I Dream of Joni, page 16
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In 2002, shortly before the release of her album Travelogue, Joni met a reporter from W magazine for an interview at the Hotel Bel Air. Dressed in an understated, black Ann Demeulemeester dress and smoking American Spirits, Joni told the writer, “I’m quitting after this, because the business has made itself so repugnant to me.” The record business, she said, was “the most corrupt one of all.” She added, “They’re not looking for talent. They’re looking for a look and a willingness to cooperate.”
That the lyrics Mitchell wrote after her 1980s travails took on a more hectoring tone toward her targets—televangelism, corporate greed, ecological disaster—is nothing compared to the inflammatory comments she made in subsequent interviews. In a 2002 Rolling Stone article, she called the music industry “a cesspool.” In 2013, she told an audience at the Luminato Festival in Toronto that she squelched a film adaptation of Sheila Weller’s Girls Like Us: “I called the producer and I said, ‘If you’re gonna make this movie, it’s gonna be a piece of shit, you know. If you wanna do this, you can show me the dailies, and while it’s going down, I’ll tell you why it’s going to be a piece of shit.’ ” In 2015, when explaining to New York magazine why she had painted and hung in her vestibule a portrait of David Geffen with a banana lodged in his mouth, she said that her former roommate had been using her as a “beard.”
Perhaps most famously, Mitchell took exception to a 2010 interview she gave to a freelance music writer for the Los Angeles Times, Matt Diehl. In the article—a Q&A with both Mitchell and performance artist John Kelly, conducted to promote one of Kelly’s live shows in which he impersonates Mitchell—Mitchell went off on Bob Dylan, as she has done on various occasions over the years, like the time she called him a “perverse little brat.” This time, when Diehl said, “The folk scene you came out of had fun creating personas. You were born Roberta Joan Anderson, and someone named Bobby Zimmerman became Bob Dylan,” Mitchell replied, “Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I.” (According to Robert Shelton’s biography No Direction Home, Dylan, originally from Minnesota, adopted an Oklahoma twang after reading Woody Guthrie’s autobiography, Bound for Glory, in 1960; Dylan has acknowledged that “Blowin’ in the Wind” borrows from the spiritual “No More Auction Block.”)
When, three years after Diehl interviewed Mitchell and Kelly, a subsequent interviewer—this one for Canada’s CBC—brought up Mitchell’s earlier quote about Dylan, Mitchell responded that her comment had been taken out of context, and called the original interviewer, Diehl, an “asshole,” a “dolt,” and “a moron whose IQ is somewhere between his shoe size and his knees.” Then Mitchell clarified for this second interviewer her take on Dylan, which, to many ears, sounded even harsher than her previous one: “I like a lot of Bob’s songs. Musically he’s not very gifted. He’s borrowed his voice from old hillbillies. He’s got a lot of borrowed things. He’s not a great guitar player. He’s invented a character to deliver his songs. Sometimes I wish that I could have that character. Because you can do things with that character. It’s a mask of sorts.”
When I called the first interviewer, Matt Diehl, to ask him how it had made him feel to have Mitchell blast him in a public forum, I thoroughly expected to hear about his singed ego. But he told me, “It’s better to be called an asshole by Joni Mitchell than not to be on her radar at all. You know what I mean? I think Joni Mitchell is a fucking genius, and if my name leaves her lips by any means… I mean, it might even be better to be bitched out by her than to be praised. I don’t go into an interview with someone who’s a visionary with an incredible body of work and expect them to like me. I just want them to be them—and I’d say, Joni Mitchell was very Joni Mitchell at that moment!”
Calling Mitchell an iconoclast, Diehl added, “But I came out of punk rock, and the punk rockers—Johnny Rotten, Patti Smith—those people are fucking i-cono-clasts. They challenge every single thing you say. It’s pure intellectual combat. And thank God.”
