by David Yaffe
13 BETWEEN BREAKDOWN AND BREAKTHROUGH
James Baldwin wrote, “Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle. Love is a war. Love is a growing up.” Before Blue, no one had ever written about the growing up of love the way Joni had. After Blue, the genre of the love song would be forever changed, haunted by Joni’s hollowed-out hurt and her clear-eyed knowing. Sure, we would—as a culture—continue to write frothy, frilly love songs. But after Blue, that would always be a choice. We couldn’t pretend that we hadn’t heard the flip side and that, somewhere deep down, we didn’t know better.
“I’m open,” Joni told me in 2015. “I’m a living storybook.” If this is true, then the deepest, truest chapter in the Joni Mitchell storybook might be Blue. It wasn’t the way she wanted it to go, the life she dreamed for herself when she was a girl in Saskatchewan. In the late 1960s, there was a Sunday Canadian television news program called The Way It Is. Eager to capture a youthful, political audience, the show asked Joni to write its theme song. She declined. “I was totally politically green,” Joni remembered. “I thought, ‘How can I write the theme song for a news program?’ My mother was always badgering me into keeping up with current events. All I wanted to do was dance. And kiss.” A few years later, a few love affairs later, Joni was less starry-eyed about love. It is one of the hallmarks of Blue; it’s about what you see when the façades of the fairy tales have faded away. Joni told me that the “whole concept that romance was suffering was really foreign to me, even though that’s what a lot of my work was about. To me, romance should have been Hawaiian, if the church hadn’t gotten involved. It should have been up and friendly and robust.”
“Blue was very open and vulnerable, unprecedented in pop music,” she said. “All the men around me were really nervous. They were cringing. They were embarrassed for me. Then people started calling me confessional, and then it was like a blood sport. I felt like people were coming to watch me fall off a tightrope or something.”
On the Waterfront had come out in 1954, when Joni was still in elementary school, and decades later she marveled at Brando’s performance in that movie and its influence on Blue. “Marlon Brando is touted by nearly every actor who came after him for his performance in On the Waterfront. No one had seen anything like it, and they all agreed that it changed the standard. It was unprecedented. It had nothing to do with the Method. It had everything to do with Marlon’s personal genius. I’m a Method actor. The Method is that you deliver the lines like you never heard them before. So that every time you perform the song, it’s gotta come up like you never heard it before. As a result, I will phrase it differently to keep it spontaneous. Marlon’s take was that he couldn’t watch the rushes. He was totally embarrassed by his performance. And when they started laying this confessional label on me, I felt really embarrassed . . . When Blue came out it was not popular and it was shocking to the men around me. Stunningly shocking. And upsetting. Kris Kristofferson said to me, ‘Oh, Joni. Save something for yourself.’ The vulnerability freaked them out.”
So how did Blue rise beyond its initial reception to become Joni’s best-selling and most canonized album? One powerful reason is that Blue fits into the Great Album theory of pop music. Like the Great American Novel benchmark in literature, the Great Album theory is about pop music’s highest ambitions. If someone’s music stash has only one Joni album, that album is likely to be Blue.
Great Albums are usually made in a period of crisis, or change, or transition, or all of the above. In the case of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966), Brian Wilson’s incipient mental breakdown loomed over the material; with the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper (1967), it was Paul McCartney’s competition with Wilson, with the band outgrowing the limitations of performing for screaming girls in stadiums, prolonged time in Abbey Road Studios, and generous tabs of LSD; just a few years later, they would outgrow one another, too. Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks (1968) was driven by improvised Yeats-inspired lyrics sung against the grooves of jazz virtuosi (the guitarist Jay Berliner of Mingus fame, the bassist Richard Davis of Dolphy fame, and the drummer Connie Kay of Modern Jazz Quartet fame, anticipating Joni’s scintillating collaborations with Jaco Pastorius, Herbie Hancock, and Wayne Shorter). Simon and Garfunkel’s Bookends (1968) was superbly constructed, with beautifully crafted songs that fit together like book chapters—hence the title—and The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (also 1968) was similarly cohesive. On Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On (1971, the same year as Blue), Gaye was breaking from the Motown hit factory to produce a major, harmonically adventurous artistic statement, one that would inspire his former Motown label mate Stevie Wonder to take the leap and create a masterpiece of his own with Innervisions (1973), on which Wonder played every instrument and sang every vocal track himself. And Blood on the Tracks (1975) was Bob Dylan’s intimate and raw divorce album; Dylan said when he was writing the opening track, “Tangled Up in Blue,” he was tangled up in Joni’s Blue.
