Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (18 page)

The adrenaline rush of Newport seemed to fuse the two Canadian souls together in an arc welder's flash as the opposites connected for the first time. Already a published and well-regarded poet and prose stylist, the young man did nothing to change Joni's taste for non-Gentile males, as well as educated ones.

After Newport, the two hooked up and travelled to other music festivals, including Mariposa. By the time Mitchell moved to California and bought her home in Laurel Canyon, the signs of Cohen were still evident—even though she was now in love with Graham Nash. A 1969 interview in the
Globe and Mail
describes a grandfather clock that was given to her by Cohen, as well as a much-quoted line on the shared Canadian sensibility: “We Canadians are a bit more nose-gay, more old-fashioned bouquet than Americans,” Mitchell said. “We're poets because we're such [a] reminiscent kind of people. I love Leonard's sentiments, so I've been strongly influenced by him. My poetry is urbanized and Americanized, but my music is influenced by the Prairies. When I was a kid, my mother used to take me out to the fields to teach me bird calls.”
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Mitchell credits Cohen with her penchant for character sketch songs, such as “Marcie” and “Nathan La Franeer.” In return, magazines like
Rolling Stone
have described Mitchell as the embodiment of Cohen's Suzanne, who “shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers.”

The affair barely lasted four months but it left a lasting impression on both artists. Cohen's great song of redemption, “Hallelujah,” has been called an ode to Mitchell's “musical onomatopoeia”
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—the chordal movement follows the lyrical prompts: “The fourth, the fifth / the minor fall, the major lift.” In turn, Mitchell's time with Cohen inspired many acts of creation. She says she abandoned her box of paints when she got into music, but after being with Cohen and spending time in Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum, she was inspired to paint a portrait of Montreal's brooding poet. And it was Cohen's friend Mort Rosenthal, a noted sculptor, who gave her one of the most valuable lessons she ever received in art practice. Mitchell says that Rosenthal “gave me a very simple exercise which freed my drawing—[and] gave it boldness and energy. He gave me my originality.”
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It's a fitting tribute to Cohen's creative stoking and poking of Mitchell's furnace that her first painting after several years was what she called a “really bad” portrait of Cohen in the style of Van Gogh. She gave it to a friend. Shortly thereafter, the friend's house burned down—taking the Cohen portrait with it.

Fortunately, there are more lasting artifacts of the brief affair to be found in Mitchell's catalogue. She would write several songs inspired by and about Cohen, from “That Song About the Midway”—in which the young poet “stood out like a ruby in a black man's ear” and was “playing like a devil wearing wings”—to “A Case of You.” This classic, probably my favourite Mitchell song of all time, refers to her former lover as in her “blood like holy wine” and pouring out of her in “these lines from time to time.”

Although Mitchell doesn't like narrowing the context of her material down to specifics, preferring that her vast catalogue speak to the universals of experience rather than a gossip-rag obsession with sexual trysts, even Cohen believes “A Case of You” to be about him. In December 1975, eight years after their first meeting at Newport, the two reunited in Montreal when Bob Dylan and his band of merrymakers pulled into town in a cloud of coke dust for the Rolling Thunder show. Cohen had been invited to participate in the crazy rock 'n' roll circus. He declined, but he did take in the show—which had recently enlisted the talents of Joni Mitchell.

Larry Sloman records what happened next in
On the Road with Bob Dylan
.
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Arriving just as Mitchell was strumming the last chords to her set, the grand seducer greets her with the patronizing line: “Joni, my little Joni.” Mitchell seems unfazed by the diminishing term and asks Cohen why he won't get up onstage and sing. “No, no, it's too obvious,” he says, proving the famed ladies' man was probably just a little obsessed with appearing cool. The next night, Mitchell, McGuinn, and Sloman head over to Cohen's house for dinner.

Mitchell talks about how the tour has helped her gain a better understanding of both her personal and performer's ego: “It's really interesting... cause people are always testing each other all the time, you know, misreading you,” she says. “Coming from a position where I need always to be sincere and to be understood, I, like, allowed myself to float through situations... It's so exciting to me. It's not giving a shit. It really is an interesting thing because it's a traveling commune,” she continues, reaffirming the creative liberation involved in simply letting go of ego.

Inherent in this conversation is Mitchell's perception of Cohen as a kindred spirit: she's been aching to share her deeper, philosophical observations of the tour with someone she knows will understand. As a result, the degree of candour in Sloman's vérité reportage is unprecedented. Sloman was on the tour, and recorded everything on tape, the transcript of which forms the core of his book.

Mitchell goes on to address the issue of identity and its role in the creative process: “I've come to deal with my multi-phrenia: They're all realities. There are so many ways to look at [yourself], you know that as a writer, cutting through the layers of personality to get to the one who is the most honest.”

Cohen responds with an equally candid remark: “I don't know how honest I am... I'm unstable.” Mitchell counters with a competitive “Maybe I'm more unstable than you... You have a more consistent character than you play out,” she says, foreshadowing the “superficial” remark that would come years later. Cohen replies with an acknowledgement of the funniest lyric in “A Case of You.” “Oh yeah,” he says, “I'm as constant as the North Star,” referring to the passage: “Just before our love got lost you said / ‘I am as constant as a northern star' / And I said, ‘Constantly in the darkness / Where's that at? / If you want me I'll be in the bar.'”

“A Case of You” reveals a relationship unlike any other in Mitchell's life because the mutual respect and shared creative zeal did not involve any sense of being threatened. She could “drink a case” of Cohen and still be on her feet. The line is a great metaphor for the intoxicating quality of love, but moreover, it's an inside Canadian joke about liquor content. Our beer is stronger—usually a percentage point or two above American beer—frequently leaving plenty of American bands drunk before they even play their first set. When Canadians go to the States, we can drink a case of Miller—and still be on our feet. This shared Canadian identity plays out beneath the entire song as she talks about drawing a map of Canada with “your face sketched on it twice.”

