Reckless Daughter

by David Yaffe

  Joni wondered, “What does that mean? I like ideas? I thought it must have been some Zen discipline he was going through. After that, every time I saw him, all he said was, ‘They’ll never get us, Joni.’”

  When we met in 2015, Joni said something to me that spoke of the vulnerability and the longing that she believed so few people understood. “I’m so easy to win back,” she said. “But if there’s no meeting and no communication and the vibe is cold, what can you do?” Did Cohen ever know? Did anyone who ever loved Joni ever imagine that Joni Mitchell was, in her heart of hearts, so easy to win back?

  7 EXPERIENCED

  Everything was changing for Joni and rapidly. “Both Sides, Now,” as covered by Judy Collins, hit the Top 10 and won the 1968 Grammy for Best Folk Performance. Her own stardom was only a matter of time—especially considering that no one could play or sing her material better than she could. She could say no to an offer from Vanguard Records, Joan Baez’s label, calling it “slave labor.” And she did not jump at the chance to be managed by Bob Dylan’s Svengali manager Albert Grossman (who would end up dying of a heart attack on a plane before resolving legal issues with his famous estranged client). After taking her out for sushi (her first time), they adjorned to her ornately and delicately decorated little room in Chelsea. He was so startled by her impeccable décor, he immediately took her to his place nearby in the Village, little more than a mattress on a floor. He was convinced that she was in the wrong business, and that she would be better off as someone’s wife—maybe his. “I’m not going to manage you,” Grossman said.

  “Why not?” asked Joni.

  “You should be managing me,” Grossman retorted. She was too domestic, he said. She would hate the business. Years later, she conceded he’d had a point. “He was right,” Joni recalled. “I am domestic and I do hate the business. But I had a responsibility to my gift because it kept growing, whether people noticed that or not.”

  After Grossman turned her down, Joni went to Arthur Gorson, whose stable included Phil Ochs and Tom Rush. He offered to manage her in exchange for fifty percent of her publishing company.

  “Well,” Joni replied, “give me fifty percent of your management company.”

  “Are you crazy?” asked Gorson.

  “Back at you,” Joni replied. “Are you crazy?” She walked out.

  Joni just continued playing her gigs. She had already had success as a songwriter; she needed to seal the deal with everything else, and Elliot Roberts and others were sure it was only a matter of time.

  Elliot Roberts had dropped out of high school and two colleges and given up on acting when he walked in the door of the famous William Morris talent agency. At William Morris, all of the aspiring agents started in the mailroom and Roberts was no exception. Sorting letters and delivering packages, he met another mailroom assistant who would prove instrumental to all of their careers, David Geffen. (Geffen attained the job with a faked degree from UCLA. When, at the appointed hour, the university wrote a letter to inform the William Morris Agency that Geffen, who dropped out of Brooklyn College, did not attend the school, he steamed open the envelope and replaced it with a fake letter.) Roberts was repping another Canadian singer-songwriter, Buffy Sainte-Marie, when she dragged him to hear Joni sing.

  Sainte-Marie and Joni came out of the same Yorkville coffeehouse scene in Toronto. Born on the Piapot First Nation Reserve in Saskatchewan, Sainte-Marie had been raised by adoptive parents in Massachusetts. She’d written a hit song called “Cod’ine,” about her addiction to the drug, that was and would be covered by artists from Donovan and Janis Joplin to Gram Parsons and Courtney Love. Sainte-Marie had just been named Best New Artist by Billboard. She was the star on the rise, but when Elliot Roberts heard Joni, to paraphrase the Carole King song, he felt the earth move under his feet.

  It was the songwriting above all that blew Roberts away. “When she first came out,” he remembers, “she had a backlog of twenty, twenty-five songs that were what most people would dream that they would do in their entire career . . . it was stunning.”

  But not stunning enough to get her signed. “Everything about Joni was unique and original, but we couldn’t get a deal,” Roberts remembers. He tried to shop her to every major label. “The folk period had died, so she was totally against the grain. Everyone wanted a copy of the tape for, like, their wives, but no one would sign her.” Joni remembered that the timing of her music seemed to be against her. “I started at a time when folk clubs were folding all over the place. It was rock and roll everywhere, except for a small underground current of clubs.”

