by David Yaffe
In 1952, when Annie Ross was in her early twenties, the owner of Prestige Records, Bob Weinstock, challenged the young singer (who had already appeared on Our Gang at the age of six) to put lyrics to one of the label’s bebop numbers. She chose Wardell Gray’s “Twisted” for the title, and, before the word vocalese even existed, she took Gray’s melody and solo and wrote words overnight. The lyrics have become canonized, and the opener, “My analyst told me that I was right out of my head,” became a “Call me Ishmael” of jazz libretto. Looking back on it, Annie Ross remembers, “I was telling a story, and that’s what I do when I sing. I wanted to get it done quickly because I was broke.” It was a story that gave just the right humor to an album that had its share of the blues, and even some madness, too. “I had a brain, it was insane,” went the rhythmically supple lyric.
“Twisted” rounded out the dark emotions of the album with a clever punch line—“Instead of one head / I got two / And you know two heads are better than one.” But this would be an album that, however popular it was, punched in many ways. Court and Spark would be a turning point. Joni would soon be demanding even more from her listeners.
The success of the album would bear fruit on the road, and the success of the tour would be documented on another hit album, Miles of Aisles. On the road, Joni debuted two new songs. One of them, the biblical, erotic, emotive ballad “Jericho,” where walls tumble down everywhere, and gloriously, was given a second and even greater pass, in another phase, on Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter three years later. Another track, “Love or Money,” was placed at the end of the album, never rerecorded or revisited and, oddly for such a popular album, seldom talked about. It is about that precarious perch Joni has found herself on. And it makes her think of the unappreciated artist in the “firmament of Tinsel Town,” asking, “Where’s my own shining hour?” It is such a hard-driving rock song, it’s easy to miss that this is a tender story about a “well-kept secret of the underground / . . . in debt to the company store,” someone who might have recorded an album or two for Asylum that never made it, someone who would never be Geffen’s houseguest. He writes songs about loss—“stacks and stacks of words that rhyme / Describing what it is to lose.” He wants success, he wants that girl. He doesn’t get anything. He can’t get anything down for love or money. He’s that close to playing real good for free. At the end of the song, recorded live, there is roaring applause.
Just as Dylan’s storytelling had opened the door for Joni to write music in a different way, Joni was beginning to influence a wide range of musicians. Led Zeppelin, reportedly, wrote “Going to California” as a love song to Joni:
To find a queen without a king;
They say she plays guitars and cries and sings
In performances, Robert Plant would utter the name “Joni” after these lines; it was a reference to “I Had a King,” the opening track on her debut album, Song to a Seagull. Jimmy Page would tell a reporter, “That’s the music that I play at home all the time, Joni Mitchell. Court and Spark I love because I’d always hoped that she’d work with a band. But the main thing with Joni is that she’s able to look at something that’s happened to her, draw back and crystallize the whole situation, then write about it. She brings tears to my eyes, what more can I say? It’s bloody eerie.”
In Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga, Stephen Davis writes, “Later Jimmy was aglow because he had been introduced to Joni Mitchell at a restaurant called the Greenhouse. It was just small talk, but Jimmy had at last met one of his true idols. Later Robert passed up an opportunity to meet La Mitchell at a party, saying he was too shy to talk to her.”
Prince Rogers Nelson was a high school student living in Minneapolis when Court and Spark exploded onto the airwaves of radio stations around the country. In an interview with New York magazine, Joni remembered, “Prince attended one of my concerts in Minnesota. I remember seeing him sitting in the front row when he was very young. He must have been about fifteen. He was in an aisle seat and he had unusually big eyes. He watched the whole show with his collar up, looking side to side. You couldn’t miss him—he was a little Princeling.” She laughed as she recalled, “Prince used to write me fan mail with all of the U’s and hearts that way that he writes. And the office took it as mail from the lunatic fringe and just tossed it.”
Decades before artists like Lady Gaga would encourage their fans to, in a paraphrase of David Crosby, “let their freak flag fly,” Joni Mitchell songs permeated the cities and the suburbs of North America, assuring her fans that whatever they were going through, they were not alone and they weren’t certifiable. One of the best compliments Joni said she ever received was when she was approached, in the 1990s, by two teenage girls who told her, “Before Prozac, there was you.”
