Reckless Daughter
Page 1
DEDICATION
For my parents,
Martin and Connie Yaffe
CONTENTS
Dedication
PREFACE: NOTHING LASTS FOR LONG
1 ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, I’D RATHER BE DANCING
2 LET THE WIND CARRY ME: LESSONS IN WOMANHOOD
3 WILL YOU STILL LOVE ME TOMORROW?
4 A COMMON MODERN-DAY FAIRY TALE
5 DON’T GIVE YOURSELF AWAY
6 THE WORD MAN: LEONARD COHEN
7 EXPERIENCED
8 CLOUDS
9 OUR HOUSE
10 LADIES OF THE CANYON
11 SAND
12 BLUE
13 BETWEEN BREAKDOWN AND BREAKTHROUGH
14 THE SUNSHINE COAST
15 FOR THE ROSES
16 STAR-CROSSED
17 COURT AND SPARK: SOMETHING STRANGE HAPPENED
18 MILES OF AISLES
19 THE QUEEN OF QUEENS
20 HEJIRA AND THE ART OF LOSING
21 CRAZY WISDOM
22 MIRRORED BALL
23 DON JUAN’S RECKLESS DAUGHTER
24 MINGUS
25 NERVY BROAD
26 WILD THINGS RUN FAST
27 DOG EAT DOG
28 EMERGENCY ROOMS
29 SAVE THE BOMBS FOR LATER
30 TURBULENCE
31 SEE YOU AT THE MOVIES
32 CURTAIN CALL
33 JUST LIKE THIS TRAIN
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
Photo Section
A Note About the Author
Also by David Yaffe
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PREFACE: NOTHING LASTS FOR LONG
When I was fifteen, I had a high school girlfriend who was a couple of years older than me—dog years in those days. She had a piano and a stereo in her room, and very tolerant parents. We were both music students at an arts high school in Dallas; she sang, I played piano. We had a ritual of lying on her bed together in pitch-darkness, taking in what we were hearing with everything we had—the Velvet Underground, Miles Davis . . . One day, she played me Joni Mitchell’s Blue. Years later Joni would tell me that when she made that album she was totally without defenses, as vulnerable as “a cellophane wrapper on a packet of cigarettes,” as she once put it. When one is fifteen, everything is new and raw. I was falling in love with a girl and falling in love with this music. Neither came to you. You had to come to them. I held on tight in those tender, cellophane years.
In time, I would learn that while Joni was famous for being tender in public she also had to be tough in private. By the time Blue was released in 1971, she had survived polio and a bad first marriage, and recently fended off a marriage proposal from Graham Nash, whom she had loved. I didn’t know about these things yet. But my need to know about this woman I heard on the record eventually brought me closer and closer.
Over the years, I would turn to Joni’s music, sometimes when I needed to hear her tell me, as she does in “Trouble Child,” that I really am inconsolably on my own: “So what are you going to do about it / You can’t live life and you can’t leave it.” Ouch. And yet, in that voice, in those chords, there was nevertheless an implicit promise that life would go on, and would be full of surprises. And in her music, as again and again she sought someone who could understand her, who could offer a counterbalance to her ramblings and yearnings, she would tell us not to listen for her but to listen for ourselves. She wanted us to have some sort of transference. It was not a delusion to listen for yourself. It was an injunction.
That said, Joni’s songs taunt listeners into biographical readings, and they also invite us to understand the mind creating them. That’s what I wanted to understand, that’s what I hoped to find out when I first met Joni Mitchell, in January 2007. She had just finished recording her first album of new songs in ten years, Shine, and the Alberta Ballet was in rehearsal with The Fiddle and the Drum, a collaboration between Joni and the choreographer Jean Grand-Maître. I had come to Los Angeles to interview her for The New York Times.
It was five p.m. at La Scala Presto, an Italian trattoria in Brentwood. Joni had picked the restaurant because it was among the local restaurants willing to incur fines just for the pleasure of having Joni Mitchell dine and smoke there. As urban centers all over America were banning smoking in public places, life for Joni Mitchell was still a noir film from the ’40s, full of nicotine and screwball repartee. She kept smoking in public as long as she could, until she was eventually reduced to e-cigarettes.
