by David Yaffe
Said Joni: “Most women would have been flattered [by the attention]. It was flattering, but there was no way that I would have . . . My problem was that I was sad. I wasn’t mentally ill. I was sad, trying to get something going in impossible situations. When someone’s undermining your self-worth, it’s not a healthy situation. Well, it’s not James’s fault, he’s fucked-up. And Jackson’s just a nasty bit of business. So to go from one to the other kind of scared me against going into another relationship. I knew the game [Beatty] was playing. He told Grotjahn that I was the only woman that beat him at his own game, and I said at that point, ‘I don’t know what the game is, but I don’t feel like a victor. If I won something, what did I win?’”
Spurning the advances of Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty was less competitive sport than self-preservation. Joni would tease Beatty and call him “Pussycat.” Joni was referring to Beatty’s famous pickup line, “What’s new, Pussycat?”—a line that inspired Woody Allen’s first screenplay. This might not have penetrated the cultural barrier for the German Dr. Grotjahn. (He and his family had fled Berlin when he realized that “there was no room for Hitler and me in the same town.”)
“You call him the pussycat?” asked Dr. Grotjahn in his thick German accent.
“Yeah, for obvious reasons,” she replied, perhaps not realizing that they were not obvious to the good doctor.
“What does a pussycat do?” he asked. “He’s cute and fluffy and then one day, you get scratched: Meow!”
At this point, Joni threw up her hands.
“Warren is not my problem.”
“But you are his!”
“That’s indiscreet. Believe me, Warren is not my problem, nor will he be my problem. If he has a problem that I won’t let him be my problem, then he’s got a problem.”
Joni might as well have continued throwing psychology books against the wall. The sessions became increasingly absurd. If Joni had a dream, then Dr. Grotjahn was sure he was in it. “You’re just like John Lennon!” he would say. Lennon was having a Hollywood crisis of his own at that time. Was he part of this, too?
“You’re just like Marilyn Monroe!” he would then say.
She loved Monroe’s line from The Misfits: “If I have to feel lonely, I’d rather be alone.” Figuring out the difference between alone and lonely would be a lifelong project for Joni. “I’ve covered a lot of [loneliness] on my records. I mean, I have expressed it almost like open letters . . . I need a lot of time, solitary time. Ideally, I would like to be able to withdraw into a corner in a room full of people and work. I love the bustle of a room of people interacting where perhaps I am apart but busy on my own project.” She knew when she could be alone and not feel lonely. “Sometimes I go up to my land in British Columbia and spend time alone in the country, surrounded by the beauty of natural things. There’s a romance which accompanies it, so you generally don’t feel self-pity.” But back in Los Angeles, she too often felt “surrounded by people who are continually interacting, the loneliness makes you feel like you’ve sinned, as Leonard Cohen said.”
Joni wasn’t afraid of exploring the complex caverns of her heart and mind. But Dr. Grotjahn was putting dark thoughts in Joni’s head. She didn’t trust him. She didn’t bond with him. Finally, he told her, “You have come to the wrong psychiatrist.”
He then put Joni in a group he was running with eight psychiatrists as patients. Now she really saw what was going on in the kitchen.
This therapy for therapists would later surface in some of “Trouble Child,” but first there were songs to write, music to record, boundaries to break. Joni’s love affairs tended to be with fellow musicians, and not with men with more power than she had. The movie star world would be a different kind of power. If she made herself vulnerable, she would feel the same terror many of her own lovers would feel. Even if people around her assumed that there had been, at some point, some sort of encounter between Joni and Warren Beatty—he was, some have speculated, the man “weighing the beauty and the imperfection” in “Same Situation”—she would not let her guard down. Maybe she liked herself more than Carole King could know.
17 COURT AND SPARK: SOMETHING STRANGE HAPPENED
If, looking from the outside, you wanted to be Joni Mitchell, this was the moment you would want to be her. If she were a stock, this would be the time to short it.