18 MILES OF AISLES
Joni’s first album with a band would be followed by her first tour with a band. It would be too soon when the tour began to know just how big it would be. It turned out to be quite big indeed, so big that the live album from the tour, Miles of Aisles, charted at number two. The tour began on January 18, 1974, the month Court and Spark was released. Early dates included college campuses (Yale, Cornell) and prestigious halls (Massey in Toronto, Avery Fisher in New York, Constitution in D.C.) that were still intimate for a big rock show. Miles of Aisles was recorded during a two-night run at the Berkeley Community Theatre (where she name-checked San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel in “For Free”), a night at the LA Music Center, and a whopping five-night run at Universal Amphitheatre in Universal City, California, which had recently opened for the new generation of rock concerts. The venue filled at 5,200, which, for five nights of a packed house at a hometown venue (and performances for a hit live record), is more than 25,000 tickets, about one-sixteenth of the mostly nonpaying audience of the Woodstock festival she’d so memorably missed. The hall’s very existence—it was the venue for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s blockbuster musical Jesus Christ Superstar—was evidence that the utopia of Woodstock had quickly moved on to capitalism. Guys with long hair could play nasty, loud rock and roll, and quickly co-opted by the system. There was big money in being stardust and golden, and Joni was getting a taste herself. “I felt like having come through,” she told Circus magazine in the June 1974 issue, “having had a small taste of success, and having seen the consequences of what it gives you and what it takes away in terms of what you think it’s going to give you.”
Joni, as usual, had figured out the implications of her success even as it was unfolding. And yet all her decisions, even if they were not exactly avant-garde (she would get there soon) were entirely musical. Even though she had David Geffen in her back pocket, she took industry advice from no one. She just wanted to take the band that had been so magical on Court and Spark and show them off on the road. John Guerin, her partner in music and all the love and lust she sang about (in songs about earlier paramours), was there on drums, along with Max Bennett on bass and Tom Scott on reeds. Joe Sample and Larry Carlton both had commitments with studio work and would have lost money on the road, but Robben Ford, a twenty-two-year-old guitar player, joined up. He had just quit a gig with the blues shouter Jimmy Witherspoon. Joni was no shouter, certainly not onstage, but she would be demanding in other ways, all of them stimulating. Like Larry Carlton, he had no trouble translating the language of her open chords.
“I didn’t use the open tunings,” Ford recalled forty years later. “It wasn’t necessary for me to use them. It wasn’t an issue. The way she tunes the instrument, it’s like a chord on top of a chord. It’s very natural—it’s like the white keys at the piano. It’s still just the key of C, but you’d have a G triad on top of a C triad. That’s why her music sounds so different, because she’s superimposing chords. Instead of playing a C triad, you’d be playing a G triad with a C in the root. And it was a different way of approaching being an accompanist. I had never heard music like that before. We certainly allowed her to have a more expansive presentation . . . I just felt like I
had the greatest opportunity in the world. To be happy to be an accompanist is a chop. I learned it there. To me, I take great pleasure in accompanying.” To be twenty-two and a musically deft guitar player in a Joni Mitchell band in 1974 was, to use Wordsworth’s formulation, very heaven.
Joni’s 1974 tour would run for seventy-five dates, between January 19 in St. Louis and September 2 in Boulder. In the midst of it, on August 9, 1974, Richard Milhous Nixon became the first president to resign from office. That night, Joni’s band played the Pine Knob Music Theatre in Clarkson, Michigan. “I was so apolitical,” Joni recalled. “I don’t find politicians that interesting. I’m with Lincoln, who said, when he left Congress, that it was better to not have any intelligence to be a politician. I followed Watergate. I felt no need to comment on it. Neil Young would have. But the politics of rock and roll was so junior, so baby anarchist.”