Even among these and other great albums, Blue still stands out. For sustained and beautifully wrought personal revelation—for sheer intimacy and soul baring—it is peerless. Often thought of as the ultimate depression album, it contains a great deal of joie de vivre, even if the more brooding songs left a bigger impact. The album, in fact, offers a cornucopia of moods and states: joy, sorrow, ennui, self-destruction, and getting loved so naughty, made weak in the knees. Joni has often criticized pop music for liking its sad songs in minor keys and its happy songs in major ones. But life is more nuanced than that. Joni described her approach—filled with suspended chords, mixing and matching chords with the roots of different chords, and with unconventional progressions—as “going along happy-sad.” Even though the sad notes are generally the last lingering harmonies listeners take away from the album, Blue is not just about feeling blue. It is about feeling generally, with songs so intimate, Joni has described them as “private letters that were published.”
Those letters are to California; to Cary Raditz, the Peace Corps volunteer she met as she was playing the role of cave hippie in Crete; to Graham Nash, her discarded “Old Man”; to Kilauren Gibb, her missing daughter, addressed as “Little Green”; to the composites (including Leonard Cohen and others) who inspired “A Case of You” and “This Flight Tonight”; to her own melancholy on “River” and “Blue” (where the “needles, guns, and grass” refer to James Taylor’s addiction to “needles,” and she wasn’t done yet on the matter). But who the letters are to is less important than who they are by. Joni has often said that if you listen and are thinking of her, you’re doing it wrong. You should listen, she insists, and find yourself. “Otherwise,” she said in 2013, “you’re just rubbernecking a car accident.”
Of “Blue,” Joni says, “I was demanding of myself a deeper and greater honesty, more and more revelation in my work in order to give it back to the people where it goes into their lives, and nourishes them, and changes their direction, and makes lightbulbs go off in their heads, and makes them feel. And it isn’t vague. It strikes against the very nerves of their life, and in order to do that, you have to strike against the very nerves of your own.”
Before the release of Blue, which the Rolling Stone reviewer Timothy Crouse praised in the August 5, 1971, issue as “some of the most beautiful moments in recent popular music,” the same magazine, in an awards issue in February, anointed Joni “Old Lady of the Year.” In a cruelly dismissive fashion, it presented an illustrated chart of how people in the music industry intersected and were connected. It was a familiar trope in magazines at the time. There were maps and constellations of writers and artists—who had worked with or inspired whom—and, of greater titillating interest, who had slept with whom. Joni was represented on the chart as a lipsticked kiss surrounded by a scattering of broken hearts, connecting her to David Crosby, Graham Nash, and James Taylor. They labeled her the “Queen of El Lay.”
It was deeply unfair. Male rock stars were celebrated for
their promiscuity, and no one parodied Stephen Stills for writing “Love the One You’re With” (a song with a chorus dominated by Joni’s soprano). Blue was all about being too much, excess love, excess pain, traveling through all those highs and lows. How low does she go? As far as blue can take her, as a mood, as a lifestyle, as a way of looking through a glass darkly. The Germans have a word for a poetic dwelling in misery: Weltschmerz, or world-weariness. Joni has a color, and she’s not trying to brighten its hues but to dig as deep as she ever has, deeper than “Both Sides, Now,” deeper than “The Circle Game.” The cycle of life has stopped at a dark and dangerous place, and she takes us with her. This is a new place and it’s not comfortable. A painter first, she dedicates the song to a color, and one can imagine, say, Picasso’s 1902 masterpiece Blue Nude, in which there is a nude female figure turning away, one knee up on her elbows, where she is cradling her face. If it weren’t for the shades of blue around it, the emotion would be indeterminate. With the use of this particular type of tumultuous blue, it looks like a study of a beautiful woman in agony, a recurring theme in Picasso’s painting and life. And yet the viewer admires the stunning brushstrokes while feeling the figure’s sadness. With Picasso in mind, she wraps her sad subject with haunting tones and dazzling vocal leaps. There are so many shades of blue, so many places to go. “Acid, booze, and ass / Needles, guns, and grass / Lots of laughs,” she sings, and we know, as her voice is still pristine, that she’s living it. Lots of laughs? Really? The song contains an allusion to the straightforward love song to Graham Nash, “My Old Man,” as a brief reminder of those laughs before returning to the abyss.
