Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (28 page)

Mitchell did get to knock on the door of O'Keeffe's estate. A five-thousand-square-foot compound O'Keeffe bought in 1945 and spent three years restoring, the home and surrounding landscape can be found in much of O'Keeffe's work: the patio, black door, cottonwood trees, and the many bleached cattle skulls scattered across the terracotta vastness. Mitchell would have noticed it all as she went through the gate with a small package of gifts, including a copy of her new album
Hejira
, limited editions of her drawings, and a handwritten note that read: “I want you to have this book—it is a collection of growing pains. The work it contains is not quite ripe. Nevertheless—I want you to have it out of my respect, admiration and identification with some elements in your creative spirit.”

Joni Mitchell would have identified with O'Keeffe's sense of exile, especially from a gender perspective, given O'Keeffe was doing commissions and public projects no female artist had ever undertaken before. She was a pioneer not only artistically but also socially, as a result of having a public affair with gallerist and photographer Alfred Stieglitz—a married man with children. Mitchell and O'Keeffe were both eager to put their creative growth first, before any man or any contract, and though Mitchell didn't meet her ornery idol that particular trip, she was eventually invited to visit the legendary painter in the home she shared with her younger companion, Juan, who happened to be a big fan of Mitchell's.

The two women apparently shared an awkward introductory dinner, with Mitchell remembering only two points of conversation. “The first was ‘Well, Warhol was here. He wasn't much,'” says Mitchell, who felt intimidated by the challenge to be entertaining. The second point that struck Mitchell was O'Keeffe's insistence on unique vision, and her assumption that a pop star like Mitchell wouldn't see things the same way. “She'd say things like ‘Of course, she doesn't see things like we do, does she Juan?' And I'd say, ‘Wait a minute, I can see perfectly fine.'”
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It was O'Keeffe who was legally blind at the time.

Although it was, as Mitchell says, “testy” at first, the two women warmed up to one another and shared something soulful, since O'Keeffe assigned Joni the nickname “Zoni” and later asked Mitchell to be a witness of her will. Shortly before her death, an interviewer from
ArtNews
magazine asked O'Keeffe how she would like to return to earth, should she have the joy of being reincarnated. “I would come back as a blonde soprano who could sing high clear notes without fear,” she replied.
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Mitchell says their connection was the result of a profound, shared respect for the creative vibration that offers up signs to those who are truly naked and open: “I think in a certain way, synchronistic events and auspicious things mean a great deal. And the more you trust them... the more spectacular the display they seem to put up. For a long time, that's been the colour in my life and kind of my guidepost, and Georgia's too.”
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Because the women were on a shared platform of professional achievement and creative expression, O'Keeffe was able to push buttons in Mitchell no one else could— especially when it came to the issue of creative cleavage. O'Keeffe believed you could only serve one muse in order to be a master—an idea that made Mitchell recoil. “When I met Georgia O'Keefe she was in her 90s and she said to me, ‘Well, I would have liked to have been a musician too, but you can't do both.' And I said, ‘Oh yes you can!' And she leaned in on her elbows and said, ‘Really? You know, I would have liked to have played the violin.' I said, you know, ‘Well, take it up, Georgia,' you know? I mean, you know, start today,” Mitchell told NPR's Liane Hansen.
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The other big button that O'Keeffe laid into was smoking: she may be the only person on the planet with enough balls to tell Mitchell to butt out. According to Karen O'Brien's Joni Mitchell biography, “As they walked across the arid, stony ground, Georgia spun around to a chain-smoking Mitchell and exclaimed, ‘You should stop smoking!' Juan remonstrated with her, only to have Georgia insist on the last word: ‘Well, she should live.'”
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Mitchell says she's a smoker—period. It's part of her creative persona and a lingering wink at death in the wake of eluding the grim reaper as a kid. Mitchell's early bout with polio actually led to her first cigarette: she had made a deal with the Christmas tree in her room that if she could walk, she'd sing in the choir. When she ditched her crutches, she made good on her promise and starting singing the descant harmonies the other kids didn't hear. “Nobody wanted to sing the descant part,” Mitchell explains. “I said ‘I'll do it, that's the pretty melody,' the part with the odd intervals, fourths and fifths. Most kids couldn't really hear them; they were lucky to hang in with the triads.”
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One night after practice, she smoked her first cigarette: a Black Cat king size. Some kid had stolen her mom's butts and brought them to share with her friends, who happily partook, peeling back their woolly mittens to get their little fingers around a tobacco-filled tube. “We all sat by the wintry fish pond in the snow, and passed them around. Some girls choked and some threw up, and I took one puff and felt really smart! I just thought, ‘Woah!' My head cleared up. I seemed to see better and think better. So I was a smoker from that day on.”
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Mitchell has called smoking her “focusing drug” and a “grounding herb.”
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It helps her think. It helps her create in the wee hours of the morning. That's why she makes no apologies for her habit and was a bit taken aback when Georgia O'Keeffe suggested she stop. As Mitchell says, she's been doing it a long time: “I smoked in cars, in saunas, in all sorts of small spaces. If secondary smoke is going to kill me, I would have been dead 20 years ago.” It's a gesture of control over the chaos. Mitchell finds cigarettes a bitter nipple, nurturing to her creative soul. “Honestly, I couldn't have gotten through life without it,” she admits.
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Mitchell seems to find the same creative support when she holds a paintbrush, because it's not for any other purpose than her own enjoyment. As she told Rene Ingle, “I don't paint for galleries, I don't paint for museums... I paint to go with my couch.” When Ingle asked whether she would paint over someone else's work so that it matched her couch, Mitchell said, “Oh, I've done that... I mean, after all, they're domestic decorations. That's really what they are.”
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Mitchell's terminology is suggestive, because “domestic decorations” moves beyond “wall treatment” and pulls us right into the domestic sphere of the home. Moreover, Mitchell has referred to her album cover artwork as contractually obligated “decorations”: “[The record company] said, put your picture on the cover... to decorate the space.”
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And so she did. That said, the idea of “decorating” one's internal spaces with artwork from one's own easel of experience sounds like something altogether inspiring—as well as integrating. By creating artwork that wasn't subject to market forces, Mitchell could re-laminate her peeling soul.

