Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (2 page)

From Heidegger, we can extract the metaphysical importance of the poet and the singer, mortals who can “reach into the abyss” and “sense the trace of the fugitive gods.” It is the artists who can show “their kindred mortals the way toward the turning.” In his essay “What Are Poets For?” Heidegger says we “must learn to listen to what these poets say,” because they “are on the way to the destiny of the world's age.” The poets and the singers (terms he used more metaphorically than literally) represent the very salvation of the human soul.
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And from Nietzsche, a man many people sadly believe to be soulless, we can pull on the most important thread of all: the idea of self-creation, as well as self-destruction. In
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
, Nietzsche killed “the vain old god” for one good reason: to free us from the concept of being “smaller than” or “less than” a grand creator. He killed the God concept not because he hated the idea of a Creator—he loved creation above all—but because he figured that as long as we felt inferior to some abstract concept of God, we would never take full responsibility for the good and evil within us, or for our limit-less creative potential. Nietzsche believed that to be a fully realized human being, one must overcome oneself: unchain the creator within, even if that means bulldozing the walls of institutional thinking.

I have no doubt Joni Mitchell got there.

Not only did she create herself from scratch on the golden plains of Saskatchewan, but she also turned away from the crucible of celebrity and willfully created art—whether people were inclined to embrace it or not. Sometimes they did. Often they did not.

I hope this book appeals to the avid fan as well as the wary cynic because, forty years after my first giggling encounter with Joni Mitchell's music, I can see the scope of her journey. Moreover, because Mitchell has shared her personal and creative growth so clearly, and so honestly, her life has emerged as a well-painted portrait of experience, illustrating both the universal and the particular with equal skill.

What makes the odyssey all the more impressive is how Mitchell has managed to turn the blink of the music industry into an extended stare-down with the masses. This is the woman who, at fifty-one years of age, picked up the Grammy for best pop album (and best album package) for
Turbulent Indigo
—more than a quarter-century after she won her first statuette for Best Folk Performance with
Clouds
.

My hope in writing about Mitchell is to avoid becoming a “smug fool” who tears apart her life's work—one of the woes she describes in her last recorded song, “If.” Instead, I hope to unveil the defining stops of her personal voyage and draw a creative map—a road guide through human experience that anyone can grasp, regardless of how you feel about her music. In fact, the music is something I embrace along the course of this journey but do not spend great amounts of time discussing sonically. Mitchell has always maintained (in a quote attributed to Frank Zappa, David Byrne, and others) that “writing about music is like dancing to architecture.” The point I will drive at is the beauty of Mitchell's creative life at every level—regardless of how problematic or selfish it may appear.

In other words, this is not a fawning chronicle of a life, nor is it a comprehensive portrait of an artist. It's simply my take on the woman whose soprano I first heard as a kid, and whose alto I have grown to love as an adult.

I have gathered the material into chapters centred on various creative challenges and life themes. From romantic love to career burnout, Mitchell has survived the human comedy without losing her sense of humour, her compassion, or her will to become a better, more complete person. She did this because she believed in the larger purpose of being, and existing, as an artist.

As someone who's watched the entertainment industry for decades, I've witnessed the creative process debased at an alarming rate in the wake of the so-called “economic crisis.” The tougher things get, the less art seems to matter. And yet, at a time when the local entrepreneurial spirit has been steamrolled by offshore manufacturing, franchise shopping, and endless remakes of old movies, the creative impulse may well represent our best chance at a better tomorrow.

Joni Mitchell's creative courage certainly stoked my personal furnace, and changed my life. She put me on a different track, where I found myself questioning the basic geography of being—and remapping the existential terrain. It got a little dark every once in a while, but there was always a great big ball of creative fire to guide the way. Joni Mitchell taught me the only real meaning in life is making something, because by making something, you make something of yourself. I feel incredibly privileged to have had the chance to create this book; my deepest hope is that in reading it, you will feel the same thump of the universe beating in your chest—and release your creative spirit with a fearless cry of freedom.

Katherine Monk,
February 2012

“When the sound and wholesome nature of man acts as an entirety, when he feels himself in the world as in a grand, beautiful, worthy and worthwhile whole, when this harmonious comfort affords him a pure, untrammelled delight; then the universe, if it could be sensible of itself, would shout for joy at having attained its goal and wonder at the pinnacle of its own essence and evolution. For what end is served by all the expenditure of suns and planets and moons, of stars and Milky Ways, of comets and nebulae, of worlds evolving and passing away, if at last a happy man does not involuntarily rejoice in his existence.”
—Goethe, essay on Winckelmann

“I was the only black man at the party.”

That's the sentence with which Joni Mitchell intends to open her own (as yet unpublished, four-volume) autobiography. And so, in a gesture of homage, I happily surrender the first sentence to her. Not only is it suitable for her own words to kick off this rambling adventure into the creative soul, but the compelling image of “the only black man at the party” also takes us to the doorstep of the fundamental creative challenge: Who am I?

