Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (10 page)

“My chords are inverted; the natural order of the scale is altered and twisted,” she told Divina Infusino of the
San Diego Union-Tribune
in 1988. “My chords are like questions. They are a depiction of complex emotions. Most major chords are a depiction of well-being and happiness. My major chord will have a dissonant note leading to sorrow, then another note leading back to joy. There is always the possibility of the opposite emotion in my chords.”
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This internal play of opposites reaffirms the notion of the creative process as a reconciliation of opposing natural forces, and it's one that music PhD James Bennighof discusses in technical detail in his tome
The Words and Music of Joni Mitchell
. In a discussion of Mitchell's tunings, he explains: “A particular tuning usually implies a particular tonic note.” The tonic—or keynote—is essentially the core foundation of a chord and the note we want to hear in order to feel resolution at the end of a song. Mitchell's tuning has a tendency to resist the expected tonic, and as a result, her songs immediately feel different. Bennighof goes on to say, “The fact that Mitchell often relocates a single finger configuration along the neck of the guitar to create different chords often gives rise to ‘parallel motion'—all notes moving in the same direction from one chord to another,” and “the fact that many of her fingerings let some open strings ring often results in several complex chords sharing several pitches.”
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The devil lurks in such complex details: many of the blues chords Mitchell plays were once considered “godless”—or “devil's music”
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—because they were so different from the orthodox approach to western scale.

Her lexicon of tunings made live performance awkward, since the instruments had to be retuned for practically every song. Electronics simplified matters later in her career, when she embraced the body of a Fender Stratocaster hooked up to a Roland VG-8—what Mitchell described as “a computerized brain with foot pedals into which are programmed a whole palette of sounds.”
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Before the Roland translated the sounds Mitchell heard in her head to the guitar, she says session players would give her grief and argue over the root of a given chord because she didn't compose or play by the established rules of musical tradition. She was often ridiculed for her independent ear—but it never stopped her. In conversation with KCRW's Chris Douridas in 1998, Mitchell talked about pushing the boundaries of scale and harmony, with specific reference to
Taming the Tiger
:

Some of the things I told myself to do and tried were pretty strange on this record... I worked my way down from what was considered strange upper harmony anyway. I had a strange harmonic sense. So I was asking the bass to do things on the bottom. [Session players] would say, “Well, that's not the root of the chord.” I was asking them to do rhythmic and harmonic things that they thought were not hip. I was... asking people to go against the vogue, and people don't like to stick out. There aren't that many people that like to take chances. They're afraid to be unhip, you know, to take [a risk], to be the leader of the next hip, you have to be willing to be unhip.
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Despite what the professional musicians were telling her, Mitchell listened to the sounds in her own head instead of the flapping of the paid hands, and strangely enough, it worked. She created music that was aurally satisfying despite its so-called theoretical flaws. More fascinating still, even the music that Mitchell wrote in standard tunings found a note of difference.

In his examination of the undeniably mournful “Tin Angel,” Bennighof introduced me to a musical term I had never heard before to describe how Mitchell undermines expectation: “Replacing an expected final minor chord with a major chord in this way is a centuries-old technique—the raised third of the chord, in this case G-sharp rather than G-flat, was first dubbed a ‘Picardy third' (“
tierce de Picardie
”) in print by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1797... to express [the idea that] hopefulness might seem unremarkable, or even clichéd.”
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In other words, the Picardy third is the cliché of a “happy ending,” and one Mitchell uses to close her seemingly earnest, and altogether mopey, song about losing one lover and moving on to another. The Picardy third arrives on the lyric “I found someone to love today,” suggesting Mitchell is internally aware of romantic love's inability to provide true happiness but, gosh darn it, it's a nice illusion all the same.