The L.A. Express was the opening act and the backing band. Some disaffected keyboard players came and went. Roger Kellaway complained about playing pop triads and went back to leading a jazz trio after a few months. Larry Nash suddenly insisted on being paid in cash. They needed him for three nights, paid him his cash, and kicked him out. Victor Feldman, who played on half of Miles Davis’s Seven Steps to Heaven (1963), cowrote the title track, and turned down Davis’s offer to join the band—because he was making a fortune as a session player and even the top small-group jazz gig would have been a financial downgrade—finished the gig, and made the same complaints as Kellaway, but then, he was known as a misanthrope anyway, and the rest of the band were honored to have him finish the tour.
Even for these pros, Joni’s music wasn’t easy, and they would need to reconvene after any time off the road. “Her harmonic structures for her tunes were so elusive that when we came back after a two-week vacation, we’d have to go back to the studios and rehearse,” recalled Max Bennett. “If you analyze some of the tunes, the chord changes don’t go where you think they’re going to go. The whole attitude was elusive, but great.”
Bennett and Guerin were running the band, and they would get bonuses for ticket sales that went above 15,000, which was happening more and more. Joni and Guerin were inseparable. They would always share hotel rooms and, after Joni left David Geffen’s house and before she bought her home in Bel-Air, Joni and Guerin lived in Burbank with Max Bennett, who had a spacious house, a pool, and no wife. These sidemen were making $5,000 a week.
And so the shows went on. Joni was playing to the biggest crowds of her life. Her reviews were love letters, Court and Spark kept selling, and the two-record live album Miles of Aisles hit number two on Billboard, something live albums (outside of industry cash cows like Frampton Comes Alive, which hadn’t come out yet) don’t usually do. At Temple University in Ambler, Pennsylvania, on August 22, she introduced “Barangrill” talking about her impassioned reading of Nietzsche, but then added that such things lack a certain warmth “when you like somebody.” Joni liked somebody indeed, and the world decided that they liked Joni Mitchell very much. What could possibly go wrong?
19 THE QUEEN OF QUEENS
Joni wants to step outside the Boho Dance. It’s tired, it’s clichéd, and it’s really based on a myth. Noble poverty doesn’t make you better; it actually is an impediment to greatness. It’s life and life only—not to mention innate talent and vision—that makes the perfect storm of art. Low wages and slums are what they are. Joni grew up having to rent albums rather than buy them. She sewed her own wedding dress and performed at her own wedding. It was a big deal when, right before “Both Sides, Now” changed her life forever, she could be the proud owner of a checking account with a few hundred dollars in it. She struggled before she made it, even gave up her daughter in the bargain. So if she feels like having a house with a pool, she will have a house with a pool. And if she feels like taking a dip in her Bel-Air pool, and showing off her athletic, toned body to anyone putting down their $5.98 for her new album, she will do so. She was nude, at a distance, in the gatefold of For the Roses. Three years later, back in the gatefold, she’s not exactly wearing a fig leaf (she’s in a bikini), but the garden has become a different place indeed.
Joni is at a crossroads with label bosses—well, one label boss in particular, David Geffen—wondering how many more Court and Sparks she can churn out before she’s put out to pasture. In this allegory, Joni is the doomed Edith Piaf and the Free Man in Paris is her pimp. No one asked Van Gogh to paint A Starry Night again, because no one bought it in the first place. Many people bought Court and Spark, and now she’s given the luxury to express contempt for the people who made her popular. “You’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see,” sang John Lennon, who visited Joni while she was recording Court and Spark and suggested she put some fiddles on it if she wanted a hit. He was a mean drunk, telling Joni, “It’s all a product of overeducation,” when they had the same educational background: art school dropouts.
The Hissing of Summer Lawns is not quite what the label bosses had in mind. It is obsessed with the wildness beneath the suburban surface, and it is directed straight at the haute bourgeoisie, and Joni wants to confront them, not love them. Listen to the slave ships making your clothes, look at the pimps and hos who toil while you sleep, look at the Boho Dance, where artists are frauds and critics are sophists. See the world like I see it, she’s saying, in all its gradations and degradations. To the people with paper wives and paper kids—people who might have spent good money on concert tickets for her—she responds with social critique, and they are the ones she’s critiquing.
