Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (19 page)

Whether they like it or not, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell are seen as the torchbearers of the whole singer-songwriter movement and its supposed desire to recreate the world. They are constantly compared to each other and, in many cases, ranked in order of their respective skills and lyrical genius. Although it's quite certain neither party would be happy about it, they operate as a binary system, with Mitchell representing the edgy and chaotic side of creation, and Dylan representing a slightly sunnier and more commercial side. To truly understand the dynamic between her and Dylan, and how initial idolatry morphed into a sense of sibling rivalry and, finally, an old couple's petty bickering about who did what better and who did what first, we'll go back to square one.

In the beginning, only Bob was tooling around the nascent folk Eden. Then known as Robert Zimmerman, Bob dropped out of college in 1960, and in January of 1961 made his pilgrimage from the American Midwest to New York City in search of folk fame and some face time with his hero, Woody Guthrie, who was languishing in a hospital with the symptoms of a neurodegenerative disorder called Huntington's disease. Dylan officially became Dylan in 1962 and released his debut album on Columbia the same year. The subsequent year saw the release of
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
, featuring Dylan on a snow-covered New York City street with an attractive woman on his arm. I mention the artwork because it shares some elements with the cover of Mitchell's debut album,
Song to a Seagull
, which featured Mitchell on a New York City street in equally bad weather.

The two wouldn't meet until 1969, after they were both firmly established as solo artists at the crest of the breaking folk wave. “What unites Bob and Joni, the royalty of songwriting, is their common starting point,” writes Michelle Mercer. “They both came of age in folk music's pop heyday (and) broke away from the folk tradition with as much inevitability as the so-called confessional poets broke away from modernist dicta in the 1950s.”
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Mitchell herself has cited Dylan as her earliest influence as a songwriter because he wrote in a bracingly personal way that made a deep impression on the young art student. “What always bugged me about poetry in school was the artifice of it,” she says. “When Dylan wrote, ‘You've got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend,' as an opening line [in the song “Positively 4th Street”], the language was direct and undeniable. As for Plath and Sexton, I'm sorry, but I smell a rat. There was a lot of guile in the work, a lot of posturing. It didn't really get down to the nitty-gritty of the human condition. And there was the suicide-chic aspect.”
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“Positively 4th Street” was recorded in 1965 and was met with critical and commercial success, even though it was just a single—and wouldn't hit an album groove until Dylan's first greatest hits collection. At this time, Mitchell was getting over the surrender of her baby and doing her best to make her way in the folk clubs of Toronto's Yorkville. When she wasn't playing other people's songs, she was waiting tables or modelling clothes, or hanging out with like-minded souls such as Neil Young, her fellow convalescent. Mitchell had yet to find her creative voice, but it wouldn't take long.

By 1969, Mitchell had two studio albums to her credit,
Song to a Seagull
and
Clouds
. Dylan, meanwhile, had released a whopping nine albums in just seven years, including
The Times They Are a-Changin'
,
Highway 61 Revisited
, and
Blonde on Blonde
.

They finally met on the premiere of
The Johnny Cash Show
on June 17, 1969. They were joined as opening night guests by Cajun fiddle player Doug Kershaw. The
Detroit News
carried a small item on the premiere, describing Mitchell as a “current happening on the national scene,” thanks to her song “Both Sides Now,” which had recently been covered by Collins as well as Frank Sinatra. Mitchell's former hometown paper, the
Saskatoon Star-Phoenix
, also carried a tidbit glorifying the fact that Saskatoon was mentioned on U.S. network TV. “Not often do U.S. produced television shows give recognition to Canadian entertainers and their home towns.” Good golly. It was exciting! And sadly, we Canadians still explode out of our socks whenever our bands, artists, and bergs are given Yankee ink.

