by David Yaffe
“I was introduced to Buddhism at art school when that infatuation with the East was floating around,” Joni told Malka Marom years later. “I wasn’t drawn to the mystical East at that particular time. They all seemed kind of like mystical gobbledygook to me.”
But in Trungpa, Joni would meet her spiritual match.
Sometimes, it takes a thief to catch one. The Tibetan Buddhist master and Joni met just before Easter. “He asked me, ‘Do you believe in God?’” Joni told me. “I said, ‘Yes, here’s my god and here is my prayer,’ and I took out the cocaine and took a hit in front of him. So I was very, very rude in the presence of a spiritual master.”
It is more than likely that he had seen worse. In fact, it was even likely that he had done worse. Best known in popular culture for his association with Allen Ginsberg, the Beat Eminence of the Rolling Thunder Revue crew with whom Joni spent that unforgettable month in late 1975, Trungpa was an unusually charismatic teacher, and he did not play by the rules. He was a hard drinker—heavy use of alcohol certainly violates a Buddhist precept against intoxicants—and it was counterintuitive (to say the least) to think that a self-styled “healer,” even such a celebrated one, would be able to help someone kick one substance, cocaine, while going heavy on the booze himself (indeed, Trungpa eventually died of alcoholism).
Trungpa never tried to hide his heavy drinking—he often gave public lectures quite soused—or his tendency to have affairs with his female students. Such contradictions are like an old joke. “Make me one with everything,” says the Buddhist to the hot-dog vendor, handing him a fifty-dollar bill. When the hot dog with all the fixings is delivered, no cash is returned. The punch line? “Change comes only from within.” Getting clean with a drunken healer sounds like another joke, too, except that Joni did find her own way to become one with everything and to change from within. Crazy wisdom—Trungpa’s phrase—was a metaphysical conceit that had a way of working.
Pema Chödrön, who became Trungpa’s student a couple of years before Joni’s encounter, had this to say about her experience of having him as her teacher:
When I asked Trungpa Rinpoche if I could be his student in 1974, I was not ready to enter into an unconditional relationship. But for the first time in my life I had met a person who was not caught up—a person whose mind was never swept away—and I realized that was also possible for me. And I was incredibly drawn to him because I saw that I couldn’t manipulate him. You felt seen by him? It wasn’t as personal as that. It was more like: This is a man who knows how to cut through people’s trips . . . [W]hen we work closely with a teacher, all the ways that we hold back and shut down, all the ways that we cling and grasp, all our habitual ways of limiting and solidifying our world become very clear to us, and it’s unnerving. At that painful point, we usually want to make the teacher wrong or make ourselves wrong or do anything that is habitual and comforting to get ground back under our feet. But when we make an unconditional commitment to hang in there, we do not run away from the pain of seeing ourselves—and this is a revolutionary thing to do and it transforms us. But how many of us are ready for this? One has to gradually develop the trust that it is ultimately liberating to let go of strongly held assumptions about reality.
Most of Trungpa’s students tried to impress him, but Joni figured out that this was not the right way to experience him. “I came in looking down on him because I thought the girl who dragged me there [Gayle Ford] was a jerk and then I saw he had some shit, so I looked up at him and flattered him and I busted myself for flattering him.” What Pema Chödrön said of Trungpa was true for Joni, too: “This is a man who knows how to cut through people’s trips.”
All it took was fifteen minutes: they were meeting, barriers were breaking down. She was suddenly genuflecting to something even more powerful than cocaine. Trungpa began to do a breathing technique that, for Joni, emanated grace waves. Joni lost her “I.” An ego that had been so extravagantly fed by fame, cocaine, and adoring, handsome men competing for her affection had been extinguished. In Tibet, they call it the “fast way.” It certainly felt like a quick escape. She left there in what she called “the awakened state.” In “Refuge of the Roads,” she paid tribute to him as a “friend of spirit” who “drank and womanized.” When she rerecorded the song for Travelogue in 2002, she changed it to “a drunk with sage’s eyes.” He was all of those things. Joni was also always convinced that he was the real thing.
