by David Yaffe
28 EMERGENCY ROOMS
Despite the debacle of Dog Eat Dog and the financial strains, things seemed solid between Joni and Larry Klein. She felt that she had finally made a good marriage and continued to avoid writing personal songs about heartbreak. But this would change near the end of 1985, when Joni, surprisingly, became pregnant. A pregnancy at forty-two is delicate, and made even more parlous when the mother will not give up a four-pack-a-day habit, or drinking, or any other vice. Joni had a miscarriage that winter, and the fracture in her marriage with Klein would never entirely heal.
“He dragged me all over Europe, as sick as a dog, on his vacation,” Joni told me. “Never a thought that his wife was pregnant and needed to go to a doctor. The baby died. I know the night: December eighteenth. We traveled and I miscarried on the twenty-eighth of January, 1986. And we ate in Italy and France. I was turning gray and green and he didn’t even notice.”
She remains fiercely bitter. “When I miscarried, he didn’t comfort me, no arm around me. I was distraught, and in that state, rather than being a comfort—and this was five days before he began his first legitimate job as a producer—he just went out, stocked the fridge with groceries, and got in his car, went to the airport. He had five days before it began: no comfort . . . Marriages break up when you lose a child, let alone having a husband that behaved so badly. And his excuse was that he didn’t know how serious it was, and I was hemorrhaging. So ten days later, I’m still bleeding, and my girlfriend said, ‘You’ve got to get to a doctor.’ I said, ‘I can’t drive. I’m too weak.’ She took me, and then I had to go through D and C with a doctor who said, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this to Joni Mitchell!’”
The superfan doctor froze, she said. “I had to guide him through it. This poor guy, I just said, ‘Don’t tremble. Come on. Be a professional. Forget who I am. Let’s just do this. We know it’s painful. Be objective, for Christ’s sake. What kind of a doctor are you?’”
By 2015, Klein had gained some perspective on how the miscarriage was the beginning of the end of their marital happiness. But he did not see her version of events as complete or entirely honest. “I have to tell you the way that she portrays that situation . . . I certainly would agree with certain things she says, but the story she tells is neither accurate nor full in the way that she relates it. What happened was that she, to her amazement and mine, got pregnant. Then we were on a press tour for something, and then she didn’t know she had miscarried, but she was already in the process of miscarrying. The sad part of this whole thing is that, leading up to losing that child, which was a tragedy, of course, and it destroyed our entire world, she did not take care of herself, and was not at all receptive to anyone else telling her to take care of herself. And this happens. Still, it’s a very sad, horrible thing.
“The position I was put in was that when this all came down, the rest of the people who were involved in this Benjamin Orr record were already at a residential studio in England getting set up and they were waiting on me. And so I was in a really difficult situation. If the same thing had happened to me now or any time after that, I would’ve behaved differently. I would not have gone.”
At the time, in a state of relative ignorance, Klein asked her for advice. “This is a terribly difficult situation,” Klein said to his recovering wife. “What should I do? I’m holding everything up. Should I just tell them I can’t come?”
“No, you can go,” Joni said. He took this at face value, only to regret it later.
“Of course, after the fact, she said, ‘Why did you listen to me?’” Klein recalled. “In retrospect, I shouldn’t have listened to her. I should have stayed. I honestly did not know very much about this. I don’t know how many times we talked it through and I thought we resolved it. Nevertheless, in her mind, I just sold her down the river. If you found a linchpin event that created the abandonment that would fuel her acrimony, the miscarriage was it. I told her, ‘Listen, I didn’t realize all the ramifications of a miscarriage. My mom had a number of them, but it was kept so hush-hush, I thought it was like a common cold.’
“I never knew all the emotional and psychological parts of the things that accompany something like that happening to a woman. I think you’d find a lot of men in my age group in the same boat. When I was growing up, we just didn’t talk about miscarriage. Women would have them, and everything was kept away from the kids. So here, all these years later, I have to pick up books and find that she’s reinventing history. All of a sudden, I’m the only bad guy in the plot, for having abandoned her, and that is very hurtful.”
