by David Yaffe
Joni, even as a twenty-four-year-old divorcée who had secretly given up a child for adoption, was resolute. “Every bit of trouble I went through, I’m grateful for,” she said. “Bad fortune changed the course of my destiny. I became a musician.”
5 DON’T GIVE YOURSELF AWAY
I was reading Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King on a plane and early in the book Henderson the Rain King is also up in a plane. He’s on his way to Africa and he looks down and sees these clouds. I put down the book, looked out the window and saw clouds too, and I immediately started writing the song. I had no idea that the song would become as popular as it did.”
She’d been instructed to read the book by her soon-to-be-ex-husband. In it, Bellow writes about the mystery and majesty of traveling by plane. “We are the first generation to see clouds from both sides. What a privilege! First people dreamed upward. Now they dream both upward and downward.” At the time, Chuck Mitchell ridiculed the song. What could his young wife possibly know about looking at both sides of life? Joni was indeed all of twenty-three when she wrote it, but she had seen more of life and love than most young adults. The description of Henderson’s awe, filtered through experience, resonated for her: “And I dreamed down at the clouds, and thought that when I was a kid I had dreamed up at them, and having dreamed at the clouds from both sides as no other generation of men has done, one should be able to accept his death very easily.”
After landing, when she picked up a guitar to match the music with the words, she followed the line “I’ve looked at life that way” with a blues riff that undercut any mawkishness from the words she had just sung, and even from the falsetto in which she sang them. That blues riff keeps coming back on every turnaround, a reminder that the images of childhood dissolve into a more complex mode, harmonically—in this case, the Mixolydian mode, with what bebop musicians called its flatted seventh—and thematically.
“Both Sides, Now” was an early instance of a method Joni would explore throughout her career: that of a repeated trope (or anaphora) that holds together a concept that widens throughout the song. First she sings:
I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
Then she circles back and sings:
I’ve looked at love from both sides now
Each time, she returns to the phrase a little differently and a little deeper. Part of what makes her songwriting so powerful is that within the familiar four-minute melodic structure she consistently refuses to let a chorus be merely a catchy refrain. She chisels away at the rock of what is repeated until something more powerful is revealed. Finally, the third time around, she tells us:
I’ve looked at life from both sides now
But if she is a scientist, probing, studying, asking questions, exploring, ultimately she is dissatisfied enough with the data to pronounce that her findings are inconclusive:
It’s life’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know life at all
Despite all she had gone through, Joni was, at heart, still a romantic. “I loved the beautiful melodies which belonged to the crooner era. But those melodies had very simple text. There wasn’t much room for poetic description. They’re beautiful, but they are very direct English. That’s what suits that kind of melody. But I like the more storytelling quality of Dylan’s work.”
She followed Dylan’s path from the coffeehouses to the concert stage, but she also followed the trail that he carved out as a songwriter, the opportunities that his particular, peculiar expression of music created for a young musician trying to find her voice. “Dylan inspired me with the idea of the personal narrative. He would speak as if to one person in a song. Like, ‘You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend.’ Nobody had ever written anything like that in song form. Such a personal, strong statement. His influence was to personalize my work. I feel this for you, or from you or because of you. That was the key. This opens all the doors. Now we can write about anything.”
Joni would have to find her own way: balancing the complexity of narrative that she aspired to and the music. “The thing I was reluctant to let go of was the melodic, harmonic sense. Whereas [with] Dylan, you could speak in paragraphs. But it was from the sacrifice of music. You get the plateaus upon which to speak. It was my job to distill a hybrid that allowed for a certain amount of melodic movement and harmonic movement. But with a certain amount of plateaus in order to make the longer statement, to be able to say more.”
