Reckless Daughter

by David Yaffe

  But Joni was not at any of these spaces on Thanksgiving, the most homeward bound of holidays. She had a good reason. Robbie Robertson was breaking up the Band, and they were staging at San Francisco’s Winterland what was being touted as the greatest group rock concert since Woodstock or the Isle of Wight, to bid farewell to rock and roll’s Class of ’76. If the rock critics were to be believed, the Clash, Patti Smith, the Ramones, and Talking Heads were putting the old guard, if not out of business, then at least on notice.

  The artists of what was being called the Last Waltz—including Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, and Joni—represented an older sensibility; they were adults, and they did not share this new generation’s angry and blasé spirit, although Neil Young would be embraced as a trailblazer from punk to grunge. (Muddy Waters would be there as sixty-one-year-old elder statesman. Neil Diamond was allegedly there to represent Tin Pan Alley, but really, because Robbie was convinced they had made a monster record together.)

  No one yet knew that the classic rock radio format would keep the airplay of many of Joni’s contemporaries alive—while she would mostly live on in CSNY’s “Woodstock” cover. The Band’s farewell seemed like a fork in the road. Martin Scorsese would make a film out of it, showcasing eccentric interviews with the members of the Band—including a heartbreaking story of Sonny Boy Williamson coughing up blood, and some wink-wink, nudge-nudge remarks about how the “women of the road” kept them going more than the music. And this was the segment that introduced Joni, the only woman on the bill.

  Except for the drummer and Arkansan Levon Helm—who sang lead on many of the best-known songs Robertson wrote for the group—the Band were from Canada, and had released their debut, Music from Big Pink, in 1968, the same year as Song to a Seagull. Decades later, the Band’s keyboard eminence, Garth Hudson, was still marveling over that album. “We all fell in love with Joni. There are certain Canadianisms that sneak across the border, and she was very careful in creating her vignettes,” Hudson recalled. “I wondered how she came up with those melodies—so analytically creative.”

  The Band had a studio in Malibu called Shangri-la, built in a house—with swimming pool intact—that had been owned by Sammy Davis, Jr. Before the Last Waltz, Joni once paid Hudson a visit to look at the Yamaha CS80, the first fully polyphonic synthesizer. She wasn’t a woman on the road at that point. She was another musician in the studio, someone with whom to talk shop. It was in that spirit that she was the token female at the festivities. She was one of them. At the Last Waltz, there was no female dressing room; Joni shared a trailer with her friend Neil Young. While she was honored to be the only female artist there, she also felt a little lonely. Scorsese clearly realized this deficiency and added Emmylou Harris and Mavis Staples (along with two of her sisters) in a sequence shot later for the film.

  Scorsese had been an assistant director on Woodstock, and by the time he got to Winterland in ’76, he had made his reputation on Mean Streets (1973) and Taxi Driver, which had stunned audiences when it was released in February. His intent was to make the greatest rock concert film ever, and there is a critical consensus that he did exactly that.

  Somehow, the Band leaving the road was an occasion for an entire generation of rock stars, in the middle of the 1970s, to consider what they were doing to themselves. Robertson said that they had been on the road for sixteen years—and he couldn’t even begin to think about making it to twenty. The road meant drugs, regrettable hookups, exhaustion, alienation, despair. Rock and roll was supposed to be an escape, yet it seemed like a trap. “The road has taken a lot of the great ones: Hank Williams, Buddy Holly, Otis Redding, Janis, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis,” rasped Robbie Robertson at the end of the film. “It’s a goddamn impossible way of life.” (To which Levon Helm, who opposed the breakup, replied, “I ain’t in this for my health!”)

  It happened that the Last Waltz concert was performed the month Hejira was released. Joni would harmonize on Neil Young’s “Helpless,” and would present—bolstered by Levon Helm’s brush work, Garth Hudson’s organ adventures, and especially Robbie Robertson’s subtle and elegant guitar accompaniment—“Coyote” (which made it to the film), “Shadows and Light” (strummed, like the Rolling Thunder version), and “Furry Sings the Blues” (with Neil Young doing the shambolic harmonica part he performed on the record).