  “Elliot pitched being my manager,” Joni remembered. “I said, ‘I don’t need a manager, I’m doing quite nicely.’ But he was a funny man. I enjoyed his humor.” So Roberts became her manager, following Joni on the road, paying his own way. On the road, in city after city, Roberts developed a game plan for Joni that would set the course of her career. “The role model was Bob Dylan, and it wasn’t a matter of radio play or hits,” he said. “It was a matter of people being guided by your music and using it for the soundtrack of their lives.” It was a powerful new idea and one that would take some time to bring to fruition. But it spoke to all that Joni was: why men fell in love with her and women felt like she was singing their secrets out loud. It was 1967 and Joni was breaking the mold of what a girl singer could and should be, just as women were flipping the script on society’s expectations and conventions on every level.

  Joni was beautiful and she was gifted, but she worked her butt off. She remembers all of her naysayers—and vividly. Bernie Fiedler and his wife had a club in Toronto called the Mouse Hole. Joni was playing at a place called the Half Beat. Joni remembered that Bernie and his wife came to hear her play one night, “sort of snooping.” Bernie had what Joni called a “great kind of dry wit. We’re friends now, but at that time, I didn’t really understand him.”

  Bernie approached Joni and said, “Trying to achieve the Baez sound, are you?”

  Joni kept trying to get booked at his club, but Bernie wasn’t having it. He rebuffed her every time, but with panache. Once he told her, “Darling, don’t bother me, I don’t like to associate with failures.” Another time, he told her, “Yes, I’ll call you when I need a good dishwasher.”

  It got under Joni’s skin. “I was very angry with Bernie, those two times. I could remember really burning over those things. I was insulted. I really was . . . It was all like his sense of humor, but there was a certain amount of seriousness to it. He wasn’t interested. I wasn’t going to make him any money.”

  Joni became Joni through the ten-thousand-plus hours she put in on the road. Her mother may have called her a quitter, but it took an extraordinary amount of stamina and discipline to book herself all those gigs, to travel, mostly by car, all over the United States and Canada to play all those live shows. Joni realized pretty early on that there would be no shortcuts to the success that she craved. In particular, she would remember, with a little bashfulness, how she had once encountered Gordon Lightfoot, a folk-rock singer a few years her senior, who was becoming internationally known. Robbie Robertson of the Band called Lightfoot “a national treasure” and Bob Dylan famously said that when he heard a Lightfoot song, his only wish was that “it would last forever.” Joni remembered approaching Lightfoot, eager for wisdom; he had the things she wanted—better bookings, a contract, and ownership of his publishing. “He really could do nothing for me, but I felt somehow or other let down by his attitude that he couldn’t give me any advice.”

  Later, when people were turning to her for career advice, hoping that she might offer them a leg up in the music business, Joni thought back to Lightfoot and “the position that I had put him in.” She would reflect: “The way I became successful between 1965 and 1973 . . . was the way that was available. It meant a lot of working in front of audiences. I continually performed, so that’s something I say to people . . . I feel if you are great, you will be found out. I think it would be mo
re difficult for people who are only good.”

  Joni knew that she was more than “only good.” During a tour of Michigan clubs, with Elliot Roberts gamely in tow, Joni went to see her ex, Chuck Mitchell. Years later, he would recall that it was a “rainy fall night, with a moody golden light coming from the chandelier.” Joni stood with her back to Chuck, her “tenement king,” and peered out the window onto the street below. And what Chuck remembers her telling him is, “It’s gonna happen, Charlie. I’m scared, but I’m gonna be a star.”

  David Crosby was not the most prepossessing of suitors. His round face, mustache, and fedora inspired Joni to compare him, not entirely kindly, to the Looney Tunes cartoon character Yosemite Sam. But this guy was a big deal. He was the arranger of the Byrds’ harmonies—a crucial element of the band’s sound that made a number one hit with Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

  Crosby was in rock star limbo and had time on his hands. His exit from the Byrds was teased on the cover of the first issue of Rolling Stone (“Byrd Is Flipped”): In the end, the guitarist and vocalist Roger McGuinn just couldn’t take Crosby’s ego trips anymore—whether it was his acting like he was the first conspiracy theorist about the Kennedy assassination when introducing “He Was a Friend of Mine” in concerts or pushing a song, “Triad,” about how much fun a guy could have with two girls.