Al Kooper was sitting in Joni’s New York apartment at 41 West Sixteenth Street when he heard her play “Both Sides, Now.” It was his passion for it, his instinct for what he had heard and what he had found in Joni that would change everything. Al Kooper was a master of seizing the moment. The most famous example involved him being in the recording studio when Bob Dylan was laying down the track for “Like a Rolling Stone.” When Kooper saw that the great blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield had showed up for the date, Kooper was ready to pack up. Then he saw no one was sitting at the organ and he saw an opportunity. Kooper kept insisting that the song needed an organ. When he started working out his part, the producer Tom Wilson turned to Dylan and said, “He’s not an organ player.” Dylan said, “Don’t tell me who’s an organ player and who’s not an organ player.” Wilson had a point: Kooper didn’t know how to play organ, not really. But he hopped on the bench, started playing, and within seconds, created the simple yet iconic organ part that opens “Like a Rolling Stone.” Dylan’s instinct was correct, and Wilson was replaced with another producer the next day. It was the kind of luck that turned an obscure young studio musician into a music industry legend.
When Kooper heard Joni sing “Both Sides, Now” in her apartment, he leaped for the phone and despite the hour, three a.m., started to frantically dial a number. When Judy Collins picked up the phone, Kooper was blathering on about an amazing talent he’d discovered. He was convinced that he’d found the missing element for Collins’s upcoming album Wildflowers, and that if she didn’t snatch up the song right away, someone else would make it a hit.
Collins had, by that point, already made her way through a few musical transitions. She had been a classical piano prodigy, then a folkie siren whose only peer was Joan Baez. (Bob Dylan wrote “Daddy, You’ve Been on My Mind” for her to sing even as he was performing the “Mama” version with Baez.) Her recent role was that of popularizer, which began in the role of discoverer, something at which her blind disc jockey father excelled.
Although Judy was starting to write songs—Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen encouraged her—her albums were essentially compilations of new rock and folk arranged with lush orchestrations that sounded destined for an Original Broadway Cast soundtrack. Covering the Beatles—even though she did it beautifully—meant competing with well-loved recordings. Discovering the optimal unsigned and unrecorded talent was priceless.
Kooper apologized for waking Collins up, but assured her it would be worth it. Without even saying hello, Joni, guitar tuned and ready, launched into “Both Sides, Now,” an intimate song she was now sharing with someone she had never met.
“She did play me ‘Both Sides, Now,’ which is a miracle,” Collins recalled. “Can you imagine? For that to happen to me? How extraordinary is that? Absolutely mind-boggling. I had an album that was being made right then and I wanted to record the song right away. That night, I went crazy and said, ‘I must have this song.’ So the next day, I said, ‘Why don’t I bring Jac Holzman to your place?’ Which I did! I called Jac the next day and said, ‘You won’t believe what I just heard. We have to go see Joni.’ So we went to see Joni. And there was some discussion about Dave Van Ronk wanting to record the song. Then she sang us the song and he said, ‘Of course! It must be on this album!’”
The song as Joni played it was still too raw to be a hit—not without some studio tinkering—but Judy was immediately floored by hearing a young woman strumming and singing about illusions gained and lost, love seen from the heights of hope and wonder and the
depths of disillusionment. Beneath the soaring soprano and cascading chords, there is a bluesy turnaround; admitting that one doesn’t know life at all is when the fantasy crashes down to reality, and when one turns to the blues.
Judy remembered, “We went into the studio, we recorded ‘Both Sides, Now’ for Wildflowers, and, of course, the whole setup was right, it was right for the song at the moment, because we had Josh Rivkin, who was doing orchestration. I was mad about Joni’s songs, mad about them. I went to her apartment and she played me ‘That Song About the Midway’ and ‘Michael from Mountains,’ which I recorded. It was all about getting those songs on this particular album, because it was a big, big deal. Everyone at Elektra was ready to make this happen. It took about nine months for it to go on the charts. We did it over and over. We remixed and remixed until they got it.”
Collins was twenty-eight—four years older than Joni. She had known suicidal depression and the euphoria of romance, the disappointment of divorce, and the perils and pleasures of commercial success. Her perspective may not have been as vast as Joni’s, but she could certainly hear herself in it, an experience Joni would strive for in her listeners as long as she made music.
