Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (14 page)

Mitchell understood the importance of creative evolution, which is why she's always standing next to her own self-portrait, ready to touch up the flaws or make them more obvious—depending on what makes for a better picture. Mitchell is complicit in the pop idol process. As she told Vic Garbarini, she was a willing storyteller. “First of all, the pop star is very self promotional. You know, ‘I'm DA GREATEST LOVER, BAYBEEEEE!' The nature of the beast is to present yourself in the early years as some kind of teen idol,” she said. “Initially I wrote those extremely personal songs like ‘Marcie' as a response to the big roars from the audience. I would stand up there receiving all this massed adulation and affection and think, ‘What are you all doing, you don't even know me.'”
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Mitchell's words echo last chapter's opening quote from Keith Richards, who felt fame made things absurd and removed the frame of individual meaning. It just wasn't real.

“Affection like that usually doesn't come without some kind of intimacy, like in a one-on-one relationship. So I thought, you better know who you're grinning at up here,” said Mitchell. “And I began to unveil more and more of my inner conflicts and feelings. Then, after about four years... I guess it's just the nature of the press, having built you up, they feel it's time to tear you down,” she continued. “So I began to receive a lot of unfavorable attention. At the same time it became harder and harder to sing these intimate songs at rock festivals. The bigger the audience I drew, the more honest I wanted to be,” she added with a laugh.

Even while that was happening, Mitchell articulated the desire to ditch the iconographic imagery, telling
Rolling Stone
's Larry LeBlanc in 1971 that she was “isolated, starting to feel like a bird in a gilded cage. [Fame] has its rewards but I don't know what the balance is—how much good and how much damage there is in my position.” The conflict between outward politesse and inner truth is something Mitchell feels instantly. “Inside, I'm thinking: ‘You're being phony. You're smiling phony. You're being a star,” she said, equating celebrity with artifice.
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“But if you're watching yourself over your own shoulder all of the time,” she continued, “and if you're too critical of what you're doing; you can make yourself so unhappy. As a human, you're always messing up, always hurting people's feelings quite innocently... There are a lot of people you want to talk to all at once. I get confused and maybe I'll turn away and leave someone standing and I'll think, ‘Oh dear,'” she said, proving her good Canadian manners had remained intact. All the same, “I've changed a lot,” she said. “I'm getting very defensive, I'm afraid.”

Complicating her relationship with fame were the diehard fans who devoted themselves to following her every move. Some of them were beyond ardent: they mistook the music, the persona, and the image of Joni Mitchell as pure truth. One fan camped outside her house for years, believing she had sent him a personal message about his dead sister in the song “This Flight Tonight.” It all took a toll on the woman who grew up beneath an open sky.

Many of her observations about fame and its spiritual cost came out in the music, in songs such as “For Free” and “For the Roses,” both of which address the dangers of public adoration to the creative soul. In “For Free” Mitchell writes about a clarinet player on the street who can play “real good” but is ignored because he's not famous. Meanwhile, she's living it up in limos because she's been on TV:

I've got a black limousine
And two gentlemen
Escorting me to the halls...
But the one man band
By the quick lunch stand
He was playing real good for free

Nobody stopped to hear him
Though he played so sweet and high
They knew he had never
Been on their TV
So they passed his music by