Self-perception is the foundation of identity. But few of us let ourselves defy expectation, and even fewer would have the guts to answer the question “Who am I?” with “I am an artist.” We usually let others define us.

We have a bad habit of building our own house with other people's bricks, trapping ourselves in an identity that isn't truly our own. Further limiting our freedom is the notion that all those bricks have to be mortared and arranged in a certain way to match some recognizable, off-the-rack architectural design. The same way neighbourhoods have bylaws to enforce conformity among houses, society has unwritten expectations about the reasonable boundaries of behaviour and personality. You can be a little different, but you have to fit in. This means that from the moment we are conscious of our place in a larger universe, we're essentially moving into one prefab box of identity after another—and frequently resenting it.

Joni Mitchell never did that. When she asked herself “Who am I?” she came up with the only right answer: “Anything I want to be.”

After all, she was the only black man at the party.

In an enigmatic phrase that she said in 1998 to
New York Times
journalist Neil Strauss,
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Mitchell asserted a self-created, self-assigned identity that did not match a single brick of public evaluation. She constructed her own house and she lived in it—at least for one day, and one very memorable Halloween night. When Joni says she was the only black man at the party, she doesn't just mean it as a metaphor to suggest she's been ostracized, undervalued, oppressed, and misunderstood—which she has been. (She told Alice Echols of
L
.
A
.
Weekly
in 1994: “I write like a black poet. I frequently write from a black perspective.”
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) She also means it literally: Mitchell actually showed up at a swanky Hollywood shindig in blackface.

Before we get to the
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
moment, it's important to note Mitchell's album covers. Those familiar with her catalogue know most of her twenty-seven releases feature a self-portrait created by her own hand. This was the result of her first record deal with Reprise, which gave her full creative control over content and packaging, but it also gave her a chance to freely experiment with optics, perception, and her own public identity. Every cover shows a different side of Joni Mitchell, a different public face, but the one she offers up on the cover of
Don Juan's Reckless Daughter
is easily the most different of all.

On the cover of the 1977 release, there's an image of a black dude strutting in full peacock mode. Standing nearby is Mitchell, recognizable in a Mickey Mouse–inspired robe and top hat. A boy in a tux watches in awe as she releases doves from thin air. They stand on paprika-coloured plains, and a text bubble coming from the man in the chapeau reads, “Don Juan's Reckless Daughter.” If you bought this album, you probably stared at the cover a good long while, before no doubt giving up on its cryptic meaning. I owned the record, and until I wrote this book, I didn't know the black dude was Mitchell.

For a white woman to take on the guise of a black man is an extreme makeover. So what image did Mitchell feel the need to blow up? Judging by the bout of press that preceded this incident, Mitchell may have felt caged by male expectation. As
Melody Maker
's Michael Watts wrote of her 1974 show at London's New Victoria Theatre: “Joni Mitchell is disturbing in a very real way because after watching and listening to her for a while you start thinking she's not just a woman, she's woman, embodying all male desires and expectations.” No wonder she wanted to shed her pale skin and female form: the false image was hemming her in.

Mitchell explained the role play like this: “I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard, in search of a costume for a Halloween party, when I saw this black guy with a beautiful spirit walking with a bop,” she told Angela LaGreca of
Rock Photo
in 1985. “As he went by me he turned around and said, ‘Ummmm, mmm... looking good, sister, lookin' good!' Well I just felt so good after he said that. It was as if this spirit went into me. So I started walking like him,” she said. “I bought a black wig. I bought sideburns, a moustache. I bought some pancake makeup. It was like ‘I'm goin' as him!'”
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When she showed up for the Halloween party at the sprawling Topanga Canyon home of Betsy and Peter Asher (a former Sony Music executive who would eventually manage Mitchell's career), no one recognized her—not Cheech, not Chong (both of whom cameoed on
Court and Spark
's “Twisted”). Not even former lover J.D. Souther could see past the faux 'fro and dark pancake that was getting oilier with each cocktail. He assumed the Ashers' interloper was a pimp, but politesse stopped anyone from asking who he/she was. It was only once the black man removed his hat, sunglasses, and, finally, wig, that people realized the black man at the party was Joni Mitchell.

Her walk on the wild side was a complete success, an experience so empowering she would make a mental note of it as the opening line of her own life story. One gets the feeling that for the first time, Mitchell escaped the exterior facade of the “winsome bittersweet blond”
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with the high cheekbones and big Canadian teeth that haunted her from the moment she became a star. Her liberator was the alter ego she originally dubbed “Claude” but would eventually become known as “Art”—Art Nouveau.

