Reckless Daughter

by David Yaffe

  Joni remembers, “I said, ‘Leonard, I’ve got to read. I’m illiterate.’ I said, ‘I used to do my book reports from Classic Comic Books!’ And he said, ‘For someone who hasn’t read anything, you’re writing very well.’ So I left that marriage with a chip and I said to Leonard, ‘I need a reading list because my husband’s given me a complex that I haven’t read anything, except I did read the Tolkien books.’”

  When she went on to read Lorca, Camus, and Rilke, she was disappointed to find that Cohen had taken lines from all of them. This was, she insisted, because she shared a birthday with “the discoverer” Madame Curie. “It is in my stars to invent,” she would say, and she was not impressed with T. S. Eliot’s maxim “immature poets borrow, mature poets steal.”

  Leonard Cohen did not know at the time how much his literary influences rankled his new lover. He said, “I read somewhere that she felt that I had tricked her in some way because I hadn’t told her that Camus had written a book called The Stranger and that I’d written a song called ‘The Stranger.’ The song had nothing to do with the book, nor was I the first person to call a song ‘The Stranger.’ She felt that I’d plagiarized Camus.”

  “I found a lot of Lorca and Camus in his lines,” Joni recalled. “And he was living the life of Camus, even down to the way he dressed, and his house in Hydra. It was disappointing to me, because as far as I could see, he was an original. I have this perverse need for originality. I don’t really care for copy, second-generation artists. I’m not a traditionalist. It’s the discoverers that excite me. Not ‘new’ like a new face, the way ‘new’ is used to sell something. They’re not new at all. They’re a new person doing the old shit. ‘Suzanne’ is a beautiful song, though.”

  She (wrongly) believed that “Walk me to the corner / Our steps will always rhyme” was ripped off from Camus, but she could not deny the beauty of “Suzanne,” a song about restraint. Just as Cohen’s “Dress Rehearsal Rag” is a song about not killing yourself, “Suzanne” is a song about not seducing a beautiful woman. Many lifetimes later, Cohen looked back on it with wonder. “We were channeling some kind of reality that none of us was living,” he recalled. “The songs were much better than we were. We didn’t know how good they were. I didn’t know that I’d be able to sing ‘Suzanne’ forty years later.”

  It was “Suzanne” that first made Cohen well known. Judy Collins recorded it on In My Life, the album preceding Wildflowers. The beautiful woman he elected not to seduce was inspired by the wife of a friend. Instead, he wrote a song, with the first and the third verse devoted to describing her beauty, and the second verse devoted to Jesus, a counterintuitive mood for a Jew who grew up in Montreal, a largely Catholic city. Cohen seemed like a man who knew just what to say, a man in possession of poetry, mysticism, and wisdom, and he used all of this in the art of seduction. Songs of Leonard Cohen is one elaborate pickup, and Joni, even as she knew that a relationship with such a man could never last long, could hardly resist Cohen’s charms.

  He would continue to influence her work. Traces of his line from “Suzanne,” “The sun pours down like honey on our lady of the harbor,” can be heard in Joni’s line from “Chelsea Morning”: “The sun poured in like butterscotch and stuck to all my senses.” Joni also wrote a song, never released, called “The Wizard of Is,” a dead ringer for “Suzanne,” perhaps just as a private experiment, as if she wanted to inhabit it, albeit privately.

  Back in 1967, when she and Leonard were still together, Joni changed the name of her publishing company from Gandalf (a nod to The Lord of the Rings) to Siquomb. “So,” Joni told me, “based on the Tolkien books, I invented this kingdom: Queen SIQUOMB (She Is Queen Undisputedly of Mind Beauty), King HWIEFOB (He Who Is Especially Fond of Birds). They lived in Fanta on the border of Real (Ree-al). And I used to draw these fantasy birds that came from the border, sparrows with peacock tails, very naïve drawings. On the first album cover there’s quite a bit of it.”

  Mind beauty was what Joni was trying to achieve while Leonard was admiring her beauty in many ways. “So Leonard thinks, like a lot of people, that it’s about me. It’s about the question: What is mind beauty? I very rarely see it. Most people think it’s a conceit. They think everything is about me.”