She had been summoned back to the City of the Fallen Angels by David Geffen when he heard through the grapevine that she was suicidal after a breakup with Jackson Browne. (For the record, she insists she wasn’t.) She moved into Geffen’s Hollywood mansion on Copley Drive, which he was renting from the director Blake Edwards and his wife, Julie Andrews. (The hills were alive with the sound of music! Oh, and Geffen was living with Cher.)
Joni was back in the crowd, although not the same crowd of her earlier life. Here was a new set of characters to inspire a new set of songs, each of which would be realized with a band, including, on some tracks, a full orchestra. The escape from society that produced the brooding introspection of For the Roses was followed by an embrace of civilization and its discontents: flawed people, lust masquerading as love, parties that could get awkward, and the search for meaning that was as unquenchable as ever. The spectacle beckoned and she beckoned back; the album would be the result.
Many things in the ’70s seemed like a good idea at the time, and the drummer John Guerin was one of them. “I’m frightened by the devil,” Joni sang in “A Case of You.” “And I’m drawn to those ones that ain’t afraid.” Guerin was one of those. With his feathered dark hair and chiseled features, he had just enough of the derelict in him. (In “Just Like This Train,” Joni playfully imagined her vain darling’s hairline receding.)
Joni and Guerin would spend hours in bed listening to Miles (whom she adored and revered) and John Coltrane (who she decided, based on tone and note choice and his “corny-ass adjacent-valve doodeloos,” was overrated and a “midget” compared with the Ellington altoist Johnny Hodges, a “giant” who made her “melt”). Guerin made her melt, too. He played the rogue and the virtuoso. They did indeed court and spark, and the spark lasted long enough for a record and a tour, which by the standards of the decade was pretty impressive.
Guerin was crucial in raising the bar for musicianship, taking it to places Joni wanted to go before she quite knew the route. Folk musicians are used to looking at one another’s left hands to follow the chords by what is on the frets. Bob Dylan, for example, recorded Desire (1976) with no rehearsals, no charts. The bassist Rob Stoner got through the sessions following Dylan’s frets. But playing this way with Joni is a waste of time. Her left hand, weakened by polio, is just a single finger running up and down her guitar’s neck. Joni leaves all the work to her right hand, which builds polychords with her open tunings. She can’t name them, but they are the basis of her chromatic harmony—the quality that gives her chords color and fluidity. Imagine songs filled with a few chords on top of each other—that still make complex harmonic sense—and you will get the idea of what it’s like to play with her. It’s not necessary to learn open tunings. All you need, as George Martin said, is ears.
Guerin was the drummer for the jazz-pop ensemble L.A. Express, which would build on Joni’s musical eccentricities in new ways that would be as exciting to her as they would be to her listeners, who were accumulating along with her musical expansion. In jazz, as with many other cultural entities, many of the things that were going on in New York were also going on in Los Angeles, sort of. In the 1950s, there was an identifiable West Coast Jazz sound. It all came out of appropriations, adaptations, or outright imitations of the great swing era and Count Basie alum tenor saxophonist Lester Young, whose latter-day mellowed-out style came from his running out of steam and everything else. (He and his musical twin, Billie Holiday, sounded like they were, sublimely, running out of steam together, and died in the same year.) Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, and Stan Getz—all superb musicians—popularized this conception and made it
sound, to use a word associated with Miles Davis, “cool,” and it was Miles Davis who was being riffed on again in the ’70s when his hugely popular album Bitches Brew spawned an entire generation of bands that combined the sounds and rhythms of James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, and Sly and the Family Stone with extended improv. Some of this music was powerful and innovative. Some of it sounded like expertly played soundtrack work. Some of it dated like a pet rock. Many jazz purists never accepted this music as real jazz, but Joni was not one of them.
The ’70s was a golden age of session musicians, in New York and LA. Many musicians, including Joni’s future collaborators and friends Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, moved from New York to LA and stayed there. Top call players could get way more than scale and never have to leave their SoCal homes if they didn’t want to. (Victor Feldman, who became an L.A. Express keyboardist and toured with Joni, turned down an invitation to tour with Miles Davis because he was making too much bread on LA studio gigs.) The top ones could all play “real jazz” and the new style. None of them were purists if they wanted to work. And Joni was the least purist of all. She loved the styles of her teenage years, but prided herself on looking forward. Artistic conviction went hand in hand with something that became, almost accidentally, hugely popular.
Joni had worked extensively with Tom Scott on For the Roses; he’d overdubbed his parts on woodwinds and reeds the way she overdubbed her parts. After seeing his band, the L.A. Express, at a Studio City club called the Baked Potato, she invited them to join her at the studio, and what was left of her ties to the folk era would be severed, mostly, for good. The music they were playing then was definitely more like the jazz-rock crossover in the shadow of Bitches Brew. It sounded nothing like the genuinely weird and avant-garde music Davis was making by 1973, or the compositional innovations of Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul’s Weather Report. It was basic meat-and-potatoes rock and roll and funk with killer solos and excellent rhythm. It is easy to hear, when listening to the 1974 album Tom Scott and the L.A. Express, why drummers fawned over Guerin. He sounded like he could do just about anything. And now these stellar musicians could take their chops and put them in the service of Joni’s music. They passed the audition, and she was soon joined in the studio by Scott, the bassist Max Bennett, the keyboardist Joe Sample, and of course, Guerin.
When Joni began looking for musicians to work with her on what would become Court and Spark, Russ Kunkel, the drummer on Blue and For the Roses, gave her some advice. “You need to work with jazz musicians,” he told her, begging off the drummer’s seat she had offered him again. “I thought that the direction she was going in would be conducive to playing with an established rhythm section,” Kunkel recalled. Kunkel managed to stay out of Joni’s way on the two albums he recorded with her, but he opted to pass on this one. “I guess in my mind, if it had been taken to the nth degree, it would have been: How great would it have been for her to play with Bill Evans or Miles Davis or Philly Joe Jones? But what was available were amazing musicians in LA. As history would say, it worked out.”
It turned out Kunkel was right. These guys were very quick on the uptake. The bass player, Max Bennett, was the oldest member of the band. He had played with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Stan Getz; Bennett had famously advised a young singer named Peggy Lee that she should record a song called “Fever,” which included his memorable syncopated bass line. Even with all this experience among musical royalty, playing with Joni was still remarkable to him. “I felt like everything she did was about something or somebody and very honest,” Bennett recalled. “She never sang anything for a special effect or to impress someone. It was always, ‘This is the way I feel about it.’ I worked with many great singers, but she was different. She was a great player. She was a great musician. She had great time, rhythmically. She was right on the money. With real professionals, she really held her own. We were all jazz musicians, and jazz musicians are more flexible than any other type of player, in every aspect of music.”
Larry Carlton, the lead guitarist for the Crusaders (“Street Life”) and an extremely prolific session player who had just joined the L.A. Express, was not at all flummoxed by this unorthodox method the day he walked into the studio: “Humbly, I could hear the chord changes. I didn’t have to watch her fingers. None of us were struggling harmonically to figure out what to do against her great chords.” These were musicians with superlative jazz technique, who were also content to engage with aspects of jazz harmony and rhythm without playing jazz. And none of them held on to jazz-sized conceptions about how long their solos would be, or if there would be anything other than riffing behind a vocal line.
“When we went into the studio with Joni,” said Carlton, “my job was to help her make her music. It wasn’t about me. My job was to help make those songs as great as I thought I could help make them. Our job was to help arrange behind her so that she could present those great chords on her songs. Let’s take a C major seventh chord and you put a G major chord on top of it. Now you have a C major ninth sharp eleventh chord. Joni would instinctively hear those kinds of sounds. I would just hear it and write down the chord chart. I remember her putting a cassette on and Tom Scott and I would grab pencils and pieces of paper, writing down chords.”
Carlton also found the best way to complement Joni’s rhythm playing, a method that would later be used by Robben Ford (on the Miles of Aisles tour of 1974) and Pat Metheny (on the Shadows and Light tour of 1979). “In 1971, I got my first volume pedal and I used it on the first Crusader records, and that became an identifiable Larry Carlton sound, so that was a way to play where I wasn’t just chucking rhythm or playing licks,” he recalled. “In the right hands, that can really enhance a track without it being so typical guitar.”
