by David Yaffe
Here was a Joni Mitchell song that Joan Baez singled out for admiration, the kind of protest song that Joni normally avoided. But this was indeed a horrifying morality tale, with corrupt priests, heartless nuns (who reminded her of ones she knew in the polio ward), and a hypocritical Catholic Church.
Of all the categories of fallen women, Joni leads the song as a woman condemned not for anything she did, but simply because of the reaction she got:
I was an unmarried girl
I’d just turned twenty-seven
When they sent me to the sisters
For the way men looked at me
When Joni was an unmarried girl of twenty-seven, she was recording Blue. And when she was pregnant at twenty-one, she felt a shame comparable to those martyred laundresses, even if she didn’t have to pay their terrible price. Just as “Ethiopia” came from an empathy with women who couldn’t afford to feed their babies, “The Magdalene Laundries” was both not an autobiographical song and one that dovetailed with a secret in her life that would soon become not such a secret at all.
In song, Joni had reached out to the daughter she gave up a couple of times. In “Little Green,” hidden in flowery language that no music critic could get beyond. In “Banquet”: “Some watch their kids grow.” Ten years later, even more explicitly in “Chinese Café”: “My child’s a stranger / I bore her but I could not raise her.”
By 1995, after the tabloids had finally revealed Joni’s search for her daughter, she confirmed the story without evasion. Her parents, who were the main reason she kept her daughter a secret all those years, were in their eighties and could handle it. And so, in the pages of the April 1995 issue of Vogue, she said, bluntly, “I had a child, and I was broke, literally penniless . . . And I met Chuck Mitchell, and he said he would take us on. I was kind of railroaded . . . we were never suitable. I went down the aisle saying, ‘I can get out of this.’” Boom. Joni Mitchell’s giant secret was now officially out. It was harder for a public figure to have privacy by 1995, and by then, Joni didn’t fight the beast. On this matter, she and the media were on the same search.
Around the same time, thirty-one-year-old Kilauren Gibb, a single mother and runway model from Toronto who reminded people of a young Joni Mitchell and who eventually would remind Joni of a young version of her mother, and Wally Breese, founder of jonimitchell.com, connected on the Internet, a venue that Joni actively avoided. But before any of that happened, Joni had another album to make.
31 SEE YOU AT THE MOVIES
Joni’s hatred for the music business had reached a tipping point. And yet the superb young jazz drummer Brian Blade reminded her why she loved music. All of Joni’s musical eccentricities that flummoxed her critics and typical musicians were things that Blade embraced and played right back to her. Blade came into Joni’s life just when she was ready to throw in the towel. A Gen X native of Shreveport, Louisiana, Blade grew up as an admirer of Joni’s music. Just as the master drummer Tony Williams grew up memorizing every rimshot and cymbal ride played by Philly Joe Jones on Miles Davis records, Blade, from adolescence onward, grew up in awe of Joni’s records, starting with Hejira. Blade was first gaining prominence in the mid ’90s as the drummer for the tenor saxophone player Joshua Redman, who caught the final wave of major label interest in jazz, when executives were still trying to spot the next Wynton Marsalis. The handsome and charismatic Redman—he was the son of the free jazz saxophonist Dewey Redman, and a Harvard graduate who turned down Yale Law School—led a quartet including some of the most dynamic and exciting jazz musicians to emerge in the ’90s, including the pianist Brad Mehldau and the bassist Christian McBride, both exemplars on their instruments. This was a band of stars before they became stars, and it was clear at the time that every accompanist was no mere sideman.
Like Tony Williams in his prime, Blade’s attack on his instrument was sensitive to everything around him, so nuanced, rhythmically and emotionally, his attunement was microtonal. Like Wayne Shorter, who employed him in his quartet beginning in 2000, Blade knew exactly when to shine and when to fade—and everything in between. His approach to drums was anything but rudimentary. He’d heat things up with sticks, cool them off with brushes, and rumble in the mysterium on mallets. Like Russ Kunkel, he was as intimate as a heartbeat, but with many more variations. Blade was, like Joni’s beloved Miles Davis, a master of space and minimalism. And like Joni, Blade understood the cinematic element of musicianship. As Shorter would say before he brought Blade and the rest of the band onstage, “See you at the movies.”
