by David Yaffe
And so Joni, for her musical director, picked Pastorius, who, shortly after being given the assignment, missed rehearsals for weeks. Pat Metheny, Jaco’s chosen guitarist and all of twenty-five, was suddenly given the musical director spot. Metheny had already used Jaco as a sideman for his 1976 album, Bright Size Life, and since then, the Jaco legend had grown exponentially, almost ready to explode. Metheny was a subtle player, a muted contrast to Jaco’s rock-star-size virtuoso theatrics. Lyle Mays, a quiet musical partner of Metheny’s, was given the keyboard spot. Michael Brecker got the position that Joni dearly wanted for Wayne Shorter. (“I wanted genius and settled for talent,” she recalled.) Brecker was an excellent musician, but also overtly influenced by John Coltrane, whom, of course, Joni believed—without much consensus—to be overrated. (A greater consensus would call him overimitated.) When Pastorius eventually resurfaced for rehearsals he tried to fire Brecker, but Joni talked him out of it. Don Alias was given the drummer chair.
Joni told The Washington Post that although she still played songs like “Big Yellow Taxi” she was avoiding some of her older hits, especially “Both Sides, Now.” She said of the song, “I’ve heard it too often in supermarkets and elevators. I guess my first reaction when I hear it is a rush of pride. It’s getting universal—almost to the ‘Happy Birthday’ stage. But I’m also critical of it when I hear it. They’ve usually reduced it to the lowest denominator.”
The band would be given a little room to solo, but not much. In addition to his few minutes of lead-in to “Hejira,” Metheny had only one guitar solo. Mick Taylor or Ron Wood, as second guitarists, had many more chances to solo at a Stones concert. The muzzled musical director was a fan of Hejira, so they did many songs from that album, many more than from Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter or even Mingus, which was the occasion for the tour’s existence. The doo-wop group the Persuasions would be the opening act, and would also sing with Joni on “Shadows and Light” and the ’50s standard “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” Brecker got to play honest-to-God solos on two songs. The frustration Victor Feldman and Roger Kellaway had felt was palpable from some of these musicians, not used to toiling in the shadows. Lyle Mays didn’t seem to mind hiding behind a pop star, but Metheny would later observe that procuring musicians of that caliber and then giving them such limited opportunities to blow was the equivalent of buying a Ferrari and driving it around the block.
Despite his complaints, Metheny loved listening to Joni sing and, like Larry Carlton and Robben Ford before him, used volume pedals to give subtle colorings to Joni’s rhythm chucking. But, unlike Carlton or Ford, he didn’t find that to be musically stimulating. Joni had her meeting with jazz, but she also didn’t want to be upstaged, or perhaps uprooted, by long, virtuosic solos. Charles Mingus had famously called her a “nervy broad,” and it was perhaps in how she led her bands that Joni showed her steeliness most. “Because of my wordiness, I am first responsible to my words,” she explained later on. “So when I play with a band, I have to be the leader. Well, the words have to be the leader. And if there’s any room for anyone to get in, well, good luck!”
The band, in other words, would still be an extension of her guitar, her voice, her songs. They would lend sophisticated musicianship, but not beyond pop-sized attention spans. A live double album, Shadows and Light, recorded at the Santa Barbara County Bowl in September 1979, would be released in September 1980, and a video of the concert would be made available in various formats and aired on cable television. It is the only commercially available footage of her performing with Jaco Pastorius, who was becoming even more unruly and uncontrollable than he had been before. Cocaine and bipolar disorder are a lethal combination. He would become lost to Joni and, eventually, to nearly everyone else. There were stories of him running naked through a fountain in Japan, and living in Washington Square Park after his landlord evicted him for filling his apartment with water and inviting people in to swim.
