Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (15 page)

It's a catchy tune with a kick-ass message, but no one outside her loyal fan base has probably even heard it. Mitchell hasn't had what they call “heavy rotation” since
Court and Spark
in the mid-1970s. She's been acutely aware of her absence on the airwaves. She's even been known to complain about it in public, and on the record, on those rare occasions when she actually does interviews. “Artists like Madonna spend a lot of money to get themselves on the radio,” Mitchell told the
Globe and Mail
's Christopher Guly in 1996. “It's sickening.” She added: “I've been undervalued for a long time, and it leaves a bad taste in your mouth, you know. How would you like it if you've been doing your job—an excellent job, if I may be so bold—and no one plays you on the radio and no one plays your videos? I'm still in the game, but all the doors have been closed.”
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Mitchell blames some of those closed doors on her “bad experiences” with the press. One former manager, Steve Macklam, said it's a matter of broken trust. “Joni's had her problems with the press. She's been saying that for years,” he said. “She has trusted certain people, then they just go and betray that trust.”
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But not doing press is a huge liability in a world where visibility and ink generally translate into a thick black bottom line. When Mitchell entered the business in the 1960s, traditional media such as newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV were the only games in town. Mitchell's early press glowed.
Rolling Stone
called her the “Queen of Rock & Roll,” and the male-dominated sphere of rock writers couldn't help but notice her long blond hair, her soft features, and her full lips. It was a communal crush, even without décolletage or a leather bustier—which now seem
de rigueur
for any young ingenue looking to make it in the business.

Then, in February 1971, things between Mitchell and the media took a turn for the worse when
Rolling Stone
named Mitchell “Old Lady of the Year” and listed a number of her supposed flames, including David Crosby and Graham Nash. They also, apparently, named her the “Queen of El-Lay.”

According to the “Joni Myth,” created over the decades through mountains of press clippings and magnetic tape, Mitchell's hate-on for
Rolling Stone
started with the “Old Lady of the Year” comment, which, she was told, also featured a dynamic flow chart of her rumoured sexual conquests. Since then, people have referred to the “love chart” for half a century. It's now such an inherent part of the Joni narrative that some writers, looking to rephrase the whole thing in an original way, have changed the meaning of the slight—with one reporter saying she'd been called a “groupie” by Wenner's minions.
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Given the differing reports of the infamous slag and its historic significance in the Joni story, I went a-lookin' for that graph with its alleged flowers, hearts, and dotted lines. I bought the complete
Rolling Stone
database on CD-ROM, which features every page of the magazine in its original layout. After arduously flipping the virtual pages for days, I finally found the “Old Lady of the Year” reference, which appeared in the New Year's edition of what was then still a newsprint tabloid. The writers of the magazine handed out awards to music personalities they felt merited a bit of backhanded ink. Given that the “Man of the Year” in 1971 was Charles Manson, you'd think this gave Mitchell a much better ground for griping than did some brief and boring rundown of her sex life.

In truth, there is only a photograph of Mitchell with a cutline next to it: “Old Lady of the Year: Joni Mitchell (for her friendships with David Crosby, Steve Stills, Graham Nash, Neil Young, James Taylor, et al.)”
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This appears under a small photo of Mitchell in profile, surrounded by Grace Slick for “Immaculate Conception of the Year” (she was pregnant), as well as the tombstone covers for the recently deceased Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.

Months later, I finally found the “love chart” with the hearts and arrows. On February 3, 1972,
Rolling Stone
published “Hollywood's Hot 100,” featuring a chart of incestuous connections among the power hitters. The chart featured everyone from Herb Alpert to Rita Coolidge and chronicled the degrees of separation between the members of the music elite. Mitchell does appear on this graph—as a set of lips, surrounded by the words “kiss kiss.”