29 SAVE THE BOMBS FOR LATER
Something good did come from Larry Klein taking the gig with Benjamin Orr. He ended up in Ashcombe House, Peter Gabriel’s studio outside Bath in Somerset, played gratis on So, and then shared his new friends with Joni, who would sing with both of them on her next album. Because Klein didn’t accept payment from Peter Gabriel, Gabriel invited Joni to record her next album at his studio, reciprocating Klein’s good deed with another.
“When I went to England to produce Ben Orr’s album with Mike Shipley, we were working at a studio in Somerset called the Wool Hall,” Klein recalled. “It was just a little bit outside of Bath, in a very rural area that had a great music scene happening at that time. Peter Gabriel lived there, and had a studio built into a garage-type structure called Ashcombe House, the guys from Tears for Fears were up there and were part owners of the Wool Hall, Kate Bush, Peter Hamill, and a bunch of other interesting bands that were around at that time. Everybody would hop over to each other’s studio and drop in, people would call each other to come play on things; it was a real catalytic place to be working. After I had been there for a while, Peter Gabriel, who at the time was trying to finish what was to become So, called me to come play bass on a few tracks over at his studio. I was already a big fan of Peter’s music, so I was pretty thrilled to be asked. I went over, and the first track that he played me was ‘Mercy Street.’ Now, I had been a fan of Anne Sexton’s poetry in my teens, so this song hit a very deep place inside me. I think that I was almost crying the first time that I heard the track. We finished working on what they had for me in a couple of days. I somehow felt awkward taking money for having played on his album. Now that I look back on it, I find it strange. I think that I had assimilated the noblesse oblige approach to these situations that was a part of how things worked between well-known artists when they were asked to sing or play on each other’s albums.”
On June 15, 1986, Joni Mitchell made a rare television appearance. The occasion was the Conspiracy of Hope benefit concert for Amnesty International. Joni was playing real good for free, and doing so for a good cause; she was also performing new songs that challenged the times she found herself in. Would a stadium audience—not to mention a fickle TV audience—get the picture? In an event for human rights, how humane would their treatment be of an artist they might have forgotten about—someone who headlined the first Greenpeace concert back in 1971, the year she recorded Blue? How charitable was this charity audience?
She came on at the Amnesty International concert unannounced, between Bryan Adams and U2, before a stadium crowd of about 150,000 rowdy ticket holders waiting for Pete Townshend, who couldn’t show. Suddenly they were confronted by his replacement, Joni, singing a quiet rendition of a song that none of them knew. At forty-two, she looked stunning, and she delicately strummed, on acoustic guitar, a song from the all-electronic Dog Eat Dog. The noise of the crowd all but drowned her out.
For anyone listening, it was the closest one could come to imagining her in a folk club, singing this new song, “The Three Great Stimulants.” Inspired by Nietzsche’s take on (or takedown of) Wagner, this was Joni versus the pop ’80s. “Only sick music makes money today,” wrote Nietzsche. That was the 1880s. By the 1980s, Joni felt deeply, Nietzsche’s prophecy had become fate. If Nietzsche was disgusted by Wagner, what would he have made of Hall and Oates, or Phil Collins? The sickness of the decade even pl
agued music that might have otherwise been good. The standards, in other words, were low, and the people were sheep.
The Police had reunited for the concert and the audience was with them, “sending out an S-O-S.” Peter Gabriel (with Larry Klein on bass) got the crowd riled up with his impassioned performance of “Biko”—“oh-oh-oooooh,” the crowd cried out for the slain South African activist. Bono did the thing that Bono does, making love to the camera, and everyone else, loving himself even more than he wants the audience to love him. Even Lou Reed, in spite of his misanthropic reputation, seemed, in his way, to agree with everyone else that Amnesty International was a good cause. He sang a classic Velvet Underground song about how someone’s life could be saved by rock and roll, and it took on new significance. Someone in the third world could be saved by rock and roll, too. A month after the concert, Amnesty International reported 45,000 new members.
