by David Yaffe
Rock guitar, in other words, divides into pre-Hendrix and post-Hendrix. In addition, he wrote powerful and beautiful songs—“The Wind Cries Mary,” “Castles Made of Sand,” “Little Wing,” “Voodoo Child,” and “Angel,” to name a few—and his covers were more like hijackings. He was, as Harold Bloom might have put it, a strong poet.
And so it happened that Joni and the Jimi Hendrix Experience were both playing Ottawa in March 1968. Hendrix left the following testimony in his diary:
March 19
Arrived in Ottawa. Beautiful hotel. Strange people . . . Beautiful dinner. Talks with Joni Mitchell on the phone. I think I’ll record her tonight with my excellent tape recorder (knock on wood). Hmmm . . . can’t find any wood . . . everything’s plastic. Beautiful view.
Marvellous sound on first show. Good on second. Good recording. Went down to little club to see Joni, fantastic girl with heaven words. We all got to party. OK, millions of girls. Listen to tape and smoked up at hotel.
March 20
We left Ottawa City today. I kissed Joni goodbye, slept in the car awhile . . .
Hendrix’s drummer, Mitch Mitchell, wrote about that night in his memoir, Jimi Hendrix: Inside the Experience:
We heard of this great girl singer in town, called Joni Mitchell. Hendrix and I had these portable Sony tape recorders, huge things that we dragged ’round the world. So we went to this little folk club, after our gig, with Hendrix’s tape machine. We were amazed, she was wonderful. So we taped the show and then went back to the hotel.
Turns out, not only is she staying in the same hotel, but she’s on the same floor. So we went back to the room, just the three of us, played the tape back, compared notes, that kind of thing. It’s two in the morning, but we’re keeping things low and we’d been there about an hour and the manager comes up. He went fucking berserk. “You can’t have guests in your room.”
What! We couldn’t believe it. We were all staying on the same floor, for God’s sake.
So we said, “We can’t have any guests in this room, right?”
“Yes.”
So we moved everything into my room. We got chased out of there and went to Joni’s. This went on all night. Unfortunately, the tape recorder and the tape were stolen the next day, so end of story on that, but strange guy. Who knows what it was? Black man, white man, white girl, I don’t know.
Nearly half a century later, Joni did know. “Back in those days, the music was segregated,” Joni told me. “Rock and roll had not fully gotten into the arena scale where it was, mostly playing for dances, where it should have stayed. To me, rock and roll was dance music at its best.” There was a theater in Ottawa that had been converted to stages. Rock and roll was performed to a seated audience, starting at 7:30 and ending at 10:30. Joni was used to the coffeehouses, which typically started at 8:30 with four sets until midnight, and the jazz musicians would play later. The rock promoter also owned the Libeau coffeehouse, where they had a party for Hendrix, attended by Mitch Mitchell and Joni. Hendrix, reel-to-reel in hand, came into the club and shyly introduced himself.
“My name is Jimi Hendrix and I was just signed to Reprise, the same label that you’re on. Could I tape your show?”
“Sure,” Joni said.
“So he put the reel-to-reel down,” Joni recalled. “Here’s the mic and here’s me and he put it down on the side, on the left, facing the stage, and he spent the whole show leaning over it and watching levels all the time. He didn’t put it there and back off. He engineered it all the way through. Once in a while, he’d glance up and smile and go back to this thing. After it was over we all went to a party that the promoter put on and I’m looking right and he’s looking left. This guy came up to them and said, ‘What sign is Joni?’ And they said, ‘Scorpio.’ And he said, ‘I’ve got all these songs. I’ve got one for every sign in the zodiac. I could pull any girl with these.’ And Jimi said, ‘Well, you won’t be pulling her.’ I don’t have much memory of an asshole coming up to me and singing a Scorpio song, hoping to sweep me off my feet. We didn’t stay there very long and we went back to the hotel. It’s a stuffy old hotel that was part of the parliament buildings. And we went to my room first and we played back portions of his show, sitting on the floor like a campfire, really close to it. Not loud. And sitting cross-legged around it. Well, the hotel dick came up and told us to break it up. They didn’t like the idea of three hippies sitting around, especially one black, alone in the room in this conservative hotel. So we left and we went to Mitch’s room, and we had it down so low, we were huddled over it. And they broke it up again. We thought: ‘Indian build him big fire, sit him far away, Indian build small fire, sit him close.’ We built a small fire and sat him close. We were leaning over this thing. We went from my room to Jimi’s room to Mitch’s room, and the cop kept showing up and breaking us up, and we kept rotating around. In the course of the evening, it was a really sweet visit with both of them. Mitch had a very good memory, unlike everybody else’s.”
