Reckless Daughter

by David Yaffe

  The decision to buy a ukulele was, not surprisingly, the product of a battle with Myrtle. “When I wanted a guitar, my mother said, ‘Oh, no, no. You’ll buy it and you’ll just quit. You’re a quitter,’” Joni recalled. “I couldn’t afford to buy it on my own. So I saved up thirty-six dollars, and on the day when my wisdom teeth were pulled, with bloody sutures in my mouth, I went and plunked down the thirty-six dollars, bought this ukulele, and just hunkered over it everywhere to the point where my friends said to me, ‘Anderson, if you don’t put that goddamn thing down, I’m gonna break it in half.’”

  Yet she didn’t put the ukulele down; she didn’t quit. According to Simon, “As soon as she got that ukulele, something went off inside her and she could not put that thing down. I distinctly remember standing in line to go into a movie and she wouldn’t even talk. She was just playing this damn thing. She went through a lot of hard work to master the ukulele, and it set her off with some momentum that never stopped.”

  The tiny instrument filled a big gap in Joni’s aesthetic education. There weren’t many record albums in the Anderson household, and it wasn’t until high school, when she began to pick up extra money modeling at the local department store, that she could have her own Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross to feed her muse. Bill Anderson was an amateur trumpet player who also gave lessons; he was a Harry James man. “My father had Flight of the Bumblebee by Leroy Anderson, ‘Ciribiribin’ and ‘Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White’ by Harry James. Those were his three records. My mother had ‘Clair de Lune,’ Moonlight Sonata, and they were all nocturnes. Those were all the records in our house. I had the Alice in Wonderland soundtrack and Tubby the Tuba. Later I had Jimmy Boyd, ‘God Bless the Postman,’ in his country child voice.”

  The music that she shared with her parents makes its way into “The Tea Leaf Prophecy.” You can hear the hurt in it, when Joni sings about the three of them—her father, her mother, and herself—“laughing ’round the radio.” While all the while, she knows that her mother is longing to leave Saskatoon and maybe she thinks that means her mother is also longing to leave her.

  There is reason to believe, however, that the mother-daughter relationship also included friendship and even, at times, secret alliance. It is not difficult to imagine that Myrtle, a woman of a more conservative era, struggled to understand her daughter’s libertine behavior: inclined, as a mother of the 1950s, to rein in her daughter’s free spirit; tempted, as a woman herself, to nurture her daughter’s spark.

  Lorrie Wood, a co-conspirator in the shoplifting incident, remembers Myrtle taking pride in her daughter, betraying, perhaps, a deep sense of her daughter’s unique charisma. “You never wanted to one-up Joan,” Lorrie recalled. “We used to sew our own dresses. You could never outdo Joni in her mother’s eyes. If you got compliments on your dress, her mother would say, ‘Oh, but look at Joan’s.’ Joni never let you outdo her, and she got a lot of that from Myrtle.”

  In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the notion of womanhood was being challenged and reimagined. Joni clearly drew energy and conviction from the incipient radicalism of the times. A high school friend, Anne Logie, would recall Joni as “the most original person I knew.”

  Joni was always the leader. “I had a column in the school paper called ‘Fads and Fashion.’ I started fads and I stopped them. I knew the mechanics of hip. It’s hip to wear your father’s tie to school. Ugh, it’s uncool, we did that last week. So by the time I was sixteen, I knew that hip was a herd mentality, certain people would do it, they’d follow you and you could embarrass them easily by saying, ‘Ewww, that’s not hip now.’ And they would stop.”

  That ability to suss out what was hip was a quality that would hold Joni in good stead when she got into the music industry. She simply had an innate sensibility of what was commercial, which allowed her to anticipate and preempt the arguments of meddling record executives, and would make her impervious to the interventions of producers. (She would eventually demote her favorite producer to the status of “engineer.”) Joni commandeered the sequencing and sound on her records, and what she picked was usually right: right for her and right for her audience.

