Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  After Hejira was released in late November 1976 to good sales (peaking at #13 in Billboard) and reviews (with The New York Times’s Stephen Holden later noting that “Miss Mitchell refined Bob Dylan’s elongated narrative line into a folk pop poetry of unprecedented density and sophistication”), Joni discarded confessionalism. She picked up where Hissing had left off, with an album she called Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, the cover of which bore, among others, the image of Joni as the black pimp Art Nouveau. It was during the making of this album that Joni met Don Alias, the jazz musician with whom she would have a serious three-and-a-half-year relationship.

  Born in Harlem and a pre-med graduate of Pennsylvania’s Gannon University, Don Alias was in many ways uncannily like John Guerin. Both were almost exactly four years older than Joni; both were drummers and total jazzmen from whom Joni learned a great deal about the idiom; and both were men of whom, despite having had “tempestuous” relationships with them, Joni remained fond. (Another sad similarity: both Guerin and Alias died, in 2004 and 2006, respectively, of heart failure.)

  A handsome, very tall, dark-copper-skinned man with a trim Afro and a wide mustache, Alias was a percussionist who eventually specialized in an Afro-Cuban sound. He’d played with Dizzy Gillespie and with Eartha Kitt’s dance troupe in the late 1950s; then he’d been Nina Simone’s musical director for three years. From 1969 to 1971, he’d worked with Miles Davis—his congas can be heard on Bitches Brew—and he toured with Miles. Jaco Pastorius, considered the best jazz bass player in the business, was working with Joni on Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. Pastorius’s input was crucial on the album; in the same way she needed a jazz drummer for Court and Spark, she needed a jazz bassist now. Pastorius had called in Alias. Don’s reaction to the prospect of working with Joni Mitchell was close to what Guerin’s had been. “I thought, ‘Oh, another one of those skinny-ass folksingers,’” he recalled, in an interview he gave for this book, two years before his death. As with Guerin, once Alias got into the studio, he was stunningly disabused of his condescension. “What a genius of a musician Joni was! And intuitive! And eloquent!” As she had to Wayne Perkins and Tom Scott on “Car on a Hill,” she told Don, “Sound like a garbage can!” “Sound like something’s falling down the stairs!” He quickly came around to viewing Don Juan’s as “just one of those great artistic Joni Mitchell albums.” Winning over jazz musicians was now her point of pride.

  Don remembered, “There was definitely a warmth being built up during the session, definitely a thing.” One night Joni suggested going dancing at On the Rox, the Roxy’s upstairs private club. “And it happened there; it happened there as we danced. I fell in love with her. I fell in love with her openness—what openness! I fell in love with her childlikeness, that wide-eyed childlike quality. And her independence and intelligence.”

  They became a couple. In a trip that Don said was “supposed to be our kind of honeymoon,” he and Joni rented an RV and drove from L.A. to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Joni had found out the address of her hero, ninety-year-old Georgia O’Keeffe. As usual, she was going to just show up, uninvited, at a doorstep. Don hadn’t heard of O’Keeffe before he met Joni, “and then she showed me some of those paintings—how naturally erotic those flowers were.” On the drive down, Don wrote a song in honor of the legendary painter. “Geor-gia O’Keeffe! Geor-gia O’Keeffe!” he sang, rhythmically slapping the congas while Joni drove. And they both laughed when, finding themselves starved, in the desolate area of desert where the movie Giant had been filmed, it took them an hour to drive to the closest restaurant for some (very bad) Chinese food.

  When they got to O’Keeffe’s gate, “this was her moment,” Don recalled. “I said, ‘You go ahead, Joni.’ I just nodded and went back to the RV.”

  Joni—who considered herself “a painter first” and who turned out paintings (which would soon fill numerous shows) as steadily as she did songs—walked to the compound’s gate. Inside was not just a hero, but a kind of mirror. Like Joni, O’Keeffe was the child of a northern midwestern farm family (Wisconsin, in her case). Like the young Joni, the young O’Keeffe had been a beauty. Like Joni, who’d started painting when girls in art school (like her classmate Beverly Nodwell) were warned that they could merely teach, not make art, O’Keeffe had defied such an etched-in-stone fate. With her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and their friends, such as Paul Strand and Edward Steichen, O’Keeffe was at the center of the Modernist culture of the 1920s and 1930s, in the same way that male-musician-ensconced Joni was at the center of the popular culture of the last ten years. And, like Joni, O’Keeffe had produced a paean to clouds, inspired by what she, like Bellow’s Henderson, who had inspired Joni, had viewed from airplane windows.

