Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  Nevertheless, Joni remained in love with Jackson. Newly lionized, handsomer now that time had slightly lined his baby face, well placed in the Troubadour-Canyon elite (“Everybody loved him,” Joni’s friend remembers her feeling), six years younger than she: the power was shifting, and all her worshipful reviews wouldn’t change that. When she first came to the Canyon, she’d been the awe-inspiring queen. Now, the gravity of sexism (or reality) had pulled her down a notch. He had the advantage.

  One night at the Troubadour bar Jackson Browne saw a beautiful young blonde being screamed at by her boyfriend. Browne interceded in her defense (“I was doing my very best Bogart” is how he put it, in his “Ready or Not”), and the boyfriend threw a punch at Browne. Browne’s gallantry was rewarded; he went home with the damsel in distress, a Southern California girl who, with her mother’s booking and chaperoning assistance, had recently been a successful model in Europe. Her name was Phyllis Major.

  Jackson’s attention to Phyllis Major felt, to Joni, like “a great loss and a great mind-fuck,” says her confidante. One night Joni was at her apartment on that hilly street, expecting Jackson to come over. He didn’t show up.

  What happened next Joni has described to several people as her “suicide attempt.” One confidante says she said she “took pills. She cut herself up and threw herself against a wall and got completely bloodied—glass broke. She vomited up the pills.” According to one confidante, David Geffen came to her rescue and got her medical help. Joni wrote a song, “Car on a Hill,” about that evening. The narrator worries because her lover is an hour late, but rejection, not catastrophe, is what she really fears is the reason the car is not—as she tensely puts it—“CLIMB-ing / CLIMB-ing / climbing the hill.”

  After the incident, Joni got a recommendation from David Geffen. “She went to a ‘think tank’ for therapists” in a residential setting, the confidante says, “and the head guy said to pick the [therapist] you want to work with.” Joni wrote “Trouble Child” about this experience. In the song, whose airy, hazy melody and long pull on every fourteenth beat mimic the effect of sedation, she writes of being “up in a sterilized room,” rendered “weak” and “spacey.” She refers to her dogged depression, which has kept her in torpor and which rules out her ability to “give love,” even though she knows she “need[s] it.” The indignity of psychiatric intervention, for a strong, proud person like Joni, snaps through the lyrics; no wonder she’s called these songs of Blue, For the Roses, and Court and Spark, her next album, “scrapings of my soul.” (Still, many critics didn’t know how autobiographically she was speaking. Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau, for example, would catch the “tragic” story being told in “Trouble Child,” but he assumed its “infinite compassion” was trained on someone else.)

  During this same postbreakdown moment, she wrote “People’s Parties”—complex, its lyrics “through-composed,” like many of Blue’s songs—to describe the acute self-consciousness she had still not overcome. Now the parties weren’t hang-loose Canyon gatherings but Hollywood bashes that she attended with the likes of Beatty, whom she’d unwittingly shared with Carly. Some of her gaffes at these parties were funny, at least in retrospect. Joni went with Beatty to Hugh Hefner’s one night and slipped off her clothes to skinny-dip in a pool on what seemed to be a totally deserted part of the estate, only to find herself stuck, in the water, nude, while the entire party moved poolside. In her telling, she bolted from the water, dressed, got in her car to drive off, only to run out of gas. The experience left her mortified. But more often she was the deft observer at such fetes. As she’d limned the Ibiza party on the red-dirt road, she dissected the stylish people with “passport smiles…giving to get something.”

  Her near-simultaneously written “The Same Situation” is thought by at least one of her subsequent boyfriends, Dave Naylor, to be Joni’s Warren Beatty song, just as “You’re So Vain” was Carly’s. Tucked inside this sensitive song about her unceasing “search for love” lies a Me Decade celebrity-romance chess game. A bored playboy who’s gone through an infinite number of desirable women now fixes his “gaze” on her. She’s blasé as well, having been, “for so many years” now, in that “same situation” of being desired and narcissistically pampered (those ringing phones, those proffered mirrors), and she assumes they’re equal. The man is an earnest, cerebral, let’s-really-communicate sort. With Joni, brutal candor is best withheld for her songs, where she keeps all the power, so his pseudo-caring entreaty that they be “truthful” is as threatening as if it had come from “the church…a cop…[or] a mother.” When she obligingly lets down her guard, he turns around and uses her candor as a “weapon” against her. By now, she’s snared; she craves his “approval.” Game over.