  It all began to swirl together, her rejection of the simple country life her parents led, her yearning for wide-open spaces, her desire to make art and how it differed from anything that had been held up as an example of a life she might lead. Years later, in the song “Let the Wind Carry Me,” she would write about this time, about how her artistic ambitions collided with the lessons from childhood. In the song, she casts her father as her champion and her mother as the one who tries to hold her back:

  She don’t like my kick pleat skirt

  She don’t like my eyelids painted green

  She don’t like me staying up late

  In my high-heeled shoes

  Mama and Papa are arguing. Mama wants to hold Joni back, knowing what the rock and roll dancing scene can lead to. Papa wants to set Joni free. He wants her to follow her “star eyes.” He has a feeling she’ll be okay. Joni liked to say that her mother had the same birthday as Queen Victoria—the day of the extreme moralizer. And yet she taught Joni “the deeper meaning.”

  By the end of high school, Joni would begin barreling toward the creative life that she felt calling for her. Of the album on which the song appeared, The New York Times wrote, “Each of Mitchell’s songs [on For the Roses] is a gem glistening with her elegant way with language, her pointed splashes of irony and her perfect shaping of images. Never does Mitchell voice a thought or feeling commonly. She’s a songwriter and singer of genius who can’t help but make us feel we are not alone.”

  Joni may have felt she was a misunderstood member of the Canadian lunatic generation, but it was her destiny to alchemize all that loneliness into music that made people feel they were not alone.

  As Nietzsche, Joni’s favorite philosopher, wrote, “I should only believe in a god who knew how to dance.”

  3 WILL YOU STILL LOVE ME TOMORROW?

  She had survived polio. Survived Saskatoon. She’d barely graduated high school, but that didn’t bother her much. In twelfth grade, she failed math, chemistry, and physics. “So I flunked and had to take those subjects over, which was stupid because everything I was memorizing was fucking wrong,” Joni told me. “If they had told me, ‘Light is an intermittent particle,’ that would have been intriguing. Light is matter? How intriguing.”

  She enrolled at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary. She didn’t know it then, but doing time in art school was a rock and roll tradition, particularly in Great Britain, where art schools were holding pens for dropouts and rejects. Like Joni, Keith Richards flunked chemistry, physics, and math and wound up in art school. John Lennon, Pete Townshend, and Jeff Beck went, too. (Lennon was thrown out). And, later, in the United States, future musicians such as Michael Stipe and members of Talking Heads found refuge in college art programs and art schools like the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

  Despite Joni’s draftsmanship, no one offered her a scholarship. And so she found other ways to make ends meet. “I worked as a model, which was lucrative,” Joni said. “It was wholesale modeling, so I was a quick-change artist, modeling a whole line. The buyers from the store would go to the hotel, travelers would come through the hotel, and you’d just model a line. You had to be poised in a size eight, and I did ramp modeling for the department stores, but small-town. It was a common way of presenting a line in those days. You wore a black modeling slip, a tight-fitting sheath dress, and you changed over it, so that you were never in your underwear. And it paid a lot of money.”

  Sometimes it’s not the gig, it’s the cover-up. Joni would learn the art of covering up soon enough. During her brief time as a matriculated art student in Calgary, her roommate was her fellow art student Lorrie Wood, whom she knew from back in Saskatoon, in the days of dancing, partying, and shoplifting. “When Joni and I lived together in Calgary, she started art sch
ool,” recalled Wood. “It was at Seventeenth and Sixth. We didn’t even have a bedroom. We had wall dividers and twin beds. When she came to Calgary, I’d been there for a while. She was interested in paintings and drawings and poetry.”

  It was 1964, the peak of the cult of the minimalist Barnett Newman, with his flat slabs of color, which Joni found about as soulful as graphic design. (Joni later devoured Tom Wolfe’s harsh critique of the Abstract Expressionists and the Minimalists in The Painted Word, a book alluded to in her 1975 song “The Boho Dance.”) If Newman was a minimalist, Joni was a maximalist. Her paintings, then her songs, were based on emotional premises, while his work, she felt, was meant to leave his viewers cold. It was a hard time for Joan Anderson the young artist. She had little patience for what she saw as the fads and fashions of the Abstract Expressionists and Minimalists. Jackson Pollock just seemed like surface splatter, and while Mark Rothko might have been impressive in his depth, she was in search of the human subject. Her theme would be relationships. Her biggest subject would be love, even in its absence.