So in other words, this was an ongoing teacher-student relationship. Once she got to what she considered to be level-four Buddhism—otherwise known as the fourth of the four stages of attainment—she thought she could ask what she called an “arbitrary stupid novice question: ‘What is the meaning of life?’” Trungpa responded with the cynicism she knew she deserved. “When he finished, he made me laugh and I felt like an insider,” she told me. “I felt like he was talking to me, not like a novice. We had one of those shared laughs that went on and on. It got better and better. It was delicious. My comment was cynical, but it was realistic. There was no beguiling to it. ‘Life’s shit and then you die.’”
Maybe so. But Joni wasn’t ready to die yet. She still had to live up to the muse and deliver songs on one of her creative peaks. When the ego returned, she had perspective on it. It was finely tuned, nuanced, and decanted. And the album she was about to record benefited from all kinds of inspiration. It would be executed in the cold light of day, with her painter’s ego back with her, like an old friend.
Even if cocaine fueled some of Hejira’s powerful songs, the clarity of going off coke produced other songs that came from a different and equally compelling kind of power. She had to let go of the ego she already name-checked in “Coyote”—“I tried to run away myself / To run away and wrestle with my ego.”
It is a painter’s cap she wears so memorably on Norman Seeff’s beautiful album cover. And inside, Joel Bernstein would capture her in the wild, as he had in his photo for For the Roses. Joni knew precisely what she wanted and she micromanaged the shoot so that there could be no room for error. After she ran away from the debacle at the University of Maryland, the band played one more gig at the Dane County Coliseum in Madison, Wisconsin, on February 29. It was near there, on a frozen pond by the Edgewater Inn, that the skating pictures on the gatefold were shot. Joni dressed in funereal black; a sable stole, a crepe skirt, and a woolly hat. All she needed to complete her look were black ice skates. But this was the 1970s, and women wore white, or pink, or “nude” skates. Men wore black or forest green. It was like wanting to play Roy Rogers on the playground all over again. It was harder than one might think for a woman to convince a salesman to sell her non-female skates.
“Look. Just fit me for a man’s skates.”
“But they’re for men.”
Joni argued with the skate salesman. Finally, she demanded, “Just fit me for black skates.”
She knew they looked weird. But she also knew that these black clothes against the snowy background would produce the contrast she was looking for, no matter what. She told Bernstein: “I just said, you know, just shoot a lot. And those are the best pictures that were taken, other than the bare bum shot, which I think is also a striking landscape and figure.”
Whether it was black boots or a bare bum, Joni’s cover was going to look exactly as she wished, almost as if she were shooting her photos herself. As for the record the jacket contained, there was a reason she was so specific about what happened on the outside. What happened on the inside was yet another breakthrough.
That was some trip to Boulder. Robben Ford played her “Portrait of Tracy.” Gayle Ford introduced her to Trungpa. Then Joni kept driving, coast to coast, back and forth. And on that trip, in motel rooms, sometimes in disguise, checking into motels as “Charlene Latimer,” Joni wrote the rest of the Hejira songs. At Rolling Thunder, she wrote “Coyote” and, saved for later, “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter” and “Talk to Me.” On her Hissing of Summer Lawns tour, she wrote “Furry Sings th
e Blues.” Those songs were driven by cocaine. The rest were driven by something else. Trungpa helped her find clarity. And Jaco helped her find a new harmonic world. These two enlightened derelicts were crucial in making the eccentric, inspired masterpiece that is Hejira. And, as soon as Joni, inspired by Trungpa, might have figured out how to lose her ego, that ego was on extravagant display, especially when it was unveiled from the wild, untamed genius of Jaco Pastorius. Although he plays on only four of the album’s nine songs—“Coyote,” “Hejira,” “Black Crow,” and “Refuge of the Roads”—his presence is so expansive, it seems to go even beyond the boundaries of these songs. You can hear him bubbling over everywhere. He is crucial in making “Coyote” sound like what it feels to be driving on the highway: the alternating strummed chords with the contrapuntal bass accompaniment is the aural equivalent of driving under highway lights, alternating light and darkness.