A decade of pushing, exploring, and risk taking would be coming to a close. And it turned out that Geffen and Roberts were right. The album didn’t sell. It was the first of her ’70s albums not to go gold, although it peaked at number seventeen and went silver, a huge accomplishment for such an experimental album. And they were also right that she would be exiled from the airwaves forever. Je ne regrette rien! She would do it again no matter what, she will tell you. And yet the musical road she began to pursue would be rather different than the experimental Mingus album. When she was making it, she told Melody Maker that going back to rock and roll would be like going back to a metronome. But back to the metronome she went. She would spend the next decade following trends instead of setting them, inveighing against the ’80s while using its commercial sounds, the aural equivalent of fluorescent lighting.
When David Geffen sold Asylum to Elektra, and debuted Geffen Records in 1980, it was clear that the era of Elektra/Asylum was over. His initial acquisitions included Joni, Elton John, and John Lennon. Unsurprisingly, Elliot Roberts pushed Joni to the label.
“I don’t want to go there again. He’s going to get bored and I know what’s going to happen,” Joni said.
“Joan, it’s David,” Geffen said. “It’ll be like old times.”
“So he gives me an advance,” she told me. “It’s not a great advance, but it’s not a bad advance. Then he reneges on a quarter of it, which he says he needs to buy me out of a quarter with Elektra. And he said, ‘Joan, you want me to make some money, don’tcha?’ Disgusting, but I acquiesced . . . I wasn’t aware of what he was doing, but he was damming up my incoming income until two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars of it is paid off.”
“I haven’t seen a royalty check in twenty years,” Joni would tell Brantley Bardin in a 1996 interview with Details magazine. “And at a certain point, Geffen dammed up my only income—which is my writer’s income from my publishing company—so I had no money coming in. So I went to David Geffen and said, ‘Let me go.’ He said, ‘Joan, you’re not gonna find a better deal out there than this. I’ll keep you here forever—I’ll never drop you.’ And I said, ‘Slavery with tenure is not attractive to me.’”
Geffen bought Joni’s contract for subsequent work, even as Elektra would have maintained ownership. He was essentially leveraging Joni for the buyout. This is standard industry practice—artists often complain about being in debt to their companies, even after they’ve made millions. At least Geffen expected recoupment on the $225,000 when he wrote the contract. What was unusual was that, according to Joni, Geffen mixed the revenue streams that would have usually been controlled by two different companies, not only through record sale royalties, but also through publishing royalties. Among the revenues from the publishing side were public performance rights from radio, mechanical productions, and so on. Usually, recoupment is from one or the other. This wasn’t the act of a loving mentor; this was the act of a tycoon, building a business on the artists in his stable.
What Geffen was hoping for was another multiplatinum Court and Spark, for the ’80s. But this would prove to be impossible. The commercial and artistic storm of Court and Spark belonged to an earlier time.
Joni was still hanging on to her relationship with Don Alias. In an interview with The Washington Post, Joni talked about Don. “We’ve talked about getting married,” she said. “I don’t know. Kids? I don’t know about that either.” Joni went on to say, “I’m really strong as far as child-bearing goes. But it’s a difficult time to bring children in the world.” One can only imagine how hard it must have been for her to give these interviews without thinking of her little girl, Kelly Dale, who would now be a teenager.
On February 5, 1981, when Joni was thirty-seven, she was inducted into the Canadian Hall of Fame by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Joni’s proud but racist parents came, begrudgingly, with her African American boyfriend. In her brief speech, where she thanked Henry Lewy as her “assistant in the recording studio,” she had to think for a moment before remembering the name “El
liot Roberts,” and she thanked her fans who had stuck with her through her experimental phase (and did this mean she was done experimenting?) and, especially, her close friends for making “this gauntlet called fame a—pleasant—and beautiful experience.”
Joni realized that Trudeau was playing politics, saluting a girl from the prairies to broaden his support. “I was born in Alberta, but I left there when I was two and a half,” Joni told me. “But he said I was Alberta’s. So he used me politically. So I thought he wanted to be my presenter because he liked my music, but it was just politics as usual.” It was also “politics as usual” when she had to justify bringing Don Alias with her parents.