Joni had gotten a jazz education from drummer boyfriends before, first from John Guerin and then from Don Alias. Now she was hearing herself reflected back in just the right ways, by someone she started talking to when he was a twenty-three-year-old wunderkind. “Kid,” she would tell him when they first started playing together, “you’re dotting my i’s and crossing my t’s.” To be Joni’s dot and cross felt like a miracle for Blade, but before her music was revived, Joni was convinced that the muse had deserted her and that she would finally quit this crazy scene. (And when the muse went out of music, Joni would say, all that was left was the “ick.”)
Joni had been introduced to Blade by the producer Daniel Lanois, and they had been talking on the phone on and off since 1993. Joni invited Blade to what she said would be her swan song at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival on May 6, 1995. Joni had listened to Blade on recordings but had never played with him before. She hadn’t even met him in person.
“I’m coming down to play the jazz festival,” she told him. “Come in and wing it with me.” Blade was amazed that Joni would give him such trust. And he was equally crestfallen that he had already committed to play with Joshua Redman that night. Looking back on it, he felt that he realized he was being tested. Would he commit to his principles or follow his dream? “One thing I learned from my heroes in New Orleans was that if you give your word, you can’t take it back just because something seemingly better—or something that you desire more—comes along,” Blade recalled. “I learned it the hard way. I realize in hindsight, it was the right thing to do, as much as it hurt.”
Joni could hear that this was a young simpatico spirit. “Now, Brian Blade is another breed,” Joni said in 2015, when what she liked was getting whittled down. “There’s a young jazzer who loves all things jazz but also loves acoustic guitar and words. He’s a new breed. Before, they were very apartheid. Jazz had its own box. Mingus was an acoustic man and was very limited in what he could like. I’m very limited in what I can like. At this time: not much. I hear too well, and I need purity of spirit.”
She found that purity of spirit in Blade. Their first gig together was an American Way benefit organized by Gary Trudeau and Norman Lear. The next was a gig at Fez, in the basement beneath the Time Café in the NoHo section of Manhattan, an event where the Pretenders’ lead singer, Chrissie Hynde, had to be restrained from showing her love a bit too exuberantly.
“That’s a real singer up there!” she hollered, as Carly Simon tried to rein her in.
What was really up with Chrissie Hynde? Sure she loved Joni, but why did she have to climb all over her to prove it? Just the night before, it happened that Joni was backstage with Hynde and her manager, Tony Secunda. “She’s in a really bad mood,” said Secunda. “I’m just gonna warn you.” And Hynde was indeed storming around the dressing room. The Pretenders had just played LA and she was complaining about her fans. “I didn’t get into this business to have girls throwing themselves at me!” she groused. And just one night later, Hynde came to Joni’s gig at Fez and got blasted around Natalie Merchant and other young female singer-songwriters.
Joni was appalled by Hynde’s behavior. “Chrissie was sitting close to Carly Simon. And she just got drunker and drunker and yelled, ‘YOU ROCK, JONI!’” Joni recalled. “And this was a small room, so Carly told her to be quiet, and was shushing her, and she started insulting Carly, so Carly had to leave, and she left a note of apolo
gy. And then Chrissie came backstage and was literally climbing my body. And just the night before, she was complaining about all these women throwing themselves at her. It was so bizarre, the contrast.”
Being loved so intensely by someone who was so intensely loved herself was, while a bit odd, also flattering. Joni was about to turn fifty-two, and she suddenly felt that maybe she wasn’t quite ready to pack it in. She would throw obscurities from her catalogue to Blade—“Moon at the Window” or “The Three Great Stimulants”—just to see what he would do with them. Even the least canonical Joni Mitchell song still held vitality for Blade, who was clearly more than willing to go the distance with her. The Blade-Mitchell duo did television, including CBS This Morning (“A morning gig for Joni,” Blade recalled. “Not the wisest thing in the book. But she was a trouper.”) and Jay Leno, where they performed the new song “Love Puts on a New Face.” For Blade, every new song by Joni was a lifeline.
