by David Yaffe
Joni and Klein accepted the award arm in arm: Joni talked about making the album in a state of divorce, buying kittens to take off the bad vibes for the sake of the engineer, then let Klein have the floor, promising not to finish his sentences. Klein thanked her for “ten years of instruction in the arts.” From the art of love to the arts of creativity, Klein got an instruction like no one else, if sometimes the punishments were severe. Klein lived from his mid-twenties to his mid-thirties with Joni.
Life had a way of going on. They managed to remain friends and musical collaborators, which would seem strange if Joni didn’t have a tendency to continue working with ex-lovers. David Crosby became an ex-lover while they were working on Song to a Seagull. James Taylor played on Blue soon after their breakup, Graham Nash played harmonica on “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio” a few years after their breakup, and John Guerin played drums with her on three albums past their stormy impasse. Joni and Klein even shared a limo with Donald Freed and Klein’s girlfriend—a woman Joni called “the mistress”—to the Grammy Awards.
After Joni and Klein separated, Leonard Cohen came over and brought Joshu Sasaki Roshi, his longtime Rinzai Zen Buddhist teacher. Joni recalled, from her days of keeping him company, “Leonard’s real problem was envy. He was the high prince of envy.” Indeed, before Cohen found enlightenment and way before the eventual payday of “Hallelujah,” the conquests of others could rankle him. And although he and Lou Reed crossed paths in the days of Max’s Kansas City—Reed inducted Cohen into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008—he could never get over the one who got away. “I didn’t hear the Velvet Underground, but I was in love with Nico. I didn’t like the fact that she was with all those guys in the Velvet Underground, sleeping with everybody but me! And that, incidentally, could describe a great deal of my activity, contrary to public opinion.” As the years rolled by, Joni would hear Cohen lyrics like “First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin,” and think, “He’s still singing about making conquests!” As someone who asked him for a reading list way back in 1967, Joni was haunted by hearing him sing, on his first album, “Are your lessons done?” Who would be learning and who would be teaching?
And yet, while Joni would always have complicated feelings about Cohen, she recognized that he had a great master and was a great disciple. “He had a great teacher and he worked hard. I wasn’t a Buddhist when I was hanging out with him, but years later we hung out with Roshi, and Roshi and I laughed at the same things. We found the same things amusing, and Roshi decided he wanted to move in with me. I went, ‘Great.’ He was seventy at the time. And I never thought about it in any kind of man-woman way. I just thought he was a sweet little Buddhist monk. And he came by the house and I was going to show him that I had a spare room and he was welcome to it when he stayed in the city. Donald, the man I was dating at the time, was here, and Leonard, of course, was an old lover, and I treated him with respect. And suddenly he jumped up and said, ‘Come on. Let’s go. Roshi lonely! Roshi lonely!’ And I didn’t get it at first. It didn’t take me long, though, and I thought, ‘Holy shit!’ I had been treating him with deference. It was so touching. It was so sweet. He became so human at that moment. Who knew? I thought, Oh, my God. My behavior to him was different than these two other guys. Too much respect.
“After Graham and I split up, he’d be sitting with Callie, his girlfriend who came after me and his wife, and he’d be joking around, kidding around with them, and then when he’d turn to me he’d give me too much respect. I thought, ‘I know exactly what I did.’ Graham couldn’t kid around with me the way he could with his wife. Too much respect. Makes you lonely.” Somehow, she felt a kinship with the septuagenarian Buddhist monk who jumped in her bed. Joni was lonely, too.
Night Ride Home (1991) brims with loneliness, an eternal cold that one can never come in from. One must have a mind of winter, wrote Wallace Stevens, and one must have a stoicism to survive when the love you are longing for is out of reach, or is exploiting and abusing you.
“Two Grey Rooms” began with a melody and chord setting so phenomenal, Jeremy Lubbock, an arranger on Mingus, fell madly in love with it and offered to arrange and record the strings at his own expense. That was in 1982, and Joni sang diphthongs over the track and called this thing of beauty “Speechless.”