Myrtle McKee Anderson was scandalized. Meeting the prime minister with a black man! Heavens! “What would Trudeau say?” asked Joni’s mother.
“Mother, he’s a man of the world,” Joni pleaded. “He deals with black leaders. He’s a sophisticated man.” Myrtle Anderson was still upset.
After the event, Joni, her parents, and Don Alias were seated at the end of a long table. Bill and Myrtle Anderson were visibly embarrassed. “They had to sit with this gorgeous black man, and we were down in the middle,” Joni recalled. “Trudeau’s on this side. There was also this very nice, handsome man, a good man, but he had gotten into a scandal. He had gotten a woman pregnant while he was married. And he did a very unusual thing for a politician. He took care of the woman and child, and he’d informed his wife about it, and women adored him because he didn’t try to weasel out of it. So he got this huge women’s vote for being a mensch. So I had him on one side of me and Trudeau on the other and a French singer-songwriter girl across the table.”
As soon as they sat down, Trudeau said of Alias, “Good-looking guy.”
“Yes, he’s very handsome. But he’s also the greatest conga player in the world. In a very unlucrative form, he’s a master. Not just a pretty face.”
The French singer-songwriter woman concurred, “Yes, Don Alias is fantastic.”
On to politics. “You know,” Trudeau said, “the trouble with Alberta is that it wants to be the east.”
“The trouble with the east is that it wants to be New York,” Joni replied.
Trudeau bristled and pulled back. There would be no more Christmas cards. That was the end of Joni’s Pierre Trudeau relationship.
And soon after that came the end of her complicated four-year relationship with Don Alias. Even though he was willing to pimp her out to Miles Davis, his jealousy would brutally end the relationship.
“Don Alias was irrationally jealous and beat me up a couple of times,” Joni recalled in 2015. “So, the first time, it was a long break. And then he went and appealed to all my friends. So I went back, and then he did it again, irrationally. He thought I was cheating on him. He invented it. Paranoia, and probably because he was on the road all the time and was probably cheating on me. I would say it was projection. He was very sweet, but you don’t want to get beat up by a conga player—in the face. He’s very strong and those hands are lethal weapons. He beat me up pretty badly.”
The second time Alias beat Joni, she had gone out to dinner with John Guerin with his permission. They agreed to a time when Joni would come home. Anyone familiar with Joni’s rococo conversation style would expect her to be late. She was. She rolled in after four a.m. and came home to a battering. The dinner was with a former lover, a longtime lover, a lover whose prowess Alias had been hearing about for a while. Alias must have known that Joni tried to maintain friendships with her exes, but he also knew how Joni had never quite let go of this one. She kept hiring Guerin for albums and forgave him for everything he put her through.
“I’m monogamous when I’m monogamous,” Joni told me. “And it was with Don’s permission. So I came home, he beat me up, then the next day, John, who was living with Pixie at that point, he went to work—and he’s a studio musician, so his job depends on being on time—but our relationship was really deep and psychic. My housekeeper said we talked to each other in our sleep. My mother said that none of the men I chose suited me. It made me really mad, and I was coming down with double pneumonia at the time. I called her back and said, ‘Let me explain to you these relationships you don’t understand.’ John Guerin and I were sleeping in Max’s spare room, which had a twin bed. We were sleeping in a twin bed. And if you didn’t wake yourself when you went over, you’d go over the edge. So I’m sleeping on the outer edge that night and, in my sleep, I’m rolling towards the edge. And in his sleep, John Guerin reached out his arm and pulled me in. In his sleep! There was a pause on the other end of the phone and my mother said, ‘I see.’”