In her interview with
CoEvolution Quarterly
, she talks about reading Tom Wolfe's book
The Painted Word
, which helped her understand herself as an artist and inspired a track off
The Hissing of Summer Lawns
. “‘The Boho Dance' [tells of] that period in an artist's existence when he's a Bohemian, when he's established all of his moral justifications for poverty while still striving for success,” she says. “The second stage is the consummation which he has aimed himself toward, when the public says, ‘Yes, we like your work, we would like to buy it,' and he is celebrated. He finds himself sucked into a social strata which he deplored as a Bohemian.”

As Mitchell explains to Brand, artists react differently to this change. “Picasso went right into it you know and bought himself a Rolls Royce and some little black and white maids, and everybody said, ‘Look at Picasso, man, he's going to blow it,' like he sold out. Jackson Pollock said, ‘I won't sell out,' went to all of these fancy cocktail parties and pissed in the fireplace and did everything just to show he wasn't going to enjoy it.” Mitchell says she found Pollock's words to be stupefying: “I experienced my own understanding of what he was saying so strongly that it almost paralyzed me from reading further.”
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Mitchell did not want to be resentful of success or pee in the fireplace of fame. And thanks to her passion for painting, she found a more suitable outlet for her many frustrations.

In the half-consciousness of creative release, she's able to find a fresh outlook. “An amazing perspective takes place where your brushes are suspended in air and you can see, you know, behind them... you hit that point in the painting where your eyes open up, you know exactly where to go. I mean it's almost worth it pushing yourself for fourteen hours to hit a pocket of fatigue just to hit that state,” she told Ingle.
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Mitchell says painting is not just a pastime or a more sophisticated form of needlepoint. “It's not like a hobby,” she maintains. It's a true obsession, and one that's helped her balance the constraints of commerce—because she's never painted for money. There was one exception, where she sold a crop of paintings in Japan “at inflated prices” in order to pay some bills. It was one of the more depressing periods of Mitchell's career and made her particularly bitter about the business. Art has been therapeutic in the sense that it has afforded Mitchell a means of expression without the weight of public judgement. She likened it once to crop rotation, where she leaves her musical fields fallow while she lives in her box of paints to recalibrate and re-energize.