“This thing wants to be written in French,” Joni thought, and her diphthongs did have a French feel, with echoes of Edith Piaf, whose recordings gave her goose bumps as a child. Luckily, she eventually came across an article about the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, legendary for films Joni would have seen at Manhattan’s Film Forum in the ’70s, when he, an erotic and emotional risk-taker like herself, was making brilliant, devastating films such as In a Year of 13 Moons, The Marriage of Maria Braun, and Lili Thorleen while she was renting her SoHo loft.
“I finally found a story to set to the fledgling melody,” she said when the album was released. This story, according to the article, was “about a fellow who was part of Fassbinder’s scene, homosexual, aristocrat, German who had had a lover in his youth whom he never got over and now in his forties he discovered the route by which this guy went to work. So he moved into these crummy rooms overlooking the street for the sole pleasure of seeing the man walk by in the morning and walk back in the evening.” She added ten years to the man’s age when he says, “I loved you thirty years ago,” and this could have been to accommodate Joni’s own age of forty-seven at the time of the album’s release, or could even project a man in his fifties. Even the Joni of 1982 wouldn’t have those textures that her voice would develop by the time she found the Fassbinder story. Like the method actor she was becoming, she inhabited this desperate and lonely ex-lover, obsessed with the past, who can live for nothing else.
“Things stick in my craw,” Joni would say, and this thing certainly stuck in this man’s craw. The two gray rooms could also be the mind itself, storing up those memories that are impossible to shake off. The thing that makes Joni an artist could easily be, in another person’s life, something that would create obsessive, self-destructive behavior. For anyone looking for confession or autobiography, this wasn’t it. She had the negative capability to inhabit this man’s life, feel his longing, and belt out a melody that did not sound easy to sing. This aristocrat lived in an industrial dump just so he could watch his ex-lover walk back and forth from work. The song ends in a reverie for something self-destructive, yet poignant. It took another person’s sorrow to build the edifice of “Two Grey Rooms.” It would have made superb material for a Fassbinder film. (It might have if Fassbinder had not died at the age of thirty-seven of a drug overdose after making forty-one films.) There was even an ending: the aristocrat who lived to watch his ex-lover never approached him. There were seven years between the recording of the instrumental track and the version on Night Ride Home. The song needed those years. Joni grew into the character of that song. Her younger voice would have been a miscast role. It is a shame that Fassbinder did not live to hear “Two Grey Rooms.”
There was no shortage of dark material from Joni’s own experience. Of all her reveries of her prairie youth in central Canada, the song that is among the most vivid and the least nostalgic is “Cherokee Louise.” When Joni performed the song at the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage, vamping on the A minor riff in a near shuffle, she did not exactly tell the story of the song, but she led into it, evocatively hinting, and only hinting, at what the song is really about: “This is another song that takes place on another bridge in Saskatoon, this time the Broadway Bridge . . . I had a best girlfriend when I moved from North Battleford, Saskatchewan, to Saskatoon, which was the closest thing we had to a big city up there. The Paris of the North! The City of Bridges! And the Broadway Bridge was a big concrete-span bridge. And the boys did their youth rites there. You had to crawl across it on your belly from one side to the other. And the river was wide, like the Mississippi, so it took some daring. I had a girlfriend who got misunderstood in the commu
nity, basically because of her genetics. She was an Indian kid in a foster home. This is her story.”
Joni’s voice drips with condescension when she announces little, provincial Saskatoon as the “Paris of the North.” The bridge that Joni sings about has nothing to do with the Seine and everything to do with that misunderstood girlfriend. Those boys doing their slimy rites of passage, they are nowhere in this song. We have patches of memory in Louise, of swinging in the breeze one year, and then of her hiding from her predatory foster dad the next. Throughout this harrowing tale, Wayne Shorter is not only an accompanist, he is the Greek chorus, reacting, as we do, to this poor girl, misunderstood by local racists, without a stable home, and stuck with a foster dad who forces her to give him fellatio. There is no transition between childhood play and this sudden, unwanted, and horrifying introduction to adult sexuality. One day they’re putting pennies on the rails and jumping around like fools. The next, Louise’s foster dad “opens up a zipper / And he yanks her to her knees.” Innocence and the violation of it clash violently in this story.
