Still, one day around 1966, she brought a copy of Henderson with her on a plane. It just so happened that the narrator of the book was also on a plane. “We are the first generation to see clouds from both sides,” he wrote, and Joni read. “What a privilege! First people dreamed upward. Now they dream both upward and downward.” That passage snagged something inside her. She closed the book. She scribbled some lyrics, and when the plane landed she picked up a guitar and twirled the tuning knobs until she found the properly improper chords to accompany her words. When she first played the song for Chuck, he scoffed. What could a 23-year-old girl know about “both sides” of life? More than anything, he was insulted that she’d put the book down less than halfway through and hadn’t bothered to finish it. He took this as evidence of her inferior intelligence, her “rube” upbringing, her flighty attention span. And yet, what else was there to get out of Henderson the Rain King? What more could a human being possibly get out of a book than Joni Mitchell putting it down to write “Both Sides Now”?
Some people think that when a woman takes her husband’s last name it is necessarily an act of submission or even self-erasure. Joni Mitchell retaining Chuck’s last name for decades after their divorce has always struck me as a defiant, deliciously cruel act of revenge. In the 50 years since, she spread her wings and took that surname to heights and places it never would have reached had it been ball-and-chained to a husband: the hills of Laurel Canyon, The Dick Cavett Show, a window overlooking a newly paved Hawaiian parking lot, the Grammys, Miles Davis’s apartment, Charles Mingus’s deathbed, Matala, MTV, the Rolling Thunder Revue, and the top of a recent NPR list of greatest albums ever made by women. Over a singular career that has spanned many different cultural eras, she explored—in public, to an almost unprecedented degree—exactly what it meant to be female and free, in full acknowledgement of all its injustice and joy.Not long after “Both Sides, Now” was written, the folk pioneer Joan Baez caught a Chuck and Joni set at the Gaslight Cafe in New York. “I remember thinking, ‘You gotta drop this guy,’” Baez recalled. Soon after, Joni did. Leaving Chuck Mitchell was her first hejira, a variation of an Arabic word she’d later stumble upon in a dictionary that, too, would snag something in her—it means a “flight or journey to a more desirable or congenial place,” or “escape with honor.” There would be many more. Decades later, in a 2015 interview with New York, though, Mitchell reflected on the decision to leave her first marriage. She quoted an old saying: “‘If you make a good marriage, God bless you. If you make a bad marriage, become a philosopher.’ So I became a philosopher.”
It did not take long. In the opening moments of her first album, 1968’s Song to a Seagull, she bid goodbye not only to Chuck, but to the roadmap of a traditional life. This is the chorus of a song called “I Had a King.”
I can’t go back there anymore
You know my keys won’t fit the door
You know my thoughts don’t fit the man
They never can
They never can
There is right now a spirited conversation about women and canonization happening in the music world, and there is right now a new biography of Joni Mitchell on the shelves. If you pay more than passing attention to these topics, you will know that neither of these occurrences is particularly rare, but they are as good reasons as any to take stock of Mitchell’s singular, ever-changing legacy, in the always-fickle light of right now. (...)
“Before canons are handed down, someone has to make them,” Wesley Morris recently wrote in New York Times Magazine. “The atmospherics around that consecration tend to default to masculinity because the mechanisms that do the consecrating are overwhelmingly male.” Inspired by NPR, Morris decided to listen only to music made by women for several months, and to write about his experience. He started with all 150 albums on the NPR list and eventually added 72 more. The result was a sharp, thoughtful essay, but, as critic Judy Berman pointed out on Twitter, it may have mapped a territory that only seemed uncharted to men. “Gorgeous piece,” she wrote, “but jarring that one of our best male critics had to hear 150 albums to get something all women know… I would never think to write this essay, because it just seems obvious to me, but maybe men need to have the conversation amongst themselves.”
Morris’s essay, though, was astute in identifying the cultural forces and biases that combine to create the idea of legacy. It’s true that we’re living through an exceptional time for women in pop music, with mainstream artists like Beyoncé, Rihanna, Taylor Swift, and Adele all pushing boundaries and/or dominating the charts, but, Morris wondered, “What happens in 20 years?” He used the (somewhat selective) example of Donna Summer, who once seemed winningly ubiquitous in the pop world: “Now she’s the epitome of a bygone era instead of the musician who paved a boulevard for lots of women who top charts.” Men, of course, are perceived to grow older more “gracefully” in our sexist, ageist culture. It follows that the masculine forces of canonization and legacy-making are stacked against female artists as they age, and that perhaps the most crucial time to assert female artist’s importance isn’t so much in the moment of their domination but in that crucial “20 years later.”
