Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  Court and Spark was Joni’s first smash hit. It charted at #2 and stayed there for four weeks, then went platinum, with over a million copies sold. It received Grammy nominations for Album of the Year and Record of the Year (“Help Me”), and Joni for Best Pop Female Vocalist. (When Olivia Newton-John won instead, there was audible dismay from the audience.) Joni and her boys went on a fifty-city tour, from which was produced a live album, Miles of Aisles, which, in November, also reached #2. This rush of mainstream success was new for Joni, and road life had been grinding. She let her friend Ron Stone remain at her Lookout Mountain house, and, by the end of 1974, she bought an elegant Spanish home built in 1929 atop a private Bel Air road. Its intricate wrought-iron gates opened into a fountained courtyard, and there was a pool, of course. John Guerin packed up his drums and jazz records and moved in with her.

  Over the next year and a half, working with a decorator, Joni would turn the home into a Mediterranean palazzo of warmth and glamour. She hired a live-in South American maid, Dora, who would become her life manager and who enjoyed Joni’s largesse—driving around town in a little red sports car, taking Club Med vacations—while putting up with her boss’s temper. (In the middle of one argument, Joni struck Dora.)

  Despite the luxury, Joni continued to think of herself as “a ‘seeker,’” John said. “She had this image of herself as being an artist who’d go up to Canada and be a hermit and starve herself—and that I wouldn’t let her do. She was driven; she’d get tunnel-visioned: She’d be up all night honing lyrics, and she’d hone them again and again. I’d say, ‘Joan, that’s beautiful!’ The next night she’d rehone it. I’d say, ‘Damn, Joan, I love it!’ Tomorrow it’s a little different, and I usually loved it more.”

  John helped her have fun—they went to Rio and Bahia during Carnival and had wild nights dancing the samba. They were crazy in their different ways. “He was this wild man who would give big bashes; one time Sarah Vaughan came, and the party went on for days,” a friend says, while Joni was the pushy adventurer (“She just put herself out there, got herself in there…,” John said, bemused): dragging him along on explorations that often led to her being bawled out or run out of town. They were screamed away from the doorstep of an Indian turquoise craftsman she’d insisted on visiting in the middle of the night; the next day she was angrily stared down by Hopi kids whose pictures she tried to take. Another time, Joni was snapping pictures of the old people “who didn’t know who she was” in rural Canadian luncheonettes. John expected one of them to take her camera and smash it. And, through a Beale Street pawnbroker, Joni sleuthed out the great Furry Lewis and arrived at his house bearing gifts: a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and a carton of Pall Malls. But while he was sitting there (“propped up in his bed, with his dentures and his leg removed”), something popped out of Joni’s mouth that made the cranky old bluesman turn nasty. He loudly snarled to another person present, “I don’t like her.” (Joni used the line in “Furry Sings the Blues,” on Hejira and—in certain cases, she could get as well as she could give—Furry claimed she owed him royalties.)

  Joni’s next album, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, was released in November 1975, and it embodied the duality between the wealthy mansion dweller and the gleefully nosy provocateur. The awkward title (named for the sound of Bel Air sprinklers in the title song about a trophy wife) shouted “upper middle class.” But like a conceptual artist, Joni played with this fact. The album’s internal photo showed her submerged in her Bel Air pool, and the Joni-painted cover—a miragelike downtown L.A. in the backdrop of a surreal pea-soup-green megalawn on which African tribesmen are carrying a long, snakelike communal drum (illustrating the album’s most innovative—and strange—cut, “The Jungle Line,” featuring drummers from the African nation of Burundi)—announced that she was mocking her own affluence with intentionally controversial symbols.

