Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (25 page)

The house at 8217 Lookout Mountain had pine panelling, stained-glass windows, and the grandfather clock that Leonard Cohen had given to Joni. It also had a piano—a Priestly piano, according to
Rolling Stone
—that Mitchell and Nash would race to every morning. “It was an intense time,” Nash told Weller, “Who's going to fill up the space with their music first? We [were] two very creative writers living in the same space, and it was an interesting clash: ‘I want to get as close to you as possible.' ‘Let me alone to create!'”

This creative friction proved empowering to Mitchell, who was in the midst of recording
Clouds
. Having already experienced the creative-romantic conflict with Crosby in production, Mitchell asserted herself in the studio and became her own producer—a decision that shaped the rest of her career, until her next big love affair recalibrated the gears of autonomy. For now, though, Mitchell was giving herself the space to make mistakes but always with the ambition of finding her true voice as a creator. “I was working with a producer and we were pulling each other in opposite directions,” she told the
New York Times
. “I was working within this framework of sound equipment, and the sound was fantastic, but I felt stifled. Now the sound isn't so good, but at least I know I'm doing what I want to do.”
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Mitchell's second taste of domesticity turned out to be short-lived, but the music that came out of her failed relationship will last the ages. Neil Young wrote “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” after watching his buddy mourn his relationship with Mitchell. Nash wrote a song about their time together, the rather twee “Our House,” with its sentimental rush of innocence and longing in every lyric: “I'll light the fire, you place the flowers / In the vase that you bought today / Staring at the fire for hours and hours / While I listen to you play your love songs / All night long for me, only for me.” The tune is a showstopper every time the boys get together for a $125-a-ticket round of nostalgia. But Mitchell's oeuvre from the era does more than elicit endless applause or wide-eyed appreciation.

Now part of music history,
Blue
is widely considered the all-time classic of lover's laments. From the title track, which features Mitchell literally heaving vocal sobs in the final verses, to the romantic ambivalence of “All I Want” (“I hate you some, I love you some”),
Blue
is Mitchell's transparent testament to the acid strength of love. “[On
Blue
], there's hardly a dishonest note in the vocals,” she told Cameron Crowe. “At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world, and I couldn't pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy. But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defenses there either.”
Blue
is the exposed emotional and musical nerve, and its undeniable accuracy has earned it a marquee placement in the annals of pop culture.

Whenever Mitchell's name bubbles to the slick surface of today's media sea, it's usually in this regard—as a shorthand reference for sensitive men and emotionally unlaced women. In Lisa Cholodenko's 2010 film
The Kids are All Right
, Mark Ruffalo's character is immediately considered emancipated because he owns a copy of
Blue
. The movie stars Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as a lesbian couple raising two children conceived through artificial insemination. They also love Joni Mitchell, and all this mutual Mitchell love eventually creates an unexpected love triangle—because if you love Joni, you share something profound. You believe in love. You believe in pain. But as Mitchell herself is only too well aware, love can be destructive instead of creative if it's applied incorrectly and without compassion.

Mitchell's readiness to accept responsibility for her own limitations in matters of the heart is a signal of her creative ability to transcend, and it reappears on the 1972 follow-up to
Blue
,
For the Roses
, which contains more great lyrical turns about love, such as “I get so damn timid / Not at all the spirit / That's inside me / Oh Baby I can't seem to make it / With you socially / There's this reef around me.” She told Crowe she came to a significant turning point: “The terrible opportunity that people are given in their lives. The day that they discover to the tips of their toes that they're assholes,” she said, solemn at first, then swelling with “a gale of laughter.” Mitchell said she was in the midst of her “inquiry about life and direction and relationships” and she found something cold inside. “I perceived my inability to love at that point. And it horrified me some. It's still something that I... I hate to say I'm working on, because the idea of work implies effort, and effort implies you'll never get there. But it's something I'm noticing.”
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Mitchell doesn't just “notice” things. When they come into her field of vision, she takes a microscope to her emotional petri dish of experience. On
For the Roses
, it shows through in a sense of scientific detachment. Her romantic revelations include her intermittent impulse to partner on “Let the Wind Carry Me”: “Sometimes I get that feeling / And I want to settle / And raise a child with somebody / But it passes like the summer / And I'm a wild seed again,” as well as her resignation regarding relationship failure on “See You Sometime” (“O.K. hang up the phone / It hurts / But something survives / Though it's undetermined / I'd still like to see you sometime”).

At times, the emotion is bittersweet, but mostly it's determined and self-aware—or just plain matter-of-fact: “I'm not ready to / Change my name again.” Mitchell is committed to her freedom and her evolving sense of self. But that didn't stop her from becoming involved with some fascinating bachelors when she got back to Los Angeles after an extended hiatus on the Sunshine Coast.

One of the more cryptic chapters in Mitchell's love life is her brief romance with Jackson Browne, one of David Geffen's discoveries. Geffen had thrown Browne into the opening slot for several Mitchell shows, spawning a mentor-student kind of love affair with Joni in the driver's seat. Mitchell was in her wheelhouse, but when Browne dumped her, she reportedly fell apart. The pretty boy who “makes friends easy, he's not like me” broke her heart when he tossed her for fashion model Phyllis Major. Browne had defended the fashionista in a bar fight, and Joni was bounced by the man she would later call a “phony” and a “seducer.”

According to Sheila Weller's
Girls Like Us
, Mitchell took pills, cut herself, and threw herself against the wall as she waited for Browne to show up for what we can only assume to be a fiery rendezvous. Browne never did drive up her sloping street (resulting in the truly catchy tune “Car on a Hill”), and Mitchell ended up in therapy. According to this story, it was Geffen who patched Mitchell up, got her medical attention, and eventually convinced her to move in with him so he could monitor the effects of what was becoming a rather public depression.