That night, Jimi confessed to Joni that he was already growing weary of playing guitar with his teeth, but he didn’t want to disappoint his fans. He was envisioning a style more like Miles Davis’s: an ensemble with no theatrics. Alas, Hendrix did not live long enough to evolve in this direction.
A month later, the outside world barged in on such innocent memories. Nineteen sixty-eight, after all, was a year not just of decadence and hedonism but of assassinations and riots. Dylan had stopped writing protest music after 1963. Joni hadn’t yet developed the strident voice of protest that would alienate some of her fans in the ’80s. The year Song to a Seagull was released, she had already expressed her misgivings about the fantasy world of much of the album. She was writing about emotional and erotic turmoil, but that didn’t stop her from protesting in the press. In a 1968 interview with Melody Maker, she disclosed that she hadn’t yet figured out a way to write about the violence inflicted on people her age: “I’m too hung up about what’s going on in America politically. I keep thinking, how can I sing ‘night in the city looks pretty to me,’ when I know it’s not pretty at all, with people living in slums and being beaten up by police? It was what happened in Chicago during the Democratic Convention that really got me thinking. All those kids being clubbed. If I’d been wearing these Levi’s, they’d have clubbed me, not for doing anything, but this is the uniform of the enemy. That’s what they are beginning to call the kids today, the enemy.”
This does not sound like the giggly ingénue who was delighting audiences on the folk circuit, although it does foreshadow the deeply principled artist who was beginning to emerge. Creating beauty and truth was something Joni could always do on an intimate level. David Crosby believed that her maturity led to that early prodigal depth in her music. “I think she had more understanding than most people do of human beings. She had already been through some hard things. What makes human beings get wisdom is paying dues. Sort of like, you arrive as a boulder and you knock corners off yourself until you get smooth like a river stone. She was already starting to get smooth.”
8 CLOUDS
Joni thought of herself as a painter first, a musician second. But Joni the painter went against all the trends in art school. Really, the only twentieth-century painter she loved was Picasso. Her own draftsmanship looked back further—to Van Gogh, to Rembrandt. Yet her music looked forward, taking Dylan, Cohen, Ellington, Piaf, Holiday, Miles, and so on and creating something new. Joni the antiquated painter would be on display on many of her groundbreaking albums, certainly offering something worlds beyond the imaginations of the record labels’ design departments. Clouds is filled with daring emotions, open tunings, weird chords, enchantment, sorrow and ebullience, and everything in between. It offers no shortage of beauty, and yet every song on Clouds sees beyond conventional ideas of beauty, forcing listeners to rethink what they thought they knew or appreciated. Those chords, those feelings, for all their drowsy nights and Chelsea mornings, could be dark, eccentric, brooding, diff
icult. And the cover?
