Reckless Daughter

by David Yaffe

  “Henry, I can’t go through this,” she said. “You know, this will kill my love for music, you know, I’ll never want to record again if I have to go through this process. Could we get it done in two weeks before he gets back?”

  Without missing a beat, Lewy said, “Sure.” A relationship was born. Lewy, a soft-spoken German Jewish refugee, had already amassed an eclectic résumé, working with a range of artists from the Mamas and the Papas to the Chipmunks. Joni could have it both ways, utilizing the engineer’s knowledge for all things technical without the imprimatur of a George Martin–Phil Spector model of producer as auteur.

  “What happened with Henry is that he was a producer on her records, without the title,” said Larry Klein, a bass player and producer who would become Joni’s second husband. She would eventually concede to this by calling Lewy, in the credits for The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975), “more than an engineer.”

  “Rothchild and Crosby made her think of ‘producers’ with dread and anger. She came to simply hate the word. The idea that there are a lot of bad producers is absolutely true, but there are a lot of bad everything doing everything,” said Klein. “There are a few people who are good at what they do, and there are a lot of people who are not good at what they do. But she had a real trigger when it came to the word producer.”

  She was a young woman dodging male authority in a man’s world. “I found that all the producers were men, and if I stood in defiance of them, then someone would call me a ‘ballbuster,’” Joni later remembered. She had a painter’s ego; she did not welcome authoritarian intervention. Being told in the middle of a track that she had missed her mark was, to her, coitus interruptus. She knew her way around the studio better than Rothchild thought. But this was not really about music, it was about power, and Joni was going to seize it for herself.

  Getting blown off by Rothchild for two weeks for the Doors was a gift. Joni liked the assistance, without the authority. “Henry’s an engineer,” Joni insisted later. “You don’t need a producer. A producer is a babysitter if you don’t know what you’re doing. A producer is an interior decorator. I decorated my own house. I don’t need a decorator . . . I never put ‘producer’ on the stuff that Henry and I did because there was no producer. My point was that you don’t need one.

  “But what happens if you have a vacuum? They started giving credit to the second engineer or anybody who was near.” The second engineer, she would explain, got coffee for the engineer. “I’m the producer,” Joni told me. “Henry was my assistant. My point was that I didn’t need a producer. A producer is a leech. He’s a babysitter and an interior decorator for people who are lazy or not full artists.”

  Joni now had a partner in Henry Lewy, someone who had exquisite ears and who knew how everything worked—and, most of all, what Joni wanted—all without vanity or authoritarian behavior. She didn’t need Paul Rothchild or anyone else to step on her freedom. She and Rothchild would meet again: when Clouds won the 1970 Best Folk Performance Grammy and he was listed, just for “Tin Angel,” as producer. With her golden hair, her joking, her miniskirts, and, of course, with the soprano end of her three-octave voice, Joni could seem so sweet, so girlish. But if she needed to bust balls, she would find a way to do it.

  The songs on Clouds beautifully and elegantly meander toward enlightenment, sometimes reveling in fantasy, sometimes coming to terms with reality, when every new day can be greeted with ebullience or uncertainty. Lovers can light up the sky or disappoint. Euphoria or revenge or moping: pick your track, then pick the optimal part of the track, since the emotions, with their ambiguous chords, take unexpected journeys.

  After the morbidity of the opener, “Tin Angel,” with its foreboding minor progressions and “Roses dipped in sealing wax,” ebullience bursts through with “Chelsea Morning.” The song was written in 1967, and when Joni introduced it in clubs, she would blame Andy Warhol’s film Chelsea Girls for giving girls in Joni’s hood a bad reputation. (Leonard Cohen, who had become affiliated with Warhol’s Factory crowd, coincidentally, was living a few blocks away at the Chelsea Hotel.) The song dances with the joy of the prairie girl from Saskatoon who, not even a morning person, still finds delight in wondering what excitement the day and the (not yet gentrified) neighborhood could bring. Notes that modulated down in club performances now veered upward.

  Joni was spending a lot of time on Bleecker Street because of the folk clubs there. The golden era of Dylan and Baez had faded, but the audience, perhaps hoping to catch the next Dylan or Baez, was still filling the clubs, and Joni, with her homemade glamour, packed them in at the Cafe Au Go Go.

