by David Yaffe
The tour lasted less than a month, from the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on May 12 to the Blockbuster–Sony Music Entertainment Centre in Camden, New Jersey, on June 2. If anyone speculated whether this would be Joni’s final tour, Roney had no idea. Onstage, he took in the meaning of her words and intonations. He was certainly there to be original. “I remember we did ‘Comes Love,’ that was the first thing I did with her,” Roney recalled. “Mark Isham, the trumpet player before me, would do Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison’s opening every night. I felt that was a bit Hollywood. I knew ‘Sweets’ Edison. He was one of my mentors. I would never do that. I played it as though I was in the moment that Sweets was in when he came up with it. Joni had no problems with that. Every night was in the spirit of what this music is—in the spirit of the moment.” He already knew the standards on her set list—“You’re My Thrill,” “At Last,” “Comes Love,” and so on. “Trouble Man” came out easily. Since he was her star soloist—the saxophonist Bob Sheppard emerged from the ensemble for one saxophone solo—they were in their own dressing room. The perennial topic was Miles: his beautiful music and his bad behavior. Joni spoke of Don Alias in the present tense, as if their romance hadn’t ended nearly twenty years earlier.
This brief tour was such rough going for Joni, healthwise, it was not a surprise that it would be her last. “I was very ill and I had to stay separate from people to save my energy,” Joni told me. “I was in isolation to get through that tour. I was lucky I didn’t fall down. The disease was coming on, and I didn’t know what it was yet. We were picking up orchestras in every town with shitty horn sections. We needed a lead trumpet player, because horn sections were so shabby. We kidnapped Wallace in Boston. The only thing we carried was a drummer, bass, and saxophone, and we carried a first violin, and in every city we picked up an orchestra. LA wasn’t bad and New York wasn’t bad. They’ve got big musician pools in those towns. Florida was pretty bad, Atlanta had a good horn section although the strings sucked, although I heard them on a classical station and they were better. Detroit was horrendously bad. But Boston had this great trumpet player. We kidnapped him because we needed a good leader for the brass section in these other towns because we still had Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia to go.”
By then, Joni was slipping more of her own songbook into the mix, including a bombastic “For the Roses,” a Beethovenian “Judgement of the Moon and Stars,” and a cooled-off version of “Be Cool,” a gem buried in the middle of Wild Things Run Fast. Even though she no longer had a guitar to tune, as she did with her folk audiences, she told many rambling stories, including, in an introduction to “Judgement of the Moon and Stars”—a song that had already been introduced many times since she started performing it in 1972—and came up with an anecdote that fit her current disgust with the music business: Beethoven put a little melody into a music box made by the inventor of the metronome—she called him “Metronomio.” It was a smash hit all over Europe, she said, and Beethoven had to live with the idea that he would be most remembered for the biggest piece of shit he ever wrote. Joni did not have that problem.
She was most remembered for her younger work, which is always a frustration when one is no longer younger. These performances naturally led to Travelogue, a project that would fulfill her contractual obligation while also revisiting her young work as a woman who was, despite what she’d learned from her encounter with Mabel Mercer, an older woman—and what she had left was certainly aged, filtered not just through American Spirits but decades of experience. She thought some of those songs were miscast for an ingénue. And she wasn’t going to do this on the cheap, either. Gone were the days of acoustic guitar and a couple of mics. She was now accompanied by a seventy-piece orchestra including some of the same London Symphony Orchestra members from the Both Sides Now sessions. But crucial to the project was her collaborations with jazz musicians who had become a part of her musical family, especially Brian Blade, Wayne Shorter, and Herbie Hancock. “Jazz musicians use standard tunes as vehicles for improvisation,” recalled Mendoza. “The lyrics are not as important as the changes and the rhythm behind it, and what that implies for the rest of the improvisation. A songwriter reprising a song like that needs to retain whatever that song needs. A fresh version of it retains a certain meaning of the lyric. I don’t think that Herbie, Wayne, and Brian even cared what the original versions were. They were interested in the moment that you create right then.” And, like Joni, Mendoza found that recasting material in an exquisitely worn voice was like a form of Method acting; Joni was a natural. Mendoza said it was “like working with Robert De Niro.”