  Much has been made of the lengths the filmmakers went to cover up Neil Young’s notorious “cocaine booger,” doctored to disappear against his nose. What is less known is the degree to which the sound had to be modified. “When Neil and Robbie asked me to sing on the Last Waltz, they were so high, and they were so out of tune, I thought, ‘How am I gonna do this?’” Joni told me.

  The story has often been told that Joni sang on “Helpless” from behind a curtain, so as not to detract from making a grand entrance before it was time for her set. But Joni remembers it somewhat differently. “I said, ‘I’ll do it offstage,’ because it was going to take such concentration.” Neil and Robbie wanted her to “lock up with them in three-part harmony. No way I could do that,” she recalled. “Their pitch was all over the place. And Neil calls out to me, ‘Sing with me somehow,’ not realizing why I can’t. He was just unaware. CSN was always out of tune. They were never aware of how out of tune they were, partially because of drugs, I guess. When Neil played on ‘Furry Sings the Blues’ he had to play on four harmonicas. It was kind of adventuresome. It was very unusual harmonica.”

  The first shot of Scorsese’s film is of the bass player Rick Danko setting up a pool table, explaining the terms of a game called “cutthroat.” These were very competitive guys. It is sad to see Danko in the film, after the concert is over, listening to playbacks and unable to imagine the future. When the Band ended up going on the road without Robbie Robertson, the venues got smaller and sadder. Richard Manuel, who seemed to be crying for help in songs like “The Shape I’m In” and “Tears of Rage”—the latter cowritten with Bob Dylan and ending with the refrain “And life is brief”—hanged himself in a hotel room between gigs in 1986.

  Joni didn’t want to be a road hog or a road casualty. She sought refuge in it, and didn’t want to see the concert mark the end of an era while she was still making new discoveries. Still, she didn’t tour for another three years. Nor did she feel the desire to record, until one day, in 1977, at home in Bel-Air, she suddenly hobbled to the piano and began improvising chords. On guitar, she would do this by finding new tunings. But she was too weak for guitar. She had been sick for some time, in and out of the hospital. She hadn’t really played piano since her tour was aborted early in 1976, so those eighty-eight keys had some novelty. In her weakened state, she felt a sense of the uncanny. It was somehow impossible for her to hit a wrong note. The more she explored, the more fascinating it became, so complex, and yet the combination of dissonance and euphony hit her sweet spot. Even in recovery, her jive detector was never wrong. She knew she had to commit this to record as soon as possible. A call to Henry Lewy was in order.

  “Henry, I don’t know what’s happening, but I’m an idiot savant,” Joni told him. “I haven’t played it in three years, and all of a sudden I’m playing. You got to go into the studio and capture it. I can’t hit a wrong chord. We’ve got to go into the studio.”

  “I’m sick,” he replied.

  “So am I. What’s wrong with you?”

  “I’ve got bursitis.”

  “Well, I’m just getting over abscessed ovaries,” she said. “I’m coming back to life and gimping along. Let’s go in.”

  And so they made their way back to A&M studios, far from hale and hearty, but with Joni’s muse to spur them along. Joni, in increments (with cigarette breaks scheduled in), recorded a series of the same chords that had her feeling like a savant propped up from her sickbed. These improvisations added up to two hours of music, cut and spliced with tape, the old-fashioned, predigital way. If Joni knows anything about the piano, it is where middle C is, and that was the focal
point; wherever she wandered, middle C was home. Joni then returned with lyrics that spilled over in what became “Paprika Plains,” a song that would end up running more than sixteen minutes, with more than seventy lines that didn’t make the final cut, but were included on the printed lyrics in parentheses.

  Unlike “Both Sides, Now,” where she would take huge themes—innocence and experience—and distill them to just three verses, “Paprika Plains” is twice as long as “Song for Sharon,” with more diffuse subject matter, all inspired by a cocaine-fueled dream she had had on the Rolling Thunder tour.

