by David Yaffe
Dickens wrote about sending off his novels to the shadowy world, comparing them, as Joni did with her songs, to his children. “For the Roses” was her petulant child, but also a beautiful and brilliant one. The song is a warning, first, she has said, to her ex-lover James Taylor, beginning in the second person but then ending up in the first. Like a poem in the tradition of pastoral elegy, in which the poet is mourning the dead but really self-mourning, Joni is really talking to herself, and also imagining the applause that she will face when she next performs.
Decades before music videos allowed artists, particularly female artists, from Annie Lennox to Madonna to Björk and Beyoncé, to use film to shape and reshape their public image, Joni was playing an elaborate game of show-and-tell with pictures. It started with the self-portraits that she painted for her album covers. With For the Roses, she took it up a notch. For the gatefold of the album Joni ventured out onto a rocky promontory in the tranquil water by her home in British Columbia. She was nude, ravishing, buck wild, untamable. “Joel Bernstein took the picture on For the Roses under my guidance,” Joni recalled. “That was going to be the front cover. It was going to be like a Magritte or a Starry Night. And it’s a very innocent nude. It’s like Botticelli’s Aphrodite. I’ve had a few bum comments. It’s a nice bum. It’s no big deal. The cock of the leg is Aphrodite rising from the clamshell. It’s an art posture borrowed from paintings.”
Her manager Elliot Roberts argued against it. “Joan, how would you like to see $5.98 plastered across your ass?” he asked, convincingly. The stunning image was moved inside the cover, and for the front, Joni posed, a sort of wood nymph overlooking the sea, in green velvet and brown suede boots, and with the tan of one who went indoors only to sleep. It was a sign that the music world was beginning to really get Joni, and the stance she was taking in her work, when Rolling Stone said of the cover that it underscored the “unique feeling that one gets about the person who made this record, who can emerge from the hazy watercolor of life and say, ‘I am the best person it is within my power to be. Here I am.’”
On For the Roses, Joni was just an album away from a commercial breakthrough that would change everything. Goodbye folk clubs, goodbye privacy. The mixed blessing of goddess fame was on its way, and it would hit hard. Would it make her happy? Anyone could be happy. The bigger Joni got, the more prophetic the words of Nietzsche would sound: “There is a musician who, more than any other musician, is a master at finding the tones in the realm of suffering, depressed, and tortured souls, at giving language even to mute misery . . . He draws most happily of all out of the profoundest depth of human happiness, and, as it were, out of its drained goblet, where the bitterest and most repulsive drops have finally and evilly run together with the sweetest.” It is almost as if Nietzsche is talking about the holy wine that Mitchell immortalized in “A Case of You.” It is that mixture of the bitter and the sweet, along with the desire to fulfill her own definition of creative mastery, that continues to intrigue her on For the Roses, and that will lead her eventually off the trails of the pop charts forever.
It is easy to get lost in those chords, that voice, the melody, the naked Joni in the gatefold and the clothed, pensive, and fascinating woman sitting in nature on the cover. She is looking right through us. “You turn me on,” she will sing, but be careful. She will also be serenading us with devastating songs about the One Percent at their fancy banquet, a junkie getting his fix, a musical genius trapped in his deafness, the electrical currents that will ruin us as a species, a prize horse about to get shot. The songs on the album follow nature’s cycles. Several are as perfectly formed as any she had ever created. Others are angrier, more confrontational, and more meandering than those on Blue, yet they dig even deeper.
She was never more confrontational than she was on “Woman of Heart and Mind”:
Drive your bargains
Push your papers
Win your medals
Fuck your strangers
Don’t it leave you on the empty side
You might be trying to impress Joni, says the song, but she is far from impressed with you. For the Roses has not achieved the canonical status of Blue, perhaps because it was even more emotionally exhausting than its predecessor. It was also tougher, which tested those for whom defenselessness was a virtue. Yet in 2007, it became one of twenty-five albums selected by the Library of Congress to add to its National Recording Registry. It’s the only one of Mitchell’s albums to earn that exalted place, one for the ages.