I stood at the bar at the restaurant waiting for her, clenching my glass so tightly it broke into little pieces. That’s when they figured out I was the one meeting Joni and told me to relax: she was really nice. Really. I asked where she liked to sit. The outdoor table with the ashtray, of course. It was unseasonably chilly for LA and I asked them to turn on the heating lamp. I took the seat she didn’t prefer. I had brought a collection of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and Nietzsche Contra Wagner, books I knew had inspired Joni’s lyrics and weltanschauung, along with Kipling’s “If,” which I knew she had set to music. I looked to the final stanza, which I later learned Joni did not include in her adaptation, as a mantra to give me strength:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
I didn’t want the earth or everything in it, and I didn’t think Joni would want me to be the kind of man Kipling was telling me to be, but I thought, if this poem was important to Joni, then I would figure out why.
A half hour late, perfectly on time, a hand studded with more jewelry than I could fully take in reached out to me. “I’m Joni,” she said. “I know,” I replied. Be cool, just listen, and breathe. And listen some more.
None of the wines at La Scala Presto pleased her. She tasted each one. None was smooth enough to suit. Much more to her liking was a 1998 Chateau Margaux she pulled out of a case, later, at home.
She was giddy about the album, and ready to unleash what she calls a verbal “cauldron.” We talked about Miles Davis—about how she was introduced to him by Joni’s drummer boyfriend Don Alias, who had played on Bitches Brew, and about how Miles once made a play for her, then passed out with a deathlike grasp on her ankles. She had always dreamed of collaborating with him, she said, and it was reported to her that he owned all her albums that had been released up to his death. She loved Duke Ellington; disliked Coltrane, but she so loved Kind of Blue that she even liked Coltrane on it. And Debussy, which she pronounced “De-Boosie.” When she heard La Mer, she saw the sea.
Of course we talked about the ballet, and the new songs, which no civilian had heard yet. We talked about environmental apocalypse, about the Indian chiefs with their old beliefs, about the stupidity of Western medicine. “I’m mad at Socrates,” she said at one point. We talked about our shared love of the films of the Serbian director Emir Kusturica; about how she missed the conversations in New York City; about how she loved Dylan’s “Positively 4th Street” and “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and Blood on the Tracks (the New York sessions, not the Minnesota), but that she thought Desire was just okay and that Modern Times, which had just been released and had hit number one, was a work of “plagiarism.” “You can’t rule Bob out, though,” she said. “He and Leonard are the best pace runners I’ve got.” Then she slammed Cohen’s line from “Master Song,” “Your thighs are ruined,” as cruel to an older woman, and declared that even though he walked the walk and had become an ordained Buddhist monk, he was a “phony Buddhist.”
And yet, as hostile a
s some of this might look in print, it was all delivered with a joie de vivre. She loved to be provocative. She loved to be what she called a “pot stirrer.” She was trouble—and she was really good at it.
We closed the place down. The caravan continued to her house. There was a talking security system at the gate. I looked at her stack of books and noticed Simon Schama’s Rembrandt’s Eyes. Of course, I thought. She’s the great Renaissance portrait artist in song. They go for every nuance, the chiaroscuro of human emotion, the overtones beneath the chords, the resonance of existence.
She was sleeping by day, chain-smoking and creating by night. It seemed like we could have talked forever (and by talking, I mean she did the talking and I did the listening). Even though she is known for her introspective brooding—comparing herself with Job in “The Sire of Sorrow,” and singing lines like “Acid, booze, and ass / Needles, guns, and grass / Lots of laughs”—she actually does like to have lots of laughs. A devastating mimic and raconteur, she can serve up Dorothy Parker–like zingers with terrifying speed.