The title track—a collaboration with John Guerin, a first—was an ironic response to a visit to José Feliciano’s house in the Valley shortly after his marriage. The new Mrs. Feliciano apparently “patrol[ed] that fence of his / To a Latin drum”—or Feliciano’s Latin guitar. These were the people, as opposed to a wacky Peace Corps volunteer in Matala, Greece, who were now part of her social circle. Joni still wanted to get back to the garden, in a way, but her garden was now manicured by professionals. The streets she wrote of were now those of exclusive gated communities. Everywhere, she heard the sound of sprinklers; everything seemed utterly fake.
“Paper wives / And paper kids / Paper the walls to keep their gut reactions hid,” she sang, gloriously, in the cinematic sweep of “Harry’s House.” But while Joni was singing about an unsatisfying marriage, making the music with her boyfriend Guerin was still a thrill. “You listen to ‘Harry’s House,’ and we’re falling in love during that performance,” Joni told me. “And what he said about that piece of music was so astute and smart. And I said to Henry [Lewy], ‘Set me up in front of the drummer,’ and Henry said, ‘Oh you little flirt.’ I just fell in love with him on that piece of music.”
Joni was falling in love making music that would cause some listeners to fall out of love. On the delectable “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow,” the chords, the rhythm, the trance are so musically right, the listener doesn’t want to interrupt the song. But what does it mean? The song began as a lark with Bob Neuwirth, a pop artist most famous for being the ultra-cool guy hanging out with Dylan in Dont Look Back and playing guitar and kicking in harmonies on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour, which Joni would soon join. One night, the two were pretty blasted on alcohol and they decided to write a “drunk song.” “What do we call it?” Joni asked. “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow,” he offered. “Darn right,” she replied. The rest was drivel. Joni trashed everything but the title and the rejoinder. “Anima rising, queen of queens,” she realized later, was taking the Jungian archetypes and reversing them. A man has an anima, a woman an animus. If this had been intended or a Freudian slip, it would not have devalued the song one iota. Since the song, error included, is perfect the way it is, it was a fortunate mistake. “God goes up the chimney / Like childhood Santa Claus” dresses religion down pretty dramatically for someone who, in her Laurel Canyon/Graham Nash era, could be seen in photographs with a cross necklace and who wrote a song—deleted from Bl
ue—about a Good Samaritan.
Joni had been expected to be a singer-songwriter martyr, suffering for her public, but she was getting tougher, and more of an observer than a subject. In the absence of heartbreak songs, for which Blue had raised expectations, she set new standards for third-person portraits, more ambitious and sprawling than anything she had done before. The album inspired both a young Elvis Costello and Prince to write their own third-person songs. Those songs were not for everybody, but they were a gift for the musically sophisticated.
“Edith and the Kingpin” must have startled some listeners. This is not a satire of bohemia or a send-up of suburbia. And it is not a love song, either. Unlike, say, a painter, a fiction writer, or a director, a pop songwriter of 1975 was expected to deliver a more limited type of goods. Doing so as a flagrant sellout could be derided as a kind of prostitution, which is, peripherally, what this song is about. “In ‘Edith and the Kingpin,’ part of it is from a Vancouver pimp I met and part of it is Edith Piaf,” Joni told me. “It’s a hybrid, but all together it makes a whole truth.” Edith the self-destructive singer—a French Billie Holiday—is also a prostitute waiting for her kingpin, or big daddy badass pimp. The greatest of French chanteuses still needs someone to pimp her out. This is not a heartbroken song of waiting for her “sugar to show” like “Car on a Hill” just an album ago. This is an anesthetized world where all that lovin’ is reduced to commerce. “Women he has taken grow old too soon / He tilts their tired faces / Gently to the spoon.” This is pretty close to Joni’s take on the music biz, as soon as it went sour for her. A label takes on a pretty young girl, takes her out on the road, feeds her drugs, and then puts her in the recording studio, billing her for every dollar she hasn’t earned out. Eventually, it will lose interest, stop promoting the work, guaranteeing commercial failure, and find a younger model and stamp “New and Improved” on it. The kingpin cynically watches his whore and wonders, as if she’s a prize horse (a metaphor in “For the Roses”), just how many good tricks she has in her.
