by David Yaffe
Gayle Ford was determined to not be thrown off the tour. She appealed to Joni’s industrious side by asking not for leniency as a wife, but for a job. Joni remembered that Gayle came to her and said, “‘Oh, I won’t get in the way. I’ll help you. Give me a job. Give me something to do.’ So I said, ‘Oh, okay.’” Wardrobe was more complicated for Joni than for most of her male counterparts. The roadies had put John Guerin’s blue suede jacket, which was wet, in with Joni’s beautiful gowns. By the time they arrived in Memphis, the dresses were ruined: covered with big blue ink stains. Joni thought it might be worth it to hire Ford to be the tour’s wardrobe mistress. But as Joni tells it, Ford’s competitive nature and unmasked lust for Joni’s clothing got in the way of her doing even a halfway decent job. “She’s a clothes freak,” Joni told me. “I left some stuff in my trunk and she says, ‘There are still things in your trunk. Name everything you can’t remember and everything else is mine.’ So I said, ‘Okay, wardrobe mistress is not right. I’m gonna put you in charge of food.’”
Ahead of her time as a bandleader, Joni wanted the band to be able to eat well on the road. “When we get there, we’re going to have a room and we need fresh carrot sticks and healthy snack stuff, because everything’s closed in a lot of these towns,” Joni told Gayle. “You can be in charge of that. So right before we checked out, she brought in a plastic cooler of nuts and stuff like that. And we were rehearsing still. So I went down and picked up a bag of almonds and it was that kind of crunchy cellophane that you can roll over but it pops back up. So I took some almonds out and I rolled it over and it popped back up and I set it back in with everything upright. All of a sudden, she starts screaming, ‘Who did this?’ And somebody reached in there and the almonds had gotten inside the container. And she’s freaking out and I thought, ‘This girl is too much. She’s disruptive and megalomaniacal. She’s a nightmare.’”
In New York, Joni met up with Emmett Grogan, a founding member of an anarchist street theater group who distributed free food in Haight-Ashbury. Grogan, who by all accounts was a charmer, had grown up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, had kicked a teenage drug addiction, gained admission to a fancy prep school, and parlayed his access to New York’s elite into a lucrative sideline as a Park Avenue cat burglar. Joni was more than intrigued. She had met Grogan in Paris and remembered, “He spoke French with a Brooklyn accent.” Eager to have a nice evening with Grogan, she put Ford on notice. “I said to Gayle, ‘Lookee here, we’ll have none of that funny business tonight.’ It was the first time I had ever stood up to her, except for the one time in the car, when I said, ‘This is my car and I’ll smoke if I want to.’ So Emmett said I was like De Gaulle. He said if anybody had pulled a gun on me that night it would have bounced off of me and they would have missed. But I was very strong because I was very sick and very fed up.”
Joni could be like De Gaulle for only so long. She made it through a gig at Nassau Coliseum on February 20. By the time they got to Cole Fieldhouse at the University of Maryland, College Park, on February 22, she had clearly had enough. She saw a near replica of herself—only visually, of course—flaunted before her by her ex-lover, who was also keeping time behind her, an act that Russ Kunkel compared with the intimacy of a heartbeat.
That night in Maryland, the L.A. Express played their opening set as always. The resentment had been building since the airport in Boston. This woman would be dangled before Joni for the rest of the gig, and by a guy who was not only her ex, but working for her, and being paid nicely, too. Joni had had to tolerate this for days, and it was getting tougher and tougher. She wasn’t kidding when she told Elliot Roberts she could take it no more, and now she was supposed to get up there and entertain a stadium of eighteen thousand on a college campus and sing about drinking a case of her lover or courting and sparking or even going twisted? Joni could be tough, Joni could be sensitive. And she also knew when to take off.
