Reckless Daughter

by David Yaffe

  Joni gave birth to a girl on a cold Canadian winter’s day, February 19, 1965. She named the little girl, whose blond hair and pale features mirrored her own, Kelly Dale Anderson. She was alone, but she didn’t want to give her baby up for adoption, so she left the baby in foster care and returned home to her attic room, unsure of how she was going to pay the next week’s rent, unsure of whether she was going to be able to keep the child. Having felt so disconnected from her own parents, one can only imagine how holding the baby must have brought back memories of how abandoned she had felt years before in the polio ward.

  It would be months before Joni signed the adoption papers. Lorrie Wood, Joni’s high school pal and roommate from Calgary, saw Joni in Toronto after she had given birth. Wood was in a position to give advice. “I gave up a child, too, just prior to the time Joni gave up Kilauren [the name that the baby’s adoptive parents gave her],” recalled Wood. “Adoptions don’t come out of good things. It’s a scary situation. You never know if you will meet again in later years. It’s tenuous. You have to expect a lot of ups and downs out of it. I told Joan that life would go on, that she would get over it. I told her it was the best thing I ever did. She had her career and her music. Where was the place for a child? She’d be better off, especially since she didn’t have a really committed mate. I said, ‘You can’t put yourself in it. It’s selfish. You have to be beyond it.’ Every time she looked at the child she was struck by how much the baby looked like her. That made it harder for her to give her up. I told her that she had to see it for the child and get over her own selfishness or self-centeredness. Plus, she was destitute and wasn’t trained for anything. She had nothing but the music and she had no idea where that was going.”

  Enter Chuck Mitchell, then age twenty-nine. He was older and a more established folksinger than Joni. He had a BA in English from Principia College in Missouri, which, she says, he lorded over her. He was an upholder of traditions and Joni ended up loathing the kind of traditionalism he represented. She always prided herself on being forward-looking. Still, it was with Chuck that she became Joni Mitchell—and not only because she took his name in marriage.

  Joni met Chuck at the Penny Farthing, where she corrected his rendition of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Chuck thought his revision of Dylan’s classic wasn’t so bad. “I tinkered with ‘Tambourine Man,’ changed a few words,” Chuck Mitchell wrote to me. “I haven’t sung ‘Tambourine Man’ in years and I don’t recall the changes I made, but I’m sure they were worthy and improved the lyric to no end. After all, I’m an English major.” One wouldn’t know it from Joni’s recollections, but Chuck Mitchell can be kind of funny.

  Mitchell was tall, handsome, and in possession of a union card. He was also an American citizen, and represented Joni’s best chance not only for a potential father for her child, but also for a visa. The idea was that Joni would move to Detroit and in with Mitchell, the couple would perform as a duo, and when they had saved enough money, they would, in Joni’s words, “get the baby out of hock.”

  Chuck came from an educated family. His father had gone to Antioch. His mother had a degree from Mills. To him, Joni was a “prairie girl [from a] rube place . . . I mean, she liked to go bowling—talk about your kitsch!—and with those little balls, like they do in Canada!” When Joni later wrote about Chuck that he had “swept with the broom of contempt,” she was still glowering with resentment about all his little digs.

  But for a while, there was love. The couple moved into a walk-up, and as Joni remembered it, “We lived in the black neighborhood. It was cheap housing . . . It was big and low-rent, and people would stay with us, and when we traveled we’d stay with them. We couldn’t afford hotel rooms at this point. We were making so little money. So people would take you in, and it was nice, the social aspect of it.”

  Today, Joni can be reluctant to revisit those painful times, but starting in 1973 she opened up to the Canadian broadcaster Malka Marom for a series of interviews, and the journalist Sheila Weller movingly captured Joni’s conflict in her book Girls Like Us. Weller sets the scene: “By day, newlywed Joni, wearing jeans and chain-smoking dual-filter Tareytons, refinished the dark, ornate woodwork that Chuck had stripped, and filled the apartment with Indian quilts from J. L. Hudson’s and thrift store antiques, eventually turning the heavy, depressing lair into a green-hued fantasyland straight out of the imagery of J.R.R. Tolkien.” It was Joni’s first time playing house and it would become one of her greatest gifts. To paraphrase the Graham Nash lyrics she inspired, Joni Mitchell could make almost anywhere into a “very, very, very fine house.”