  Childhood memories scatter. Fragments of her life as a young adult filter in. Then comes a memory from a 1965 concert with Chuck Mitchell in Winnipeg—the night she met Neil Young, as if she were free-associating an anthropological study of the ways of central Canadians: “Back in my hometown / They would have cleared the floor / Just to watch the rain come down / They’re such sky-oriented people / Geared to changing weather.” This actually happened at the concert. A storm broke out and the whole audience ran to the windows. Joni is remembering an agrarian prairie town where a rainfall could mean feast or famine. She and Neil would be destined for other things, but they hardly knew it then. From her perch in Bel-Air, she could look back on the people she grew up around, preoccupied with their crops. At that point, this was the only reality Joni of Saskatoon knew. A dozen years later, she would have lived many more lifetimes. She came to feel that people of warmer climes were warmer themselves, more open, more affectionate. Still, she never forgot the season cycle from the Great White North. It haunted her dreams, and it haunts this song. That prairie girl was in there, and reconciling where she came from with where she had arrived would take a very long song.

  People were shocked when Bob Dylan had a hit with the six-minute “Like a Rolling Stone,” and even more shocked when the Beatles had one with the eight-minute “Hey, Jude.” But no one really thought that any song that ran over sixteen minutes, the way “Paprika Plains” did, was going to be a hit. Joni wasn’t really thinking about hits at this point anyway. It was all about art, in the spirit of Beethoven scandalizing his audience with the Eroica Symphony, with its demanding length of more than fifty minutes, and responding with something even longer—the Ninth Symphony, which usually clocks in at more than seventy minutes.

  “Paprika Plains” begins as a childhood dream, an earliest memory. It’s about the clash between creativity and—in the worst and best sense—civilization, or as Huck Finn called it, “sivilization.” Civilization has its discontents, of course, in this case, native people who “cut off their braids and lost some link with nature.” “Paprika Plains” is about getting that link back, even if it’s filtered through the memory of a little blond girl paired with Joni’s untamed piano. This is the girl who fell in love with Rachmaninoff, then Debussy. And it was this inspired wild child who was capturing something primal, tribal, and improvised, and translating it into an orchestral suite. Through an arranger, Michael Gibbs, a professor at the Berklee School of Music, she got it all out—imperfectly, but soulfully.

  Gibbs had been recommended by Jaco Pastorius, and Pastorius had told Gibbs that he’d showed Joni some piano exercises that had put the wind to her sails. “When I listened to it, I already knew that Jaco had shown her something at the piano that gave her a freedom, which is why the piece happened,” Gibbs told me. “She was suddenly released from something, and this music poured out. She recorded nearly half an hour and edited to the version I got. It was a backwards kind of approach to then do the orchestra afterwards, but it seemed like a natural challenge to take on.”

  Jaco had the right guy with the right chops and the right eclecticism. They recorded in Columbia’s 30th Street Studio, a former Greek Orthodox church known as the greatest studio in the world, where Glenn Gould recorded both his 1955 and his 1982 versions of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Miles Davis had recorded Kind of Blue.

  Joni was nervous, daunted perhaps, by the challenge of keeping an improvised piano piece from getting lost in translation. She had to drag Henry Lewy to New York, with the incentive that Dizzy Gillespie was playing that week at Birdland. In his weakened state, he could not stop what was happening, and he wouldn’t have been able to stop it even if he’d been stronger. His hands were trembling on the console, but that was preferable to leaving the recording in the hands of the second engineer they both deemed incompetent. “Paprika Plains” was too long to be a song, but did not have the multiple movements that would have made it a symphony. If one were to give it a name, it would be a Rhapsody in C.

  Gibbs was enthralled with the material. “The roughness of her playing is part of its charm. The purpose was to give the piano part something to lie in. It was just exposed and it didn’t have anything to hold it up, not only structurally, but to envelop it, like putting on a robe. When I met her to talk about it, I remember seeing the Grand Canyon as I flew, and it gave me the idea of plains, which is wide-open flat spaces, and paprika, which is hot. That had boiled one idea to an essence. What I ended up with sounded ice-cold to me, but it didn’t matter. When I started talking to Henry and Joni like that, Joni looked really happy, because I wasn’t talking about quarter notes and eighth notes. I wasn’t talking about technical music, but poetic ideas. We got along very easily from the start and she never did give me any instruction. She never told me what she wanted me to do.”

  Gibbs brought first-call players, virtuosi as well versed in classical as they were in jazz, all handpicked by the violinist David Nadien. The jazz violinist Harry Lookofsky was on the date, as was Ron Carter, one of the greatest upright bass players in the history of jazz.