The sound check was foreboding. “The sound was bouncing off the walls and between being sick and the sound being horrible, I thought, ‘I can’t play under these circumstances.’ I was just hearing echoes of myself. It’s like when you’re talking on the phone and you get slap-back and you can’t really talk to the person.” Joni was in her own echo chamber that night. When it was time to sing her opening number, the band played the familiar groove, and Joni took to the mic and sang, “Help me . . .” before bolting from the stage. She really did need help. Eighteen thousand tickets were returned. Five more domestic gigs were canceled. A European leg was scrapped. Max Bennett estimated that he personally lost $60,000—in 1976 dollars. Joni would play a few gigs after that—the Band’s Last Waltz concert on Thanksgiving, a Save the Whales benefit, a Bread and Roses festival in 1978—but she took off because she felt like her well-being was more valuable than any deals that the men who managed her had made for her to perform. It didn’t feel like it was about letting down the fans. It felt like it was about saving her own soul. Emmett Grogan died in 1978, on the F train to Coney Island, of what appeared to be a heart attack but others believed to be a heroin overdose. Bob Dylan dedicated his 1978 album, Street Legal, to Grogan’s memory.
A road trip to Maine ended up being a circuitous solo trip back home. She wrote many songs, enough, with some that she had already accumulated, to make another album. One song was tentatively called “Traveling,” but she flipped through the dictionary to find a better word. She finally came upon it—Hejira: escape with honor.
20 HEJIRA AND THE ART OF LOSING
The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster,” wrote Elizabeth Bishop in the poet’s final volume, published in 1976. Joni’s music seemed, from the very beginning, to capture this uneasy truth, how quickly life teaches us to get good at the art of losing, how many things—places, and people, as well as beloved possessions—seem filled with the intent to be lost. For Joni, 1976 was a year to master the art of losing more and more. She had already given up her daughter, left lovers in the dust, and abandoned a two-month tour that was supposed to go much longer. One thing she was certain she needed to lose was her ego—that beast fed and inflated by cocaine.
You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, she’d already told us, yet she wasn’t done losing. There was so much yet to be lost in the future: her entire soprano range, much of her audience, her critical grace. Starting with The Hissing of Summer Lawns, some of the reviews were becoming increasingly obtuse, the more adventurous she became. Joni was in the sweepstakes to lose big; the higher the art, the greater the loss. Indeed, for Joni, loss often is where the creativity starts. It had been this way ever since polio robbed her of her dreams of being an athlete. In her childhood, when Joni returned from the ward and found she was no longer picked first for the teams, she turned inward and eventually found that she was an artist. A Joni Mitchell without polio might well have been a Joni Mitchell who could never reach the depths and darkness of Blue.
Running out on her Hissing of Summer Lawns tour was a loss of a different kind, certainly a financial loss for the members of the L.A. Express (and for her, of course). And yet those months of free time—first with fellow travelers, then on her own—led to discoveries that might have never happened if life went on as planned. And they certainly would not have led to the perfect storm of Hejira (1976), an album that is as loved by her most ardent fans as Blue, and sometimes makes it to the very top of various lists of favorite Joni Mitchell albums. Perry Meisel, an NYU English professor, slammed Hejira in the pages of The Village Voice for failing to live up to Freud and literary theory. Meisel becomes worked up about her look, reminds everyone about the Rolling Stone smear, and disses her clothes before ripping apart her language:
Hejira presents the Queen of El Lay more explicitly in the guise of a poet than ever before, festooned with cape, beret, slanted pinky, and the backdrop of a resolutely abstract landscape. Well, that’s the way poets are supposed to look, I guess, and Mit
chell’s (self-)portrait here seems to be a little too aware of that. Mitchell, of course, has always tried to pass herself off as a poet by printing out her lyrics on the covers of her recordings. No mere listening aids, the printouts constitute a tacit commitment to the perils of scrutiny and rereading. Mixing your metaphors in ignorance is one thing, but flaunting your pretensions in black and white is quite another.
Because Joni had the chance to look back on her time in what she called, in the title track, the “petty wars” with John Guerin (who still played drums on the album), and have some minor flings along the way, she could open up the arsenal of heartbreak and love-’em-and-leave-’em songs that fans of Blue and Court and Spark had been yearning for, even if coming back to the old subject always meant coming back in a new way. Hejira is no sequel to anything. It’s about being high on coke and getting drunk on love, and finally about a moment of sober clarity. It is the late-night party and the morning after. Her listeners had already learned, from “Down to You,” that everything comes and goes; this time, life’s ebb and flow would return, but in the first person. Things were now down to her. Whether she was ruminating on Amelia Earhart’s brave, independent, but doomed journey, or on the philosophical implications of turning thirty, the music seems to break free of its own confines, making as much room as it would take. It had been five years since Blue, but it sounded like a lifetime.
