by David Yaffe
No regrets, Coyote
We just come from such different sets of circumstance
I’m up all night in the studios
And you’re up early on your ranch . . .
Joni and Sam both celebrated their thirty-second birthdays shortly before the tour, his on November 5, hers two days later. “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter,” a response to Carlos Castaneda, makes an overt reference to the closeness of their birthdays: “I’m Don Juan’s reckless daughter / I came out two days on your tail / Those two bald-headed days in November / Before the first snowflakes sail.” Back in Saskatoon, this was pretty much the weather pattern, but this is a song about the meeting of two geniuses, both reckless, “twins of spirit,” but also as ill-suited as feathers and steel. He has a wife to go home to. She has a tour to get on with. The circus will end soon.
“The aim is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive,” wrote Carlos Castaneda in his Teachings of Don Juan, a trendy read in the ’70s. It was a mantra Joni took seriously. In those hazy, crazy final months of 1975, wonder would drown out the balance of terror, even as a little bit of danger made things interesting.
“Sam and I had a flirtation,” Joni remembered forty years later. “He got scared of me. What panicked him was we were sitting in a bar and we were talking and all of a sudden he said, ‘You’re really smart.’ Often when people would say that, they would lean away from me like I had a disease. He made a Sicilian gesture across the eye or something like that. And then we talked a little bit more, and I was saying things and he’d go, ‘How do you know that?’ It was like we were twins. The stars were really funny. He was born November 9 and I was born November 7. I was born beneath a really powerful sky, and I think he was, too. He’s multi-expressive. He’s a playwright and a singer and an actor and he’s good at all of them. What I think was happening was that I was forming sentences like he would’ve. Everything was creating an aversion. But for me, on coke, I found him very attractive. He reminded me of the people that I come from, from the region that I come from. He ran off the tour.”
December 7, 1975, a day before the “Night of the Hurricane” benefit concert for Rubin Carter’s defense fund, the last concert of the tour, the Revue played a concert at the prison where Carter was being held. Because of the media attention swarming around Hurricane, including a staged photo op with Dylan for People magazine, Carter was moved to the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in Clinton, New Jersey. At Rahway, Joni was practically booed offstage, causing her to respond, “We came here to give you love; if you can’t handle it, that’s your problem.” The rejection from a room full of mostly black women—where the subtleties of “Coyote” or “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow” might have been lost on that particular population—must have hurt, especially when they showered Baez with approval for hitting the highest note on “Amazing Grace.”
Baez felt sympathy for Joni that day. “I can tell you that she didn’t know how to deal with black prison inmates,” Baez recalled. “She was very white, and her choice of songs were very white. And I was just praying she’d get off the stage. I thought it was more difficult for her, because I think she didn’t get why they weren’t responding.”
Baez never got to know Joni well. Before Rolling Thunder, Joni, recording Court and Spark just down the hall at A&M studios, added vocals to Baez’s track “Dida,” on her 1974 album Gracias a la Vida, a record produced by Henry Lewy. “I got shoved into this ‘Doo-dah’ record and I went in for Henry’s sake, and for David Blue,” Joni recalled, somewhat viciously. “And the song was so dumb. I’m searching and trying to find a way to blend with her vibrato, in order to musically contribute to this stupid piece of music. I’m looking for a blend. I’m not trying to flash off my range. I’m just trying to be harmonious.”
The harmony was strictly musical. “Aloof was hardly the word for her,” Baez recalled. “She was beyond aloof. It didn’t matter. We did the song. And then we did it again. It was good working with her. Her voice is a wonderful voice. I didn’t know if it was shyness or what.” “Or what” was probably the more likely explanation. The lack of warmth between the two women intensified when they shared a sleeping van on the Rolling Thunder tour. Baez was often socially isolated as the only ’60s pop music figure who never smoked or did drugs. (She smoked a total of four joints in her life. Reaction: paranoia.) She was obsessively protective of her voice and avoided smoke at all costs. Joni, of course, avoided avoiding smoke at all costs. This led to a very bad night for Joan Baez:
“One night, as I remember it, the carnival was moving out from one town to another. I didn’t see Joni getting into any vehicle, and I didn’t know whether she had been assigned to anything, so we stopped, and I said, ‘Pick her up,’ and she got on in our van and she nearly smoked me out. It was awful. She couldn’t stop smoking and then she went up front with my two road managers. I’m not sure what they did all night, but it was not a happy experience. I asked her if she could stop. She was on cocaine and weed, I think. I was in the upper bunk, so there was no way to sleep.”