In October of 1967, a burnt-out rock star named David Crosby walked into a small club in Coconut Grove, Florida, called the Gaslight South. He had just quit one of the biggest bands of the era, called the Byrds, after running into trouble with his bandmates Roger McGuinn, Chris Hillman, and Michael Clarke. (Original member, drummer Gene Clark had already flown the coop in 1966, citing anxiety problems. Clarke would exit in the same breath as Crosby.) The boys in the band thought their long-haired rhythm guitarist was bossy and full of himself. Crosby, meanwhile, thought the band that charted with a jangly-guitar cover of Bob Dylan's “Mr. Tambourine Man” had hit a creative plateau. He needed time to consider his next move, and he was about to head offshore on his newly acquired seventy-three-foot double-masted schooner called the
Mayan
(purchased with a $22,500 loan from millionaire Monkee Peter Tork) to think things over. He was thinking he'd spend half his time sailing and the rest of the time producing new talent. When he walked through the front door of the narrow storefront and spotted Joni Mitchell through a diaphanous blue curtain, he knew he'd spotted someone special.

She was playing a simple acoustic set consisting of “Michael from Mountains” and “Both Sides Now,” and Crosby was seduced immediately by the woman onstage with the long blond hair and lyrical poetry flowing from her sultry lips. “I was just floored. I couldn't believe that there was anybody that good,” he told Mitchell biographer and archivist Wally Breese for an online interview published on the jonimitchell.com website. Of particular interest to Crosby were the bizarre tunings Mitchell played in, which he called “fascinating” because he, too, was experimenting with open tunings. “I'm sure we learned things off each other. We used to play songs to each other all the time. But I think she just outgrew me... she has since gone further with it than I have. I think she's gone further with it than anyone,” Crosby told Breese in 1997. “And I also fell... I loved her, as it were.”
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Although Crosby would eventually tell
Mojo
's Sylvie Simmons that falling in love with Mitchell is “like falling into a cement mixer... turbulent,”
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a relationship blossomed in a cloud of sweet smoke and jasmine-scented salt air as Mitchell looked into Crosby's twinkling sapphire eyes and saw the face of Yosemite Sam and the soul of a lion. The lion also had a lot of clout—and scandal rag notoriety. Crosby was a seminal figure at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius and everyone wanted a piece of him, from the record labels to the ladies. His long, shaggy hair and beard became his trademark, as well as a look adopted by the youthful masses looking to free themselves from the stiffness of Brooks Brothers collars and the establishment expectations their broadcloth represented. He knew what he was doing, and Mitchell could feel it. In fact, the moment she and Crosby started their brief but pivotal romance, she called her manager, Elliot Roberts, and, according to Roberts, told him: “Listen, I'm fucking a Byrd.”
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This may sound a little shrewd, crude, and maybe even exploitative, but for a woman to use her wiles this way was proof of personal empowerment and levelled the field of sexual play. And so, in a THC-infused homage to Henry Higgins, Crosby did his best to transform Mitchell, the fashionable, high-end clothes horse, into his own psychedelic Eliza Doolittle.

Crosby was really the first person to set the myth of Joni Mitchell in motion. It was easy for him. David Van Cortlandt Crosby was the son of an Oscar-winning Hollywood cinematographer named Floyd Delafield Crosby, an active participant in the golden age of cinema with credits that include
Tabu
,
High Noon
, and
The Old Man and the Sea
(with famed cinematographer James Wong Howe)—as well as a curious Canadian documentary called
The Champagne Safari
, which chronicles French Nazi collaborator Charles Bedaux's voyage to northern Canada with casks of bubbly—but that truly is another story.
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What seems clear is that both father and son were self-styled adventurers and accomplished sailors with a strong sense of creative power.

