Reckless Daughter

by David Yaffe

  “Hejira” celebrates flight itself. Pastorius’s tone is muted, but the effect is like Miles Davis’s muted trumpet. Subduing the instrument’s natural tones kept the lyrical expression while lowering the curtains on anything too cloyingly bright. It was also closer to the sound Joni initially heard in the rhapsodic harmonics of “Portrait of Tracy.” As his tone is dampened down, it is also overdubbed, so that he can hit more than one eccentric note at a time, even riffing on Joni’s melodic flourishes. Joni seems to want it all—freedom and companionship, human contact and solitude, recognition and anonymity. She wants to know where 1 is, and then have a bass player blissfully disregard it. Does she contradict herself? “I’m porous with travel fever / But you know I’m so glad to be on my own / Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger / Can set up trembling in my bones.”

  Albert Camus, from Leonard Cohen’s reading list, makes an appearance here, from Notebooks, 1935–1951: “What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country . . . we are seized by a vague fear, and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits. This is the most obvious benefit of travel. At that moment we are feverish but also porous, so that the slightest touch makes us quiver to the depths of our being.” (emphasis added)

  Camus describes the alienation from one’s self when one is in an unfamiliar place. For the existentialist, the self is all. Joni wanted to go further: beyond the self, then back again with greater perspective. Joni picks up the idea of porousness and also the idea of the “slightest touch,” except, crucially, she adds the stranger to it (certainly not Camus’s Stranger), which is what makes the whole image most distinctly hers. Alienation is alienation, passed around between poets and philosophers. The trembling from a stranger—that’s pure Joni Mitchell. She needs to be alone to have these insights. She’s a “defector from the petty wars” with Guerin and others. But she knows that love will suck her back in.

  Joni has said that she often begins a song with many verses and then chisels it down, since most people don’t like overly long songs. One song that was spared this editing process was “Song for Sharon,” which has ten verses and no chorus and clocks in at 8:40. There is no center, perhaps because it describes a life with no center. “Sharon” is Sharon Bell, a childhood friend from Maidstone of whom Joni had seen very little since her Saskatoon debut in 1963. Bell later said that most of their conversations were “Remember when . . . ?” and so she could be a figure that is, on the surface, one of nostalgia, someone who can still evoke the uncanny, or the return of the repressed. Joni, always looking forward, even as she looks back, digs deeper, to reflect on what she had gained and lost. She looks to her friend from the distant past to help her make sense of her present. As the song describes, Joni really did take the Staten Island Ferry to Staten Island’s North Shore to Mandolin Brothers, where she bought a 1915 Gibson Mandocello and a Martin herringbone guitar. While this purchase opens the song, it is already addressed to Sharon, the recipient of this open letter, where Joni reflects on a long-gone childhood of the Canadian prairie, back when she went to every wedding in the town, chasing white lace. More recently, she had been chasing white powder, and was trying to escape from it—one of this album’s many attempted hejiras. Joni has said that she has been cursed with sincerity. Unlike Dylan or Cohen, she has no character to hide behind. It’s part of what makes her work so human, so intimate, but it also leaves her more vulnerable.

  In “Song for Sharon,” her coked-up shout-out to her childhood friend, Joni devotes a verse to the suicide of Phyllis Major, which occurred in March 1976. It was around the same time that Trungpa roused Joni to a new level of reconciling who she was and who she was becoming. “When Chögyam zapped me, I spent three days in the awakened state,” she told me. “The awakened state is glamorized by charlatans—bliss, nirvana. It’s not a glamorous state. It’s a wonderful state. But it is ultra-mundane. Your ‘I’ thing is gone. You could say ‘ego,’ but that’s misleading. Your whole ‘I’ thing is gone. The thing you think you are is not there. But your full nature is there. Your soul is there. I know what a soul is from that experience. Whatever your full nature is—that’s your soul. So if you’re mischievous, you’ll be mischievous even without an ‘I’ thing. There’s nothing to report back to. Our whole head is filled with insane entertainment of our thoughts and our assumptions. Then you’re just a living, viewing machine.” Joni could see herself seeing her past, where she was trying to go, who she was, all while taking a sabbatical from the first person. And it was when she was still in the midst of this process of figuring out how to live, she was commemorating the dead, in her way: Phyllis Major, the wife of Jackson Browne, had committed suicide. Joni’s relationship with Browne had been four years earlier. So much had happened! That was way before she had—for three days, but still—let go of herself. And yet these feelings were coming back, to be commemorated in some new writing, that had to be done, had to be transformed into music. The “I” thing was gone, but then it wasn’t. But when it did go, she had gone to a new level of perspective. She could see herself as particles of change orbiting the sun, but she still felt a trembling in her bones from the slightest touch of a stranger. A woman, who had been married to an ex-lover, commits suicide. She feels bad. And she can’t let go her bitterness toward the man who surely drove her to it, which makes her feel even more sympathy, more anger. The Korean word han, a mixture of melancholy and rancor and anger, covers the emotional spectrum here. She is sad, she is angry, she takes umbrage. She would like to be above settling scores, yet she is compelled to do so.