Max Bennett played bass on “Furry Sings the Blues” and “Song for Sharon,” as sturdy, precise, and empathetic as ever. He and Pastorius never saw each other in the studio at all, and Bennett was feeling so alienated from Joni, he never even owned the album. Larry Carlton played guitar on five songs—“Coyote,” “Amelia,” “A Strange Boy,” “Blue Motel Room,” and “Black Crow”—and he overdubbed his parts, with Joni just telling him, “Play what you feel.” The same year, Carlton played on Steely Dan’s The Royal Scam—including a legendary solo on “Kid Charlemagne”—where he showed off rock theatrics and sophisticated understanding of jazz chord changes at the same time. Carlton’s parts are memorable: lyrical on “Amelia,” aggressive on “A Strange Boy,” sophisticated and harsh on “Black Crow.” He saw neither Bennett nor Pastorius. He played by day, they played by night. Joni was sufficiently self-possessed, her sidemen could each work independently on overdubs.
“Hejira was more separate,” Joni told me. “With the great players, all I had to say was ‘Play what you feel.’ They’d make a chart, so they knew what the harmonic structure was. I had only one battle with Carlton. I yanked the guitar around and played it quite boldly, especially for a girl. Carlton’s got many chops that I don’t have, but he’s not a yanker. He’s a graceful arcer. And I wanted him to yank this note, and he wouldn’t do it. It’s the only instruction I ever gave him. And he wouldn’t do it. So I cued him in on four instead of one, and raised the volume on it in the mix. And that’s how I got that note on it.”
In 2013, many, many years and cultural moments later, Joni gave her last public interview, a couple of days before her last public performance, both for the Luminato Festival in Toronto, which was presenting a two-day celebration of Joni’s music at Massey Hall. At the interview, the New York Times pop music critic Jon Pareles cautiously asked her a question about what most excited her in her own work. Her memory went to the second verse of the Hejira track “Furry Sings the Blues,” a lament for a nearly destroyed Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, with a moribund Furry Lewis, broken down but still singing till last call. Lewis was a minor blues figure who spent forty years as a street sweeper and was said to have played with W. C. Handy himself. Handy had famously wondered, in song, what would happen if Beale Street could talk. Now, in its death rattle, Joni was singing for it. That was in 1976, with blaxploitation, disco, and drugs springing up in the land where the blues began. In Toronto, Joni remembered the decay of Beale Street and all the gleaming details it inspired:
I don’t know if it’s the best, but the [verse] that excited me [the most] when I wrote it . . . was in “Furry Sings the Blues,” the second verse, the second part. I’m trying to describe this trip I took into this ghost town of the old black music neighborhood with wrecking cranes standing around while the city fathers decided whether to keep it for historic reasons or not. And there were three new businesses there aimed at black exploitation. There were two black exploitation films at the New Daisy Theatre and two pawnshops . . . [The song] poured out almost in blank verse . . . I thought, “Oh, girl, the blarney’s with you now.”
That verse described the demise of a once proud cultural landmark, but made poetry out of its final throes. If The Great Gatsby, which name-checked Handy’s “Beale Street Blues,” had been written in the era of Shaft and urban renewal, some of Fitzgerald’s images might have sounded like this.
Pawnshops glitter like gold tooth caps
In the grey decay
They chew the last few dollars off
Old Beale Street’s carcass
With the wrecking ball just waiting to strike down what little is left of Beale Street—a run-down movie theater, and the sad little joint where Furry croaked out what he had left—Joni is there as a designated mourner. The pawnshops are gleaming, where final trades are like a last call for the final barters. The music—and Old Furry himself—is dying, paved paradise all over again.
In the footage of Joni singing this song in her thirties, as an outtake from The Last Waltz and as a song from a video of a 1979 performance broadcast and released as Shadows and Light, she is a stunning and vital woman, in full voice and full bloom. Take notes and the pain goes away, said Virginia Woolf. Joni could take notes in her head, and someone else’s pain, too. When she performed the song a couple of days after her 2013 interview, she riffed on her memory of attempting to find common ground with Lewis because they both played in open tunings: “I can play in Spanish tunin’s, I don’t just play in toonin’s!” And she quoted him, as she quotes him in the song: “I don’t like you!”
