Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (11 page)

It was in the spirit of minimalism that Mitchell found herself singing into the body of the Sunset Sound grand piano. Crosby and the veteran sound engineer Art Cryst were the only knob-turners on the console—and they were unafraid of experimenting. Fertile vibes were all around them. In fact, down the hall in the strip mall complex of studios, members of Buffalo Springfield were putting tracks together for a new record. Mitchell told Elliot Roberts that he and Neil Young had to meet because they were both funny. Mitchell's intuition was bang on: Young and Roberts would forge one of the longest-lasting artist-manager partnerships in the history of the music industry. The Sunset sessions also laid the keystone to another piece of rock history, because it brought David Crosby together with Stephen Stills and Young, who would all go on to create CSNY with Graham Nash just a short time later.

At this particular moment, however, Mitchell was focussed on singing her highs and lows into the curved body of a grand.

Said Mitchell in a 1968 interview with a Philadelphia radio station: “One of the things we did that was kind of fun: [David] had me sing a lot of it into a grand piano with the ringing pedal down. So every note repeated itself in the strings... [they] reproduce the sound of your voice... It was so beautiful. He had so many ideas. He had the idea too of doubling my guitar part so some of the guitar sounds like twelve-string.”
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For all the creative will, the technical skills in the booth weren't ready for the challenge. Crosby says he used too many mikes and created an almost cataclysmic system hiss on the masters. “I had allowed too much signal-to-noise ratio... too much hiss,” he told Wally Breese. “I wanted to try and get the overtones that happen from the resonating of the piano and of course, it recorded at way too low a level. It was just an idea and it really didn't work.”

Art Cryst, the engineer, died shortly after the sessions were finished, leaving Crosby and Mitchell looking for an emergency fix for the masters. They found John Haeny, an engineer for Elektra Records, who stripped off the hiss—but at a price: the audio lost a chunk of range on the high end, and as a result, it feels flattened and condensed. To Judy Collins, it sounded like the whole thing was recorded “under a bell jar.” Despite the sonic traumas that went into its creation and the budding romance that blew apart under the strain,
Song to a Seagull
did what it was supposed to do: it got Mitchell noticed and started the scribblers scribbling.

Rolling Stone
's Les Brown reviewed the album on July 6, 1968. The opening paragraph reads: “Here is Joni Mitchell: A penny yellow blonde with a vanilla voice. Influenced, or appearing influenced, by Judy Collins, gingham, leather, lace, producer David Crosby (the ex-Byrd), Robert Herrick, North Battleford (Saskatchewan), New York (New York), Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Chuck, seagulls, dolphins, taxicabs, Dairy Queen floats, someone named Mr. Kratzman, ‘who taught me to love words,' the Lovin' Spoonful, rain, sunlight, garbage, metermaids and herself.” When Brown describes the production—which was everyone's biggest worry—the session troubles don't come up. “The Joni Mitchell album, despite a few momentary weaknesses, is a good debut. Her lyrics are striking. Her tunes are unusual. Her voice is clear and natural,” Brown writes. “One of the major new departures of this album may at first appear atavistic. Joni Mitchell uses no orchestration... Her main studio trick is to dub in her voice a second time as a choral answer on certain songs.”
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As Joni is quoted by Brown: “If I'd recorded a year ago, I would have used lots of orchestration. No one would have let me put out an acoustic album. They would have said it's like having a whole paint box and using only brown. But today is a better time to be recording. It's like in fashion. There's no real style right now. You find who you are and you dress accordingly. In music today I feel that I can put down my songs with an acoustic guitar and forget the violins and not feel that I need them.”

Joni Mitchell has often referred to her songs as children, and the first-born were clearly loved by everyone:
Song to a Seagull
was a creative and commercial success for the first-timer. Nearly thirty years later, she said the oldest kids got all the attention: “[Now I find myself] dismissive of my early songs in favour of championing my underdog children,” she said in a 1996
Los Angeles Times
interview.
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Nonetheless, the image of Mitchell as the California earth goddess was cast, and it didn't matter whether it was manufactured at the hands of David Crosby's magic wand or the supremely astute and ambitious woman with the killer voice. It was gaining a life of its own—for better, and for worse.

