by David Yaffe
Peter Gabriel looked into Joni’s eyes. They had just recorded a song of Joni’s, “My Secret Place,” in which they were finishing each other’s sentences. Her raspy alto was in unison with his. They were almost the same person, and filmed a flirty video for it, even though they were both married to other people. Who was this person he thought he was getting to know so well? And what was with all this paranoia about music festivals? Didn’t she write “Woodstock”?
“Your light is a puppet to cover your darkness,” Gabriel said, shaken up. This made Joni furious.
“Oh, my God,” Joni replied. “You’re naïve! My light is my light and my darkness is my darkness. Neither one are present in this scenario. I’m just telling you. You asked me what it was like. I’m telling you the things that can go wrong. You’re going out there to kick ass and you don’t want Phil Collins to be the one that shines. You’re not going out there without ambition. I know what you desire out of it, and I don’t want to see you making mistakes. I don’t go out there with that attitude, but I know it’s all around me.”
Joni’s friendship with Gabriel and his wife would not last long. Pretty soon, he was saying things she considered to be stupid and petty. Plus, Joni felt snubbed by his wife at a restaurant. How disappointing! The truth, according to Larry Klein, was that “Joni spent too many evenings spewing her didactically nihilistic view of the world at him in the kitchen of the studio.” But before all that, Joni went to the Amnesty show in LA, and she said to Gabriel, “It gives me great pleasure that you’re on an exceptional tour. There’s camaraderie, there doesn’t seem to be abnormal competition. You’re lucky. Forget what I said.”
The songs were piling up again, and Joni began recording what eventually became Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm (1988). The synthesizers were still part of the soundscape (including, on one track, Thomas Dolby on “Fairlight Marimba”), but she was back to using a drummer—Manu Katché, from Peter Gabriel’s band. It is a shame that she was not produced by Daniel Lanois, a huge fan of hers who was central to the successful sound on Gabriel’s So, and also Dylan’s Oh Mercy and his Grammy-winning Time Out of Mind. “She was always pretty dismissive of Lanois’s talent,” said Klein. “To my mind, she was not unproduceable, she was just unable to acknowledge that she needed anyone to make records, which she did. Hence Henry ‘more than an engineer’ Lewy was a producer on those records, and was given a royalty. She just couldn’t bear to give him a producer’s credit. She needed to conceive of herself as a completely self-sufficient entity.”
Klein was in England, finishing his work on Ben Orr’s album. “At a certain point I felt that Joni would be better off coming to join me,” Klein said. “We found a house in the neighboring small town of Frome, and she came over. The travail of the previous period had triggered some writing for her, so while she was in Frome she set about finishing the first four songs that would become Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm.”
Figuring that Gabriel owed him for his gratis contribution to So, Klein asked Gabriel if Joni could record in his studio. “He was in fact very happy to have us work in his studio, so work began on these tracks with Joni starting work during the afternoon, and I would come over after we would finish work in the evening at the Wool Hall. I ended up staying into the early morning hours over at Peter’s studio. As much as it was a strain workwise, it was also invigorating having all this music gestating simultaneously. A really creatively charged atmosphere. Mike and I met with Robert Plant, who lived in Wales, not far from where we were, and I played him a couple of the sketches. There was one that he really liked, and he asked if he could try writing some lyrics for it towards his album. I was overjoyed, having been a big Led Zeppelin fan since my early teens. When Joan got to Frome I played her the pieces, and she loved three of them, including the one that Robert had claimed. I protested, saying that he had already claimed the track; how could I renege on having offered it to him. Joni insisted that I give all of them to her, saying that she had ‘a wife’s privilege’ to take it back. I sheepishly called Robert, and he very generously agreed, saying that he would do it ‘only because it was Joni Mitchell.’ These three songs became ‘Lakota,’ ‘Snakes and Ladders,’ and ‘The Tea Leaf Prophecy.’”
While she was in the midst of putting together a collection in the hope that she could replicate the success of Peter Gabriel, who had followed her advice so well when she couldn’t, she appeared on the debut of a show to be hosted by Herbie Hancock called Showtime Coast to Coast, taped in New Orleans, on August 29, 1987. In a formula that would be replicated twenty years later for his Grammy-winning album River: The Joni Letters, Hancock, along with Wayne Shorter, would take two songs from Hejira and probe them for further jazz possibilities. They were joined by Bobby McFerrin, who still commanded respect among jazz musicians around the time that he released his Grammy-winning record “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” (an acappella jam that was the very antithesis of a Joni Mitchell song).
