by David Yaffe
When Ladies of the Canyon was released, “Big Yellow Taxi” became instantly popular—because its protest message was timely and right, and the song was completely infectious. Bob Dylan soon covered it, and replaced the line at the end about the big yellow taxi taking away “my old man” with a Woody Guthrie–like sentiment about a big yellow tractor pushing around his house and land. It was a line that Joni would add for live performances. Like “The Circle Game,” “Big Yellow Taxi” was a song that became popular with children and families, reflecting both the innocence of young children and the parental hope that they will inherit a better world.
With “Big Yellow Taxi,” Joni was not just riding the wave of American infatuation with Hawaii, she was also, more seriously, exploring the crest of a growing interest in environmentalism. In 1962, Rachel Carson had published Silent Spring, a damning condemnation of chemical companies and pesticides, a book that would be credited with launching the modern environmentalism movement and that inspired Joni’s “Hey, farmer, farmer / Put away that DDT now.” Just as Joni became a composer in her way, without any formal music training, Carson, too, despite her obvious and prodigious gifts, was a maverick without a Ph.D. who had to fight the sexism in her field to do her groundbreaking work. While it’s unclear how much Joni knew of Carson’s personal story, it seems certain she would have found the scientist to be a kindred spirit. “Put some time into ecology,” Joni would muse on “Song for Sharon.” She did it most memorably in this song. Marie Curie, Rachel Carson, these were scientists who took on the status quo. These were Joni Mitchell’s kind of people.
From the alarm (albeit gentle and whimsical) of “Big Yellow Taxi,” Joni ends the album on a more philosophical note. She sings:
Sixteen springs and sixteen summers gone now
Cartwheels turn to car wheels thru the town
And they tell him, “Take your time, it won’t be long now
Till you drag your feet to slow the circles down”
By 1970, “The Circle Game” had already been a hit for Tom Rush and Buffy Sainte-Marie. It was a wistful song that singers loved to sing, and it changed with every singer—how they presented it. The carousel is a circle and a game. It may not move forward, but it’s life, and even with all its shortcomings, it’s a pretty good ride. Even if no one knows how it will turn out.
The critics praised Ladies of the Canyon and, as had become common in their approach to Joni’s work, their appreciation of her beauty and the beauty of her music was often blurred. Writing in The New York Times, Don Heckman confessed, “I have been hopelessly in love with Joni Mitchell since the unheralded arrival of her first brilliant recording. This is her third collection, and she keeps getting better and better. Her crystal clear imagery is as shining bright as ever, and her melodies, if anything seem to be improving. She always has been a fine guitarist and now, surprisingly, she is becoming a growingly powerful singer, too. Unlike the sometimes delicate vocalizing on her first two recordings, Miss Mitchell’s work here seems to revel in chance-taking.” The stakes would soon be raised more than anyone could know.
11 SAND
One of the loveliest songs on Ladies of the Canyon is the plaintive “Willy,” about Graham Nash, but by the time the album was released in 1970, the relationship was over. “I had sworn my heart to Graham in a way that I didn’t think was possible for myself and he wanted me to marry him,” Joni later said. “I’d agreed to it and then just started thinking, ‘My grandmother was a frustrated poet and musician. She kicked the kitchen door off the hinges.’ And I thought maybe I’m the one that got the gene who has to make it happen . . . As much as I cared for Graham, I thought, ‘I’ll end up like my grandmother, kicking the door off the hinges.’ It’s like, ‘I better not.’ And it broke my heart.”
The year was 1969, and she was twenty-six years old. Everything in the world was changing, and young men and women were rewriting, relationship by relationship, the rules of love, lust, marriage, and engagement. Joni took off for Greece and sent a telegram from Crete that said, “If you hold sand too tightly in your hand it will run through your fingers. Love Joan.” For years, she would speak with great tenderness of Graham Nash. She could be maligning her contemporaries left and right, but Nash was a sacred subject. “I loved the man so I can’t say a bad word about him.”
