Reckless Daughter

by David Yaffe

  At the end of the track, you can hear bells. It’s not a wedding, and it’s not a funeral. It’s something in between—amorous limbo, with partners keeping their options way, way open.

  “Help Me” comes next, and it comes to the listener through the sun-drenched lens of a 1970s Polaroid camera. The song begins with an escalating guitar rhythm and it is almost like Joni is driving a car full of dreamers idling outside your house. She’s at the wheel of a 1974 baby-blue Mustang convertible that matches her eyes. Where are they going? Anywhere and everywhere you might ever want to go. Joni has described herself as a frustrated filmmaker and nowhere is this more evident than on “Help Me,” in which she constructs a three-minute-and-twenty-four-second movie with music and lyrics. There’s the heroine, who has met either the love of her life or, as Sheryl Crow so deftly described it, her “favorite mistake.” The love interest is “a rambler and a gambler and a sweet-talking ladies’ man.” They will talk and dance and lie there, “not talking,” and it all feels so good. But it isn’t built to last. Not because he’s a rogue. Yes, he loves his freedom more than he loves the loving. But she does, too. It is Love, American Style as only Joni could have written it.

  “Help Me” would become Joni’s only Top 10 single as a recording artist, and within two months of its release, Court and Spark would peak on the Billboard charts at number two, an amazing feat. It would sell more than two million copies in its first year, and eventually attain double-platinum status.

  In his 33⅓ series monograph on the album, the music writer Sean Nelson keenly puts this accomplishment into perspective: “The significance of such a quantifiably huge success is difficult to distill given that Joni Mitchell was already unquestionably a big star with a couple of gold records under her belt and also given that rock music was still the key cultural influence on young America, such that grown-up America had to take it seriously. The difference between the Top 20—where her previous hit records had peaked—and number two, however, is more than just a few numbers. It’s the difference between being well known in your field and being a household name. It’s the difference between having fans devoted to following your work and reaching people who buy whatever’s on the radio hit parade in a given week . . . In 1974, before cable TV, before the internet, before the heroic expansion of leisure possibilities that represents the past thirty years’ most obvious form of progress, a number one record meant pretty much everyone was listening.”

  Mind if I turn on the radio?

  Oh, my favorite song, she said

  And it was Joni singing,

  Help me, I think I’m falling . . .

  That’s Prince, an avid Joni Mitchell fan, echoing the power and reach of her music in his sultry love-and-lust song “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker.”

  In a June 1974 cover story for the Canadian magazine Maclean’s, Joni spoke to her friend Malka Marom about what the runaway success of Court and Spark meant to her. In the interview, Joni admits that she never expected to hit it so big. She says, “I always kept my goals very short, like I would like to play in a coffeehouse, so I did. I would like to play in the United States, you know, the States, the magic of crossing the border. So I did. I would like to make a certain amount of money a year, which I thought would give me the freedom to buy the clothes that I wanted and the antiques and just some women trips, a nice apartment in New York that I wouldn’t have to be working continually to support. But I had no idea that I would be this successful, especially since I came to folk music when it was already dying.”

  One of Joni’s defining qualities has come to be the way that her prodigious musicality and her powers of observation put her consistently ahead of the curve. If pop culture was a winding road from Sunset Boulevard up into the Hollywood Hills, one might imagine that Joni was driving the pace car, leading us through each zigzag. “People’s Parties,” for example, had the incredible timing of debuting within weeks of the premiere issue of People magazine. After a $40 million investment and with great hoo-hah, Time, Inc., published the first issue on March 4, 1974, with Mia Farrow on the cover. Three thousand miles away, Joni had been hanging out at all those Hollywood parties—intrigued, attracted, and sometimes disgusted—and her song functions like a reporter’s dispatch from the front lines of the entertainment industry.

