by David Yaffe
She walked right into the clue for the lyrics: a bar called Charlie’s and a club called Pork Pie Hat Bar. It was just too perfect. How could Mingus be suffering such a cruel fate and Joni find inspiration laid out for her like that? Joni would have her moments grappling with fate later, though none so brutal as what Mingus was enduring. There was the story of Joni and Mingus and then there was the story of Mingus and Lester, which starts off the song, and, in a way, closes the circle, too.
A few years after the release of Mingus, Joni recalled a confrontation with Vic Garbarini, whom she described as a “pompous, stout, full-of-himself jazz writer,” who thought she was out of her depth. He said that the word on the street was that she was pretentious. This was around the time that Rickie Lee Jones said that Joni wasn’t a jazz singer, that she didn’t walk on the jazz side of life. She compared Joni singing jazz to Barbra Streisand singing rock and roll. Rickie Lee Jones sang with a fake black accent. Wasn’t that pretentious? Now Garbarini was accusing Joni of being pretentious.
“Okay, what am I pretending to be that I am not?”
Silence.
“Well, you do know what the word pretentious means, don’t you?”
Silence.
“What’s pretentious?”
Garbarini then quoted the lyric “The sweetest swinging music man had a Porky Pig hat on.”
“You think that’s pretentious? That’s from Mingus. Because I’m his scribe. If he tells me, Lester Young had a Porky Pig hat on, that’s colorful. I’m gonna take that down. What’s pretentious about that?”
“That’s not what it means,” said Garbarini. “It’s a derogatory term for porkpie hat.”
Joni said, “You’d better take that up with the ghost of Charles Mingus. And besides, Porky Pig did wear a porkpie hat. What’s pretentious about that? Look, here’s the problem. You’re gonna single me out as pretentious in a country where ninety-nine percent of all singers, no matter where they’re from, sing with a fake black southern accent? The problem is probably that I’m the least pretentious and that’s what’s most pretentious about me.” Boom.
Lester Young wore that Porky Pig hat back in his halcyon days with Count Basie in the 1930s, when he and Coleman Hawkins would play dueling tenors into the Kansas City night. When Mingus met Young, Mingus was in the same position that Joni was in twenty years later. Mingus was, like Joni in 1977, in his mid-thirties, with many years of triumphs and humiliations ahead of him; he was young and vital, and he saw this great man entering his final months, not quite making it to fifty. Young’s wife on Long Island kicked him out, and so he spent his final months in a Manhattan apartment at the corner of Fifty-second Street and Broadway, not too far from where Mingus would be looking out into the Hudson. Mingus and Young watched a Cadillac they knew was owned by Stan Getz, a man Young might have called, in one of his coinages, half a motherfucker. “There’s a guy who’s driving a Cadillac on money from the way I play,” said Young. Mingus’s elegy is for Young’s sound, ripped off, exploited, and misunderstood; what sounded cool was really Young’s lyricism, his mellow tone (to use an Ellingtonism), and his impeccable command of space. When he and Billie Holiday recorded and performed together, she called him Mr. President and he called her Lady Day, and there was nothing cool about it. They approached ballads the way they were meant to be approached, waiting on the beat, sure, but brimming with warm bodies and vital souls. But Joni’s lyrics merely mention Lester Young. They are really about how a black-and-tan fantasy became fate, how the New York streets were now safe for a black and white couple.
Lester Young had to suffer the indignities of being a man of greatness, one even elected Mr. President or Pres by Billie Holiday, who still had to sit at the back of the bus:
Black musician
In those days they put him in an
Underdog position
The “underdog position” is a reference to Mingus’s outlandish memoir Beneath the Underdog, which Joni was flipping through for quick inspiration. It might have also predicted the commercial trajectory for Mingus, which would enter the charts at number seventeen (phenomenal for a jazz-themed album), but fall fast.
This was new territory for Joni. Ever since she escaped the producer Paul Rothchild and bonded with her “more than an engineer” Henry Lewy, Joni hadn’t needed to please anyone but herself. It was an honor to get the call from Mingus, sure, but he was demanding, challenging; if she deviated from a note he had written, he would upbraid her, and she wasn’t used to being scolded by anyone, including a dying jazz god. How could Joni satisfy herself and honor a great man’s dying wishes at the same time? “I didn’t really know what the disease was going to do,” Joni told me. “He was already in a wheelchair, and his speech was suffering. But it hadn’t gone yet. I kind of live more for what’s happening anyway, so I wasn’t thinking in paranoid ways. As it came near the end, I didn’t want him to die before I finished ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.’ And I had a hell of a time getting that last verse until the magic happened. But he hated what I did.”
But her wish to do him justice was superseded by her wish—her need—to do herself justice.
Finally, the record named for Mingus became a Joni Mitchell record. She would get to know him, study him, his personality, his memories, his sadness. But he would, in the end, become another one of her subjects. And even when she wanted listeners to imagine Mingus singing, she could only be assured with her own musicians playing the electric instruments Mingus abhorred. He would have appreciated a piano solo by, say, Don Pullen—his recent pianist of choice and a master of percussive dissonance and swing. On the other hand, Herbie Hancock on a Fender Rhodes, no matter how eloquent, would not have been a sound that pleased him. But then anyone familiar with Joni knew that she wouldn’t be able to submit to Mingus’s predilections anyway. The Fender Rhodes and fretless bass would have to be there. And three members of Weather Report—along with the head of the Headhunters—would be her band. It was not music Mingus approved of, but then he wasn’t around to complain. So she went back to A&M studios in LA and cut it with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Jaco Pastorius, and Peter Erskine. Mingus did, after all, hire Joni to write his epitaph.
People have wondered why the tempo on Mingus is so slow. In part, it was because of the elegiac nature of the material. This was certainly not consistent with Mingus’s music, nor did it have the rhythmic variety of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. The tempos of Weather Report ran at breakneck speeds. But the focus on Mingus would be the voice, lyrics, and melody. Anything as jam-packed as a Mingus session could be too distracting from getting the words out—or for giving enough space for Joni and her demands for audacity from Pastorius and minimalism from everyone else.
Similarly, many people in the jazz world have wondered why an album devoted (mostly) to Charles Mingus’s music and featuring some of jazz’s most stellar improvisers (even if they were not from Mingus’s inner circle) had Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter discreetly riffing behind Joni, without any real solos. The album was less than forty minutes and certainly could have had room. But Erskine explained that maintaining those tempos was a challenge, and stretching the songs further just didn’t feel right. Herbie and Wayne and Jaco could be heard taking solos on many records. This was a record guided by a voice.
Decades later, Herbie Hancock looked back on the album as the beginning of a friendship and satisfying collaborations to come. Hancock had been a child classical piano prodigy who played a movement of a Mozart piano concerto with Rafael Kubelík and the Chicago Symphony when he was eleven. His love for Ravel led him to embrace the jazz impressionism of Bill Evans. But at the same time, he loved rhythm and blues, and embraced both equally. He joined the Miles Davis Quintet at the age of twenty-three. He had already scored a hit when Mongo Santamaria covered his song “Watermelon Man.” Herbie heard Miles whisper to him, “Take out the butter notes,” when he really meant “bottom notes,” but the point stuck. Herbie learned to do more with less, except when doing
more with more was so powerful, he had to do that, too. Wayne Shorter was the dominant composer of the band, and they were kindred spirits, playing on each other’s Blue Note dates while steering on Miles’s second great ensemble.
They both became Nichiren Buddhists, and were both looking for something beyond jazz, beyond genre. It could include what was popular, but only if it fed the muse. By the ’70s, they had both moved to Los Angeles. Shorter was playing with Weather Report, who were playing stadium shows with crowds that usually turned out for rock stars, and Hancock was having hugely successful albums with the Headhunters. Hancock and Shorter would periodically reunite for the VSOP (Very Special Occasion Project), which was the Miles band with Freddie Hubbard filling in for Miles. It was in this on-again, off-again moment—when they would dip in and out between fusion and traditional jazz—that they found themselves on the Mingus album. They were Miles people, not Mingus people, and Joni preferred it that way, since she was more of a Miles person, too. They were post-genre musicians and found themselves at home on a project where Joni was struggling with the musicians recommended by Mingus.
Joni and Herbie premiered “A Chair in the Sky” at the Bread and Roses Festival in Berkeley in the summer of 1978. “I love to play with Herbie,” she told the audience afterward, and she did, even when he made it hard for her to find a space to come in. Even when it made her uneasy, she knew the results would be glorious. They both had Miles-shaped ambitions and compulsions to move forward, purists be damned, all the way to his Grammy-winning album River: The Joni Letters.
As Mingus deteriorated, Joni knew that he wouldn’t live to hear this final album, but others would.
“You’re playing a square note!” he would say when she was writing “Sweet Sucker Dance.”
“What’s square about a note?” Joni asked.
“Okay, motherfucker, you throw in your note with my note, and I’ll throw in a grace note for God!”
Mingus’s final months were spent on a wild-goose chase. The baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan recommended that Mingus be treated by a faith healer in Mexico named Pachita, and Mingus was so desperate, he followed the tip. Joni came along for the ride for ten days. Pachita conducted a ritual that purported to use Mingus’s blood, but really did not. Mingus and Joni looked at each other when each realized she was a fake. They both had their jive detectors, even as his fuse was about to go out for good. They could communicate with each other, even when Mingus was nonverbal.
Don’t blow my songs, he might have been thinking.
“It’s my solo while you’re away,” she sang.