As groundbreaking as it was to write, as many people have bought and listened to and treasured this album, Blue was as lonely to release as it was to write. It took a long time for Joni to hear the echo of approval and appreciation that the album created. “Blue is just human,” she told me. “Everybody, if they’ve got a soul, is going to go through those changes, and yet the spotlight, nobody had ever written them in song, but I’m sure it’s in cinema—certainly Bergman.”
It’s the feeling underneath the tears, before the tears, the surge and the power of heartbreak that Joni has captured so masterfully in her work.
We learn right away that songs can be like tattoos. If one is not a heroin addict but the lover of one, then tattoos can be the closest metaphor for what James Taylor was doing to himself, to feel high, get low, fall deeper, and, as an artist with indelible ink, leave a mark. “Ink on a pin” rhymes with “underneath the skin.” Her dear old compatriot Neil Young sang hauntingly about “the needle and the damage done,” but Joni went all the way inside. The right kind of song could be a fix, too. Outside the pit, the word is that “hell’s the hippest way to go.” She disagrees, but then she wants to “take a look around it though.”
Joni has said that around this time she could cry if someone just looked at her. This was a problem for someone who had already played Carnegie Hall and would do it again the following year. “The club thing was kind of fun,” Joni has said. And you can see it: in every taped performance in a smaller room, she is laughing to herself. She’s a high school ham, just playing guitar with her friends. “The big stage, I hated it from the moment I went up there. I didn’t like that lofty adoration. It seemed deluded. The idea of people at my knees is horrifying to me.”
There’s a contrast between Joni and her friend Leonard Cohen here. Cohen thrilled to the stage. As he once told Rolling Stone, “Tours are like bullfighting. They are a test of character every night. [That] is something I’m interested in examining.”
A crowd is one thing. An ex-lover is another. At the end of the song, she makes an offering to Blue—the color, the mood, all of it. The song itself should be more than enough, but she ups the ante even more. It is a shell, and if Blue puts its ear to it, there is a foggy lullaby. Rest, rest, perturbed spirit. On Joni’s next album, she would sing that “when you dig down deep, you lose good sleep.” But even Blue needs a rest, and at the end of the song, Blue becomes an echoing soporific. It is the gift that keeps on giving.
This, from the vinyl era of its creation, was the end of side one. The movement to the next track, in its original format, meant getting up to flip the record, possibly right away, possibly later. Those suspended cadences at the end of “Blue” resound in the listener’s mind even longer than they slowly fade out and finish side one’s story. Side two starts with a remarkably different mood, one nostalgic for a Laurel Canyon home that she no longer shares with Graham Nash on Lookout Mountain. Despite her constant need for change—stylistically, chromatically, romantically—there is still a nostalgic part to Joni, one that recalls when it’s “coming on Christmas,” and wishes that she could transport herself from Laurel Canyon and its endless white noise of perfect weather to the Canadian prairie she couldn’t escape fast enough.