Which brings us to Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell, an extensive new Joni Mitchell biography by the Syracuse professor and New York Times contributor David Yaffe. It is by no means the first book about Mitchell—actually, you could topple a small bookshelf with its predecessors: Barney Hoskyns’s extensive collection Joni: The Anthology; Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words (a candid 2014 collection of interviews with the Canadian broadcaster Malka Marom); and Sheila Weller’s Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon—and the Journey of a Generation (a three-woman biography) to name just a few. But Yaffe does have a few new brushstrokes to add to the canvas, thanks mostly to a series of interviews he’s conducted with Mitchell over the past decade. He flew to her California home in 2007 to interview her for the Times; after the piece ran, she called Yaffe, “bitched [him] out,” and painstakingly enumerated every detail she thought he’d gotten wrong. They didn’t speak for years. Then a mutual friend reconnected them, and over marathon hours and seemingly billions of cigarettes (Mitchell’s longest love affair has, quite possibly, been with American Spirits), the loquacious artist held court while her biographer was given a second chance to tell her story.
Reckless Daughter is an engrossing, well-told, but ultimately conventional biography. It reanimates Mitchell’s incredible history, but it also left me wondering about her current influence and relevance outside the pages of prestigious newspapers and hardcover books. While I was reading the book, a few people mentioned to me that they weren’t sure if Mitchell’s influence was carrying over to millennials. I’ll admit that there’s definitely something internet-proof about her: An unruliness that makes it difficult to distill the adoration down to a gif or a well-chosen photo as it does with, say, boomer-turned-Tumblr-icons like Stevie Nicks or Joan Didion. And yet, Mitchell has, in the past, prided herself on being out of step with the times when she did not believe the times were worthy of her footwork. When people told her she was “out of sync” with the ’80s, she felt relieved. To be “in sync with the ’80s,” Yaffe quotes her saying, would have been “degenerating both morally and artistically.”
I was in my mid-20s when I started to realize—with absolute exhilaration and a little fear—that my life was not going to play out on the same traditional feminine timeline as my mother and grandmothers. Then, late last year, I felt a certain cosmic vertigo when I passed the age that my own mother had been when she gave birth to me. Unlike she was at 29, I was without a partner, a mortgage, or a concrete five-year plan. Friends were getting married in barns and having children on purpose and putting down payments on houses in the suburbs. I had, a few years prior, moved to New York to write and make new friends and go to the movies alone when I felt like it and live in a rented apartment. Throughout my adulthood, I had made certain choices that had at times looked reckless to the people around me—abruptly leaving unsatisfying jobs or rejecting perfectly decent men—though I knew, intuitively, that they were the correct choices for me at the time. I am happy and secure and without any major regrets, but I have sometimes had to crane my neck around for other long-term models of how to be a woman who lives, as it were, off-road. This is all a long-winded way of saying that, like so many people before me, in my 20s I went through a Joni Mitchell phase.
Those many people before me, of course, are not just women. Mitchell gestures towards the elsewhere at all kinds of angles, which is intrinsic to her mass popularity. No matter how you look at her, she provides an alternative to something. One example of many: Two years ago, Dan Bejar, the eccentrically talented songwriter of Destroyer and the New Pornographers, was asked by the music site The Quietus to pick and discuss his 12 favorite albums for their “Baker’s Dozen” feature. His first six choices were, in order, Court and Spark, Hejira, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, Mingus, and Turbulent Indigo. (Blue, he actually considered too canonical to mention: “It’s so etched in stone that I wouldn’t know how to draw from it.”) The interviewer took the bait and asked him why so much Joni Mitchell. Bejar, then 42, said of her freewheeling, jazz-embracing late period in particular, “Listening to [her] I realized that this is a path I could follow, which I always search for, because at this point in my career, in terms of pop music years, I think I’m supposed to die. So when you find a different path that you can follow, it’s more exciting than the idea that you should just die.” (...)