  Meanwhile, as Joni was recovering from her breakdown in the sophisticated, hip Hollywood fishbowl, Jackson was making a life with Phyllis Major. Phyllis had quickly become pregnant, and their baby boy, Ethan, was born in early November 1973.

  Joni remained deeply angry at Jackson for years. Said percussionist Don Alias, who became her serious boyfriend for several years in the late 1970s, “She really had this hatred of Jackson Browne; the whole Jackson Browne thing was really heavy for her.” A woman very close to Joni was left with the belief that “you may have to be very strong to take on Jackson—from what I’ve heard he’s a classic example of someone who has a Madonna-and-whore complex.” (However, Jackson’s pre-Joni girlfriend Salli Sachse experienced nothing negative in their relationship.)

  The Jackson Browne story had a tragic dimension that kept it smoldering for Joni. Shortly before or after she married Jackson (in December 1975, two years after their son was born), Phyllis Major attempted suicide. People in their immediate circle knew about the attempt; among other things, she’d discreetly stolen drugs from them for that purpose. “Phyllis went around and gathered up everything,” says one woman who was a close friend. “I had some chloral hydrate”—a sedative—“and a little vial of opium, and she just scooped up everything. She left notes for everybody—to me, to Jackson—saying ‘I’m sorry’ and words to the effect of, ‘I can’t stand the pain.’” Phyllis was revived in time. But then, on March 25, 1976, with two-and-a-half-year-old Ethan and the nanny in an adjacent room, Phyllis succeeded in taking enough drugs to kill herself. “It was terrible, just terrible,” says the friend. The tragedy was a brushfire through their circle, which Joni memorialized in a coded reference in her 1976 “Song for Sharon” on Hejira. Their friend had “drowned” herself—perhaps, Joni noted with an esoteric pointedness, to “punis[h] somebody.”*

  Joni attended Phyllis Major Browne’s funeral in Santa Barbara (Jackson was angry that she’d come), and the parallel struck her deeply and bitterly. She had made a suicide attempt over Jackson; Phyllis had tried and failed. And now Phyllis had succeeded.

  Years after that, in September 1992, Jackson Browne’s longtime girlfriend, actress Daryl Hannah, accused him of beating her up. The widely reported alleged incident (its notoriety had spiked when Daryl’s ex- and future boyfriend John Kennedy Jr. came to her rescue and flew her back to New York) remained murky for months after, with no charges ever pressed by Hannah, with Browne and his friends denying he’d struck her (the incident was “grievously misreported,” says a Browne fan site), and with a flurry of contradictory accounts by after-the-fact witnesses and authorities.** It was after this scandal that Joni went public with her anger at Jackson Browne (though not the secret, personal, original reason for it), by way of “Not to Blame,” her song about domestic violence on Turbulent Indigo. It mentions his recent news-making fight with Hannah, his denial of beating her, and his friends’ support of him. Obviously—Joni sings, with hurt and anger—he was “not to blame”; surely, the woman brought it on herself. The song is unusually biting. (In a questionable move, Joni describes a child seemingly meant to be three-year-old Ethan Browne in a gratuitously negative light.) It then moves from (the unnamed) Daryl to (the unnamed) Phyllis, and recalls a scene at
Phyllis’s “lonely little grave,” where the funeral guests didn’t shed tears for their friend and didn’t blame Jackson for her death. Listeners had no idea how personal were the biting lines about the man “dri[ving]” the vulnerable woman “to suicide.” Joni wasn’t just writing about Phyllis; she was writing about her late-1972 self.*

  Joni went back to living with Geffen, and she planned her next album, Court and Spark, which would include the three veiled songs about the Jackson-centered breakdown, as well as the baleful “The Same Situation.” The album’s title song opened with some of the most arresting images she’d ever conceived, describing love as showing up like a scavenger on a porch, “with a sleeping roll and a madman’s soul.”

  Joni started doing demo recordings of the songs of Court and Spark, with Henry Lewy assisting as usual, in the summer of 1973. Russ Kunkel was signed on as drummer, but, with these new songs, something wasn’t working. “I was trying to lead [Russ] through this piece of music, and there were grace notes and subtleties and things that I thought were getting kind of buried because Russell has a great, strong kind of rock style,” Joni has said. “Russ said, ‘Joni, I can’t play to this music. I think you should get yourself a jazz drummer.’” So Joni went around to jazz clubs with Lewy, and at a club called the Hot Potato she listened to the jazz-rock fusion group L.A. Express, led by saxophonist Tom Scott (who’d played on For the Roses). Scott’s group was brought in to work on Court and Spark (they were finishing up an album of their own in the adjacent studio); its drummer—Kunkel’s replacement as the album’s heartbeat—happened to be one of the best young jazz drummers in L.A., John Guerin.