In a review of her 1972 Carnegie Hall performance, Don Hackman in The New York Times raved, “Her voice has a far greater range of timbre and articulation, especially in its ability to resonate with warm, dark chest tones. But what makes Joni Mitchell really special is the great esthetic density of her music. Starting from a base that is rooted deeply in her own psyche, she builds metaphoric excursions-through-life trips that are common to us all. And she does it with a brilliant harmonic sense, lyrical melodies and almost effortless poetry. I suspect that in her own way Joni Mitchell may be one of the most genuinely gifted composers North America has yet developed. That she chooses to express her art in small forms and personal sentiments in no way reduces either its impact or its importance.”
This last line was important because the knock on Joni, from the beginning, had been that she was an eloquent troubadour of heart matters, but not a true genius like her male peers, including Dylan. In 1969, Newsweek had heralded Joni and her generation of female singer-songwriters in an article titled “The Girls—Letting Go.” The writers began by stating, “For all its individuality, the rock-music scene has lacked the personal touch. Largely, it has been a world of male groups, of pounding, thunderous music that drowns out the words, which are rarely of the moment.” They praised Joni for her “love of words, her delight in imagery [and] complex inner rhymes.” But in the same paragraph, they criticized the songs of Clouds for being “thin in subject, nebulous in form” and “self-conscious in their poetic effects.”
The Newsweek article echoed the still-new idea that the personal is political. That sentiment was becoming a slogan of the modern women’s rights movement around the time that Joni released Clouds, and it explains why her music was beloved by so many women who came of age in that era. In her landmark essay “The Personal Is Political,” published in 1969, Carol Hanisch wrote, about the consciousness-raising groups she attended, “the reason I participate in these meetings is not to solve any personal problem. One of the first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time . . . I’ve been forced to take off the rose-colored glasses and face the awful truth about how grim my life really is as a woman.” It was a sentiment that Joni might have echoed had she not been isolated by fame and profession from the average young woman of her age.
Hanisch goes on to ask a very Joni question: “Can you imagine what would happen if women . . . stop blaming ourselves for our sad situations? We are thinking for ourselves for the first time in our lives. As the cartoon in Lilith put it, ‘I’m changing. My mind is growing muscles.’”
For the Roses is a watershed album for Joni, not only because it’s a bridge between two masterpieces. In it, you can hear that she is changing, you can sense her mind growing muscles. And by the time For the Roses was released, even the establishment journalists were getting it: just because Joni’s music was personal did not mean it wasn’t powerful. Joni’s work was much, much more than the sophomoric musings of a long-haired girl, which it might have seemed to be at first glance. Even when she was writing about her own particular sadness, struggle, and depression, her lyrics and her tunings were filled with a generous sense of grandeur, as if the doors of her heart had been flung open and she was inviting the world in. Rolling Stone raved, “Love’s tension is Joni Mitchell’s medium—she molds and casts it like a sculptress, lubricating this tense clay with powerful emotive imagery and swaying hypnotic music that sets
her listener up for another of her great strengths, a bitter facility with irony and incongruity. As the tiny muscles in your spine begin to relax as they are massaged by a gorgeous piano line or a simple guitar or choral introduction, you might get quietly but bluntly slammed with a large dose of Woman Truth.”
The praise that For the Roses garnered must have been bolstering after her monastery year on the Sunshine Coast. The critics and her still-growing legions of fans were admitting that, yes, she was unconventional. Yes, she was not always commercial. But she was, without argument, extraordinarily gifted, and by all means, she should keep going.
