Reckless Daughter

by David Yaffe

  23 DON JUAN’S RECKLESS DAUGHTER

  There are only three saxophone players Joni truly loves: Johnny Hodges of the Ellington band; Charlie Parker, pioneer of bebop; and Wayne Shorter.

  She met Shorter at the Roxy in 1974, when they were walking in to see Miles Davis at the same time. Jaco Pastorius and Shorter were bandmates in the jazz-fusion group Weather Report, a collective that was, largely because of the Cult of Jaco, filling stadiums and playing to rock and roll–sized audiences. The more Pastorius took center stage, the more Shorter seemed to vanish in the distance, so much that a Weather Report album would be called Mr. Gone. But Pastorius was there to make a listener rethink the lower end. Shorter was there to make listeners marvel at how he could fill space with perfect and inspired impressionistic splashes.

  When she reeled him in three years later to work on the album that would come to be called Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, she heard him talking to the rhythm section for “Paprika Plains,” telling them to imagine a woman with her baby in a boat on a pond. Whoosh! Weather Report might have called him Mr. Gone, and he may have painted “Mr. Weird” on his saxophone case, but he also called one of his own albums The All Seeing Eye. It described the vision that would make Shorter Joni’s first-call sax player. He understood her weird chords, and a whole lot more. Mr. Gone was, for Joni, exactly where he needed to be.

  Shorter first emerged as a tenor player who was the dominant composer for Art Blakey, then Miles Davis in what Davis called his second great quartet (1964–68). Davis, who was used to getting his way, had to wait for four years while Shorter was under contract with Blakey. It was worth the wait. Davis was resistant to the free jazz that had become so au courant with critics and younger, more progressive musicians. He hired a group of younger virtuosi, including a fledgling Herbie Hancock, who were stretching out (if also fearful of their leader, who was known, accurately, as the Prince of Darkness). During that period, Shorter would write compositions that would become part of the jazz canon: “Speak No Evil,” “Footprints,” “Wild Flower,” “Masqualero,” “Night Dreamer,” “The All Seeing Eye,” among many others. Some of these songs would appear on Shorter’s Blue Note albums, some would become Davis staples.

  When jazz fusion became the music’s next, stadium-sized step, Shorter was on the vanguard of that, too, as a member of Weather Report, trading his tenor for a soprano so that he could be better heard above the electric instruments. And his conception on soprano was completely different from his tenor playing. Suddenly, he was no longer in the Sonny Rollins–John Coltrane school, but in a school of his own. He was suddenly using more space, like Miles. This suited Joni perfectly. Pastorius was the wild man, the maximalist, the baddest. Shorter was the visionary, holding back, taking the long view, assessing the broad expanse and putting in the right notes at the right time. Like Miles Davis, what he didn’t play was as important as what he did.

  In her years out of the studio, Joni had amassed enough material to fill another two-LP album. “Paprika Plains” would take up a whole side. There was “Jericho.” It had originally been recorded with the L.A. Express for Miles of Aisles, but now she had a chance to record it with Pastorius and Wayne Shorter. “Talk to Me” and “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter” had been written on the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975 and played on her brief Hissing of Summer Lawns tour in the first two months of 1976. And “Dreamland” began as a demo dating to The Hissing of Summer Lawns in 1975.

  Joni had Pastorius for all of those, and there was quite a percussion circle assembled for “Dreamland”: Airto on surdo (bass drum), Jaco on cowbells, Manolo Badrena on congas, Alejandro (Alex) Acuña on shakers, and her lover Don Alias on snare drum and sandpaper blocks. Still, she felt something was missing. And so, as one does, she called her friend the R&B singer Chaka Khan in the middle of the night. Khan was the lead singer of the funk collective Rufus, who had won a Grammy for the funk classic “Tell Me Something Good,” written and produced for them by Stevie Wonder. Joni and Chaka had made a connection. Khan worshipped Joni’s music, and had come to a place of mutual admiration and emotional intimacy with her as a friend—a rarity for both of them, who tend to prefer the company of men.