  Guerin, thirty-three, had grown up in San Diego after spending the first three years of his life in Hawaii, the son of a navy man. (Having been a toddler during the Japanese strike at Pearl Harbor, he recalled that for years after “whenever I heard a siren, I’d go looking for a tree to run under.”) Guerin played only jazz; he listened only to jazz; he was a “jazz snob” who had worked with most of the greats—Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra, Carmen McRae. “The only one I missed”—she’d died a year before he’d turned pro—“was Billie Holiday,” Guerin said (speaking, here and throughout, in an interview that he gave for this book four months before his January 2004 death). When Scott proposed they work with Joni, Guerin thought: What am I doing backing a folksinger?

  But when he listened to her songs, he was awestruck. “She was the whole orchestra in one guitar!”

  As they sat directly across from one another during the weeks of sessions—Joni in her glass half-isolation booth—an intense connection developed. John was a sexy guy with a wide, pug nose, toothy devilish grin (telegraphing his wild ways), and a mop of thick dark hair, like Warren Beatty would soon sport in Shampoo, only messier. He and Joni played to each other, voice to beat, eye to eye—a click! that, in Guerin’s experience, was often struck between two bell-jarred session musicians, regardless of gender, who found themselves really cooking. Joni, he realized, was no folksinger—or any kind of conventional singer or composer. “You didn’t go whistling Joni’s tunes. They were much more complicated; not A-A-B-A form, not Gershwin. Joni’s songs didn’t have the usual hook; she would form the music to her lyrical thought and sometimes go across bars and in different time signatures—she didn’t care.” Guerin and the others in the Express went along with her plan, puzzled at first. “But then it all made sense. It really did.”

  “Court and Spark”—the stark a cappella opening lines of the poem (delivered in Joni’s chain-smoking-lowered voice) unexpectedly opening up into a kick-ass, wailing-sax, full-band blow-out—announces right away that this is no typical Joni Mitchell album. For “Help Me” and “Free Man in Paris” she marries her signature vocal bends to a jazzy, commercial feel. “Raised on Robbery” is a boogie-woogie-bugle-boy-tinged rocker. “Car on a Hill” has movie sound effects; “Make it sound like cars and traffic!” Joni had ordered Tom Scott and slide guitarist Wayne Perkins—and they did. The juxtaposition of dark, crashing “car” horns with sugary, girl-group backup on the “climb-ing”s gives the song a mysterious, ironic, likable energy. One reviewer called it “wrenching.” Her three vulnerability songs (“The Same Situation,” “Trouble Child,” and “People’s Parties”) are joined in pensiveness by “Down to You” and leavened by the balmy, bemused “Just Like This Train” (with its witty locomotive metaphor for her history of being emotionally high-maintenance—“shaking into town / with the brakes complaining”) and her Carly-esque fantasy of “dreaming of the pleasure” of taking a vain man down a peg. She closes by channeling her teenage role model, Annie Ross, in “Twisted”; she uses Cheech and Chong (“No driver on the top?!”) to have some bebop-chorus fun with it. Joni had needed a band of guys to shake her out of her blues (today, she has a group of pool-playing buddies she’s dubbed the Sunday Boys, for this same reason), and the jazz-rock listener-friendliness (sometimes just barely skirting TV-soundtrack slickness) of this album lofted Joni to a new commercial dimension and buoyed her to emotional health. This was her plunge into the Canadian waters.

  Guerin, who was divorced, had dated lots of singers, but they’d merely interpreted material. “Joan was a different kind of animal,” he said. She created. “A lot of” what he fell in love with “had to do with her out-and-out talent. I was amazed at her talent for most of our relationship. She didn’t have patience for repetition or rules. I never paid attention to lyrics before; I listened to a singer’s timbre or phrasing or the quality of her voice. Boy, she changed that for me! She opened up my ears to words. For Chrissakes, she turned me on to James Taylor”—whom he’d never listened to, on jazz-snob principle—“who I love!

  “And I taught her things, in exchange. She learned what the rhythm section does—she’d never paid any attention to that, or to jazz, for that matter.” John played her a steady diet of Horace Silver and Miles Davis and “definitely Coltrane. She just drank it in—which she does; she’s self-taught, like I am. It was a wonderful trade.”