This material alone would have already made Hejira superb; if Bennett had played bass on every track that needed a bass player, it would still be a classic. But what takes things up several notches further is Jaco Pastorius. Keeping time and lending support is a given for any professional bass player. Pastorius was confident enough about already taking care of this aspect of his role that he could then hit harmonics for maximum drama, and make the tricky seem easy, as if playing a fast-fingered riff—with the melodic sweep of a solo, yet still with the rhythmic and harmonic support of the accompanist—were as natural as breathing, eating, drinking, making love. And so, suddenly, the animal-like lover of “Coyote” shifts from Sam Shepard, who inspired the song, to Pastorius, who takes it over in the studio. The lyrics celebrate a certain wildness. Its alliteration—“privately probing the public rooms” and “pills and powders to get them through this passion play”—teases the listener, and Pastorius’s harmonic response teases back. Pastorius, who, like Shepard, had a wife at home, would become Joni’s lover. He was, she said, the bass player of her dreams.
“He had this wide, fat swath of a sound,” she recalled later. At the time, Pastorius was truly high on life, and high on the high end of his bipolar disorder, a phenomenon difficult to separate from his ego, his genius, and what seemed like an expansive, and overwhelming, joie de vivre. He was a moving target in those days, jumping, diving, running amok, and breaking all the rules. He ripped the frets out of his bass to get a sound that became imitated everywhere, even when he was sleeping in parks in his final years. When Joni met him, in 1976, he introduced himself by saying, “My name is John Francis Pastorius the Fourth and I am the greatest bass player in the world.” Once people heard him, they were converted, convinced that this guy was the Muhammad Ali of the fretless. His face on his debut record reminded Joni of a Tibetan sage. Like Trungpa, he was utterly unconventional, a bad boy, a derelict. Yet he was somehow in the possession of the divine. He showed her a new way. Trungpa was her “friend of spirit.” Jaco was her guide to the lower frequencies. He was getting high on the low end, which sounded like bliss. He broke the rules. He let her open up in ways she had been yearning for as long as she had been making music. She didn’t know what to call it, because there was no name.
They became lovers in a noncommittal way. The Tracy who inspired “Portrait of Tracy” was his wife and the mother of his children. Joni, feeling the biological clock, wanted to have his baby, convinced that they would produce a musical genius. Fucking around with Jon
i was one thing—hey, he was working for her—but he was still a husband and a father, at least in his mind. Tracy knew what was going on. She even called Joni’s house late at night and Jaco answered. “I always knew you were a witch,” he told her. But that witch was still Mrs. Pastorius.
When it came to music, though, no one could get in their way. He pushed her to go further and she let him do all he wanted. Pastorius had a way of making a place for himself even when he wasn’t invited. When Down Beat named him the greatest bass player of the year, he crashed an Oscar Peterson gig and bounded in front of Ray Brown, the great upright bassist, who had no idea what was going on. Pastorius violated boundaries everywhere he went. In music, it was genius. In life, it was trespassing, which he got away with for a while, too.
The first track that Pastorius recorded for Hejira also turned out to be the most radical: its moody, searching, and splendidly ruminative title track, too unfixed for typical bass support. In the liner notes to The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Joni thanks John Guerin for showing her “the root of the chord and where 1 was.” If a chord is a C chord, then if a bass player plays a C, the player is stating where 1—or the tonic—is. By the time Joni made Hejira, she no longer needed to be shown where 1 was, because if you’re working with virtuosi, it should be obvious. Pastorius ran amok and took 1 with him. Joni didn’t miss it. The Greatest Bass Player in the World claimed to have absolutely no prior knowledge of Joni’s music. He was so busy as a working musician, he claimed he didn’t have time to listen to records. But he did know the Beatles and James Brown, and he knew Stravinsky well enough to quote from The Rite of Spring on “Hejira” (an allusion he would make again on “Talk to Me”).