  In a tribute written for the Luminato Festival honoring Joni on her seventieth birthday, Leonard still clearly thought that “mind beauty” was about Joni:

  Master Poet. Master Painter. Most Subtle Technician of the Deep.

  You are indeed Queen Undisputed of Mind Beauty.

  Star-breasted, Disguised as a Ravishing Piece,

  You Changed the Way Women Sing, and the Way Men Listen.

  What an Astonishing Victory over the Unforgiving Years!

  Leonard found beauty in Joni’s mind and in Joni herself. He may have ultimately disappointed her, but that feeling was far from mutual. “Her beauty was a very accurate manifestation of her whole being,” Leonard remembered. “She was not just another pretty face, although that, too, of course, at my age, occurred to me, too. But there was something about her face that was carved.”

  It was coincidence that Joni and Leonard wrote songs called “Winter Lady” before they knew each other. But Joni’s song “Marcie” displays a precise use of language, color, and repetition that seemed to demonstrate Cohen’s influence, at least according to what she has said over the years.

  “Marcie” is a sad and simple story of a girl waiting for a letter and hoping for love. Musically, it is beyond Cohen, scaling octaves and mixing and matching tone colors as dramatic as the colors of nature, emotion, tastes, and the city. The song was originally called either “Portrait in Red and Green” or “Ballad in Red and Green,” and in it she reaches into her painter’s palette: there’s a yellow cab, green and red stoplights, red anger, green envy. Images pile up as a chromatic harmony, with chords as counterintuitive as they are inevitable, a shocking beauty.

  “Marcie” is a reminder that there is so much going on in a Joni Mitchell song—tone colors, lyrics, that voice in its multi-octave crystalline splendor—sung by a woman so full of sadness and beauty and wonder, it’s hard to know where to start. And watching Joni perform the song—as she does in the footage from the Cafe Au Go Go, in her shiny pink shirt and purple pants, her stunning features adding to the sensory overload—it is easy to see how she would inspire passion from Leonard, her teacher of sorts, and all the men who followed.

  In 1968, she wasn’t afraid to give Cohen credit for inspiring the poetic texture of “Marcie”: “My lyrics are influenced by Leonard . . . My song ‘Marcie’ has a lot of him in it, and some of Leonard’s religious imagery . . . seems to have rubbed off on me, too.”

  As in “Both Sides, Now,” the repetition is in the melody and the use of the word Marcie, but the song has no chorus, no anaphora. First, she sings:

  Reds are sweet and greens are sour

  Then she turns the colored candies into emotions:

  Red is angry green is jealous

  Time passes and the colors of the heart become seasons:

  Red is autumn green is summer

  Finally, we’re in the city with the “yellow cab,” and “Red is stop and green’s for going.”

  B-flat major becomes A major, which becomes A minor and G major. “Marcie,” which might have been a maudlin girl-group pop song about a lady in love waiting for a letter, becomes oh so much more in Joni’s hands. Girl-group songs by Goffin/King or Bacharach/David are great, of course, but the storytelling here is richer and much more detailed, especially with the seasons and the colors. Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist and musician who teaches at McGill University, Cohen’s alma mater, later said, “Joni is incredibly innovative in terms of her song structure and harmonics. She broke from the standard Tin Pan Alley format of verse-verse-chorus very early in her career.”

  And yet despite Joni’s claims from 1968 that the song was “Cohen influenced,” there is a recording of it from Philadelphia’s Second Fret from 1966, bef
ore she met Cohen or knew anything about him. Memory can be an unfaithful old lover, too. For some reason, she felt like saying that “Marcie” was Cohen influenced. Regardless, the song stands on its own. “Marcie” is a kind of skeleton key to Joni’s pictorial brain. Another girl’s sad story occasioned Joni’s color-acute mind.