  “She called me at three in the morning and she wanted me to come to the studio,” Khan recalled years later. “And I got my shit on and went down there. We were partying. That track was like a drum circle song. Joni added her vocals later. She told me to sing some stuff. She already had the bass vocal part—‘Dreamland, Dreamland, Dreamland . . .’ So I had a key. And she wanted me to sing some chanty stuff . . . I was glad to work with her, of course, but that wasn’t the song I wanted to work with her on. I wanted to work with her on a real song. ‘Dreamland’ was kind of a chant. I wanted to sing with Joni, you know, sing together.”

  Chaka Khan, who has made deep and soulful covers of “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow,” “The Hissing of Summer Lawns,” and “Two Grey Rooms” (from 1991’s Night Ride Home), had a particular Joni Mitchell song in mind. Still, she added the kind of voice that had not been heard on a Joni track before. Years later, in 2000, Khan was scheduled to cover “Dreamland” at a Joni Mitchell tribute concert on the TNT network. When she had to cancel at the last minute, she was replaced by the feminist gospel group Sweet Honey in the Rock, who, at the event, criticized Joni’s lyrics and accused her of racism.

  Khan was aghast. “You know what? The thing I love about her is she sings the truth, with no holds barred. She doesn’t care about the social crap. She cuts through all that, and that’s what I love about her.” Whether it was the lines about black babies covered in baking flour or the image of Tar Baby and the Great White Wonder, Joni represented her unconscious, filled with unsettling images.

  As Joni puts it: “It’s a long, long way from Canada.”

  Two years after Joni was booed by a room of black female prisoners in New Jersey, in December 1977, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter was released. Many people who first saw the album cover may not have realized that the image of a black man in full pimp regalia, captured by Norman Seeff’s camera, was Joni herself. Joni’s provocation—a white woman dressed as a black male boss pimp—comes with historical baggage, much of which was unknown to her. Blackface minstrelsy—white performers blacking up with burnt cork and singing “coon songs,” the most famous example of which was Ernest Hogan’s “All Coons Look Alike to Me”—was the dominant form of popular entertainment after the Civil War, all the way through the 1920s vaudeville era. White performers would perform in terrifying makeup and do imitations—sometimes grotesque, sometimes in homage—of the black performers doing a far superior version of songs in early jazz and blues, although there were also famous black minstrel performers, most notably Bert Williams and Johnny Hudgins. The Jazz Singer (1927), the first talkie, was a sentimental biopic for Al Jolson, torn between his Jewish family’s expectation for him to be a cantor, and his passionate need to sing “Mammy” in blackface.

  Joni, defending her own costume, also defended Jolson. “Al Jolson’s not a Stepin Fetchit,” Joni told me. “He’s a Jew in blackface, so he’s always getting the better end of the deal, kind of like Bugs Bunny. And I didn’t see anything derogatory. But the prejudice was enormous. When I did that, people thought it was a bro, and it wasn’t stereotypical, it was individual. Why I got away with it . . . I got the greatest reviews for that record in black magazines. They saw the brother, they reviewed it, and they got it.”

  It’s not clear how many black journalists even recognized Joni on the cover of the album or how many black magazines actually reviewed it. The black music journalist Greg Tate, who interviewed Joni for Vibe magazine in 1998 and wrote a poem, “How Black Is Joni Mitchell?” for Joni’s honorary doctorate ceremony a few years later, would come out in passionate support for what he called her “stunt.” Janet Maslin was the only journalist for a major publication, Rolling Stone, to criticize Joni’s album cover. “The album offers what is, one can only hope, the ultimate in cute cover
art,” Maslin wrote. She is blunt in her attack: “Here and elsewhere, there seems to be the notion that blacks and Third World people have more rhythm, more fun and a secret, mischievous viewpoint that the author, dressed as a black man in one of the photos on the front jacket, presumes to share.”

