Reckless Daughter

by David Yaffe

  Eight years after its release, and for the first time since the nasty “Queen of El Lay” squib, Joni spoke to Rolling Stone. In the interview, she remembers the making of Blue as a time of thin skin and bare bones: “At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world, and I couldn’t pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy.” One gets a sense of what she means from the album’s most morose moments. And it is those moments that have inspired the most intimate appreciation from her listeners, when she was between breakdown and breakthrough.

  At the end of 1999, the pop music critics of The New York Times selected twenty-five albums that were emblematic of the twentieth century. They chose albums, not singles, even though albums as a genre did not become popular until the late 1940s, because they wanted to choose artistic statements that were complete in their rendering. The works they chose ranged from Tito Puente’s 1957 masterpiece Dance Mania to a very different album made the next year, Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely. Michael Jackson’s Thriller made the list, as did albums by the Ramones, Nirvana, Public Enemy, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan. It surprised no one that Joni was one of only three female solo artists to be named. By the end of the twentieth century, the Joni Mitchell renaissance was in full swing. Of Blue, the critics wrote: “A restless woman travels, falls in love and longs for what she left behind as she moves on; in the background 1960s’ ideals crumble. Joni Mitchell turned unsparing autobiography into sparse songs that quietly rejected symmetry and happy endings while they poured out her yearning. As she ushered in a confessional mode for pop songwriting, few of her emulators noticed that her seemingly unguarded revelations were so finely constructed.” It was one of the few moments when Joni and her critics saw eye to eye. After all, it was Joni who had said, “You have to have a certain grab-ability initially and then something that wears well for years to come.”

  14 THE SUNSHINE COAST

  After Blue, the substitute for hope took the shape of not another lover, but a place: Canada, oh Canada. Although she had grown up in the central provinces, she went to the west, to British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast: even the name seems like good medicine for someone struggling with depression. With unspoiled ocean views from every vista, old-growth forests, pebble beaches, and dozens of waterfalls, the region was the polar opposite of what Los Angeles was becoming in the booming 1970s. The First Nation communities of the coast, the Squamish and the Sechelt, kept their history alive through storytelling and environmental outposts in the region: something Joni would have also liked. “I know neighbors in B.C. and I go to town,” Joni told me. “I’m not a recluse. I’d ride my bike in the country and smoke and watch the birds fly. And I’d come home feeling wonderful. I’m happy observing water, especially. So that was my shrink.”

  She bought property, put up her Canadian flag, and sequestered herself in what she called “a little stone house like a monastery where I could just go away and hide.” There, she could live without electricity because she believed it was “so carcinogenic. I had a revelation about it. You’ll never cure cancer until you go back to candlelight.”

  Tony Simon was very present in those days, a confidant from her Saskatoon days who had become, in a casual way, her lover during this period when she could trust very few people. “The place she originally built in 1971 was entirely designed by her,” Simon recalled. “She made changes as the thing went along. She basically built the structure around herself, so it reflects her personality in a lot of ways. That little house, impractical now, was a jewel. There was a pet heron that stood out on a rock. There’s a lot of things about that house that are so natural. It looked like it could have been there six hundred years—stone cottage, nothing fancy. I would think her memories about that place are all pretty positive. The original property she bought was around sixty acres. Because, arguably, the most beautiful sixty acres you could find in the world. The water is uncharacteristically warm for the area. You’ve got big trees and the place is so beautiful beyond description. She bought a couple of neighboring properties to give her more room and protect her from people building on the property. That area is unbelievably gorgeous. It was part of her artwork.”

  “I was at that place outside Vancouver,” Leonard Cohen recalled. “It must have been soon after she got it. It was a beautiful house. It was very bare, like a stone cell. Very beautiful. Austere.”