The younger Crosby started with the all-important externals and gave Joni a hippie makeover. He told her to lose the fake eyelashes and mascara and man-made fibers. He pushed her to ditch her beautiful designer purse in favour of a woven pouch, and even though Mitchell wasn't all that fond of the formless sack or the “natural look”—as opposed to Carnaby Street sexy—she cunningly agreed. Her willingness in the role of Eliza earned her a trip to California, where Crosby was the dude du jour. He introduced her to the L.A.-based music scene, including key disc jockeys, such as Crosby's pal B. Mitchell Reed, known as “the fastest tongue in the west.” Ever the showman and impresario, Crosby set up private showcase sets for Mitchell with the musical cognoscenti swarming in the warm cracks of Laurel Canyon. One of his “favourite tricks” (according to Crosby) was to give the friends and guests in attendance a hit of intolerably strong marijuana before asking Mitchell to play a tune or two. “They would walk out stupefied,” said Crosby.
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The noted session player Russ Kunkel remembers that Crosby's early showcase sets for Mitchell cast a spell. “Most of the women [of the Canyon] were magical then 'cause there was this incredible feeling of freedom that was enhanced by various things, including drugs, but Joni was drop dead beautiful,” Kunkel told Sheila Weller. “And she had this amazing voice: her voice register and her guitar tunings, which no one had heard.” According to Peter Fonda, Mitchell attracted attention because she was beautiful—and because she had a habit of playing around with the tuning pegs. He said Mitchell frequently took Crosby's guitar and “de-tuned the fucker.” Crosby would later credit the musical adjustments to “Martians.”
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The Crosby-induced buzz surrounding Mitchell grew stronger just as Judy Collins's rendition of “Both Sides Now” started climbing the charts. For Mitchell's relatively green manager, Elliot Roberts, the stars were in alignment for a once-in-a-lifetime coup. He headed to California, met with Mo Ostin at Warner/Reprise, and walked out with the keys to the creative candy store: he negotiated full creative control for Mitchell's first record deal, from the music in the grooves to the cover art. The deal had only one caveat: David Crosby had to be part of the whole shebang. The former Byrd was seen as being on top of the modern sound, and the label saw the collaboration as crucial. The first test of the mentorship took place within the storied, acoustically imperfect walls of the Sunset Sound complex in Hollywood.

“Hey, Joni. I have an idea: Why not sing
into
the piano, man!”

I have no idea if that's how Crosby said it, but that's what happened when he and Mitchell headed into the studios on Sunset Boulevard to lay down tracks for Mitchell's debut,
Song to a Seagull
. Crosby had assigned himself production duties on the album—and no one was going to argue, including the headstrong Mitchell. She sang into the piano because she could, and because the creatively inspired—and probably somewhat stoned—Crosby thought it would be a good idea. Crosby, who confesses to struggling over songs, whereas Mitchell would create with awe-inspiring ease, said their romance was cooking—until they got into the creative kitchen. “I did bring [Joni] around to everyone I knew... it was a lot of fun. It only stopped being fun when I started producing her first record,” he said.
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For Mitchell, the Henry Higgins treatment was becoming irritating. She told Estrella Berosini (one of the Ladies of the Canyon quoted in Karen O'Brien's biography) that she really did love David. “But when we get together,” she said, “we just don't get along.” Crosby saw the collision coming: “Joni is not a person you stay in a relationship with. It always goes awry, no matter who you are. It's an inevitable thing. We were starting to have friction and at the same time I was starting to produce her record and I didn't really know how,” he admitted to Breese.

Indeed, Crosby didn't know how to produce a record, but he was powerful and experienced enough in the music industry to sell his production skills to the Warner executives, who thought he might have the sonic vision to be the folk-rock version of an era-defining sound designer in the tradition of Phil Spector. But the last thing Crosby wanted to build was a “wall of sound” that would stand around Mitchell's oeuvre.

Crosby set out to strip Mitchell down and keep her vocals as pure as they had been off the coffee-house mike the first time he heard her. Mitchell understood this was a significant stand to make at a time when the music industry was shifting away from prefab band models toward the more organic singer-songwriter who could sell entire albums—and not just singles. “The record company was going to ‘folk-rock' me up and David thought that would be a tragedy, that my music should be recorded the way I wrote it,” Mitchell is quoted as saying in Crosby's biography. “He appreciated it the way it was and since he had been in the premiere folk rock group, he could go to the record company with some authority and say ‘I'm going to produce her' and the trick was that he was not going to ‘produce' me at all! Anything we added would be minimal; that's the way we proceeded.”
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