  But the key to the trade was their personalities. Joni was only half out of her depression when they met, and John’s down-to-earth (and hell-raising) quality seemed to pull her the rest of the way out. As she later put it in “Refuge of the Roads” (one of her favorite of her own songs), he was the “friend of spirit” who “mirrored me back, simplified.” He, too, saw their fit that way; “Joan’s a very complicated person and I’m a pretty straightahead guy. I think she lightened up a lot with me”—even though, as she put it in the song, their “perfection would always be denied.” Says a close friend, “It was a very turbulent, highly sexually charged relationship; they broke up six or seven times” over five years. John Guerin would be one of the great loves of her life. And, for increasingly grudge-holding Joni (“If you’re in Joan’s life, you’re gonna get blamed,” says subsequent beau Dave Naylor; “Joan rewrites history really well, and once she tells a story once or twice in her head, it becomes true to her—I call it her ‘iron whim’”), Guerin was that rare lover “who she never said anything bad about,” says another friend. “She was crazy about John Guerin.”

  One of their first breakups occurred just after Court and Spark was finished. John was unfaithful, which she would document in Hejira’s “Blue Motel Room.” She paid him back by having a six-week liaison with session guitarist (and sometime Leon Russell bandmate) Wayne Perkins, a handsome half-Cherokee Alabaman. Perkins was just twenty-two, but having grown up in a big country-and-church-music-playing family, he had good music sense. He’d helped talk Joni into putting “Free Man in Paris” on the album, and he played her vintage discs of regional legends Lord Buckley, the Alabama State Troopers, and Furry Lewis, a seminal blues guitarist who started out as a protégé of W. C. Handy. Joni was very taken by Furry, who was still alive (though in decrepitude) in Memphis.

  Joni’s house-sharing with Geffen had a wacky eye-of-the-needle glamour, like an early-1970s elite Hollywood version of the TV show Friends. One n
ight Joni and Wayne were on their way downstairs for a midnight swim in Geffen’s pool when, on the stairs, they bumped into Geffen and his then-squeeze Cher—“bouncing off the walls, laughing like crazy,” Wayne remembers. “They couldn’t get upstairs [to his bedroom] fast enough,” which only put Joni and Wayne in a hotter mood for skinny-dipping and its aftermath. (Geffen came out as a gay man after the Cher romance.) Another time, Wayne woke up to Joni’s proffering of “this huge stein of tea, with milk and sugar, the way the English and Canadians serve it,” and went downstairs to find Bob Dylan on a bar stool reading The New York Times and talking with Geffen about their just-released Planet Waves, along with Joni’s dulcimer maker, Joellen Lapidus. Joni made omelettes, and the morning turned into an all-star guitar-dulcimer-tambourine jam session.

  Joni and John Guerin reunited shortly afterward.

  Court and Spark was released in January 1974, and the pleading, scatty “Help Me” was released in March, becoming Joni’s first—and only—Top 10 single. The critics were even more ecstatic than they’d been with For the Roses. Robert Hilburn called it “a virtually flawless album that may well contain the most finely honed collection of songs and most fully realized arrangements in the singer-songwriter’s distinguished career.” Robert Christgau of The Village Voice decreed Joni “the best singer-songwriter there is right now.” Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau called the album “the first truly great album of 1974” (granted, 1974 was only two months old when he wrote that). The Chicago Tribune’s Lynn Van Matre, who always lent a bit of feminism to her reviews (and who paired her review of Joni’s sixth album to Carly’s near-simultaneously released fourth one, Hotcakes—giving Joni points for depth and Carly points for humor, and having the good sense to not mention James Taylor), agreed. Court and Spark, Van Matre said, was “pure Mitchell,” but with “clearer lyrics” than before, Joni “connec[ting]” to the listeners “beautifully.” At this point, though, reviewers were painstakingly trying to figure out what Joni’s songs meant, other than the eternal balance between love and freedom. Landau says, “The lyrics lead us through concentric circles that define an almost Zen-like dilemma: The freer the writer becomes, the more unhappy she finds herself.” And: “No thought or emotion is expressed without some equally forceful statement of its negation.” His effort and tolerance reveal what would be a problem: you can’t keep writing endlessly about the ups and downs of love; freedom has its limits as a subject. Joni would have (after Court and Spark) one masterful exploration of that theme left in her—Hejira—and then, like Carole after Tapestry, where she would choose to go and where her fans wanted her to go would, painfully, diverge.