Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (3 page)

Semiotician and psychologist Jacques Lacan picked up on this notion of the performed “I,” and distilled it further using the image of the mirrored self. Lacan, a name typically batted around by top-shelf academics whose ideas can be so hard to reach, said that once a kid sees himself in the mirror, there's a schism between the reflected self, which seems ideal, and the true self, which seems vulnerable. For the rest of our lives, we try to resolve these two images into one whole “Me.”
13

There is no simple trick to personal integration, which is why there's an entire industry devoted to self-help, creative emancipation, and spiritual awakening. We all sense there's something more to existence, but we often can't access it because we're trapped in that house of mistaken identity, built from bricks that didn't come from our own oven.

How do we find the key to our own true house? First, we have to recognize that other house we built, then pull it down brick by brick. Dissecting meaning, component by component, is called “deconstruction.” Joni Mitchell constructed, and deconstructed, her meaning through identity several times over. It's one of the reasons why she's such a realized creator.

If we're to take the experts' word for it, Mitchell's central strength in this endeavour was her ability to achieve safe distance. She had enough perspective on her identity that she could play with it. She literally did this through “Art” and, in so doing, gave us a human case study in what art therapists have been scribbling about for decades. According to psychologist Ellen Levine, the creative act allows us to gain distance from our core self and, in turn, gauge it and transform it from a healthy perspective. “Distancing allows for the capacity to separate and externalize, not to detach but to maintain a connection without fusion,” she says. “[The artifact] can be seen as a crystallization of feelings in the form of the art work, not the actual feelings themselves. There is comfort in this kind of distancing,” she continues. “It creates a space within the psyche for understanding and re-incorporation.” She says that role play can be a good distancing technique and explains, “Here, through words, actions, or movements, a radical shift in perspective takes place in which the roles are reversed and reversed again. Enacting the point of view of the other and feeling what this is like involves new information, and on a deeper level, a new bodily experience.”
14

Levine's words echo Nietzsche and Lacan as they affirm the importance of the physical and the concrete, but she also asserts our potential to scale these brick walls with a little imagination and a sense of play. “By creating an as-if situation in play, there is the possibility for exploration and, as always, surprise,” she says. “There is a significant felt difference between talking about a difficult... relationship with another person or part of the self, and
being
the other for a discrete period of time—talking, walking, and feeling the experience of otherness.”

The gatefold sleeve for
Don Juan's Reckless Daughter
certainly wasn't the first time Mitchell slapped an image of herself on her own package. The tradition of self-representation—and, in turn, self-creation—began with her first album,
Song to a Seagull
(1968): the cover featured Mitchell's own pen and ink doodling as well as a small photograph of herself.

The artwork grew more ambitious with the 1969 release of
Clouds
, successfully setting in celebrity cement the image of Joni Mitchell as hippie chick earth goddess: the self-portrait on this cover is a close-up of the singer holding a red lily in one hand with Saskatoon landmark the Bessborough Hotel, built by the Canadian Pacific Railway and designed to look like a Bavarian castle, looming alongside a snaking river in the background. Mitchell's face is almost beatific; her blue eyes gaze at the listener with an open expression. The near-random designs of
Seagull
are abandoned in favour of a complete and carefully painted portrait. This speaks to a creative confidence in Mitchell's artwork that's matched by the music:
Clouds
contained the proven single “Both Sides Now,” which had already charted thanks to Judy Collins's smash cover version, as well as “Chelsea Morning,” which Mitchell would turn into a hit on her own.

Ladies of the Canyon
followed in 1970, and here Mitchell's line drawing of herself is incorporated into the Laurel Canyon landscape, suggesting her identity is now literally integrated into the scene—which was probably the most interesting and creative community in Los Angeles at the time, home to every noted musician and artist in the area, from Jim Morrison to Frank Zappa.

At first glance, the cover art for
Ladies of the Canyon
may feel like a return to
Seagull
's singular dimensions, but the line drawing is assured and created from just a handful of pencil strokes. It also places Mitchell in geographical context once more—demonstrating an unspoken understanding of the relationship between the artist and her environment. As Mitchell says of this period: “[It was] like falling to earth... It felt almost as if I'd had my head in the clouds long enough: Shortly after that time, everything began to change. There were fewer adjectives in my poetry. Fewer curlicues to my drawing. Everything began to get more bold and solid in a way.”
15

Blue
(1971) and
For the Roses
(1972) followed, but unlike Mitchell's previous releases, they featured photographic covers. The first was snapped by Tim Considine at a concert; the second was taken by Joel Bernstein on a bluff overlooking Mitchell's home on British Columbia's Sunshine Coast. These photographic covers are certainly of the moment, and show a very attractive female, but the music beneath the covers was equally “realistic” as it explored two significant disillusionments: heartbreak and the realization of romantic love's limitations on
Blue
, and the emptiness of the music industry on
For the Roses
.

The cover for
Court and Spark
(1974) signals a return of Mitchell's artistic energy with a rather abstract sketch called
The Mountain Loves the Sea.
Minimalist in form and colour, the sketch features a strange, hugging, Madonna-like wave cresting before mountains. Mitchell says she created the drawing, at one time owned by Rosie O'Donnell, in a “moment of whimsy” on her land in B.C. “It's a metaphor for the way the waves met up with the mountain; the way they embraced one another,” she said.
16
Interestingly, this visual fusion of ocean and mountain—water and earth, chaos and order—graced the cover of Mitchell's most successful album of all time.
Court and Spark
is the only Mitchell release to hit the number one spot on the
Cashbox
chart in the U.S. and on the Canadian sales charts (it hit number two on the U.S.
Billboard
album chart), and it contains Mitchell's only Billboard Hot 100 top-ten single, “Help Me”—which peaked at number seven.