“Furry Sings the Blues” would be loosened up; “Hejira” would be recast as a wild samba. Joni, smoking, chewing gum, was so nervous that, when she sang the “Hejira” line about “waving truce,” she seemed to be attempting to wave the TV cameras away. And yet it was some of the finest music she had made in a very long time, at least since the standout tracks on Wild Things Run Fast five years earlier. Her voice was exquisite. Whatever huskiness was starting to build up only made the material deeper. She still had a soprano, and even if it was smoky, it was full of evocative and rich expression. Sarah Vaughan’s voice dropped as she kept living and smoking, and it just fit into the trajectory of the great jazz singer she was until last call. It was as if the lessons Joni learned from Mingus—the man, not just the album—were coming to fruition. McFerrin, who seemed intrusive, was actually keeping Joni at ease. “Ooooh, I’m traveling in some vehicle . . .” she sang in her still stunning upper register. For just one late-night, early-morning session, Joni allowed herself to be heard without synthesizers, and with jazz masters, and we see the direction she could have taken if she had just kept her musical adventures of Mingus going.
At the Amnesty International debacle, the biggest audience responses came when she announced that she would, on “Number One,” a track that would appear on Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm, be joined by Peter Gabriel’s drummer and, as backup, Dolette McDonald. It was clear who was selling, and it must have been frustrating to be influencing people who were having the success that was eluding her. The song was a withering indictment of the dog race the music biz had become, and how the view looked from the sidelines. At Amnesty International, she threw these words at that audience: “Win and lose, win and lose / To the loser go the heartsick blues / To the victor goes to spoilin’ / Honey, did you win or lose?” Winning and losing are for the bean counters at the record company. Beauty and truth are for the artist. Joni tried to dress this contempt with the rhythms and sounds that had worked for others.
She would stuff her album to the gills with celebrities. Do people buy albums for the guest stars? Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm would make the experiment. Don Henley, who was pushed aside for Lionel Richie on “You Dream Flat Tires”—because Richie’s range offered more of a contrast—finally got his spot on “Lakota” and “Snakes and Ladders.” (He made it clear he was ticked off by being pulled off.) Benjamin Orr of the Cars—whose solo record was, of course, produced by Klein—sang on “Number One” and “The Beat of Black Wings.” Wendy and Lisa from Prince’s band sang on “The Tea Leaf Prophecy.” Billy Idol and Tom Petty both played characters fighting over Joni’s character on “Dancin’ Clown.” Willie Nelson, the redheaded stranger himself, sang, effortlessly, a cowboy part on “Cool Water.” All of these people, either as solo artists or as part of outfits, sold records. Could Joni cobble them together in a way that would get her in the black with Geffen?
Of all these appearances, the one that sounds the most like a genuine collaboration—not in composition, but in sound—was “My Secret Place” with Peter Gabriel. �
�My Secret Place,” which opens the album, is, for Joni listeners, a relief after the synthetic assault of Dog Eat Dog. Instead of a programmed drum part, there is a real drummer, Manu Katché, a key player in the “World Beat” sound that brought Gabriel massive success in the ’80s. Katché plays on the whole album, a welcome, living and breathing presence. “My Secret Place” even sounds like a Gabriel song. Rhythmically, it’s not far off from “In Your Eyes”—the song John Cusack blares on a boom box to get his girlfriend back in Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything—and lyrically, it’s unlike anything Joni had done before. She sings in the first person but the narrator is clearly a fictional character, a woman born and raised in New York City, just getting used to Colorado. Joni’s voice had become so smoky, she and Gabriel finish each other’s sentences in the same range and timbre. It’s a seduction song, showing a prospective lover a hiding place, a place where they can hide together if the planets align. The song ends with a question: “Why did you pick me / For the secret place?” Who is asking and who is answering? There was an accompanying black-and-white video of their flirtation, playful and evocative, perfectly capturing the song’s mood. “Sledgehammer,” a 1986 single from So, became the most played video in the history of MTV. “My Secret Place,” for all its charms, was no contender.