  Some are friendly, some are cutting

  Some are watching it from the wings

  Some are standing in the center

  Giving to get something

  Joni is our emissary into the world of glitterati. She sees vanity, success and failure, outer beauty and inner emptiness. What does she have? Is she that special? She says she’s not the sharpest tool, wandering around with “a weak and a lazy mind.” Trevor Horn, the British music producer who some have dubbed “the man who invented the eighties,” once told BBC’s Radio 4 that “People’s Parties” was the song he’d most like to pass down to his children. He said he’d considered “citing Bob Dylan as an example of lyrical excellence, and Debussy as a master of melody, but then realized Joni Mitchell did both at once. Court and Spark,” Horn declared, “will stand up in two hundred years’ time, in my opinion.”

  She has one foot planted in the 1970s, and another in a timeless realm. Here we find every subtle and glaring aspect of love—the chase, the quest, falling in, falling out, falling again, being dizzy, disappointed, and everything in between. And we don’t just feel, we hear it. “Car on a Hill” is an elaborate expression of what it means to be stood up. You are alone, you are waiting for a lover, and the hills of Hollywood represent the thing that’s on its way, maybe. The car could be caught in traffic, you tell yourself. But that car could be picking up another girl, one who has already been picked up. You plot your next move, you contemplate revenge, you are furious, but you still aren’t sure.

  Joe Sample’s keyboard climbs up and down the keyboard, Larry Carlton’s guitar evokes traffic, John Guerin’s sticks hit the skins like pacing feet, and the horn section signals the next car. Cars were never bigger or flashier than they were in 1974. Those gas-guzzlers were boats. It would be hard to miss one coming. The singer knows that men are like cars—there really will be another one. Still, it’s a lonely wait up there. This is a movie scene with no resolution, losing hope with every added line. “There’s still no buzzer, they roll on,” she sings, “and I’m waiting for his car on the hill.” The action of this song is where things don’t happen.

  The same could be said, in a sense, of “Free Man in Paris,” in which our man feels “unfettered and alive” with “nobody calling me up for favors / And no one’s future to decide.” David Geffen begged Joni not to include the song on her album. It had been inspired by a vacance taken by Joni, Geffen, and Robbie Robertson of the Band, and Geffen was that momentarily free spirit.

  “But why?” she asked. “It’s not an unflattering portrait.”

  And it wasn’t—but the liberation expressed in the song wasn’t just about escaping dreamers and telephone screamers. It’s about trawling the Champs Élysées, going from café to cabaret, thinking how he’ll feel when he finds “that very good friend of mine.” It was about the freedom to express your true sexual self.

  Geffen is gay, and was terrified the song would out him. This was less than five years after the Stonewall uprising of 1969, a response to the treatment of men caught in gay bars in New York City, men whose names would be punitively published in The New York Times whether they were schoolteachers or surgeons at Mount Sinai. Gay liberation was still a fringe movement, and for someone as ambitious as Geffen, exposure felt downright dangerous. The inspired and unstable singer-songwriter Judee Sill blew her Asylum deal when she began outing Geffen in a radio interview. (She was furious that Geffen was paying too much attention to Joni.) Geffen was at heart a businessman, as savvy an operator as the industry has ever seen, with a knack for knowing who to sign, then a knack for knowing who to hire to do the signing when he got too old to know what the young people would want. And when he sens
ed the traditional music business was about to go belly-up, he sold his company at its peak market value. It would take Geffen twenty years to come out of the closet, when the times really had changed—and when he was too rich and too powerful to take down.

  It is beyond ironic that such a stubbornly independent artist as Joni would also move in with her label boss and even write an affectionate song inspired by him. The Stones loved Ahmet Ertegun, but was he really expecting Mick and Keith to write a song about a Turkish music mogul taking a vacation? “Free Man in Istanbul”? Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen never wrote songs for John Hammond, and wouldn’t have moved in with him, either. (Dylan and Hammond as roommates? Seriously?) Joni ended up hating the music business as much as anyone who had thrived in it, but she was also in way deep with the Man. (For a song about what was really wrong with David Geffen, one would have to listen to Aimee Mann’s “Nothing Is Good Enough” many years later.) Joni is philosophical about her old friend. “The music business has always been operated by crooks . . . but at least the crooks loved music,” Joni would say.