The fact that she got so much media attention could have been seen as a feather in her cap, but she immediately felt defensive—even though she never actually saw the offending article with her own eyes. The information had been presented to her through friends, and she felt the editors of the youth mag were making a moral judgement—and in some ways, they were. Essentially, they were calling her a “slut” without actually saying it. In the seventies, you were a man-hating feminist who stood up for herself, a prude who wouldn't put out, or the alleged “Queen of El-Lay.”

By the time Mitchell spoke to the
Toronto Star
in 1974, she was wary of anyone holding a steno pad and pencil: “Joni Mitchell has just been told there's a journalist in the hallway and she is not exactly enthusiastic about journalists,” writes Marci McDonald. “Now, Joni Mitchell extends a limp and wary wrist and makes it quite clear she doesn't do interviews anymore: ‘I've had some bad experiences,' [Mitchell will] admit much later that night. ‘And besides, I just don't find these things very interesting reading.'”
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Nearly a decade later, the “Joni hates the media” story was well established—as witnessed by her interview in 1983 with Vic Garbarini.
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Garbarini prefaces his piece with a bit of background about trying to land an interview with the woman who was also called “the queen of hippie chic” and “the great Earth mother.”

“Hi, got your letter!” says Mitchell. Garbarini asks why it took Mitchell two years to respond. “Oh, I liked your natural loose approach and the questions you raised about the creative process and inner growth,” she says. “Sounded like we might have a decent conversation. I also like what you didn't want to ask me about.” The reporter ventures to ask what they shouldn't talk about. “My romances!” she responds.

Mitchell probably didn't realize the media only cares about who you're fucking when you're young. TMZ doesn't obsess over middle-aged cougars. It only has time for the young and nubile, because as mythology tells us, the gods were all beautiful and immortal. Not even Madonna's sex life is all that sexy anymore now that she's perimenopausal. Garbarini focuses all of his attentions on Mitchell's art, calling her “an ace storyteller out of the Homeric tradition... conjuring up visionary landscapes of cinematic power that take the listener vicariously through the event. You emerge from the other side with the feeling that you've lived the event yourself and learned whatever lessons it inherently had to offer. Very exhilarating and a little spooky,” he writes. “But then, artists have a predilection for that kind of thing.” It's interesting to note how the balance of adjectives is now reserved for her creative gifts instead of her physical ones. She's being given the courtesy of growing old gracefully in the public eye.

In 1997, after another prolonged absence from the spotlight, in an interview with
Vanity Fair
, she circles back to the original slight. But Bill Flanagan assigns her a whole new role—one that has nothing to do with her looks, or her sex life: she is now the social observer, the gossipy matron at the great ball called show business. Mitchell uses colourful language to describe her feud with the paid interrogators in the press: “I love making records and I hate talking to the press. It's how Chairman Mao brainwashed China: it's Oriental torture. You're supposed to be this icon that transcends everything. ‘Well, you should rise above that!' Nobody can rise above that! The cumulative psychological effect of being interrogated seven hours a day is how they break down hardened soldiers! Have dental work done at the same time and you're a prisoner of war.”
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Later, she outlines the feud with
Rolling Stone
as one of the reasons why her entry into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame came four years after she became eligible, prompting Flanagan to borrow a comment once reserved for Van Morrison: “Mitchell's capacity for holding a grudge is Serbian.” When Flanagan mentions Wenner's name, Mitchell recoils and says that if Wenner had had anything to do with the selection process, she wouldn't have been inducted—even if she did make the cover of
Time
magazine in 1974. “
Rolling Stone
used to call me ‘The Queen of Rock 'n' Roll.' Of course, there weren't that many of us. Me, Janis Joplin, one or two others passed the crown back and forth.”

Flanagan describes Mitchell's commentary as “hilarious” and compares her to Dorothy Parker but then depicts a penitence of spirit. “The trouble is that, in print, her wisecracks can hurt others which makes Mitchell feel guilty later. So she is trying to curb her tongue,” says Flanagan, concluding with Mitchell's own words of pop wisdom: “I don't want to be known as the Truman Capote of my generation.”