That was before the publication of his 2013 memoir, Wild Tales. In the book, Nash describes sailing with David Crosby on his boat, the Mayan. They set sail on January 23, 1970, months after his breakup with Joni. Nash recalled, “Joni met us just outside of Panama, and that altered the dynamic. I knew she was coming and it was anything but pleasant. Some kind of argument broke out, with Joan yelling that I hated all women. Coming from somewhere else, I would have dismissed such an irrational remark, but from her I had to think about it and it hurt, for sure. In the end it was nothing more than a way to strike out at me. She had come to Panama to have a nice sail with David and me, but things had turned too ugly between us.”
When we met, Joni countered all the important details of Graham’s sailing story: “It was unbelievable what he left out—the drama, the real drama,” Joni recalled in 2015. Because she is Joni, her first quibble is how the story of that boat ride is told. She agrees, the trip was monumental. But she finds Graham’s telling of it to be lacking, “I think these people are not storytellers. They’re sleeping through their lives.” It bothers her that he is clearer about where they kept their stash than on the details of their relationship. She told me, “First of all, he remembers where the dope was hidden: that’s the clue. Just before I got there, the cops raided the boat and they didn’t find the dope. It was hidden in a jar in the refrigerator. He remembers that. He remembers where the dope was hidden. In the meantime, they’re all beating me up for leaving Graham.”
All of a sudden we are there: at the soft spot beneath the steely layers that Joni has become known for. In the rock and roll legend books, theirs is the fairy-tale romance of another era: Joni, the blond, blue-eyed girl who could both bake and play the hell out of a guitar, and Graham, the brown-haired British Prince Charming who wanted nothing more than to live in that little castle on the hill in Laurel Canyon with the girl/musical genius whom he adored. In the telling, Graham is guileless. Why? Because he does more press than Joni and wrote it down in a best-selling memoir. Even after all these years, Graham has never wavered from this narrative, so his version sticks. And there’s even a score to it! “Our House” didn’t just make it onto charts all over the world, it’s become the ultimate paean to domestic bliss, a song to be played at weddings. In other words, Graham’s version feels like truth because we can all hum along to it.
Not surprisingly, this gets under Joni’s skin. Not just because she is competitive and prides herself on being more of a truth-teller than most of the Laurel Canyon crew, but because she loved him. She did not waltz away from the relationship without a second thought. She gave it a second thought, and a third, and by the time I interviewed her, she had thought it through thousands of times. “I was the great love of his life and I broke his heart,” she says, a bit derisively. “Well, my heart was much more broken than his. He just jumped right back into dating, he had one after another after another. And I suffered because I really thought we had a very good relationship, but at a certain point I introduced him to David [Crosby]. Now I had to take Graham and David, and it was as if they were married and he chose David. I chose to leave.”
Joni remembered the sailboat ride as torturous and ill planned. “Graham says I got on ‘somewhere near Panama,’” she scoffed. “There was no ‘somewhere near Panama.’ We sailed from Jamaica to Panama. There’s nowhere in between.”
As Joni remembered it, Crosby and Nash were ill-equipped for the journey: there was no radio, no lifeboat. “David trained Graham, who had never sailed before, but who was a smart dog, as second mate,” Joni told me. “But he doesn’t mention that we hit seas that were completely abnormal, with ten-story swells, in good, su
nny weather. And going up ten stories and down ten stories, I got what might have been my first Morgellons attack. I got a full-body rash. Every pore doughnuted up like chicken pox blisters. They wrapped me in a sheet and tied me to the railing because of these swells. And I spent three days throwing up over the side. I hit the shore and just ran, so glad to be on the ground.”
When they arrived in Panama, Joni and Nash started fighting in earnest. Joni told me, “It got ugly. We had just broken up. I hadn’t expected him to be on the boat. David invited me; there were quite a few people on board. I had enjoyed sailing with him, and he’s a good sailor. Not so good that you don’t have lifeboats and a radio when you’re going to make a long sail like that, and then hit abnormalities. It was stupid. You’d think Graham would have the sense to be panicked, because we were in this extraordinary situation, improperly equipped. He says when we landed, it got ugly and I called him a woman hater. I racked my brain and thought, I wouldn’t even call David Crosby a woman hater, and he’s a human hater. He admires my talent, but not to my face. They admire my talent, but socially, it creates problems. They have to attack me. It’s weird.”
