by David Yaffe
This was the Joni Mitchell of our dreams, the one who came up from the darkness, skated over the river, and even if she had, indeed, lost her heart, had emerged to tell us the devastating tale while she was finding it yet again. Joni’s love songs were often written at the tail end of a romance or on the uncertain quest of a new one. Or they even questioned love itself. Joni’s audience responded to these songs because the emotions were as nuanced and eccentric as the chords accompanying them. It is a long way from there to Wild Things Run Fast’s “Yes I do, I love yah!” on the exuberant—maybe too exuberant—“Underneath the Streetlights.” “Hot dog, darlin’,” she sings unashamedly on “Solid Love,” a song inspired by the ska crossover rhythms of the Police (if without the advertising-style repetitions that made their songs hits. Joni even wanted the Police to be her backing band for the album, but they couldn’t fit it in around their blockbuster touring schedule).
A crucial aspect of a Joni Mitchell song is that it does not necessarily conform to expectations of what a Joni Mitchell song is. But the ’80s were not the ’70s, and it would be a more difficult environment for riding her changes. The Police began as punks who were so militant, Sting had to persuade his bandmates that they wouldn’t lose their edge by having a song with a soppy girl’s name. That girl was Roxanne, and Sting argued that if Elvis Costello could still have cred with a lovely song for another girl—Alison—then surely they could get away with it in a kind of punk tango.
Joni had more baggage than the Police. She had gone through more changes than pop stars usually got away with, and there was something about her angling for the mainstream that landed with a thud. Her love for Larry Klein was as sincere as it got, but peddling for the masses wasn’t something she had tried to do before. Contrast with a decade earlier, in 1973, when she just heard the L.A. Express one night at the Baked Potato and found a musical cushion. But now it was the ’80s. Everything would be different.
The decade may have seemed like the golden age of a certain kind of pop, but success in the ’80s didn’t come as easily as all those radio-friendly pop songs made it look, and for Joni, commercially, hits didn’t come at all. She would record a total of four albums for Geffen Records—and she knew changes had to be made. She knew the albums were expensive to make. She could have recorded them with a lot less expense, and less of a need to recover costs. But success is as addictive as any drug. Once you’ve had a taste of it, it’s hard to live without it, especially when you have people on your payroll, a lavish Bel-Air property to maintain, and a level of lifestyle that wasn’t about to go back to that old Boho Dance. Joni’s career moved with the culture—for a while. The Hissing of Summer Lawns was released in the year of Tom Wolfe’s “Me Generation.” Hejira came out in the year of Gail Sheehy’s bestselling Passages. Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter was released in the year of Annie Hall. Joni was telling her listeners who and what they were, and as they were making their way through self-discovery and discursive relationships, Joni’s personal expression was part of the larger conversation. But by 1982, those people were on second or third marriages, women were wearing shoulder pads and had become Yuppies, or middle-aged people trying to keep up with them. Some of them had even voted for Reagan. The critics were rewarding work that was edgy, cool, ironic. Vulnerability, emotionality, disclosure—these salient Joni qualities were dismissed as so ’70s.
Wayne Shorter—who dodged jazz orthodoxies himself, not always to optimal effect—continued to be an empathic collaborator, and Victor Feldman, who complained all the way through his stint as keyboardist on the 1976 Hissing of Summer Lawns tour, continued his griping when he was playing vibes on “Moon at the Window.” Feldman, author of the textbook Musicians Guide to Chord Progressions, could not tolerate this session. “I thought the words were bothering him because he’s a family man and it was about people with the incapacity to love, and he had a very loving family,” Joni recalled later. “I said, ‘Are the words bothering you?’ He said, ‘I hate the harmony and the harmonic movement.’ I had to stop and send him home. I said, ‘You can’t play on something that you hate!’”