The aforementioned aren’t the only entities that have elicited Joni’s invective over the years. She has also mouthed off about Judy Collins (“there’s something la-di-da about her”), CSN (“always out of tune”), Joan Baez (“would have broken my leg if she could”), Madonna (“what’s the difference between her and a hard hooker?”), producer Thomas Dolby (“slimy little bugger”), ex-husband Chuck Mitchell (“my first major exploiter, a complete asshole”), ex-husband Larry Klein (“tyrannical, insecure”… a “puffed-up dwarf”), Jackson Browne (“a mini-talent,” “a phony”), the curriculum of her twelfth-grade math, physics, and chemistry classes (“Everything I was memorizing was fucking wrong”), her fellow performers at the 1990 concert of Pink Floyd’s The Wall on top of a recently demolished Berlin Wall (“Not one single adult in the whole pack”), Time magazine (“unbelievable”), record labels (“criminally insane”), the audiences at charity benefits (“when I go on, they use the time to talk”), Saskatoon (“an extremely bigoted community”), having her work called “confessional” (“makes what I do seem cheap and gimmicky”), “confessional” writers like Saint Augustine, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton (“all three make me sick,” “Plath is morbid and Sexton is a liar”), Shakespeare’s sonnets (“I can smell the commerce”), her generation (“the greediest generation in the history of America”), her father (“a tremendous sense of entitlement and squashing”).
For us fans, these blasts of vitriol are confounding. On the one hand, it’s possible, when Joni’s slams are amusing and well grounded, to admire her wit and candor, and to rally around a woman of a certain age who has no fucks left to give. Joni has always said that her greatest curse is sincerity—a sentiment echoed by the rapper Q-Tip, who rapped on Janet Jackson’s 1997 “Got ’til It’s Gone” that Joni “never lies”—and here is living, palpitating, bloody evidence of same.
It should also be pointed out that Mitchell will occasionally temper her biliousness with self-deprecation: in 1998, in “Come In from the Cold” on Night Ride Home, she’ll take a little dig at her habit of speaking out in self-important tones; in 2010, she’ll tell an interviewer, “I have a tremendous will to live. And a tremendous joie de vivre. Alternating with irritability.” All this helps. A little.
But it’s also possible to view Mitchell’s persecution complex as self-serving and arrogant, a kind of victim porn that is doubly disturbing given that it hails from someone whose songs have accompanied us through the emotional terrain of our lives—and who, in these same songs, has often attacked arrogance and pettiness (“Big Yellow Taxi,” “Hejira,” “The Magdalene Laundries,” “Borderline” et al.). To my mind, the only unforgivable thing that Mitchell has ever done was to write the lyrics to Turbulent Indigo’s “Not to Blame,” a song about domestic abuse: after a celebrity drives his wife to suicide and beats up his girlfriend, the celebrity’s three-year-old son, bizarrely, suggests that he and his father go pick up some girls; we learn that there hadn’t been a single wet eye around the suicided mother’s grave. Though Mitchell has denied it (“It’s not about anyone specific,” she told Time in 1994. “It’s about the phenomenon of the battered woman at this time”), the song seems to me that it could be laying siege to Jackson Browne (understandable), his three-year-old son (deeply inappropriate), and Browne’s suicided wife (unspeakable).
It would make sense if Mitchell’s fiery comments over the years were purely the result of her seeing in print the stark reality of her highly candid interviews; you’d have to possess an iron constitution not to regret some of the stuff she’s dished out. But that’s not what’s usually happening when she takes issue with writers like Matt Diehl or Ratso Sloman or Graham Nash (she has said that everything he wrote about her in his memoir is false)—her point more often seems to be that she’s being misinterpreted or misjudged in some way.
Mitchell’s reputation as a fire-breather has trickled down into the culture. In the 2020 fantasy novel The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin—whose Broken Earth trilogy has sold more than 2 million copies—the book’s shape-shifting antagonist, the Enemy, sometimes takes the form of the Woman in White, an alien force that weaponizes white privilege by possessing the bodies of white women. At one point author Jemisin, who is Black, writes that the Woman in White has long, raggedly straight hair that is “very Seventies chic, which matches the pointed, narrow, sloe-eyed face that she currently wears. She looks like an evil midcareer Joni Mitchell.” (I wrote Jemisin and asked if she cared to elaborate, but she did not respond.)