Says Timothy White in his 1991 book
Rock Lives
: “Mitchell began by embodying the archetypal fair-haired hippie-chick singer, ornamenting the male folk-rock enclave.”
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She fit the part perfectly, but for Mitchell, it really was a performance. She enjoyed the laid-back blue jean style, but she missed dressing up—and she resented the peer pressure to root herself on the seedy side. “The whole hippie thing was a relief in a way—we were all so fresh scrubbed and in jeans,” she told Carla Hill. “But [it was also] an inhibiting time, peer pressure. You couldn't dress up. Well, I succumbed to some of that. If anything I'm coming out now.”
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Joni's facade became synonymous with the flower power generation. To this day, she's seen as the icon for the whole era—not just among music writers and pop culture mavens, but for the fashion world as well.

In 1998, the
Sunday
Telegraph
published an article called “Joni Chic,” itemizing a look that was being rediscovered by a new generation of performers. “Joni Mitchell was the consummate ‘hippy [
sic
] chick', Annie Hall meets urban-cowgirl, with a haunting beauty that intrigued many famous lovers,” waxes the intro. “But Joni's style was also ahead of her time. While Joni's contemporaries... festooned themselves with every bead, feather fringe, and bit of patchwork they could lay their hands on, Mitchell never sought attention with her style.” The piece goes on to describe the look:

Hair: Long, blonde, parted in the centre or loosely plaited. Face: High Faye Dunaway cheekbones, fresh-faced slightly tanned complexion with freckled nose. Make-up: Barely there. Even if it takes hours to apply, it should still look natural. Accessories: Beret or a soft straw or floppy linen hat; ethnic, Navajo-style turquoise and silver belts, necklaces and cuffs, cameo rings. Clothes: Homespun knits, linen shirts and wide-leg trousers, suede jackets and boots, Ikat prints and Guatemalan scarves.
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The specifics of the description prove how fully realized Mitchell's “hippie chick” persona was, and because it was so complete—and so timely—it attracted an automatic following. Mitchell was offering women a completely new type of role model that negotiated the distance between traditional femininity and the changing pop culture landscape, where women were suddenly in charge of their own sexuality and creative power. Actor Edie Falco (
The Sopranos, Nurse Jackie
) was one such young woman. Falco said Mitchell's music just “clicked” for her. “I can't tell you how much I respect her. I'm in awe, really,” she said. “She was there for me at every significant moment in my life. I hear her music in my head. She provided the soundtrack for my life.”
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Though she'd been nudged into the role by Crosby, the ensuing manifestation of Mitchell as folk goddess turned out to be the right image at the right time. In the wake of the pill, Barbie, the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan's
The Feminine Mystique
, and the 1968 release of Roman Polanski's
Rosemary's Baby
, young women were looking for a female role model who could accommodate so many different dynamics. Mitchell's combination of ethereal good looks, long blond Barbie hair, and wholesome sexuality had its own power. Together with that big, round, octave-spanning vocal box, it vaulted Mitchell to the very top of the pop culture wave as the ultimate California girl—a small irony for a prairie kid from Canada.

Chuck Mitchell recognized later what deeper forces were at play in his ex-wife's rise to fame: “What I didn't understand at the time was this business of identification,” he says in Sheila Weller's book. “The guys loved Joni because she looked great. The girls were identifying with her in droves.”
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This phenomenon of identification did not go unnoticed by executives at Reprise Records, where Stan Cornyn devised a series of print ads for the release of
Clouds
and
Ladies of the Canyon
that exploited Mitchell's enigmatic sexuality as well as her appeal to young women. These minimalist promos featured simple text on a white background and appeared in
Rolling Stone
and other youth-targeted publications. “Joni Mitchell is 90% virgin,” read the first marketing salvo. The line, based on the joke that you can't be a partial virgin, was referring to the fact that most of her material was still unheard—even though Judy Collins had a
Billboard
hit with Mitchell's “Both Sides Now.” That ad was followed by two more: “Joni Mitchell Takes Forever” (referring to the long-awaited release of
Clouds
) and “Joni Mitchell Finally Comes Across” (referring to the “full release” of the record). Mitchell may have had complete creative control over her recordings, but she had no control over how the record company marketed her—resulting in these hilariously dated, sexist, and altogether shallow yelps of money-grubbing hype.