  Don sat in the car and played his congas. When Joni returned, “she was in heaven!” he recalled. She had not been turned away. (A correspondence would develop, and the following year, Joni would visit O’Keeffe for five days. During this talk, O’Keeffe mused to Joni, “I would have liked to have been a painter and a musician, but you can’t do both.” On the basis of her own life, Joni replied, “Oh, yes, you can!” only later realizing that it was O’Keeffe who’d “ploughed the grain” that had eased Joni’s journey.)

  When Joni told John Guerin about her unrebuffed visit to O’Keeffe, he smiled.

  Joni wanted Don Alias to move in to her Bel Air home, but he refused. “I said, ‘No way!’ That mansion was the princess’s palace. I’d always be ‘Mr. Mitchell’ if I lived there. What was I going to do?—tell her maid, ‘Do my shirts, Dora’? With all that money that was rolling around, I really fought hard not to get involved with that.” Instead, he insisted that they divide their time between her Bel Air home and his apartment in a modest neighborhood—on Sepulveda, between National and Pico. Joni obliged. His not wanting to be “Mr. Mitchell” was a big issue in their relationship, she would tell friends. And on one of their first dates, he became incensed that a wealthy male fan, noticing her at the restaurant, sent a bottle of wine to their table. (Joni was hurt by his reaction, which he realized was excessive and gratuitously proprietary.)

  Approaching Joni’s lily-white social world, Don took a deep, wary breath. “It was a big, powerhouse scene of Jack Nicholson, of Crosby, Stills and Nash, of Linda Ronstadt—and here I am, the black guy coming into this thing.” Even though her character Art Nouveau had nothing to do with Don, he was certain that “a great deal of those people thought that Art Nouveau had been based on me, that I was a pimp, and that I was using Joni—the black cat capitalizing on the white woman with the money.” Since she was recently known to date musicians, such as Perkins and Guerin, who were lower down in the star hierarchy than she—something that, needless to say, wouldn’t be an oddity for a male star—“it was ‘Oh, here comes another one of Joni’s toys,’” Don felt—made worse when the “toy” was African-American. Through their years together, even though Joni considered him, as one friend says, “the real deal: a brilliant musician who she learned from, and such a musically connected guy,” Don had a seasoned skepticism about these supposedly black-music-worshiping rich white musical stars. His radar picked up their masked appraisals of him, and he was sensitive when he was not officially acknowledged as what he was: one of the major men in Joni’s life.*

  The “one guy” on the scene who Don felt never viewed him negatively was Jack Nicholson, who, from the first time they met, knew that Don had worked with Miles Davis and who, along with his girlfriend Anjelica Huston, unfailingly respected him as a social peer and a serious musician. With just about everyone else, Don felt he had to maneuver a little. “Stephen Stills was an asshole, unequivocally”—though not for any racial attitude. “Bob Dylan and Stephen Stills would be sitting around at Joni’s house, talking mainly about themselves, their careers, and how good they were. Dylan was a quiet dude, but Stills was always talking about himself. Don Henley was also a real obnoxious guy—‘me, me, me.’ Graham Nash, on the other hand, was always a gentleman.” Don sai
d that Joni would protect him from having to endure the egomaniacal Stills and Henley. “I would be coming downstairs and Stephen would want to include me, and Joni would say, ‘No, he doesn’t get involved in stuff like that’—which I’m so glad she said; she kind of stood up for me.”

  Don viewed Linda Ronstadt as “the intellectual”; Betsy Asher, Joni’s best friend, “was beautiful and in torment, always talking about Peter and [John Phillips’s daughter] Mackenzie Phillips.” The Ashers had recently ended their marriage. For the last eight years Betsy had been the L.A. rock world’s premier hostess, mediator, and confidante (“Betsy knew about everything and could have been anything—she could have been a Sherry Lansing,” says Danny Kortchmar), but now, alone, she fell into a downward spiral—cocaine abuse, paranoia, agoraphobia—that eventually resulted in years spent in a sanitarium, from which she is now fully recovered. (James Taylor’s hit song “Her Town, Too”—written with J. D. Souther—detailed Betsy’s emotional vulnerability during this time and the couple’s divorce.)