“I call Brian my youngest, because when he was a kid he was just so open, and saying, ‘Listen to this, Joni,’” Joni told me, when her own musical enthusiasm was contracting. “And he just loved everything. Now he’s getting narrower because when you get older you become more discerning. Also, you need something to feed you so you keep growing. It’s harder to get. That’s why Miles at the end would play three notes and walk around, because his bands were so terrible and there was no inspiration.”
Joni did not want to become like that. Blade helped her feel young just a little longer. Their infrequent trips to the studio became more frequent, until they had enough songs for Taming the Tiger. Some of the songs Joni performed live with Blade ended up without drums, in the spirit of Hejira, where Guerin’s drums came and went. Wayne Shorter is on hand for six tracks, Blade for five. Larry Klein’s bass is present for only three tracks, with Joni playing other bass parts on synthesizer. (By 1997, synthesizers had improved substantially since the Dog Eat Dog era, with fake sounding less fake.) At fifty-four, she was still in love, still filled with rage, still looking into the soul of her own sadness, still playful, still wanting to dance. She hated on the music business—no shock there. And yet she was still offering intimacy and musical curveballs. The question of whether she was at the top of her game seemed irrelevant. For listeners in 1998, this Joni Mitchell was the only one they were going to get. Her soprano was not ever coming back, but her alto was a rugged and resilient instrument, good for a sultry memory of being a bad girl (“Harlem in Havana”), mourning and melancholia (“Man from Mars,” rescued from Allison Anders’s film Grace of My Heart), a genuine pissed-off rocker that opened with “Kiss my ass!” (“Lead Balloon”), the I Hate the Music Biz song for which she had been preparing her listeners in interviews (“Taming the Tiger”), and shaming everyone involved in the U.S. military rape scandal on Okinawa (“No Apologies,” which rhymes with “outraged Japanese”). There were no epic songs on the scale of “The Sire of Sorrow” or “Come in from the Cold”; none even made it to five minutes. One song, “The Crazy Cries of Love,” which used her then boyfriend Donald Freed’s name in the first person, began with, “It was a dark and stormy night” as a response to the bad writing competition, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. (The song was never submitted.)
It was while she was finishing Taming the Tiger that Joni would finally be reunited with her daughter, Kilauren Gibb. Some have remarked that they could detect a change in tone in Joni’s voice on those final vocal tracks. Many believe that “Stay in Touch” was a song Joni wrote for Kilauren. Susan Lacy’s American Masters documentary of Joni used the song, with Mark Isham’s emotive muted trumpet, to accompany material about the reunion. Even if “Stay in Touch” was intended that way, though, the song had its roots in a different era, when she and Donald Freed were throwing the I Ching the night they met. That night, they each threw change, and Joni took notes:
This is really something
People will be envious
But our roles aren’t clear
So we mustn’t rush
Taming the Tiger, released September 29, 1998, would be Joni’s last collection of original songs for ten years. It would sell an anemic 133,000 CDs, fewer than half of Turbulent Indigo. Joni seemed to see this coming, especially on the vitriolic title track. But it would be, gratifyingly, backed by a tour. The last time out, on the 1983 Refuge of the Roads tour, had nearly wrecked her—barely breaking even, exhausting Joni’s voice and, with her post-polio flaring up, her back. But in 1998, she toured with her old friend Bob Dylan, whose album Time Out of Mind would win him his first Album of the Year Grammy and usher in an era of rebirth in many ways. By teaming up with him, along with Van Morrison, Joni did not have to worry about carrying on a tour operation completely on her own. She would be with Dylan, who had been on some version of his Never Ending Tour since 1988, and who was at home on the road.
