The Unspeakable

by Meghan Daum

  Wrong, wrong, wrong. Joni is the ultimate antiromantic. Her major influence is not Judy Collins or Carole King but Friedrich Nietzsche. Joni has explained in interviews that it was Nietzsche’s epic prose panegyric Thus Spoke Zarathustra that rocked her world as a seventh grader (here’s to the Canadian education system) and whose ruminations on the eternal recurrence of the same and the death of God had a defining influence on her songwriting. Yes, she was initially introduced to the public (by David Crosby, incidentally, who heard her in a club in New York and brought her to L.A.) as a delicate flower child who sang about broken hearts and small-town sunrises. But her roots were steeped in dark, dystopic soils. She worshipped complication, trepidation, and mixed feelings of every imaginable kind. Her love songs were less about love than about love’s inherent limitations. Her narrators asked not to be swept off their feet but merely to find “somebody who’s strong and somewhat sincere.”

  I used to think Joni Mitchell was a big influence on my writing. When I was a teenager, her habit of cramming a bunch of words into one line, plus the way her lyrics tend to start with small particularities and ripple outward into universal truths, lodged itself into my ears and wound up directly on my pages. That is to say, they put me on the path to being the writer who, as a college student, kept an entirely straight face while producing seventy-five-word sentences that included both “Dionysus” and “athlete’s foot” (and used alliteration).

  Now, however, I realize that Joni didn’t shape my approach to language as much as my approach to my own emotions. She taught me the power of not taking things personally. She taught me that feelings can be separated from the self, that they can undock from our psyches and hurtle their way to the outer reaches of the atmosphere, where they can transmit not just our own aches and agonies but also the collective invisible passions of, if not all of humanity, at least a whole bunch of people besides ourselves. She conditioned me to appreciate the concept of amor fati, another Nietzschean preoccupation that has to do with taking a positive view of all of life’s circumstances, including those shot through with suffering and loss. (Though possibly the real takeaway is that even if everything in life does not in fact “happen for a reason,” it always has the potential to be mined for the sake of art.)

  The conventional wisdom about Joni is that she wears her heart—or even her guts—on her sleeve. There may be truth to that, but she also siphons out her messy emotions and rearranges them into coherent ideas, making for a very finely tailored sleeve. This is not the technique of a confessionalist, though that’s the rap she gets. “Save something for yourself” is what Kris Kristofferson said to Joni after she played him a demo of her 1971 breakout-turned-classic Blue. It’s practically impossible to read anything about that album or that period of Joni’s history without running across that anecdote. But despite its omnipresence, the story has always struck me as generic and anticlimactic. We never hear what Joni said to him after that. We don’t know if she defended herself or felt embarrassed or even cared in the least what Kris Kristofferson thought of her record. (Four decades later, it’s hard to imagine that too many people ever cared what Kris Kristofferson thought of anything.) But it’s also a crucial anecdote in that Kristofferson’s remark is emblematic of one of the central aspects of the Joni Mitchell problem. It’s emblematic of the tone deafness suffered by many who fancy themselves discerning listeners. It speaks to the inability of most people to tell the difference between putting yourself out there and letting it all hang out.

  Letting it all hang out is indiscriminate and frequently gratuitous. It’s the stuff of paint flung mindlessly at a canvas and words brought up via reverse peristalsis, never to be revised or thought better of, always to be mystically discounted as “a gift from above.” Letting it all hang out is an inherently needy gesture. It asks the audience to do the heavy lifting. It dares the audience to “confront the material” without necessarily making that material worth anyone’s while.

  Putting yourself out there is another matter entirely. It’s an inherently generous gesture, a gift from artist to listener or viewer or reader. The artist who puts herself out there is not foisting a confession on her audience as much as letting it in on a secret, which she then turns into a story. That’s Joni’s entire modus operandi. She doesn’t want us to care about her heartbreak. She’s inviting us to think about heartbreak in a more general sense. Her best lyrics seem to orbit the earth (it’s hard to avoid the space analogies). They start with a small detail, like a woman in a makeup mirror or a sparkling Christmas lawn display, and accelerate to bigger ones like rain or naked flesh or the wrath of prairie thunder. Then they hit on a few ambitious metaphors about the sky or ancient gods, and glide back down to the place where they started, where the woman in the makeup mirror suddenly has a wrinkle or two on her face. Whether or not the artist behind such lyrics needs to save something for herself is beside the point. The point is that she had something to say and is saying it as artfully as she possibly can. Whether or not there’s anything left of her afterward is none of our business.

  My interest in Joni starts in 1970 with Ladies of the Canyon. Admittedly, this album is hit-and-miss, as is 1971’s classic, supposedly unassailable Blue. I know I’m committing blasphemy by saying that about Blue. But even though the piano songs are sublime—there’s the anti–Christmas carol “River,” the anti–romance ballad “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” and, of course, the title track, which may well be a perfect song—the rest of Blue (“A Case of You” excepted) has always sounded to me tinny and unanchored.

