I think people who are creative, in the arts, also seem to have larger appetites for life than most people, to excess usually. Whether it be drinking, whether it be sex, whether it be anything, the appetites seem to be larger. I don’t know why, but they seem to be that way. And with writers too—most of them don’t seem to be terribly happy people, whatever that means. Because I guess you are always in a way trying to prove yourself, and as an entertainer, you’re always in front of an audience. People say you’re only as good as your last performance.
JONI MITCHELL
by Cameron Crowe
July 26, 1979
Looking back, how well did you prepare for your own success?
I never thought that far ahead. I never expected to have this degree of success.
Never? Not even practicing in front of your mirror?
No. It was a hobby that mushroomed. I was grateful to make one record. All I knew was, whatever it was that I felt was the weak link in the previous project gave me my inspiration for the next one. I wrote poetry and I painted all my life. I always wanted to play music and dabbled with it, but I never thought of putting them all together. It never occurred to me. It wasn’t until Dylan began to write poetic songs that it occurred to me you could actually sing those poems.
Is that when you started to sing?
I guess I really started singing when I had polio. Neil [Young] and I both got polio in the same Canadian epidemic. I was nine, and they put me in a polio ward over Christmas. They said I might not walk again, and that I would not be able to go home for Christmas. I wouldn’t go for it. So I started to sing Christmas carols and I used to sing them real loud. When the nurse came into the room I would sing louder. The boy in the bed next to me, you know, used to complain. And I discovered I was a ham. That was the first time I started to sing for people.
Do you remember the first record you bought?
The first record I bought was a piece of classical music. I saw a movie called The Story of Three Loves, and the theme was [she hums the entire melody] by Rachmaninoff, I think. Every time it used to come onto the radio it would drive me crazy. It was a 78. I mean, I had Alice in Wonderland and Tubby the Tuba, but the first one that I loved and had to buy? “The Story of Three Loves.”
How about pop music?
You see, pop music was something else in that time. We’re talking about the Fifties now. When I was thirteen, The Hit Parade was one hour a day—four o’clock to five o’clock. On the weekends they’d do the Top Twenty. But the rest of the radio was Mantovani, country & western, a lot of radio journalism. Mostly country & western, which I wasn’t crazy about. To me it was simplistic. Even as a child I liked more complex melody.
In my teens I loved to dance. That was my thing. I instigated a Wednesday night dance ’cause I could hardly make it to the weekends. For dancing, I loved Chuck Berry, Ray Charles. “What I’d Say.” I like Elvis Presley. I liked the Everly Brothers. But then this thing happened. Rock & roll went through a really dumb vanilla period. And during that period, folk music came in to fill the hole. At that point, I had friends who’d have parties and sit around and sing Kingston Trio songs. That’s when I started to sing again. That’s why I bought an instrument. To sing at those parties. It was no more ambitious than that. I was planning all the time to go to art school.
What kind of student were you?
I was a bad student. I finally flunked out in the twelfth grade. I went back a year later and picked up the subjects that I lost. I do have my high-school diploma—I figured I needed that much, just in case. College was not too interesting to me. The way I saw the educational system from an early age was that it taught you what to think, not how to think. There was no liberty, really, for freethinking. You were being trained to fit into a society where freethinking was a nuisance. I liked some of my teachers very much, but I had no interest in their subjects. So I would appease them—I think they perceived that I was not a dummy, although my report card didn’t look like it. I would line the math room with ink drawings and portraits of the mathematicians. I did a tree of life for my biology teacher. I was always staying late at the school, down on my knees painting something.
How do you think the other students viewed you?
I’m not sure I have a clear picture of myself. My identity, since it wasn’t through the grade system, was that I was a good dancer and an artist. And also, I was very well dressed. I made a lot of my own clothes. I worked in ladies’ wear and I modeled. I had access to sample clothes that were too fashionable for our community, and I could buy them cheaply. I would go hang out on the streets dressed to the T, even in hat and gloves. I hung out downtown with the Ukrainians and the Indians; they were more emotionally honest and they were better dancers.
When I went back to my own neighborhood, I found that I had a provocative image. They thought I was loose because I always like rowdies. I thought the way the kids danced at my school was kind of, you know, funny. I remember a recurring statement on my report card—“Joan does not relate well.” I know that I was aloof. Perhaps some people thought I was a snob.
There came a split when I rejected sororities and that whole thing. I didn’t go for that. But here also came a stage when my friends who were juvenile delinquents suddenly became criminals. They could go into very dull jobs or they could go into crime. Crime is very romantic in your youth. I suddenly thought, “Here’s where the romance ends. I don’t see myself in jail . . .”
So you went to art school, and at the end of your first year decided to go to Toronto to become a folksinger.
I was only a folksinger for about two years, and that was several years before I actually made a record. By that time, it wasn’t really folk music anymore. It was some new American phenomenon. Later, they called it singer/songwriters. Or art songs, which I liked best. Some people got nervous about that word. Art. They think it’s a pretentious word from the giddyap. To me, words are only symbols, and the word “art” has never lost its vitality. It still has meaning to me. Love lost its meaning to me. God lost its meaning to me. But art never lost its meaning. I always knew what I meant by art. Now I’ve got all three of them back [laughs].
