Reckless Daughter

by David Yaffe

  She came of age in the postwar baby boom, but she was an only child. Her mother’s unhappiness with marriage and motherhood is threaded through “The Tea Leaf Prophecy”: “She says ‘I’m leavin’ here’ but she don’t go.” There is also, in the song, Myrtle’s advice to her only daughter:

  “Hiroshima cannot be pardoned!

  Don’t have kids when you get grown.”

  It was a line from real life that Joni found baffling. “She used to say it to me all the time: ‘Don’t have kids when you get grown.’ I was an only child and I found it insulting. She meant that I was a pain in the ass. I was in conflict with her. She was a bigot, she was very cautious and conservative and wouldn’t take any chances, no displays of emotionality or anything.”

  Joni sized up her parents and found them wanting. As a toddler, she had a recurring dream, more like a nightmare, of being in the car with her parents and her father losing control of the car. “I would wake up with the most horrible emotion,” she told me. “And I would have never been able to figure that dream out, and I can usually interpret my own dreams easily, because I’m in touch with my own symbolism. This was a real incident that stored like film. I thought, ‘Okay.’ My dream was a stored photograph of what preceded his irrationality. The road ahead was flooded after we came on a bright, sunny day. The slough was overflowed, and you could see there was water lying across the road. We were in danger. And as an infant, I could see: What is he acting like that for? Turn the fuckin’ car around. And I sucked my thumb and gave myself an overbite. My parents—their judgment was so sucky all the time. These people are not thinking and I’m small and in their care. Help! So I had to be my own person very young.”

  Many years later, she and her friend Tony Simon were with her father, talking about dreams; her father usually had an uncanny ability to interpret them. Joni, who was still unable to understand the dream, brought it up. Her father hung his head in shame.

  “Well, that really happened,” he said. “I behaved irrationally.”

  For Joni, it was a powerful affirmation of her childhood suspicion that she was being raised by adults who were not up to the task. She would veer back and forth between feeling contempt for them and the deep desire to protect them. “So, I was two and a half years old and I discovered that my parents were nuts—that they had really bad judgment. But that they were acting like they were in danger. After that incident, I perceived him as vulnerable, and I was kind of his champion. Because in school, people would say, ‘If you talk about your dad one more time, I’m going to punch you.’”

  She had similar memories of her mother’s own shortcomings. Sharon Bell (who is now Sharon Veer) remembered, “Joni and I were hanging out at her house, and Myrt went to get groceries. She was buying liver for supper because Joni liked liver, which I could never understand at that age. Myrt went down to the basement, she tripped, she fell, and this liver splattered out and Myrt fell on the floor. We were all standing there looking down the stairs at her. [Our friend] Marilyn said, ‘Is she dead?’ And Joni said, ‘I don’t know, but I don’t think we’re having liver for supper.’ For whatever reason, Joni thought that was just hilarious, and I bet she told that same story every time I saw her.”

  The near accident and Joni’s traumatic recurring nightmares about it confirmed her feeling that her childhood was an ongoing car crash. She was alone in a house with her simple and conservative parents, in a countryside whose beauty she embraced and whose provincialism she abhorred. Nobody else could tell Joni how it felt when her parents’ slights and shortcomings made impacts. No one knew how many times she felt the vehicle of family life flip and turn and crash.

  Joni felt her parents lacked vision—figuratively and literally. As soon as Joni could identify her colors, she already had an advantage over Bill and Myrtle Anderson. “My parents are both color-blind and I’m color acute,” Joni recalled. “I don’t know how they got through traffic. My father wanted to fly and they grounded him, which broke his heart. But he wouldn’t be able to see the color of the landing lights. They never tried to paint or anything. You could paint color-blind, but you’d be making green skies and blue water, which is okay. They’d think you were being very modern, daring.”

  Joni’s mother was a housewife, and her father was the merchandising coordinator for Shelly Bros., owners of the OK Economy grocery chain. They led a modest life and never wanted to attract too much attention. And then they had Joni. In the words of Philip Roth: There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.