Greta Garbo always felt she was misquoted on her famous “I want to be alone” line. She actually said “I want to be left alone”—and as far as she was concerned, there was a big difference. Garbo had no desire to move through life solo; she simply needed space from the public crush. Fame is exhausting, which is why most modern celebrities create a remote aerie where they can rest and regain a connection with their private, inner self. The sanest creators do this early. Robert Redford purchased his sprawling Sundance resort property in Utah after cashing in with Butch Cassidy, Celine Dion bought an island off Florida, and George Lucas built the Skywalker Ranch. Joni Mitchell did the same thing, because she has an almost reflexive drive for creative self-preservation. Instead of seeking numbness through drugs or other addictions (although she says she's tried everything—except heroin, “What's the point?”—and wrote “Song for Sharon” on coke), she fled into solitude and protected herself in a creative cocoon. Each time, she emerged from the chrysalis a new Joni with a new vision, a new sound, and a new purpose. This continual cycle of recreation is perhaps the greatest testament to her success as a creator because, unlike artists who become trapped in the velvet coffin of success, she resisted repetition and clichés—even the ones she gave birth to.

As she famously noted in impromptu stage banter that preceded her rendition of “The Circle Game” on the live album
Miles of Aisles
(1974):

That's one thing that's always been a major difference between, like, the performing arts to me, and being a painter, you know? Like a painter does a painting, and he does a painting. That's it, you know? He's had the joy of creating it, and he hangs it on some wall, and somebody buys it, and somebody buys it again, or maybe nobody buys it and it sits up in a loft somewhere until he dies—but nobody ever says to him, like nobody ever said to Van Gogh “Paint a
Starry Night
, again, man.” You know, he painted it. That was it.

It's hard to turn your back on popularity, applause, financial reward, and sycophantic ego-stroking, because it all feels so good. It's candy for the immature soul but it's unhealthy and rots the creative root. Mitchell, somewhat miraculously given our culture's current insistence on empty fame and untalented nobodies, recognized this creative roach motel. It was the dark force of fame and reflected ego that pushed her to find the light of truth and molt, leaving her former selves behind like so much dead snakeskin. No wonder she says of her life's work: “I don't really think of this as a career, it's more like a journey.”
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Every journey needs a destination, as well as a safe harbour, and Joni Mitchell found both after one of her first retirements, in 1970 (there's a
Rolling Stone
report of her retiring as early as 1969). She bought a chunk of real estate on British Columbia's rugged and romantically scenic Sunshine Coast. But before she set to work building her new, and decidedly ascetic, Canadian nest, Mitchell decided to take a year off and fly. She spent a large chunk of 1970 seeing places she'd long imagined to be magical. One place that had tremendous allure was Greece—in particular, a small Cretan village called Matala. The subject of a
Life
magazine article in 1968, Matala had become a destination for lost youth. You could live on $5 a day, sleep in a cave for nothing, and spend your time exchanging free love, singing songs around a campfire, and gawking with disgust at the raw meat in the local market. Mitchell decided to make the romantic trek to the land of Homer with a friend, a rather aptly named poet from Ottawa we know only as Penelope (the same name as the wife of Odysseus).

“Matala was full of kids from all over the world who were seeking the same kind of thing I was but they couldn't get away from... ummm,” Mitchell told Penny Valentine in 1972. “I mean they may as well have been in an apartment in Berkeley as in a cave there because the lifestyle continued the same wherever they were. And the odd thing to me was that after my initial plans to be accepted into the home of a Greek family fell apart, we came to this very scene—the very scene we were trying to escape from—and it seemed very attractive to us.”

Mitchell hoped to escape the demon of her fame and celebrity, which had just been cemented with a Grammy win for best folk performance or recording for
Clouds
as well as her first gold record with
Ladies of the Canyon
. She was tired and disconnected, and had just cancelled two pretty big concert dates: Carnegie Hall in New York City and Constitution Hall in D.C. She needed to rekindle her creative fire, and the very birthplace of western civilization seemed like a good place to start.