  Chuck Mitchell told Weller that the backdrop to their early years was the fate of Joni’s baby. “We have this issue, Chuck,” Joni would say as the couple drove back and forth from Detroit to Canada, where Joni was still playing in clubs. “What should we do? What should I do?” Then finally, during one of those trips back to Canada, they visited the foster home where Joni’s daughter was living. Joni held the baby. Chuck held the baby. And then Joni signed the surrender papers. There was a form in the baby’s adoption files called “Non-Identifying Background Information.” Without revealing either parent’s name, there were details left for the baby: that her father had been above-average height, that her mother had once had polio and grew up in Saskatchewan, and then this telling line: “Mother left Canada for U.S. to pursue career as folksinger.”

  With the issue of the baby settled, Joni could turn her attention to music. She began performing at the Chessmate, Detroit’s biggest folk club, and the couple began making friends on the scene: Tom Rush, Harvard-educated and fresh off the Cambridge folk scene; Bruce Langhorne, one of the few prominent African-American folk musicians. (Langhorne was the inspiration behind Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.”)

  Chuck and Joni began performing together. Joni could certainly stand up for herself, but she needed a push to move from coffeehouse singer to a bigger spotlight. Chuck may have been traditional, but he was ambitious enough for both of them; he helped Joni start her publishing company. He told me by e-mail: “We were both talented, remember that, if in quite different ways. It was fun, and a lot of things were happening at once; songs getting written, tunings found, clothes sewn, curtains fashioned and hung, estate sales and auctions and roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and green beans and all-night card games and soirees with troubadours (a.k.a. hustling songs at the local clubs). It was. a. great. scene.”

  It is a portrait of a marriage in 1965 that had one foot in the ’50s and one foot in all the creativity and chaos that was to come. Joni was writing songs and hanging curtains, cooking Yorkshire pudding and hustling songs at local clubs. She was not her mother. She was not stuck in old patterns of domesticity, but there was some of Myrt in her. She longed to roam and she craved home, all at once. That Mitchell feels the need to assert, decades later, that he, too, was talented, hints at what might have eventually driven the couple apart.

  “Chuck Mitchell was my first major exploiter, a complete asshole,” Joni told me. “We were a duo then. He was pandering all the time. His taste in music was so foreign. It was show tunes: Flanders and Swann—very quaint and clever—and The Fantasticks. To me, it was cornball stuff.”

  Chuck Mitchell insists that, at the time, Joni didn’t think his music was all bad. He e-mailed: “She said she liked the Brecht/Weill tunes, ‘The Bilbao Song.’ She told me that was my metier and I should focus on that sort (cabaret) of music. I still think it was canny advice, but cabaret, that’s New York City, or maybe Chicago, and as it turned out, I ended up a heartland kind of guy; not much call for ‘The Sailor’s Tango’ in Des Moines, Iowa.”

  In June of 1966, fifteen months after they walked down the aisle, Chuck and Joni left Detroit for New York City. They played the legendary Gaslight, and Joan Baez was in the audience. Years later, the queen of folk recalled the moment: “I remember Joni with her bangs and long hair and she still had her partner singing with her, and I remember thinking, ‘You’ve gott
a drop this guy.’” The Detroit music scene and the urban “jazzers,” as Joni called them, had put new sounds in her head, and she was blossoming out of her repertoire of folk favorites and beginning to make extraordinary music, getting better every day. Chuck Mitchell still looks back on her musicianship with awe. “Joni’s ability to tune was mystical, like her ability to beat me in gin rummy,” he said. “I don’t think she had it cold when she arrived, but it grew along with her songwriting. And, no matter what tuning she was in, we were always in a comfortable key for our duo songs. She did often play in standard tuning, too. I don’t recall tuning as ever being a problem for Joni; there, it’s done, let’s sing. Listen to tapes of early live shows. You can hear it happen.”