  “I wrote [‘Chelsea Morning’] in Philadelphia . . .” Joni recalled decades later. “Some girls who worked in this club where I was playing found all this colored slag glass in an alley . . . We collected a lot of it and built these glass mobiles with copper wire and coat hangers. I took mine back to New York and put them in my window on West Sixteenth Street in the Chelsea district. The sun would hit the mobile and send these moving colors all around the room. As a young girl, I found that to be a thing of beauty.”

  Joni had a small room, but its window and its reverberations brought the outside in. Joni was mugged three times while living on this block, but it did not dampen her hope. And even though she was cooped up in a little room, what happened outside of the room, including who she might bring into it, electrifies the song’s buzz. (Chelsea Clinton would be named after this song, even though it was the Judy Collins cover that her parents loved.)

  That buzz was stopping and starting in many directions on Clouds. Joni was changing so fast between 1966 and 1969, this collection sometimes suggested scattered selves, parts of which would be developed later and others that would be abandoned, stunted influences, innocence sometimes derailed on the way to experience. There are experiences, there are songs, and then there is the cultural “share,” and Clouds is an instance of when these things did not all happen in order. “Chelsea Morning” and “Both Sides, Now” had already been popularized by Judy Collins. The Tolkien fixation of “I Think I Understand” was a phase. Joni was already living in Laurel Canyon by the time she recorded songs written in Detroit and New York. She was writing songs at a furious clip, and engaging in a cultural moment that was changing fast, too. Mother Nature, as Neil Young would put it in song, was on the run, and Joni was keeping up with her.

  There were, of course, roads not taken and orphans left behind. In 1967, still an unsigned artist, she found herself playing a club in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and she asked a friend what she should see there.

  “Well, there’s Fort Bragg, you might as well go ahead and see that,” he said. Unlike most of the members of the Woodstock generation, Joni was not opposed to entertaining the troops. Her father was a flight lieutenant in the Canadian Air Force, and she believed that performing for soldiers was not the same as endorsing the policies of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Still, Fort Bragg proved to be disappointing. She found the antics of the self-styled “Fayette-Cong” to be unpleasant, to say the least. Joni bought a guitar from an army captain, a little Martin classical. It had made it to Vietnam and back. The soldier who was carrying it was not so lucky. Just when she felt ready to give up on the charms of Fayetteville, inspiration came from the most unlikely place:

  “The last day I was there, my friend said, ‘I just remembered something you should do before you go away. You should go and see the dentist.’ I didn’t think that was a very exciting idea until we got out there and I found out that the dentist was not just a dentist, he was an amateur architect, and like a lot of rural North Carolina people, he had collected around his house lots of rusty junk, just discarded and abandoned things: wrecked cars and old decrepit tractors. Suddenly, he looked out and saw that he had three acres of rusty junk he’d collected and he hadn’t done anything with it. It was just lying out all over the place. So he began to build a house, and he’s still building it. I think he’ll always be building it. It
’s made of portholes from ships and television screens and tractor wheels and Pepsi-Cola-crate paddle wheels, formal weed gardens, rusty palms with dead rubber mallard things at the bottom. Piped full of Muzak for the tourists, roof covered with spinning things, television antennas, those funny little air-conditioning units from the tops of buildings. It’s really a wonderful place, so I wrote a little poem coming back, a silly little poem called ‘Dr. Junk, the Dentist Man,’ and I set it to this silly little Bo Diddley melody. It’s a silly little song.”

  Joni followed a whimsical song about a hoarder with an achingly gorgeous love song that would become a standard in its time, a song about being kept in turmoil that could speak to anyone who ever felt that way. Some things are meant to be cast out—on the lawn, on the cutting-room floor, circled clichés from Mr. Kratzmann. But sometimes it takes a rumination on garbage before coming up with the flowers. Sometimes one has to produce a throwaway to come up with a perennial.

  “The same day that I discovered crazy old Dr. Junk the Dentist Man, I sat up all night and wrote another song, on which I do a little trumpet solo. My daddy was a trumpet player. I always wanted to be a trumpet player.” That song was “I Don’t Know Where I Stand.”