Mitchell echoes the same sentiments to
Sounds
magazine's Penny Valentine in a description of seeing a “good friend” skyrocket to success (either Jackson Browne or James Taylor, most likely). “I was watching his career and thinking that as his woman at that time I should be able to support him. And yet it seemed to me that I could see the change in his future would remove things from his life. I felt like having come through, having had a small taste of success, and having seen the consequences of what it gives you and what it takes away in terms of what you
think
it's going to give you—well, I just felt I was in no position to help,” she says. “But everything I saw him going through I thought was ludicrous, because I'd thought it was ludicrous when I'd done it,” she recalls. “Like, go after it, but remember the days when you sat and made up tunes for yourself and played in small clubs where there was still some contact and when people came up and said they loved a song, you were really glad they loved it. After a while, when people come up, it begins to sound hollow,” she concludes.
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When Mitchell was just a teenager, she almost seemed to prophesy the effects that fame would have on her. For a school assignment she wrote a poem about the celebrity couple of her day, Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee, called “The Fishbowl.” She recited some lines of it for biographer Timothy White: “The fishbowl is a world diverse / where fishermen with hooks that dangle / from the bottom reel up their catch / on gilded bait without a fight. / Pike, pickerel, bass, the common fish / ogle through distorting glass / see only glitter, glamour, gaiety / and weep for fortune lost. / Envy the goldfish? Why? / His bubbles are breaking 'round the rim / while silly fishes faint for him.”
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Mitchell says she always felt highly aware of the compromises fame necessitates, which is why she still finds it odd that she became a public performer in the first place. “It's very peculiar that I ended up in this game because I knew that I was more of a private person,” she told White. “Maybe I don't handle adrenaline very well, but even the applause was hard. I know I have adrenal problems now, and I'm hypoglycemic—but back then I didn't. So my animal sense was to run offstage! Many a night I would be out onstage, and the intimacy of the songs against the raucousness of this huge beast that is an audience felt very weird,” she said. “I was not David to that Goliath... I had to adjust to the din of that much attention.”
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Mitchell writes about the din and the lingering, hollow emptiness that goes along with it in the song that really gets to the nub of the fame dilemma, “For the Roses”: “Off to the airport / Your name's in the news / Everything's first class,” she writes. “The lights go down / And it's just you up there / Getting them to feel like that.” As in “For Free,” she contrasts the fame with the original artistic impulse: “Remember the days when you used to sit / And make up your tunes for love / And pour your simple sorrow / To the soundhole and your knee / And now you're seen / On giant screens / And at parties for the press / And for people who have slices of you / From the company.” The contradiction of loathing her own celebrity is not lost on Mitchell: “I guess I seem ungrateful / With my teeth sunk in the hand / That brings me things / I really can't give up just yet.”

The imagery in the lyrics tells the whole story of where Mitchell was at, and pretty much remains, with the fame game: she sees it as a sort of martyrdom, where you're hammered to the cross and thrown up in public view for others to adore, or criticize, or maybe just gawk at. She sees the whole picture, where the artist becomes the centrepiece for a fancy party and a nice bauble for business folk to flaunt, but all the music industry really cares about is money.

Bitching about the music business is nothing new, but what makes Mitchell's poetic whining remarkable is how much responsibility she assumes for her own unhappiness. She even told Timothy White: “I started this thing, all this star machinery ‘that brings me the things I really can't give up yet.' That was the dilemma. And I threatened to quit all the time, but it's, hey, you're in show business until you're in the poor house! [laughs] You either stay up there, or you begin your decline and the vultures come and pick the last little bit as you go down. As your money diminishes, so does your ability to buy good lawyers to fight the monsters.”
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Mitchell recognizes she's been a willing partner in this particular devil's bargain, but she's also eager to deconstruct the dimensions of her iconography and destroy the god she's become. She does this through creative discipline, through her words—and, most of all, through her sense of humour.

When she was selected as one of
Rolling Stone
's clutch of “Guitar Gods” in 1999, she laughed at the honour but asserted her one true talent. “I never emulated anybody. I'm driven to innovate,” she wrote. “Am I a god? I'm a godette.”
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This ability to tear herself down to a human scale is evident throughout her career. She says she wanted to use a drawing of a horse's ass as the cover of
For the Roses
—a nod to the so-called “winner's circle” at the track, where the winning pony is draped in roses. Clearly, at that time, Mitchell felt more like a horse's ass than a winning thoroughbred because she was having such a hard time reconciling the two sides of herself: her creative need for truth and her ego need for fame. “The title itself was facetious,” she said. And although she never used the ass image as cover art, she did use it as a billboard ad in Los Angeles. “It was my joke on the Sunset Strip, the huge drawing of a horse with cars and glamour girls, and it had a balloon coming out of the horse's mouth which said, ‘For the Roses.' But nobody got the message.”

