by David Yaffe
Among all the social commentary, third-person narratives, reverse-gender mythological references, and ’50s rock and roll madeleines, Joni, the personal figure who was followed so avidly on Blue and Court and Spark, returns on one song. With her heart on her sleeve, Joni sings on “Sweet Bird” about a beauty that hasn’t faded yet, but would be inevitable if she were fortunate enough to fade away and not burn out. That piece of reflection, so personal it’s as close as her own skin, is palpable throughout “Sweet Bird,” the album’s penultimate track. On the level of orchestration, it’s the most pared down on the album: Joni on piano and acoustic guitar, Larry Carlton on electric. On the level of theme, it continues the inquiry of her earliest, wise-beyond-her-years fledgling work. If “Both Sides, Now” is prophecy, “Sweet Bird” is fate. Joni was twenty-one when she dared to announce that she had looked at life from both sides, now. She was thirty-one when she imagined herself on some borderline lying down “golden in time” and waking up “vanishing.”
The song’s title makes a passing reference to Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth; its contents refer to every human ever on earth, alive or dead, certainly every female. The Sweet Bird of time and change laughs at this woman in possession of beauty in her voice, her words, her music, and that lovely physique she sprawled in the gatefold of her album. She was the singer, the guitarist, the pianist, the writer, the painter, and the subject. No wonder she scared people. The promises made by “beauty jars” are all in vain. Joni scrutinizes her still young and beautiful face.
Behind our eyes
Calendars of our lives
Circled with compromise
Sweet bird of time and change
You must be laughing
Joni could see all the way around the circle game when she was all of twenty-two. The album flaunted it all: the pool, the house, the body, the genius, the voice. It seemed immortal, but it was very mortal, and, at thirty-one, she felt it every minute.
Joni would tour in support of The Hissing of Summer Lawns just as she had for Court and Spark. Before heading out, though, she found herself on a diversion, catching Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour and then, as she put it later, joining the circus. Her ride with Rolling Thunder lasted not quite a month. She began on November 13 in New Haven and ended on December 8 at Madison Square Garden, a fund-raiser for a legal defense for Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a boxer whom Dylan was convinced had been wrongly convicted, which he sang about in his song “Hurricane” every night of the tour.
With their compatriots Joan Baez, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Roger McGuinn by his side, Dylan and his crew would show up for unplanned small gigs around the country. Dylan still missed the Bleecker Street of 1961 and tried to re-create it, sort of. His wife, Sara, was on the verge of leaving him, but she came along anyway, and he sang “Sara” to her every night. If that didn’t bring her back, nothing would. (As it turned out, nothing would.)
Joni was there partly because Dylan essentially invented the singer-songwriter game, and because she considered Dylan and Leonard Cohen to be her best “pace runners.” There was a part of Joni that constantly weighed decisions and revisions. And then there was the part of her that would go on a road trip on the spur of the moment. How could she say no to Bob Dylan? The competitive analogy of being anyone’s pace runner was far from Dylan’s mind when, in a 1978 interview, he said he was inspired to write his much celebrated “Tangled Up in Blue” after spending a weekend listening to Blue—not just the title track, but the whole album. Joni didn’t know this at the time, but she loved Blood on the Tracks, welcoming it as a return to the greatness of the astonishing three-album run of Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Highway 61 Revisited (1965), and Blonde on Blonde (1966), which besotted her and set new standards for what a pop songwriter could do, raising the stakes of her game, allowing her to bring something new to the table. Blood on the Tracks offered a new intimacy, a new vulnerability, a Dylan inspired by Joni. She could take that influence and raise the level of musicianship substantially.
For Joni, ambitious lyrics didn’t have to be at the expense of music; they could be matched with ambitious music. Lyrically, Dylan, at what she considered to be his best, was an influence—and Leonard Cohen was even more—but musically, she came from Debussy, Rachmaninoff, Piaf, Holiday, Ellington, and Miles. But there was still an aura around Dylan, and this was a chance to hold her own in its presence; no one checked their ego at the door.