The gist of the Mitchell marketing angle switched for
Ladies of the Canyon
as the target demographic changed gender. The new ad was a story about a fictional character named Amy Foster, “23 years old and quietly beautiful,” suffering the ache of failed romance. Amy “was sitting in her orange inflatable chair listening to Neil Young's second album... toying indifferently with the enormous antique ring on the index finger of her left hand” as she thought about tie-dying some curtains for her '64 Chevy camper. Amy wanted to split for Oregon to “get her head back together,” but when the grocery boy arrived with fresh food and the RIT (dye for those curtains), they sat down to smoke a “concise little joint” and to listen to the new Joni album,
Ladies of the Canyon
:

By the time “For Free” was over they were both quite mellow indeed. As much as they downed her by reminding her all too vividly of her now-irrevocably-consummated relationship with David [Amy's recent ex she'd met at the Jeans West shop], “Willy” and “Conversation” were somehow reassuring—there was someone else, even another canyon lady, who really knew. Amy began to feel a little better. By the time “Circle Game” had finished, Amy was no longer dejectedly contemplating splitting for Oregon. In fact, she could scarcely wait for the sun to get through setting so she could drive up to the top of Lookout and watch Los Angeles twinkle beneath the indigo April sky.

They just don't write them like that anymore, do they? Frankly, I found it a bit shocking that a corporate entity like Warner Bros. would talk about marijuana and pre-marital sex in an ad campaign, but that was then. And back then, Mitchell clearly represented a novel force in the world of pop music—not only for being a woman who wrote her own material but for being her own woman, as well. That's why she's a role model for the fictional Amy Foster as well as the very real Edie Falco.

Mitchell was aware of the marketing manipulation in the name of profit, and for a time, she submitted, because she was not questioning the basic assumptions behind the status quo: “We're talking about a business that is not as much musical as it is physical. The image is, generally speaking, more important than the sound, whether the business would admit it or not,” she told Mary Dickie in 1994. “When I was contracted to Reprise, they didn't know what to do with me. There was no overt sexuality, and I think the executive mentality found that difficult to market,” she said. “Always women have had to burlesque it up, and I had no penchant for that, and I didn't think it was necessary. I thought we were liberated, and I guess I bought a lie and proceeded accordingly.”
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Mitchell didn't question the dominant belief system from a gender perspective until later in her career because she didn't have much time for the feminist rhetoric of her day. She says she never even heard the word “feminist” until she went out for dinner with Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty. Her beer and taco buddies couldn't believe she'd never heard the word, which explains why she allegedly had a brief romance with Beatty, the conquistador of California. Mitchell's tacit acceptance of traditional gender stereotypes allowed her to be part of the guy posse while still owning her own sexual power. She says she resisted feminists and feminism because they felt too “divisive” and she always saw herself “as one of the boys.” In a 1998 interview with singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco for the
Los Angeles Times
, Mitchell's apparently paradoxical views on feminism prove too much for the younger artist, who turns the piece into a feisty meditation on the merits of feminist thinking. It's also, unfortunately, a complete bore—and only seems to prove Mitchell's beliefs about feminists being arrogantly self-righteous and rigid. DiFranco's words say everything: “Either you are a feminist or you are a sexist/misogynist. There is no box marked ‘other.'”
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Mitchell couldn't identify with the rhetoric. And despite becoming the reigning royal in a new breed of sisterhood, she felt rather removed from the “hippie” and feminist movements, as well as the marketing. “A lot of hippie politics were nonsense to me,” she told
Rolling Stone
's Steven Daly in 1998. “I guess I found the idea of going from authority to no authority too extreme. And I was supposed to be the ‘hippie queen,' so I had a sense of isolation about the whole thing.”
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