These mutual cultural roots place both Cohen and Mitchell outside fame's fishbowl. Canadians are natural observers. It's this ability to pull back that gives the poetry of Cohen and Mitchell as much power as it has. Even Larry Sloman, who would prove to be a thorn in Mitchell's side during the Rolling Thunder tour, conceded that Cohen and Mitchell probably have more in common than any of the other songwriters on the bus. “I'd say out of all those people, you probably have the most affinity with Leonard, but I don't know if that's a cultural thing,” he tells Mitchell, who had just finished writing the songs for
The Hissing of Summer Lawns
. “Up to a certain point,” she replies. “Except my work now is much...”

Mitchell never did finish that sentence, but over the course of 1975, everything in Mitchell's creative valise was re-evaluated. She was desperate to stay original and resisted the idea of painting more
Starry Night
s—she embraced more challenging musical forms, such as jazz and syncopated African beats, and incorporated literary inspirations. The Rolling Thunder experience had a fundamental role in that recalibration as it spawned tracks for
Summer Lawns
as well as
Hejira
—two of Mitchell's most original works. She sang an early version of “Coyote” (which would appear on
Hejira
) in the Rolling Thunder dressing room. The song is about another brief lover, Sam Shepard, who joined the Rolling Thunder bandwagon along with Allen Ginsberg to write scenes for the accompanying movie,
Renaldo and Clara
. The movie also featured appearances from Mitchell and Roger McGuinn, but for all its rock cred, it was critically panned. The only markets where the four-hour surrealist reel had any legs were Minneapolis, Kansas, and Vancouver, Canada. But I won't hazard a guess as to why.

Mitchell's switch in songwriting was partly the result of her confrontation with the egos on the tour and partly just plain growing up: “Like three times I had this ego battle and it was emotional immaturity, knowing that it really didn't make a difference in that my longevity as an artist is not affected in any way by what position I'm in this thing or whether they say Joni Mitchell was ineffective or whether they don't even mention my name... but from time to time... I begin to say, ‘Like wait a minute. I'm a sophisticated musician in a naïve kind of way. I'm a sophisticated observer.'”
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These comments, recorded by Sloman, illustrate a creative distance and an understanding of the bigger picture, as well as her place in it. She's giving herself some credit because she's not the twentysomething naïf she was at Newport in '67. She's a self-created thirty-two-year-old whose fame is quickly eclipsing those of her peers. Notably, she sees this through Cohen—her self-described creative “mirror.”

Her 1975 encounter with Cohen during Rolling Thunder marked the high point of her appreciation for the winking Lothario. In the taxi back from that dinner at Cohen's home, she told her cabmates, “I'm a stone Cohenite. Dylan,” she added with a flap of her wrist, “ehhhhh...”
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Mitchell's limp attitude to Dylan had been gestating for a long time. The two had been circling each other on the folk circuit for years and were frequently cited in the same breath as folk poets and musical innovators—with Mitchell often called the “female Bob Dylan.” The term drove her crazy—she loathes it even more than “confessional songwriter”—but she accepted the dynamic. She recognized she and Dylan “were good pace-runners” because they pushed each other forward in a spirit of friendly competition. There was grudging respect between them but also a sense of cool playfulness that lasted until the last salvo, when Mitchell famously called Dylan a plagiarist and a fake.

What was all that about? To really understand the Joni-Bobby relationship, it behooves us to look back on the rich history of David Geffen's couch. No, we're not going to talk about his infamous heavy petting with Cher—thank god. We're going to look at a famous listening party he held in his Copley Drive home in Bel Air.

Geffen had just leveraged his next career move as the head of the newly merged Elektra/Asylum, and he was about to embark on the most successful phase of his life—when he would earn a reputation as the man with the “golden touch” for releasing the three top albums on the
Billboard
chart: Bob Dylan's
Planet Waves
, Joni Mitchell's
Court and Spark
, and Carly Simon's
Hotcakes
.

The listening party was for the former two, who were easily David Geffen's prize ponies. Mitchell was living at Geffen's mansion while she recorded
Court and Spark
. But Dylan was Geffen's big “get,” the cornerstone of his recently expanded roster on the Warner-owned subsidiary—a new company that gave him a $1-million-a-year salary (in 1973), as well as the coveted chairman's title. He'd recently wooed Dylan away from his long-time home at Columbia and was bragging about it to anyone who would listen. Geffen was intensely focussed on the sessions for
Planet Waves
.

Mitchell remembers the evening as she hung out with Geffen, Dylan, and members of the Band. “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,” she told Cameron Crowe. “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 and everybody went, ‘Oh, wow!'”
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Mitchell says the sycophantic reaction to Dylan was constant, and she found it entirely off-putting. She recognized it was part of a widespread deification, but she saw through the myth and she saw through Bob, especially when he started sawing logs.

You see, right in the middle of the joint listening party, as the strains of
Court and Spark
vibrated through David Geffen's swanky sofa, Dylan drifted off into snoresville. “I played (my songs), and everybody talked... and Bobby fell asleep.”

Mitchell had the last laugh. Sales for
Planet Waves
dried up, though its failure doesn't seem so tragic when you consider it was recorded in all of three days. But
Court and Spark
is considered one of Mitchell's finest—if not
the
finest, depending on who you're talking to. (A monograph by Sean Nelson refers to the album as “her most accessible work” and a pop record that contains “multitudes.”) As she told Crowe, Mitchell had enough creative confidence to know the work was good: “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.”