The most extraordinary revelation on the album came from flawed, all-too-human Joni, making revelations that were entirely personal. “Chinese Café” has all the elements of an astonishing Joni Mitchell song, and the secret of her life was sung about in the open, daring her audience to find it. In contrast to the flowery language of “Little Green,” so occluded in obscure, fairy-tale language, here she reaches out to Kelly Dale, who would now be eighteen, in a conversation with a Canadian friend named Carol, in the spirit of “Song for Sharon,” imagining the road not taken all the way back to Saskatoon. Like Sharon Bell, Carol did the conventional thing: married with children, watching the little ones go off to college. Joni, at thirty-nine, is doing what would have been expected of her peer group twenty years earlier: finding a happy, stable marriage to a guy in his mid-twenties. Joni is watching Carol’s daughter fly from the nest, remarking how “we look like our mothers now when we were those kids’ age.” It’s the cycle of life, the forty-year-old version of the twenty-year-old boy’s “Circle Game.”
The song begins innocuously, “caught in the middle,” with an old school friend, both “middle-class” and “middle-aged.” (Joni despises being called the former, but it fits the purposes of the song.) Forty-year-olds who buy records surely remember when they were wild things, and for Joni, it was remembering the “birth of rock and roll days,” when she could dance the night away without wondering what it meant.
Then, she doesn’t even bury the lede. She leads with the revelation, eavesdropping on her own conversation. “Now your kids are coming up straight / And my child’s a stranger / I bore her / But I could not raise her.” There it is, on the table, the thing that, she later claimed, made her surrogate mother to the world when she couldn’t be a real one. “Nothing lasts for long,” she intones three times, building intensity with each repetition. The further we go into Joni’s secrets, her pain, all that she had and all that she had given up, the song transitions to memories of youth, of dreaming on her dimes at the Chinese Café.
There was a real café. The CM Café was owned by Artie and Charlie Mack, two Asian men who allowed their customers to loiter and put another dime in the jukebox. The Chinese Café was a place for teenage Joni to smoke and listen to nasty rock and roll and swoony ballads, and the song, giving copyright where it’s due, switches, like an associative jukebox, to the latter: the Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody.” “Time goes by so slowly and time can do so much. / Are you still mine?” The way she sings it, this simple ballad sounds like it has more than twenty years’ baggage. It’s a shout-out to the past, to eighteen-year-old Kelly Dale, maybe even to herself. How much longer can I mother the world? Who am I suffering for? And where does the time go?
Joni would be a good soldier for Wild Things Run Fast and embark on her final long tour as a solo artist—from February 28, 1982, in Tokyo to July 30 at Red Rocks in Colorado. This was the longest tour she would ever do, and the strain of carrying an electric guitar showed in her face. She was as gorgeous as ever, but she had found a new limit and began pushing over it. She added Michael Landau, who, in stark contrast to the subtle timbres of Larry Carlton, Robben Ford, or Pat Metheny, busted in with an arena-sized rock and roll guitar, heavy, aggressive—really, in the pre–riot grrrl era, a cock-rock sound—that had never been associated with Joni Mitchell before. She thought he was better than Metheny, a shocking judgment to a jazzer. A new, focused hard rock groove gave new weight to chestnuts like “Song for Sharon.”
Nostalgia would have been more remunerative, but Joni would never be a human jukebox, even as she trotted out the old hits with new sounds. “Mike Landau was and is a beautiful player,” Klein told me. “She could be, I believe with some cause, critical of his sense of musical architecture. But we had a wonderful time playing with that band. A lot of great music every night. Beautiful and intuitive and painterly playing
from everybody.”