  Maslin didn’t approve, but she was one of the few journalists who actually noticed. Joni’s costume was so convincing, most people did not realize it was her.

  After Joni failed to reach a room full of black female prisoners because she, as Joan Baez said, “couldn’t do black,” she decided she’d one-up them all by being black. “So there came Halloween, and I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard,” Joni recalled. “There were a lot of people out on the street wearing wigs and paint and masks, and I was thinking, ‘What can I do for a costume?’ Then a black guy walked by me with a New York diddybop kind of step, and he said in the most wonderful way, Lookin’ good, sister, lookin’ gooood. His spirit was infectious and I thought, ‘I’ll go as him.’ I bought the makeup, the wig, the sideburns, I went into a sleazy menswear [store] and bought a sleazy hat and a sleazy suit, and that night I went to a Halloween party and nobody knew it was me, nobody.”

  When Joni was planning a memoir, she said that the opening would be “I was the only black man at the party,” and her intent was to be a combination of pimp and artistic creation. She would dress up as this character from time to time and never got spotted, even by men who should have known. Sometimes she would call this character Art Nouveau; other times he would be Claude the Pimp. In a 1979 concert taped for Showtime, in the middle of “Furry Sings the Blues,” on the line “everybody’s fly,” she turned into her pimp character. What was troubling was that her desire to be the black man on the street superseded the unsettling history. Art Nouveau/Claude the Pimp, as he appears on the cover of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, is a dead ringer for Zip Coon, the minstrel character ridiculed for trying to dress the part of a gentleman. Zip Coon, like Jim Crow and Tambo, was a standard figure in minstrel shows. Zip Coon was the dandy, Tambo was the singing, dancing fool, and Jim Crow was ignorant and poor—a pretty accurate indicator for the intentions behind the Jim Crow laws. And yet Chaka Khan, who, as a teenager, had been a member of the militant Black Panther party, had no problem with the cover of the album for which she provided vocals. “I loved the cover of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter,” she said unequivocally. “She’s into color. She’s a world of person, and she lived that, she sang that, she is that. I am, too. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s a way to go.”

  Joni debuted her costume at a 1976 Halloween party at the house of Peter Asher, the manager of James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt. A decade later, Asher would become Joni’s manager as well. “She looked great,” he recalled. “She had done a serious job of preparation. Nobody knew it, not even John David Souther.” John David—known as J. D. Souther, who coauthored many Eagles hits and a few on his own—was, indeed, among the suckered guests, an especially impressive triumph considering that he was sleeping with her at the time. “Joan and I never saw each other exclusively,” said Souther, decades later. “She really challenged my writing. Joan has a very sharp tongue when she wants to. She said, ‘Well, John David, we’re still waiting for your work to live up to your ego.’”

  Maybe Joni should have been worried about how her alter ego would be perceived. But she wasn’t. She never doubted that people—black and white—would “get it.” And just as likely, she didn’t care.

  By the time Joni recorded Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, she was not only impersonating a black man but was in a serious relationship with one. Joni, at five feet six inches, was nearly a foot shorter than Don Alias, the mighty percussionist, someone she regarded as not only a swinging and soulful kit drummer but also a top-three auxiliary player—especially congas and bongos—in the world. Don Alias played auxiliary percussion on Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter and would later play drums on her 1979 Shadows and Light tour. He came with an impressive résumé: He was in Nina Simone’s trio and played on three Miles Davis albums, including Bitches Brew, where he played the trap set part on “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down,” because he was the only one to get the slow, funky, swinging march feel Davis was looking for. Joni had loved Miles Davis’s music since high school, and she would often cite his influence on her singing, especially on the title track of Blue. It was Joni’s dream to play with Davis one day. Maybe Alias could help.

  Between 1975 and 1981, Davis had retired from music. He was ensconced in his lair on West Seventy-seventh Street, doing any drugs he could get his hands on, and getting into as much group sex as he could get into, often as an observer, since the drugs had siphoned his libido.

