I Dream of Joni, page 20
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2022. On a flight from Vancouver to Calgary, I told my seatmate—a smiley Canadian woman in her early thirties—that I was writing a book about Joni Mitchell. The woman looked slightly confused and said, “I know my mom loves her, but… is she the one who does ‘You’re So Vain’?” No, I said, that’s Carly Simon. “Oh! Oh! Wait, I know who she is,” the woman said. “ ‘Paving Paradise’!” Close enough.
While, as previously mentioned, people occasionally confuse Mitchell with Judy Collins, and while I myself have alluded to her similarities with Georgia O’Keeffe, Mae West, Neil Young, Prince, and Shelly from Northern Exposure, there is one luminary who is an even more apt point of comparison: beloved singer-songwriter Carole King. King has denied the alikeness: “We do the same thing but we do it in such different ways,” said the most successful American female songwriter of the latter half of the century in a gracious video testimonial she made when Mitchell won the Gershwin Prize in 2023. “She goes to the place of total creativity” whereas “I was trained to write on assignment. I have been struck by the muse, I have worked at the direction of the muse. But that’s Joni’s native habitat.”
Nevertheless, consider: both have blue eyes, came from humble beginnings, gave birth early (Carole: eighteen, Joni: twenty-one), changed their names, initially wrote songs that were hits for singers other than themselves, were skittish about performing live, lived in Laurel Canyon, performed with James Taylor and a lot of the same musicians, are white but buoy their music with traditionally Black music (Carole: R&B, Joni: jazz), recorded their biggest individual records at the same time and at the same studio with the same piano, included on their breakout albums—albums that trafficked heavily in romance and the use of the first person—third-person songs about outlaws who let their freak flags fly (Carole: killer Smackwater Jack, Joni: the prostitute in “Raised on Robbery”), freaked out at fame, retreated into the wilds (Carole: Idaho, Joni: B.C.), put their cats on their album covers, played Carnegie Hall, received a lot of the same honors, have implanted our brains with artisanal word pronunciations (Carole: the sky comes “tum-BOOL-ing” down, Joni: children are let out of “skoo-ells”), are associated with entities that are either hanging above our heads (Carole: “Up on the Roof,” Joni: clouds) or are furry and adorable (Carole: the theme song to The Care Bears Movie, Joni: various boyfriends), appeared in ads for The Gap, performed with their daughter, became increasingly vocal about environmental issues, and continued recording, despite having announced their retirement, after turning seventy-five.
But perhaps most auspiciously, King wrote the song “Jazzman,” and Mitchell [lower your voice two octaves here]… is a jazzlady.
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May 7, 1996. Stockholm, Sweden. Joni has just been awarded the Polar Music Prize, an annual award referred to by Swedes as “the Nobel Prize of music,” usually given simultaneously to one classical musician and one popular musician for their contribution to the field. Joni was the first woman ever to win the prize; her co-recipient was Pierre Boulez, one of the dominant forces of postwar classical music, whose accomplishments range from leading the New York Philharmonic to conducting Wagner’s Ring Cycle at Bayreuth to collaborating with rock weirdo Frank Zappa.
At the press conference for the prize, an interviewer asked Mitchell, who was seated next to Boulez, if she had any kind of relationship with the maestro. “No, we are sitting beside one another, that’s our relationship!” Mitchell said.
“But surely you’d heard of Maestro Boulez when the prize was announced,” the interviewer followed up. At which point Mitchell, who has never gone in for computers or cellphones, apologized for “living in isolation” and said no.
Joni Joni Joni, those of us who lead lives guided by manners and deference to elders want to scream when we witness such a lapse of decorum, have ya heard about this crazy new thing called the Google? (Similarly, in 1998 when celebrated musician and maverick Ani DiFranco interviewed Mitchell for the Los Angeles Times, we learned that Mitchell had neither listened to any of DiFranco’s music before the interview nor learned how to pronounce DiFranco’s name.)
The unflappability in the face of social norms, the relentless candor, the utter dedication to her craft at the expense of certain interpersonal niceties: for many of us, Joni represents what it means to be an artist, if not an Artist. Her career is full of examples of Joni prioritizing art over commerce. Her management begged her not to make the full departure into jazz that they knew Mingus would be, but she did it anyway (and, even more iconoclastically, made it a jazz record with no solos on it). There are many examples of Joni opting not to play her hits at concerts, focusing instead on new material that she feels strongly about (in 1998 the Toronto Globe and Mail carped about the “sheer perversity” of just such a set). She didn’t put fan favorites “The Circle Game” or “Both Sides Now” or “Urge for Going” on her first album. In 2023 when Rolling Stone reviewed her third volume of archival material, the magazine gave the story the headline “Joni Mitchell Did Whatever the Hell She Wanted. A New Box of Unheard Music Proves It.”
Her dedication to her craft is a large part of the equation here. She has said that she wrote some two hundred verses to her song “Taming the Tiger,” keeping only four. Jimmy Webb, whose songwriting credits include classics like “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “MacArthur Park,” and “Wichita Lineman,” told me that, while sitting with Joni in his living room in London once, he got a glance of Court and Spark’s lyrics-in-the-making. “She would write out different versions of a single verse four or five times,” he said. “Look, let’s be honest about songwriters,” Webb continued, “if they get a couple of verses and a chorus strung together, they’ll usually run off to a recording studio and cut it.” But not Joni: “Every strike of the chisel is premeditated.”
Roger McGuinn told me that, during Rolling Thunder, “Joni came back to the dressing room one night and said, ‘Why do I get so scared out there, McGuinn?’ I said, ‘Well, you’re doing brand-new material and the audience doesn’t recognize it.’ And she said, ‘But I have to!’ ” (On YouTube there’s an excerpt from Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder documentary, with more than 3 million views, wherein we see McGuinn and Mitchell and Bob Dylan playing “Coyote” at singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot’s house. McGuinn introduces the song by admiringly saying “Joni wrote this song about this tour, and on this tour, and for this tour.”)
Mitchell’s commitment to art extends to defending art that is not of her own making, too. In 1980, James Taylor, JD Souther, and Waddy Wachtel wrote a song, “Her Town Too,” inspired by the divorce between Taylor’s manager Peter Asher, formerly of the pop duo Peter and Gordon, and his wife, Betsy. But Betsy Asher thought the song—despite the fact that its only specific detail was that the wife would get the house and the garden in the settlement while the husband would get the boys in the band—was an insult and that everyone would know it was about her and Peter. So Taylor and Wachtel were summoned to the Ashers’ house to meet with Betsy, who’d invited her friend Joni for moral support. Asher pleaded her case, whereupon an exasperated Wachtel turned to Joni and said, “Joni, why don’t you tell her everything’s fiction no matter whose fuckin’ name is in it, or no matter who wrote what or who inspired what! It’s all a bunch of bullshit, and it’s all fiction!” Whereupon Joni said, “Well, he’s right. He’s basically right, Betsy. Nothing’s really literal around here, you know, it’s just art.” (Released in March 1981, the song “Her Town Too”—a duet between Taylor and Souther—stayed in the Top 40 for ten weeks. Most listeners assumed it was about Taylor’s marital troubles with Carly Simon.)
While the net yield of Mitchell’s commitment to artistic ideals or bullheadedness was several albums that her listeners didn’t necessarily want to listen to, Joni has never given us the impression that she makes decisions based on wanting to get more airplay or sating her fan base or appeasing her label. You can dislike or be unmoved by her music or her tart comments or even her persona, but it would be almost impossible to accurately call her inauthentic; when Mitchell was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Academy of Songwriters in 1996, she said, “I actually feel humbled, which, considering how arrogant I am, is very unusual.”
Her coolness in the face of honors and awards can very occasionally seem like bad manners, but more often it further underlines her commitment to her artistic ideals. She didn’t go to Cleveland to collect her trophy from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1997: she was miffed that it took four years for her to be admitted once she became eligible, and it was going to cost her $20,000 to take her family to see her unpaid performance. But a year after the ceremony, Graham Nash presented Joni with the remnants of her trophy, which had been smashed by an airline’s baggage check: in the middle of Joni’s Painting with Words and Music concert, Nash handed over the broken trophy, which he’d put in a green plastic bag.
“I’m sorry I didn’t wrap this a little more genteelly,” he said.
Joni looked at the offering and said, “It’s perfect in a garbage bag.”
* * *
What’s particularly sweet and unexpected about Mitchell’s artistic idealism is that the world has rewarded her for it—which we see best, ironically, when we compare her music with her painting. Although Mitchell often describes herself as a painter derailed by circumstances, the bulk of her artwork—or, at least, the artwork that she has shared with the world—tends to be, with the exception of her 1980s abstracts, both traditional and figurative. “I don’t paint for galleries, I don’t paint for museums. I paint to go with my couch,” she once told a Los Angeles radio interviewer; in 2013 she’ll tell the CBC, “Paintings are square things to hang on the wall to decorate your house.” In 1999 she confessed to KCSN-FM that she has even painted over other people’s artwork given to her, to make it jibe with her decor.
Her music, by contrast, is the product of a much less quotidian impulse, and is less like a poofy chair warmed by the afternoon sun than it is a boat ride with unforgettable scenery but no life preservers. Yet of the two mediums, it’s Mitchell’s music for which she is lionized—a rare instance of the world exalting the progressive and the unusual rather than the comfortable and the familiar.
Score a win for Art.
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One day in 1998, Joni and Kilauren and Kilauren’s son, Marlin, accompanied by Joni’s friend Paul Starr, a makeup artist, went to the Hollywood Athletic Club so Mitchell could play pool. To amuse young Marlin while Grandma banked some shots, Starr told the five-year-old, “Pretend like you’re excited.” Marlin duly took on a look of pop-eyed joy. “Now pretend like Joni’s going away,” Starr said, whereupon Marlin paused before arranging his face.
“That was hard,” Marlin responded. “I couldn’t imagine why Joni would be going away.”
If only Joni and Kilauren’s relationship were so sweet. Though the mother and daughter’s reunion was full of familial grace notes, their subsequent interactions were something less than a cakewalk. The initial meeting’s burst of marathon talking sessions and silly dancing gradually subsided. An initial period of practicality post-reunion saw Kilauren deciding to keep living in Toronto, Joni calling Kilauren’s parents to assure them that she wasn’t trying to take their daughter away, and Joni and Kilauren having dinner with Kilauren’s birth father, Brad McMath. When biographer David Yaffe met Kilauren and saw that she had had “Little Green” tattooed on her arm, Kilauren told him, “Don’t tell my mother”; when Yaffe later told Mitchell about it, Mitchell—who probably numbers among the mothers in the world least likely to take exception to a tattoo—responded, “She doesn’t know me.”
Joni, spending increasing amounts of time with her grandchildren—Kilauren gave birth to a daughter, Daisy, in June 1999—found herself glued once more to her television, which she enjoyed (though she worried a little about it: “I thought, ‘Uh-oh, is this the rest of my life? Smoking in front of Ted Turner?’ ”). Her friends noticed a new lightness to her demeanor; Herbie Hancock said that his collaborator looked “so overjoyed, she was like a little child. Joni’s face had changed.” Mitchell’s friend drummer Brian Blade told me, “Man, it was such a deep time! Any restoration in life—you’re thankful to see it, to witness it.”
Joni and Kilauren liked swimming in Joni’s pool; they watched two movies about people tracking down their birth parents—Secrets and Lies and Flirting with Disaster. “My relationship with my daughter is coming along beautifully,” Mitchell told the BBC in 1999, “and my relationship with my mother is improving probably because of it, so maybe that hole was at the root of it.”
Soon, however, the stress marks revealed themselves. “There were easier reunions for other people,” Mitchell will say. “This was not easy. She had a lot of things to work out. You know, she had a lot of issues, and a lot of blame, and couldn’t understand my circumstance, and didn’t want to in the beginning.” A confidante of Joni’s told Girls Like Us author Sheila Weller that Kilauren, like her birth mother, is “brutal to argue with.”