  It was an imagination that still lingered for Cohen many years later. “She doesn’t read music and it really is fully developed from the god’s head,” Cohen told me. “She just came out that way. When I saw her detune a guitar, for me, just tuning the guitar is an ordeal, worrying if I can tune the damn thing. I was so relieved when I finally had guitar techs. It was always an issue for me. To see Joni just twist those little knobs, tuning the guitar in about thirty seconds, into all different strings that nobody had ever heard, and nobody’s ever played it. That indicated to me immediately that there was something very remarkable going on. Same with the piano. I was staying with her in Laurel Canyon when her piano arrived. She sat down and played the piano. Just to hold all those tunings in her mind indicates a superior intellect. I remember being overwhelmed by the fertility and the abundance of her artistic enterprise, because it was so much more vast and rich and varied and seemingly effortless than the way I looked at things. Naturally, I was very impressed and somewhat intimidated.”

  During their brief romance, from later summer 1967 (when she wasn’t spending time with David Crosby) to early 1968, Noel Harrison, the son of Rex Harrison, who had recorded “Suzanne,” asked Cohen, “How do you like living with Beethoven?” What a question! And yet, of course, what a compliment. For Harrison, Joni’s genius somehow made her less feminine. Cohen didn’t see it that way at all. “With all the obvious consequences, it was clear that her genius was already formed and just waiting to manifest,” Cohen told me. “She was fully formed: uneducated, uninformed, uninstructed. Fully formed and unneeding of any kind of influences. So she was able to pick her influences, as I understand. I am happy to have been one in whatever capacity it was. It was clear that she could pick and choose, and that there was no learning curve. The songs were complete! ‘Both Sides, Now,’ ‘The Circle Game,’ complete. Her beauty was so compelling, she certainly existed as a figure in my heart. I think that Joni was in ‘Joan of Arc.’”

  Cohen’s song “Joan of Arc” is, of course, about Joan of Arc. As a rich Jew growing up in Quebec, he was fascinated by the Sisters of Mercy around him. The song is a conversation between Joan of Arc and the fire that killed her. Some thought it was about Nico—a woman who Leonard felt, with great bitterness, was sleeping with everyone but him. Yet, according to Leonard, it was also about Joni—Joni of Arc. At one point, musing about her presence in Leonard’s songs, she sang these lines to me:

  She said, “I’m tired of the war, I want the kind of work I had before,

  A wedding dress or something white

  To wear upon my swollen appetite.”

  Joni, like Joan of Arc, is tough. She has a cause, and could even be a martyr to it, but that cause is her independence, along with a pack of smokes. (The song describes, morbidly, Joan of Arc’s “long and smoky night.”) As for that wedding dress, it made an appearance in many of Joni’s songs—most notably in “Song for Sharon.”

  “Swollen appetite” is something else, something more like living with Beethoven—or someone living with a female version of Leonard Cohen, someone who could love her loving and her freedom. “I always thought ‘Joan of Arc’ was about me,” Joni told me. “But what are my ‘swollen appetites’? That’s projection. See, those Don Juans all think I’m a Don Juan. I ran into Warren Beatty at a party and he gets fidgety around me. This is years since I’d seen him and he called me a Don Juan. I said, ‘I’m not a Don Juan.’ If a guy’s undermining me, I’m not gonna stay there and let him squash me. It seems to be a masculine tendency.”

  And Joni was convinced that “Bird on the Wire” was inspired by a painting she showed Cohen, an eccentric statement about not fitting in with her husband’s family. She thought Cohen would appreciate it. “I had this painting I did for the Mitchells. I was such a misfit in that family, and I did this painting, which I showed to Leonard. In this painting, there are these sparrows sitting on a wire. It’s got a hot-pink background, and there are sparrows with peacock tails. There are all these fictitious birds. And there was one for each Mitchell, and one of them was hanging upside down. Guess who? I think that had some input on ‘Bird on the Wire.’ I showed it to Leonard. It was something I did on a Sunday about how I didn’t fit in. They were the first Yuppies that I met. They were pedigreed consumers. They all had the same education. They were brand-name people. A suit had to be Brooks Brothers. No, you don’t drink Canada Dry, you drink Vernors. Ice cream has to be Häagen-Dazs. Cars have to be a Chevy Corvair. Frank Lloyd Wright architecture and Danish modern furniture. They were so materialistic in such an unfamiliar way to me, and I didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about.”