Mitchell and Dylan didn't have a whole lot to say to each other at the studio or even when they ended up at Cash's home afterward. Mitchell told Cameron Crowe that she “always had an affection for [Dylan],” but “over the years there were a series of brief encounters. Tests. Little art games.” Mitchell went on to relate a story about Dylan asking her about paint and the rules of colour mixing, then she says her next meeting with Dylan was on the
Queen Mary
, when they were both guests at a Paul McCartney party: “Everybody left the table and Bobby and I were sitting there. After a long silence he said, ‘If you were gonna paint this room, what would you paint?' I said, ‘Well, let me think. I'd paint the mirrored ball spinning, I'd paint the women in the washroom, the band...' Later all the stuff came back to me as part of a dream that became the song ‘Paprika Plains.' I said, ‘What would you paint?' He said, ‘I'd paint this coffee cup.' Later, he wrote ‘One More Cup of Coffee.'”

Dylan would offer his inimitable Bobby charms on a continuing basis—and Mitchell would take them as a grain of salty homage. Throughout her career, and in several interviews, she's been known to imitate Dylan's rasping nasal voice and poetic grandiosity with astonishing accuracy. This usually happens when she's trying to point out the effect ego has on one's life as a performer—as she did when she told Vic Garbarini about her two-year withdrawal from the public eye between 1970 and 1972: “I became a hermit. I felt extremely maladjusted about... the contrasts that were heaped on me. It was just too much input... it was as if (sings like Dylan) ‘People just got UGLIER and I had no sense of TIME!' (laughs).”
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The teasing goes both ways. When Mitchell hooked up with Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975, Larry Sloman described an ambivalent reaction from Dylan: “Joni? Which Joni?... I don't know. Is she on the tour? I don't know if she is or not. I don't know, she just showed up in the last town,” he said with a yawn, “and got on the bill.”

Mitchell's presence on Rolling Thunder was unplanned. She says she'd been in Toronto and Vancouver to see friends and her parents. “It was like a cycle, I had my ticket and everything, then I got sucked into [the tour] and the magic happened for me at Niagara Falls... I couldn't get off it.”
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There are a few elements in this quote from Sloman's book that I'd like to note before moving on. The first is the notion of surrender to something “magical”—as though she recognized a creative force greater than her own will was at play. The other is this “cyclical” dynamic; she still feels like a “cog in something turning” and sees Dylan as an inherent part of that spinning dynamo—as peer, competitor, and teasing older brother. Mitchell and Dylan, as opposites, pushed each other creatively.

The enthusiasm from both parties permeated the raw-silk tapestries of the backstage dressing rooms like so much incense, because the alternately happy-irate vibe just keeps crackling. When the caravan pulled into Montreal, Mitchell talked to her old high school friend Ruthie at her swanky home atop Mount Royal and confessed her conflict about not being more prominent on the bill. Sloman recorded the conversation, in which Mitchell says, “I'm in the position in the show of being an opening act and I'm receiving that kind of press attention, whereas in fact, I have attained a much higher...” Mitchell doesn't finish her sentence, because her friend Ruthie interrupts with a query—with a wee barb attached: “Why is Joni not number one?” Joni has an answer for that one: “I'll tell you why: It's experimental. I'm having a good time. It's like a rolling party... I have nothing to lose by it. To me, this is the most interesting thing: I've felt highly productive, that's another reason why I've stayed. In the slot I have, like if I was to go out and do the most popular material the effect would be different. It's much more interesting, like, winging it.”
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She was experimenting with every aspect of her professional persona, from the music she wrote to the character she assumed onstage. Mitchell's feelings about the tour were mixed, as were her feelings for Dylan. One minute she was laughing with him backstage, the next she was telling her friend Ruthie that her one-time idol “has a mean streak. He gets mean.”
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This was a reference to an argument Mitchell and Dylan had earlier in the tour, while shooting a scene for
Renaldo and Clara
. As Mitchell later recalled in a conversation with Leonard Cohen: “I quoted from pure Nietzsche and Bob wouldn't let me give him credit. I said, C'mon Bobby, I got to say like
Thus Spake Zarathustra
, and I can't be like an intellectual quoting from Nietzsche, with no originality, give me a break. With Dylan, he just like strikes you out of a scene or puts you in the scene where he wants you to manifest different parts of yourself, it's different. He's got the power, he's got the hammer.”

