by David Yaffe
Larry Klein agrees with Joni’s take on this. “The version of things that I heard was that when the Chicago review came out praising the sound on our portion and denigrating Bob’s sound, that he reacted by firing Ed,” Klein recalled. “The reason that our sound was better was that we played very quietly onstage. That enables the house soundman to have a fighting chance at doing something legible in a big basketball arena. If the band plays loud onstage, it’s over.”
This was a tour where Joni’s (as she called him) “magnificent ex-husband” played bass, and where her boyfriend was along for the ride. The two men got along well enough. Keeping cool—especially in the midst of frail health and wounded egos—was the order of the day. “We had managed to split up while staying on good terms,” Klein recalled. “But she was in a relationship with Don Freed, who was an unusual guy—albeit being a very unusual situation, touring with her, with the ex-husband on board. He used to sit around with earphones on, humming to himself. I guess that was how he dealt with conversation with Joan, which was increasingly becoming like witnessing a monologue.”
Off the road, Joni had a life to get back to like never before. Suddenly, Joni, a woman of heart and mind with no child to raise, had a daughter—grandchildren, even. Her life, she thought, was complete. The songwriting began shortly after she gave birth in 1965, and each song was somehow a message to her daughter, or to the world in which she was growing up. Now that she had her daughter back, she had the ultimate excuse to bolt from music. She held on to this reasoning for about ten years, including in a 2005 interview with the cultural critic Camille Paglia, who began the interview stating, “I’m interested in your creative process.” Paglia had included Joni in a collection called Break, Blow, Burn, an anthology of what she considered to be the forty-three greatest poems in English, beginning with a Shakespeare sonnet and ending with “Woodstock.”
Paglia called herself a “pro-sex feminist,” even as her writings were often calculated to offend normative feminists, especially in a New York Times op-ed called “Madonna: Finally a Real Feminist.” Joni once compared Madonna to Nero, and yet she and Madonna had common ground: tough, independent women who did not identify with conventional feminists. But the creative process was not something Joni could talk about in the present tense; her songwriting had been on sabbatical for a while. Toward the end of the interview, Joni explained why she wrote and why she wasn’t writing. “I don’t write at all anymore,” Joni told Paglia. “I quit everything in ’97 when my daughter came back. Music was something I did to deal with the tremendous disturbance of losing her. It began when she disappeared and ended when she returned. I was probably deeply disturbed emotionally for those thirty-three years that I had no child to raise, though I put on a brave face. Instead, I mothered the world and looked at the world in which my child was roaming from the point of view of a sociologist. And everything I worried about then has turned out to be true.”
This was an enormous claim, one that she was certainly feeling at the time. While the theme of suppressed motherhood came out implicitly in “Ethiopia” or explicitly in “Little Green” or “Chinese Café,” she was now making the more radical claim that every pain or conflict in every song was from the suppressed sorrow of giving up her daughter. It would be reductive to view all of her work only from this perspective, but then this was the Joni who rushed into a relationship with a troubled young woman with all the intensity of a love affair, which, in a way, it was. But Joni’s love affairs either ended badly, or at their most benign, simply ended. And this love affair would have its ups and downs. By the time that the songwriting did come back for Shine (2007), it would be for an album that had no love songs. By then, the bloom of the reunion had wilted for a while. The first tussles were resolved, but Joni’s attempt to offer parenting advice to her daughter was angrily rebuffed. Joni resolved never to give advice without solicitation. But things kept going south. Joni decided that Kilauren was a “damaged” person, someone who would never forgive Joni for abandoning her. When Joni asked a friend to introduce her daughter to people at the Viper Room, the friend came back with the conclusion that Kilauren was “a far cry from Joni” and was “a barroom bitch—someone who hangs around bars and starts mouthing off.”
Did Joni expect a kid who was not troubled? Did she think that, just as they looked alike, they would be alike? Like Kilauren, Joni was a rebel, someone who would not fit in any institutional setting. But Joni was a genius, whose greatness presented itself early. “I sang ‘Urge for Going,’ my second song, on television shortly after I gave birth to Kilauren,” Joni recalled. By the time she was twenty-two, she was already developing an idiosyncratic approach to guitar playing and had written “Urge for Going” and “The Circle Game”; at twenty-three, she had written “Both Sides, Now.” When they were reunited, Kilauren, at thirty-three, had dropped out of various schools (including stints as a nonmatriculated student at Harvard and the University of Toronto). She was living on student loans and studying desktop publishing at George Brown College in Toronto. Her only professional experience was as a model with the Elite agency for ten years. She had two children with two different fathers, and brought a host of emotional problems into Joni’s life.