Joni wasn’t. The exposure to air-conditioning and other irritants would ravage her immune system. And there were days on the road when she was so exhausted she could barely move. “Walk!” she would say in her head, and one foot went forward. And with every step she had to command the automatic function for walking. One night in San Jose, she was so sick with the flu that she spent the whole day in a steam cabinet, just trying to get the gunk out of her so she could go on. Every time she hit a high note, she thought she would pass out from all the congestion in her head. By the time she went onstage, she was delirious. She warned, “Just so you know, I might fall to the ground at any minute.” Always the high-wire artist.
But two things kept her going: the pleasure of working with Brian Blade, and her Roland VG-8 digital guitar processor, which allowed her to program all of her tunings and that also had the crucial benefit, with all her post-polio back problems, of being much lighter around her neck. Suddenly, the guitar wasn’t such an albatross. It wasn’t a perfect solution. The Roland VG-8 sounded like a computerized approximation of a guitar with a head cold, a rhythm instrument with a digital tinge. Still, it was necessary for keeping Joni in the game. To the people who missed the sound of her on acoustic guitar, she said, “Go sit on a tack!” Pushing on those frets was becoming an ordeal. In her fragile state, it was a miracle she could make music at all in 1998.
At this point, Joni’s most devoted fans, who had lived through the synthesized wilderness of Dog Eat Dog, were ready to tolerate this new electronic timbre, knowing that such matters seemed superficial compared with going the distance with this artist. Many would go to the concert out of loyalty to their favorite periods of Joni, usually from the ’70s. Some of them would also be Dylan people or Van Morrison people. Bruce Springsteen took his mother to one of those concerts. He writes movingly in his memoir, Born to Run, about how the concert inspired him to regroup the E Street Band and get back out on the road.
In the Chicago Tribune, Greg Kot gushed, “With Larry Klein sliding around the rhythm on bass, and Brian Blade dancing with brushes on the trap kit, Mitchell’s exquisite guitar voicings guided her band. The quintet conjured lush tones at even the quietest volumes, with Greg Leisz’s pedal steel drifting like a desert tumbleweed on Mitchell’s luminous ‘Amelia.’”
“I’m not used to arenas,” Joni said. “And my music was bouncing off the walls. That had happened to me before in 1976, and there was no way that I could sing when it’s bouncing around like that. I was just hearing echoes of myself. So I turned down and turned down some more. It was still slapping back. I turned down till I hit the sweet spot and it stopped slapping, right?”
Joni, in other words, did what seemed impossible. She turned the music down until it could be heard. “Only a woman would turn down,” thought Joni. Big, loud, and fast: that’s the masculine aesthetic. “Those shows are always too loud.”
“So, Dylan got very upset about this because I’d gotten the good review. And he fired Fast Eddie, who’s a great soundman. Before we went out on tour, I went to a show of Bob’s, and you couldn’t hear the words. It was illegible. It was a mushy sound.” Fast E
ddie—a.k.a. Ed Wynn—was known to be among the best in the business. He had been Joni’s soundman on the Refuge tour in 1983, back when she could afford him. Wynn and the drummer Vinnie Colaiuta moved on to bigger and better-paying gigs after that tour. Joni knew what Wynn could do then and what he could do again. Joni was a tough critic of sound, and Wynn met her standards.
Joni spoke to Elliot Mintz, Dylan’s media consultant at the time.
“Look,” Joni said, “he’s got this new stuff and I can’t hear the words. Can’t you get Eddie to dig him out?”
“No, that’s the way Bob likes it. He likes to be an enigma.”
“Eddie was my soundman,” Joni said. “And I couldn’t afford him after everyone else took him. There’s nothing wrong with Eddie. He’s a great soundman. But Bob fires him! And he hires a new soundman like it was Eddie’s fault that I got a good review. No! I turned down. You saw This Is Spinal Tap, where the amps go up to eleven! That’s all it was: common sense. It’s the same with sus chords. Only a woman could have discovered harmony that was never used before in the history of harmonic movement.”