Gabriel’s studio happened to be a ridge away from the airstrip where U.S. troops were launching the 1986 air strike on Libya. The strike, in response to the Libyan bombing of a German disco, commenced on April 15. All told, there were forty Libyan casualties, along with two American airmen, whose plane was shot down. Shortly after, Joni recalled, “At night we could see the orange glow from the landing strip . . . During that period, all of our thinking turned to war . . .” The war inspired “The Beat of Black Wings,” about a soldier, Killer Kyle, who felt he had vanished into the sediment, “a chalk mark in a rainstorm,” an image that became the album’s title. The song has notable fans, including Janet Jackson, who covered it, and Elvis Costello, who called it “beautiful but harrowing.” The airstrike had transported Joni back to Fayetteville, North Carolina, 1967, where she met the soldier who would inspire the character of Killer Kyle. He had told this sweet young lady with her love songs that, from where he stood, there ain’t no love. “I’m gonna tell you where love went,” he’d growled. And he’d ended up sobbing in Joni’s arms.
Like Joni, Killer Kyle lost a child, but unlike Joni, he lost a child for good. His girl had an abortion “without even grievin’.” He had possibly, like many Vietnam vets, killed civilians. Killer Kyle feels useless, shrouded by the beat of black wings. He was trained to kill, but he wasn’t prepared for the aftermath. Hope without an object cannot live, wrote Coleridge. Kyle lives without hope:
The old hate the young
That’s the whole heartless thing
The old pick the wars
We die in ’em
To the beat of the beat of black wings
Kyle was traumatized in an unwinnable war. This war had warped an entire generation. Following the release of Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning Platoon (1986), and anticipating Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial, it was a time to come to terms with America’s greatest military failure. Unlike the David Crosby crowd she was running with, she, like Bob Hope, performed for soldiers. The war ruined many lives. Killer Kyle feels real because he was based on a real person. In the video for the song, Joni puts on makeup and plays him as a black man, the last time she did a variation on her Art Nouveau character. She really plays this guy as a drunk in an alley, a ruined man from a lousy war. Her performance as the character on record is some of the best acting she ever did.
For someone who captured the Geist in the Zeit of the ’60s—who was mourning a cultural moment while it was still happening—1989 proved to be another pivotal year. The Berlin Wall would be torn down, and communism would, with the exception of Albania, disappear from the Eastern Bloc. Something new was afoot, and Joni Mitchell was tapped for an event where rock stars could perform at the site of the recently torn down Berlin Wall. The Cold War was finally over.
But the old battles continued.
In 1990, she appeared with Roger Waters, Sinéad O’Connor, Van Morrison, members of the Band, Cyndi Lauper, Bryan Adams, and the Scorpions, among others, to perform Pink Floyd’s The Wall in Berlin. Waters, who wrote most of the album and was estranged from his bandmates, staged the production on his own, using the fall of the Berlin Wall to celebrate a new cultural moment. Joni sang on “Goodbye Blue Sky,” a song she thought to be a dead ringer for the Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday,” but which also had an environmental message simpatico with hers. Probably because Joni was singing from the top of what used to be the Berlin Wall to accompaniment from the bottom, her singing was as unmusical as any she ever did in public. (It would be corrected for the video and the recording.) At the performance, she saw Thomas Dolby again for the last time, at her side on the finale, “The Tide Is Turning,” an uplifting anthem from a Waters solo album. Joni sang with her arm around O’Connor, who Joni thought was a “passionate little singer.” It was time to pass the baton.