By the mid-’70s, Mitchell had developed a disdain for much of the pop music world; in the ’80s, it curdled into outright disgust. There’s a hilariously biting scene in Yaffe’s book chronicling the backstage drama at a 1990 charity concert celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall. The rock stars of the day were constantly falling short of her expectations. Cyndi Lauper was acting “childish,” Bryan Adams was rude to his girlfriend in front of Mitchell, Sinead O’Connor (“a passionate little singer”) looked down at her feet rather than making eye contact. “The childish competitiveness, the lack of professionalism—I don’t have a peer group,” she told Yaffe, recalling this era. “All of them, these spoiled children. It’s not what I would have expected in an artistic community.”
And so—to the frustration of some of her fans—as the years went on she sought out her artistic equals in the jazz world. One of her first collaborators to truly challenge her was the electric bass iconoclast Jaco Pastorius; they started working together on Hejira. “Nearly every bass player that I tried did the same thing. They would put up a dark picket fence through my music,” she recalls in Woman of Heart and Mind. “Finally, one guy said to me, ‘Joni, you’ve gotta play with jazz musicians.’” Eventually, in 1978, she was summoned for her most daunting collaboration yet, working with the legendary Charles Mingus on his final album, while he was dying of ALS. Though plenty of jazz purists scoffed at Mitchell’s involvement, she earned the admiration of her brilliant, cantankerous collaborator. (He called her, affectionately, “motherfucker.”) As her music grew less commercial, it sometimes felt—for better and worse—that she was simply sending out dog whistles to other musicians as accomplished as herself. The very first time she met Mingus, he said to her, “The strings on ‘Paprika Plains’—they’re out of tune.” Far from offended, she was delighted—the strings were out of tune, and “she wished someone else had noticed.” Only a fellow genius would have noticed, and introduced himself like that.
Those many people before me, of course, are not just women. Mitchell gestures towards the elsewhere at all kinds of angles, which is intrinsic to her mass popularity. No matter how you look at her, she provides an alternative to something. One example of many: Two years ago, Dan Bejar, the eccentrically talented songwriter of Destroyer and the New Pornographers, was asked by the music site The Quietus to pick and discuss his 12 favorite albums for their “Baker’s Dozen” feature. His first six choices were, in order, Court and Spark, Hejira, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, Mingus, and Turbulent Indigo. (Blue, he actually considered too canonical to mention: “It’s so etched in stone that I wouldn’t know how to draw from it.”) The interviewer took the bait and asked him why so much Joni Mitchell. Bejar, then 42, said of her freewheeling, jazz-embracing late period in particular, “Listening to [her] I realized that this is a path I could follow, which I always search for, because at this point in my career, in terms of pop music years, I think I’m supposed to die. So when you find a different path that you can follow, it’s more exciting than the idea that you should just die.” (...)
By the mid-’70s, Mitchell had developed a disdain for much of the pop music world; in the ’80s, it curdled into outright disgust. There’s a hilariously biting scene in Yaffe’s book chronicling the backstage drama at a 1990 charity concert celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall. The rock stars of the day were constantly falling short of her expectations. Cyndi Lauper was acting “childish,” Bryan Adams was rude to his girlfriend in front of Mitchell, Sinead O’Connor (“a passionate little singer”) looked down at her feet rather than making eye contact. “The childish competitiveness, the lack of professionalism—I don’t have a peer group,” she told Yaffe, recalling this era. “All of them, these spoiled children. It’s not what I would have expected in an artistic community.”
And so—to the frustration of some of her fans—as the years went on she sought out her artistic equals in the jazz world. One of her first collaborators to truly challenge her was the electric bass iconoclast Jaco Pastorius; they started working together on Hejira. “Nearly every bass player that I tried did the same thing. They would put up a dark picket fence through my music,” she recalls in Woman of Heart and Mind. “Finally, one guy said to me, ‘Joni, you’ve gotta play with jazz musicians.’” Eventually, in 1978, she was summoned for her most daunting collaboration yet, working with the legendary Charles Mingus on his final album, while he was dying of ALS. Though plenty of jazz purists scoffed at Mitchell’s involvement, she earned the admiration of her brilliant, cantankerous collaborator. (He called her, affectionately, “motherfucker.”) As her music grew less commercial, it sometimes felt—for better and worse—that she was simply sending out dog whistles to other musicians as accomplished as herself. The very first time she met Mingus, he said to her, “The strings on ‘Paprika Plains’—they’re out of tune.” Far from offended, she was delighted—the strings were out of tune, and “she wished someone else had noticed.” Only a fellow genius would have noticed, and introduced himself like that.
by Lindsay Zoladaz, The Ringer | Read more:
Image: Getty