  Crosby was planning to follow the path of his cinematographer father and sail around the world. He had just borrowed $22,000 from Peter Tork of the Monkees to buy a boat that was docked in Florida—and he was in Miami, checking out the new talent, browsing the clubs where he had played when he was a fledgling folkie. He walked into the Gaslight South, in the Coconut Grove neighborhood, known among folk musicians as “The Grove.” The rest would be a conversionary experience he would tell and retell for decades. Joni was seated on a stool, with her skirt just high enough to keep the crowd interested as she told anecdotes that would last just long enough for her to move from one open tuning to another. For a male heterosexual musicophile, there was so much to watch, so much to hear, and it was all coming from her. Unemployment did not make this ex-Byrd any less confident. And yet, even as he knew that he had the power to make her famous, he was also suddenly vulnerable in a new way. This beauty was a better musician than he was, and he knew it by the time the set was over.

  “She was singing ‘Michael from Mountains’ or ‘Both Sides, Now’ or some other fucking wonderful song,” Crosby told me. “And she just knocked me on my ass. I did not know there was anybody out there doing that. And I fell for her immediately. It was the highest quality of songwriting that I’d run into. I liked her better than Dylan or anybody. I thought she was the best girl songwriter that I had encountered. I was also very attracted to her. When she was done with that we hung out in Florida a little bit and then I took her back to Los Angeles and started introducing her to the Los Angeles record scene and I produced her first album. We went to Los Angeles, and there’s a famous picture of her and I and Eric Clapton sitting on a lawn at Mama Cass’s, and Clapton has this slightly stunned look on his face ’cause he had never heard her before. I did that regularly. I would say, ‘Joni, could you sing a song?’ and it was just a delight to watch their minds crumble out their noses when they heard this girl. They would tell me she was the best young girl singer-songwriter that they’d ever met, which was the truth. Nobody knew about the open tunings, and up till then, there were very few of us doing it. I was doing it, but I was nowhere near as sophisticated as Joni became. And the lyrics are deep, man. She is a truly magnificent writer.”

  If you go back to the photograph that Crosby referenced, there’s something else, too. Besides Crosby lying back and looking blissful, besides Joni in a red-and-blue-striped shirt playing the guitar and singing, besides Clapton cross-legged and mesmerized, in the foreground of the photo, there’s a baby, Mama Cass’s daughter, chewing on a film canister. Joni is looking away from the little girl.

  According to Joni, she and Crosby had a brief summer romance. It was never serious, but it was sweet. “I was kind of impressed,” Joni recalled. “He was a star. He loved my music. And he was in a really good place, which he never got back to. He was relatively drug free. He wasn’t doing cocaine. He was just smoking a lot of pot. I was so feminine then. I’m my own man now. I’ve had to fight so many battles. I had to get tough. He just was genuinely excited by the music, which was exciting for me that someone established thought it was good. I was young and I knew that it was good, but I didn’t know if anyone else was going to think so. And he had just bought this boat, the Mayan. It was a beautiful boat. Coconut Grove was really sweet then. It was like Malibu when I first moved there. It was poor. A lot of artists, novelists, stuff like that. It was slow, and the air smelt of flowers, it was poignant, it was warm, and he was actually a joy. We used to ride our bikes and kid around and he had sparkly eyes and didn’t show any signs of the problems to come. We had a summer affair. But there were no plans.”

  Riding on the Mayan was the peak of their seduction. By the time they arrived at her apartment on West Sixteenth Street (where Tony Simon was staying), the static was already beginning. “It was a summer affair, which did not translate to another city, or anywhere else,” Joni said. “Chalk it up to a nice experience and move on. Because it’s never gonna be nice again. When he came to see me in New York, he was just a whole other person. He was paranoid and grumpy. He was paranoid about his hair. He was unattractive in every way and overlording. He was not the same person. We broke up. It was a nice thing in Florida and this horrible thing in New York.