  She lasted at the school for only a year. But she would never abandon her artwork, which she would eventually show to acclaim. As she put it much, much later, “I sing my sorrow and paint my joy.”

  She began to teach herself to play guitar with a Pete Seeger instruction record. But in a very Joni way, she quickly grew tired of it and decided to teach herself. “I couldn’t do what I first set out to do,” she wrote in Rolling Stone in 1999. “I wanted to learn ‘Cotten Picking,’ which was kind of rudimentary. Elizabeth Cotten, who was Pete Seeger’s housekeeper, a black woman, had a style of picking that every folkie could do. It was on this Pete Seeger record that started with how to tune the guitar. Most of it didn’t interest me, but I did attempt to learn ‘Cotten Picking.’” The song, with a simple I–V bass line, was too difficult for Joni’s polio-weakened left hand. “I didn’t have the patience to copy a style that was already known,” she said. So she taught herself to play, just the same way she taught herself to sing. As she told Rolling Stone in 1969, “I used to be a breathy little soprano. Then one day I found that I could sing low. At first I thought I had lost my voice forever. I could sing either a breathy high part or a raspy low part. Then the two came together by themselves. It was uncomfortable for a while, but I worked on it, and now I’ve got this voice.”

  Once she had a voice, she was ready to put it out there and see what she could do with it. In Calgary, John Uren had just opened a club called the Depression. It was a dark and lonely walk down those steps to audition, but Joni was unfazed. She had a baritone ukulele around her neck, a vocal style that was equal parts Joan Baez and Judy Collins, and a repertoire of English and Scottish ballads known as the Child ballads, along with a handful of sea chanteys and other odds and ends.

  Joni began playing three sets a night, starting on Friday, September 13, 1964. At twenty, she was a quick study, a natural mimic. The folk scene was about authenticity, not originality. She played songs like “Reuben James” and “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again,” which she sang with a Canadian “haroo-haroo” instead of “hurrah-hurrah.” It was a fine way to earn fifteen dollars a week. That was enough to buy smokes and the occasional record.

  “Joni was pretty good-looking and she was confident,” Uren recalled. “There was no doubt about her voice. She had a smart mouth and was very engaging. Privately, I always thought she was shy.” Uren wouldn’t be the last person to find, even back then, that there was something complicated about what was then the Joni Anderson affect. It was serious yet playful, intimate yet withholding, outgoing yet taciturn.

  It was in Calgary that Brad MacMath, tall, blond, and chiseled, came into Joni’s life. “She went to the art school and she met Brad, brought him home, and we all became pals,” recalled Wood. “We used to call Brad ‘Moochie.’ I think she thought he mooched. He’d come to our house and eat. But Brad was a really nice guy. I didn’t think of them as being a couple. At the time, Joni was the only virgin left in art school and she was looking to lose it. So Moochie was the most available guy.”

  Joni got pregnant right away and Brad MacMath moved in, a first step toward doing the right thing. “I got pregnant right out of the chute with my friend,” Joni told me. “It was my own stupid fault. That was not even a romance. It was just that I was the only virgin in art school, and I thought, ‘What is this all about?’ And I got caught out and that was bad.”

  Joni was young, pregnant, and far from home. But in a gesture that would both draw from her past and predict her future, she would alchemize her pain into music. Her first “real” song as a songwriter, “Day After Day,” made poetry of a common situation. Recalling the stern admonitions of her beloved writing teacher, Mr. Kratzmann, she was careful not to fall into cliché. The melody sounded like a familiar ballad in F minor, haunting and almost familiar. Not all of the lines rhyme, but the melody compels the listener through a song of regret, where the movement eastward is to a terrifying and strange place, one where she will be truly on her own. The clock keeps ticking. The baby will come. The man will go. The only thing to keep time is to make music out of it:

  So this must be my fate

  To sit and weep and wait

  And pray my darlin’ comes before too late

  There is no turning back. The train is going forward. A new life of uncertainty awaits. It is a lonely ride. Joni was just another folkie singing songs of sorrow. But the song mattered, because it was the first time she discovered that, when her back was against the wall, she could create beauty. When she was hurt and trapped and scared, she could write and sing her way to a kind of freedom.