  Standard tuning, also referred to as concert tuning, is most people’s method of tuning a guitar in accord with the entire orchestra. The six strings of the guitar are tuned in the following manner: E A D G B E. And there are also alternate or open tunings to choose from: various forms of folk, Celtic, blues, and so on. These alternate and open tunings are notable for their resonant sound, as the open strings drone off one another. When Joni’s songwriting started to take off in 1966, she took from various open tunings that already existed, then turned them into something that no one had heard before, and started writing songs primarily in open chords and dropped tunings. Some of her earliest compositions sounded like indicated orchestration—creating complex, almost orchestral melodies, using simple chord shapes across the fret board. Joni picked up open tuning from Eric Andersen and other coffeehouse folk musicians, but quickly expanded the technique to create her idiosyncratic voicings. With these tunings, most listeners who knew nothing about the guitar were still hearing something utterly unlike anyone else’s music.

  The songwriting began flowing. “Born to Take the Highway” was a song about escape, an adventurous spirit that made her want to move on from Saskatoon, and somehow, bust out of the marriage. “Urge for Going” made the point even more explicitly. The birds know when to fly south for the winter. And humans know when a romance is over. The song was a hit on the country charts for George Hamilton IV and became a staple for Tom Rush. It was Joni’s second song, a huge leap from “Day After Day.” Even bigger leaps were soon to come.

  On October 4, 1965, “Joni Anderson” went on Let’s Sing Out, a popular folk television program hosted by Oscar Brand, joined by the legendary folkie Dave Van Ronk, known as the “Mayor of MacDougal Street.” It was her debut as a folk artist, and she was entering and leaving at the same time. “I did that show twice,” Joni told me. “That’s when I was a folksinger. I was a folksinger as Joni Anderson. As soon as I became Joni Mitchell, I was no longer a folksinger. Once I started to write my music, that’s not folk music.”

  Her new surname became for Joni a mark of independence, of disclosure, of sexual and emotional adventures. Joni Mitchell became the name of a Woman of Heart and Mind. It was not the name of someone’s wife, even if, technically, it was. As the days unfolded and the songbook proliferated, Joni began to make a name for herself, and she and Chuck began to perform separately. The audiences were coming for her voice, her guitar, her stories, her idiosyncrasies, her songs. People began to fall in love. And in the dark clubs, it was still intimate enough to connect with the woman they were falling for.

  Joni had taken Lorrie Wood’s advice and signed the papers and given her Kelly Dale away. And in the process, she would find both the hope and the melancholy that would fuel her songwriting for decades. In 1966, Joni wrote a song called “Little Green,” where she would tell all but reveal nothing. She didn’t release it for five years—in another time, another moment, another level of fame, many lives later—but it became a staple of her gigs right away. On October 26, 1967, with the cameras rolling in full-bleed color, Joni Mitchell sat on the stage at a packed Cafe Au Go Go in the midst of folk fabulousness on Bleecker Street. She was wearing a shiny pink button-down shirt and purple form-fitting pants. She was still in the habit of smiling, or suppressing a smile, whenever she was performing, as if to say, I know I am sitting on something extraordinary, and no matter how melancholy the contents, I am proud of this. It was the same proud grin she wore when she was interviewed on the CBC and told the interviewers that “the general message of my songs is just happiness . . . Even the sad songs aren’t depressing, they’re just sort of wistful.” As Joni got older, it became increasingly difficult for her to be so evasive. But she was giving her first televised interview, and it was showtime.

  The song she was performing was “Little Green.” The song had already been recorded at Philadelphia’s Second Fret. She was still out to make people fall in love with her, and this packed and hushed crowd seemed to be doing just that. And yet she sang a song that revealed a secret hiding in plain sight. When the song eventually appeared on the album Blue, Timothy Crouse, reviewing it in Rolling Stone, complained that “the pretty, ‘poetic’ lyric is dressed up in such cryptic references that it passeth all understanding.” But Crouse, like everyone else, had been duped.