With Klein in the musical director role—one that had been Pastorius’s and then Metheny’s—the vibe would be a bass player who was also a loving spouse. “She wanted to record everything including sound checks, as improvised pieces were often making her want to write songs,” Klein explained. The tour itself was idyllic. “We all loved each other’s playing, Joan generally loved the way the band supported her. There were no hierarchical lines between crew and band; we all loved hanging together, laughing, drinking, and partying. A fair amount of drug intake for us all, but I have to say that we had a ball. The road becomes so insular and removed, and we had a year of all of us just traveling, playing her great songs, and enjoying each other. I was the de facto musical director, so when people would start overplaying, or things became problematic musically in any way, it was my job to work it out with the band. Joan hated confronting these things herself, as she, quite perceptively, thought that it would stiffen things up. We got along wonderfully during this time. Until later, we always got along in a wonderful way when we were working on records or touring. Seamless interaction. Always refining things. Our conversations about musical design would glide into philosophical discussions, then into other areas. A lot of laughter and mischievous smart jabbing at each other, and always a lot of music. She had a big personality, and was very opinionated, but was still capable of enjoying differences. I remember thinking during the Refuge tour that life doesn’t get better than this.”
When she did break out the dulcimer for “A Case of You,” she had to transpose it down several keys. On the road, they were having too good a time to see that Joni was not being a devoted custodian to her own instrument. But her voice was starting to really show the wear and tear of the smoking. That, coupled with the endurance issues of touring—singing sometimes three days on and one day off, not getting much sleep, as her hours were by then completely turned around, making it very difficult for her to get up for flights, do sound checks—just started to really expose the lack of resilience that was there because of the smoking.
“It wasn’t that she was singing too hard because of the band being too loud, as I was often the one who did her monitor mixes, and the band actually played quite softly onstage,” Klein explained. “The fact that they did was responsible for the sound usually being outstanding in the house, aside from really unworkable basketball-arena-type places. She was just incorrigible when it came to taking care of herself on the road. Knowing that she had a tough time going to sleep every night, she still would drink cappuccino after the gigs, and of course was smoking from the moment that she woke up to the moment that she fell asleep.”
All that toil and toll would lead to almost no money in the end. After the band and crew took home their checks, there was very little left.
Klein told me: “Joni was very naïve in the way that she approached money at that time. So was I! She never went to Elliot Roberts and said, ‘How much will I net out of this tour?’ Elliot of course didn’t care much about that bottom line, as he took his cut off of the gross, like all managers. On the other hand, she was not able to survive the kind of work schedule that other singers could on the road. Part of this was because of the smoking at this point, but also because of her insomnia and inability to get a good night’s sleep, then travel and play the same night. Every travel day off costs you on the road with a big crew and band.”
Joni would not scale back her lifestyle, but money was something to worry about in the midst of living large, even more so after the tour was over. “I think that some of the financial setbacks that followed her not making money on the Refuge tour scarred her, and began a gradual process of embitterment that resulted in her becoming angry more and more of the time. I think that anger is poison, and these setbacks left her spending more and more time stuck in ‘search for the guilty’ mode.”
He remembered well the ways in which Joni, who had once been the Queen of Rock and Roll, began to feel financially unmoored. “She was invested in real estate, and that was when everyone who had real estate took a beating,” Klein told me. “She was repeatedly assured that she was still in good financial shape, but this didn’t stop her from having ‘Caine Mutiny’ nights, where she would stay up all night trying to figure out who was against her, and what the next threat against her would be.”
The California Board of Equalization singled her out for a retroactive tax during her peak years between 1971 and 1977, and since most of her work was done without a producer, there was no one to hide behind. She was, in effect, an independent contractor, and independence had its price. In addition, she suspected someone at Elliot Roberts’s office had been pilfering her purse. She responded by leaving the agency, saying that Elliot was still a good friend, but that he was a manager in need of a manager. She signed with Peter Asher instead.
And then Dora, her housekeeper, accused her of beating her, said Klein. “It was settled out of court and the insurance company covered it. I always thought that she was making a lot of it up, but not all of it. I think Joan did physically attack her. According to Dora, she pretty much threw her around the room. The truth probably lies in between. You’d have to be like Hulk Hogan to do those things that Dora was claiming. Joan maintained that she kicked her in the shins. The housekeeper was small. She was short. Joan said that Dora planned it out and knew how to trigger her anger.” Dora received $250,000.