  As for Warren Beatty, Don marveled at what the others were long used to: “Every time I saw Warren, he was hitting on somebody.” Don had a tactic when Beatty walked into Joni’s house. “I used to always stand up—because, within that crowd, Warren was Mr. Man and he was the tallest, and,” at six feet five “I was taller than him, so that way he wouldn’t feel so kingpin-ish.” (But at least one form of more blatant masculine one-upping Don Alias did not want, though Joni certainly did. As she had with Jackson and other lovers, Joni painted a portrait of Don. But this was a different kind of portrait: “It was me, with my bathrobe open with—bang! like this—a hard-on sticking out. I said, ‘Joni, what are you doing?’” when she hung it “smack-dab in the middle of the living room” of the loft they would soon share in New York. Don was embarrassed. “My friends would come over and they’d go, huh? Joni said, ‘What’s wrong with it?’” He said she said it was a “testament to his sexuality,” to which he replied, “It’s not a testament to anything—it’s annoying; it’s an embarrassment!” Don wanted her to repaint it with the bathrobe closed, “and she fought me on it, all the way, all the way.” Finally, they compromised: She repainted part of the painting, making the penis tumescent, not erect.)

  Released in December 1977, the double album Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter was intensely ambitious and contrarian music: jazz-based, experimental. Its centerpiece was the sixteen-minute-long “Paprika Plains” (in which Joni reminisces about the prairies of her childhood), a Gershwin-like opera (with Laura Nyro–like turns at the piano)—part Philip Glass, part-melodramatic old movie score—with splashes of great risk and beauty. But what Joni’s fans had always related to so deeply wasn’t her trying to be Philip Glass; it was music that had made so many women say, as Danny Kortchmar puts it “‘I was so depressed, I was going to slit my wrists, and then I heard one of your songs.’” With this album, people felt Joni deserved either applause for leaving the comfort of her feathered nest (one critic later called it a “masterpiece”) or dismissal as cold, pretentious, and irrelevant. Years later, Steve Pond in Rolling Stone would recap its reception by calling it “four widely dismissed sides of sometimes forbidding jazz” and saying that Joni had become “a jazz dilettante.” How the public was coming to feel is represented by a fan’s recent confession on a Web site devoted to discussion of Joni’s work: “I’ve struggled to enjoy much of Joni’s output after 1977, but the albums prior to that were perfection.”

  Three months after the album’s release, in March 1978, Janet Maslin, writing in Rolling Stone, delivered a review whose thrust was hinted at in its headline—“Joni Mitchell’s Reckless and Shapeless Daughter”—only gently, for Maslin’s opinion was devastating, and all the more so for being thoughtfully reasoned. Calling the album “an instructive failure,” she said, “Mitchell appears bent on repudiating her own flair for popular songwriting, and on staking her claim to the kind of artistry that when it’s real doesn’t need to announce itself so stridently.” That review, and others like it, would leave Joni angered and wounded. For a tough, confident woman who could dictate to and win over session after session of skeptical old-hand jazz musicians, and for a recording artist of whom studio executives would (having learned the hard way) sigh, “You don’t tell Joni Mitchell what to do,” she was surprisingly needy—she wanted her fans’ love. And, like others who had (as she’d prophetically put it in “For the Roses”) gotten “a taste for worship,” she was presumptuous, expecting those fans to follow her away from the bargain they had struck: that she was describing life for both of them. The album reached only #25 in Billboard, but it went gold (as with Carole’s Simple Things of that same year, her previous momentum assured as much); still, like Carole’s, it would be Joni’s last album to do so. Joni had been lacerated critically the same year as Carole—Carole for being too sappy and self-derivative; Joni for being removed and pompous. It wasn’t just that staying at the top was harder than getting to the top; more to the point, rock and pop music belonged to shining youth, and they were no longer young.

