Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (5 page)

According to Clance and Imes, the crippling effects of impostor syndrome tend to affect women because female talent isn't reinforced in our society. Men feel entitled and deserving of their success, even if they score much lower in ability than a woman with low self-esteem. Society reads confidence at face value until undeniable failure, sheer incompetence, or violent defensiveness forces a shift of opinion—and even at that, the problematic evidence is often overlooked because the man is able to rebound quickly with an assertive ego and defend his greatness. Moreover, we want him to rebound because it puts the universe back in its normal order.

Women are not typically infused with a reservoir of confidence, and the authors of the study blame society's low evaluation of female creativity as well as family dynamics for this unfortunate cycle:

We have observed that our “impostors” typically fall into one of two groups, with respect to early family history. In one group are women who have a sibling or close relative who have been designated as the “intelligent” member of the family. Each of the women, on the other hand, has been told directly or indirectly that she is the “sensitive” or socially adept one in the family. The implication from immediate and/or extended family members is that she can never prove that she is as bright as her siblings regardless of what she actually accomplishes intellectually.
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By comparison, the members of the other group of “impostors” have been told the opposite: they are gifted and can do anything they set their minds to. This can backfire, though, once the female child discovers she is human and is not capable of “perfection with ease”: “Because she is so indiscriminately praised for everything, she begins to distrust her parents' perceptions of her. Moreover, she begins to doubt herself. When she goes to school her doubts about her abilities are intensified. Although she does outstanding work, she does have to study to do well and... jumps to the conclusion that she must be dumb. She is not a genius; therefore, she must be an intellectual impostor.”
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Clearly, from what Mitchell said about Dylan, she's not suffering from any brand of impostor syndrome—and probably never did. From the beginning of her career, Mitchell seems aware of her foibles—“I'm selfish and I'm sad.” But she believes in herself and her bona fide ability.

Self-confidence is one of the hallmarks of a realized creative soul. However, the source of Mitchell's certainty remains somewhat mysterious. Perhaps it was the result of being an only child who was never forced to compete with a sibling for parental affection or wear an inappropriate label that scratched and bled. Perhaps it was the result of another absence: a lack of gender stereotyping growing up. According to Clance and Imes, “the high-achieving women in our sample escaped, at least to some degree, the societal sex-role stereotyping in the preschool years that can be transmitted through the parents.”
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The other defining element of the impostor syndrome is self-awareness of “intellectual flattery”: the subject wins over authority figures and those she respects by gushing false and insincere remarks. According to the study:

She believes, “I am stupid,” but at another level she believes she is brilliant, creative, and special if only the right person would discover her genius and thereby help her believe in her intellect. She first finds a candidate she respects and then proceeds to impress that person. She studies the person carefully and perceives very accurately what that person will be responsive to. She uses her friendliness, charm, looks, humor, sexuality, and perceptiveness to win the person over... If the candidate is in a difficult situation, the woman listens with understanding and concern. She may volunteer to assist a professor with his/her pet research project. She may even become sexually involved with her mentor.
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I'm sure we've all encountered at least one woman who matches this description to a
T
. But for all her efforts, her attempt to solve the impostor riddle fails, no matter what kind of forced ego reinforcement comes her way, because the entire relationship is based in artifice, and she knows it.

In the end, impostor syndrome is based in fear—easily the most destructive force to the creative soul. Mitchell's ability to take on alternate personae (even controversial ones) and her deep belief in herself make her the fearless and potent creator she is. Exactly how Mitchell found her courageous will, and rode it to the top, will become clearer in the following chapter.

“Dreamland”
from
Dreamland

“Jungle Line
from
Hissing of Summer Lawns

“Twisted”
from
Court and Spark

“What does not kill me makes me stronger.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche,
Twilight of the Idols

Art Nouveau, Mitchell's pimped-out blackface alter ego, made his public debut in November 1977, the same month legendary jazz musician Charles Mingus Jr. was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease), a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that reduces muscle function to the point of paralysis. It is terminal and has no cure, and because it's relatively rare, it's considered an “orphan disease”—one that lacks an international infrastructure for research and support. It was a cruel twist of fate for the man who wrote in his stream-of-consciousness biography: “I am Charles Mingus—I am nothing. I am Charles Mingus, a famed jazz musician but not famous enough to make a living in society, that is in America, my home.”
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Goethe said “the first and last task required of genius is love of truth”
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—and Mingus spoke his truth, regardless of the consequences. He expressed himself as honestly as he could, not only in his words and music but also in his entire stage presence. He famously sacrificed one of his own instruments in a moment of ire, destroying a bass at a Village Vanguard show when the audience wouldn't shut up—which earned him the nickname “The Angry Man of Jazz.”