In 2013, Saskatoon was planning to honor Joni on her seventieth birthday, but plans were scuttled when Joni said—loudly and publicly—that her hometown was as racist as the Deep South. (She had no problem accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award from it in 1993, perhaps because her parents were still alive.) That element of Louise’s pain—a Native American “misunderstood” by the yokels—is in Joni’s introduction to the song from 1995, but is only hinted at in the lyrics. Joni wants to make this misunderstood young woman understood, and by the time the song is through, it is impossible to miss.
Back in late April 1992, a little over a year after the release of Night Ride Home, Los Angeles, in an event evoking Watts of 1965, exploded in riots after the LAPD was found not guilty in the beating of Rodney King. Even though King expressed his hope that everyone get along, it was clear that everyone would not. In a few days in South Central, at least sixty-three people were killed and two thousand were injured. None of this touched Bel-Air, but Joni, who had lived in Detroit during the 1967 riots, was attuned to a time and city where, as she put it, “everyone hates everyone.” That phrase is from “Sex Kills,” the second song on Turbulent Indigo. It is Joni at her most dystopic. It is the Janus-like opposite of “Sisotowbell Lane” or “California.” Joni no longer wanted Oscar Wilde’s map with Utopia on it, because she no longer thought it was possible. She felt the apocalypse coming. Things were already bad; she was sure, like a seer, that they would become even worse. She remembered pulling up behind a Cadillac belonging to the rapper Just-Ice, and she saw JUST ICE on his license place. She had never thought of justice that way. What is justice anyway? Is it just ice? Is it cold as ice? Is justice “just as” things should be? It was hard to believe.
There is no justice in “Sex Kills.” Indian chiefs see the balance is undone. Gas leaks, oil spills, rapists haunt public swimming pools, little kids pack guns to school, and, in the closest thing this song has to levity, “Lawyers haven’t been this popular since Robespierre slaughtered half of France.” That’s funny for a second, but this whole song is so dark, it builds up to this: sex sells everything and sex kills. It’s a long way from the garden, a long way from loving the one you’re with. Literally, sex means AIDS, which, in the pre-protease-inhibitor days of 1992, killed. But sex also kills emotionally. And in a marriage beginning to fray, sex no longer offers a sense of comfort. Now it can not only wound you, given an unfaithful partner, it can actually kill. One comes in from the cold only to find, even in Sunny California, just ice.
Joni went on a media campaign singing this song from west (on Jay Leno in 1995, her first American television appearance since The Johnny Cash Show in 1970) to east (on David Letterman). “Sex Kills” did not have a pleasing message, yet she got this platform to spread it, whether it was a colossal bummer or not. “Sex Kills” railed against many, many things. Joni saw the degradation of the human spirit—and, in this case, the human body—for what it was, and if it was a contrast to the sweet homage of “California,” it was also a sequel to “Down to You,” where easy pleasure is followed by a trouble that leaves too slow (and a night that covers you like a fig leaf, with trouble already lurking in the garden).
But Joni does more than moralize on Turbulent Indigo. She also says what art is and what it is not, which, for Joni, is everything. One of her most haunting melodies accompanied some of her vindictive lyrics on “Not to Blame.” In September 1992, Joni’s ex-boyfriend Jackson Browne was all over the tabloids. Although no charges were pressed, the actress Daryl Hannah claimed that Browne beat her badly enough to put her in a hospital, a charge that was supported by Hannah’s uncle, the cinematographer Haskell Wexler. There was violence of some kind—allegedly in both directions—during Joni’s relationship with Browne, and this song finds her carrying a grudge twenty years later.
Your charitable acts
Seemed out of place
With the beauty
With your fist marks on her face
The reference to “charitable acts” fits Jackson Browne’s appearances at No Nukes and Farm Aid and the Amnesty International concerts (Joni appeared at all three); Browne also cofounded the groups Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE), Nukefree.org, and the Success Through the Arts Foundation, which serves the same kids in South Central LA who were directly affected by the riots Joni sang about on “Sex Kills.”
Lest there be any question who she is singing about, in the third verse, she returns to his wife Phyllis Major’s suicide. Joni alluded to it on “Song for Sharon” on Hejira (“A woman I knew just drowned herself . . .”). Now she went at it—and Browne—with a double-barreled shotgun. “I heard your baby say when he was only three / “Daddy, let’s get some girls, one for you and one for me.’“ Ethan Zane Browne was indeed nearly three years old when his mother committed suicide.