  Anyone who was listening probably thought it was another Child ballad, another song about a young lass taken away by a rogue and tied to the tracks down by the river, waiting for her prince to save her. The song sounded like it had existed for centuries, yet it was about a predicament happening in the present tense.

  In those days way before social media, it was easy for Joni to perform visibly pregnant, and not worry that word would get back to her parents that she was expecting. Joni would later try to explain the stigma and the burden of the pregnancy by stating, “That [pregnancy out of wedlock] was a terrible thing for a woman, nothing worse. You may have well killed somebody. You know, you were—It was losing face to the max.” Joni and MacMath moved to Toronto, but soon after, he bailed, eventually to California. The parting gift was a drawing of a pregnant woman and a line by the Japanese Buddhist priest Ryokan: “The thief left it behind—the moon at the window.”

  Joni never shied away, in music or in life, from how much romantic love meant to her. She was a new kind of woman for the early 1960s: independent, irreverent, headstrong, but she was also deeply interested in love and how she could shape a married life that was modern and satisfying. In “Song for Sharon,” which appeared on her 1976 album, Hejira, she sings:

  When we were kids in Maidstone, Sharon

  I went to every wedding in that little town

  To see the tears and the kisses

  And the pretty lady in the white lace wedding gown

  She didn’t know it when she was little, but all of this was what she would call, in “Both Sides, Now,” “love’s illusions.” In childhood, they are very real, and as an adult artist, she could still be stimulated by them. Back when she was a little girl with Sharon Bell, she wanted it all: the white dress, the romantic love, the illusions. But in Toronto, things were getting real and adulthood was bleak. At that very moment—pregnant and alone—she concentrated on, quite literally, singing for her supper. She couldn’t afford the local musician union dues of $149, so she supported herself at what she called “the best of the scab clubs,” which included the Half Beat, the Place, the Village Corner, and especially the Purple Onion. She had already moved from the ukulele to the guitar. Now, her pregnancy increasingly visible, she moved on to the tiple, a mini-guitar that she could rest on her belly.

  What would happe
n tomorrow? And the tomorrow after that? The more Joni’s belly grew, the more uncertain her future would become. Will you still love me tomorrow? asked one of Joni’s favorite songs from high school. And the song she loved would take on a different meaning once she became a mother. Because when it came to her baby, the answer would be a heartbreaking, resounding yes, after yes, after yes. Even after she gave her baby up, Joni would never stop thinking about her, writing about her, loving her.

  4 A COMMON MODERN-DAY FAIRY TALE

  Joan Anderson was far from the only unmarried pregnant young woman looking for help and a safe harbor in 1964. She remembered that she tried to seek shelter in a home for unwed mothers and she “couldn’t get in. They were flooded. I tried to.” Protecting her parents from the truth, even though she was not close to them, was of the utmost importance. “I tried to spare my parents by going to the anonymity of a large city, under the ruse that I wanted to be a musician,” she later recalled to her friend Malka Marom. “Because my mother already thought I was a quitter, so she’ll believe it.”

  She arrived in Toronto with sixty dollars to her name. The cheapest room she could find cost fifteen dollars a week. She remembered that “it was the attic room and all the railings . . . there was one left out of every four because last winter, the people burnt them to keep the room warm . . . And I had six months ahead of me, no work.”

  Work at scab clubs kept her going, just barely. Martin Ornot, the organizer of the Mariposa Folk Festival, remembered Joni as beautiful, unassuming, and kind. “She wore long gowns or jeans, leather jackets, holding her guitar . . . She seemed quiet. If vulnerability can be translated into people wanting to do things for her, then she was vulnerable. You really wanted to be around her and help her, if you could. It wasn’t that she was needy, it was that she was so nice.”