Joni is the girl on the cover. She is not smiling. She is in black, but offers a red flower with six petals. She is not going to pluck them to ask “How do I love thee?” Her gray-blue eyes aren’t staring us down. They seem to be in a trance. They are certainly entrancing. But, for someone with such emotionally indeterminate songs, where is the chiaroscuro? Joni is posed before a Pacific sunset, filled with yellow, orange, and red. Wouldn’t nightfall be a better moment for this album filled with such indeterminacy? Song to a Seagull didn’t sell much. Would the pretty girl in the hills of Laurel Canyon—on an album featuring the tried-and-true successes of “Chelsea Morning” and “Both Sides, Now”—make the nickel go down the slot this time? Joni’s artwork would become more daring pretty soon—the vivid and earthy paintings of Mingus, the takeoff of Rousseau on The Hissing of Summer Lawns—but on this record, a pretty girl could invite you into a dangerous and difficult brew. Fear is like a Wilderland, she tells us. Yet you are being led there by this stunning visage. It’s hard to resist.
On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, and just hours later, Joni Mitchell climbed into her first limousine. She looked out the window at New York City and saw mounted police and fights breaking out everywhere. “We moved along slowly. People were beating on the limo.” Joni had just been signed by Elliot Roberts and he had booked a concert on Philadelphia’s Main Line, at Swarthmore College, where she was to be the opening act. The limo was not for Joni, but for the singer Laura Nyro, and they were on their way to pick her up, but once they did, it was hours before they could make it to the concert. “We rolled into Philadelphia and in the meantime, this guitar player had had to go on first, and such importance was placed on position billing. And he had to go on, and I got there, just as he finished his set, late. And I went on and he couldn’t stand it. So he went on again, and everybody walked out on him. Talk about a stupid ego! I believe we stayed in Philly that night.”
Riding in a limo while cities rioted, Joni felt history breathing down her neck. She had never been political before, but now politics would find her, and she would have to respond, in her way. Dylan—who had sung fiercely about the murder of Medgar Evers for Martin Luther King, Jr., at the March on Washington—was now out of the protest business, and it would be years before U2 (“Pride”) and Paul Simon (“So Beautiful or So What”) would eventually deliver their MLK eulogies.
Oscar Wilde famously quipped, “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at,” but it was getting more difficult to believe it. Joni still had the fictional Sisotowbell Lane to cling to. “It was my dream of happiness. I didn’t dream of being a rock star. My dream of happiness was Sisotowbell Lane—my place in Canada . . . Really rural . . .” The festival at Woodstock would keep the utopian ideal alive for a while. But not for long. These were turbulent times.
In his 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon originally used a verse from “Cactus Tree” as the epigraph to section 4, “The Counterforce.” After much anarchy and war, Pynchon’s book ends with apocalypse, without the philosophical comfort of the counterculture. These lines are a kind of apolitical declaration of freedom:
“She has brought them to her senses,
They have laughed inside her laughter,
Now she rallies her defenses,
For she fears someone will ask her
For eternity—
And she’s so busy being free . . .”
—Joni Mitchell
Although this appeared in the reviewers’ galleys for the novel, it was replaced in the finished book with
“What?”
—Richard M. Nixon
These were times when the demands on the artist loomed larger than personal experience, but Joni wasn’t made for writing about collective movements. She was grateful to Buffy Sainte-Marie for singing her praises a few years earlier and for covering “Song to a Seagull,” but she did not want to write a clone of Sainte-Marie’s “Universal Solider.” She needed the human element—character and narrative and humanity—which was all the more vital as her new adopted country was destroying itself: old vs. young, war vs. peace, silent majority vs. Weather Underground.
Joni was an exile—later, more of a roaming ambassador—from Canada, with a left-leaning prime minister, and where the biggest political controversy she could recall from growing up was when it was time to choose a flag. “It’s good to be exposed to politics and what’s going down here, but it does damage to me,” she told a reporter in a cover story for the Rolling Stone issue dated May 17, 1969. “Too much of it can cripple me. And if I really let myself think about it—the violence, the sickness, all of it—I think I’d flip out.”