That extraordinary bonding carried Guerin for a long time. The next morning, on his way to work, he pulled up in front of the recording studio and thought, “Something’s wrong with Joni.” And he turned away—he would be late for the gig, a reckless move for a studio musician—and drove to the house. He still had a key. He came into the bedroom toward the canopy bed, and the curtains were pulled. He heard her moaning. At first, he thought she had a lover and he was reluctant to go any further, but he thought, “No, there’s something wrong.” He came and he saw that Joni was battered. Her face was black-and-blue. “Think of the intuition,” Joni said.
The drummer boyfriend of the past came to comfort Joni, black and blue from the boyfriend of the present—soon to be of the past. Guerin was a philanderer, but he was always, to Joni, a lover. He loved women too much, but he really loved them. And seeing this woman he had loved—imperfectly, but deeply and passionately—in so much physical and emotional pain, inflicted by the guy who came after him, was overwhelming. All he could do was comfort her in the gentlest way possible. He was raised by women who taught him to love women, in his mischievous way. “John’s mother was a wonderful woman with a great sense of humor. Handsome woman. She was an equestrian and she had great carriage,” Joni recalled. “They were circus people. The grandmother was really carny and she played solitaire with a cigarette dangling out of her mouth and she had all kinds of little quips. John as a boy would come to her and say, ‘Am I bad yet, Granny?’ And she’d whisper, ‘Yes, you’re very bad, John.’ They encouraged him.”
And yet, in spite of it all, she still had fond memories of Alias, especially the music. “You can hear the love between Alias and I on ‘The Wolf That Lives in Lindsey.’ Those things are poignant and beautiful and valuable, and the fact that they don’t go the distance, or that there are serious obstacles like battery, that’s pretty serious. I couldn’t live with him anymore.” The third time Alias tried to beat Joni, they were in St. Martin and she outran him. “That’s it!” she called out. “You’re not gonna get me again. You can’t control yourself and I can’t stay here.”
“That’s the only bad physical relationship,” Joni recalled. “The other ones were bad psychologically. I can’t say that any of them were a waste of time. For either one of us. There was a healthy trade-off. We made beautiful music and we learned things from one another. So I don’t look back . . .”
John somehow knew Joni needed him. He could be very bad, but he could also be very good. He comforted her when she needed him. He couldn’t be counted on to be faithful, but he could be counted on for other things. Joni would hire him for her next album. The ’80s would be hard on Joni, and she was constantly on the defense against: engineers who bludgeoned her music; careless dentists; a tax law that applied only to a dozen people, which she would appeal twice and eventually win, after the lawyers got a big cut. The Board of Equalization found a vulnerable target in Joni. Because she was an independent contractor with no producer to hide behind, the state of California—about which she had sung so warmly and famously—was allowed to glom on to her income, because in essence, she was a somewhat independent entity making something for the record company for hire. These things were built into her contract by her lawyers and her management in order to protect her. Sometimes, history is a way of looking back and asking, How the hell did this happen?
26 WILD THINGS RUN FAST
Most decades don’t officially begin in their first year. With the ’50s it was the 1952 McCarthy hearings. With the ’60s, it could be the March on Washington or the Kennedy assassination, both in 1963, or the Beatles’ arrival in America in 1964. The ’70s were defined, in some ways, as the winding down of the ’60s, with the resignation of Richard Nixon, which happened as Joni was riding high with Court and Spark in 1974. But the ’80s crashed down almost immediately, with the election of Ronald Reagan and the murder of John Lennon. Brutal times. Even though Joni personally encountered Lennon only at his most drunk and belligerent, she was still moved by his assassination to link him to Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King in her 1985 song “Impossible Dreamer.” And the dream of “Woodstock” was growing dimmer as the ’80s unfolded. AIDS was discovered in 1981, and the discos and bathhouses emptied out. MTV debuted with a song by the Buggles called “Video Killed the Radio Star.” The Buggles did not go on to become video stars, but Michael Jackson, Duran Duran, the Police, and others became video stars of epic proportions.