Mingus died on January 5, 1979 (along with, according to the album’s liner notes, fifty-six beached whales). The album was released in June.
There are two songs on Mingus composed entirely by Joni—“The Wolf That Lives in Lindsey” and “God Must Be a Boogie Man,” the last song written. Even though the lyrics and music are credited to Joni, the words are based on the first chapter of Mingus’s memoir, Beneath the Underdog. In it, Mingus is trying to work out his dreams, his existential dilemmas, and his identity. “In other words, I am three,” says the opening line. “One man stands forever in the middle, unconcerned, unmoved, watching, waiting to be allowed to express what he sees to the other two. The second man is like a frightened animal that attacks for fear of being attacked. There’s an almost over-loving gentle person who lets people into the uttermost sacred temple of his being and he’ll take insults and sign contracts without reading them and get talked down to working for cheap or nothing, and when he realizes what’s been done to him he feels like killing and destroying everything around him including himself for being so stupid. But he can’t—he goes back inside himself.”
Considering Mingus’s ambitions, his burdens, his history, his sensitivity, and his bathos, it should be considered a psychological miracle that he could pare all his necessary selves to merely three. In 1903, the great W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about the “double-consciousness” one feels as a minority in a majority culture:
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
It was this double-consciousness that one can see most clearly in Joni’s career. The desire to be “her own man” as a songwriter, a bandleader, and a studio producer. While at the same time, she is the woman looking for her next lover, the girl who went to every wedding in her small town, who admits that “love stimulated [my] illusions more than anything.” Black cool can be a posture of strength against a mainstream society that refuses to allow you to live within the full range of your humanity. In those years after Rolling Thunder, after the Last Waltz, Joni in her own way was pushing back against the limitations of a society that didn’t know quite what to do with her mix of creative muscle and distinctly feminine sensibility, to quote Du Bois, “those two warring ideals . . . whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
25 NERVY BROAD
Louis Menand once floated a theory in The New Yorker that he called “the iron law of stardom.” In it, he claimed that celebrity had a three-year limit and that “this law dictates that stardom cannot extend for a period greater than three years. There is no penalty for breaking this law, for the simple reason that it is unbreakable.” Menand went on to explain that when we thought of celebrities who seemed to break this law, what we were witnessing was a celebrity who had enjoyed two three-year terms. The Beatles, he posited, had enjoyed one term as “lovable mop tops (1964–67)” and another term as “hippie artistes (1967–70).” Madonna, as another example, Menand offered, had “enjoyed three years (1985–88) as the downtown queen of sexual hip and then three years (1989–92) as an uptown version of the same thing.”
One might argue that by the time Joni turned thirty-seven she had enjoyed two distinct turns on the celebrity merry-go-round. She’d been the girl who had embodied the vibrant rock scene of Laurel Canyon (1968–71) and then another turn as the grown-up goddess from Court and Spark to Hejira (1973–76). Joni hadn’t done the expected and settled into the pop/rock/jazz synthesis of Court and Spark like Steven Spielberg making Raiders of the Lost Ark movies. She kept changing, and it was painful, surprising even, that her audience found it hard to follow. Menand wrote in his essay, “Stardom is the period of inevitability, the time when everything works in a way that makes you think it will work that way forever. The dial seems permanently tuned to the frequency at which the individual star is broadcasting. Stardom means that (if you are the star) that nothing you do can be asymmetrical with what people want . . . Stardom is the intersection of personality with history, a perfect congruence of the way the world happens to be and the way the star is. The world, however, moves on.”
But after so many shifts in the industry, after the overdoses and the band breakups and the personal crack-ups, Joni had survived and was ready for another turn at the celebrity circle game. Joni was a good soldier for the Mingus album. She broke her eight-year ban on being interviewed by Rolling Stone—imposed since they ran their “Old Lady of the Year” diagram in 1971—and did two: a talk with Ben Sidran when the album was in process and Mingus was still alive, and, for a cover story (her second and, so far, her last), an interview with Cameron Crowe, barely out of his teens. He was so eager to please, he brought galleys to her house. She was, as usual, disappointed, but didn’t show it. She also talked to Down Beat and the Los Angeles Times with Leonard Feather, the only major jazz critic to endorse the project without reservation; Larry Kart of the Chicago Tribune; Michael Watts for Melody Maker; and Bob Protzman for the Charlotte Observer, among many others. The publicity-shy Joni was suddenly opening up. She would do everything she could to prove Geffen and Roberts wrong,
not only by talking to the press, but by launching her first full-scale tour since the debacle of her scuttled Hissing of Summer Lawns outing more than three years earlier. Her original plan was to use Weather Report as an opening act and backing band, just as she had done with the L.A. Express. The explanation for why this didn’t happen came from Weather Report’s keyboardist and co-leader (with Wayne Shorter), Joe Zawinul: “We ain’t no fucking L.A. Express.”