The Rolling Thunder Revue kicked off in Plymouth, Massachusetts, on October 30, 1975. Joni joined in New Haven two weeks later. Although she would find herself in close quarters with fellow artists and be inspired (Sam Shepard) and infuriated (Joan Baez), it was really the power of an early acetate of Blood on the Tracks that drew her to the combination of robust, cocaine-fed egos that made the experience a dream, a nightmare, and a refuge from reality. There was already trouble in paradise with John Guerin, who had been an intuitive musical collaborator and passionate lover. Joni found herself drawn in—really kidnapped by the tour. A jealous Joan Baez, in an opening move, shoved Joni to the top of the bill. Allen Ginsberg told Joni she was a masochist. (Who did he think he was? Carole King?) Meanwhile, Elliot Roberts told Joni that, in fact, she was being a masochist.
“Why would you make yourself subordinate to them? Those old has-beens?”
“Well, I wouldn’t call them that. Bob is still worth looking at.”
She thought that Dylan hadn’t really been fully present in his records since Blonde on Blonde. She thought they were just a “collage of other people’s thinking.” This was different. This early version of Blood on the Tracks was a fully present and vulnerable Dylan, too vulnerable, finally, for prime time. More than forty years later, she remembered greeting the original recording with excitement, only to be disappointed later:
“Joel Bernstein gave me a tape of it, and it was really good, it was really good. But people said, ‘Oh, it’s like a Joni Mitchell album,’ so he went and recut it with his brother in Minnesota. They butchered it all up. They stomped all over it. But originally, the writing was different, it was more vulnerable, and the orchestration was subtle, very like when I was using just a little of that stuff to my performances. It had Al Kooper on it, but he was mixed kind of under, you know, like some of his early players. It was beautiful. And one night, I had a party here, and it was so star-studded, you wouldn’t believe it. It made the newspaper. It said, ‘If a bomb hit Joni Mitchell’s house, it would have wiped out the music industry and the acting industry.’ And you wouldn’t believe the crashers. Robert De Niro crashed it, David Bowie crashed it, Robin Williams crashed it, and Bob crashed it. And the bootleg of that first Blood on the Tracks was playing. They were out in the garden, and somebody said that Bob wanted to see me. And the bootleg was still playing and I said, ‘Why didn’t you put that out?’ And he said, ‘Somebody stole the tape.’ Which was not true. He chickened out. People said it was like a Joni Mitchell album. There was some stylistic production to it, but not the material. It was more honest. He’d already cracked by the next one. He took the vulnerability out of it, and in the process he took the depth out. The New York sessions were touching. The Minnesota sessions were not touching at all. He asserted himself again as a man.”
That night, when all of Joni’s guests walked out, the recording walked out with them. “When they left, it disappeared,” she recalled. But those New York sessions of Blood on the Tracks are not hard to find. Some tracks were issued on Dylan’s first Bootleg Series release (1991) and the rest are widely available as bootlegs, and will eventually be commercially issued as part of the ongoing Bootleg Series.
Joni would be disappointed by the new songs on the tour that would end up on Desire (1976), but she had already joined the circus by then. She had missed Woodstock. This time, she would not be the girl who got left behind. Joni did not allow herself to be filmed for Renaldo and Clara, the experimental film made during the tour with a skeleton of a screenplay by Sam Sh
epard. The mostly improvised film would be a failure, spending only a couple of weeks in theaters. It is not, in any sense, a good movie, but the musical performances are excellent and a scene with Dylan and Allen Ginsberg at Jack Kerouac’s grave is a keeper. Joni would later recall that almost everyone on the tour—not Joan Baez—was on coke, which was fine with her, no stranger to what Gilda Radner called “the devil’s dandruff.” Fighting a flu for the entire tour, she would stay up all night on the tour bus writing songs, which she would premiere in every place they landed. Allen Ginsberg was house poet, Joan Baez was Queen of Folk, and Joni was Queen of Rock. A busload of egos, coke to spare, and everything decided on the whim of Bob Dylan, in a great creative moment of his own but not necessarily someone meant to be master of ceremonies.