Baez now looks back at Joni with admiration: “She has such a qualified and earned ‘fuck you.’ I really admire her. She’s a really strong woman who doesn’t give a fuck about what anybody thinks, and we all wish we could be that way, but we can’t.”
Rolling Thunder culminated in a benefit concert at Madison Square Garden a day after the prison concert, and it was the perfect moment for Joni and the Revue—which would continue without her while she went on a tour of her own—to part ways. Around this time, Joni began to have her doubts about the cause anyway. “I had talked to Hurricane on the phone several times, and I was alone in perceiving that he was a violent person and an opportunist,” Joni said. She thought of the irony of Dylan and Baez painting their faces white, commedia dell’arte style. “I thought, Oh my God, we’re a bunch of white patsy liberals. This is a bad person. He’s fakin’ it.”
As Joni got ready to break ranks on the Night of the Hurricane, Muhammad Ali made an appearance at the event, and Joan Baez asked Joni to introduce him. “Fine,” Joni recalled telling her, “what I’ll say is—and I never would’ve—I’ll say, ‘We’re here tonight on behalf of one jive-ass n——who could have been champion of the world and I’d like to introduce you to another one who is.’ She stared at me, and immediately removed me from this introductory role . . . Anyway, Hurricane was released and the next day he brutally beat up this woman . . .” Joni knew she was pushing buttons with the patron saint of the left with her use of the most offensive racial epithet in English. (Baez had no memory of this exchange years later.)
What made this blonde from Saskatoon believe she had the right to use it? Joni believed she had an inner black person, and she would bring him out more over time, making even more extravagant provocations, all in an attempt, however foolhardy, to break barriers. It was no doubt more jive than her music, but she said as much already when she begged off the interview for Rolling Stone. This night would be it for the Revue. One friend she picked up on Rolling Thunder was Kinky Friedman, who went pretty far for a novelty act, with ersatz country songs like “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore” and “Proud to Be an Asshole from El Paso,” which Joni sang onstage with him, decked with a sombrero. In March, Joni came to a Friedman party in his Hollywood apartment that was said by Dennis Quaid and others to be the party of the decade. Joni and Dylan disappeared into a room for hours. When Dylan fell asleep, people just watched him. Joni and Dylan were the last to leave. They stayed all night and then hitchhiked to Malibu together.
Dylan inspired Joni, but she would never follow him for any extended period of time. She was her own woman. And, besides, it was time for her to start planning her next gig. The Hissing of Summer Lawns tour would be starting up soon. Tom Scott would be replaced with David Luell (“a kind of yakety-sax player,” Joni recalled. “He didn’t make much of an impression on me as a player, frankly. But he was good enough”). New
songs would have to be rehearsed, some of which were written on Rolling Thunder.
Joni began her tour in mid-January, a little over a month after her departure from Rolling Thunder. Sales of The Hissing of Summer Lawns had tapered off from the blockbuster success of Court and Spark, but people were still filling halls to see her, many of them no doubt eager to hear material from the earlier albums, while others must have realized that they had the privilege to capture a brilliant artist in motion, in the process of creating some of her most important work, at the summit of her powers. The band was not only reconfiguring material from The Hissing of Summer Lawns into band performances—replacing studio effects with group cadences—but they were also giving birth to the first live performances of “Talk to Me” and “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter” played as a medley with “Coyote.” Still, she hit Houston for a Rolling Thunder reunion and a solo set, a second night of the Hurricane, even though she was quite clear in her reservations about the first. Dylan returned the favor a couple of nights later, on January 28.
There are photographs of them performing “Both Sides, Now” that night, but Joni remembers it differently, perhaps because it was a particularly charged night. “Dylan showed up at the Austin concert, and he was acting really weird. He showed up onstage like a crazy person. He wandered around through the amps. He made it very apparent to the audience that he was there, but he never came forward. He just got on the stage and wandered around. We didn’t sing anything together. That made John nervous.”
John Guerin thought he had some reason to be nervous. “We were invited to a party and John decided not to go,” Joni recalled. “So, I entered in fighter mode, because he was all jealous about Bob Dylan. Nothing was going on. Dylan was acting like a maniac and there was nothing between us. But I’d been out on Rolling Thunder and he’s imagining all kinds of stuff. So I go to this party and Bob is there and my friend Boyd Elder is there and Bob and I ended up in this bedroom.” Boyd Elder was a Texan friend of Kinky Friedman’s, whose friendship with Joni went back to her Laurel Canyon days with Graham Nash. He was a graphic artist best known for his Eagles covers, to his great regret.
Joni and Bob were talking about God like college kids in a dorm room. “It was dark, with Bob and Boyd and I, and Boyd was sitting up in a chair right behind the door, and Bob was looking out the window, and I was sitting on the foot of the bed.” This was when Joni and Dylan had their exchange about what he meant when he used the word God. Was it the Old Testament God? Joni never got an answer. “And just then, the door flew open, and there’s John Guerin, and he doesn’t see Boyd because the door covers him up. And he looked at me like I was a monster, and he leaves and goes back to the hotel.”
When Guerin thought, incorrectly, that there was something between Joni and Dylan, he brought in the first woman he could find. He imagined that Joni was unfaithful, so, for such a ladies’ man, the only response was to bring in another lady. And, right on schedule, Joni left Dylan’s party without getting his answer to what he meant by God. (The answer would come a few years later during his born-again Christian phase.) Joni went up to her room. They had two doors, a sitting room, and a bedroom, all close together. As she goes by the door she could hear what she described as “a feminine sniff.”
“Oh, he’s got a girl in there,” she thought. Joni knocked on one door and stood behind the other, and, sure enough, the girl came out. Then Joni and Guerin got into a tussle. She was really mad at him, and he usually behaved like a gentleman.
“My shoulder on my coat got torn in the scuffle, but he deflected like a gent,” Joni recalled decades later. “He had a good mother and a good grandmother. He had wonderful women behind him. And he just deflected my assaults as I was saying, ‘How dare you bring this girl into our room?’ It came out that he was suspicious about Bob and there was nothing to be suspicious about. Anyway, I had an interesting experience that night because of the emotions it stirred up. I’m lying in the room and I’d done some yoga, and I did these exercises with chakras. My throat chakra opened up like a lotus, so much so that the petals touched along my throat and it was hard to breathe. I ran to the window and I did these breathing exercises and it was kind of like a big flower opening up in there, but like petals. It was delicate, but suffocating. So I opened the window and took some deep breaths and it went back into place. And then we continued to tour a few cities, but we stayed in separate rooms.”
Shortly after the news had spread among the band that Joni and John were sleeping in separate rooms, John pushed the limits of his freedom further. Joni played the Spectrum in Philadelphia, and, while she should have been excited to share “Furry Sings the Blues,” a new song with a colorful story, she did so in a voice utterly flat and expressionless, making it all the more odd when she said, in a drone, “I love a good story.” But Joni was unable to love a good story when she was in the midst of one that was getting rougher and rougher. Max Bennett recalled that Joni was palpably pissed off at this point. In her performance of “Harry’s House,” instead of moving from the chord sequence of the song to the Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross vocalese take on Harry Edison’s “Centerpiece,” she sang the Jon Hendricks lyric, which, on Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross’s Everybody’s Boppin’ and on The Hissing of Summer Lawns, is the hippest of love letters, set to a twelve-bar blues: “The more I’m with you, pretty baby / The more I feel my love increase / I’m building all my dreams around you / My happiness will never cease / But nothing’s any good without you / ’Cause baby, you’re my centerpiece.” Amid the Sturm und Drang with John Guerin, at the Spectrum, Joni sang the lyrics not as a twelve-bar blues but in the “Harry’s House” changes, strummed forlornly. Suddenly, the lyrics were even more ironic than they were on the record, where Joni, as Harry’s henpecking wife, repeats, “Nothing’s any good.” Nothing was any good, indeed.