  “Elliot and Geffen and I went to California.”

  Despite the static, Crosby welcomed Joni to the LA he knew so well. He drove her, and her friend Geffen, around town in a Mercedes, blasting Sgt. Pepper. Joni found a house in Laurel Canyon, though not the one on Lookout Mountain that she would later buy. But she had enough from her just-signed record contract to put up the money for a rental.

  There is a photograph from Record World dated March 16, 1968. Joni is at a desk, ready to sign the contract. She looks lovely, but there is tension in her face. Three men hover over her: Reprise’s VP and general manager, Mo Ostin; Elliot Roberts; and David Crosby, who is lending some of his fame by putting his name on the album, even though he has no idea how to live up to the title of “producer.” Ostin looks directly into the camera and offers a professional ear-to-ear grin. Crosby and Roberts both look down, smiling serenely. Joni is pensive. Peggy Lee could have summed it up: Is that all there is?

  The not-so-plush offer has come from a right-wing Englishman named Andy Wickham, who is living somewhat incongruously in Laurel Canyon. With the exception of Vanguard Records, he’s the only person in the industry to make Joni an offer. Wickham’s job at Reprise is unusual. Rumored about. No one seems to quite understand it. He’s friends with Van Dyke Parks and Randy Newman, the industry oddballs. His favorite song is Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee,” which he plays for everyone he meets, and he’s not being ironic. “Andy Wickham heard me somehow,” Joni recalled. “He gave me the worst deal in the world. But it wasn’t as bad as what Vanguard offered me. That was even worse.”

  By the time the papers were signed and Crosby and Joni were in the recording studio—his first attempt at production and her first at the console—their relationship had turned turbulent. But Crosby’s genuine giddiness about Joni’s gift would never fade. To his mind, they were embarking on a grand adventure: getting Joni’s performances of her original material to the public. Crosby thought listeners should experience as closely as possible what first rocked his world in Coconut Grove, which meant pure Joni: guitar and vocal.

  In 1963, this would have been a standard folk aesthetic. By 1968, this was way out of style. Dylan had gone electric in 1965. Psychedelia, LSD, Jimi Hendrix, and Sgt. Pepper had already happened. What Crosby was proposing was a throwback, and to industry insiders, it could sound like little more than a demo. The approach was cheaper, which was a
n upside on a deal of Joni’s size, but it would also show off her orchestral approach to the guitar.

  First albums are often made as an escape hatch to prevent them from being last albums, meaning that back then, for your debut, all you wanted to do was serve up appetizers. Back when the music business was plush, and deals were made for the long haul, you saved the good stuff for the second album, when your name was established and you had built up an audience. For his eponymous debut album, when he was being mocked as John Hammond’s folly, twenty-year-old Bob Dylan went to the Columbia studios and recorded only one original song and a few folk standards, some of which he had never even tried in clubs. He was saving something for later, when he then quickly recorded his follow-up, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963), which would include “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Masters of War,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” and “Girl from the North Country.” Life would never be the same. Simon and Garfunkel nearly blew their chances on Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. (1964), an all-acoustic debut that contained “The Sounds of Silence,” with some gospel and altar-boy songs that seemed like attempts to divert attention from their Jewish names. The album was initially a flop, and their careers were saved only when an electric “Sounds of Silence” hit number one the next year.

  As a debut recording artist, Joni was in a place similar to Leonard Cohen’s, except that she was much younger. At thirty-three, Leonard was slightly long in the tooth to make a pop debut. He had been sitting on lyrics for years, many of them poems, and held nothing back from Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967), a debut that laid everything on the table. It had been written and recorded before his encounter with Joni, but was released in the midst of their on-off transfiguration. That same year, another debut, The Velvet Underground & Nico, was released. As Brian Eno very famously observed, only about a hundred people initially bought the album—but each of them formed a band. It is now recognized as a classic. Also in 1967, Jimi Hendrix held nothing back for Are You Experienced, one of the most extraordinary debuts in the history of rock and roll, forever changing the depth, static, and attack of the electric guitar, loaded with hits that will continue to be played as long as classic rock is a format.