  Alias was usually possessive, but Miles was like a god to him. He delivered his woman to him. The rest was farce.

  In 2015, nine years after Alias’s death, Joni’s encounter with Miles still amused her, sort of. Alias and Joni went to Davis’s apartment. Joni had been given a small budget for a television special that never got made. She wanted Davis to appear as a guest, but, typically, he wanted the special’s entire budget for himself, and this was in the midst of his six-year silent period. He hated the music business as much as Joni did. He said, as if offering a ransom note, that he wouldn’t come out until someone paid him $1 million. “That was back in the days when a million dollars was a million dollars,” Joni recalled. “I didn’t blame him. I completely understood it, but he was killing himself in the meantime; he was so coked out. [Don brought Joni to Miles and] Miles kicked Don out of the room. And then he came on to me. And I thought, ‘Oh, my God.’ Don, with all his jealousy, didn’t stay there to protect me. So I had to protect myself, which I can do pretty well. It was a funny scene, really. But I strayed into his web. That’s all he was doing, escaping into sex and drugs in there. He had no respect for Don, but Don and everybody else admired Miles so much. He lunged towards me on the couch and I jumped up. And he flew off the couch with his hands around my ankle—and passed out. So I’m there with Miles clinging to my ankle, out cold. And I had to call for this crazy, jealous man, Don, and I was worried that he would accuse me of instigating it. He was insanely jealous. But anyway, we had to peel Miles off of my ankle, and he had a dead man’s grip on it. It was a funny scene.”

  Maybe one day Miles would clean up and ask her to collaborate with him. There weren’t many people she looked up to, but Miles Davis, at his best, was one of them. Sure, he could behave like a monster, but so could Picasso. Miles did stage a comeback with The Man with the Horn, but it was never the same. Joni knew that the great man had become considerably less great. Miles’s final decade, for those who loved him at his peak, was just sad. “Miles at the end would play three notes and walk around, because his bands were so terrible and there was no inspiration,” she said.

  Joni couldn’t get exactly what she wanted. But another opportunity came along, one that would give her an unexpected education, from another jazz giant.

  24 MINGUS

  When Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter achieved gold status—despite the fact that its singles failed to crack the Top 40—it seemed that Joni was that rara avis in pop music, an uncompromising artist who blissfully ignores commercial pressures, keeps evolving and experimenting in public, and still comes out ahead. Half a million copies of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter were sold—or at least shipped—in three months, and it entered the charts at an underwhelming but still respectable number twenty-five. The single “Off Night Backstreet,” with backing vocals by Glenn Frey and J. D. Souther, who were making the charts elsewhere, did not register. Even if half a million record buyers were not necessarily hip to the audacity of Jaco or the subtlety of Wayne or a rhapsody that lasted more than sixteen minutes—nearly half of it taken up by a meandering orchestral suite occupying a side of an album (pushing it to become a double album, bumping the price up)—they were still invested in this woman who, even as she changed, took her sincerity with her. She was fleeing the mainstream, sure, but sh
e wasn’t fleeing her listeners, not yet.

  The decade had begun with Ladies of the Canyon, an album that captured the zeitgeist and was loaded with hits, a triple whammy of “Big Yellow Taxi,” “Woodstock,” and “The Circle Game.” It is a long way from there to the experiments and liberties of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. But even though she was testing attention spans and baffling some critics, she held on to her audience, who were growing up, too. They, too, were having their sexual experiments, their spiritual quests, their broken families. Joni may have been writing for herself and her intimates, but her output in the ’70s was, unintentionally, in sync with the decade’s private and public life. Joni would later refer to the ’80s as “The Lost Years.” She would be told that she was out of sync with the time. Thank God, she thought. To be in sync with the ’80s, she later wrote, “was to be degenerating both morally and artistically.” She would have one more album and tour before she was done with her decade.