One problem that loomed increasingly large was her resentment toward her birth mother for giving her up. She was not convinced by the argument that Joni had been penniless and that Kilauren would have been better off. In many ways she had been better off with the well-meaning upper-middle-class family who adopted her. And Joni had no career to speak of on February 19, 1965. Until she met Chuck Mitchell the next month, she could not even afford a union card. Her songwriting, which became her first and most lasting source of income, began later that year, and if she hadn’t given up her daughter, the songwriting might not have come at all—at least according to Joni’s reasoning in several interviews.
Over the years, Joni adjusted to an on-again, off-again relationship with Kilauren. She did bring her onstage at the Luminato Festival in 2013 when everyone in the program sang “Woodstock.” “The first two weeks with Kilauren were very pleasant, but after that, she was hostile,” Joni said in 2015. The disappointments and bitterness were still present in 2015. According to Tony Simon, Kilauren was not listed as Joni’s official next of kin when she needed a medical proxy, and, when she was summoned to her mother, lying in a hospital bed installed in her Bel-Air home, she claimed to have no money for the plane ticket from Toronto.
Still, the relationship gave Joni something she had long been missing, to be able to see her parents in her daughter’s children. Joni may have left the provinces of Canada as quickly as she could, yet she carried them with her, made music out of their beauty, and brought their beauty to the world. She told me, “Marlin, my grandson, can think for himself. He’s a thinker. Even at five, he’d listen to stuff and then he’d look at me to see what I thought, and then he’d come up with his own conclusions. He’s very sweet and smarter than you would know. He’s gotten very quiet as an adult—he’s a good listener. He takes in what you’re saying and he laughs. He’s like my dad in that way. My dad was like that. He had a very unusual mind, and I do, too. I think it’s like an Oriental mind.”
Joni was equally proud of her granddaughter. “Daisy’s an A student,” she told me. “She’s an honor student. She’s learning ukulele, and I asked her if she could play something and she said, ‘Oh, no. I’m only in my second year.’ Second year? I had mastered it in six months. Marlin has a different mentality. I think it’s the Sami blood. Norwegians don’t have the extremely high cheekbones as a rule. But the place I come from, which is close to the border where the Sami run—the Sami have them. To my father’s horror, I know we have Sami blood.”
The difficulties with her daughter were worth it for the grandchildren. As for the songwriting, now that she had Kilauren back, she wasn’t sure if it would ever return. And so Joni rounded out her recording contract by channeling the writing of others, and then recasting her earlie
r material; the arranger Vince Mendoza would conduct and write the charts for Both Sides Now (2000) and Travelogue (2002).
Suddenly, without an instrument other than her voice—and without any new songs—she would, without a fight, now relinquish the writing and orchestration to others. Near the end of Billie Holiday’s short life, Lady Day would record Lady in Satin with a battle-scarred voice matched, devastatingly, with Ray Ellis’s lush orchestra. It would be Holiday’s final completed album, and the roughness of her instrument only made the heartache she sang about even more profound. Lady Day was only forty-two when she recorded it, but she sounded like she had lived many lifetimes. By the time Joni was in her fifties, she was closer in intonation and range to late-period Billie Holiday. And even though Vince Mendoza’s charts were carefully chosen for a comfortable range, what was revealed was just as bare-bones as Lady in Satin.
Joni had been honest in all of her work, whether it was in an effortless multi-octave instrument or whether, as the years and cigarette butts accumulated, that range narrowed to a spot that was still sweet, even when it was bitter. Joni first worked with Mendoza on Kyle Eastwood’s From Here to There (1998), where she first tried out her take on Marvin Gaye’s “Trouble Man,” and what was breathy in the studio became more percussive and precise the more times she sang it on the road in every performance she gave that year. “Trouble Man” dates back to 1972, the year of For the Roses, when Joni had not yet channeled her inner black man. The line “I feel the kind of protection that’s all around me” was changed to “I see the kind of pretension that’s all around me,” and that, of course, is what the jive detector is for.