What are us fans to do with Mitchell’s ire? At the risk of sounding patronizing, maybe the proper response is pity. Maybe we didn’t realize how bad Mitchell’s tough times had been for her. Or maybe we didn’t realize the damage we’d done when we took a little break from Joni during her jazz period or during the Wild Things Run Fast/Dog Eat Dog/Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm period. Remember how, in 2022, when Brandi Carlile was asked what she had been hoping to achieve by bringing a post-aneurysm Joni back to the Newport Folk Festival for the first time since 1969—a highly emotional experience for many of us, only redoubled when we found out that Joni had had to relearn how to play guitar by watching videos of herself on YouTube—Carlile responded, “Joni hasn’t always felt the appreciation that exists amongst humanity for her. I wanted her to feel that.” Carlile’s comment seemed strange—Joni had recently been honored at the Kennedy Center, accepted to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, won the Polar Music Prize, and been named the MusiCares Person of the Year, in addition to being the honoree of various star-studded tribute concerts, winning a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2002 Grammys, and having Blue hit #1 on iTunes five decades after its release.
But a long-lasting commercial and critical drubbing, as Mitchell perceives the reaction to her work post–Court and Spark to have been, is not an easy thing to forget or overcome. Current celebration doesn’t always erase past wounds—sometimes it simply provides distraction.
Which is all to say: maybe we fans didn’t realize the repercussions of our neglect.
Maybe we didn’t realize that we’d abandoned our girl.
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The other night I lay in bed and couldn’t stop thinking about the aforementioned night at the Joni tribute concert at the Hammerstein Ballroom in 2000 when Mitchell, seated in the audience watching colleagues perform her work, ate a banana. I started wondering why the image haunted me. My first thought was, Because it surprises. You’d expect someone who writes spectacularly sensitive lyrics to be sensitive to performers’ feelings, or to other audience members’ level of concentration, or to whatever keeps us from launching publicly into any of that array of slightly unattractive habits—putting gum on the undersides of tables, say, or clipping nails—that we typically reserve for the confines of our home.
My second thought was, Maybe I’m fixating on the incident because it’s so entirely and purely Joni: Mitchell has made a career out of being private in public, and what advertises your grasp of the concept “You do you” quite like a peel-and-nosh in a former opera house packed with your colleagues? Given that the respect that Mitchell elicits from her colleagues has always bordered on terror—Elton John has said that performing for her is more intimidating than performing for the Queen; Brandi Carlile had to be hypnotized the first time she performed Blue in concert; biographer David Yaffe snapped a wineglass into shards while waiting to interview Mitchell for the first time—maybe Mitchell’s banana-eating is the very height of sensitivity: maybe she’s signaling to the performers that, hey, we’re all just normies here, hanging out and scarfing down whatever snack foods we happen to have at hand, so let’s all take a chill pill.
My third thought was, Maybe she just really likes bananas.
At which point I realized that the author of “Both Sides Now” had totally “Both Sides Now”-ed me.
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Early spring 1997. Joni was sitting at an outdoor table at a restaurant in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. She was smoking American Spirit cigarettes (duh).
Joni told her lunch mate that during the first few years after she’d put Kelly up for adoption, she “worried constantly” about Kelly’s health because Joni’s diet during her pregnancy had been “atrocious” and thus Joni wondered if Kelly’s “bones were all right.”
Joni said that the memory of her baby “comes to you at funny times. Like when a friend’s child falls off a bike.”
The REUNION
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St. Paul’s Hospital, Saskatoon. December 1952.
One afternoon while Joan lay in her bed, a young doctor in a wheelchair—he’d gotten polio, too—wheeled himself into her room. Joan told him, “I wanna go home for Christmas.” The doctor said she couldn’t because she couldn’t walk.
“What if I walked?” Joan said.
“You can’t even stand up.”
“What if I stood and walked?”
The doctor looked at the ceiling. He sighed heavily, looked at his knees, and then rolled himself out of the room as if to say, I am not gonna argue with this kid. Would the doctor ever walk again himself? Probably not.