Blue had been the last album on Joni’s contract with Reprise, and David Geffen and Elliot Roberts had moved quickly to sign Joni to the newly formed Asylum Records. Geffen and Joni were friends, but despite her tremendous critical success, he urged her to record at least one song that would be what his new label desperately needed: a Top 40 hit. “I kept on telling Joni I wanted her to write a hit,” Geffen said. “She was always making fun of me about the idea that she should have a hit. But I wanted her to sell a lot of records.” He still remembers the first time she sang it to him: “I’m a radio / I’m a country station / I’m a little bit corny / I’m a wildwood flower.” He said, “When she sang it to me, it was almost her making fun of me for trying to get her to write a hit record.”
“To write a hit song because David Geffen wants you to have a hit is like saying, ‘Go take a paper route so that you can do public service,’ when she had already worked as a candy striper,” said Russ Kunkel.
Joni was up to the challenge. She had a direct marketing campaign to charm the DJs, using their argot: “Dial in the number,” “Broadcasting tower,” “Who needs the static?” The playfully tongue-in-cheek “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio,” which used what Joni called her “own peculiar warped sense of humor,” hit number twenty-five on Billboard. Maybe she’d do better the next time without trying.
16 STAR-CROSSED
Nineteen seventy-three opened with Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” at the top of the charts. It was rumored to be about Warren Beatty. In recent years, Simon has insisted it was (mostly) about someone else, but no one actually seems to believe her. Even Beatty, who called Simon to thank her for it.
If the year opened with accusations of vanity, it unfolded, for Joni, with every stripe of narcissism.
Joni did not experience anything like culture shock; she was thriving on fluidity, grooving to the extremes. Either do it all the way or not at all: be at the center of the star-maker machinery or secluded in the woods. “Look at my chord changes,” she told me. “There are abrupt changes of key. I’m equipped to ride big changes. I had no trouble making the transition.” But she was hardly starry-eyed. “These are not fun people,” she said. “Stars are hardly ever fun. They’re neurotic, they’re self-centered, they’re nervous, they’re insecure, especially movie stars. I’m more comfortable with farm people.”
And yet even if Joni was uncomfortable, she was still brimming with inspiration. A photograph shows her standing in front of Geffen’s grand piano, with a bowl ashtray on one side and pen to paper. Her anticipation is palpable; she could not wait to pounce. This material was just too good to waste. Celebrity, psychoanalysis, decadence: Hollywood in 1973 was filled with actors and directors embracing the new freedoms that came with the collapse of the studio system and the end, just five years earlier, of the prudish Hays production code. Now you could get away with almost anything in a film, and Joni felt that, in her songs, she was making movies of her own; she, too, could go for broke.
The melancholy of the Sunshine Coast did not magically disappear in Hollywood. Warren Beatty suggested she do what he and most of his friends did: turn for help to the renowned German psychoanalyst Martin Grotjahn. Dr. Grotjahn had established Southern California’s first psychoanalytic training center, the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute, while at the same time maintaining a private practice in Beverly Hills, with a massive clientele that included Beatty, Geffen, and many of their celebrity friends. Dr. Grotjahn, Joni recalled, was “Freudian, proud, happy to be a narcissist.”
Joni, still reeling from one failed relationship after another, certainly had a lot to talk about. From the couch, she answered the same kinds of questions the journalists would have asked her. But she was barely speaking to journalists, and when she did, these were precisely the topics she wanted to avoid. “James [Taylor] was in a bad place and it just didn’t work,” she told the doctor. “He had gotten off heroin and was on methadone. He was broody and moody and I was trying to be cheerful, which was really the wrong thing. You can’t be self-destructive without destroying everything around you.” Joni could not handle being on this path of destruction for long.
And Taylor was not simply morose, he was bitter. “He said, ‘You think you’re hot shit.’ He was incapable of a relationship . . . There were some very likable things about James, but for the most part, he was incapable of affection. He was just a mess. If somebody’s dark and brooding, you’re better off brood[ing] beside them. Don’t go acting cheerful. You’re just a reminder of what they’re not. They’ll hate you for it. The last thing you want is a cheerful person when you’re down like that. That’s when I learned that lesson. And then I bought the property and spent a year up there and sealed myself from that.”
