Reckless Daughter

by David Yaffe

  Here, as in Dylan’s song, Joni uses eternal language for a topical issue, but with a twist. She sings the song to America, her “friend,” but her friend is not her country. She had been living in the States on a visa for only a couple of years, and was singing as an exile, an outsider to America, as someone who left Saskatoon in the dust, but for what? She was starting to make it big in America, but what was America exactly? People in her age group had become increasingly enraged over Vietnam, and the young men were not only enraged, they were terrified. She looked at the soldiers as scared young men trained to kill. She looked at the same images everyone else was seeing night after night on Walter Cronkite. She looked at Nixon and saw the face of death. This was a long way from Pierre Trudeau. The mainstream had become so warped, a counterculture had to be assembled to register dissent. What is wrong with this place? Who are you people? Why must it cost so many lives on both sides to intervene in someone else’s civil war?

  The song is stark acappella, stripped of her usual chromatic harmony, as if to say: this is an outrage beyond ornament, or ornamentation. One didn’t need to be against all wars to be against this one. There are neither fiddles nor drums in this song—just a voice, a melody, and words singing out against the beats of war. Joni would revive the song in 2007 for Jean Grand-Maître’s ballet, for another war and another time. Much of the rock and roll around her sounded like the beats of war. She was singing for something more delicate. “How did you come / To trade the fiddle for the drum?” she sang. Marches never sounded good to Joni, not like Rachmaninoff, not like Debussy, Ellington, or Edith Piaf. “The Fiddle and the Drum” would have fit in perfectly at the New Generation Club the previous year. And it provides an uncanny introduction to her finally recorded “Both Sides, Now.” By the time that song appeared as the coda of Clouds, Joni would be three cities, many lovers, and an entirely new life beyond where she had written it two years earlier. Judy Collins won the Grammy for performing it, but Joni had been living it, and would continue to live it.

  9 OUR HOUSE

  Joni moved out to California with her manager Elliot Roberts and David Geffen, who was just at the start of his own ascension. “I was their first racehorse, so to speak,” Mitchell told the music critic Robert Hilburn. “We moved out together from the concrete jungle into the sun and the trees . . . and I’ll never forget the smell of Laurel Canyon when we first moved in. Geffen didn’t move there, but Elliot and the rest of us moved all the way up Lookout Mountain. It was an amazing time.”

  As Elliot Roberts described it many years later, “It was the time everyone was coming out to California, there was a camaraderie among all the artists . . . up and down the canyon . . . playing new songs for each other. There was so much happening. Electric music was starting to happen. Acid rock was happening. The Byrds and [Jefferson] Airplane and the Grateful Dead, all those groups were playing all the small clubs.”

  The house at 8217 Lookout Mountain Avenue in Laurel Canyon proved to be the escape Joni needed from the turbulence of 1969. It fit the elegant bohemian princess that Joni had become: a California bungalow with stone steps, Tiffany stained-glass windows, and a big picture window through which the late-afternoon sun streamed in. The house had a large stone fireplace, and a wildflower garden studded with azaleas, palm trees, and eucalyptus. Sunset Boulevard—all its traffic, clubs, and commotion—was just a five-minute drive away, but the Lookout Mountain house was protected by the foliage from all the noise. It wasn’t the country roads and wild open prairie land of Joni’s childhood, but it was the kind of retreat she craved. The house featured an intricate Balinese-style carved front door. When the house next door burned down and Joni’s home was untouched, she ordered that the soot on her front door should never be cleaned: she considered it a talisman of good luck that had protected her home. Joni decorated the home with keepsakes from people and places she loved: a grandfather clock from Leonard Cohen, prints by Maxfield Parrish, Victorian shadow boxes, cloisonné boxes, and art nouveau lamps. There was a piano, and the house became a gathering place for the great musicians of the day.