Mitchell still paints in her new and improved house on the Sunshine Coast, as well as her residence in California. She's had career retrospective showings in Los Angeles and at the Mendel Art Gallery in her hometown, Saskatoon. And even though she now calls herself a “bourgeois painter”
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as a result of abandoning abstractionism and other influences that didn't speak to her, she's still, no doubt, teaching herself new lessons every day. “I'm still experimenting with very personal painting... I haven't taken any formal training but I have discovered my own educational system. I know how I learn best and I know how I learn most rapidly and how to feed myself information for my particular kind of growth, so I'm out of this a self-educator,” she says. “Picasso was constantly searching and searching and changing and changing. I thrive on change... That can drive some people crazy, but that's how my life is.”
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Sounds like an artist to me.

“Both Sides Now”
from
Both Sides Now

“Songs to Aging Children Come”

“And to me also, who appreciate life, the butterflies, and soap-bubbles, and whatever is like them amongst us, seem most to enjoy happiness.

To see these light, foolish, pretty, lively little sprites flit about—that moveth Zarathustra to tears and songs.

I should only believe in a God that would know how to dance.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche, “Of Reading and Writing,”
Thus Spoke Zarathustra

There was a hint of déjà vu about Grammy night 2008. All the awards, save one, had been handed out—mostly to Amy Winehouse, who was being toasted as the femme feral for
Back to Black
. Winehouse had been granted a day pass from rehab in order to play a song via satellite from London, and she ended up patching into the broadcast to make acceptance speeches for best new artist, song of the year, record of the year, female pop vocal performance, and pop vocal album. Everyone expected Winehouse—or at the very least then-tragedy-stricken Kanye West, who had just lost his mother to surgical complications—to win the final and most prestigious prize for album of the year.

When a breathless Quincy Jones opened the envelope, “there was an audible gasp—at least where I was sitting,” said music
reporter Joe Levy when interviewed on
The Today Show
.
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The winning album on the Grammys' fiftieth anniversary was
River: The Joni Letters
, Herbie Hancock's tribute album to Joni Mitchell, explored entirely through jazz progressions. The win was a surprise on a few levels. First, few people had even heard of the record before it picked up the biggest prize of the night. Second, Joni Mitchell's name hadn't been Grammy night currency in more than a decade. Third, it was a jazz record.

“You know it's been forty-three years since the first and only time that a jazz artist got the album of the year award,” said Hancock, referring to the 1965 win for Stan Getz and João Gilberto. Hancock, the boundary-breaking musician who rose to fame in the wake of his pioneering 1983 dance hall instrumental “Rockit,” thanked his mentors, from his former employer and friend Miles Davis to fellow jazz artist John Coltrane, for their inspiration along the way. “But this is a new day,” he continued, “[It] proves the impossible can be made possible. Yes, we can, to coin a phrase.”

As Hancock's tip of the hat to Barack Obama ricocheted through the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles, he thanked the blond ghost who occupied the studio: “My thanks of course to Joni Mitchell, her music and her words, and without the vision of Larry Klein as producer, this could never have happened.”

Hancock held it together in the moment, but he later said he was as “shocked” as everyone else by the win. “It's totally out of the blue,” he said. Once Hancock had digested the awards-night press, he called Mitchell, who was supportive of Hancock's win but largely indifferent to the Grammy glitz. “She is not enamored with the Grammys, I'll tell you that,” said Hancock. “She's all for the things that have the greatest real value, such as the quality of music, honesty, compassion. And she could care less about the media and television.”
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From what Hancock tells us, Mitchell is happy in her hermit's cave, where she can sit back and focus on what gives life real meaning: creative honesty. This brings us back to the beginning, because there's a circularity to the unexpected win for
River: The Joni Letters
, and it lends the narrative a beautiful sense of closure—it proves her catalogue is not only enduring; it's capable of being interpreted by others without losing its inherent power. Symbolically, Mitchell's work is no longer falling on deaf ears; her voice is finally what the perpetually misunderstood Zarathustra called the “mouth for these ears.”

Creating work that can strike the universal is proof of artistic success, and Hancock's interpretation of Mitchell's music offers us the reverse image of the one we started with: Art Nouveau and
Don Juan's Reckless Daughter
. Instead of a white woman assuming the persona of a black man while recreating jazz in her own image, we get the image of a well-regarded jazz musician reinterpreting the music of a white woman as a genuine black man. Hancock's album proves that Mitchell has achieved “classic” or “standard” status, which in the music world is akin to hanging a painting in the Louvre or the Met.