  It all came rushing back. Jackson had the nerve to dump her. Then she had such a vivid sense of what was wrong with him, and she could see what he was doing to the women who came after. Poor Phyllis, Joni thought. She was reaching a new sense of being present while being confronted with her past. And so she reaches back further—way, way back to her friend from Maidstone, from between the ages of three and five. Without naming names, Joni, in this rambling conversation with Sharon Bell, thinks about what happens when the dream of the white lace turns into a nightmare:

  A woman I knew just drowned herself

  The well was deep and muddy

  She was just shaking off futility

  Or punishing somebody

  Over the years, accounts have surfaced that Joni, too, became self-destructive after her breakup with Jackson Browne. Not so, said Joni in 2015. “I read a page in one of these books. It said, when Jackson Browne dumped me, I attempted suicide and I became a cutter. A cutter! A self-mutilator! I thought, Where do they get this garbage from? I’m not that crazy. I’m crazy, but not that kind of crazy.”

  Phyllis Major apparently was that kind of desperate. She had already been with Joni’s friend Eric Andersen—who showed Joni the open G tuning back in the early folk days of ’65. It hadn’t started, or ended, well. “My friend Eric Andersen was married to Debbie Green. He ran off right after their baby was born. He ran off with Phyllis. Phyllis was a gorgeous girl and he had taken her at a young age to the [Roger] Vadim scene. That’s a woman-hating scene. Phyllis was a sensitive, artistic, beautiful girl, who was passed from guy to guy to guy. Her brother committed suicide, too.”

  Joni described Major as a “poetic, beautiful girl, looking, with that stupid ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’ dream that so many of my generation inherited. Especially if you were beautiful, you’d figure that your prince would choose you. You were even more susceptible to being conned.”

  Joni remembered Eric Andersen calling her and going on about the beautiful girl he’d just met. He was, Joni said, “the kind that would seem to be a prince: he’s sensitive, he’s romantic, he’s poetic.” A week later Eric called, distraught. Major had gotten the flu and Joni could hear her throwing up in the background. Joni was incredulous that Andersen “called for sympathy from me. Like, ‘Oh, God, she’s sick. My toy is broken!’ And that’s basically the mentality of all th
e men of my generation that I met, just narcissistic, fair-weather types. So I felt really sorry for her.”

  Later, when Major ended up with Jackson Browne, Joni was even more concerned. “So, here comes another one—the worst one of all. The very worst one. And all of the shit that she’s gone through to fall into his clutches.” The funeral would be revisited in a later song, “Not to Blame,” when finger-pointing against Jackson Browne escalated. “Song for Sharon” spends only a stanza on Phyllis Major’s funeral. The song is dominated by disappointments and frustrations, not tragedy. But what is clear from the song is that, with the wrong people, white lace can turn into a funeral shroud.