Joni could have come out and performed an anthemic “Woodstock” and had New Jersey begging for more. But she wasn’t there to comfort them, or to love them. All by herself, she was there to perform an acoustic intervention. Joni was there to get her dark Nietzschean message out: We should not feel good about ourselves. We are decadent and far, far away from the garden. We may be far from combat, Joni is saying, but it is there, it is real, and we have become too weak and complacent to stop that rough beast. “No tanks have ever rumbled through these streets,” she sang, her blond hair blowing in the summer breeze, looking like a Nordic goddess in a stadium of thugs. “And the drone of planes at night has never frightened me.”
Just as she sang the word frightened she was suddenly pelted, on live TV, with enough ice to fill maybe a dozen Big Gulps. And it was even worse than it looked. It wasn’t just ice cubes. “They hit a water glass and it shattered and it rooster-tailed up to eye level,” Joni told me. “But they were throwing it at everybody and it just happened to hit something.” When she continued, somewhat shaken up, with her line “I keep the hours and the company that I please,” she added, in the middle—“Not you!” It was all too apropos that she concluded by repeating, “Oh, these brutal times!”
After the verses concluded, she let out a sound that she had not committed to record before Dog Eat Dog. It was not a sound of ecstasy or beautiful, tragic, yet mellifluous pain. It was an alarm of contempt blared from her chest cavity. She had to be careful with that falsetto, still there, but less supple. It would disappear for good by the end of the decade, and New Jersey didn’t deserve it that night.
When the song was over, she went up to the mic and said, “Hey, save the bombs for later. I’m not that bad, you dig? Quit pitching shit up here!” Nobody seemed to be listening. These really were brutal times. Joni was not going to suck up to this crowd. What would be the point of that?
Later, she had a sense of humor about it. “Well, the thing is, that crowd was throwing stuff all day,” she recalled. “It just happened that by the time I got out there, they’d had a lot of practice. Their aim was getting better.” On the video, you can see Joni light up when she comprehends the absurdity of it all. These lyrics, she thought, are fucking perfect: “Will they shower you with flowers / Or will they shun ya / When your race is run?” Throw it! This is great theater!
Besides, she had been through worse.
Between August 26 and August 30, 1970, Ron and Ray Foulk staged a music festival almost a year after Woodstock: the Isle of Wight Festival. It was the festival’s third consecutive year; the previous year, they featured Bob Dylan’s first major performance since his motorcycle accident three years earlier. This would be an occasion to perform “Woodstock” for a crowd even bigger than the one she sang about but missed. Murray Lerner would document the concert for a film, and it would include Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez, the Who, Miles Davis, and, in their last filmed performance, the Doors.
In the aftermath of Woodstock, the Foulk brothers realized that they had to make the concert free. But as Joni was about to go onstage, a Charles Manson look-alike, calling himself Yogi Joe—who had actually given Joni a yoga lesson—took the microphone to inform the crowd that, with the festival promoters lining their pockets, they were all going the way of Dylan’s Desolation Row. He was removed from the stage by security, and Joni took the microphone to quiet the incensed crowd:
Will you listen a minute? Now listen . . . A lot of people who get up here and sing . . . I know it’s fun, you know, it’s a lot of fun, it’s fun for me. I get my feelings off through my music . . . but listen, it’s like, last Sunday I went to a Hopi ceremonial dance in the desert and there were a lot of people there and there were tourists . . . and there were tourists who were acting like Indians and there were Indians who were getting into it like tourists . . . and . . . and . . . I think you’re acting like tourists, man . . . Give us some respect.
The Hopi ceremonial dance she described included a bad peyote trip with James Taylor. And now this was a bad trip for real. She was facing six hundred thousand hecklers as she tried to perform the new “My Old Man.” They thought because Joni was discouraging Yogi Joe from saying his thing—however incoherent—that she was one of them, the authoritarian festival establishment with their ticket charges, silencing the drugged-out hippie giving the peace symbol while being dragged away. And yet her rant also drew applause. By the time she delivered an ebullient “Big Yellow Taxi,” she received a standing ovation from many of the same hippies who had been howling at her minutes earlier. “I just felt my heart go thump-thump-thump,” she said after her set was over. This was a long way from stardust and golden. She knew how to tame this beast, but she never quite got over it.