  Joni was leaving behind the confessionalism that had intensely defined Blue, For the Roses, and Court and Spark. This new album, as Stephen Holden put it, was Joni doing “social philosophy. All the characters are American stereotypes who act out socially determined rituals of power and submission in exquisitely described settings. Mitchell’s eye for detail is…precise and…panoramic.” The intellectual substance Holden saw in Hissing (for which Guerin played drums) was small comfort to her bewildered fans, who had come to Joni to feel. There are hum-along-with cuts—the lovely “Shades of Scarlett Conquering,” which presents (a disguised) Ronee Blakley, who had just had a star turn in Robert Altman’s Nashville, as a diva coquette; and the bubbly, sexy “In France They Kiss on Main Street,” which evokes her teen years at the Y dances and Commodore Cafe, and which became a moderate hit. But others—“The Boho Dance,” about starving-artist hypocrisy; the pretentious, semiliturgical “Shadows and Light”; and “Harry’s House,” about a wealthy man and woman separating—seem preachy or (odd for Joni) wordy, though a Lambert, Hendricks and Ross song inset on that latter song is wittily sublime. Joni had recently been the subject of a major Time profile, in which she said, apparently unfacetiously, that her “lover was a man named Art.” Despite the fact that her real lover was meat-and-potatoes-and-Monday-Night-Football Guerin, with whom she talked shop (they had endless arguments about “the root of the chord”), that self-seriousness on Hissing was undisguised. Although Hissing shot to #4—Court and Spark’s wake was strong—the negative reviews (the Detroit News, for example, called it “sometimes so smug that it is downright irritating”) upset her.

  “Joni was very self-involved and thin-skinned,” John recalled. “Elliot would keep the bad reviews away from her, which I thought was really dumb—I thought it was abnormal; she should have been way past that. But Joan remembers everything any critic said about her.” Joni was vulnerable in general. “There were days where she’d lose her self-confidence—and days when she didn’t feel like the prettiest girl on the block.”

  At some point in 1975, Joni and John became quietly engaged. “We had wedding rings made,” he said. “Joan designed them—gold, with a kind of hieroglyphic that meant ‘lasting relationship’ in some Eastern language.” (John, who was married twice after his breakup from Joni, kept his ring until he died.) “We had dinner with her folks and discussed where the wedding was going to be.” A baby was not in the picture, John said. As for the baby she’d already had—“there were times she would feel maternal, but she didn’t dwell on it. It was gone. Who knows what kind of guilt she really felt, but she had set up a defense mechanism a long time ago and that’s the way she handled it.”

  At the same time that Hissing was released, in November 1975, Joni flew to the East Coast to join Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, an intentionally nostalgic coast-to-coast rock tour that doubled as a fund-raiser for imprisoned prizefighter Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, who was seeking a retrial after having been convicted of murder. The tour, which featured Dylan and Baez singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” as if it were 1963 all over again, was tinged with historical symbolism (it kicked off near Plymouth Rock, for one thing). It was also, behind the scenes, full of drugs, angst, and misunderstandings—as Joni would put it, in song, the participants were indulging in “pills and powders to get them through this passion play.” (It was during the tour that Joni’s friendship with Ronee Blakley was severed.) Along on the tour—he would cowrite, with Dylan, the movie Renaldo and Clara that essentially came out of it—was Sam Shepard.

  Shepard was one of the most award-winning of Off-Broadway play-wrights (he later won a Pulitzer), a sometime musician, film actor, former downtown Manhattan scene-maker, self-styled cowboy—and a devastatingly attractive man. Shepard and Joni were exactly two days apart in age; they both turned thirty-two during their time on the tour. He was a physical type she had cottoned to before; like Eric Andersen, Tom Rush, James Taylor, and Jackson Browne, he was, under his long hair and scowly sensitivity, as neatly WASP-handsome as any debutante-escorting Wall Street scion out of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  Joni had
planned to follow the tour for only three cities, and, at that, as an observer. But, for what she has called “mystical reasons of my own,” she stayed on for the duration of its ’75 leg. (There was a 1976 leg as well, which did not include her.) A song started “coming” to her, and she wrote pieces of it during the bus rides. Called “Coyote,” it would be one of her wittiest, sexiest, and most un-self-pitying, telling the story of a woman in a transient situation who meets a stranger from a beguilingly different background: a cowboy. (What Joni was writing, of course, Carole was living.) A brief, humorous but avariciously erotic affair seems to ensue in funky roadhouses and hotels with lots of “keyholes and numbered doors.”