“Standards are a part of my roots, whether it's visible or not,” Mitchell says. “I think people were surprised I'd absorbed standards. People assumed that I didn't understand that. I don't think I proved myself to guys like Herbie Hancock until I did standards.”
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The Grammy win proves Mitchell's music is like all great art: capable of being recreated, repeated, emulated, and even turned into elevator muzak without losing any of its inherent integrity. Thousands of artists have turned to it for inspiration, and some of the biggest names in pop music cite her as a seminal influence, from Chrissie Hynde, Elvis Costello, P.J. Harvey, and Sarah McLachlan to Stevie Wonder, Sting, Van Morrison, Jack Johnson, Tony Bennett, Prince, and even kids' performer Raffi.

Hancock had known Joni since 1979, when he and fellow Miles Davis backup player Wayne Shorter worked on
Mingus
, but his fandom was no less ardent as a result of the familiarity: “She's like a hero to me. I consider her a Renaissance woman,” he said. “I love hanging out with her, conversing with her, and listening to her talk. She talks the same way that she writes the lyrics. I don't think of [“River”] as a tribute. She inspires me, so yes, it is a tribute, but that's not the primary motivation. It's more respect for this friend of mine whom I love as a person and I love as an artist.”
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Hancock said his compassion and profound respect for the work and the passion didn't hamper him creatively, however, because Mitchell was all about exploration. Hancock's own approach to creation broadened and deepened by working through Mitchell's example.

“Herbie and I have the same problem from two different approaches,” Mitchell told
JazzTimes
during a joint interview with Hancock.
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“He was going too far into pop and I was going too far into jazz. They accused him of commercialism, and they accused me of obscurity.”

Hancock nodded. “I learned early on that if I'm feeling what I'm supposed to do, that's all I'm supposed to do—no ifs, ands or buts about it. Who's sitting there behind the piano? Me. Not them. Who has to answer to that? Who's it coming out of? It's coming out of me. I have to be honest with myself. She does the same thing.”

Hancock said there was one tune that shook him to the creative core and pushed him to find his own path—a song that would bring Joni Mitchell's oeuvre full circle: “Both Sides Now.” “Something happened when I was trying to figure out what to do with that song,” he said, splaying his fingers before him. “I started following what I was feeling, and it was getting more and more interesting. I said, ‘It would naturally go here, but I want it to go somewhere where it's not expected to go.' I tried something and I said, ‘Oh, wow, that's a surprise.' Finally, I said, ‘The meaning as I feel it seems to say it's O.K. for me to do this,'” he concluded.

“Yeah,” agreed Mitchell, “because it's a discourse on fantasy and reality.”

We could say the same thing about Mitchell's body of work, as well as her life: it's a discourse about what is, and what could be. In every undertaking, she has fearlessly addressed the longing and the communion, as well as the emptiness and the exhilaration, of being alive.

We've explored several manifestations of Mitchell as creator, except the obvious: the singer. Voice is the very echo of the soul, which is why German philosopher Martin Heidegger put such an emphasis on using it. It's not enough just to breathe. In order to transcend and realize one's creative potential, one needs to speak and, finally, to sing—because “song is existence.” Heidegger sees song as the highest state of being because it represents the urge to utter made into art. Some sing falsely, but the true artists can be identified: “Their singing is turned away from all purposeful self-assertion. It is not willing in the sense of desire. Their song does not solicit anything to be produced. In the song, the world's inner space concedes space within itself. The song of these singers is neither solicitation nor trade.” Heidegger says that in singing, one belongs to the realm of the truly living: “To sing the song means to be present in what is present itself. It means
Dasein
, existence.”
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In short, to sing is to be—and not just any garden variety of being, but Being: the holiest of the holy metaphysical grails, in which we are one with the spheres.

Mitchell had a voice, and if we're going to make a distinction between creativity and natural, god-given talent, we can easily assert the notion that Mitchell had a leg up on the rest of the ambitious masses as a result of her three-octave range and pure, almost ethereal singing voice. Singing came naturally to Mitchell, but when she first started to strum and hum at parties, she says, the voice she used wasn't truly her own.