Dylan, who had been dissatisfied with his much-anticipated tour with the Band in 1974—his first in eight years—had an idea. Why not just make the music without being rock stars? He wanted to go back to the clubs, the kind of intimate venue that Joni missed, too. The irony is that the whole enterprise, while shrinking the performance spaces, seemed to only enlarge the egos. And the concerts ended up getting bigger anyway—the War Memorial Coliseum in Rochester, the Quebec City Coliseum, and so on. But they were still traveling and sleeping in vans, like circus performers. How could so many illustrious people share space without sibling rivalry or competition? Dylan’s marriage was doomed, but he would try to bring himself back to his version of the garden, which had nothing to do with Joni’s Woodstock, but with his memories of 1961 New York and its “music in the cafés at night and revolution in the air.” With so much crisis and so many drugs, it’s not hard to imagine that the next stop would be Jesus. He was on his journey, and Joni was on hers. Before his religious conversion, he told her, “God is just a word.” When just a few years later, in 1979, he became a born-again Christian and started preaching to her, she told him, “Bobby, don’t you know the Bible was written by poets like you and me?”
This tour was in between the encounters about God. One of the motivations for joining the Revue—where she later said she must have lost an octave singing in the rain and getting sick—was getting closer to Bobby. At last, a peer, someone who would understand greatness as only a great person could. But she found that between Joan Baez and Sara Dylan, there was little room for her. (Baez and Sara Dylan also felt frustrated. Dylan was very difficult to be around, and was an ever-present conversation topic when he wasn’t, when they would say, “Here we are—just the three of us.”) In fact, Joni recalled only two conversations with Dylan in total for the whole tour. If you’re Joni Mitchell and you can’t have the conversation you thought you’d get, what can you do but write a song? In this case, the song was “Talk to Me,” which she would perform on her Hissing of Summer Lawns tour the following year.
Please just talk to me
Any old theme you choose
Just come and talk to me
Mr. Mystery, talk to me
While Joni was trying, with great difficulty, to have a meaningful conversation with Dylan, the journalist Larry “Ratso” Sloman, covering the tour for Rolling Stone, was meeting great resistance in trying to talk to her. “I’m much jiver than my work and I’d rather have people think my work is me,” she told him in what could be a coherent manifesto. She was using the word in a very 1975 way, the way the Bee Gees used it that year in “Jive Talkin.’” She could have also sung him “Talk to Me”: “You could talk like a fool (I’d listen) / You could talk like a sage / Anyway the best of my mind / All goes down on the strings and the page.” Dylan could have told her the same thing. Here we are: two poets who could have written the Bible, and instead we’re getting back to the garden by joining the circus, when either of us could have filled these places up alone.
What pulled Joni in? She couldn’t stand Joan Baez, was disappointed in Dylan, and she had her own tour to do. Why join this particular circus? More than forty years later, the Revue had a force of its own, even as it came with flawed people and mounds of cocaine:
“On Rolling Thunder, I went out to see the show, and it was so bizarre and everybody was so insane, I mean insane, that I decided to stay for another one, then they coerced me into playing, and I did in two cities, and in Boston I was kind of sucked into it. In Boston, Joan Baez spoke to me for the one and only time. She came to my door, and she said, ‘You got the biggest applause tonight,’ and I said, ‘Oh.’ And she said, ‘Oh, come on. You knew that.’ And I said, ‘How would I know? I didn’t see the whole show.’ First of all, I had seen it before I was in it, and Baez got the biggest applause in the show, and for a cheap trick. She’d hit a high note and put her arm in the air. If you want to get your applause that badly that way, you’ve got it. I’ve been moved when the audience was so spellbound, they forgot to applaud. I said to her, ‘I don’t know. I just use the applause to tune up in,’ which was true. If it runs out and I’m not in tune, I have to start storytelling to get through it.”
Baez has no memory of measuring who got the louder applause. “If I told her she got louder applause than me, I was saying it to be accommodating,” said Baez. “I knew that I was queen of that outfit. It sounds like something I would have said to make somebody feel okay. Apparently, it didn’t.”