  “I knew her parents very well,” said Tony Simon, her friend from Nutana Collegiate High School and the Y dances in Saskatoon. “They were friends with my parents. They were not friends with a lot of people. My parents were very social. The Andersons weren’t. They were very nice. They didn’t energetically mix with a lot of people, but they were always very receptive to anybody that Joni brought over. They paid attention. Her father especially, if you met him at any age from sixty-five up, you’d think, what a laid-back nice guy. But what you’d be missing was that he was an intensely competitive guy. Not many people have shot their age in golf. He has. He was a championship tennis player, and I think some of Joni’s competitiveness came from that. He was quietly competitive. Saskatchewan during the war and right after was not a very competitive place. Being a grocery store owner in those days was a pretty prestigious job. They didn’t have [a lot of] money, but in those days, people were careful with resources. Living was pretty goddamn good for Joni compared to what’s going on today. Did she have to scrape along? Not really.”

  Growing up in the years after World War II made an impression on Joni. They made her a rebel, with a strain of Rosie the Riveter in her DNA. At the same time, she was a young woman of the 1950s; she came of age in the Mad Men era when happiness seemed just a purchase away. “There were only two stores in town,” Joni explained. “My dad ran the grocery store and Marilyn McGee’s dad ran the general store. She and I called the Simpsons-Sears catalogue ‘The Book of Dreams.’ It was so glamorous when I was a child . . . We’d be down on our bellies looking at every page, and she and I would . . . pick out our favorite matron’s girdle and our favorite saw and our favorite hammer. ‘I like that one best.’ Every page, ‘That’s my favorite.’ So in that way you learned to shop before you have money, you learn the addiction of the process of selection.” The love of shopping stayed with Joni. So much so that even today, she says, “You could take me anywhere on any budget level and I’ll go into ‘That’s a good thing for that much money. That’s a beautiful thing.’”

  She always loved music. “The Hit Parade was one hour a day—four o’clock to five o’clock,” she recalled. “On the weekends they’d do the Top Twenty. But the rest of the radio was Mantovani, country and western, a lot of radio journalism. Mostly country and western, which I wasn’t crazy about. To me it was simplistic. Even as a child I liked more complex melody. In my teens I loved to dance. That was my thing. I instigated a Wednesday night dance ’cause I could hardly make it to the weekends. For dancing, I loved Chuck Berry. Ray Charles. ‘What’d I Say.’ I liked Elvis Presley. I liked the Everly Brothers.”

  She called herself a “good-time Charlie” and her school friends still confirm it. The laughter at the end of “Big Yellow Taxi” was as familiar to them as a telephone call from an old friend. “I was anti-intellectual to the nth,” she explained. “Basically, I liked to dance and paint and that was about it. As far as serious discussions went, at that time most of them were overtly pseudo-intellectual and boring. Like, to see teenagers sitting around solving the problems of the world, I thought, ‘All things considered, I’d rather be dancing.’”

  She was anti-intellectual, in part, because she had little faith or interest in rote learning. As a little girl she attended Parish Hall, which was associated with the Anglican Church. Canadian culture was deeply shaped by the English influence, and in the 1940s and ’50s when Joni was growing up, nearly half of all the immigrants were British. Joni re
membered, “Because of the Baby Boom population, I was there. It was grade three. We were marked and given grades. And this old lady that was brought out of retirement to teach this class was cheerful and well-meaning, but old-fashioned in her teaching methods. She examined us and broke down all the rows. She put the A students in one row and called them Bluebirds. She took the B students in a row and called them Robins. All the C students in a row and called them Wrens. Then the flunkies were lined up and she called them Crows. I looked at the A students with their hands clasped on the desks, looking like they’d won something important, and there wasn’t a person in that line that I thought was smart. They were all looking so proud, and I remembered looking at them and thinking, ‘All you did was she said something and you said it back.’ So I broke with the school system at that moment and I had this thought, ‘I’m not even gonna try from here on, until they ask a question that nobody knows the answer to.’”