  Even though “I Don’t Know Where I Stand” is about ambiguity—an uncertain romantic status and an unresolved set of expectations from a lover—its delivery is as classic as Tin Pan Alley. The song starts minor, resolves major, and goes back to another minor chord, as if to say that happiness is brief and that loneliness has endless variations. Plus, she’s writing from the road, a lonely room in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The nocturnal Joni probably didn’t greet that many Chelsea mornings with such glee, and she probably didn’t usually feel, as she did with “I Don’t Know Where I Stand,” “so drowsy now I’ll take what sleep I can.” The song’s harmonic eccentricities were not obviously commercial, but its lyricism and emotional content would not have been out of place in the crooner era that she loved in her childhood. In the years since, the song has been covered more than thirty times, most notably by Barbra Streisand.

  Did she want to know where she stood? Was she the doormat or the heartbreaker? No one wrote kiss-off songs quite like Bob Dylan, including “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” and the song that turned Joni into a believer: “Positively 4th Street.” But she never wanted the language to be at the expense of music. So her breakup song on Clouds, “That Song About the Midway,” had a deceptive lyricism and melodic sweep. Judy Collins recalled in her memoir, “Joni wrote ‘That Song About the Midway’ about Leonard, or so she says. Sounds right: the festival, the guy, the jewel in the ear.”

  Although Cohen may have resonated in the song, David Crosby, four decades later, was sure the song was about him. “The ‘David, hello, I love you’ song was ‘Dawntreader,’” Crosby said. “And the ‘David, goodbye, we are done’ was ‘That Song About the Midway.’ She came into a party that we were all at and sang it looking straight at me angrily and then sang it again. She didn’t want there to be any misunderstanding.”

  Joni said of Crosby, “I guess people identify with songs that you write and think that you wrote them just for them.” Joni’s vocal performance of “The Dawntreader” is as intimate as her singing ever got. It is a breathtaking performance—as otherworldly as a mermaid, and as familiar as a lover. It’s no wonder that Crosby, who produced the song on Song to a Seagull, would have wanted to be its source of influence. Joni’s affair with Crosby overlapped with her affair with Cohen. Crosby was instrumental in her career; Cohen was essential for her art. And Joni’s independence would ultimately be crucial for everything. “That Song About the Midway” does not sound, melodically, anything like a Dylan breakup song, but it is just as venomous in its delicate execution. Even if the song was addressed to a composite—Leonard Cohen from the 1967 Newport Folk Festival and Crosby from the Gaslight South in Coconut Grove, Miami—it wouldn’t have stopped her from repeatedly singing it like a weapon to Crosby at a party, throwing his flamboyance in his face.

  The song begins with attraction, although the man’s dubiousness is obvious from the start, playing the horses as he was playing on a guitar string. And while Cohen influenced Joni’s songwriting, it was Crosby who acted as Joni’s talent scout, even if he was so confident in her gifts, he didn’t see it as much of a gamble. The gambler becomes a devil, a man who stood out “like a ruby in a black man’s ear.” The passage evokes a line from Romeo and Juliet, I, v, 49: “It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night / Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear / Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!”

  This guy is a gambler, a pimp (of music anyway), an eagle taking unfair advantage of his prey from the sky. The usually indefatigable Joni—the one who could drink a case of her lover and still be on her feet—has had enough. At the end, the man is still gambling, and the singer is tired. “Slowin’ down / I’m gettin’ tired! Slowin’ down / And I envy you the valley that you’ve found.” Is the valley Laurel Canyon, so rich with musical and erotic possibility? Will the rambling gambler keep rolling the dice? The singer has had it and is ready to move on.

  “The Gallery” has also been associated with Cohen, although it is clearly not straight-up memoir; it is about an artist who is a connoisseur of beauty, and who continually collects beauties while his old lady stays back. It is a doormat role Joni would never have created for herself in real life. If anything, she would identify more with the artist than the old lady, like the libidinously resilient singer of “Cactus Tree” from Song to a Seagull. The singer of “The Gallery” wonders what it would be like to devote so many years to such a cad: “I gave you all my pretty years / Then we began to weather / And I was left to winter here / While you went west for pleasure.” This was as close to “Stand by Your Man” as Joni would ever get, and it ends with bitterness and regret.