After twelve hours of Joni, up all night, my sense of reality had been permanently altered. On the flight home, I wanted to somehow keep the experience going, and I started listening to Hejira. The voice I heard was different. In the 1976 recording, I could hear her Saskatchewan cadences, her joys and her sorrows and everything in between.
During the week that followed, our conversation continued on the phone. And then my piece about her was published, and there were things about it that felt to her like an invasion, a betrayal.
I got bitched out by Joni Mitchell! She was a maestro, hurling one indignity at me after another. She loathed the picture the Times had chosen, and there was one phrase in particular that made her gorge rise: “middle-class.” That was the adjective I had used to describe her home. It struck a chord—and not a chromatic one—through the heart of the author of “The Boho Dance,” the art school dropout for whom there could be nothing worse than to be bourgeois.
“I don’t know what you think of as middle-class, but I live in a mansion, my property has many rooms, I have Renaissance antiques.”
“I meant that your home, at least what I saw of it, wasn’t intimidating. It was inviting. It was earthy.”
“Yes, that’s true. You were in the earthy section of my property.”
“Yes, earthy. I should have said earthy. If I could substitute the word now I would.”
She was so disappointed in me. She had thought I was different, somehow better than the others. Now I was the worst.
Years passed. One night, I had a delightful time out with a friend of hers, a sculptor who inspired her song “Good Friends” from Dog Eat Dog. Without any prompting from me, he called Joni and told her she had to go back to talking to me, and she did.
I flew to LA to see her. Even under the fluorescent kitchen light, she looked more beautiful than she did in the ads for Yves Saint Laurent that were in all the magazines. She looked strong, resilient, defiant, head held high. Ready for battle.
“You have no attention span,” she snapped.
“I’ve been sitting here for twelve hours,” I said. “In what universe does that mean that I have no attention span?”
I got an idea of what that universe was. I had questions prepared about her music, about art, and we did talk about those things, but she would invariably shift to her emotions, her body, her desires, the desires of men, the impossibility of relationships. At one point, during a wrenching description of a miscarriage, she stopped.
“Why are we talking about this?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was prepared to talk about the music.” But talking about the music meant talking about everything, because Joni Mitchell’s songs go straight to the heart, to the marrow, to the stuff of life. We weren’t going to sit there for half a day just talking about open tunings, though we did some of that, too.
And she played for me. She clipped her nails and began strumming a sequence of stunning chords. I recognized it as “Ladies’ Man” from Wild Things Run Fast (1982), a song inspired by the notorious lothario David Naylor. I asked her why she’d chosen to play me that. “It was the first tuning I found,” she said. I got up from the chair and watched her play from various angles. There is a picture from 1968 of Eric Clapton looking at her with similar wonder. His facial expression unmistakably said, “How does she do that?” This late in the game, she still had the power to confound. She delivered it once more, to an audience of one. When she was done, I applauded.
A couple of months after our encounter, Joni suffered a brain aneurysm. Joni would need to claw her way back yet again. Nothing lasts for long. All romantics meet the same fate. Albums are like novels or poems except that you can listen to them in the dark. You can always flip the record, put in another CD, reset the iPod. Close your eyes. Joni Mitchell will be there waiting for you.
1 ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, I’D RATHER BE DANCING
One more time, she had to explain how she was born, and how the stage would be set for her to be the hero of her own life. The more unlikely, the more heroic. Things conspired—extraordinary things, things no one back home or anywhere else—could have ever imagined. She said she did not grow up playing air guitar in the mirror. But she painted, she danced, nearly died, came back, danced again, and began to unfold.