“I found out two years ago that I'm an alto,” she said in October of 2002. “My mother was an alto, my grandmother was an alto. And all this time I've been singing sort of soprano just because at the time that I began to sing in art school, I'd imitate Judy Collins and Joan Baez, just to get money to smoke.”
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Mitchell suggested she was almost whoring herself creatively at the genesis of her life as a performer, compromising her truth and her artistic purity for the corporeal satisfaction of tobacco. Yet, like most things in Mitchell's career, it was a calculated risk with significant rewards; it allowed her to assume the folkie stance and play the waify maiden onstage. She could play to expectation with a quiet little smirk that no one could ever see because her audience was dazzled by the appropriate, pretty facade. It was like acting. “I would say [I was] a folksinger from 1963 to 1965,” she told William Ruhlmann. “When I crossed the border, I began to write. Once I began to write, my vocal style changed,” she said. “My Baez/Collins influence disappeared. Almost immediately, when I had my own words to sing, my voice appeared.”
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Joni Mitchell has been a singer ever since she sang Christmas carols “real loud” in the polio ward as a child and realized she “was a ham.” Having made good on her polio-ward bargain with an almighty power that if she could dance again she would sing in the church choir, she discovered she was a natural.

The assertion of her voice was an act of defiance in the face of death, and from that moment on, Mitchell used her voice as a sort of sonar—a way of orienting herself in the sea of experience. It's this voice that spurred Chrissie Hynde to grab Carly Simon by the neck and proclaim, “That's a REAL singer up there,”
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but it took a while to bloom. Although Mitchell's voice is automatically recognizable in today's cacophonic mix of generic howlers, it's undergone several transformations—both literally and figuratively. She has gone from the “multi-phrenia” of her early career and arrived at a single, whole, resonating voice that is entirely her own.

Mitchell has sunk from the gliding, ephemeral soprano that marked her first two records in the late sixties to the huskier alto we hear on
Shine
, her last release, from 2007. The descent in range is the result of age as well as her well-publicized nicotine addiction, but Mitchell says the voice we hear later in her career is the one that's closer to her truth—on several levels.

If we look at the vocal evolution as a spiritual voyage unto itself, we can observe the arc of a creator's victory: Mitchell descended the heights of the soprano mountain and bore witness to the changing world below. She got harder, wiser, and “more masculine.” As her vocal range condensed, she too began to integrate: the notes of her life began to cluster tighter as she gained self-knowledge and trusted her inner voice.

In the beginning, Mitchell disappeared behind a persona. Her voice was still in the glass-shattering soprano range, and its “girly tone” seemed to match her “ultra-feminine” beginnings, but by the time she made
Blue
, she was already descending the vocal slope—and stripping off the vocal veneer.

As Elvis Costello noted in the précis to his
Vanity Fair
interview with Mitchell:
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“Joni shifted from the beautiful pure soprano voice of her first records to her more natural alto tones—the opening vocal note of the song ‘Blue' sounded like a horn.” Costello applied the same critical ideas to the “narrative voice” within Mitchell's music as he described the shift from the commercial, first-person plots woven through
Court and Spark
to the distance she began to find in
The Hissing of Summer Lawns
. Mitchell's voice was changing, whether in her role as a singer, storyteller, or producer and arranger.

“The influence of jazz upon her writing and arranging became more pronounced, and the dense, third person lyrical portraits of damaged and unsympathetic characters in songs such as ‘Edith and the Kingpin' and ‘Shades of Scarlet Conquering' did not sit well with some of her more starry-eyed listeners,” said Costello, pointing out the now-standard Joni theme—and cruel irony—of fan disenfranchisement.

The closer Mitchell came to being true to her voice, the more challenging she became to her hardcore fans. One reviewer even went so far as to write: “Mitchell doesn't always sound like Mitchell.” Proving just how potent expectation and predictability can be, the critic felt betrayed by Mitchell's changing vocals on
Both Sides Now
. “She comes across instead like someone who has listened a lot to Billie Holiday and at least a little to Sarah Vaughan,” wrote Mark Miller in the
Globe and Mail
. “The strongest of her borrowings can seem studied and sometimes rather strangulated (the untoward mannerisms of ‘You're My Thrill' for example) but, these specific points of style aside, Mitchell's singing is remarkable for its absolute certainty of pitch and phrasing.”
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