  Not that I don’t think Blue deserves its vaunted status. The go-to record for dumped girls everywhere, it’s rightly recognized as one of the great examples—perhaps the great example—of emotional bloodletting channeled into the cause of great art. I just think Joni didn’t hit her stride until For the Roses in 1972. This was when her famous alternate guitar tunings started to get really alternate. This was when her records started to feel less like short story collections and more like novels, with songs folding into each other and Big Ideas looming overhead like weather systems.

  I may be one of approximately thirty-four people on earth who genuinely like Mingus, Joni’s rather minimalist and sometimes petulant 1979 collaboration with the jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus, recorded months before he died of Lou Gehrig’s disease. I like it because it does not spend even a millisecond of its time trying to make itself accessible to people who liked Song to a Seagull or even Blue. I like it because “The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines” is a tour de force of circumlocutions and syncopations. I like it because I’m forever mesmerized by “The Wolf That Lives in Lindsay,” which has the line “the stab and glare and buckshot of the heavy, heavy snow.” I dare anyone reading this to find a recording artist of any era who can deliver a line of such sharpness and elegance.

  On second thought, scratch that. Waging such a bet will only result in a pileup of ineligible candidates. These candidates—Kate Bush (nope, too whimsical), Rickie Lee Jones (too train-wrecked), Bob Dylan (a decent poet but, sorry, not remotely the musician that Joni is1)—will reveal not just the futility of my How to Correctly Appreciate Joni Mitchell tutorial but also the vast scope and many applications of the Joni Mitchell problem. That is to say, they will remind me all over again that no matter how vigorously I tell people that no judgments should be made about Joni based on “Big Yellow Taxi” or “The Circle Game,” country house record collections will always contain Clouds and Song to a Seagull and not Mingus or Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. There will always be people not just mocking the yodeling but, worse, preferring the yodeling. There will always be people liking things for the wrong reasons. No one knows that more than Joni herself, who told The New York Times in 1991 that she “didn’t like getting to a place where my audience was bigger than those who understood what I was saying.”

  The thing with being a Joni fan, of course, is that it’s always mattered less that we understood what she was saying than tha
t she understood what we were feeling. I may be a snob about the tunings and the instrumentation but I was never above drawing all kinds of far-fetched connections between her life as a major recording artist and my life as a regular person. As it is for nearly all Joni-philes, this identification was especially strong in high school. In the tenth grade, for example, I was convinced that lines like “acid, booze, and ass / needles, guns, and grass” described my situation exactly.

  Never mind that this lyric, from the song “Blue,” supposedly expressed Joni’s grief over the demise of her relationship with the heroin-using James Taylor. To me, the song was about a certain brooding burnout I had a crush on who smoked cigarettes on the front lawn of the high school (the front lawn, for some reason, was a haven for stoners and Ultimate Frisbee players) and who seemed to enjoy trading affectionate insults with me in math class but stopped short of wanting to be my boyfriend (maybe because he was literally having sex with an older girl from another town, or so the rumors went).

  Other Joni lyrics that told the story of my life were as follows:

  1. “Since I was seventeen I’ve had no one over me.”

  Getting driver’s license at age seventeen (legal driving age in New Jersey). Lodi DMV, this song’s for you!

  2. “You love your loving, but not like you love your freedom.”

  College boyfriend number one.

  3. “I guess you learn to refuse what you think you can’t handle.”

  College boyfriend number two, who dumped me because he was clearly intimidated by me. (Also applies to dropping Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology beginning of sophomore year after seeing scary syllabus.)

  4. “He saw my complications / and he mirrored me back simplified.”

  Jock boyfriend who had no idea what I was saying half the time.

  5. “No regrets, Coyote / We just come from such different sets of circumstances.”

  Mountain-man boyfriend who didn’t know how to use a computer.

  6. “You can’t hold the hand of a rock and roll man.”

  Also true of guys who work in finance.

  I’ll stop there. But, believe me, I could go on.

  Unlike Joni, I have never referred to anyone as my “lover.” As with the use of double negatives by ostensibly educated people, the word lover is something that works only in song lyrics. Otherwise you sound imbecilic. Unless you are Joni Mitchell. Joni has had many lovers, both in her songs and in her life. Her lyrics have her counting “lovers like railroad cars,” marking time “by lovers and styles of clothes.” Her curriculum vitae in the bedroom reads like a who’s who of sweaty art boys of the Nixon era. She had relationships with David Crosby and James Taylor and Jackson Browne. She had flings with Sam Shepard and Warren Beatty and even Leonard Cohen. “A Case of You,” with its “map of Canada with your face sketched on it twice,” is apparently about Cohen. She dated several members of her band, including the jazz drummers John Guerin and Don Alias. For twelve years in the 1980s and early 1990s she was married to her bass player, Larry Klein, who was thirteen years younger than she.

  Joni’s great love is always said to have been Graham Nash, who was utterly besotted with her and wrote the Crosby, Stills, and Nash classic “Our House” about their life together in Laurel Canyon in the late 1960s. But Nash wanted to get married and because Joni associated marriage with her grandmother’s thwarted creative ambitions (not to mention her own first very brief marriage, which she’s said had her thinking, “How am I going to get out of this?” even as she walked down the aisle), she ran off to Europe and broke up with him via telegram. It read, famously, If you hold sand too tightly it will run through your fingers. Ironically, I don’t think this line would have passed muster as one of her song lyrics.