Passion is often mistaken for anger, and Mingus was passionate about finding the most honest mode of expression: “In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time.”
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Mingus, like Mitchell, never felt he had to cement himself into one pair of shoes. He had a love of experimentation and pushed the very boundaries of his own identity in order to come closer to the truth of his own art, yet until that November, the two were complete strangers to each other, creators from opposite ends of the universe. Mitchell was a middle-class Canadian girl who entered the business via the folk circuit, while Mingus was of mixed racial heritage (white, black, and Chinese), grew up in Watts, and, according to his autobiography, once worked as a pimp before settling into a career in jazz.

Maybe Mingus recognized something of himself in Art Nouveau's rakish grin and manly bop, because when he picked up
Don Juan's Reckless Daughter
and saw this white-bread chick prancing around with a pimp's strut, he was rapt. Apparently, Mingus thought Mitchell had real “balls”—not just a faux masculinity as a result of her drag conquest; he was impressed by her musicality. “Mingus was intrigued by that disguise,” Mitchell told
Impact
's Mary Dickie in 1994. “
Don Juan's Reckless Daughter
, which was very unpopular in the white community, was understood by the black community, and I picked up a black following with it. World beat had not yet happened, and white people were just not ready, especially in pop music, for this. I was dressed as a black man on the cover, and because of that I was reviewed in black magazines, and when they discovered the error they didn't seem to turn back,” she said.
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The black man in Mitchell struck a chord with the black man in Mingus, igniting a deathbed collaboration between the two artists that would eventually redefine them both.

Mingus wasn't impressed just by Mitchell's boundary-busting music and her ability to don the costume of a black Don Juan. When he listened to the piano tracks on “Paprika Plains,” he figured Mitchell was on her very own planet: the tuning was entirely off.

“I finally flew to New York to meet him, and he was in a wheelchair with his back to me, but when he turned around he had a real mischievous look on his face and I thought, ‘Uh-oh, he's really going to fuck with me, this guy,' but in the best way!” In 1983, Mitchell told
Musician
magazine's Vic Garbarini: “One of the first things he said to me was, ‘Those strings on “Paprika Plains” are out of tune!' And this was true!”
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The dissonance was the result of a protracted recording period. “We went in the studio and cut this thing four times. It was a trance-like situation,” she said. “In the meantime the piano had been retuned a number of times. Then I gave the piano piece with lyrics to an arranger who added strings. The strings begin in the January section of the piano piece, but when they hit the October part, the piano tuning has changed, so the strings have no chance to retune as they cross over. That really infuriated Charles,” Mitchell said. “The orchestra's out of tune... they're in tune, they're out of tune! Well, that drove him crazy (laughs). So he thought I was a nervy broad.”

Despite these imperfections—or more likely because of them—Mingus asked Mitchell to work with him on a project based on T.S. Eliot's
Four Quartets
with a full orchestra. The bassist and composer wanted Mitchell's voice as a narrator—which immediately upset Mitchell's former beau, jazz drummer John Guerin, who was a huge Mingus fan. “You unconscious motherfucker,” he told Joni. “You don't even like his music,” Guerin said, according to her 1994 interview with Alice Echols in
L.A. Weekly
.
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As Mitchell told Leonard Feather of the
Los Angeles Times
, “[Mingus] wanted me to distill Eliot down into street language, and sing it, mixed in with this reader.”
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She was intrigued by the idea but, after mulling the material for a while, couldn't commit to the creative endeavour, because reconfiguring Eliot felt like a violation of a creator's code. “It seemed like a kind of sacrilege,” she said.
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Mingus let the Eliot go but told Mitchell he'd written six melodies just for her, and he wanted her to pen some lyrics for each. Flattered by his attention and excited by the risk, she pushed herself into the unknown: “Immediately... the project became challenging and fun. I knew it would be difficult, but this was an opportunity to be pulled through the die of black classical music with one of the masters,” she said.

When she saw Mingus again, his condition had deteriorated. “He had become very seriously ill, he and his wife, Sue, went to Mexico, to a faith healer, and during that time I spent ten days with them,” Mitchell told Feather in 1979. The two musical pioneers had a lot to talk about, but Mingus's muscle control was seriously affected. He was in a wheelchair, largely unable to move. Most importantly, “his speech had deteriorated severely... every night he would say to me ‘I want to talk to you about the music,' and every day it would be too difficult. So some of what he had to tell me remained a mystery.”

Mitchell says the whole experience rearranged her creative approach and pushed her to explore. “The funny thing was I wasn't a huge fan of Mingus; he was too rooted in the blues for me,” she said. “I had to be pulled through jazz blues with more complex melodies before I could appreciate the simple blues that were the roots of his composition. It opened me up to another block of music. So it was worth it, but it cost me my airplay. I was excommunicated,” said Mitchell, the rebel saint. “From that point on, I was considered a jazzer by the rockers and a rocker by the jazzers, except the great ones. They are less bound by boundaries, as a rule.”
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Mitchell, like many successful artists, is comfortable in the chaos of the unknown, and so was Mingus, who said: “Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.”