The good news was that Mendoza won a Grammy for his arrangement of “Woodstock.” The bad news was that the album, which cost around $300,000 to record, sold around 72,000 copies, by far her lowest sales figure. Joni blamed it on having got what she saw as a demotion to Nonesuch, what she called Warner Bros.’ “boutique label”—a label that had, at one time or another, the Kronos Quartet, the MacArthur-winning experimental artists Don Byron and John Zorn, along with more commercial fare by the Black Keys and Natalie Merchant. Joni was not impressed. She simply saw it as a downgrade. Her only publicity would be an interview with W magazine, in which she stated, to James Reginato, “I’m quitting after this, because the business has made itself so repugnant to me.” (She later added, “Don’t make me sound too dissy.”)
Her contractual obligation was fulfilled. She had no songs in her, certainly no more energy for the road. She would surface to promote a series of collections of her least popular work—from the 1980s and ’90s, with nothing new but cover art—in an effort to shift the conversation. Mostly she was painting, living her life, dodging health disasters, from post-polio to symptoms of Morgellons syndrome, a condition that the medical establishment doesn’t recognize, or it is dismissed as psychosomatic, but to its sufferers, including Joni, it feels indisputably real. “I have this weird, incurable disease that seems like it’s from outer space,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “Garbo and Dietrich hid away just because people became so upset watching them age, but this is worse. Fibers in a variety of colors protrude out of my skin like mushrooms after a rainstorm: they cannot be forensically identified as animal, vegetable or mineral. Morgellons is a slow, unpredictable killer—a terrorist disease: it will blow up one of your organs, leaving you in bed for a year. But I have a tremendous will to live: I’ve been through another pandemic—I’m a polio survivor, so I know how conservative the medical body can be. In America, the Morgellons is always diagnosed as ‘delusion of parasites,’ and they send you to a psychiatrist. I’m actually trying to get out of the music business to battle for Morgellons sufferers to receive the credibility that’s owed to them.”
In 2007, she skipped the Grammy Awards when Herbie Hancock won for River: The Joni Letters. She loved glamour, she loved accolades, but no amount of makeup could cover up what she was doing to her face—picking at it, peeling back layer upon layer. She became convinced that the disease was not only causing damage to her skin, but was eating away at her brain, as well. Doctors responded by prescribing antibiotics, but they were no help at all. Just as Joni left hints about her unwanted pregnancy and adoption in “Little Green” and “Chinese Café,” she also sang, in “The Sire of Sorrow (Job’s Sad Song)” of “pompous physicians” and “nights without sleep and festering flesh.”
She began to be regarded as a recluse, even as she still gave interviews here and there, and even as she took most of her meals in public and would chat people up when she felt like it. It would be another four years until the muse would return one last time.
32 CURTAIN CALL
When the songs did come back, in 2006, it was because of a combination of gratitude and incipient doom, and the two were deeply connected. Love, Joni’s most enduring and most complicated subject, was nowhere to be found, at least not the romantic kind. She had love of the earth, and she had found pastoral inspiration on her British Columbia property, but it was also in
danger of being yet another paradise paved away. She had love for her grandson, whose precocious words “bad dreams are good in the great plan” would inspire what goodness she could find with plundered ecosystems and a war in Iraq waged on lies and deceit. She was more outspoken against the Iraq War than the Vietnam War, and everything she was creating was either implicitly or explicitly protest art in various media. And so, after ten years of drought, the songs came pouring out, mostly, as she put it, of environmental and theological complaint.