  For years, fans who loved the casual, devil-may-care-about-feminism abandon of the song, which would lead off her 1977 album Hejira, have wondered who “Coyote” was. Who was the man who has two other women but, Joni sang in a flattered flush, still wants her? And the one who inspired one of Joni’s ten best lines ever: in a coffee shop in the morning, right after their tryst, the sexy brooder is “staring a hole in his scrambled eggs”; then he “picks up my scent on his fingers while he watches the waitress’s legs.”

  “Coyote” was Sam Shepard.

  Joni’s breezy adieu of a hook—“No regrets, Coyote!”—is a sort of ten-years-later version of “Cactus Tree” ’s “She will love them when she sees them.” And it is how any sophisticated woman in her early thirties would want an affair to end. But whether or not that interlude with Coyote/ Shepard was so blithely inconsequential is questionable.

  Joni and John and her band embarked on the Hissing tour in mid-January 1976. Joni sang the deliciously suggestive “Coyote” on the tour and told audiences that it had come to her during Rolling Thunder. Before the end of the Hissing tour, for reasons that may or may not have had to do with the source of the song, Joni and John had such a big fight that the rest of the tour (including its international leg) was canceled. They broke up—this time (they thought) for good. His version of events: “I finally left. There was too much water under the bridge—I’m not gonna cite a certain thing, an ‘I did this, she did that.’ We had our differences, but it was a buildup.”

  Joni stayed with her friend Neil Young for a while to sort out her life; then, around late spring, she embarked on a cross-country road trip, traversing the northern part of America, west to east, with two male friends. One of her road mates, in the midst of a custody battle, was picking up his young daughter from the child’s grandmother in Maine; the other, who was considerably younger than Joni and with whom she became briefly involved, was the inscrutable near-juvenile (“he lives with his family…”) that Joni describes in “A Strange Boy.”

  After her road companions remained on the East Coast, Joni rented a white Mercedes, donned a red wig, renamed herself “Charlene Lattimer,” and drove herself back across the country, this time taking the southern route. But the trip—her hejira—was undeniably symbolic, from the brassy red wig (denoting a female performance-art-like adventure) to the fact that she was undertaking it all by herself: the contemplation-breeding solitude; the arduous, unshared driving. To the fact that she was making it while America was celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence: freedom for the thirteen colonies; freedom (yet again) for the Cactus Tree girl. The long trip seemed to highlight how out on a limb she’d chosen to climb. As with more than a few other women in their early thirties, the indecisiveness that had started as a temporary principled rebellion had become her life. Six years ago she’d journeyed through Europe—sleeping in Matala caves and Ibiza fincas—to shake off a relationship with Graham. Now, in shaking off John, cold-water interstate restrooms, blue motel rooms, and Winn-Dixie cold cuts formed the starker backdrop and sustenance for her advanced reflections.

  As she drove and stopped and drove and stopped, she wrote song-postcards from the road, many of them puzzling out the breakup. The half tongue-in-cheek 1940s torch-style “Blue Motel Room” mused about getting back with John. In the title song, “Hejira” (literally, “Mohammed’s flight from danger”), Joni embraces her “melancholy,” as she has so many times before, but this time—months from turning thirty-three—thoughts of mortality encroach; while she’s visiting a church in one of the cities, the wax from the devotional candles “rolls down like tears.” Continuing on, she falls “in with some drifters cast upon a beach town” on the Gulf of Mexico; “Charlene Lattimer” ends up making them dinner (it’s not only the likes of Geffen, Dylan, Cher, and Sarah Vaughan that she’d cook for) and thinks fondly of them as she drives on. We eavesdrop as she seeks relief from her oppressive analytic thinking and her deep self-absorption. She is grateful when she succeeds at ditching the former (in a forest, she marvels at the “muscular” clouds and exhorts the sun to “shine on your witness!”). She also overcomes the latter: while gassing up at a service station, she is riveted by a tacked-up photo of the earth taken from the moon and by the fact that “you couldn’t see a city / on that marbled bowling ball…[emphasis added] or me here, least of all.” “Westbound and rolling,” she’s finding solace in the “refuge of the roads”—that line, the title of the song.