  A more eerie brew is cooked up in “Roses Blue.” A curio in Joni’s canon, one as eccentric as the unreleased “Dr. Junk,” “Roses Blue” is a song that Joni introduced in a 1969 concert as a “song about a witch who lives in my nation’s capital,” referring to Ottawa and not Washington, D.C. “All you need to be a witch is the right amount of negativity and the belief that you have that power,” she said. The combination of major and minor is not only appropriately creepy for her subject, but actually inspired a jazz cover by the eclectic trumpeter-composer Dave Douglas on his album Moving Portrait (1998), an up-tempo exploration of chromatic surprise, sounding an awful lot like Wayne Shorter writing for Miles Davis, chordal explorations for the future (Douglas even quotes Shorter’s “Orbits” toward the end). “To me there was something incantatory and magical about ‘Roses Blue,’” recalled Douglas. “I mean, obviously the lyric deals with the supernatural, the paranormal, and the dark side of where that can go. In addition, as with all Joni Mitchell songs, the musical content supports the lyrics in such a profound way that the entire effect is deepened. It’s eerie. Joni has a deep, rich, elaborate, and finely tuned ear for harmony and its effects.”

  A version by the superb jazz pianist Brad Mehldau from Live in Tokyo (2004) shows how a virtuoso takes the song’s spooky juxtaposition of major and minor keys, scrambles them up, and keeps the melody and the chords intact. There is no chorus, no bridge, just a refrain about thinking of roses blue; the musical trajectory is insistently grim, as if the rose’s petals were wilting. The lyrics drift from a painterly image of roses blue—a still life with an ominous hue—and we learn, associatively, of a woman named Rose, who casts spells, mixes potions, and haunts. Among her dark arts are “zodiac and Zen.” Even though Joni fit the ’70s mold of a woman who believed, at least playfully, in astrology, and whose recent lover Leonard Cohen would eventually become an ordained Zen monk, and was already frequenting Zen monasteries and writing songs about them, lyrically, this song about the occult is an anomaly in Joni’s songbook; musically, the sublime jazz covers—and their exploration of advanced harmonics way beyond the vocabu
lary of folk—speak for themselves.

  On an album that includes songs of former neighborhoods, lost cities, ex-lovers, and the Lord of the Rings–inspired “I Think I Understand” (“Fear is like a Wilderland,” goes the song’s refrain, a chilling memory and wake-up call from her Tolkien period), Joni did not understand why America was killing civilians on a daily basis in Vietnam. Ever since the Tet Offensive of 1968, a consensus grew that America, strategically and morally, was losing the war, and televisions broadcast the evidence—a burning village, a crying Vietnamese child—seven days a week. Young men choosing between fighting an unjust war and risking prison looked to pop musicians for answers, even though none of them had backgrounds in foreign policy. Poets who wrote meaningfully on war—Tennyson, Yeats, Auden—weren’t foreign policy experts, either, and didn’t need to be. The best protest singer of the era, Bob Dylan (who was also no foreign policy expert), sat this war out, although songs from 1963—“Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Masters of War,” and so on—could still apply to any war anywhere. John Lennon, proudly naïve, came up with “Give Peace a Chance,” a song with a chorus anyone could understand, but with verses that needed an apparatus for anyone who wondered about most of the obscure figures name-checked in each verse. David Crosby’s “Almost Cut My Hair,” his reaction to the RFK assassination, turned the war into an aborted trip to the barbershop, and it was only slightly comforting to know that he decided to let his “freak flag fly.” Jimmy Cliff’s “Vietnam” was more like it: a simple story with a new groove—thought to be ska but actually what was then the new beat of reggae. Freda Payne’s “Bring the Boys Home” was a soulful tearjerker. Amid the new antiwar anthems, Joni’s first offering of peace sounded like the oldest ones, even older than “We Shall Overcome.” The eerie acappella of “The Fiddle and the Drum” is, like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” a song that could have been written hundreds of years earlier, as long as there has been war, which has been forever, even longer than the guitar.