The hospital continued giving Joan her treatments—scalding hot rags were pinned to her and then a doctor or nurse would say “Touch your toes.” But Joan’s hands couldn’t even reach her knees, let alone her toes. The trailer Joan was in had a down ramp that led to an up ramp to a scarier trailer, a trailer filled with the worst cases: the iron-lung patients.
Joan felt like the medical staff didn’t spend enough time with her on her exercises, either because they didn’t have the patience, or because they didn’t believe in the methodology of the cure. So, at night, after lights-out, during the hour when the hospital staff would let Joan keep her Christmas tree lit, Joan would exercise her legs on her own. By day, when the therapists would visit, she tried to let them bend her more than she had done previously.
When she started to notice improvement, she told the medical staff “I want to try to walk.”
They wheeled Joan out into the hallway. Several patients in wheelchairs lined the hall, to cheer Joan on.
Joan got out of the chair, put her hands on the double chrome bars that ran along the corridor, and painstakingly pulled herself to the corridor’s end. Then she turned herself around, and pulled herself back to her starting point.
“Now can I go home?”
She was home by Christmas.
* * *
In July 2021, Brandi Carlile, whom Joni had started calling her “ambassador,” told Jay Sweet, the head of the Newport Folk Festival, “One year from now, I bet you we can get Joni Mitchell to this stage.”
It seemed wholly unlikely to Sweet. In the two decades prior, Mitchell had suffered two medical crises. By 2010, she was at the height of her suffering from Morgellons, the self-diagnosed, medically unsubstantiated skin condition in which people get sores that they think are the product of bacterial infection or parasites. Mitchell has claimed that “fibers in a variety of colors protrude out of my skin like mushrooms after a rainstorm.” Which sounds altogether bizarre—though, if anyone is growing colorful, mushroomlike fibers on their skin, it’s Joni Mitchell. But, wow, it’s no fun being a human Chia Pet: “I couldn’t even wear clothing. I had to have alkalized soft cotton, and even then it felt like barbed wire. I couldn’t leave my house for several years. Sometimes it got so I’d have to crawl across the floor. My legs would cramp up, just like the polio spasms. It hit all of the places where I had polio. When it’s severe, I can’t walk. I had one attack where I had to crawl to the bathroom. And I had to turn around and back down the stairs. I started laughing.… I’m so glad I don’t have a man to be repulsed by this. I thought I must look pretty funny.”
Even more dramatically, in 2015 Mitchell had been found lying on her kitchen floor, where she’d been for three days after having had an aneurysm and incurring significant brain trauma. (Aneurysms occur when the wall of a blood vessel, bulging and weakened, balloons the vessel to more than 50 percent its normal diameter. Their cause is high blood pressure. Does cigarette smoking cause a temporary rise in blood pressure? It does.) She was rushed to the hospital for emergency brain surgery—though Mitchell doesn’t believe in Western medicine, her care at the time was determined by the state of California because she was not conscious—prior to being put in an intensive care unit. Joni fans worldwide were on tenterhooks that night—New York Times music critic Lindsay Zoladz was put on obituary watch; NPR prepared its Mitchell obit; People magazine accidentally ran an obit on its website.
Once moved back to her house in Bel Air, Mitchell eventually started talking. She spoke almost daily with Graham Nash, telling him at one point that she’d forgotten that she smoked; her ex Larry Klein came by and showed her their wedding pictures, and Joni was able to identify nearly everyone. Childhood friend Sharolyn Dickson brought photos of Joni’s childhood home in Saskatoon. Occasionally, there were glitches: Nathan Joseph, the former Soho flatmate with the singing parrot, visited with his wife; while sitting at the kitchen table, Joni looked at the assembled, including Joseph, and asked, “What ever happened to Nathan?”
But on the whole, Joni’s short-term memory was patchier than her long-term memory, as is often the case with people who suffer brain trauma. She worked assiduously with physical therapists. Her doctors had told her that if she could walk, she could do whatever she wanted: shades of the polio ward.
Post-aneurysm, Mitchell had hosted a series of informal Joni Jams in her living room, but she had not returned to performing.
“I gotta be honest with you,” Jay Sweet told Carlile. “You are the manifester of miracles, but you may have overshot on this one.”