  That was the plan—beauty, austerity, solitude. She had escaped to what seemed like paradise. She would call her B.C. retreat her Walden Woods, and like Henry David Thoreau, she wanted to live deliberately. She buried her electrical lines—this was standard—and avoided contact with the outside world, although if she really needed company, she could get it from Vancouver friends or invited guests. She had only one TV station and couldn’t always tune in to Midnight Special, so there was even more time to turn inward. But the home was memorable because making a home was one of her great gifts. As Graham Nash once said, “She could transform a shack and make it look chic and gracious.”

  It may seem counterintuitive for an artist on the cusp of her greatest commercial success to be roughing it, but then what seemed necessary for Joni’s life also became crucial for her art. She couldn’t just keep writing relationship songs, when relationships, the further she went along, seemed to be mere folly.

  She was more than a little battered after Blue and wanted to live up to her own words and get back to the garden for real. There must be more to life, Joni figured. “I bought every psychology book I could lay my hands on. Jung, Freud, theology, self-help, psychiatry,” she said. She also said she threw all of them against the wall. And then she was introduced to Nietzsche, who came recommended by the singer Ronee Blakley—another singer on Geffen’s new label, Asylum, who would eventually give an Oscar-nominated performance as a fictional country singer in Robert Altman’s Nashville. Nietzsche would stick with Joni. He taught her that, among other things, “to live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” Nietzsche also wrote that “without music, life would be a mistake,” and she would follow both of these ideas when she wrote the songs that would appear on For the Roses (1972), which would be Joni’s first for Geffen’s new label. The ironically named Sunshine Coast was a good place for a bad mood. Her view of the ocean was spectacular and the rain was relentless; Emily Carr, the nineteenth-century Canadian writer and painter, called it the wettest place on earth.

  It was on this rainy, craggy coast that Joni would learn, as she would sing on the album’s title track, “new lessons in survival.” The girl who so famously sang “I’m selfish and I’m sad” wanted to not just sing the words, but do something about them. “Depression can be the sand that makes the pearl,” she later said. “Most of my best work came out of it. If you get rid of the demons and the disturbing things, then the angels fly off, too. There is the possibility, in that mire, of an epiphany.”

  She came across a small study called Beethoven: His Spiritual Development. First published in 1927, it was a groundbreaking text because the author, J.W.N. Sullivan, argued, “I believe that in his greatest music Beethoven was primarily concerned to express his personal vision of life. This vision was, of course, the product of his character and his experience. Beethoven the man and Beethoven the composer are not two unconnected entities, and the known history of the man may be used to throw light upon the character of his music.”

  For Joni, the book was a valuable analysis of how a working musician struggles with the dual pressures of life and creativity. She told the Toronto Star, “It was all about his struggles, and self-doubts and his worries about how his work was being received and what it all meant on a deeper level and, of course, about his going deaf. At the time, that’s just what I was thinking about too. How am I going to get back in the saddle? And what about the audience? Would you still love me if you knew what I was really like?”

  Joni, seeking
wisdom in solitude, away from the media circus described in “For the Roses,” found a bona fide genius who, like her beloved Van Gogh, was too rough and coarse to be appreciated in his own time. Van Gogh famously cut off an ear, and Beethoven, also famously, lost the use of both of his, the ultimate betrayal. Joni, who had already survived polio, knew something about a rogue body. As the months on the Sunshine Coast went by, Joni began composing at the piano, a piece bigger and more ambitious than anything she had tried before. She could not come up with lyrics for a while, and, as a placeholder, called it “Roll Over Beethoven Revisited.” Eventually, she called it “Ludwig’s Tune,” put in parentheses after settling on “Judgement of the Moon and Stars.” This song presents Joni’s biggest challenge yet: without classical training, she’s going to give Beethoven a tribute from one of the roughs, whose piano had no smooth technique but was as open as the night sky. Even when ears have turned deaf, there is still the muse beyond the music. Joni preferred Beethoven to Mozart, who, when he wasn’t at his darkest, sounded too perfect, too courtly, too much, she would say, like wallpaper for princes. Beethoven was the sound of what was rejected by the court. Joni identifies with a man too raw and wild for this world, whose ability to hear is denied him at the peak of his powers. On June 10, 1972, a few months before the release of For the Roses, Joni performed the song on the BBC, and while the network had its fill of programs on Beethoven, it had never heard anything like this:

  This is a song about Beethoven. I was reading a book on his spiritual development and my heart really went out to him because here he was with all this genius, which wasn’t really accepted in his own time. People thought he was really radical and crazy and you couldn’t do parallel fifths. It just wasn’t music, you know? Plus he was kind of an immalleable person and kind of coarse by the standards of the courts in those days, so though he had an eye for all of the women of the courts, they didn’t really have much of an eye for him. So there was another frustration in his life, coupled with the idea that he couldn’t even hear some of his final music.

  Rock audiences can often be too rude, and jazz audiences can be too hip, but classical audiences can be the worst: so snooty, they have to repress all reactions. Schumann would have been too wild to sit still in the concert hall, and Beethoven didn’t fit in, either. By the time he went deaf, even listening to his own great work was denied him. Manners could not have been less relevant.

  For Joni, this was as pure as it could get. She first became an artist when polio stole her athletic ability. By the time she wrote this song, she learned there was so much more to lose: her daughter was lost and many relationships were in the dust. She still had her music—at the full range of her vocal powers—but she knew that one day she would lose those, too. When she read about Beethoven’s Geist, she knew that, by the time of the Ninth Symphony and the late quartets, that’s all he had left: his Zeit was not giving him his due. Just as Joni had the rustling arbutus tree for an audience, the only audience that mattered for Ludwig was the moon and stars. Their judgment was all he had left. “So you get to keep the pictures / That don’t seem like much,” she sang. Deafness was a raw deal for this raw spirit. The keys under his fingers were cold, just a touch and a memory of a sound. Beethoven was the first great composer for the piano forte, but he reached beyond the construction of any instrument: “Condemned to wires and hammers / Strike every chord that you feel / That broken trees / And elephant ivories conceal.” Musical instruments, even when they are made from nature, are still artificial. The deaf genius just needs to pound the hell out of that piano, the wilder, the better.

  As Joni’s legend grew, she was known to compare herself to Van Gogh, Picasso, Miles Davis, and Beethoven. Modesty was not her thing, but “Judgement of the Moon and Stars” proves that her identification with such hallowed figures was more legit than most people could know.

  15 FOR THE ROSES

  It was up there, north of Vancouver, shrinking herself with the ocean air and musing on Beethoven, that she began writing the songs that would become her fifth studio album, For the Roses. She presented many of the album’s new songs at a concert at Carnegie Hall on February 23, 1972, about eight months before its release. There was thunderous applause for each one. The audience was getting to know the many sides of Joni Mitchell: the dark and the light—and yes, they still loved her. But “For the Roses” is about the complexity of applause, and after the clapping died down, she explained the meaning of the title to her rapturous fans:

  It comes from the expression “to run for the roses” . . . That’s when you take this horse and he comes charging into the finish line and they throw a wreath of flowers around his neck and then one day they take him out and shoot him. It’s kind of a macabre thing to say, I guess.

  She concluded this “macabre thing” with a giggle, but she was deadly serious. She knew she had been groomed to be a prize horse, but that she would eventually be put out to pasture, and so would James Taylor, and so would the next poet who would tremble and make up tunes for love and sing sorrow into the sound hole. When she first began to get mainstream success and reporters asked about her management team, Elliot Roberts and David Geffen, she would tell them, “I was their first racehorse, so to speak.” She was always aware that her ambition and her success did not come without a price. But she had made a decision a long time ago to run for the roses, aware of what would happen once that wreath was hung around her neck.