This urge to flee her old folk persona was matched in her music, which by the time of
Don Juan's Reckless Daughter
was beginning to shift towards jazzier structures, unusual orchestrations, and new backup players. Mitchell says the gender-bending getup was just a Halloween necessity inspired by a fortuitous encounter with a complete stranger. But given the parallel shift in her artistic production, it seems something deeper was taking place at a creative level: she escaped not only the now-iconographic image of long blond Joni but also her own race and gender on a visual level. Mitchell talks about “feeling like a black man in a white woman's body”
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on a regular basis, but by making the internal external, she consummated a long-gestating belief that she had to use her yin
and
her yang. As Mitchell summed it up in a 1994 interview with
Mojo
's Barney Hoskyns: “I started in the business kind of ultra-feminine, but as I went along I had to handle so many tough situations for myself—had to be both male and female to myself.”
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Somewhat surprisingly, Mitchell's black and butch experiment didn't raise all that many eyebrows in 1977. Drag was strutting into the mainstream thanks to the cult success of
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
, the theatrical side of David Bowie (who had already given us Ziggy Stardust), and the increasing visibility of gay people in rock 'n' roll—Elton John was a
Billboard
juggernaut and Freddie Mercury's black leather fetish accessories were becoming fashion. I don't think Mitchell donned the
Don Juan
disguise because she thought it would open up new audience demographics, or because it made her trendy and hip. I don't think she was even making an overt political statement on gender or race in North America. I think it's a reflection of the un-gendered creative soul that can accommodate both male and female energy—what Jung called the anima/animus dynamic—as well as the magic of the creative impulse. It's a theory I believe is backed up by the presence of Mitchell as both magician and black man on the album cover.

Mitchell told Angela LaGreca that she wasn't all that aware of what was actually going on in her mind at the moment she gave birth to “Art.” “A lot of it is instinct—the important point is the chain of events,” she said, “I was just going on the hottest impulses I had, the creative ideas.”
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This absence of forethought, intellectualization, and self-criticism is an important piece of the creative puzzle and one Mitchell clearly mastered early—over the course of her career, she would don multiple identities. “I feel like I belong to everything and nothing,” she told Barney Hoskyns. “Sometimes, that's lonely.”
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With Art Nouveau, Mitchell set herself up as outsider and social pariah, given she was “the only black man” at a party where the rest of the guests were affluent white people. She took on the identity of a man who was systematically disenfranchised by the establishment—which describes Mitchell's feelings about her position in the music industry, especially when she attempted to experiment with her own style. She was getting into jazz and traditionally “black” structures, but industry types were only too eager to keep her in the little enamelled Joni box, a pretty white folksinger with a guitar and a pristine soprano.

Mitchell enjoyed the role playing. She's often described herself as a frustrated actress, or filmmaker, who “writes roles” for herself. Over the course of her career, she's assumed countless identities and surrendered to what she calls a bad case of “multi-phrenia.” She's highly aware of the game and even called herself on it when she declared to the
Toronto Star
's Marci McDonald in 1974: “Will the real me please stand up?”
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This ability to play with identity is the foundation of the creative process, for a variety of reasons. Not only does it affirm the importance of self-creation; it spurs a sense of dynamic tension between who you are and what the world expects you to be. Each individual has the innate ability to subvert expectation, to recreate the world at the drop of a plumed chapeau, but very few of us try. All of which makes Joni Mitchell's creative journey so compelling: she did it without even thinking about it. She did it on instinct, as though the creative impulse was mapped into her DNA.

Psychologists, evolutionary biologists, philosophers, and all variety of scientists have spent a great deal of their own creative energy trying to understand the creative impulse—and most of them believe it's the reason for our rise to the top of the species totem.
Homo sapiens
is the only creature to question and to seek answers to abstracts. We make connections between what is and what could or should be, and that's the ignition button on the creative engine.

According to Sigmund Freud, the creative self is kick-started in infancy. It begins as a way to reconcile the nihilistic forces in the universe by giving us a sense of meaning through the assertive power of self. Early child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein applied Freud's concepts to her own research, and in her 1932 book
The Psycho-Analysis of Children
she said it all came down to the life-affirming power of the “good breast” versus the destructive presence of the “bad breast.” The good breast is nurturing, loving, and accessible whereas the bad breast is dry, unpredictably unavailable, and emotionally cruel. For an infant to reconcile these two conflicting realities, she engages the power of creation to gain a sense of control over her environment and the goodness/badness of the breast.
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For Freud's colleague and follower Carl Jung, creativity is everything that “flows from the living fountain of instinct” and connects us to the deeper sense of self that is the “collective man” and our shared subconscious.
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Artistic man lives in a higher realm, in harmony with the timeless, echoing gong of experience. These ideas, contained in his 1919 essay “Instinct and the Unconscious,” assert the spiritual value of the artistic impulse. Jung believed the creative act puts us in direct contact with truth by building a bridge to the collective subconscious—the chorus of human souls we can all hear at a primal level and desperately need to connect with in order to achieve full psychic integration.

Nietzsche distilled the notion of self-creation and identity down to the word “I.” He separated this word into two components: the intellectual notion of self and the physical reality of being. “You say ‘I' and are proud of this word,” says Nietzsche in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
, calling our attention to what Freud would later call ego. “But greater than this—although you will not believe in it—is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say ‘I' but performs ‘I.'”
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Identity isn't just a function of the words we speak and the image we hope to put forward; it's a matter of what we actually do. He says our body has a way of knowing that operates independently of words, language, and ego. This “body” of instinct is the seat of the creative soul.