  What is striking to recall is that back in the 1970s, privacy was something you could travel for. Parisians didn’t know who, say, David Geffen was, and they were less likely to care if they did. You could walk into a club as one thing, and walk out something else. Straight-gay, rich-poor-Jew-gentile: these distinctions could collapse in the stunning scenery of a Paris night.

  As of 2017, Geffen is the hundred-ninetieth richest man in the world, with a fortune of $7.35 billion. Joni did not blow his cover—and in truth, few people hearing the song when it was released would have understood what it was about. It did make one thing clear, though: No one is immune to loneliness.

  “Same Situation” is not about loneliness ipso facto. It is more of a rumination on what happens on one’s way to intimacy, or at least an attempt at it. It is about artifice, about a phone that stops ringing, and about a room full of mirrors that turn a simple ritual of primping into a fun house of desperation. The song begins with Joni, who, like the rest of us, is preparing a face for the faces she will meet. She is not the resilient woman of “Cactus Tree,” who collects men but doesn’t need to be watered. Nor is she the precocious sage who has looked at life from both sides, now. She is looking at her reflection in “a room full of mirrors.” Those mirrors are meant to catch her least flattering angle, and, as the title has it, she has been here before. The singer of “Same Situation” wonders how she can measure up to another girl gazing in another mirror. This is not narcissism, but reflection as blood sport. In El Lay, there’s always another pretty girl looking at another mirror, and that girl could be having the same doubts, too. But this song is not about the competition. In 1974, the rules were changing fast. The man has told her he loved her, but she wonders if it can be real. The piano climbs up and down, the bass and the cymbals come in right in time. The L.A. Express is there, but she is inconsolably alone. There is a man, but it’s complicated.

  Joni was said to be involved with Warren Beatty when she was writing these songs, at least according to gossip rags and a tabloid photo in which they are walking together, looking down and in cahoots about something. Whatever their history, Beatty was clearly on Joni’s mind in those heady days of 1973–74. Writer, actor, director, lothario, major pain in the ass, Beatty was as discerning about his paramours as he was with his work. This was the guy who, when working with Robert Altman in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, would reshoot Altman’s scenes after the day’s shooting had wrapped. Beatty, who was romantically linked to Julie Christie in this period, was always looking for perfection, and the songs on Court and Spark, meticulously wrought, take dead-center aim at a man who is “Weighing the beauty and the imperfection, to see if I’m worthy.”

  David Crosby said that Joni was “about as modest as Mussolini.” Yet in “Same Situation,” the singer is uneasy about what this man, who has known lots of women, will find. The imperfection is never defined. Is it physical? Is it emotional? Is it the same thing that makes her vulnerable, and is it vulnerability that made her an artist? Can the beauty of the art be bracketed from the imperfect woman who made it? Beauty and imperfection are big categories for a song that doesn’t quite reach three minutes. The air gets pretty thin up there, where the search for love sticks around in the highest of stratospheres. It’s quite a swirl of neuroses, a perfect storm for a Joni Mitchell song.

  The singer is expected to measure up to every standard of beauty while also expected to be a moral exemplar, “like the church, like a cop, like a mother.” Larry Carlton’s slide guitar cries in the distance, and the strings, arranged by Tom Scott, swell. This same situation is not something that can last for too long. Heaven is full of astronauts. The Lord is on death row. The weight of the world is even heavier than the judgmental gaze of any heartthrob. She wants this man’s approval, but she can also see to the other side. The search for love will go on.