During that time, much had changed. She was maturing, her life was progressing, and this was captured on her recordings in real time. She claimed to have lost an octave at Rolling Thunder (her soprano was still there, floating above Neil Young at the Last Waltz). Her voice certainly sounded heavier, both literally and figuratively. In 1971, it was still shocking to her that life fell short. In 1976, it was a grim reality, even as her passion was as deep as ever. Blue may have been private letters that weren’t published. Hejira is filled with personal revelations blurted out to anyone who would listen. And it would find God (or the devil) in the details: Coyote picking up a woman’s scent on his fingers, mama’s nylons underneath her cowgirl jeans, a man and a woman sitting on a rock that will either thaw or freeze. Joni’s mind picked up pictures and put them into words. It wasn’t poetry she was after; it was more like movies for your mind. “Girl, you make me see pictures in my head,” said a woman to Joni backstage at the Grammys. Joni has received many compliments, but this, she told me, was among her favorites.
In March 1976, shortly after Joni went home following the aborted Hissing of Summer Lawns tour, she left LA on a road trip with two male companions—an Australian ex-lover and a young flight attendant who would inspire “A Strange Boy.” The idea was cooked up on the beach at Neil Young’s house. The destination was to be Damariscotta, Maine, to save her ex-boyfriend’s daughter from his in-laws. Surely, the way to forget her ex-boyfriend troubles was to travel with another ex-boyfriend and another man destined to be a romance with a built-in expiration date. She was still on coke when she called Robben Ford, her guitarist from both tours and The Hissing of Summer Lawns, who must have still been reeling from the canceled tour. “Hey, Robben, I’m gonna be in Boulder,” she told him. “Great, come on by,” he said. Why the hell not? He had crashed with her before in LA when she had recently moved into her Bel-Air sanctuary. When she wasn’t having a breakdown, Joni was a blast. Besides, he had something to share with her that he knew she would dig—an advance copy of the bass player Jaco Pastorius’s eponymous debut album, released by Epic in 1976.
This was anything but a casual recommendation, in a cultural moment when a recording couldn’t be shared just anywhere, and when certain releases, even on major labels, could remain unknown. At the time of release, most people in the music world hadn’t heard of Pastorius, but they had heard of the other musicians playing with him, including Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Michael Brecker, and even a reunited Sam and Dave on one track. And once they did hear it, word spread fast. Most electric bassists in 1976 were just keeping time or slapping in the funk style of that moment. Pastorius seemed to come out of nowhere to make every electric bass player rethink their game—really, rethink their lives. “If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats,” went the provocative title of a composition by the great Charles Mingus, who would enter Joni’s orbit a couple of years later. Pastorius would leave a lot of copycats in his wake, too. Pastorius made the electric bass sing, and in a range never imagined by other players, playing the notes, using the rhythms, and leaving the spaces that Joni was yearning for and demanding of other players without success.
For Joni, Robben Ford played Pastorius’s solo bass ballad “Portrait of Tracy,” which is played with an extravagant and idiosyncratic use of harmonics, the high end of the instrument no bass player of record had explored in that sort of depth at all. The song sounds like a duo with a single player, with bass notes bringing in just enough support for the acrobatics on the high end. Never had such sublime treble emanated from a bass guitar. It was as if a baritone began singing soprano. Pastorius ripped the frets off a bass guitar in an attempt to combine the volume of an electric instrument with the freedom of an upright. He wasn’t the first fretless bass player—Bill Wyman of the Stones, Jack Bruce of Cream, Rick Danko of the Band, and John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin all preceded him—but he was its first virtuoso. Pastorius compared frets to speed bumps. He had to vandalize the instrument to isolate these notes. The sound that resulted was something entirely new, as if he had found hidden beauty in an instrument that was not made for this range at all. And he kept time with such precision, he could do all these other inventive flourishes while never forgetting the pulse.