Using more tool metaphors, she added that Dylan “just keeps whittling away at you until he finds the place of you which you're the most afraid of and then, whew, he just like presses on 'til he gets you, then says, ‘No Fear.' It's an excellent exercise.” Mitchell was turned on by the creative challenge her peer was putting out there. But she was also pushed into examining what she did for a living and her ego stake on the stage.

She also saw hypocrisy in Rolling Thunder's two main goals: to publicize the plight of jailed boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, who was serving a life sentence for a crime he said he didn't commit, and to recreate the rules of rock 'n' roll touring by making it a group effort, instead of a hierarchical ceremony based on mass popularity. Mitchell thought it was all a sham. She called Carter a “phony” who comes on “like a spiritually enlightened cat and he's not... bullshit. I think he's really an egomaniac... Let him use some of his karmic pseudo-spirituality to cool the audience out if he's so powerful. He's not; he's a fake.” She had the same bracing message for Dylan's supposedly raceless, classless, genderless revue: “Billing? Do you know how much politicking there was? Do you know how many times when I started to get too hot in my spot, how, like, I let people cut my power off?”
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The importance of ego and personal recognition can never be undervalued, but in the music industry, the strokes are meted out according to sales—and for a time, Dylan and Mitchell were neck and neck at the record stores.

The changes taking place in the music business during the time of Dylan and Mitchell's rise to fame provided the context that made them unwitting siblings in the same commercial pod. The record industry was transitioning from the hit-parade culture of the 1950s, when bands produced singles that were powered by AM radio airplay, to the era of album sales. Labels realized they stood to make a lot more money with an album sale than a single (as much as four to ten times more per sale), given the unit cost of each recording. The technological change that brought forth the long-playing (LP) record pushed record companies to fill the extra grooves with material people wanted, and as the singer-songwriter movement evolved, so did the notion of the “concept album”—a record you would play from start to finish to hear a larger narrative. People like David Geffen realized you needed compelling storytellers to sell an album, which would be the key to sales for the next decade, and he had landed the two biggest singer-songwriters of his day—possibly the biggest two who ever were, or ever will be.

Mitchell was smart enough to recognize bits and pieces of herself in Dylan, and it explains her bipolar approach to her pop culture sibling. “He's gutless a lot of times,” Mitchell tells Sloman, referring to a lyric change Dylan decided to make at the last minute onstage so as not to offend his audience. But when Sloman says the Quebec City audience “hated him,” Mitchell leaps to his defence. “They didn't hate him... it's a provincial town. What did you expect?”
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The teeter-totter of affection was in constant motion, and it reframed Mitchell's view of her own performer's identity. At one point in the tour she took three days off and hung out in New York, the site of her creative birth after leaving Chuck Mitchell. She says she did it to “re-examine my attitudes in different spaces of consciousness, away from people consciousness, hyper consciousness, lampshade consciousness.”
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Years later, Mitchell talked with Cameron Crowe about her Rolling Thunder experience. She said she stayed on the tour “for mystical reasons” and that she started as a “foot soldier”: “I made up songs onstage. I sang in French, badly,” she said. “I did a lot of things to prevent myself from getting in the way. What was in it for me hadn't anything to do with applause or the performing aspect. It was simply to be allowed to remain an observer and a witness to an incredible spectacle.”
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Mitchell says it was her desire to remain a spectator that finally resulted in her removal from
Renaldo and Clara
. Although she was featured in several scenes, she refused to grant Shepard and Dylan permission to use her performance. After investing as much time and money in the film as Dylan had, it must have been frustrating to have Mitchell hijack great swaths of the negative. The resulting film is largely considered unintelligible—and extremely long at 292 minutes.
Variety
refers to it as one of “the worst excesses of the period” and a grand testament to ego.