  There is nothing more honest than the lyrics:

  Child with a child pretending

  Weary of lies you are sending home

  Or:

  So you sign all the papers in the family name

  You’re sad and you’re sorry, but you’re not ashamed

  Little Green, have a happy ending

  At the Cafe Au Go Go, the earnest crowd dutifully claps, and she flashes that big and generous smile, but beneath it all—way, way beneath—she is crumbling behind the poetic words and sonorous chords, different and even bluer than on Blue. It was the start, Joni would later explain, of her sending secret messages to her daughter in her songs. Even songs like “Big Yellow Taxi” were about the earth her daughter would inherit.

  She had begun to chronicle the end of her short marriage in song, too. “I Had a King” was clearly the artist as memoirist. Joni, playing fairy princess, elevates her first husband to the role of king, but he’s changed the locks anyway:

  I can’t go back there anymore

  You know my keys won’t fit the door

  You know my thoughts don’t fit the man

  They never can, they never can

  She sings the song as a solo performer who, not long earlier, was the reluctant half of a duo. Chuck Mitchell was the non-songwriting half of that duo, so her husband—but not, creatively, her king. After she moved out, he changed the lock. As she sang: “My keys won’t fit the door.” Joni Anderson gave her name up for him and a whole lot more. Je ne regrette rien, sang Edith Piaf, one of Joni’s musical heroes, but this song brims with regret. It could not exist without it. When she was trying the song out in clubs, she called it a “common modern-day fairy tale.”

  The song has the sweep of a romantic art song, with repetitions on the first three lines, then a flourish at the end:

  I had a king in a tenement castle

  Lately he’s taken to painting the pastel walls brown

  He’s taken the curtains down . . .

  I had a king dressed in drip-dry and paisley

  Lately he’s taken to saying I’m crazy and blind

  He lives in another time . . .

  I had a king in a salt-rusted carriage

  Who carried me off to his country for marriage too soon

  Beware of the power of moons . . .

  The guitar repeats a pattern, develops, and resolves when the voice does the same. She had a king—in the past tense. She is who she is because she rejects what was; her guitar, her voice give her form and beauty as revenge. This is not the sneering rejection of Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” (a song she would record in rather altered form much later). This is much more delicate, much more elegiac. She never says why, except that the marriage, which happened because she’d had a baby, was simply “too soon,” but any time would have been the wrong time. There is an undeniable regret in the song; it is not that things didn’t work out, but that she had an unworthy partner. B
ut she also shows some of the muscle she is developing, a hint at the steeliness that will drive her art and her life:

  Ladies in gingham still blush

  While he sings them of wars and wine

  But I in my leather and lace

  I can never become that kind

  For a very long time, the world will see Joni Mitchell as a wispy blonde, a folkie with a guitar, a sweet smile, and a bell-like laugh. But there’s another Joni emerging, one who knows her own mind, writes her own songs, and runs the show: a woman, not a girl, dressed defiantly in leather and lace. “My husband thought I was stupid because he had a BA in literature,” Joni told me. “He took me on as a trophy wife. He liked my body, but he didn’t like my mind. He was always insulting me, because he had the pride of the well-educated, which is frequently academic stupidity.”

  And while Chuck may have been the more formally educated of the pair, Joni’s talent and intelligence were something astounding to behold. Echoing what Joni had told him, David Crosby would later put it this way: “She always had a very strong need for independence, but you know about Chuck Mitchell, right? That would give anybody a need for independence. There was a guy who was using her and keeping her down. The guy was a talentless nobody who hooked on to a tremendously talented girl and married her to keep her in line and used her to have an act and make a living. This guy was no more in her league than a sheep was the size of an elephant.”

  Joni would later say, “As my work began to mature, I began to long for my own growth. I felt that I couldn’t grow with Chuck. That we would never grow together. That I had to separate myself from the duo, that I had to become an individual in order to grow. And as soon as the duo dissolved, the marriage dissolved.”