  She had come such a long way from such a different place, but Joni fit into the Laurel Canyon scene as one might imagine a Katharine Hepburn walking onto a movie set. Once she was in the room, you couldn’t imagine anyone else playing the part. The music writer Bill Flanagan explained, “Joni took this really potent, popular image that had been building for seven or eight years anyway: the California girl, the Beach Boys girl, the beautiful golden girl with the long blond hair parted in the middle, and Joni not only was the girl, she was also the Bob Dylan, the Paul Simon, the Lennon-McCartney, writing it. She was the whole package. She was the subject and she was the painter and that was incredibly powerful for people.”

  The pull of Joni and the pull of Laurel Canyon was, and remains, one and the same for Graham Nash, who has said, “I can only liken it to Vienna at the turn of the century . . . Laurel Canyon was very similar, in that there was a freedom in the air, there was a sense that we could do anything. We were scruffy kids that were, in some small way, changing the world and changing the way people think about things. There was a sharing of ideas and a true love for being in the right place at the right time.”

  Graham Nash came to visit Joni and found, in her living room, the next chapter of his career. He wrote in his memoir, “The sun had just left the western sky as the cab crawled up Laurel Canyon, bathing the Hollywood Hills in the golden flush of summer . . . It was a place where there were free-spirited people just like me doing the things that I wanted to do, being creative and making music . . . Man, it looked like home to me.” On the run from his British rock star past, feeling very much like the “kid from Northern England” that he would always be inside, Nash had called Joni from the airport and she invited him over. He remembered that there was a green VW van parked in the driveway, and from inside the house he could hear “a jingle-jangle of voices.” Then, he recalled, “Joni was at the door and nothing else mattered . . . our connection was instant. Joni Mitchell was the whole package: a lovely, sylphlike woman with a natural blush and an elusive quality that seemed lit from within. Her beauty was almost as big as her talent, and I’d been pulled into her orbit, captivated from the get-go.”

  David Crosby and Stephen Stills were in Joni’s living room and David, calling Nash by his nickname, said to Stephen, “Play Willy that song.” In two-part harmony, David and Stephen started to sing “You Don’t Have to Cry.” Nash remembered, “It’s a brilliant song. They get to the end and I said, ‘Wow, Stephen, that’s an incredible song.’” Nash asked them to sing it again. Then he said, “‘Bear with me, sing it one more time.’ And on that third time, I heard the words, the melody and I knew what I was going to do.” Crosby, Stills & Nash was formed in Joni’s living room not just on that day, but in that moment. “Whatever sound that Crosby, Stills and Nash has was born in thirty seconds,” Nash remembered incredulously. “That’s how long it took us to harmonize that way. So much so that we burst out laughing. The [Buffalo] Springfields and the Hollies were good harmony bands, we knew what we were doing. We’d been making records in harmony for years. But this was different. Nobody has any claim on the notes that we sing. But nobody can sing like David, Stephen, and I when we join our voices together.”

  And nobody saw music and lyrics the way that Joni did. “There really was an ethic of peace and love and art and poetry,” said Elliot Roberts. “Amongst that crowd, poetry, even more than musicality, was revered, and Joan was the best poet of the time. It was the kind of period when she had a lot to say and everyone wanted to hear it.”

  Joni was the subject of her first major New York Times profile that year. When Susan Gordon Lydon, a reporter for the Times, came to visit in 1969, Joni played her the newly recorded cut of “Both Sides, Now.” “She’s the only one who can sing this song,” Nash remarked. Lydon agreed, writing, “Her version, mellowed by the experience of having written it and having sung it many times, and by the me
anings added to it by Dave Van Ronk and Judy Collins, sounded infinitely rich and definitive.” Once the song was done playing, a lovestruck Nash jumped up and said, “That was magnificent, babe. I’m gonna kiss you for that.” Elliot Roberts remarked, “You would’ve kissed her, man, if she would’ve spit . . . There sure is a lot of love in this house.” Joni, for her part, was less mushy—at least in front of the reporter. “Just sit there and look groovy,” she admonished Nash when he interrupted her guitar playing. Joni talked to Lydon about her songwriting process and how the songs evolved over time and with different interpretations: “I’m more prolific with melodies than with words, but quite often I write poems and then set them to music. I guess I’m primarily an artist; what I like best is making new music. It’s like going into a trance; I sit down with a melody and reminisce. I find it easier to think about my feelings in retrospect. The way I’d like to work from now on is to go into a studio as soon as a song is finished, when the feeling of the song is most intense. You should record songs when you believe them the most . . . But it’s funny—after a song’s been written, it becomes a whole different thing; you don’t own it anymore. I love to hear men sing my songs, because they’re written from a feminine point of view, and men bring totally different things to them.”