Joni was navigating new territory as a woman: as bandleader. She wanted to keep working with John, and she didn’t want to stop him from pursuing other relationships, but she needed to protect both her heart and her leadership position with the other musicians. As the saying goes, it was complicated. “John was a lover and a Scorpio. [Scorpios], we are kind of loyal to a fault, so if we loved someone, we wanted to keep the relationship going, we tried to flow with the changes. So, anyway, even after we broke up, he was very bonded to me in a funny way, and he ended up marrying one girl four behind me, but the girl before me was named Judy, so he said, ‘I want to send for Judy. I can’t pick up women on the road.’ And he was a very sexual man, and I said, ‘I can’t have tyranny in that department anymore. I relinquish it. But, if you’re going to do that, don’t embarrass me. Don’t make me uncomfortable. You will have to take commercial flights, because we had a private plane, and you can’t come on the plane with her, and she will have to stay in the hotel. You can’t bring her to the gig, because everybody will feel sorry for me and it will be a mess. You have to keep her as a secret, and you have to make it clear to her that those are the terms of the situation. I’m fine with that, but you have to have some respect for me.’ So he agreed to that, and then in the next town, I got sick. I got the flu from the stress.”
Judy was not just a young lady, and not just one who had been a girlfriend of John’s in the past, but, according to members of the band, she was a dead ringer for Joni. And so it must have been a surreal visual gag to see this Joni double, sitting with both of them in Joni’s limo, and having fans scream Joni’s name when they spotted her doppelgänger.
Joni didn’t think Judy was her double. “Judy was a lot skinnier that me,” Joni recalled. “She was very fashionably skinny. I’m more zaftig. There was one encounter in a limo, but one only. So I call for the plane to take off at night. I have to have a sick day in New York because I’m going to have to play sick. I want to rest there rather than resting in Boston. So, we leave for New York late at night—ten thirty or eleven. We go to the plane and the horn player—horn players are like plumbers for the most part. They’re re
ally like beer-drinking plumbers. They were playing cards and the cards had red backgrounds, and they had these naked pink girls posing against a curtain. And their eyes are intense, in mild horror. And I thought, ‘What’s up?’ Their mouths are covered up by these pink nudes. And I walk in, and I went where the jump seats were for the stewardess. The roadies are there playing poker. I walk in and the room just freezes. So I go into the next part of the cabin, and I go to my seat. John has brought Judy and he has sat down where he always sits. Judy is sitting in my seat, and there’s no place for me to sit. It’s unbelievably stupid on his part, especially in the face of what I said to him, which is more than generous. It made me sick, it was so generous. I tend to be ridiculously fair sometimes, so there’s a case of it.”
Since the Miles of Aisles tour, Joni had always enjoyed the camaraderie of being one of the guys. Now the vibes were getting exceedingly worse. After the new girl rode in Joni’s limo, she then flew in Joni’s private plane from Boston to New York. At this point, Joni was telling Elliot Roberts that she really couldn’t work under these conditions, but he urged her to carry on. Meanwhile, limo politics kept getting worse when Joni collided with Gayle Ford, the wife of the guitarist Robben Ford.
“Gayle Ford was nothing but trouble. Gayle Ford was a queen bee. She was in our limo, and I get in and light up a cigarette and she says, ‘Put that out. I don’t like smoke.’ I said, ‘I’m going to put you out. This is my car. You get on the bus.’ I could give you twenty examples of that kind of queen bee behavior. Really out of line. Insensitive. And I tolerated it. Usually, I didn’t flinch. She told me she was coming on the road with Robben. They were newly married. And I said, ‘Women on the road are not good. They disturb the husbands, they disturb the music generally. There’s a rule: no women on the road. And it’s a good rule.’”