  “Bird on the Wire” became a hugely popular and widely covered song for Cohen, and Joni was certain that what spoke to the masses was the idiosyncratic self that Joni portrayed—an upside-down bird on a wire, one who does not fly well with others. The song was begun in Greece and finished in Hollywood in 1969, after Joni showed Cohen the painting. Kris Kristofferson said he planned to put the opening lines on his tombstone and Cohen, deadpan, said he would be disappointed if he didn’t.

  As for this bird hanging upside down, he was fascinated by her talent, but he was also strongly and passionately attracted to her, and his desires as a man were even stronger than his sensibilities as an aesthete. As far as he was concerned, he was, on that level, certainly not living with Beethoven. Other people could come to their own conclusions, but he was specific in the terms of their connection: “She existed as a presence for most people who met her,” he told me. “For me, it was her physical beauty that touched me more than her music. The two are connected, but as a young man in the midst of the hormonal avalanche, she was a radiant presence. The music was part of that, but from my perspective, it was just Athena with the heart. It was just the heart was part of the beauty. I didn’t feel competitive with Joni. I was on my own trip.”

  “I was a young man entranced by this radiant person,” Cohen continued. “It was already current at that time that Joni was some kind of musical monster, that her gift somehow put her in another category from the other folksingers. There was a certain ferocity associated with her gift. She was like a storm. She was a beautiful young woman who had a remarkable talent. She was a great painter. I love her paintings. Her self-portraits are amazing. She turned several of her paintings into beautiful tapestries. She gave them to a weaver. She’s a great spirit. She is a formidable presence. I wasn’t vulnerable to her complications. Mostly, I saw her as a desirable woman, with whom I had a lot in common because of the musical connection.”

  Joni was taking in everything she could from Leonard as a lyricist, but she was already in her own stratosphere as a musician. As soon as they met, Cohen helped Joni build on what she already had, and discover that deeper place that gives a song its duende, a concept of poetic darkness imported from Lorca.

  Songs are like tattoos, she would later sing, and the imprints came from deep, passionate, and even painful and potentially dangerous places. No lover gave her poetry like Leonard, and even after their affair ended, she continued to communicate with him in song; most memorably in “A Case of You.” She recalled that Cohen told her, “I am as constant as the Northern Star.” Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar says this to Brutus, and it’s not far from there to “Et tu, Brute.” “I knew it was from Julius Caesar,” Cohen recalled, “but I didn’t say it with Shakespeare’s irony. I think I actually meant it in relation to her.”

  “When I played ‘A Case of You’ for him, he said, ‘I’m glad I wrote that,’” Joni recalled. The song begins:

  Just before our love got lost you said,

  “I am as constant as a northern star.”


  And I said, “Constantly in the darkness

  Where’s that at?

  If you want me I’ll be in the bar.”

  It was a tension that spoke to a schism in their songwriting styles. “Leonard got mad at me actually, because I put a line of his, a line that he said, in one of my songs,” Joni later said. “To me, that’s not plagiarism. You either steal from life or you steal from books. Life is fair game, but books are not. That’s my personal opinion. Don’t steal from somebody else’s art, that’s cheating. Steal from life—it’s up for grabs, right?”

  Joni also recalls Cohen telling her, “Love is touching souls.” That line came from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Love Song”:

  How can I keep my soul in me, so that

  it doesn’t touch your soul?

  Joni’s music and Cohen’s music barnacled each other like lovers who would never truly separate, and her admiration for him was unending. When Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue came to Montreal in 1975, Joni gushed that she was a “stone Cohenite.” When she came to his apartment, he picked her up and said, “My little Joni.” As she did with most of her exes, she tried to maintain a friendship with Cohen. “We went out to dinner once in the late ’70s or early ’80s, and he was so quiet, and I tried to keep the conversation going, and he was distant and cold, and I said, ‘Leonard, do you like me?’ because he was so frosty. And he said, ‘Well, what does one have to say to an old lover?’

  “I said, ‘Oh, my God. Surely there’s some topic.’

  “And he said, ‘Well, you like ideas.’

  “I said, ‘Well, you can’t open your mouth without an idea falling out.’”