  In late 1978, Joni rented a New York loft on Varick Street, at the western juncture of SoHo and the Village, and despite his initial protests (“Joni, you know goddamn well I’m not going to be able to pay any kind of rent on this space!”), Don moved in with her. (It was on these walls that the argued-about bathrobe portrait of Don by Joni hung.) Don had a group called the Stone Alliance, and the loft was his base of operations. Joni wanted to go to Don’s mother and grandmother’s Harlem apartment for Thanksgiving, but Don was nervous. His family’s knowledge of Joni Mitchell was “practically nil. I thought they’d think, ‘What are you doing, bringing a white girl in here?’” On Thanksgiving Day, “Joni walked in and my grandmother wanted her to take off her shoes, and Joni did—and right away there was a love affair between my grandmother and Joni. She really, really loved Joni. My mom did, too. And…a black family in Harlem and a white woman?” Even well into the 1970s, Alias recalled in no uncertain terms that, at least within his family, that “was taboo. Taboo! But this thing between her and my grandmother was really special. It touches me now, just thinking about it. They really loved each other. We went there a lot. Joni loved being accepted.”

  As for Myrtle and Bill, they were “flabbergasted”—a confidante says—to learn their daughter had a black boyfriend. But Don didn’t care. “I was so damn in love with Joni—so crazy about her—I was willing to meet Myrtle and Bill; I was willing to break down a wall.” When the meeting did take place, “they never gave me the impression” they had any negative feelings about him, Don said. They ended up liking him just fine.

  In late 1978, the legendary jazz composer, bassist, and orchestra leader Charles Mingus asked Joni to collaborate on an album with him (an honor that made John Guerin a little jealous). Mingus wrote six melodies (flatteringly, initially, called “Joni I” to “Joni VI”) to which Joni would write the lyrics—a new situation, and one she would likely not have consented to from a lesser musician. Mingus was in the final stages of painful, paralyzing amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and he was wheelchair-bound. He was lovingly tended by his wife, Sue Graham Mingus, who in a very real sense personified that “Americanness” of Stanley Crouch’s novelized high-plains-raised white jazz singer. A Martha Stewart lookalike, Sue was the debutante daughter of a Midwestern family so straitlaced that (as she put it in her memoir Tonight at Noon) “Desire was an undercurrent, folded away with the linen. We were a formal and modest family…The rawness of our bodies was barely acknowledged—soft mollusks safe inside our casing.” A family, in short, like Joni’s.

  Sue had been drawn to the volatile, tempestuous, Watts-born Mingus, and their union was passionate and committed. Since Mingus’s death, Sue has devoted her whole life to furthering Mingus’s legacy and getting his music heard. Joni (often with Don) worked with Mingus in New York, and, later, in Cuernavaca, where Sue was nursing her frail husband through last-ditch faith healing. Here was Sue Mingus, the b
lond, pretty, heavily relied-upon behind-the-scenes spouse of her famous, divalike, and indulged black artist husband; and here was Joni Mitchell, the blond, pretty, famous, divalike, indulged artist (and jazz novice) who had an accomplished black male jazz musician boyfriend on whom she heavily relied behind the scenes. It’s hard not to wonder how Sue and Joni regarded each other: as day-for-night opposites or sisters in spirit?*

  Joni composed the lyrics for four of the pieces; recording commenced; then, after Mingus’s death in early January, Joni fully composed two other songs, “God Must Be a Boogie Man” and “The Wolf That Lives in Lindsey.” In “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” for which she wrote the lyrics (Rahsaan Roland Kirk had composed an earlier set) and Mingus wrote the music, Joni—utilizing images from Mingus’s biography Beneath the Underdog—makes statements about the dangers to black men of interracial relationships. Joni had an all-star cast of jazz sidemen: not just Pastorius and Alias, but Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter. Released in June 1979, the album was obviously a risk—her fan base was already confused by Don Juan’s (and, to some extent, Hissing). But, as she told Cameron Crowe in a long interview in Rolling Stone: “You have two options. You can stay the same and protect the formula that gave you your initial success. They’re going to crucify you for staying the same. If you change, they’re going to crucify you for changing. But staying the same is boring. And change is interesting. So of the two options, I’d rather be crucified for changing.”