  This push and pull between not giving in to what she felt strongly were inferior metrics of success and the desire for other people to know and acknowledge her gifts would play out throughout Joni’s career. She would later say, “I don’t know how to sell out. If I tried to sell out I don’t think I could. By that I mean, to make an attempt to make a commercial record. I just make them and I think, ‘If I was a kid I would like this song’ . . . You have to have a certain grab-ability initially and then something that wears well . . . for years to come. That’s what anything fine is. It’s recognized in painting [but] I’m just working in a toss-away industry. I’m a fine artist working in a commercial arena, so that’s my cross to bear.”

  Just how she would bear the cross of being different was something that Joni wrestled with from her earliest days. She took solace in what she could. For example, when she began to explore astrology, she found what she considered a good reason for her interest in difficult questions. “I got into the zodiac and found out I’m born on Marie Curie’s birthday [November 7], the day of the discoverer, the week of depth. So it’s the deepest week in the year and I have an ability to discover. I have a scientific ability, really not just an artistic ability. The stars give me a scientific ability, too.”

  Just as she wasn’t going to parrot back answers to a teacher, she had no interest in taking the Bible for gospel. “I broke with the church because I asked questions they found embarrassing,” she told me. Then she proceeded to tell about the day she raised hell in her Sunday school class with all of her questioning.

  “Adam and Eve were the first man and woman, right?”

  “Right,” said the teacher.

  “They had two sons, right?”

  “Right, Cain and Abel.”

  “And Cain killed Abel and then Cain got married. Who did he marry? Eve?”

  The teacher “just went sour in the face from that,” Joni recalled. “I only knew that there was only one woman. And then he got married. He had to marry the only woman. That shorted out my Sunday school teacher, so I didn’t go back there. She made me feel so shabby that I just refused to go back.”

  She had so much courage and yet there’s that telltale Joni vulnerability, too—she’d called the teacher out, but what she remembered was that in return the teacher made her feel shabby. It was a pattern that would be repeated with friends and lovers, music industry execs and a fickle fan base. Joni could roar, but many people had no idea how easily she could be wounded, how she would see and feel daggers that other people didn’t even know they had thrown.

  She had determined that she had the soul of a scientist and the heart of an artist; she was always trying to wrap her mind around what could be called the truth. She remembers telling her mother, “I like stories, but there’s pages ripped out of them.” Meaning, the stories seem somehow incomplete. Decades later, Joni stood by her younger self and that girl’s view of the world. “That was a really good call,” Joni told me. “Because there were literally pages ripped out of the Bible. At that point, you couldn’t ridicule me or dunce cap me or anything to make me try. I drew clothes. I was going to be a fashion designer. I drew cartoons, I wrote funny things. I lived in my own world.”

  Joni wasn’t the only girl growing up in the provinces of Canada rejecting the world around her and creating her own. When Margaret Atwood paid tribute to Joni Mitchell at the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2007, she spoke about their parallel childhoods. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to sing,” Atwood quipped. Then she went on to say, “Joni Mitchell and I have some things in common. Though I’m older and she’s blonder. For instance, we were both members of the Canadian Lunatic Generation. That was in the early sixties back when Canada was a blank spot on the map of global culture. If you said, ‘Say, I’m a novelist.’ Or you said, ‘Hi, I’m Joni Mitchell and I’m going to be a world-famous singer-songwriter!’ Other people said, ‘You’re a lunatic.’” Atwood added that you should “multiply that by ten for being from the prairies. But Joni did it anyway. And aren’t we all glad that she did?”

  Joni laughed hard at the lunatic joke, but you could also see in the way that she held Atwood in a loving, knowing gaze that she ached for her younger, isolated self. It would have made a world of difference if she had known that she wasn’t really a lunatic when she picked up her first ukulele and wouldn’t let it go although her friends begged her to stop. It would have been nice to know that she wasn’t merely loony, but rather a high-flying loon, part of a far-flung flock that included brave, imaginative women like Margaret Atwood.

  Joni did not know Margaret Atwood, but she found a kindred spirit in a girl named Sharon Bell, whom she met when her family moved to Maidstone, in 1946. The girls lived close to each other up until the age of five, then Joni’s family moved again, to North Battleford. But Sharon came to North Battleford every year for musical competitions that lasted for ten whole days. Joni remembered, “You could go to the church and listen to choirs compete or you could go to school. I went to the church.” She didn’t consider herself a musician in those days. She hadn’t yet picked up an instrument. Art was the gift she’d identified in herself. “I could draw the best doghouse,” she said. “We had to use perspective. Everyone else’s was too skinny or cockeyed. They had their perspective warped. Mine was a good, solid little doghouse with a U-shaped door. It showed a cognizance of perspective, and a steady hand. So that moment, I did something well. I did it the best. So I said, ‘I’m an artist.’” But her teachers (for the most part) solidly refused to give Joni her due. One sixth-grade teacher carped on her report card, “Joan should pay attention to other subjects than art.”

  Joni attended the musical competitions—but just as an audience member and as a supportive friend. But as was her style, she was interested in how excellence was construed in the competition. She had three friends who competed regularly. “Sharon was one, and Peter Armstrong—he went into an Italian opera company. And Frankie McKitrick—he was a precocious piano player. Frankie and Peter were my best friends in North Battleford. Sharon would come to town, and I’d go and watch them in competition and I’d see what the adjudicator was going to say—what was bad about it and what was good about it. I’d sit out there, listen closely, and the game was to see if I could figure out what the adjudicator was going to say. And a lot of the time we were on the same page, but a lot of the time she didn’t pick up on things that I would pick up on, that I thought were flaws in the performance. So it was a kind of vicarious musical education.”

  Frankie, in particular, was a great influence on Joni’s early consumption of music, and “He and I went to some pretty far-out movies together. My mother was horrified that the principal, his father, let us play hooky to go and see them.” Among them was a movie called The Story of Three Loves, starring Kirk Douglas and James Mason, and its theme song was a “gorgeous nocturnal melody,” which so moved Joni, she told me, that it made her “want to be a musician.” It was Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.” “The ballet in it looks dumb to me now, but I loved it as a chi
ld. It’s so flitty.

  “And that piece of music thrilled me to no end. It was the most beautiful piece of music that I ever heard. I had to hear the record of it. I asked my parents to buy it for me, but it wasn’t in the budget. It would be seventy-five cents or something. So I would go down to Grubman’s department store, take it out of its brown sleeve, and go in the playback and play it maybe two or three times a week and just swoon.”

  At the age of eleven, Joni moved to Saskatoon, and there was more to be joyful about when she got to study with Arthur Kratzmann, who was developing quite a reputation at the Queen Elizabeth School. “He was a hero [to me] as a child, and . . . he sparked a lot of things in me. He read us Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. He entered the room and said, ‘This curriculum is a lot of crap. I’m gonna teach you what I know. I don’t know much. I know my name. And I’m Australian, so we’ll concentrate on Australia for part of the course and then you’ll all pass with flying colors, but until then, I’m going to teach you about Australia.’ He was kind of a creative character, and he swore, which I loved.”

  Joni would go on to dedicate Song to a Seagull, her first album, to him: “To Mr. Kratzman [sic], who taught me to love words.” Joni walked into Arthur Kratzmann’s class full of confidence, but then would receive Cs on her creative writing assignments. She remembered in particular one poem that she wrote and Kratzmann’s reaction: “I wrote this ambitious epic poem for his class, and it went, ‘Softly now the colors of the day fade and are replaced by silver grey as God prepares his world for night and high upon a silver-shadowed hill, a stallion white as newly fallen snow stands deathly still, an equine statue bathed in silver light . . .’ I got this thing back, and it was circled all over with red. He had written, ‘Cliché, cliché, cliché . . .’ and gave me a B. I read the poem of the kid next to me who got an A+, and it was terrible, so I stayed after school and said, ‘Excuse me, but how do you give an A+ to that when you give me a B?’ He said, ‘Because that’s as good as he’s ever going to write. You can write much better than this. You tell me more interesting things when you tell me what you did over the weekend.’”