“It was abusive to employ that image of my son as somebody who treated his mother’s death lightheartedly,” Browne said a few years after the release of Turbulent Indigo. “I mean, he was a three-year-old baby, you know. This is inexcusable.”
In the midst of the violent and personal attack—all of it about a man who did her wrong twenty years earlier—the song is wrapped in a haunting and lyrical melody, where beauty and truth still prevail in the end. On her media blitz for the album, Joni was repeatedly asked if the song was about Browne. She never confirmed it, but she never exactly denied it, either, sometimes saying it’s a song that is generally about spousal abuse, sometimes—in a classic songwriter dodge—saying the character is a “composite,” one that, even by omission, could include Browne. (Browne never denied that he wrote “Fountain of Sorrow” for Joni.) But if Joni was inveighing generally against wife beaters, why cover an obscure ’80s-era James Brown song, “How Do You Stop,” elsewhere on the album? Of course, no one questions the greatness of the Godfather of Soul, but his version of this obscure song was recorded in 1986, during the same period when he was known to be beating his wife. Besides, Joni also loves Miles Davis and Picasso, despite their own histories of spousal abuse. “Most of my heroes are monsters, unfortunately, and they are men,” she said in 1992. “If you separate their personalities from their art, Miles Davis and Picasso have always been my major heroes.”
There is a finality to ending your album with the book of Job—“The Sire of Sorrow (Job’s Sad Song).” What else is there to say? Man is the sire of sorrow, and even if that is the end of the story, is there any redemption before last call?
In 1994, Joni appeared on the Canadian TV show Intimate and Interactive, which capitalized on the still-new technology of e-mail, along with faxes and a live audience mostly composed of young people. Joni, who won Canada’s Gemini Award for her performance, appeared in khaki overalls, with an acoustic guitar in hand, and sang several songs, beguiling the host, Denise Donlon, who told her, “I had no idea you were so funny.” And even though there was an irony about Joni’s rogue inspiration, there was abs
olutely nothing funny about the songs she’d come to play. At fifty, it was as if she had gone back to the coffeehouse days, telling meandering yet compelling stories about where the songs came from. And she told the story behind “The Magdalene Laundries” in what seemed like forensic detail:
“I live in British Columbia as much as I possibly can. Because I’m absent sometimes, I have a man named Hans who, he and his family caretakes my place. So Hans, sucking on his pipe, said to me one day, ‘You know, Joni, you’re basically a cheerful person, but you write these melancholy songs,’ he said. ‘It seems to me that you should write more in the daylight. You’re always writing at night.’ So I sat out in the sun on a rock and I tuned my guitar to the sound of that day, because I play in open tunings . . . So I tuned to the crows and the seagulls and the sonic references available. And it was a fairly cheerful chord progression. It was a little melancholy, because beauty has a little. I intended to write quite a cheery lyric to it, but I went to the supermarket to get my groceries, and standing in the line between the Enquirer and the Star was the Vancouver Sun. I had never bought a paper in my life. What possessed me, I don’t know. But I picked this paper up and I never got past the first page.
“To the left hand of the page was a story out of Ireland. The Sisters of Our Lady of Charity outside of Dublin, which was a nunnery, had sold eleven and a half acres to realtors. The realtors, in plowing this land for development, unearthed over a hundred bodies in unmarked graves, thus opening up a scandal that had rocked Dublin from, they said, 1800 to 1970 [when] these laundries were closed. Basically, the Magdalene Laundries, which stood outside of every major Irish town and maybe some minor ones, . . . took as slave labor fallen women. Fallen women were classified as the obvious, I guess—prostitutes, unmarried mothers, frequently impregnated by their parish priest, their father, their brother. But the worst of all was that an unmarried woman in her late twenties, if the men of the village were looking at her, she could be deemed a Jezebel by the parishioners and even her own family, for her indecisiveness in choosing a mate, and incarcerated for life, or at least until somebody managed to get her out . . . ‘Dickensian conditions’ was the way it was described. Well, there went my cheerful song.”