One, an instrumental piece in the tradition of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, The Song of the Earth, called “One Week Last Summer,” would win a 2007 Grammy for best instrumental piece. And the title track of the album on which it appeared was called Shine. Shine calls on the illumination of everything: the polluters and the polluted, the church and its heretics, civilization and its discontents. Like Dylan’s 1964 “Chimes of Freedom,” in which hiding from a rainstorm brings together a coalition as broad as a song could handle, Joni alludes to the gospel standard “This Little Light of Mine,” while calling for the shining of a light that nothing can escape.
Shine on good humor
Shine on good will
Shine on lousy leadership
Licensed to kill
Joni shines her light where it is needed most: dying soldiers, mental patients, “Dickens, Rembrandt, and Beethoven”—her peer group—even the “asshole passing on the right.” High and low, from the inspired to the broken, and everyone in between, Joni lights it all up.
That light—is it just poetic illumination, or is this some sort of search party? In the midst of this nearly eight-minute epic, all sublimely rumbling with the ride cymbals and soft rim shots of the ever virtuosic Brian Blade, the song has a bigger heart than the singer, or really all of us. To shine does not mean to forgive. It could mean that if we can view the world, even at its most wretched, with all delivered luminescence, our all-too-human and battered hearts could open up a little more.
Joni piles up image after image centered on a single theme, just as she did so many years before on “Both Sides, Now.” This is a song, she said, “that could have had a million verses. So what are the pertinent things to shine on at this time? It starts, ‘Shine on Wall Street and Vegas / Place your bets.’ I have written about sixty different verses and rhyming couplets to this thing and I’ve kept twelve. ‘Shine on the dazzling darkness that restores in deep sleep / Shine on what we throw away and what we keep.’ Are they the best ones? I don’t know. I could write sixty a week. What are the twelve most important things to illuminate? It’s overwhelming.”
When Joni got her inspiration back, it flowed so extravagantly, it seemed like the well would never go dry again. And just as the songwriting had been reawakened (her ten years of silence was longer than the Beatles’ entire recording career) the French Canadian choreographer Jean Grand-Maître, who had no way of knowing that Joni was writing songs again, wrote to her to invite her to participate in a project in a medium that had always fascinated her.
“Please forgive my somewhat imperfect English as I am a native of Quebec and I am still brushing up on this new language,” wrote Grand-Maître. “Next year will be Alberta Ballet’s 40th Anniversary Season and as Artistic Director, I would be enthused by the possibility of choreographing a ballet to your brilliant and profoundly moving music.
“I would really love to fly to Los Angeles,” he went on, “and meet you personally for a very short moment.” That “very short moment” turned into a marathon chat into the wee small hours. Dance, since girlhood, had been a major passion of Joni’s, and writing for dance was a natural outlet for her. After defeating polio, the teenage Joni danced the night away as often as she could back in Saskatoon, even adding an extra night on Wednesdays because she couldn’t wait for the weekends. “I want to wreck my stockings in some jukebox dive,” she sang on “All I Want,” the song that opens Blue, an album known more for introspection than dancing.
Joni felt affection for Grand-Maître from the beginning and found him to be soulful. But she did not like his initial idea—a retrospective called “Dancing Joni,” revolving around a blond Australian ballerina who would be dancing events imagined from Joni’s life. Joni said yes to a ballet, but nixed the concept. In addition to writing songs that ended up on Shine, she was also embarking on a new art project after her flat-screen television malfunctioned and turned everything green. Her television was transmitting an uncanny commentary of the times, with Busby Berkeley musicals, CNN, the History Channel, and Iraq War footage drenched in the same tint of green. And so a photo installation, called Green Flag Song, was being prepared for exhibits in LA and New York.