A year later, on May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard shot four unarmed students at Kent State University during a protest against the Vietnam War. Neil Young, Joni’s old friend from Canada, responded with the stomping, outraged anthem “Ohio.” What could Joni do? She was the first to admit that hers was a naïve wisdom and that she was still trying to find her way in a world that was becoming increasingly difficult to comprehend. When she sang, “I really don’t know life at all,” she meant it.
Joni’s and Neil’s songs had sung to each other before. She told the story to an audience at a BBC taping in London in 1970. “In 1965 I was up in Canada, and there was a friend of mine up there who had just left a rock and roll band in Winnipeg, Manitoba, near where I come from on the prairies, to become a folksinger à la Bob Dylan, who was his hero at that time, and at the same time there were breaks in his life and he was going into new and exciting directions.
“He had just newly turned twenty-one, and that meant in Winnipeg he was no longer allowed into his favorite hangout, which is kind of a teeny-bopper club and once you’re over twenty-one you couldn’t get in there anymore, so he was really feeling terrible because his girlfriends and everybody that he wanted to hang out with, his band could still go there, you know, but one of the things that drove him to become a folksinger was that he couldn’t play in this club anymore. He was over the hill.
“So he wrote this song that was called ‘Oh to Live on Sugar Mountain,’ which was a lament for his lost youth. And it went like this . . . [sings a few verses].
“And I thought, God, you know, if we get to twenty-one and there’s nothing after that, that’s a pretty bleak future, so I wrote a song for him, and for myself just to give me some hope. It’s called ‘The Circle Game.’”
Neil was a grumpy young man: he thought life would only go downhill the minute you became too old for the teen clubs and too young for the bars. The girl singing “The Circle Game” consoled the boy of “Sugar Mountain.” Just you wait, Neil. Life will get much better. (Joni even made a rare use of standard tuning to perform “Sugar Mountain” on the radio in 1967 with Chuck Mitchell on second guitar.)
Joni and Neil would remain kindred spirits. He would add his harmonica to her later song “Furry Sings the Blues,” and she would add her voice to his performance of “Helpless” in Martin Scorsese’s concert film The Last Waltz.
The world around Joni was changing fast. But before her music could catch up, she had a backlog of songs from various incarnations, lovers come and gone, cities lived in and abandoned.
The songs on Joni’s second album, Clouds, released in May 1969, emanated from Toronto to Detroit to New York, on the road in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and finally Los Angeles’s Laurel Canyon. Song to a Seagull had peaked at a not-so-auspicious number 189 on the Billboard charts, yet Reprise was patient, especially since Joni, a vocals-and-guitar artist, was relatively cheap to record. She loaded her second album with songs—“Chelsea Morning,” “Michael from Mountains,” and especially “Both Sides, Now”—that had already been hits for Judy Collins. The Clouds songs were practically archival—the “new” album would be filled with “old” songs—but it was an opportunity for Joni to reclaim those songs for herself.
Before she could do that,
however, there was a producer she had to get around.
His name was Paul Rothchild and he was best known as the producer of the Doors. In the three weeks in which Rothchild tried to whip one song, the lead track, “Tin Angel,” into shape, it triggered a slew of painful memories. “When I was a child and took piano lessons, I composed a piece called ‘Robin Walk’ and I brought it in to my teacher to play, and she hit me with the ruler. I thought I was the only one, but it turned out that every piano player of my generation got a rap on the knuckles from their piano teacher. She said, ‘Why would you want to play by ear’—smack!—‘when you could have the masters at your fingertips?’ Well, how did the masters come up with this music? By playing by ear, right?”
Even as an eight-year-old piano student, Joni was onto something. And she was self-possessed the next time an authority figure tried to squelch her muse. After an agonizing experience birthing “Tin Angel,” the album’s maudlin opening track, Joni—like a kid skipping school—asked the engineer Henry Lewy if he would help her finish the album over the next few weeks, before Rothchild came back from producing the Doors. Joni knew that Lewy was a busy man. She also knew she had to conscript him right away.