After she wrote much of For the Roses with the memory of Taylor in the periphery, she was then thrown on the road with Jackson Browne, another brooding singer-songwriter who was even more harmful to Joni’s already fragile emotional state. “I did love, to the best of my ability, and sometimes, for a while, it was reciprocated, and sometimes the person was too far gone on drugs or whatever, that they were incapable. James numbed on drugs and Jackson Browne was never attracted to me. We got thrown out on the road together and traveled all around. We were companions, because we were playing in Amsterdam and playing from London to New Orleans. But when he spoke about old lovers, he leered. He was a leering narcissist.”
The relationship was temporary, and the breakup less eventful than has been reported elsewhere. But Jackson Browne committed the unpardonable sin of instigating the breakup. Larry Klein, Joni’s husband from 1982 to 1994, was sure that this was why Browne was vilified by Joni. “Joni had a great deal of anger towards Jackson,” Klein said. “I don’t know all their history. I certainly know some of it from her perspective. Maybe it stems from the fact that he was the one to end the relationship between them. I think that’s a pattern in her life. She would do things that would lead to the end of the relationship. She would force the hand of the person and then feel unjustly abandoned.”
“Jackson’s mother warned me against him,” Joni recalled. She was not the first mother whose warnings Joni recalls. She would come to see the mothers as a sort of “women’s union,” sharing collective knowledge, raising collective concerns. Chuck Mitchell was, according to his mother, the firstborn and “first waffle” that should have been thrown out. As for Leonard Cohen, his mother was the one who said, “Be prepared to bleed.” One evening Joni was having dinner at Browne’s family’s house. Beatrice, his schoolteacher mother, turned to Joni and said, “I wondered what form your perversion would take.” Was Mrs. Browne calling her perverse? Joni eventually came to feel she was being given a heads-up. Maybe there was something off about Jackson’s relationships. And he did seem to be more giddy with his male friends than he could ever be with a woman . . . And why was he so obsessed with women having holes in their clothes? He would run her sweaters through the Laundromat a dozen times just to fray them. This guy had issues.
James Taylor and Jackson Browne would both move on, although they would not entirely leave Joni’s life (about which everybody seemed to have an opinion). Once, in Joni’s telling, Carole King came up to her and said, “You don’t like yourself. I can tell. I like myself.” Then she walked away. What a little brat, thought Joni. So much, she thought, for the women’s union.
There was a
lot to unravel on Dr. Grotjahn’s Beverly Hills couch. Joni was not only there to talk about her recent romantic disappointments, but also her current life, which included Warren Beatty, another of his patients.
By 1973, Beatty and his friend Jack Nicholson were the two biggest male sex symbols in Hollywood—and both were after Joni. Beginning with the success in 1967 of Bonnie and Clyde, Beatty was being seen as a combination of Cary Grant and Orson Welles—equal parts sex symbol, writer-director-actor triple threat, and control freak. This guy could dominate Hollywood. He was having a hard time understanding why he couldn’t dominate Joni. Nicholson was also a legendary smooth operator, but he could have an easier time living with not being able to sleep with every beautiful and fascinating woman on earth. He would be a fixture at Joni’s parties in Bel-Air; he would be a fan and a friend.
Beatty and Nicholson each made moves on her—their games were among the best honed in town—but Joni thought, No way. The three of them had a ritual of going to dinner together, but Joni would always take her own car. She thought they had a bet going on who would get her into bed first. (In Reds, Warren Beatty, as John Reed, and Jack Nicholson, as Eugene O’Neill, were comrades fighting over Diane Keaton.)
This chase was certainly entertaining, but Joni had no intention of taking it all the way, which was very disturbing to Warren Beatty, who was used to having his pleasure served to him from any woman whose stock was high, and Joni’s was. Beatty thought this was irrational behavior, and told Dr. Grotjahn so.