  Given the stellar musicianship in the room, how, one might wonder, did the orchestra notoriously go out of tune? Most people can’t hear it. And, as Gibbs points out, “It’s not constantly out of tune, there’s just a moment when it was out of tune,” though that moment seems to last through much of the eighth minute. According to Joni, when she tried to point it out, Gibbs couldn’t hear it, Henry couldn’t hear it, and the assistant engineer couldn’t hear it. But Jaco Pastorius noticed it right away: “There’s out-of-tuneness there,” he said. And when Joni met Charles Mingus the following year, the first thing he said to her was “The strings on ‘Paprika Plains’ are out of tune.” She was impressed that he’d noticed, and replied, “Yeah! Did you hear that?” Mingus was taken aback. He thought he was telling her something she didn’t already know.

  So what happened? The problem was the improvisations, those Joni and Lewy had hastened into A&M studios to record, to capture the magic before it disappeared. There had been four of them, around half an hour each: one was thirty-one, one was twenty-nine, and two were thirty minutes long. (She would play until she needed a cigarette.) And then Joni and Lewy edited them down, and put the pieces together. The problem, said Gibbs, was this: “They were done on different days, and the tuning on the piano changed. So when we put it together, we tuned to the piano at the beginning. When the piano’s tuning shifted, the orchestra became out of tune. Usually, a piece for piano and orchestra has a fixed piano part, and then the pianist will work with the orchestra. What Joni did was not normally done. I never knew of anyone who worked this way.”

  Says Joni, “With Pro Tools, I could have gotten the middle part more accurate, but we had to cut tape, so it was pretty clumsy—the timing and the spaces between edits—because I cut that from two hours of improvisation down to ten minutes.” But the sour notes were only part of the story of this ambitious and fecund piece of music. What soared above it were the most ambitious and expansive lyrics she would ever write, as open with possibility as the prairie sky.

  A few years earlier, miles from the prairie, Joni found herself at a party thrown by Paul McCartney and Wings on the Queen Mary. She was seated with Bob Dylan, who, unlike Joni, doesn’t dance. They talked about painting; Dylan was a neophyte student of Norman Raeben, the Russian-born painter who taught on the eleventh floor of Carnegie Hall
. Dylan later said, “Five days a week I used to go up there, and I’d just think about it the other two days of the week. I used to be up there from eight o’clock to four. That’s all I did for two months . . . It changed me. I went home after that and my wife never did understand me ever since that day. That’s when our marriage started breaking up. She never knew what I was talking about, what I was thinking about. And I couldn’t possibly explain it.”

  At the party, Joni asked him, if he could paint anything in the room, what would he paint?

  “I’d paint this cup of coffee,” he said.

  Looking up, Joni said, “I’d paint that mirrored ball.”

  It was emblematic of their friendship that what felt like idle chitchat would soon be captured in song. Soon after, Dylan wrote “One More Cup of Coffee.” And Joni wrote these lines in the final section of “Paprika Plains”:

  You see that mirrored ball begin to sputter lights

  And spin

  Dizzy on the dancers

  Geared to changing rhythms

  Changing weather becomes changing rhythms. Now the disco ball is shining on the dancers, illuminated by an artificial globe. It’s a continuum. She’s still as “wide-eyed open to it all” as she was when she was “three feet tall.” Everywhere she looks, she sees patterns and makes poetic images out of them. Like a medicine ball, the mirrored ball is moving, yet it is also a center, like coming back to middle C. That mirrored ball shines on everyone. Jaco Pastorius, John Guerin, and, for the first time, the great jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter are all there to give her support, and to give the song a big summation, as harmonically rich as jazz and as rhythmically direct as rock and roll. They give a big and powerful resolution for a song that digs deep into the earth she sings about. Running away, coming back, running away again: it’s a cycle that needs an entire side of an album to get it across. It could have gone for even longer if she had found a place for the additional seventy-plus lines on the jacket. Joni’s cup runneth over, and it was as grand and sweeping as anything she would ever do. The dancers, the players, the dreams, all of it: she demanded much of herself, so it seemed only fair that she make demands of the listeners, too. “I’m floating back to you!” she sings at the end. To Don Alias? To her listeners? To reconcile her prairie girl self with her urban pop sophisticate self? “Paprika Plains” is Joni’s most ambitious challenge yet—too big and sprawling to be a pop song, but too wild and untamed to be a concerto. You think you can keep up with me? I dare you.