Joni often referred to her collaboration with Charles Mingus as a musical education, and yet the albums that immediately followed Mingus—especially the electronic din of Dog Eat Dog—did not reveal any obvious fruits. But by the time Joni appeared on Herbie Hancock’s Gershwin’s World (1998)—singing “Summertime” and “The Man I Love”—it was clear that her phrasing and overall conception had far surpassed her Court and Spark cover of “Twisted” or even the ambitious hybrid experiments of Mingus. By then, Hancock told Joni that she was the best jazz singer alive. Joni later complained about Ira Gershwin’s limitations as a lyricist—“Shame on you, Ira Gershwin,” she said, referring to the phrase “And so all else above”—but there was no doubt that George Gershwin’s melodies were the perfect vehicle for Joni to show off her new jazz chops, which became more sultry with age. She was no longer the ingénue who had done her homework. She sounded like experience itself.
It was Mr. Kratzmann back in seventh grade who not only circled her clichés, but told her that if she could paint with colors she could paint with words. Now that she wasn’t bringing new material to the table, interpretation was all, and her word painting, along with her method acting, became even more acutely attuned. Wayne Shorter, who shares Joni’s pictorial approach, was on hand, and Vince Mendoza’s arrangements and conducting were in consultation with Larry Klein, all with this idea that she would reveal herself anew with someone else’s material, or her own songs from an earlier self.
As Joni seemed to be concluding her recording career, what began as the minimalism of the first few records turned into the kind of maximalist orchestras that David Crosby rightly kept off Song to a Seagull, which then set the minimal tone for Clouds, Ladies of the Canyon, and Blue. At that point, Joni’s voice could cover three octaves, containing such a near orchestral range that an actual orchestra would have been redundant. But it was not Sinatra listeners they were aiming for, not yet. By the time she was in her fifties, she was ready to sing her variations on “It Was a Very Good Year,” looking back with tenderness, with sorrow, a bit of wistfulness, and more than a little melodrama. Everyone involved with Both Sides Now knew that including Bill Carey and Carl Fischer’s “You’ve Changed,” which had been covered by many legends, including Nat King Cole, Sarah Vaughan, and even Marvin Gaye, would invite comparison with Billie Holiday’s Sturm und Drang version from Lady in Satin, an album that beautifully exploited the aesthetic possibilities of an eviscerated larynx with strings.
The two versions seem similar, but are in fact a study in contrast. Holiday was out of range and out of breath. Joni was in a comfortable range, letting the song, and not just the pathos of the singer, tell the story. “There’s a theory that you need to be wrecked when you read the lyric to ‘You’ve Changed,’ but there’s another read to it when you’re not wrecked,” Vince Mendoza recalled. “Realizing that the person you loved is not the person you thought they were could have a tragic read or just a different kind of read than that, and the orchestra in that piece was the tragedy. The approach to writing that was transfigured ninths and Schoenberg and post-Romantic orchestral approach and not as an orchestra playing behind a jazz standard. Joni’s approach to singing it was much smoother. She didn’t need to be tragic. She just let the words do the talking. I totally resonate with her theory about the singer getting into character. And in every chart I work on, I have to get into character to figure out what I want the lyric to mean. The idea of it was tragedy. But she didn’t need to impart that with her voice.”
The performance that made the largest impact from Both Sides Now was the near-millennial reading of the title track, a reminder of how many new meanings had been accumulated from the many lives Joni had been living since she wrote that song and, a few months later, sang it to Judy Collins on the phone in that auspicious middle-of-the-night encounter. Joni had finally, in many ways, earned the right to sing her song. In the ’70s, she heard Mabel Mercer sing it—when Mercer was in her seventies—and went backstage and, without introducing herself as the author, told Mercer that it takes an older woman to bring the song across. Mercer was offended, and Joni, still in her tender years, learned that a woman is never an older woman. And yet when her time came to redo the song with the gravity of accumulated years, Joni, for theatrical purposes, decided that sometimes a woman is an older woman after all. If wisdom was the prize for the indignities of aging, she would take it and run with it. As Joni was vamping it up in the studio, the orchestra, which included members of the London Symphony Orchestra, were in tears, and Mendoza was having trouble holding it together, too.