“I was on the board of the Newport festival with all the boys—George Wein, Harold Leventhal, Pete Seeger, Peter Yarrow,” Collins explained. “Ronnie Gilbert [of the Weavers] and I were the only women, and I started to campaign with the board to get a singer-songwriter afternoon, because I wanted Joni Mitchell on that show. And I wanted Leonard Cohen on that show. It was like coming up against a brick wall. They didn’t want anything to do with this. They were in this odd retroactive phase. It was as if they forgot that Pete Seeger wrote all these songs. They wanted everything old. If it wasn’t at least two centuries old, they didn’t want it. And I had to bang their heads together to get them to understand that they had to have this afternoon concert with Joni and Leonard, and Tom Paxton was on it, also, and Janis Ian. It was a big, big, big deal. I wanted to do this for Joni, Leonard, and Janis.”
Judy Collins could be a game changer for an up-and-coming singer-songwriter, and Joni knew it. Collins could call the shots at Newport and beyond, while Joni was just a musician’s musician, not yet in a situation when she could afford to be dismissive of someone about to give her major exposure. Yes, she was being covered by Tom Rush, Ian and Sylvia, and Buffy Sainte-Marie, but she was living from gig to gig.
Those who had seen her were enthralled by this Aeolian harp, idiosyncratic tunings and all, and how she whispered back the secrets of their heart, with an honesty that could be terrifying. She developed a habit, which she would eventually take with her to the biggest venues, of locking eyes with someone in the front row. She would sing directly to that person the entire show, pouring out everything she had and sharing it with someone who was probably a total stranger. “Don’t give yourself away,” she sang, but give herself away was exactly what she was doing night after night.
And yet before most people could hear Joni perform “Both Sides, Now,” they had to hear Judy Collins first. Joni was not impressed. She wasn’t turning down the royalties or the glory of Judy Collins’s Grammy, but she never did like what Collins did to her song. There are some people Joni can be very harsh about, and Collins is one of them. “Judy Collins sounds like the damsel in the greenroom,” Joni said dismissively. “There’s something la-di-da about her.”
Joni has made no secret of her opinions about Judy Collins, a fact that Collins finds baffling. “Joni has never gotten over whatever it was that happened, which was that she got famous because I recorded the song,” Collins told me. “It was amazing, and I am eternally grateful—Joni, I don’t think so. I once asked David Crosby, ‘Why is Joni so mad at me?’ He said, ‘Joni hates everybody.’ There are other issues with what Joni’s mind does for her when other people get around her, or when other people do something fantastic for her. I did something fantastic for her. And I was honored that I was a part of that. How could you think that that wasn’t a blessing for the both of us? It was the beginning of her career! Why slam the person who did the biggest favor of her career? It’s so insulting.”
There exists a low-fidelity bootleg of Joni performing the song a few months after Judy heard it, and after Newport. It’s from a date at the White Swan in Leicester, England, in September 1967. Joni would later describe the sound of her voice in this period as “a squeaky girl on helium,” but her listeners are clearly enthralled. Back then, she had written some of her future hits—including “Urge for Going,” “The Circle Game,” and “Chelsea Morning”—but hadn’t recorded them yet. Giggly and self-deprecating, Joni nervously chats up a storm between songs while adjusting her tunings for each one.
James Taylor would later say, with no small degree of admiration, “Joni invented everything about her music, including how to tune the guitar. From the beginning of the process of writing, she’s building the canvas as well as she is putting the paint on it. No one’s trained her, she trained herself. And even in these early compositions, she finds a harmony or a group of chords, and invariably, it’s never straight on.”
As she tunes to an open A chord (the Clouds version would be recorded in F-sharp—an open D with a capo on fret 7), she sounds deceptively rambling and timid, like an eager college student who hasn’t finished her reading assignment. She explains to the crowd how she came to write a song that, by then, they knew well: “A short time ago, a friend of mine gave me a book called Henderson the Rain King, and I started to read it but I never got finished. I got halfway through and sort of left the whole plot up in the air—literally—and got inspired to write the next song . . . I liked the idea of clouds from both sides . . . and some other things from both sides.” Then, as only Joni can, she starts to sing.
6 THE WORD MAN: LEONARD COHEN
In 1954, the producer George Wein founded the Newport Jazz Festival. The first festival took place at the Newport Casino, where academic panels discussed the importance of elevating jazz, what would come to be known as America’s classical music. Outside the casino, on the expansive lawns of that seaside town, were the performances. On Saturday, July 17, 1954, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, the Dizzy Gillespie Quintet, and more than half a dozen other notable jazz acts performed. On Sunday, July 18, Billie Holiday was the headliner. More than thirteen thousand people attended that first festival: a surprisingly young and racially mixed crowd. Although many of the white, upper-class residents of the Newport community protested against the festival, the event only grew in popularity.
Five years later, Wein launched a tandem festival: the Newport Folk Festival. Joan Baez was the surprise guest in 1959. Four years later, Baez made history when she introduced Bob Dylan as her surprise guest. Judy Collins knew well what she was doing when she brought a then unknown Joni Mitchell and fellow Canadian Leonard Cohen to the festival: she was introducing them to the world. What she didn’t realize was that she was also introducing Mitchell and Cohen to each other, the beginning of a romantic and creative friendship that would deeply influence both of their careers.
In the photos from that day, Joni and Cohen don’t look like they have just met. It could’ve been an album cover shoot. Cohen, thirty-three, in a blazer and crisply ironed shirt, holds his guitar. Joni is the picture of mod elegance in a chic minidress and T-strap shoes. The two brim with ebullience, youth, beauty, and artistic ambition. They look completely at ease together, as if they are already intimate. Joni is beaming, and Cohen shows no signs of the angst that had overtaken him, off and on, in the previous months. It was in that fragile state that Collins had brought Cohen to a performance at the Fillmore months earlier, and he fled mid-song in a fit of stage fright, only to be coaxed back by Collins, who held his hand until his performance of “Suzanne” was complete. The audience, impressed by this authentic neurosis, burst into approving applause.
Cohen had spent much of the previous year in the studio recording his debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen—or trying to. “[The
producer, John] Hammond created an extremely hospitable atmosphere and wasn’t breathing over my shoulder,” Cohen recalled. “He had a heart attack, and I went down to Costa Rica to cool out on a beach, because I was so anxious. Then I went to a hypnotist. And I said, ‘I’ve forgotten what all my songs are about. Could you hypnotize me to remember what I meant when I wrote these songs?’” By Newport, Cohen was more confident. Or at least was having a better day.
Cohen was no match for Joni as a musician; he knew only a limited number of chords on guitar and his voice was a drone that could be hypnotic, but only to those persuaded by the material and the persona. But Cohen had no vanity about his musicianship. He was a “word man,” confident as a writer, a reader, a suitor, a lover. He passed whatever her jive detector was at that stage.
Cohen became the most significant man in Joni’s life after Chuck Mitchell, and he was certainly more significant to her than Chuck Mitchell, even if her romance with Cohen, off and on, lasted only a few months. Joni would later call Cohen a “boudoir poet.” Yet their boudoir wasn’t just a place for seduction and consummation—even though, with Cohen, there was always plenty of that. It was also a place for poetry, for spiritual yearning, for a relentless, almost compulsive search for deeper and deeper meaning. When they met, he was nine years older than she was, and before recording Songs of Leonard Cohen, his first album (which would appear at the very end of 1967), he had already published four books of poetry and two novels.
The combination of her voice, her guitar, her words, and the way she looked—such beauty emanating from such beauty—made her irresistible. Yet with Cohen, even casual sex was never casual, but a pathway to souls, words, and inspiration. To inspire literally means “to breathe life into.” The combination of lust and the life of the mind was essentially what the Cohen of this period was all about. He looked to the verse of Lorca, the philosophy of Camus, and the wisdom of Zen masters as part of the art of seduction. So here was this radiant woman who appeared before him at the Newport Folk Festival, not only offering her body, but also her mind. When Chuck Mitchell recommended books, it was with condescension. Cohen was a man who made Joni want to read more, to find more ways to be inspired.