Graham has always professed his admiration and affection for Joni, and her reaction to his memoir reveals both her own deep feelings for him and how much she struggles with the notion that she alone is to blame for the breakup of their relationship, that if she’d only been a little less reckless with his heart, the two of them would still be playing piano and buying farm-stand flowers on Lookout Mountain.
Joni told me, hurt written across her face, “Graham says that I called him a woman hater. He said I was promiscuous.”
In Nash’s book he writes that he and Joni went to visit her parents in Saskatoon, and they wouldn’t let the two of them sleep in the same room. “I can’t describe what Joan’s room looked like,” he wrote, “because I wasn’t allowed within twenty feet of it. Bill and Myrtle were a very straight, religious couple, and they weren’t about to let a long-haired hippie sleep with their daughter under their roof . . . It wasn’t like she was a virgin, not even close. But just to make sure, they put me in a downstairs bedroom, separating us by a floor, and made it clear I’d need an army behind me if I intended to sneak up there.”
Joni found the line “not even close” to be deeply wounding.
“Now, does a man say that about the great love of his life?” she asked me. “No, he doesn’t.”
She grew even more heated. “It isn’t even true. In the Summer of Love, I was one of the least promiscuous people around. I got pregnant right out of the chute with my friend. I called for that. Then I made a bad marriage trying to keep my child, then I had an affair with a drummer in New York whose girlfriend was away, and when she came back it was over. Four people! Is that ‘not even close’?”
Looking back on the Summer of Love decades later, Joni said, “Free love—now we know there’s no such thing. Pay later, always.” She was joking, but not really. That sand ran through Graham’s fingers long ago, yet the two old lovers were still telling competing versions of their story. Joni was convinced that it was her pictorial memory—stored up like film, she would say—that would matter in the end. She was right, she knew it, and she knew that he must have known it, too. Their accounts may differ, but the upshot is the same: you really don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.
12 BLUE
As 1970 drew to a close, Joni did one more major benefit concert, Amchitka, supporting the launch of a fledgling environmental organization, Greenpeace, which was protesting nuclear weapons tests in Amchitka, Alaska. Joining her there, as a surprise guest, was a young James Taylor, who, for a brief but crucial time, would be Joni’s old man (though not “My Old Man” of her song, a keepsake from her romance with Graham Nash). The two were both regulars at the Troubadour, a West Hollywood club on La Cienega that became famous as a launching pad for a generation of singer-songwriters. Taylor was twenty-two. Joni was twenty-six. She later said, “He wasn’t very well known when I first met him, but the things I did hear were a bit conflicting. But I fell for him right away because he was very easygoing and free-spirited. We shared a lot of similar interests and common ground.” Taylor fell hard for Joni, too, writing poems and love letters to her. He said, “She’s so sensual and free with her body. She’s like a goddess: a goddess of love.”
At the Amchitka concert, they played together on “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and he jumped in when she forgot a verse. Later that month, they performed together again, this time at the Paris Theatre in London. Onstage, they harmonized—mellifluously—on “You Can Close Your Eyes,” which he was said to have written for her. On the live recording, broadcast on the BBC, Joni can be heard giggling before their voices blend, as if they were meant to be together, as if closing their eyes meant entering a dream. “I don’t know no love songs / And I can’t sing the blues anymore / But I can sing this song, and you can sing this song when I’m gone.” That was James Taylor’s song, but it was about what both of them were experiencing and creating, something that’s not quite a love song and not quite the blues. They can each sing this song—along with all the others, by both of them—when they’re gone. When they sang together—on his album Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, or onstage—they each seemed to be in ecstasy, in harmony in more ways than one. But offstage, it was clear that they were each seriously disturbed. This euphony would not last for long. In one telling photo, Taylor is looking down, stoically enduring something that will turn dark very soon. Joni, one braid over her shoulder, has a look of distress in her eyes: her own Blue Horizon is coming soon. Given Taylor’s history, it would be fair to say that he was self-medicating, and while it gave her material for a few songs, she knew that as his career was taking off, he was going down, and she wasn’t going to go all the way down with him.
