby, and photographer Joel Bernstein.
Nash noticed that Crosby was smiling mischievously.
“So what is it?” Nash asked.
“None of you have heard this,” Crosby said, pulling a cassette out of his pocket. “This is the new Jackson Browne record.” Crosby had provided backup vocals on Browne’s debut album.
“Who’s Jackson Browne?” Mitchell asked.
Crosby and Bernstein chimed in unison, “Only your next boyfriend!”
Jinx.
While touring together in 1972, Joni and Jackson, who was five years her junior, started seeing each other. “L.A.’s two newest lovebirds,” a student reporter will call the duo in the University of Pittsburgh’s daily paper when he sees them later that year at the Mariposa Folk Festival. “They each did their own sets, then ran around taking little Instamatic photos of the other, the audience, and people in general.” As with Mitchell’s, Browne’s doe-eyed beauty seemed to crystallize or heighten his air of childlike wisdom. “He was a real soulmate,” Bonnie Raitt has said of Browne, who would go on to become a tireless activist on behalf of the environment. “There was something so truthful and at the same time so heartbreaking about his songs.” Case in point: his lovely “Fountain of Sorrow” from Late for the Sky, a song, probably inspired by Mitchell, about how a single photograph can open memory’s floodgates.
Joni’s take is less enraptured. “Jackson Browne was never attracted to me,” she’ll say to David Yaffe about the singer-songwriter who’ll have three gold records in the early seventies before reaching even greater success with 1976’s The Pretender and 1977’s Running on Empty. “We got thrown out on the road together and traveled all around. We were companions, because we were playing in Amsterdam and playing from London to New Orleans. But when he spoke about old lovers, he leered. He was a leering narcissist.” (Mitchell, as we’re reminded in a lyric on 1991’s Night Ride Home, has always been sensitive about freighted enthusiasm: “Does your smile’s covert complicity / Debase as it admires?”)