  The trip’s profound epiphany comes near journey’s end. Nine years earlier, Roy Blumenfeld had thought of Joni as “Dorothy, trying to find her way home.” Now a different storied female—not naïve, like the fluffy-dog-toting victim of the Kansas tornado, but rather a skilled woman who chose her risks—comes into play. Traversing a strip of highway “through the burning desert” of the Southwest, the silence is broken by an overhead burst of “six jet planes”—probably a test formation from a nearby military base. Those thin metal stripes in the sky remind Joni of “the strings of my guitar,” and she—solo-piloting her vehicle across the perilously empty hot sand—feels a sharp kinship with another solo pilot: Amelia Earhart. Joni checks into “the Cactus Tree Motel, to shower off the dust” of all that journeying, literal and figurative; she sets her head on the “pillows of my wanderlust.” The song she writes that night braids Earhart’s disappearance with her own protracted wrestling with her vulnerability in affairs of the heart and her ever-reasserting need for independence. Six words about dashed anticipation—“It was just a false alarm”—end every stanza. For Earhart, the “false alarm”—the thing that never came—was a rescue vessel. Joni’s “false alarm” is disproof of the fear she’d expressed in “River,” that she is incapable of love, destined to spend her whole emotional life “in clouds at icy altitudes.” “Clouds,” “planes,” “cactus tree,” “wanderlust,” “roads,” “picture-postcard charms”: ten years of her images and preoccupations woven into one penetrating hymn. Conceived at the end of the long drive that capped off six years of fraught relationships, the tour de force “Amelia” would be the last deeply soul-baring song the young Joni Mitchell would ever write. She’d said it all.

  One day in late 1977, when J. D. Souther walked into Peter and Betsy Asher’s house on Summit Ridge Drive, he was introduced by the Ashers to a trim black man, his face half-hidden by big shades and a wide, thick mustache. The dude’s name was Claude, and Souther took him to be a pimp. He was nattily attired in dark creased pants, white vest, light, pointy-collared shirt, and white jacket. His fluffy Afro was topped by a slick chapeau. For ten minutes there was minimal small talk among the group—the Ashers, Souther, Claude, Danny Kortchmar. Claude didn’t say much; yeah, well, pimps, y’know.

  Claude took off his hat. And then he took off his wig. Claude was Joni, in blackface. Souther and Joni had been lovers, but he hadn’t recognized her under the costume. This was her new alter ego, a character she would imminently name “Art Nouveau,” her “inner black person,” as her friend and archivist Joel Bernstein wryly puts it.

  Like many young white people of her generation, Joni romanticized being black (without the disadvantages of being black, of course). She would increasingly insist that her music was “black” and that, as it progressed deeply into jazz, it should be played on blac
k stations (it rarely was). “My harmonies were not very ‘white,’ like James Taylor’s or Carole King’s,” she would later say (wrongly, in the case of Carole, whose music is largely R&B-based). “I gravitated toward…‘black’ voicings out of gospel and jazz, because they mirrored what I was feeling.” Joni has repeatedly said that she has already written the first line of her autobiography, and (perhaps referring to the day at the Ashers’) it is this: “I was the only black man in the room.”

  It is easy to take the insistence by a blond granddaughter of Nordic-Scottish-French-Irish Canadian farmers that she is somehow “black” as an offensive delusion, or at best a dry performance art conceit. But such crossover hubris wasn’t only quintessentially ’60s-generation (à la Ellen Willis’s remark); it was also timelessly American, in the opinion of cultural critic Stanley Crouch. The heroine of Crouch’s novel Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome is a young blond woman from (Saskatoon-longitude) South Dakota, whose jazz singing and long relationship with a black jazz musician represents both an attempt to embrace racial Otherness and a confrontation with the limits of doing so. When Crouch’s novel was published in 2000, the character was compared to Peggy Lee. In a way, it is Joni—Joni from 1977 to 1980.