To psychologists, the complicated, the chaotic, or what we've called the “unknown” or “mystery,” represents the “unconscious”—the wellspring of creativity, at least according to Jung. Great artists seem capable of turning off their rational mind just long enough to access the formless energy beyond our understanding. Musicians constantly talk about how their best songs seem to come to them whole: “The last time this happened was when I wrote ‘The Boys of Summer,'” Don Henley explained to Jenny Boyd in
Musicians in Tune
. “It was incredible. It was just coming to me, and I don't know where it was coming from.”
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Mitchell echoed Henley's feelings. “With one particular song I wrote, when it came time to write about my experience, it was so dense with imagery that... it was hard for me to sift through it... There came one line, though, that was like a gift. It flowed out. I drew back and said ‘thank you' to the room... I'd been grinding the gray matter trying to get this thing to come and maybe I then just relaxed or something. Whatever it was, when it poured out it did seem like it was a gift,” she told Boyd. “There are pieces in a song that just seem to pour out in spite of you. I mean, you're the witness but the language does seem to come from someplace else.”
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These gifts arrive when she allows the gurgling fount of the unconscious to do its work. “Oh, yeah, I work from intuition, so I'm always flying blind and looking to be thrilled. I think it's easier to recognize the truly spectacular from an intuitive position than from your intellect, which is linear, dealing only with knowledge of the past projected into the future.”
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Mitchell says she relied on this creative autopilot while recording
Mingus
because the central creator, Mingus himself, was unable to communicate. Mitchell had to find the confidence to speak for him and create her own melodies to fill out the album. At the same time, she tried to maintain the original Mingus vision, and at his urging, she read a passage in his autobiography that dealt with his philosophical stance, particularly the god concept. “It was his own metaphorical description of God and relationship to God,” she told Leonard Feather. “I just couldn't lift that literally and make it adhere to his melody. That threw me into my own confrontation with my own metaphors about God and it boggled my mind—it fried my brain.”
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I like the idea that Mitchell's circuits sizzled when she tried to reconcile her own creativity with the idea of an outside, almighty creator. It suggests she was questioning something fundamental and profound through the act of creation itself. From a very practical, real-world point of view, Mitchell was moving through the definitive metaphysical process—death—from a distance. She was observing the downward spiral of the organic body. It was becoming a cruel cage for a creator who could no longer use his hands, make music, or use his voice. This loss meant Mitchell had to find her own way through the creative thicket.

The album was greeted with barbs, but Mitchell says her skin had thickened after
Summer Lawns
was trashed. She had no regrets. Eager to capture the essence of Mingus and the creative courage they shared, she marched into the darkness of the unknown without fear—a key component of what Nietzsche saw as the true creator. “Live dangerously!” he urged. “Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves!”
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Both Mitchell and Mingus loved dancing on the edge. It's this passionate desire that unites them. “He had a very wide emotionality. He cried easily, he fought easily, and he was an angry man,” she told Leonard Feather. “There was a lot of mojo in his life—there's a lot of mojo in my life, too. Charles was a very complex person, and when it came down to finish the album, I felt that we didn't have a complete portrait. I wished that every song had been dedicated to a certain aspect of his personality. But in a way, this did happen indirectly. The four [Mingus melodies] I did complete were all in some way inspired; they came to me in mysterious ways.”

If Mitchell felt uncharacteristically insecure about
Mingus
during its creation, she used her creative will and inner belief in the creative “mystery” to overcome the doubt. In fact, when she talked to the media about the record, she actually sounded a little—um—overconfident: “I'd be surprised if it wasn't well accepted in the jazz world, because it contains all the best elements of that music: It's very spontaneous, creative and fresh. As for the pop field, I dare not make any predictions. I hope people will find it accessible, but I know how intimidating great musicianship is to a lot of people.”
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David Crosby once said Joni Mitchell is “as humble as Mussolini.” This makes for a delicious sound bite, but it also points to one of the biggest misapprehensions about the artistic process—and that concerns ego. Mitchell loses patience on the topic: “I am an arrogant artist! And I'm sick of the false humility in this business!” she told
Details
in 1996.
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And I get really arrogant when they start pitting me against people and saying something or someone's like me when that something is mediocre! And talk about arrogance—Crosby has no right to call... I mean, I'm fond of Crosby. In fact, when I thought he was gonna die I actually prayed for him. [But] when Crosby says I'm as humble as Mussolini, let us please put it in context that he's always ready to take credit where it isn't due, and that's typical—get a man within four feet of me and he's gonna say he did it.

Yes. Joni Mitchell is one nervy broad, and her creative
cojones
were big enough to go toe to toe with a recognized jazz master. Regardless of what the outside world said, or continues to say, about
Mingus
, Mitchell sees the album as an unmitigated creative success because it achieved a level of musical symbiosis: “Even the great jazz vocalists tend to be fronting a track, whereas in this music, we're all mimicking each other,” she told Leonard Feather. “We're really entwined.”
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