  Nash marveled at how Joni wrote songs. “Watching her was the most interesting process,” he said. “It’s almost like she channels. She was gone for hours. I mean she was physically right there, but she wasn’t there. She was gone. I’d say things to her and she wasn’t even listening, she was gone. It was a great thing to see, to see someone taken away by vision.” Joni was being taken away by vision on Lookout Mountain, but at twenty-five, she was also making the beginning of a domestic life with Graham. In his memoir, Graham remembered that the home he shared with Joni “was built in the 1930s by a black jazz musician, lots of knotty pine, creaky wooden floors, warped window sashes, mismatched carpentry. [It] cost about $40,000. She was not a rich girl at that point, so [Joni] used her artistic sensibility to dress that place in her inimitable style.”

  When the editors from Rolling Stone showed up to do their first major profile on Joni, Graham was “perched on an English church chair” and Joni was “making the crust for a rhubarb pie.” She would have, as she ever did, one foot in the 1950s of her youth and one foot in the new counterculture. She told them, “Lately, life has been constantly filled with interruptions. I don’t have five hours in a row to myself. I think I’m less prolific now, but I’m also more demanding of myself. I have many melodies in my mind at all times, but the words are different now. It’s mainly because I rely on my own experiences for lyrics.”

  California was home, but New York was still calling. Joni performed her first solo concert at Carnegie Hall that year. There’s black-and-white footage of her: she is wearing a long dress, holding her guitar, the microphone is so big it looks like a stage prop, and Joni’s blond bangs are so long they nearly cover her eyebrows. She looks happy. By way of introduction, she says, playfully, “It’s a long way from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, to Carnegie Hall.” She laughs at her own joke, a light and lilting, carefree laugh, and the audience bellows along with her. A man screams out, in a way that is quite undignified for the setting, “I LOVE YOU,” and Joni laughs again.

  Graham was with her, and he remembered that “the audience at Carnegie Hall was ecstatic that Joni was there and it was jammed to the rafters. It was Joan’s coming out in a really big way . . . She had reached a place in her career that was indisputable.” She sang, “When morning comes to Morgantown / The merchants roll their awnings down / The milk trucks make their morning rounds / In morning Morgantown.” And in that moment, the audience was lifted away to brighter, simpler, more hopeful places.

  Joni was proud of her Carnegie Hall debut. She’d flown her parents in from Canada, and the photos show them backstage. Myrtle’s smile is wide and toothy as she sits back in her black dress and her double-stranded pearls. Beyond the optics, it was another story. Joni and Graham were wearing maxi coats before they were in style, and heads kept turning in their direction. Myrtle and Bill walked six feet behind them. As conservative prairie Canadians, they were embarrassed to stand out. When Joni took off her coat, she had Gypsy clothes underneath. Fifteen minutes before showtime, Myrtle scolded, “Oh, Joan, you’re not going on in those rags.”

  “As if I was going to degrade them with my appearance,” Joni recalled. “That was typical of my mother. And the people she was afraid of, the upper crusties, they would have that same reaction. So frightened and so nervous, poor thing.”

  There’s a photograph from the end of the concert: Joni is holding a bouquet of flowers and a giant cutout heart that says, “Dear Joni, New York LOVES YOU.”

  A few months later, in August, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young played at Woodstock. Joni was invited as well. David Geffen remembered that the group arrived at LaGuardia Airport and that, as he put it, he “picked up a copy of The New York Times and it said, 400,000 people sitting in mud.” He turned to Joni and said, “Let’s not go.” She was scheduled to make her national TV debut on the Dick Cavett show the next day. What if she got stuck up there? Joni wasn’t pleased. She remembered, “The boys weren’t going to miss out on it and they rented a helicopter. They got in and . . . they got out [and] they crashed the TV show the next day.”