Mitchell frequently mourns the fact that few listeners, if any, really understand the point she's trying to make with her work. Many of her more creative expeditions have been greeted with arched eyebrows of dismay by the label executives, who really just have one goal in mind as they swivel in their corporate chairs: selling units. Writes James Reginato in
W
: “She accuses Reprise executives of ignorance. Since they have never heard of, for example, Edgar Allan Poe or Job, they don't get the references in her lyrics. ‘And they think if they don't, nobody else will,' she says.”
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“It was the same frustration Van Gogh... felt,” she says. “Misunderstood.”
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Yet, for all the challenges, Mitchell continued to create music, despite the “soul-selling” and “whorish” aspect of it all. She learned to survive creatively because she kept her inner kid alive. “You wonder about people who made a fortune, and you always think they drank it up or they stuck it up their nose,” she told White. “That's not usually what brings on the decline. It's usually the battle to keep your creative child alive while keeping your business shark alive. You have to develop cunning, and shrewdness, and other things which are not well suited to the arts.”
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“Flee, my friend, into your solitude: I see you stung by poisonous flies. Flee to where the raw, rough breeze blows!

Flee into your solitude! You have lived too near the small and pitiable men. Flee from their hidden vengeance! Towards you they are nothing but vengeance.

No longer lift your arm against them! They are innumerable and it is not your fate to be a flyswat.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche, “Of the Flies in the Marketplace,”
Thus Spoke Zarathustra

If there's a front line on the battle for fame and success, it's the media. The Fourth Estate and its myriad products provide the sponsor-paid bridge between the rich and famous and the great unwashed. Mitchell has always had an uneasy relationship with reporters and credits her first of many retirements, in part, to media burnout. In 1970, she decided to stop doing interviews because they seemed pointless and shallow. “All people seemed interested in was the music and the gossip. I felt then that the music spoke for itself and the gossip was unimportant,” she told Valentine.
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In fact, something happened to Mitchell in 1970 that forever changed her relationship with the media, but before we get there, let's begin this examination with a single incident.

In the summer of 2010,
Rolling Stone
editor Jann Wenner took to Twitter. One of his first tweets was: “I don't know who this Ke$ha girl is, but she reminds me of a young Joni Mitchell.” Clearly, a long-standing feud between Mitchell and Wenner wasn't over—because comparing Mitchell to pop queen Ke$ha, who brushes “her teef wif a bottle of Jack” on the catchy and hugely successful but only marginally poetic “Tik Tok,” seems like the prison version of homage: a shiv between the shoulder blades. Not only does Ke$ha use a crass dollar sign in her name, she can't even sing. Every tune featuring her vocals has been digitally pitch corrected, and you can hear it—the voice tracks frequently sound like they're emanating from the ass of R2-D2. Wenner was no doubt going for ironic and droll sarcasm, given how opposite Joni and Ke$ha are from a musical perspective, but he was probably also giving Mitchell a middle finger salute, because for the past forty years the two have been playing a fun game of “f-you, too!”

Before Wenner issued the last salvo over the Internet—at a time when Wenner, by the way, had all of twenty-something followers—Mitchell was the one who had the last slap—almost literally. According to Mitchell, she threw a drink in Wenner's face at some awards show and told him to “Kiss my ass!” According to unattributed accounts, Mitchell was struggling through a knot of fans without help from the security people, and Wenner smirked as she was getting pawed and prodded. Hard to imagine the editor of
Rolling Stone
as a frat-boy brand of smartass, but the event is dramatized in one of the few feedback-laden tracks Mitchell's ever recorded, “Lead Balloon” (from
Taming the Tiger
, 1998). Although the title may suggest a strange nod to Led Zeppelin, it's not. The song is more of a meditation on the music business and how Mitchell believes her record sales were hurt by her war of words with the pulp bible of rock 'n' roll: “‘Kiss my ass!' I said and I threw my drink / It came a-trickling down his business suit / Must be the Irish blood / Fight before you think... An angry man is just an angry man / But an angry woman / Bitch!” Mitchell laments needing “to ask him for a helping hand / It came with the heart / Of a Bonaparte / Of a frozen fish / It's his town / And that went down / Like a lead balloon.”