Taylor’s “Fire and Rain,” one of his best-loved songs, was a stark account of a friend’s suicide and his own shock therapy; it is a beautiful distillation of end-of-the-rope mourning and melancholia, and if he had written more songs like it, he would have been closer to Blue’s level of astonishing vulnerability. The clinical depression he sang about so nakedly on that song had landed him in the famous McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, which also treated Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Ray Charles, and, later, David Foster Wallace. That depression led to a heroin addiction, and as he fell deeper into the pit, Joni stayed with him, long enough and deep enough that she emerged with a batch of new songs, some of them darker and more disturbing than ever. There is really no consolation for such misery, but if anything can come out of it, it can be not only surviving to tell the tale, but writing something greater than you have written before. Or composing songs as deep, honest, and achingly gorgeous, in their way, as anything anyone has ever done, which is what Joni would eventually do on Blue. All that suffering and turbulence was not in vain.
In 1962, Herb Alpert (then famous for Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass band) and his business partner, Jerry Moss, formed a label they called Carnival Records in what was then Alpert’s garage. When they discovered the name “Carnival” was taken, they used their initials and formed A&M Records, which would become one of the most important independent labels in the history of American music. They then purchased a complex of properties at 1416 North La Brea in Hollywood, the old Charlie Chaplin studios, which they transformed into a cutting-edge recording studio and a suite of executive offices. Through the 1960s and ’70s, artists flocked to the Hollywood location to work with the finest mixers and sound engineers in the business. Burt Bacharach, Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66, Quincy Jones, Paul Williams, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Liza Minnelli, Cat Stevens, Joan Armatrading, and Peter Frampton all made music and magic in the buildings’ four recording studios: A, B, C, and D.
Joni recorded Blue in Studio C. The Carpenters were recording in Studio A. Carole King was recording Tapestry in Studio B. King would write in her memoir, A Natural Woman: “A constant stream of singers, musicians, friends, and
family flowed in and out of the recording studios along Sunset Boulevard. At A&M we commuted down the hall. Sometimes we commuted between A&M and Sunset Sound . . . When I wasn’t working on my own album I drove to Sunset Sound to play as a sideman and sing background on James [Taylor’s] songs . . . Periodically James came over to A&M to play acoustic guitar and sing background on my record. Physical proximity to me and romantic proximity to James brought Joni’s beautiful voice to both James’s and my albums. Sometimes it seemed as if James and I were recording one massive album in two different studios.”
Joni’s instinctual sense added to the lore that would surround Studio C. As Carole King recalled, “Studio C had a reddish wood Steinway piano that everyone said was really special. One morning I was able to slip in and try that piano out. I couldn’t help but agree; there really was something extraordinary about it. It felt good to play, and its exceptional sound resonated with Lou [Adler] and [engineer] Hank [Cicalo], as well. Unfortunately, the red Steinway also resonated with Joni and Henry Lewy, which led to Joni and me vying for time in Studio C to record basic tracks. Unknown to me, Hank made several attempts to move the red Steinway into B, but Joni and Henry wouldn’t allow it.” One evening, King learned that Studio C was available—for three hours—before Joni was coming in. She rushed in with her team and in three takes recorded “I Feel the Earth Move.”
In a departure from the covers of her first three albums, all featuring Joni’s playful artwork, the cover of Blue was stark, graphic. The photographer Tim Considine shot her singing, possibly in ecstasy, possibly in sorrow, probably in both, and she is sinking into the color blue. In his 1976 study of black music, Stomping the Blues, Albert Murray wrote that the blues was like the catharsis of Greek tragedy, and that while one was singing or playing the blues, one was stomping the blues away. This kind of blue didn’t seem like that.