Some of the artwork was also used for the ballet, which was renamed The Fiddle and the Drum, after her antiwar acappella ballad from Clouds, back in 1969. The song made no references to Vietnam or any other topical subject, and so would be as relevant to the War on Terror as it was to the Cold War. In the midst of an imperiled environment and a war that was losing support the more the facts came in, this new work would be a way to get Joni’s new (and least appreciated) music alive on the stage with beautiful young dancers who would represent the pulse and passion of the music. And with an emphasis on underappreciated songs from the 1980s and ’90s—rhythmically charged and better for dance than her earlier work—she would also be calling attention to her most neglected work. But Grand-Maître’s choreography and Joni’s music would roar out a warning. “It’s a red alert about the situation the world is in now,” she said. “We’re wasting our time on this fairy-tale war, when the real war is with God’s creation. Nobody’s fighting for God’s creation.”
It was a big gamble for Grand-Maître. Not only had he alienated some of his sponsors in oil-rich Calgary, but, while Joni had taken over the project conceptually—integrating it with her art show, changing the songs and the theme—she had no involvement with the dance itself, and no one knew how she would react. There was a two a.m. celebratory dinner planned if she was happy, and a plan B if she wasn’t. The dancers, who were trained to peak at performance, were deliberately holding back through the rehearsals. In the darkness, Joni could be seen by Grand-Maître, taking notes, and, when she felt like it, gyrating to the rhythms of her own music. This was as close to the stage as she was going to get—so near and so far.
“I never really explained to her what I was choreographing physically, but rather how I was staging it,” Grand-Maître recalled. “Like when Mary Magdalene appeared on a screen during ‘Sex Kills’ or when Killer Kyle in ‘Beat of Black Wings’ transforms from innocence to aggressive behavior. I told her I wanted to create that in a dance performance. She loved that.” This was similar to the trust that she put in Brian Blade, when they were to perform together without any rehearsal. “Come in and wing it with me,” she had said. But this was a completely new medium. This was uncharted territory.
Joni was elated. This was the Joni who was determined to prove the doctor wrong at the iron lung. She would walk in time for Christmas. She would not sink. Lovers would come and go, popularity would wax and wane, celebrity would offer perks and punishments. She would dance the night away at the Saskatoon sock hops, at Studio 54, even in a private movement at the Calgary Performing Arts Centre. These bodies onstage were young and vital. Her music would find a new purpose. She would find a new collaborator. Before the world fell apart, her music would be getting a new lifeline. Nietzsche wrote that he could only believe in a god who could dance. That night, Joni certainly believed in the dance itself. She had a new record to promote, and a new art exhibit.
“I’m working three shifts,” Joni said at the time. “I’m doing the work of four twenty-year-olds. Between the art show and the ballet and the new album, I’ve never worked so hard in my life.” At sixty-three, Joni was still in the midst of creation. Her muse hadn’t deserted her after all. The Fiddle and the Drum ballet went on at Calgary’s Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium on February 8, 2007, while outside the C
anadian prairie got pounded with snow. Journalists murmured excitedly and photographers lugged their cameras from vans. But Joni was not quite ready. She hadn’t performed since 2000, and this was a surprising reentry into the spotlight. She had been fussing with her outfit and her hair, knowing the cameras would be flashing, that her unlifted sixty-three-year-old face would be compared with images of her younger self. “Do I have to look good?” she had asked as she checked herself out in the mirror the morning before the dress rehearsal.
She had settled on a fatigue-green A-line dress in ripped gauze, cinched at the waist with a macramé belt with a pouch attached, an effect that was simultaneously glam and earthy. At the last moment, she added a green beret, a gift from Graham Nash for her sixtieth birthday, perhaps a nod to the ballet’s antiwar sentiment and color scheme. Despite this uncertainty, when she made her way to the stage, it was obvious that she belonged nowhere else. Her face was alight, her body alive to the music. The lights dimmed, and, if you looked closely from the right sight lines, you could see her reacting to the dancers. After a decade of silence, the new songs of theological and environmental complaint were now coming out. Two of them were getting their world premiere at the ballet. Grand-Maître swept Joni onstage for the curtain call, and the crowd in Calgary went berserk. The dancers all did their stage bow in unison, and even though Joni had practiced it in dress rehearsal, she just couldn’t bow with the chorus. She was taking a bow all by herself. The crowd cheered for more.