Some of the most audacious innovators look outside of what an instrument is even built to do. Charlie Parker was known to have practiced from a violin book. John Coltrane played out of a harp book, trying to make a tenor saxophone play in a single note what the most ornately chordal instrument would play in cascading notes; attempting to make a tenor saxophone play harp chords—to play fast enough, the chords would somehow congeal—Coltrane brought the instrument beyond its intended function. “Portrait of Tracy” was a track that made many players rack their brains and wonder how Pastorius did what he did, especially on a ballad, as emotionally deep as it was innovative. It took live performances to prove to skeptics that there was no studio trickery involved. He really was making those sounds all by himself—a bass way out of range and then back again. It would be an understatement to say that Pastorius—who proclaimed “I’m the baddest” so often it should have been on his tombstone—was not a humble man; these Promethean adventures on the instrument showed the reasons.
Joni said that he sounded like she had dreamed him up. She had always yearned for a bass player who approached the instrument as someone who could go all the way up to her soprano range. Max Bennett, who was a superb accompanist, bristled at some of the audacious things Joni was asking for. Even if, years later, Joni listened back to her work with Max Bennett, from Court and Spark (“Trouble Child”) to Hejira, and realized that he was right to put his foot down, with Pastorius, she heard a kindred spirit, someone who took an instrument—the bass guitar—and remade it, as radically as Charlie Parker remade the alto sax or as Jimi Hendrix remade the electric guitar. Joni learned that this guy was in Miami, playing gigs with Bob Hope and Phyllis Diller. The next time she was in a studio, she’d have to bring him out.
But she hadn’t written all the songs for the next album yet, and in those peripatetic months, she would clock as much time on the road as she would have on the tour she’d escaped, except without limos, private jets, an entourage, and paying customers lined up to see her. She’d be in the company of whoever she felt like being around—certainly not John Guerin, at least not until things had cooled down and she would be back in the studio, where she trusted him to play drums as only he could.
Her itinerary was exhausting. She had escaped her tour, and she would keep escaping. Cocaine kept the energy and confidence brimmi
ng, and would be part of what kept some songs going—the proliferating verses of “Song for Sharon,” in particular. That song had ten verses with no chorus or bridge, an act of audacity, perhaps, except that one could not imagine the song any other way. Joni took chances when she was on cocaine, but then again, she had been taking chances all along. The giddy song-speak was written on coke; so was the associative “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter” and the loquacious “Talk to Me.” Joni had been giddy, associative, and loquacious before, but her ambition was now even more magnified. The romantic sweep of so many of her songs, from “Both Sides, Now” to “Sweet Bird” (and, later, on “Amelia”), gave way to lines that accommodated conversational syllables from a woman, already a big talker, becoming a flagrantly bigger talker, “always talkin’,” as she put it, “chicken squawkin’.”
The breathy folksinger of the past was shoved aside, although not quite for good. She later often said that cocaine destroys the heart and that it was the greatest source of what’s wrong with pop music. This period of coke was, if not the essence, then certainly an essence of her work at this stage, but so was the sobriety that followed it. Indeed, when she needed to kick, that would be part of the journey, too. She took a drive to Maine, went solo, landed in New York City, got diverted to Florida, traveled incognito in the Deep South, then through the desert. When she got home, Hejira was ready to be recorded.
21 CRAZY WISDOM
Robben Ford not only turned Joni on to Jaco Pastorius, but his wife, Gayle Ford, who had caused Joni such grief on the Hissing of Summer Lawns tour earlier that year, took one look at Joni and “said I was in bad shape and took me to this guru.” This was not just your run-of-the-mill Colorado 1970s guru. This was Vidyadhara Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, founder of the global Shambhala network of Tibetan Buddhist communities and of Naropa University, located right there in Boulder. Trungpa was considered a reincarnate lama, or “tulku,” the eleventh such lama in the Trungpa line; a figure of monastic authority in Tibet while he was still in his teens, before the Chinese invasion and his subsequent exile.