You and Neil Young have always been close. How did you first meet?
I was married to Chuck Mitchell at the time. We came to Winnipeg, playing this Fourth Dimension [folk] circuit. We were there over Christmas. I remember putting up this Christmas tree in our hotel room. Neil, you know, was this rock & roller who was coming around to folk music through Bob Dylan. Of course. Anyway, Neil came out to the club and we liked him immediately. He was the same way he is now—this offhanded, dry wit. And you know what his ambition was at the time? He wanted a hearse, and a chicken farm. And when you think of it, what he’s done with his dream is not that far off. He just added a few buffalo. And a fleet of antique cars. He’s always been pretty true to his vision.
But none of us had any grandiose ideas about the kind of success that we received. In those days it was really a long shot. Especially for a Canadian. I remember my mother talking to a neighbor who asked, “Where is Joan living?” And she said, “In New York: she’s a musician.” And they went “Ooh, you poor woman.” It was hard for them to relate.
Later, you know, Neil abandoned his rock & roll band and came out to Toronto. I didn’t know him very well at the time we were there. I was just leaving for Detroit. We didn’t connect then. It was years later, when I got to California—Elliot [Roberts, her manager] and I came out as strangers in a strange land—and we went to a Buffalo Springfield session to see Neil. He was the only other person I knew. That’s where I met everybody else. And the scene started to come together.
By this time, David Crosby “discovered” you singing in a club in Coconut Grove, Florida. What was he like back then?
He was tanned. He was straight. He was clearing out his boat, and it was going to be the beginning of a new life for him. He was paranoid about his hair, I remember. Having long hair in a short hair soci
ety. He had a wonderful sense of humor. Crosby has enthusiasm like no one else. He can make you feel like a million bucks. Or he can bring you down with the same force. Crosby, in producing that first album, did me an incredible service, which I will never forget. He used his success and name to make sure my songs weren’t tampered with to suit the folk-rock trend.
I had just come back from London. That was during the Twiggy-Viva era, and I remember I wore a lot of makeup. I think I even had on false eyelashes at the time. And Crosby was from this scrub-faced California culture, so one of his first projects in our relationship was to encourage me to let go of all of this elaborate war paint [laughs]. It was a great liberation, to get up in the morning and wash your face . . . and not have to do anything else.
Is there a moment you can look back on when you realized that you were no longer a child, that you had grown up?
There’s a moment I can think of—although I’m still a child. Sometimes I feel seven years old. I’ll be standing in the kitchen and all of a sudden my body wants to jump around. For no reason at all. You’ve seen kids that suddenly just get a burst of energy? That part of my child is still alive. I don’t repress those urges, except in certain company.
My artwork, at the time I made the first album, was still very concerned with childhood. It was full of the remnants of fairy tales and fantasia. My songs still make references to fairy tales. They referred to kings and queens. Mind you, that was also part of the times, and I pay colonial allegiance to Queen Lizzy. But suddenly I realized that I was preoccupied with the things of my girlhood and I was twenty-four years old. I remember being at the Philadelphia Folk Festival and having this sensation. It was like falling to earth. It was about the time of my second album. It felt almost as if I’d had my head in the clouds long enough. And then there was a plummeting into the earth, tinged with a little bit of apprehension and fear. Shortly after that, everything began to change. There were fewer adjectives to my poetry. Fewer curlicues to my drawing. Everything began to get more bold. And solid in a way.
By the time of my fourth album [Blue, 1971], I came to another point—that terrible opportunity that people are given in their lives. The day that they discover to the tips of their toes that they’re assholes [solemn moment, than a gale of laughter]. And you have to work from there. And decide what your values are. Which parts of you are no longer really necessary. They belong to childhood’s end. Blue really was a turning point in a lot of ways. As Court and Spark was a turning point later on. In the state that I was at in my inquiry about life and direction and relationships, I perceived a lot of hate in my heart. You know, “I hate you some, I hate you some, I love you some, I love you when I forget about me” [“All I Want”]. I perceived my inability to love at that point. And it horrified me. It’s something still that I . . . I hate to say I’m working on, because the idea of work implies effort, and effort implies you’ll never get there. But it’s something I’m noticing.
How aware were you that your songs were being scrutinized for the relationships they could be about? Even ‘Rolling Stone’ drew a diagram of your supposed brokenhearted lovers and also called you Old Lady of the Year.
I never saw it. The people that were involved in it called up to console me. My victims called first [laughs]. That took some of the sting out of it. It was ludicrous. I mean, even when they were drawing all these brokenhearted lines out of my life and my ability to love well, I wasn’t so unique. There was a lot of affection in those relationships. The fact that I couldn’t stay in them for one reason or another was painful to me. The men involved are good people. I’m fond of them to this day. We have a mutual affection, even though we’ve gone on to new relationships. Certainly there are pockets of hurt that come. You come a little battered out of a relationship that doesn’t go on forever. I don’t live in bitterness.