The live concert album
Miles of Aisles
was released in the same year and features a photograph Mitchell snapped as she was viewing the empty stage in the Pine Knob Music Theater outside Detroit. It's taken from the point of view of a spectator, which tickled something in Mitchell, who said it “appealed to me as an abstract painting—the blue blobs where the knees are, the checkerboard grid at the top. I like the way it looks, but more than that, it was just impulse.”
17

A significant creative shift took place on
The Hissing of Summer Lawns
(1975) as Mitchell moved away from standard pop/folk forms and embraced jazzier structures and syncopated beats. (The album was also declared by
Rolling Stone
to have the “worst title of the year.”) The cover reflected the change; it showed a group of tribesmen holding a snake outside a sprawling city skyline. The colours are black and lime green, and the lines are either curvilinear (the natural world of the tribesmen and the snake in the foreground) or entirely linear (the urban architecture of the First World in the background). The tension between these two worlds splashes all over the album. Raw, primal energies mingle with the rarified fumes of intellect, and although some embraced this new sound (Prince has repeatedly talked about his debt to Mitchell and
The Hissing of Summer Lawns
in particular), many more rejected it.

Unfazed, Mitchell continued to experiment with both her art and her image, and her following release,
Hejira
(1976), ushered a return to the photographic cover. This time, it was a composite collage showing Mitchell in black and white as a highway rolls through the middle of her body, the vanishing point of the road ending right around her heart.

Up to this point, all the photographic covers feature Mitchell as she is, and as her fans would recognize her, so the next album marked a definite turning point:
Don Juan's Reckless Daughter
was proof that Joni Mitchell wasn't just an artist on a creative odyssey; she was entirely self-aware of her personae, her place in the universe, and her innate potential for recreation. After all, if we're going to decrypt the cover featuring Art Nouveau, Joni as magician, and a little kid with doves, we could say Mitchell has been her own pimp; transcended race and gender lines; maintained a respectful, childlike sense of wonder in the face of creation (the boy in a tux); and learned to embrace the magic inner peace and winged spirit of the truly artistic stance (doves).

Mitchell's comfort with myriad identities speaks to her experience as the chameleon and, in turn, an innate trust of her creative impulse. It was entirely “incorrect” for a white woman of privilege to assume the identity of a black man from the streets, but she did it without fear. This fearlessness could have come from a sudden revelation that forced her to rebel against her old familiar sense of self. More likely, Mitchell's foray into gender-bending role play was merely the culmination of a long personal history with a shape-shifting identity and a strong propensity for self-creation.

Does this mean Joni Mitchell was born to be an artist and her life's journey was cast in stone before she even exited her mother's womb? Maybe, but that makes creativity sound like an almost Calvinist enterprise, where only the select few will find salvation through the expressive process—and that just doesn't seem fair, nor does it resonate as truth. I believe we all feel the tickle of the creative spirit.

Jenny Boyd, a music fan who ended up in the midst of the psychedelic explosion as a result of her attraction to sexy rock stars, eventually wrote her PhD about the creative experience. In her book,
Musicians in Tune
, she says, “a creative person's drive determines whether or not he will be able to express himself, no matter how much talent he has.”
18
Given that most psychologists believe we all have innate creative abilities to help us reconcile life's nagging conflicts and “actualize our true nature,” it seems Mitchell is simply a brilliant example of someone who figured out the importance of self-creation early.

Boyd says most successful artists are possessed by a sense of “destiny” or a “calling.” Mitchell believes in these mysterious forces: in the 2003 PBS documentary
Joni Mitchell: Woman of Heart and Mind
, she says, “Bad fortune changed the course of my destiny... I became a musician.”
19
The “bad fortune” was getting pregnant, but the idea of destiny is clearly present. More importantly, Mitchell had the strength to surrender one vision for another; she could roll with the waves of destiny. And a lot of us can't do that. We hang onto the debris of broken dreams until we drown, believing fate has cheated us of a shot at personal happiness.

Joni Mitchell built her ark of “I” at a young age. Roberta Joan Anderson was born on November 7, 1943, and for those nearest and dearest to her, she remains “Joan.” How did Joan become Joni? Easy: she made it so. Mitchell adopted the name Joni at the age of thirteen after admiring the jaunty look of her art teacher's name on his canvases. Henry Bonli was an abstract expressionist who followed the Barnett Newman school of hard-edge colour fields, and he signed his work with a lower case
i
—a detail that impressed Mitchell far more than any large swaths of applied pigment. She told Timothy White: “I admired the way his last name... looked in his painting signatures.”
20

That “name-changing” event took place in 1957, back when “you had to dance a foot apart.” Did Mitchell have any clue then that her bold little
i
—which stands entirely alone and completely disconnected to the loopy
J
and the rather pedestrian
o
-
n
—in her own signature would be the beginning of a great big
I
?

Maybe, but if so, she's kept it to herself. It smacks of self-importance, at least to the Canadian psyche, which is infused with a socialist sensibility of equality and an unfortunate case of “tall poppy syndrome”—you can't stand too tall, lest you be cut down to size by jealous colleagues and peers. In Canada, it's best to keep quiet about your suspicions of personal greatness, because most of us find it distasteful. Those who don't feel uptight about tooting their own horn move to the United States, where they can be embraced for their moxie and self-confidence.

Joni made the big move to the U.S. in the wake of her brief marriage to Chuck Mitchell, a folksinger who lived in Detroit and helped Canadians land gigs in the U.S. It was Chuck who gave Joni the other half of her now-legendary stage name, and it's because of Chuck that Joan Anderson fully became the character of Joni Mitchell—or, at least, the person she imagined Joni Mitchell to be.