“There are so many layers to what happened on ‘Both Sides, Now,’” Mendoza recalled. “The woman who wrote it didn’t really know the gravity of the lyric until many years later, as an older woman reading it. Also, the same person who sung it was singing it again. The song itself—the melody is so beautiful. That totally scared the hell out of me when we were doing it, because I grew up with that song. I didn’t know how I could do it justice without ruining it, and then adding an orchestra to the cast of characters might bring it into another world that we didn’t want it to be in, so I’m happy that it worked out well. At the sessions, you could tell from the first line that she read that she sang that this would be the one. It’s funny when you’re on the other end of that pathos. When you’re a twenty-three-year-old singing about being older, you still know that you’re just twenty-three. All of her younger lyrics were wise beyond her years. My recollection of the sessions is that she seemed like she was quite delighted with the way that the voice and the orchestra came together, and there were certain things about the lyric that came out as a result of the orchestration. I don’t remember her getting emotional about it. I remember seeing a little smile. She was delighted. I never saw her getting emotional about it. I do remember that the musicians were in tears.”
Joni knew exactly what she was doing and the effect she was getting. The arranger and the musicians were losing it, but Joni was smiling. She had them exactly where she wanted them. She knew she had achieved spectacular theater just by getting older and going back to a song people thought they knew. The song was more than three decades old, and even though it was among her most covered songs—by hundreds of artists representing a cross section of genres, from Dolly Parton and Frank Sinatra to Doris Day and Dizzy Gillespie, all the way
to American Idol.
Joni was sure that, in 1967, she couldn’t possibly adequately cover the subject of fantasy and reality in a short pop song. But by the time she was in her mid-fifties, she had lived it, and her nicotine-stained mezzo sounded as weary as the words she rasped. Her voice might have lost clarity, range, and dexterity, but it had gained a new emphasis, and Wayne Shorter’s soprano filigrees at the end—playing in the range that twenty-three-year-old Joni could reach—embodied the song’s refrain that “something’s lost, but something’s gained.” The folk waif in the pastel miniskirt was long gone. Joni gasped for breath between phrases, but the struggle was a crucial part of the performance. The lyrics were familiar, but the delivery was startling. When she was a girl, clouds were like “ice cream castles in the air.” “Now,” Joni at fifty-five growled with phlegmatic wisdom, “they only block the sun / They rain and snow on everyone.” She takes her time between the words: “So many things . . . I . . . could have done . . . but clouds got in my way.” When the London Symphony Orchestra members broke decorum and cried, perhaps they were lamenting the multi-octave voice gone, a pristine and mellifluous instrument decimated. Maybe they were crying because for the first time, they were hearing what the song was really about. It took all these years for Joni to finally sound like she had looked at life from both sides, now. “It was quite amazing to see an English orchestra get that emotional,” recalled Klein.
Joni did a brief tour—twelve dates in 2000. She was surrounded by superb musicians, including Herbie Hancock on piano and Wallace Roney on trumpet. Mendoza was on hand for conducting the orchestras, which were different in every city. A constant presence was Roney, who had been recommended by Wayne Shorter. Roney had the ultimate Cinderella moment of jazz trumpeters when an ailing Miles Davis, who was attempting to play the parts he had mastered with the arranger Gil Evans, was too weak to step up to them again when he was paired with Quincy Jones for a Montreux performance in 1991. Miles Davis never looked back and never asked for help. Now he was doing both and Roney, at the age of thirty-one—the age of Miles at his summit—was able to fill in what was needed with superb musicianship. He had gotten to know Shorter when he was plucked to play Miles Davis’s parts when Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams reunited as the Tribute to Miles band in 1992. Eight years later, he found himself as the only featured soloist on a tour with Joni and orchestras. “I was standing right next to Joni every night,” Roney recalled. “I didn’t travel with the orchestra. I traveled with her and the band. She traveled with us but in her own car. She was cool, you know? The music she had been playing all along was jazz, even if it was in a folk-rock form. She was always an improvisational artist. When she had a chance to draw on her jazz influences—Miles and Billie Holiday—she went for it.”