  “What came first? The music or the misery? Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?” wonders the protagonist of High Fidelity, Nick Hornby’s landmark novel about love and music. Court and Spark was fabulously popular in 1974, maybe because all the lonely people were listening to it, too. “What are you gonna do now? / You got no one to give your love to.” This question, placed in the bridge of “Just Like This Train,” is a variation of the second-person interrogation of “Down to You,” even as it is in the context of a more playful song, about accumulating lovers (“I used to count lovers like railroad cars”) and coming late to all occasions, a sure sign of success. Joni doesn’t count on anything anymore, so why should anyone count on her? The sculptor Nathan Slate Joseph, who rented a SoHo loft to her from 1978 to 1987, recalled that making a Sunday brunch plan with Joni was always dicey: she would often get lost in a song or a painting and shrug plans away. What is the price of independence? A brunch plan is with a companion; a song could be for the world. But these emotions could be annoying! “Jealous lovin’ll make you crazy / If you can’t find your goodness / ’Cause you lost your heart.”

  The singer of “Down to You,” a rumination about looking for love and walking away with lust, hasn’t lost her heart, and that is where the trouble begins. The casual hookup inspires her to take a cold, hard look at solitude. “Blue” is sung to a color, a mood, a spectrum of melancholy. “Down to You” is addressed to all that, plus everything else, all in second person. She is singing to the listener, or to anyone else looking for warmth and beauty, settling for less than fascination, and having a morning-after regret. “Everything comes and goes” is the opening line and opening move of the song. Most things are ephemeral: fashion, relationships, pop songs, and dance crazes that disappear among the flotsam.

  “Down to You” is about the bigger picture. The “You” is a “constant stranger,” both kind and cold. You, Joni says, have a choice. Even though, on the Top 10 single on this album, Joni sings about loving one’s freedom even more than one’s loving, the woman Rolling Stone crowned Queen of El Lay is actually morally unrelenting with this second-person interlocutor. “You” could live a life that means something. “You” are better than the zipless fuck. “You” are more than a hedonist, and Joni said that she never met a self-described hedonist who wasn’t a total asshole.

  The “You” of the song is probably not a total asshole, but does have a moment of hedonism so acute, “You” become less discerning with every drink, craving “warmth and beauty,” settling with less than fascination, and waking up with an emotional hangover. True to the song’s inarguable observation that “Pleasure moves on too early / And trouble leaves too slow,” the craving for warmth and beauty is immediately followed by shame, with the darkness of night covering a body like a fig leaf. It is impossible to go lower than “Blue,” but “Down to You” makes the abyss more expansive, opening up the melancholy into a narrative. “You” is a projection: brutish and angelic, on all fours and soaring in the air. “Down to You” makes no
attempt for resolution. “You” are the one to figure it out.

  Joni performed the song only once, on her Miles of Aisles tour of 1974, backed by the London Symphony Orchestra. She caused a stir when, improvising the passage between the third and fourth verse, she lost her place and gave up. It was as if she had become her own interlocutor, and even music couldn’t rescue her. The London Symphony Orchestra, in the Royal Albert Hall no less, was scandalized. She never tried to play the song live again. Although she and the London Symphony would meet again, “Down to You” is forever unresolved.

  The album closes with Joni’s cover of Annie Ross and Wardell Gray’s gem, “Twisted.” Leave ’em laughing, the entertainment-savvy Geffen would have told her, but she knew that already. After so much soul baring, the placement of “Twisted” at the end of this emotionally exhausting and rewarding album was a mark of showbiz genius. Laugh away. To everything, there is a season. And like a trailer for the albums to come, the jazzy rendition of “Twisted” lets Joni’s listeners know the direction she is heading in musically.

  Joni has said that when she was in high school, Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross were her Beatles. Dave Lambert, Jon Hendricks, and Annie Ross took scat singing—wordless jazz vocalizing, invented by Louis Armstrong, perfected by Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and Betty Carter—did the difficult yet somehow whimsical work of putting it into words that rhymed, told stories, and swung. Putting entertaining lyrics to, say, a Charlie Parker solo is sort of like running the ten-yard dash with a wrestler on your back while composing witty sonnets. This feat is known as vocalese, putting wacky lyrics not just to jazz melodies, but to jazz solos. For a teenage listener in Saskatoon, it was the sound of liberation, the idea that anything with words and music was possible—that something difficult and complex could also be lighthearted and fun as hell.