  “Joni is not a person that you stay in a relationship with,” David Crosby said about her. “It always goes awry, no matter who you are. It’s an inevitable thing.”

  * * *

  In 2006 I met Joni. In fact, I had dinner with her. One afternoon in December I drove past an art gallery in Los Angeles with a banner hanging in front announcing “Joni Mitchell’s Green Flag Song.” At first I thought I’d misread the sign and that the artist must surely be the late abstract expressionist painter Joan Mitchell. But it really did say Joni Mitchell. Joni has always painted and she’s always taken it very seriously, even if the public hasn’t.

  I was into the second year of my newspaper column at that point and it occurred to me that a Joni Mitchell art show might be a good thing to write about. It also occurred to me that this could be a good way to meet Joni Mitchell, which was far more important than coming up with a column. I visited the gallery a few days later and met the owner. He was an older Russian émigré who’d been doing print work for Joni for years but hadn’t really known who she was until his son explained that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to give her a show. Even now, he was not familiar with any of her music.

  The exhibit was made up of a series of sixty photographic triptychs bearing green, semiabstract images. The gallerist explained that the work had come about when Joni’s television set broke and began displaying zigzagging green lines and splotches that looked like photographic negatives. Joni took pictures of the screen with a cheap camera and, looking at them as a whole, thought they reflected the brutality and hypocrisy of the current political scene. Then she had the photos enlarged and printed on canvas.

  The gallerist kept me there for more than two hours. He led me from triptych to triptych, explaining their meanings in a thick, phlegmy accent I could barely understand. I pretended to scribble things down in my notebook. I told him that what would be really helpful, for the sake of the column, was if I could interview Joni sometime when she came into the gallery.

  “I wouldn’t take up too much of her time,” I said.

  He said he was having dinner with her the next night and maybe I could join them.

  “Really?” I yelped.

  He said he’d check with Joni to make sure it was all right and then call me and tell me where we were meeting.

  * * *

  “We’re meeting at Crevin’s,” he said the next day. “In West Hollywood.”

  “Crevin’s?” I asked. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Joni likes it there,” he said. “Because she can smoke. Dress warmly. We sit outdoors.”

  It took nearly an hour of searching for Crevin’s on the Internet before I realized the restaurant was actually called Cravings. I allowed extra time to get there in evening traffic and arrived thirty minutes early. I sat in my car until five minutes before the meeting time and then entered the restaurant. The gallery owner was there but not Joni and we sat in the bar for forty-five minutes as he talked nonstop about “the passion of the art life.” I nodded along, understanding about every fifth word.

  “Ah,” he said finally. “Here is Johnny.”

  She was a big woman. Big as in strapping, strong boned. She was tall, with big cheekbones, and big teeth in a big mouth. She was sixty-three years old, though a near lifetime of smoking had etched at least another decade onto her face. Her hair was blond as ever and long as ever and pulled back in a loose bun. Though I can’t exactly remember now, I think she was wearing some kind of poncho. I’m pretty sure she was wearing huge earrings, although it’s possible that her persona is so closely tied to the huge-earring aesthetic that I’ve just imposed that on her in retrospect.

  We were seated at a table outside. It was about 45 degrees. Joni took out a pack of cigarettes. American Spirits in the yellow box. She explained that her biorhythmic schedule was to sleep during the day and stay up all night, so this was actually her breakfast. She ordered a cup of tea and nothing else. I was starving but I ordered a bowl of soup and nothing else. I got out my notebook, though it was too dark to see anything I wrote down.

  We talked about “Green Flag Song.” A few years earlier, she told me, she’d gone up to her house in British Columbia and taken a lot of landscape photos. When she got bac
k to L.A. she discovered that her television had become “magical.” She was very angry with George Bush. She was even more furious with Dick Cheney. She thought the whole administration should be tried for war crimes. Then she talked about how multinational corporations were not only destroying the environment and the world’s economy but also tapping into the personal energy fields of every human on earth. She said the United States was on the brink of a major food and water shortage and that today’s young generation, growing up on materialism and rap music, was not prepared to handle it.

  She said the Internet was wasting untold amounts of electricity and that this electricity was interfering with the sonar of marine mammals, particularly whales. She spoke in a casual, matter-of-fact tone that suggested she was merely stating the obvious.

  I bobbed my head up and down and scribbled random words into my notebook: torture, energy fields, whales. I asked if we might talk a bit about her music.

  “Of course,” she said, stamping out what was easily her twelfth cigarette and lighting another in one fluid gesture.

  I asked her about the time signature changes in the middle section of “Paprika Plains,” a lush, sweeping, highly strange sixteen-minute track on Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. Had she written or planned them that way ahead of time or did they just evolve in the studio? This was something I’d always wanted to know. She said they were very much planned but that none of the players had been able to figure out what she wanted. I told her how much I loved the “stab and glare and buckshot” line in “The Wolf That Lives in Lindsay.” I told her that her music had been a profound influence on my writing. I told her that most of what I know about metaphor I learned from her.