Roberta Joan Anderson was born on November 7, 1943, in Fort Macleod, Alberta. Her mother had been a teacher and her father was a military man who later became a grocery store executive. The world would come to know her as Joni Mitchell, winner of eight Grammy Awards (including one in 2002 for Lifetime Achievement), inductee into the Rock and Roll and Canadian Songwriters Halls of Fame. She wrote a song—“Woodstock”—that named a generation, and routinely makes critics’ top ten lists of the greatest singer-songwriters of the twentieth century. “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Help Me” still play on classic rock radio every day, high school students still quote “The Circle Game” in yearbooks, and recordings of Blue are downloaded, Spotified, Pandora’d, and snapped up with mocha lattes at Starbucks around the world. “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot” has become so familiar it’s almost a cliché. In 2017, “Free Man in Paris” played, in its entirety, on the HBO series Girls, and “Both Sides, Now” was sung at the Oscars in 2016, in tribute to a year in which the world lost a stunning array of creative luminaries ranging from Prince (who loved Joni) and Leonard Cohen (who was Joni’s lover), to David Bowie, Gene Wilder, Mary Tyler Moore, and Carrie Fisher. In the contemporary imagination, Joni Mitchell is more than a 1970s icon or pop star. She is our eternal singer-songwriter of sorrows, traveling through our highs and lows, the twentieth-century master of the art song tradition that stretches to Franz Schubert. Joni is as introspective and eloquent as Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, but she went beyond them in melody and harmony, exploring chords only jazz virtuosi could play to her satisfaction. She has stopped performing, but her records keep playing, documents of beauty and imperfection. As long as people can listen to music, her story will be told in her voice, her weird chords, her inimitable way.
In her songs, big stories become gloriously condensed. And the story that began all the others—the story of her mother’s life and marriage, and of her own birth—are all told, briefly, beautifully, and powerfully in an astonishing song, “The Tea Leaf Prophecy.”
“It’s a lot of history in a small space, shorthanded,” Joni told me. “My mother, Myrtle McKee, had been a country schoolteacher and she came into the city. She was working in a bank next to the police station, and the windows of the cop shop looked down into the tellers’ area, and they were always flirting from the windows. But the tellers found Mounties and cops distasteful. She and her girlfriend went to the fancy hotel, and they had a tea leaf reader, a palmist also. They wore white gloves and hats and it was very la-di-da, because it was the tail end of the Canadian Anglophile era. So it was a kind of poshy thing to do. And when he read her tea leaves, he told her three things: you’ll
be married in a month, you’ll have a child within a year, and you’ll live to an old age and die a long and agonizing death, which is a terrible thing, even if you see it, to say.”
When Joni first recorded the song for her 1988 album, Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm, she used a pseudonym for her mother: Myrtle McKee became “Molly McGee.” First she tells the story of her mother’s visit with the tea leaf reader:
Newsreels rattle the Nazi dread
The able-bodied have shipped away
Molly McGee gets her tea leaves read
You’ll be married in a month they say
“These leaves are crazy,” says Molly McGee. It’s a joke. Consulting the leaves isn’t crazy; they’re just not making sense. And Joni’s musical mind emerges here figuratively. There are no men, just boys “talking to teacher in the treble clef.” The next verse is a beautiful, lyrical telling of her parents’ unlikely wartime romance. The man in this love story is, like Bill Anderson, a sergeant on a two-week leave. They meet and their fate is sealed. Joni imagines her young parents making love—a topic that would be awkward for most—with tenderness:
Oh these nights are strong and soft
Private passions and secret storms
Nothin’ about him ticks her off
And he looks so cute in his uniform
This romance is immediately followed with the locked-in domesticity of long hard winters in the Canadian prairies that is her mother’s life. There are endless chores, and the cycles are relentless, banal, with endless drudgery. And even her stated intention to flee becomes monotonous, too:
She says “I’m leavin’ here” but she don’t go
The story of Joni’s parents is one she attempted to unravel throughout her lifetime and in her music. Why had the stars aligned for Myrtle McKee, who had taught in a one-room school and was clerking at a bank in Regina, and William Anderson, on leave from the Royal Canadian Air Force? Anderson’s family hailed from Scandinavia. When a grown-up Joni asked him why his name didn’t have the usual Swedish spelling of “Andersen,” he said the name was changed at Ellis Island from “Amberson.” Joni suspected from her high cheekbones that she had Laplander blood. She also wondered if her father’s family was hiding a Jewish name.