  When Joni was a child, there was no such thing as a singer-songwriter, and she knew she didn’t have the classical chops to play the Rachmaninoff theme from “The Story of Three Loves” that had already besotted her. She did not envision herself as a performer, but dreamed of the path to love, which, as she put it, stimulated her illusions more than anything. The childhood dreams of white lace were dashed quickly enough, and she became the twenty-one-year-old who could look at life from both sides now. Fast-forward a decade, and after she had stretched herself as an artist and as an independent woman, she looked at the life of Sharon Bell as the road not taken. “I’ve got the apple of temptation,” she sings, “and a diamond snake around my arm.” Joni’s description of her jewelry reminds her of the Garden of Eden—a snake waiting to tempt, an apple waiting to be eaten. After all the sex, drugs, and rock and roll, Joni ends the song with a reference to Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside quiet waters. He restores my soul; He guides me in the paths of righteousness.” Joni, an awakened sinner, tells us she’ll walk green pastures by and by.

  So many nights in hotel rooms made a Gideon reader out of Joni. But could anyone really imagine a Joni who shall not want? The Joni of “All I Want” wants her lover to feel free, and she wants to feel free even more. Joni hardly sounds contented at the end of “Song for Sharon,” eight and a half minutes of reverie that surely could have gone on even longer. The psalm allusion is the last word of the song, but those green pastures are not the last word of the album. There will be crazy wisdom to spare before the hejira of Hejira reaches its destination.

  There is no Lord’s Prayer in “Amelia,” even though one can imagine, at the moment of doom, its subject making a desperate one. Amelia Earhart was, of course, the famed aviatrix who made record-breaking flights before getting lost in the Pacific, while trying to break her own record. Her disappearance is the coldest of cold cases. Watching six jet planes soar off in the desert made Joni think of the strings of her guitar, which is what put the song in motion. Earhart was a precursor woman who also subverted, ignored, and reinvented the idea of what a woman could be four decades earlier, pushing herself to greater and greater heights, ultimately to mystery. She had been lost for nearly forty years when Joni wrote “Amelia,” and yet Joni addressed her as intimately—maybe even more intimately—than she addressed Sharon Bell. While on her hejira from John Guerin (and all those who preceded and succeeded him), Joni is making a solo drive across the country. She’s not comparing herself with Earhart, not really. She’s just thinking about her, and even having imaginary conversations with her.

  Oh, Amelia, it was just a false alarm

  Joni was getting off drugs, and her newly cleared brain was giving her an insight into what could make someone self-destruct so spectacularly. Getting off cocaine is no joke, and yet she never spoke of going through withdrawal, one of the miracles she attributed to Trungpa. Amelia surely had her share of false alarms before the big one finally hit. And Joni, chronicling her own brush with disaster, knows she will live to tell her tale and sing her sorrow, all in a sultry alto, without, in this song, a single soprano leap. Joni pulls into an imaginary lodge named for her own song—the Cactus Tree Motel—evoking a song celebrating her own resilience. She dreams of 747s, of “geometric farms,” of “dreams and false alarms.” Joni may have spent some of her life in clouds at icy altitudes. “Maybe I’ve never really loved,” she said, riffing on Marianne’s line from Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. But she is not really like the Nordic Liv Ullmann. She was just feeling that way at that moment on her road trip. She has really loved and will really love again. It’s her great subject, even in its absence. She knows that Amelia will eventually get a real alarm.

  Even when Joni lands, the subject of travel—persistent since the yearning to escape winter in “Urge for Going”—proliferates, and not just about where she went, but the pain in the ass of getting there. Many associate travel with pleasure, excitement, material for Sunday newspaper sections and glossy magazines. Joni’s songs about travel are more dark and brooding—about escape, restlessness, dissatisfaction, running away, nameless yearning. Just hearing her check off her itinerary—a ferry to a pontoon plane to a taxi to a train—is exhausting. “Black Crow” is about a hejira of sorts, but it is not about the journey that inspired much of the album; it is instead mused upon from a terminus in British Columbia. Musically, it is a funk tune without drums, so Pastorius can have more room to keep a pulse, but hit some eccentric harmonics and leave plenty of space for Larry Carlton to rip through it with as much distortion as he ever used with Joni. When Joni was a C student in third grade, her reading group was Wren Row. The D students behind her were the Crows. Those D students seemed deficient at the time, but now the crow is picking up a prize, something much more appealing than polishing a teacher’s apple. On her Sunshine Coast property, she saw a black crow diving down for something shiny, and she could relate. The Joni of “Black Crow” was not the little girl of “Song for Sharon” chasing white lace. This was the artist in search of love and music, an exhausting quest, reflected by her “haggard face in the bathroom light.” She was also a road-weary soul, marveling at how the black crow is always on the hunt, diving down for something shiny, while we human beings get jet-lagged, carsick, lovesick, homesick, or, for this wild seed, roadsick.