“If you spend that much of the time angry,” reflects Klein, “it eats away at your soul and makes you sick. This, and the smoking, just began to wear her health down. On one level she wouldn’t hesitate to walk into an antique store and spend fifty thousand dollars on a lamp that she liked, but then she would be up all night angrily pacing the floor and hypothesizing irrationally about how her business managers were stealing from her, or how an innocuous comment from someone was really a veiled insult. All of this went along with a four-pack-a-day smoking habit and no reasonable sleep pattern. It just began to grind her down.”
In the summer of 1985, while she was recording her next album, she was also nearly killed by a drunk teenager on the Pacific Coast Highway, totaling her car. When she went back to the scene of the crime weeks later, another car nearly ran her over. It was a time of bad omens, and an attempt to rage against the mainstream with the sounds of the mainstream.
Joni knew that her next album would be angry.
27 DOG EAT DOG
Amid this turbulence, Joni would have to give up her precious creative freedom. For Joni’s first eleven albums, she had the luxury of creating without any intervention from the suits. This was starting to change, as Wild Things Run Fast, despite all of Joni’s efforts to reenter the mainstream, had peaked at twenty-five, even lower than Mingus’s peak at seventeen. The grueling nine-month tour, which barely broke even, also did not help matters, and, even worse, it marked the beginning of her post-polio syndrome. The filmed material from the tour, for the BBC and for her own Refuge of the Roads video, showed an unmistakable anguish in her face, with the electric guitar around her neck seeming like an albatross.
And she was angry. Very angry.
Melancholy, not anger, is an emotion more congenial to the Joni Mitchell canon. Of course, getting honest feelings across is always paramount, and if those feelings—in spite of a marriage that was still a good one—tended to be political, theological, and sociological complaints, then she had to go with her gut, as she always did. Before she fired him, Elliot Roberts, looking at the weak sales for Wild Things Run Fast, insisted that Joni hire a producer to acclimate her to the sounds of the mid ’80s. Joni had escaped those knob twirlers ever since Paul Rothchild went on vacation and she and Henry Lewy finished Clouds on their own.
Larry Klein heard a convincing electronic cover of “The Jungle Line” by the synth wizard Thomas Dolby, who had scored an MTV hit with the playful and infectious dance record “She Blinded Me with Science.” He was not only fluent in the new technology but was having fun with it. Maybe he could help translate Jon
i to the ’80s and the ’80s to Joni, because Joni was not having fun in the mid ’80s. Joni had made it by being sincere, blunt, earnest, romantic; the ’80s were ironic, ultra-hip, post-ironic. Paul Simon, a couple of years older than Joni, was hip to the new sensibility; “You Can Call Me Al” was impeccably clever stand-up wrapped in irony and Soweto rhythms. Joni’s new songs were bereft of whimsy, and were an awkward fit with the new sounds.
Dolby’s contract gave him a coproducer credit (with the engineer Mike Shipley, Larry Klein, and Joni herself), even though she thought of him as more of a synthesizer consultant. Klein had recently bought the latest Fairlight CMI (1985 retail price: £50,000, or approximately $100,000). He wanted to learn how to play with his expensive new toy. And so Dog Eat Dog was an album of its moment.
And what kind of moment was 1985? It was the year Tom Waits released Rain Dogs, an album of avant-garde Brechtian café music that wouldn’t touch a Fairlight with a ten-foot pole. Sting, meanwhile, took a cue from the Joni Mitchell mid to late ’70s playbook and recorded his first solo album, The Dream of the Blue Turtles, with the saxophonist Branford Marsalis’s band; although it didn’t match the dizzying success of the Police’s Synchronicity, and he was accused of being very pretentious—a charge he became adept at surviving, especially as he darted in and out of the mainstream—the album still managed to hit number three on the UK album chart. Like Joni’s Shadows and Light band, Marsalis was also fronting a group used to more solo space. But the money and exposure more than made up for it. Joni had no such luck. She was pilloried for working with jazz musicians while Sting was being praised for it.