  Before she moved to the Sunshine Coast, Joni had said, “I’m a little in awe of cities, being raised in a prairie town in Saskatchewan. I thought then that cities were beautiful. I judged them by their neon. Then in New York I found that cities are really vulgar. I saw their dirt, found they were plastic and in a rush for the dollar. Now I’m ruralizing myself again. I owe it to myself to live where there’s greenery.” She had taken her own advice and gotten back to the garden, but she had become more of a city person than she realized. In a year, she found herself back in California again. With no place to stay, she “came to stay with David Geffen as a guest. And I was kind of the Woman Who Came to Dinner. I ended up staying on for a while.” Geffen for his part remembers the period fondly. “We were roommates. For me, it was a very heady time. I had just signed Bob Dylan and I was dating Cher. You know, it was very tumultuous and a lot of fun and seventies.”

  It was 1972 and confusion was the order of the day, as Marvin Gaye continued to sing in his prophetic masterpiece, “What’s Going On?” There was an atmosphere of immense struggle and a lingering through-line of possibility from the ’60s. The inner cities of America were flooded with drugs, and the groundwork for the incarceration nation was building. Angela Davis was released from prison and Shirley Chisholm made her historic bid for the presidency. We were still at war with Vietnam, and the Watergate scandal was breaking. Loretta Lynn made music history with “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Ms. magazine had just been launched, and the first female FBI agents were hired. Joni, the traditional girl who was raised in the 1950s and came of age in the ’60s, created an album that spoke to the duality of that moment in a way few musicians could have. The Los Angeles Times wrote, “At a time when so many of our most successful and respected songwriters—from Carole King to Gordon Lightfoot to James Taylor—are having difficulty coming up with something fresh in their music, Joni Mitchell, as literate a writer as we have, continues to produce works of richness and value.”

  Vocally, For the Roses would be the first time Joni explored a sultry quality in her voice, one she didn’t have before, a quality that would continue to deepen and ripen over time. This was partly her continuing emancipation from the influence of Crosby, Stills & Nash, partly from aging, but, most dramatically, from cigarettes, which she had been smoking since she was nine years old. Accelerating the maturation process, something that was, at this stage, like a fine wine.

  It is not just her voice that has deepened, but the range of her concerns. “For the Roses” is as elegantly crafted a song as Joni would ever w
rite, but behind its lovely hooks, turns, and resolutions is a cynicism stewed over a summer of solitude. In an insistent soprano, she announces that life in the wilds of the Sunshine Coast has led her to reflect on subject matter broader than Blue’s cycle of love, romance, and inconsolable melancholy. And she isn’t the only pilgrim on this album. There are questers everywhere, looking up for divinity and down for junk. “Some turn to Jesus / And some turn to heroin,” she sings, leaving no room for anything in between. Joni nods to the daughter she gave up when she adds, “Some watch their kids grow up.” And yet, even in the midst of all the very Joni imagery, there’s the clarion song of a revolutionary:

  Who let the greedy in

  And who left the needy out

  Who made this salty soup

  Tell him we’re very hungry now

  The title song would inaugurate a series of what Joni called “I Hate Show Business” songs that would include “The Boho Dance” (1975) all the way up to “Taming the Tiger” (1998), in which she declared herself “a runaway from the record biz.” But she never hated on showbiz any better than she did in this song’s deceptively dulcet tones.

  The song begins with a sound that resembles applause. It concludes with the sound returning, but it’s just the arbutus trees rustling. The arbutus was a species of tree that fascinated Joni. They spring up in the least likely environments, even bare land. Yet when Vancouver tried to import several of them for a street named after the tree, they couldn’t survive. They would bloom and thrive only where they wanted to be, even when there didn’t seem to be any soil. But they could not be transplanted. Joni knew the feeling. She would not go anywhere she wasn’t thriving, and she would live as she chose, from the country to the city, and from perpetual retirement to going back to the grind one more time. She said that when she first heard the arbutus rustle, she felt the impulse to go out and take a bow. She was joking, of course, but she also knew that even as she remained in the public eye, a kind of songwriting wood nymph, a lady of the canyon, even she could never get entirely back to the garden.