And so, as side two starts, Joni gives us a portrait of where she is and where we might be, as her listeners, at the dawn of the 1970s. She tells us that she’s sitting on a park bench in Paris, France, and there’s a hint of the small-town girl that she once was—it’s not just Paris, it’s Paris, France—as if she still sees it through the lens of the girl who sat in a Saskatchewan schoolroom, looking at a map and memorizing all the capitals of the world. She mentions her trip to Greece; there’s a reference to her former lover Cary, the rogue with the red hair; she goes to Spain but she’s not one of the jet set. They invite her in, those “pretty people” reading Rolling Stone and Vogue, but while she likes the scenery, she knows she can’t stay for long. All throughout the refrain is for California, the place that’s not cold and old and settled in its ways. It’s for California, the place that will take her as she is. She hasn’t gotten love right yet. She’s “strung out on another man” but she’s going to come home, to the truest home she’s ever known, and she’s going to try again. The incredible thing about the song is that while there’s some 1970s lingo here and there—“the folks I dig”—the song doesn’t feel dated at all. There is this powerful sense of the eternal in Joni’s best songs. It could be the 1970s, the ’80s, the ’90s, the 2000s, and unless something radically changes, you could be sitting in Paris, France, reading news from home that all seems bad and dreaming of California, that place that makes you feel good, like a rock and roll band.
The California of the song is more a collection of memories from afar than an actual space and place. “A Case of You” also patches together memories of love and loss, with the singer emerging rougher and tougher than any lover with a broken but still mighty and resilient heart, still big enough for the weight of the world. Cohen, quoting the Talmud, said that “there’s good wine in every generation,” but that “we have a special kind of feeling for the singers that we used to make love to.” “A Case of You” shares that special feeling, and, like Cohen, she shares it in the past tense, lingering over the bouquet of a vintage bottle. Her open-tuned dulcimer bangs out percussive, rough-and-tumble chords while James Taylor’s standard-tuning acoustic guitar tries to bring resolution but is drowned out. What makes “A Case of You” a masterpiece, lyrically, is the Leonard Cohen exchange, from “I am as constant as a northern star,” from Cohen quoting Julius Caesar, to “constantly in the darkness, where’s that at? If you want me, I’ll be in the bar,” what Joni wished she had said. And then, recalling the “Rainy Night House” trip with Cohen, recalls his mother with a painter’s eye:
I met a woman
She had a mouth like yours
She knew your life
She knew your devils and your deeds
And she said
“Go to him, stay with him if you can
But be prepared to bleed”
“That was about Leonard’s mother. They have the same mouth. She warned me, ‘Be prepared to bleed.’ All the mothers warn me against their sons.” In 2014, Cohen sang, “My father says I’m chosen, my mother says I’m not.” (Cohen sang this, to comic effect, as an observant Jew and practici
ng Buddhist.) Marsha Klonitsky loved her son, but with a realist’s eye. Then again, Cohen and Joni were never exclusive with each other. There were no promises to be broken. But the pattern of warning mothers, like a chorus of Cassandras, was what was so striking.
“The rest of ‘A Case of You’ is nothing,” Joni said. “It’s just a doormat song. Songs for women were always doormat songs. Songs like ‘Stand by Your Man’ were written by men. They’re all male fantasy and my stuff is not male fantasy at all. It’s instructed to make men a little more informed.” Joni’s vocal leaps are breathtaking, sounding like she’s still the one at last call. If you want her, she’ll be at the bar, and she could outdrink all her former lovers combined. This should not be taken literally. Her former lover David Crosby would set a new standard for substance abuse, and James Taylor, who played so sweetly, was hooked on the smack that Joni says she never tried. Sure, these guys have given her a hard time, and sure, she can take it, but the song itself is evidence of more beauty and truth. This is the Joni Mitchell that her listeners would want, frozen in vocal leaps, emotional depths, passionate, sultry, full of memories, but in absolute possession of them. This is a beautiful woman who is sensitive, sensuous, and fully attuned to experience, yet somehow beyond heartbreak. “Love is touching souls,” says a Rilke-quoting lover, and she’ll take it at face value, without asking the Carole King–Gerry Goffin question: Will you still love me tomorrow? Tomorrow, Joni will need to be emotionally independent enough to come up with this song. She’s not demonizing her exes. The song is a tribute, not so much to them as to herself. She is the one who can drink a whole case and walk out upright. If the song is a love song to anyone or anything, it is to her resilience.