  And the road is where Joni ends Hejira, to keep us in transit forever. The finale’s title, “Refuge of the Roads,” says it all; the oxymoron—like Trungpa’s “crazy wisdom”—resolves itself like a metaphysical conceit. In her encounter with Trungpa, his crazy wisdom was meant for Joni to find her own. She explained to him that, as an artist, she couldn’t take his advice to stop analyzing, but that didn’t mean she didn’t think twice about it. Joni was enjoying meeting regular folks during her travels, especially in the Deep South, where she was not so well known. “It was a relief,” she told the Ottawa Citizen on the thirty-year anniversary of Hejira’s release. “I was able, like the Prince and the Pauper, to escape my fame under a false name and fall in with people and enjoy ordinary civilian status.” In the midst of this road party, Joni catches herself thinking too much: “Till I started analyzing / And I brought on my old ways / A thunderhead of judgment was / Gathering in my gaze.” It was in Joni’s nature to analyze; if she had truly taken the healer’s advice, this song would not exist. Letting go was a process, not a destination. One of Trungpa’s greatest achievements was his English translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the same version that John Lennon riffed on in the lyrics to “Tomorrow Never Knows.” “Turn off your mind,” begins the Beatles song, essentially intoning the same advice. Yet Joni accepts her own tendency to do precisely the thing she was advised not to do. Hejira is not a how-to album.

  And yet “Refuge of the Roads” is about an awakening of sorts. Joni was in fight-or-flight mode. She needed to know how to keep moving, but with clarity. Sometimes she needed an overdecorated house, sometimes she needed something austere. Sometimes she was in search of love and music. Sometimes she needed painting and solitude. This was a crop rotation of the mind. When Buddha, according to Huston Smith, was asked not “Who are you?” but “What are you?” he is said to have replied, “I am awake.” When Joni was “zapped”—her word—by Trungpa, sh
e was jolted to a state of being present, not distracted by the fantasies or story lines in her head of the past and future—taking in every moment of the present with an alert and awakened mind. She was, in effect, looking at clouds from every side, now. They were illuminated, vibrant. She could see around them, above them, and below them. She felt like she could see anything:

  These are the clouds of Michelangelo

  Muscular with gods and sungold

  Shine on your witness in the refuge of the roads

  Those were not really clouds of Michelangelo, but in Joni’s mind and music, they seemed that way. And they were in that moment a beatitude, a vision, as is the rest of the song, getting lost with drifters, passing through random towns, meeting random people, buying Winn-Dixie cold cuts, making a strange journey that was somehow illuminated. They were present in the moment, real, vivid. “Refuge of the Roads” brims with the vibrancy of the awakened state. How do you kick cocaine with an alcoholic? Hire a bass player who never shows you where the 1 is? And how do you take refuge in the roads? The car is moving. Those white lines on the freeway are zooming by. Try looking for safety in the middle of the freeway and see what happens. Only a lunatic would think of something like that. Only someone who sounded like they had nothing left to lose.

  22 MIRRORED BALL

  Throughout her career, Joni often spent the time between albums in painting periods. She called this “crop rotation.” She simply couldn’t go on a version of Dylan’s Never Ending Tour. Even though Hejira made it seem like the drive would go on forever, there was only so much she could take of the grind. That’s why “Black Crow” sounded so world-weary. She had been traveling so long, how would she even know her home? She had recently started renting a loft in Manhattan from the sculptor Nathan Joseph. It was in SoHo, on Varick Street, just south of Houston, near the Film Forum, where she would binge on foreign films. When she became involved with the percussionist Don Alias, it would also become a rehearsal space for his bands and whoever was sitting in with them. She made the most of both coasts, reveling in the conversation and culture of New York City, while retreating to the private space of Bel-Air. “Home” could mean B.C.’s Sunshine Coast, SoHo, or Bel-Air. In each space, there was room for her to sleep to the afternoon, and create as long as the blarney would run.