Kilauren’s relationship with Ted Barrington, who has ADD and is prone to depression, did not make her life easier. The birth of their daughter led to a nasty custody dispute. Barrington, in a questionnaire he filled out as part of a court-ordered investigation, alleged that, after Daisy’s birth, “Frequent emotional outbursts and her alienating manner were now the norm” for Gibb. When Gibb and her two children headed to Joni’s for Christmas that year, Barrington was not invited.
During that visit, on January 3, 2000, Joni and Kilauren’s troubles came to a head. While they were busily getting ready to go to a party at Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones’s house, Kilauren had plunked Marlin down in front of the TV to watch the movie The Green Mile, which includes an agonizing torture scene in which we see a man in an electric chair burn to a smoky death. Joni thought this wasn’t appropriate fare for her young grandson; Kilauren vehemently disagreed.
“Don’t talk back to me—I’m your mother!” Joni said.
“What do you know about being a mother? You gave me away!” Kilauren—whose name, when typed into a computer or phone, autocorrects to the Hawaiian volcano Kīlauea—shot back.
At which point Mitchell slapped her daughter’s face.
Kilauren called the cops, but, on their arrival, didn’t press charges, though she wanted the alleged assault reported. She took Marlin to a friend of Joni’s to spend the night.
In his court-ordered questionnaire, Barrington alleged, “The months following the Christmas trip, as I had suspected, Kilauren took no responsibility for this horrendous incident and she was increasingly hostile towards her biological mother, the children and me.” He further alleged that she began to drink heavily. Gibb, who will apply for sole custody in September 2000, will, according to the National Post, claim that Barrington is a mentally unstable and alcoholic porn addict who abused his own daughter, and who wants custody to be “connected financially” to Mitchell. (The Children’s Aid Society of Toronto concluded that “there is no evidence to suggest any immediate child protection concerns.” Barrington, who has copped to depression and ADD but denied all other claims, won limited supervised access to Daisy.)
* * *
The set of tensions swirling around Joni and Kilauren are hard for us outsiders to fully fathom. It would be more surprising if Joni and Kilauren’s relationship weren’t at least a little rocky. Biographer Sheila Weller thinks that the two women’s differing levels of engagement with life played a big part here, too; she told me, “Kilauren was frustrating to Joni because Joni is such a doer and Kilauren is not.”
Joni has not been afraid in the past to extend her competitiveness to situations involving her family. In her essay “Fear of a Female Genius,” music critic Lindsay Zoladz writes, “Joni Mitchell retaining Chuck’s last name for decades after their divorce has always struck me as a defiant, deliciously cruel act of revenge.” When Mitchell once asked if her teenaged granddaughter, Daisy, would play something for her on the ukulele, Daisy said she couldn’t because she was only in her second year of playing. “Second year?” Mitchell said later when recounting the incident. “I had it mastered in six months.”
Mitchell has always had high standards and has not been afraid to express them: when she and her friend Daniel Levitin, the neuroscientist and musician, were in the habit of getting together to play their own songs to each other, Mitchell told Levitin at one point, “You’ve gotta quit at some point because I’ve got a higher standard and your songs are never gonna be up to my standard. But at some point they’re gonna be good enough for other people to hear.” In a truth teller’s backyard lie the corpses of her allies.
Regarding Mitchell’s relationship with Gibb, Joni’s longtime friend Tony Simon told me, “I said to Joan, ‘You question your own mother and father, who were totally devoted to you, and now you talk about what a loaded situation it is to meet up with your own kid. You have to look at that not in terms of who she is but who you are: you’re a fucking perfectionist! How many people find out in their twenties or thirties that their mother is world famous? I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.’ ”
In the wake of her reunion with her birth mother, Gibb had endured a two-month-long separation from her adoptive parents, and a strained relationship with her brother, David. Meanwhile, Gibb’s friends assumed that Gibb would be picking up bar tabs now that she was a celebrity’s daughter (when in fact Gibb was doing odd jobs like refinishing boats and interior decorating). At one point Gibb found herself in an emergency ward, where she was diagnosed as being heavily stressed. When Mitchell had her aneurysm in 2015, Gibb was not listed as her next of kin; in 2023, when Mitchell made her triumphant appearance at The Gorge, Gibb was not in attendance.