  “The deprivation of not being able to go provided me with an intense angle on Woodstock,” Joni recalled. “Woodstock, for some reason, impressed me as being a modern miracle, like a modern-day fishes-and-loaves story. For a herd of people that large to cooperate so well, it was pretty remarkable, and there was tremendous optimism. So I wrote the song ‘Woodstock’ out of these feelings, and the first three times I performed it in public, I burst into tears, because it brought back the intensity of the experience and was so moving.”

  On a personal level, though, hearing her boyfriend Graham Nash and her ex-boyfriend David Crosby waxing poetic about it was not easy to take. “They showed up raving about it,” Joni said in an interview on MTV News in the 1990s, “which was really like salt in the wound . . . ’Cause to be young then and to have missed that, even though it was that close, that was everything to me. But I guess it was meant for a reason, and because I couldn’t go, [Woodstock] dominated my mind. I watched everything on TV, I just sat in front of the TV and wrote most of the song in the first few days of the festival, and it was done by Sunday night.”

  Nearly four decades later, Joni saw the value in the song more than the event, and thought of it as a lost opportunity. She said to me:

  “‘Woodstock’ wouldn’t have been written if I had been there, because those events are full of the back room, full of sibling rivalries. There are pockets of cooperation, but everyone’s desperate to win. It’s not a sports event, but there is that element of it, and it accelerates up to opening night, and it translates to a lot of hideous effort. People will be playing beautiful at rehearsals, but by the time they get to opening night, their performances are grotesque with effort. It’s like competitive children at those events. From the audience, they don’t see it, but you see it backstage. I wouldn’t have been able to write it if I had been there, because I would have been caught up in the backstage neuroses. I ended up in the position of the fan who couldn’t go, so I could be more romantic about it than I could have been if I had been there and caught up in the reality of it. I saw it as the closing of a window of opportunity. It was the beginning of a potential, but it was also a funeral.”

  And so while a cultural moment was preparing itself in three days of peace, love, and music, with mud and mescaline and all the other now-legendary ingredients, Joni, holed up at the Sherry-Netherland, prepared to share music and quips with Dick Cavett, who, after the cancellation of the Smothers Brothers, had become TV’s emissary between counterculture and mass culture. Cavett was a Yale grad in the showbiz tradition of Cole Porter, who could trade barbs with Groucho Marx or even sit as a mediator in the Norman M
ailer–Gore Vidal feud (he sided with Vidal). He indulged past-their-primes Marlon Brando, Orson Welles, and Gloria Swanson, matched wits with Woody Allen, dished the dirt with Truman Capote, and had no idea how to talk to Stevie Wonder. He was sharp, a Nebraskan like Johnny Carson, but more erudite and proud of it. His Woodstock show would be like none other: a rap session where the most aggressive kids would get the most airtime.

  Since the Cavett show was the entire reason Joni missed Woodstock, it must have been unnerving, on her major American television debut, to be sharing the stage with people who had played Woodstock and made it back in time. Stephen Stills (who showed off genuine Woodstock mud on his jeans) and David Crosby (who compared the event to an “encampment of the Macedonian army”) represented the flight (to and fro) that Joni could have taken. Jefferson Airplane was there as well, with plenty of ribbing between Grace Slick and Cavett (who, name-checking another rock icon who made a few appearances on his show, called Grace Slick “Miss Joplin” and teased her about her time at the Finch Academy, an Upper East Side finishing school). Joni managed to play four songs and chime in when she could about the virtues of Pierre Trudeau or share her views on astrology (she noted that Crosby, a Leo, looked like a lion), but mostly she had to sit back and hear war stories about the event she’d missed, and on the broadcast she’d missed it for. Cavett had no idea at the time that Joni had missed the festival for his show, and if he had known, he would have been a nervous wreck. “If I were to use this for a short story, I would have Joni say, ‘I’ve gotta go to the festival. Everybody’s gonna be there,’” Cavett ruminated more than four decades later. “And then I’d have the manager say, ‘You want to play on somebody’s farm for some pigs and a hundred people instead of being on the Cavett show?’”