Except that, just as she warned Peter Gabriel about the Amnesty International concert, going backstage at an all-star rock and roll event is a minefield. “When I did The Wall, Thomas Dolby saw me and stuck his tongue out at me,” Joni told me. “Cyndi Lauper said, ‘My boyfriend made you tea. He didn’t make me any.’ The childish competitiveness, the lack of professionalism—I don’t have a peer group. All of them, these spoiled children. It’s not what I would have expected in an artistic community. I ran into Bryan Adams and he wanted his picture taken with me and then gave the camera to his girlfriend. He kept negating her, putting her down and ragging on his girlfriend. So his conduct was really bad. Then I went to the trailer camp. All of my trailer park experiences with other artists are very bad. So I went to Cyndi Lauper’s to say hello and I didn’t linger. Sinéad came out and she had bare feet and was looking at them. She was digging her feet in the ground, never looking at me. Everybody was so weird. And I went into the greenroom, and Garth Hudson was sitting there, and I walked over to say hello. We were doing a communal project! Was there an adult in the room? No. Not one single adult in the whole pack. Garth took one look at me, slid off the piano bench, and went in the other direction. Later, my daughter wanted to see a concert of his in Toronto, so I got her tickets and got her a backstage pass, and he says, ‘Oh, I was always so in love with your mother.’ And I went: Is that what it is? These seventh-grade boys? What is it? They frost me. I tried to say hi to people and I got nothing but very strange responses.
“And I was told that Roger wrote in his book that I was the only professional there. I didn’t see anything but childishness all around me. When the press asked me in the end, ‘Who was here that you wanted to meet?’ And I said, ‘Well, I would have liked to have met Picasso.’ Because there was no one there that you could meet. They were all sullen children.’”
When Joni sang “Goodbye Blue Sky” atop a demolished Berlin Wall, a new cultural moment was coming. In a song called “Right Here, Right Now,” a band called Jesus Jones announced that a new time was coming, something different from the Woodstock generation. “Bob Dylan didn’t have this to sing about,” they sang. Dylan would have plenty of other things to sing about. What would Joni sing about? The Cold War was over, and so were the ’80s. Good riddance to both. The music of the next decade would indeed be more sparse and acoustic. But, as Dylan put it, you can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way. Joni’s voice was now a smoky alto. The soprano would be gone for good, last heard in spots on Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm. Time and other thieves washed the past away. Something’s lost but something’s gained, sang Joni when she was just getting started. Or, as she put it when the ’80s began: Nothing lasts for long.
30 TURBULENCE
In the mid to late 1990s, though she would win an Album of the Year Grammy for Turbulent Indigo, Sweden’s prestigious Polar Music Prize, and,
after four years of eligibility, finally be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it seemed to Joni that nothing she did, no matter how acclaimed, could compete with her earlier work. (Because the Rock Hall would not pay for her family’s travel, $1,500 tickets to the event, and accommodations, she skipped the Cleveland ceremony.)
The day after she won the 1995 Album of the Year Grammy (with a second award for her artwork, a self-portrait in impressive imitation of Van Gogh’s brushstrokes), she was declared yesterday’s news. “I won a Grammy for Turbulent Indigo and the following day there was a newspaper article [about] singer-songwriters then and now, and I was in the ‘then’ column, the day after winning the Grammy,” Joni said.
When Dylan was fifty and was declared to be finished, it turned out that his career would enter a vital late phase. What did it take for a broad in her fifties to get some respect in this racket?
The day before she began recording Turbulent Indigo, Joni and Larry Klein filed for divorce. “Last chance lost,” she sang, “In the tyranny of a long goodbye.” On Thanksgiving Day in 1992, Klein had reached his limit. He’d been battling with depression, and the level of anger and bitterness their marriage and home had come to hold was, he believed, killing him. He told Joni that they both would have to change the way they dealt with each other. According to Klein, Joni told him, “‘I’m not going to be changing much at this point,’ and that was it.”
When she was introduced (by her mother) to Donald Freed, her next major love interest, he asked her how she was. “Undervalued,” she said.
Joni had been feeling undervalued for a while. Even when she was honored, she often felt that the venerators weren’t venerating her appropriately. Her anger and resentment began to bubble over, but unlike Dog Eat Dog, it presented itself in ways that her listeners found much more satisfying. Part of this was a return to acoustic guitar and piano-based music, but part of it was that, on the heels of a divorce, she was wearing her heart on her sleeve again, even as she was also a social critic. What came together so exquisitely on “Ethiopia” also crystallized on what became Turbulent Indigo. The sales spiked at around 311,000 copies—about 200,000 short of going gold, although it did attain gold status in Canada—but the critical consensus was that this was the return to form they had been waiting for (even if it had already returned on 1991’s Night Ride Home). And then the Grammy that she had deserved for so long—the album of the year Grammy—finally came for this one.