In the end, it was Major who killed herself. But the story didn't end there. Mitchell and Browne hit the tabloids in 1997 after the writer of “The Pretender” publicly stated he thought “Not to Blame,” on
Turbulent Indigo
, was about him. The song addresses issues of domestic violence, and Browne had just been accused of hitting his then-girlfriend Daryl Hannah. Browne has denied all the allegations, and a subsequent investigation by the Santa Monica police department resulted in no charges, but Mitchell's alleged suggestion Browne was violent prompted him to describe his former lover as “disturbed.”
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The rough romantic road wasn't enough to deter Mitchell's libido. She added boxcars to her train, but her locomotion was creative and constant. She even revisited the theme a decade later on
Wild Things Run Fast
, in the song “Man to Man”: “I've been moving / Man to man to man to man to man / Oh what am I looking for? / Man to man to man to man. / A lot of good guys gone through my door.”

Mitchell says “Man to Man” is a personal song, but “it's also for all the women of my generation. Unlike generations before us, we have been with several men—or in some cases, many men. It raises the question, ‘Why?'”
11

It's a good question. And one every woman has to answer for herself. The easy answer, and one that seems most satisfying, is that the quest for love is an inherent part of identity building. In seeking the partner that will supposedly “complete us” and make us “whole,” we can probe the parts of ourselves we feel are missing. And just like modern-day shopping, if we don't find what we want in one store, we can always check out the store next door. More importantly, we can be inspired by the search itself. And, more often than not, the more fruitless the search, the better the music.

In a 1974 interview with Malka, Mitchell says she writes about love because her central interest is human relationships and the exchange of feelings on a one-on-one basis. She's also attracted to romantic themes because of how love changes over the course of a relationship:

Love is a peculiar feeling because it's subject to so much... change... I keep asking myself, “What is it?” It always seems like a commitment to me when you said it to someone, “I love you”... It meant that you were there for them, and that you could trust them. But knowing from myself that I have said that and then reneged on it in the supportive—in the physical—sense, that I was no longer there side by side with that person, so I say, “Well, does that cancel that feeling out? Did I really love? Or what is it?” I really believe that the maintenance of individuality is so necessary to what we would call a true or lasting love that people who say “I love you” and then do a Pygmalion number on you are wrong. Love has to encompass all of the things that a person is. Love is a very hard feeling to keep alive. It's a very fragile plant.
12

After tearing up the yard with Jackson Browne and shortly afterward with “Sweet Baby” James Taylor (whom she called her “best lover ever”), Mitchell started a new garden with plants that weren't quite so fragile. Steering clear of lead singers, she opted for members of the backup band—first drummer John Guerin, and later percussionist Don Alias.

Guerin, who headed the L.A. Express, was enlisted to bring a different rhythmic sensibility into the studio when Russ Kunkel said, “I think you're going to have to play with jazz musicians, because the subtleties you're asking for we can't really give you.”
13
But Guerin got the beat, and as he and Mitchell stared at each other from opposite sides of the glass, a connection developed. “She was the whole orchestra in one guitar,” he marvelled to Weller. “You didn't go whistling Joni's tunes... [they] didn't have the usual hook; she would form the music to her lyrical thought and sometimes go across bars and in different time signatures—she didn't care,” he said. “But then it all made sense. It really did.”
14

Mitchell realized she wasn't the best gardener after she bolted from the hothouse of her steady relationship with Guerin and surrendered to the cocaine-fuelled sexuality of the Rolling Thunder Revue. Larry Sloman chronicles Mitchell's offstage antics, including her affair with Sam Shepard. “No regrets, Coyote,” she sings of the brief encounter, “There's no comprehending / Just how close to the bone and the skin and the eyes / And the lips you can get / And still feel so alone.” The flesh can only get you so far, and Mitchell's growing awareness of romantic love's limitations seems to hit home while on the road.

Sloman transcribed a conversation between Mitchell and Roger McGuinn about monogamy
15
and whether it's a realistic expectation—a frequent topic for people who've been screwing around with one another in order to share the burden of guilt. When McGuinn says he opposes possessiveness and monogamy, Mitchell replies that she practised it for two years. McGuinn counters that he did it for five. “Really?” says Mitchell. “You didn't cheat on the road?” “Not once,” answers McGuinn. “I sure broke down in a hurry,” says Mitchell with a shake of her head.

When McGuinn says, “I'm not talking about this trip,” Mitchell laughs. “Yeah,” she says, “We all know about this trip. It's very difficult and it's very limiting and very indulgent at the same time, none of us are mature enough to be able to accept the fact that other people can love other people. We all want to be the conqueror, the one and only in every relationship we begin.” After a pause, she explains that “there's a duality that I can't make out. I don't mean to be a victimizer but sometimes I find I am by my own spontaneous nature, you know, like gravitating to people who interest me in a room and neglecting the one who is like hurting by my interest in other people. ”

Mitchell's recognition of “the duality” demonstrates her openness and eagerness to engage with others, but she's determined to remain free at a core level because she's naturally curious about others. “We love our lovin',” she sings. “But not like we love our freedom.” In the wake of her hedonistic immersion in Rolling Thunder, Mitchell said, “It got to a point where I just wasn't willing to bleed for people in romantic love anymore.”
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After she broke up with Guerin, she moved in with Neil Young for a stint and worked out the ghosts of romance on her road trip across the U.S. in 1976, the creative results of which would become
Hejira
(taken from the Islamic word for “exodus” or “odyssey”). Mitchell takes up the themes of self-isolation and her questionable ability to love again in the song “Amelia”: “Maybe I've never really loved / I guess that is the truth / I've spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitude / And looking down on everything / I crashed into his arms / Amelia it was just a false alarm.”