And now, in East Rutherford, New Jersey, Joni was fondly recalling her debut at Carnegie Hall in 1969, when things could still be stardust and golden, and a banner reading “New York Loves You, Joni” was unfurled from the balcony. Despite the thugs in New Jersey, New York still did love her, and rallied to her side after her televised indignation. The next day, there was a radio station playing Joni’s set. Joni and Klein were staying in the Varick Street loft she was still renting, and Nathan Joseph came over and cranked it up, so that Joni could hear it through the wall. “They’re playing your part in this performance!” he said. Victory, at least in Gotham.
That night, Joni and Klein went through town as celebrated martyrs. “And we went out on the town that night and New York was made aware,” Joni told me. “We were walking through SoHo and Little Italy, and this guy comes out of an Italian restaurant and says, ‘Joni! On behalf of New York, we are so sorry! What did they do to you? Come in! We’ll make you a nice dinner!’ And they made this gorgeous dinner with sweet lemons with icing sugar for dessert. We walked by this lesbian bar and these really butch lesbians came out and one of them said, ‘We thought you were really great. Come in and we’ll buy you a drink.’ I survived it. It was okay. But I shouldn’t have been put that high on the bill. Most of that audience probably didn’t know who I was. When I saw it on video and I saw the moment where it hit, I thought, ‘Don’t throw me in the briar patch! I was born in the briar patch!’”
Rolling Stone called it the Worst Performance of the Year. Really? With all the sick music of 1986? They were apparently in agreement with the rabble in the pit. It’s a shame that more people didn’t hear the song performed that way, because it was the best it ever sounded.
Shortly before the concert, Joni was recording Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm at Peter Gabriel’s studio in Bath, England. She was aware that this was not the same thing as sharing a studio with just any hit maker. Gabriel had been the lead singer of Genesis when they were an overtly and proudly noncommercial art rock band. He would perform in weird costumes that looked like amoebas or other things that could only be seen from Cold War–era microscopes in British state schools. They had a short, round drummer named Phil Collins. No one thought this guy would dominate the charts in the next decade, especially him. When Gabriel went solo, he found his way to the mainstream his own way, with less than obvious hits lik
e “Shock the Monkey.” MTV was weirdly perfect for him. When Joni was trying for a comeback, at forty-three, Gabriel, at thirty-five, was having his moment.
Henry Lewy was no longer working with Joni, and she cut the album with a third engineer, a trainee, someone who knew nothing except for how to turn on the console and make many, many mistakes. “I was only going to make a couple of demos, but then I got going on it,” Joni recalled. At a certain point, Gabriel, who had been scheduled to play at the Amnesty International concert, asked Joni for advice. He had never played in a group show before, and this one would be on live TV. He sure came to the right person! Joni had never gotten over being crucified by half a million hippies at the Isle of Wight. She knew that Phil Collins, who had been the drummer for Genesis, had become a huge, shameless commercial pop star. She saw the potential for competition right away.
“Well,” Joni said, “these group shows are a sea of egomaniacal behavior, from my perspective.”
Then, Joni added, “They’ll probably ask you to do an acoustic song.”
“They did.”
“Don’t do it,” Joni implored. “Take it from me. He who plays acoustic dies. That’s my experience in those shows. You can’t get enough volume to mask the roar of the crowd. They’re not there for the music—they’re there for the event. So you really need the camaraderie of the band and you need to be really loud. Second, bring in your own team, because they’ll sabotage you. If someone gets competitive, which they frequently do, if you don’t have your own team, they’ll sabotage you. If they think you’re going to be good, steal some thunder, or be the one that shines, they’ll break your guitar. They’ll come after you with a vengeance.”