What Carlton is describing could also be captured by the Italian musical marking una corda: drama, but with the mute. With this group, there was no lack of drama—it was in high supply in the soap opera between Joni and Guerin as the show went on—but there was no lack of precision, either. The volume pedal sustained single notes or chords, so that it would complement any rhythm playing Joni would do, and it would provide the kind of sonic atmosphere that Joni would often request. Joni now had a contrapuntal voice. She would still write alone—and she was still the maestro—but in the studio, she wasn’t all by herself anymore.
The results were extraordinary. Jon Landau, who would go on to manage and produce Bruce Springsteen, raved in Rolling Stone, “On first listening, Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark, the first truly great pop album of 1974, sounds surprisingly light; by the third or fourth listening, it reveals its underlying tensions.”
It’s the lightness that draws the listener in so seductively and powerfully. Joni may have missed performing at Woodstock, but with Court and Spark, she orchestrates, on wax, a festival of epic proportions.
If you close your eyes, you can almost picture yourself in a wide-open field on a bright sunny day. There’s Joni and her band on the stage. When the album starts it’s sunset, you might be alone listening to the album, but it feels like you’re surrounded by thousands of music lovers, all swaying to the beat, all ready to fall in love, to tune in and be turned on. “Court and Spark,” the opening song, evokes both the Delta blues of the American South and the palm-tree-studded skyline of Los Angeles. There is dirt and wildflowers underneath her feet as Joni sings, but there is also glamour-tinged stardust overhead. She is at once the boho queen of the festival world and the gowned A-lister of the red carpet, dualities that Joni has been able to hold throughout her career in a way that makes her deeply engaging and unique. And yet, while many people are grooving to it, the music is also intimate, personal, challenging, complex, taking each listener into their own darkened bedroom. It is a festival for one, and every Court and Spark encounter is a little different every time, and for each person who hears it. Open your eyes, and you are just looking at yourself, or the person lying next to you. Close them again. It
is a festival for your mind.
The title track opens up the album with an E major chord that turns into a suspended chord, and finally to a minor chord, when we learn that infatuation can turn into rejection in just a night—and it is the singer who is in control. Whether intentionally or not, that chord, and the places it moves to—D major, back to E major, then to G major, then to the E suspended chord (D major with E in the bass, a favorite chord of hers)—evokes one of Joni’s favorite pieces of music from her childhood, Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” the third movement of Debussy’s Suite bergamasque, with its dramatic D-flat major that transports listeners into one of the most well-loved progressions of late Romantic music.
Court and Spark is romantic, too, in the musical sense and in the sense that these songs will be about the seductions, follies, and illusions of eros. “Love came to my door,” she sings, and we hear courtship in the timbre and register of her voice, as it floats along stacked and suspended chords. Her musical idea of courting and sparking—with cadences and chords that flirt with the listener—is far more enthralling than this fanatic who shows up at her door. Sure, he seems to be reading her mind, and sure, he even makes a compelling proposition: “You could complete me / I’d complete you.” But this album is narrated by a sinner, one of the “guilty people” the madman is ranting against. Later, in “Same Situation,” Joni sends up a prayer wondering who will hear it with “Heaven full of astronauts / And the Lord on death row,” and it sounds like she’s preaching to herself. But this album is not about salvation, it’s about seduction, even if the seduction feels empty without a search for love that “don’t seem to cease.”
The corrupted, guilty, and deeply flawed human comedy of LA will dominate this landscape. That madman at the door, in “Court and Spark,” whoever he is, inspired a sultry, hot mess of a masterpiece that clocks in at under three minutes. But he cannot hang around for this album. As she shows him to the door, she is reminded that just as LA is filled with people with no soul but coke to spare, it is also filled with sanctimonious types who think they have the answers. Joni doesn’t pretend to have the answers herself, but she’s going to go looking for deeper meanings where she can. And she will take us along for the ride.