I’m a confronter by nature. I have a tendency to confront my relationships much more often than people would care. I’m always being told that I talk too much. It’s not that I like to, but I habitually confront before I escape. Rather than go out and try to drown my sorrows or something, I’ll wallow and muddle through them. My friends thought for a long time that this was done out of some act of masochism. I began to believe it myself. But at this time in my life, I would say that it has paid some dividend. Be confronting those things and thinking them through as deeply as my limited intelligence would allow, there’s a certain richness that comes in time. Even psychiatrists, mind whores for the most part, don’t have a healthy attitude toward depression. They get bored with it. I think their problem is they need to be deeply depressed.
My relationship with Graham [Nash] is a great, enduring one. We lived together for some time—we were married, you might say. The time Graham and I were together was a highly productive period for me as an artist. I painted a great deal, and the bulk of my best drawings were done in ’69 and ’70 when we were together. To contend with this hyperactive woman, Graham tried his hand at several things. Painting. Stained glass. And finally he came to the camera. I feel he’s not just a good photographer, he’s a great one. His work is so lyrical. Some of his pictures are worth a thousand words. Even after we broke, Graham made a gift of a very fine camera and a book of Cartier-Bresson photographs. I became an avid photographer myself. He gave the gift back to me. Even though the romance ended, the creative aspect of our relationship has continued to branch out.
This is the thing that Rolling Stone, when it made a diagram of broken hearts, was being very simplistic about. It was an easy target to slam me for my romantic alliances. That’s human nature. That hurt, but not nearly so much as when they began to tear apart The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Ignorantly. I couldn’t get together, in any way; it being human nature to take the attacks that were given certain projects. I got very frustrated at the turning point, when the press began to turn against me.
When did you first meet Bob Dylan?
The first official meeting was the Johnny Cash Show in 1969. We played that together. Afterward Johnny had a party at his house. So we met briefly there.
Over the years there were a series of brief encounters. Tests. Little art games. I always had affection for him. At one point, we were at a concert—whose concert was that? [Shrugs] How soon we forget. Anyway, we’re backstage at this concert. Bobby and [Dylan’s friend] Louie Kemp were holding up the conversation with painting. At that point, I had an idea for a canvas that I wanted to do. I’d just come from New Mexico, and the color of the land there was still very much with me. I’d seen color combinations that had never occurred to me before. Lavender and wheat, like old-fashioned licorice, you know, when you bite into it and there’s this peculiar, rich green-and-brown color? The soil was like that, and the foliage coming out of it was vivid in the context of this color of earth. Anyway, I was describing something like that, really getting carried away with all of the colors. And Bobby says to me [an inspired imitation]: “When you paint, do you use white?” And I said, “Of course.” He said, “ ’Cause if you don’t use white, your paint gets muddy.” I thought, “Aha, the boy’s been taking art lessons.”
The next time we had a brief conversation was when Paul McCartney had a party on the Queen Mary, and everybody left the table and Bobby and I were sitting there. After a long silence he said, “If you were gonna paint this room, what would you paint?” I said, “Well, let me think. I’d paint the mirrored ball spinning, I’d paint the women in the washroom, the band . . .” Later all the stuff came back to me as part of a dream that became the song “Paprika Plains.” I said, “What would you paint?” He said, “I’d paint this coffee cup.” Later he wrote “One More Cup of Coffee.”
Is it true that you once played Dylan a just-finished tape of ‘Court and Spark’ and he fell asleep?
This is true.
What does this do to your confidence when Bob Dylan falls asleep in the middle of your album?
Let me see, there was Louis Kemp and a girlfriend of his and David Geffen [then pr
esident of Elektra/Asylum Records] and Dylan. There was all this fussing over Bobby’s project, ’cause he was new to the label, and Court and Spark, which was a big breakthrough for me, was being entirely and almost rudely dismissed. Geffen’s excuse was, since I was living in a room in his house at the time, that he had heard it through all of its stages, and it was no longer any surprise to him. Dylan played his album [Planet Waves], and everybody went, “Oh, wow.” I played mine, and everybody talked and Bobby fell asleep. [Laughs] I said, “Wait a minute, you guys, this is some different kind of music for me, check it out.” I knew it was good. I think Bobby was just being cute [laughs].
Prior to ‘Court and Spark,’ your albums were mostly kept to sparse interpretations. Had you always heard arrangements like that in your head?
Not really. I had attempted to play my music with rock & roll players, but they couldn’t grasp the subtlety of the form. I’ve never studied music, so I’d always be talking in abstractions. And they’d laugh, “Aww, isn’t that cute? She’s trying to tell us how to play.” Never negatively, but appeasingly, you know. And finally it was Russ Kunkel who said, “Joni, you’d better get yourself a jazz drummer.”
The Rolling Stone interviews Page 17