Joni kept awake and kept writing. Everyone but Baez was on coke, and everyone included Joni. “John Guerin’s grandfather owned a circus and the clowns used to be paid in booze,” Joni recalled. “So, I said, ‘Pay me in cocaine,’ because everybody was out of their minds. I was the only straight person. Try being the only straight person. So I thought: I might as well bite the bullet and see what this thing is about. Well, it had an incredible effect. It made me so aggressive, the next thing I knew, I was ripping off cops. And I couldn’t sleep. I read Freud’s Cocaine Papers. It was the only thing of his I could recall because Freud was such an idiot and a narcissist. He was a cocaine addict himself, so he was proselytizing it. He thought it was a cure for the inferiority complex. And I kept thinking, this is a warrior’s drug. You’d be like Scarface. You could have ten bullet holes in you and you’d still be shooting. Initially, what it does is it’s a new head and by tracing the dragon it creates epic thought, so much thought. I think too much anyway.”
Joni really was stealing badges from policemen and keeping them as treasures. Most cops were happy to have their badges stolen by Joni Mitchell—a luxury only a noncivilian could enjoy.
“Coyote,” which Joni was performing on the tour while she was still writing it, was written under the influence of cocaine and Sam Shepard, who had a wife (O-Lan Jones) at home, as if that mattered. Shepard had chiseled movie star looks with movie star acting chops and a Pulitzer Prize–winning literary talent. Shepard wanted to get back to the desert of the American west—a place he loved and revered as an uncorrupted land, a long way from Bel-Air. In his play True West (1980), part of the “family trilogy” of plays (with Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child), two brothers nearly kill each other trying to write an authentic western for Hollywood. Austin, the screenwriter, yearns for a real American west he never had:
There’s nothin’ down here for me. There never was. When we were kids here it was different. There was a life here then. But now—I keep comin’ down here thinkin’ it’s the fifties or somethin’. I keep finding myself getting off the freeway at familiar landmarks that turn out to be unfamiliar. On the way to appointments. Wandering down streets I thought I recognized that turn out to be replicas of streets I remember. Streets I misremember. Streets I can’t tell if I lived on or saw in a postcard. Fields that don’t even exist anymore.
In Shepard’s Rolling Thunder Logbook, the bard of the American west marvels at the siren of the Canadian prairie, with her guitar, beret, and “history of word collage.” It is also not lost on him that the audience hangs on all of those words. He’s hanging on, too. He quotes from “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow,” and he is in transport:
Her word maneuverings tend to verge on th
e uncanny. “I got a head full of quandary and a mighty, mighty, mighty thirst.” She seems to have merged into a unique jazz structure with lyrics and rhythmic construction and even managed to bite the masses in the ear with it.
Shepard and Patti Smith had been romantically entangled when they were both downtown obscurities. For one night, Patti starred in their cowritten off-off-Broadway rock and roll play with the Dylan-inspired title Cowboy Mouth. Dylan, who was photographed with Smith for the cover of The Village Voice, begged her to join Rolling Thunder, but she refused. Horses was eliciting critical raves; she was now the doyenne of the CBGB scene. Why lose herself among bigger stars from a completely different crowd? Joni and Joan were struggling to share the limelight as it was. And so Shepard could instead concentrate on Joni.
It didn’t take long for the news to spread across the revue that Joni and Sam were having a casual romance, even though there was nothing casual about their artistic commitments (and what would inspire them). In Chris O’Dell’s memoir about her life as a tour manager, she recalled the odd feeling of finding out that the married man she was sleeping with was keeping company with Joni Mitchell. “How could I compete with her?” How indeed? In “Coyote,” Joni writes of such a juggling act: “He’s got a woman at home / He’s got another woman down the hall / He seems to want me anyway.” This song became a mantra throughout Rolling Thunder; it followed the rhythms of the bus, the sights of white lines along the freeway. The melody gave way to however many syllables it needed to accommodate, as wild and as feral a beast as the coyote it brings alive in song. It was understood that what happened on the road ended on the road—except, of course, in the music:
