Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (13 page)

Marshall McLuhan said the spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way; language was our creative means of finding distance and building order from the chaos of existence. He extended the same thinking into the age of the electronic narrative, so when Mitchell says she was “glued to the media” because it represented her only portal into what would prove to be an historic event, she was able to grasp it in a way that people who actually made it to Bethel could not.

“The deprivation of not being able to go provided me with an intense angle on Woodstock,” she told Zimmer.

At the time I was going through a kind of born-again Christian trip, not that I went to any church, I'd given up on Christianity at an early age at Sunday school. But suddenly, as performers, we were in the position of having so many people look to us for leadership, and for some unknown reason I took it seriously and decided I needed a guide and leaned on God. So I was a little “God-mad” at the time, for lack of a better term, and I had been saying to myself ‘Where are the modern miracles?' Woodstock, for some reason, impressed me as being a modern miracle.

Mitchell said she was moved by the fact that so many people managed to get along. “For a herd of people that large to cooperate so well, it was pretty remarkable and there was tremendous optimism. So I wrote the song ‘Woodstock' out of these feelings, and the first three times I performed it in public I burst into tears because it brought back the intensity of the experience and was so moving.” One of those first three performances was at the Big Sur celebration, and although you can't see tears streaming down her face, the emotion in her voice is palpable as she hits the final, haunting notes.

The feelings Mitchell describes in the creation of the song “Woodstock” could be interpreted as proof of what psychologist Abraham Maslow described as “the peak experience,” where the ego disappears and one transcends self: “There is a fusion with the reality being observed, and a oneness where there was a twoness, an integration of some sort of the self with the non-self. There is universally reported a seeing of formerly hidden truth, a revelation in the strict sense, a stripping away of veils, and finally almost always the whole experience is experienced as bliss, ecstasy, rapture, exaltation.”
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Peak experience creations are usually so steeped in universal truth, they resonate beyond the artist herself and ring for the masses. Mitchell's “Woodstock” captured the zeitgeist of the Summer of Love so completely that even Crosby—a highly accomplished and altogether prolific songwriter—admitted he tried to write his own song about the occasion after returning from Bethel, but there was no way he could match Mitchell's visual precision or emotional accuracy—which is kind of strange, given that he was actually there, in the primordial mud, and Mitchell was holed up with an antsy Geffen in urban Manhattan.

Whether it was loving homage or merely great marketing instincts, Crosby and his newly formed band recorded Mitchell's “Woodstock” shortly afterward on their debut album
Déjà Vu
. It was the only track on the LP that the entire band recorded together (the other tracks had each band member recording his own part in a separate session), and it reached number eleven on
Billboard
's pop singles chart in 1970. The CSNY cover is considered the more “radio-friendly” version, but there are some who find it altogether unlistenable, including Iggy Pop: “I hated ‘Woodstock.' Still hate it,” he's quoted as saying in Neil Young's biography. “It's the worst. Crosby, Stills, Nash. Just so loathsome. Not music,” said Pop, earning his “naughty little doggie” moniker.

The song went on to be recorded by others, including Matthews Southern Comfort (whose version hit number one on the U.K. album charts the same year), as well as Led Zeppelin, who incorporated fragments of the song into their live versions of “Dazed and Confused” (including a rather inspired take at a Vancouver show in March 1975 at the Pacific Coliseum that can be found on rare bootlegs).

Although Zeppelin's version of the tune is currently the subject of copyright litigation,
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hearing Robert Plant howl, “We are stardust, we are golden, and we've got got yes we've got got to people yeah ooooh yeah ooooh yeah ooooh get back to the garden, back to the mamamama garden, back to the garden, garden, garden,” as Jimmy Page caresses the strings of his electric guitar with a bow is beautiful, kick-ass proof of just how deeply Mitchell's portrait of the event sank into the popular consciousness.

Seminal Yippie and self-appointed generational spokesman Abbie Hoffman may have coined the term “Woodstock Nation,” and god knows how many hundreds of thousands have created their own fantasies about attending the event, but there can be no question that over the course of one weekend watching TV, Joni Mitchell wrote the words that would signify an entire generation's ethos.

“Getting back to the garden” was more than a reference to rediscovering the lost innocence of Adam and Eve, who were tossed from the Garden of Eden for Eve's pursuit of knowledge. For countless souls—Mitchell foremost among them—it represented the genuine potential of humankind.

Condensing the thoughts of the Woodstock poster pilgrim, who appears in Mike Wadleigh's
Woodstock
movie as he marches down the clogged roads of the Catskills with his girlfriend, Mitchell captured the emotional and existential reality of the moment in her lyrics:

I feel myself a cog in somethin' turning.
And maybe it's the time of year,
Yes and maybe it's the time of man.
And I don't know who I am,
But life is for learning.

It's brilliant poetry, but it's also cunning reportage, because the unidentified pilgrim addressed the same thoughts when he was approached by a man with a movie camera. He talked about what brought him to White Lake at that moment in time: “My father was asking whether I was in a Communist training camp or something... and I could understand where he's coming from. Because he's an immigrant... he came over here to better himself and... make it better for me... He can't understand why [the things that have value to him] have [no] value to me. But then again, he does have the wisdom to allow me to be who I am. I will, by doing what I'm doing, learn for myself how to live. And that's what he wants me to do.”
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Even the “billion year old carbon” reference is of the moment. Human beings were becoming aware of their place in the universe as a result of space exploration. The first moon landing happened on July 20, 1969, just weeks before Richie Havens took to the Woodstock stage and spontaneously composed his “Freedom” chant in the waning hours of that fateful Friday afternoon of August 15, 1969.

For a fantastic and all-too-brief moment, anything seemed possible. The sins of man—at this time symbolized by the “unjust and undeclared” and much-protested war in Vietnam—appeared to be cleansable as masses of young people converged on a single locale without destroying property or killing each other.

Even as esteemed broadcaster Walter Cronkite, the “most trusted man in America,” mused in
I Can Hear It Now/The Sixties
, his radio salute to the decade: “The festival was declared a disaster area, and if there had been a riot, the commission that would have investigated it would have blamed negligent planning by the promoters... Yet there was no violence, relatively little illness for a population of this size. Three people died, two were born and in a rare happening, even the police got rave notices.”
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More than forty years later, people are still a little dazzled at the idea that half-a-million young people could gather in a single location without violence. While I was writing this book, nineteen people died in Germany at the Love Parade, where anywhere between 100,000 and 1.4 million (the reports are that disparate, with network of record Deutsche Welle going for somewhere in between, at 500,000) were gathered to let DJs spin them into a substance-induced hypnosis. Also, my hometown of Vancouver erupted into a riot after our hockey team lost the last game of the Stanley Cup playoffs. The thousands who had gathered downtown for the party were all too eager to light Molotov cocktails and torch cop cars. Half a century hence, peace and love isn't part of the public agenda—unless you can cross-pollinate it with branded merchandise.

Back when musicians played real instruments on real stages, in three real dimensions, security was a real concern. And for then-governor Nelson Rockefeller, it was looking scary enough in Bethel to call in the National Guard to clear out the longhairs at gunpoint. But for some unfathomable reason—given the polarization between the older and younger generation—he ceded to the judgement of the twentysomething, independently wealthy promoters, who accepted full responsibility for what would happen over the next three days. In so many ways, everything that happened at Woodstock seems destined, as though the world was crying out for an emblematic moment of beauty and transcendence that proved humanity could be redeemed and we really could go “back to the garden.”

The only notable commentator of the era who saw Woodstock as an event but did not ascribe to it its own mythology was anthropologist Margaret Mead. In a 1970 issue of
Redbook
magazine, she writes: “I do not think the Woodstock festival was a ‘miracle'—something that can happen only once. Nor do I think that those who took part in it established a tradition overnight—a way of doing things that sets the pattern of future events. It was confirmation that this generation has, and realizes it has, its own identity.”
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This is an important observation because it adds the dimension of personal identity to myth: by following certain mythological strands, we can arrive at our own cave of meaning. Mead continues with a reference to, of all things, Jesus's Sermon on the Mount: “No one can say what the outcome will be; it is too new,” she writes. “Responding to their gentleness, I think of the words ‘Consider the lilies of the field...' and hope that we—and they themselves—can continue to trust the community of feeling that made so many of us say of those three days, ‘It was beautiful.'”

Given what we know now, Mead's reluctance to anoint Woodstock's pilgrims as “messiahs en masse” seems rather astute. That doesn't mean Woodstock and its ethos didn't give us a lasting legacy of goodness. They did. The modern environmental movement can trace its thickening roots back to Bethel, especially in light of the fact that the first Earth Day took place just a few months later, in April 1970, as did the formation of Greenpeace—which launched itself with a fundraiser called Amchitka, hosted by none other than Joni Mitchell and then-lover James Taylor.

Somewhat ironically, but not altogether unexpectedly, one of the biggest critics of the Woodstock generation has been Mitchell herself. In a 2008 interview for
Mojo
magazine with former
Los Angeles Times
music critic and editor Robert Hilburn, Mitchell called her peers “the greediest generation in the history of America” and railed against the apathy and arrogance of those who swore to fix the system before they acquired the reins to power.

In their youth, my generation was ready to change the world, but when the baton was passed to them in the seventies, they fell into a mass depression because all revolutionaries are quick to demolish and slow to fix... they kind of degenerated into the greediest generation in the history of America. The hippie, yippie, yuppie transition from the sixties to the seventies to the greedy eighties and Ronald Reagan—my generation dropped the baton and spawned this totally lacklustre [next] generation... Machiavelli said, ‘People don't know what to do with peace. It always degenerates into fashion and fornication'... and that's what we have. We are not building the kind of strong people in this third generation that we are going to need for the catastrophes that lie ahead. They aren't getting any ethical instruction. I'm reluctant to say ‘moral' because... things that are done in the name of morality are completely diabolical.”
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“Woodstock”

Businessmen drink my blood, like the kids in art school said they would.”
—Arcade Fire, “Ready to Start,”
The Suburbs

Reconciling the needs of art and commerce is probably the single biggest problem facing any artist—even the fire-hardened Joni Mitchell. Despite having her hands on the joystick of her career, Mitchell found herself in crisis several times as she faced the dissociating demons of fame, the vampires of the music business, and the media Minotaur. Fortunately, she found a coping mechanism early: she established distance from destructive doubt, intellectually, spiritually, and geographically.

Mitchell has reportedly cancelled more shows than she ever gave, and she's retired from the business so frequently not even she can keep count of her departures from the poker table. Yet, for every hand she decided to play, she finessed a win—maybe not on the commercial side of the spiritual spreadsheet but definitely on the creative one. Joni Mitchell never sold out to satisfy business interests, or her own ego. So while the Rolling Stones sold out to Microsoft, Bob Dylan sold out to the bank, and Leonard Cohen would be happy to sell a “Hallelujah” to just about anyone, Mitchell's music has yet to stump product. This creative stubbornness, which boils down to trusting one's inner self, is the most important creative lesson of all—but one we often silence because we're told money and financial success are more important. But greed, as Mitchell sings in “All I Want,” “is the unraveling” that robs us of “all the joy that could be.”

Before Joni Mitchell made it to Carnegie Hall and
The Dick Cavett Show
in 1969, she'd been playing in coffee houses for the better part of seven years—ever since her first professional gig at Saskatoon's Louis Riel café on Halloween Night 1962. By the time she left Chuck Mitchell and headed to New York City in 1966, she was already pretty self-sufficient. She was booking her own shows and had saved up a few hundred bucks in the bank. She's said she'd never felt more in control of her own destiny. Moreover, she was having fun playing the circuit—probably because she didn't have a huge ego stake in the performance side. “I was ready to retire from the beginning,” she explained in 2000 on the CBC TV program
SpeakEasy
. “Because I got waylaid into music, you know. [But] I decided that I did enjoy playing in coffee houses and realized that it was much more lucrative than working in women's wear—which was the only other thing I knew how to do. I decided to look for a manager.”
1

The first person she looked to was Albert Grossman, Dylan's manager. He took her out for sushi, but the two didn't have a great rapport: he told Mitchell she was too “domestic” for the biz. Mitchell continued on her own until a demo tape of her music ended up in the hands of Buffy Sainte-Marie, who had a management deal with Chartoff-Winkler, where a young pothead named Elliot Roberts (née Rabino-witz) was working. “I'd been carrying a tape of Joni's with me and I asked Elliot to listen to it. He did, then he went to see her show [at the Village's Cafe au Go Go],” said Sainte-Marie. “That's how Elliot and Joni met—through me, I guess.”
2

Once Roberts caught a glimpse of Mitchell, he was entranced. “I stay for two sets and after that I go back to Joan and say, ‘You kill me. I think I'm in love with you. I'd do anything to manage you,” Roberts told Jimmy McDonough. The smitten Roberts made an insane business offer: to tag along unpaid, without any percentage obligations, just to see if they were copasetic. Turns out the two were closet reefer fans and shared an oblique sense of humour. They hit it off. “I grinned so wide [onstage] that my upper lip stuck to my gums. My mouth was dry from pot,” said Mitchell. “Elliot was the first one to pick up on it. He started doing shtick in the audience and made me laugh all the more. So I said—Okay—I'll cut ya in. Just for the jokes, y'know. I was his first racehorse.”
3

Mitchell and Roberts would be business buddies for the better part of twenty years, and it's largely thanks to Roberts that Mitchell's career arc is so bold and unbroken, because he helped her secure the dollar side of the creative balance sheet. Shortly after Mitchell's songs were being recorded and pulling in coin for her publishing company (Siquomb—standing for She Is Queen Undisputedly Of Mind Beauty, no joke), Mitchell was getting offers from other labels, such as the folk pinnacle Vanguard. “Slave labour,”
4
is how Mitchell described the deal, so when she hooked up with Roberts, she asked him to separate her publishing rights from Chuck—essentially finalizing the terms of their divorce. She also empowered Roberts to negotiate that monumental deal with Warner's Reprise label, the boutique branch founded by Frank Sinatra. “Joan managed me for the first year. I didn't know about management—I never thought of negotiating,” Roberts relates in McDonough's book. “Joni was very gracious—I made a ton of mistakes, but it was fine with her. She didn't give a shit. In my career, Joni was my big influence. Joni taught me how you build a legend—that singer-songwriters were gonna happen, that you didn't need singles. Joni taught me everything.”
5

Roberts was a close friend of another self-created legend who would be the commercial yin to Mitchell's creative yang: David Geffen. If Roberts did indeed learn everything he knew from Mitchell, then Geffen and Mitchell could have opened a boutique for forged brass testes. After reading about their stormy partnership, it's hard to tell which of the two former business pals was tougher.

Geffen's career started, somewhat infamously, in the mailroom of the William Morris Agency. He had falsified his resumé to get the job, claiming he'd received a degree in theatre arts from UCLA. After hearing that another mailroom slave had been fired for lying, he steamed open everyone's mail, every morning, looking for the letter that would have exposed him. He opened it, got his brother to forge a believable affirmation of attendance, and voila! Problem solved. From the beginning, David Geffen discovered that dishonesty was the secret to success in show business. Another important skill was sucking up to people and making them feel important and valued. He was good at both.

Eventually he and Roberts built up a talent roster and went into the management business together. Geffen would spin it off into a record label, Asylum, which signed the likes of his protege Laura Nyro, as well as Neil Young, the Eagles, and Jackson Browne.

The son of a girdle saleswoman who called him “King David,” Geffen was just as ambitious as Mitchell, and the two were so simpatico they even lived together in the same Bel Air house once owned by Julie Andrews and Blake Edwards.

They shared this creative nest until the relationship blew up. In his Geffen biography,
The Operator,
Tom King writes that “Mitchell's affection for Geffen had been seriously diminished from the moment Bob Dylan had come into Geffen's life. She had grown jealous of and angry at the attention Geffen lavished on his newest signing. A year earlier, Geffen had told people that Mitchell was the best concert performer in America. But now, as she was out on tour promoting
Court and Spark
, the album that contained [the David Geffen–inspired] ‘Free Man in Paris,' she stewed as Geffen seemed to care only about Dylan's live performances.”
6

Geffen's relationship with Dylan didn't last long either, but he can take credit for the 1974 reunion tour with Dylan and the Band. It was also Geffen who had a crying fit after the tour wrapped in L.A., and instead of thanking Geffen for all his hard work in orchestrating such a complex collection of egos and logistics, Dylan thanked “the legendary guy who put this whole tour together... Bill Graham.”

Mitchell accused Geffen of non-payment on royalties shortly after he'd created his own label, Geffen Records. Geffen's relationship with Elliot Roberts exploded around the same time, when Geffen decided to sue Neil Young for making “uncharacteristic records” in the wake of the jewel-case coffin called
Trans
(1982), Young's first foray into electronics. The L.A. mogul didn't seem to care about alienating his former “friends,” and the last thing he's quoted as saying about Mitchell is: “If I didn't talk to her for the rest of my life, I wouldn't miss her for a minute.”
7

Joni Mitchell isn't full of kind words for the business, or its moguls. “They're not looking for talent,” she told James Reginato at
W
magazine in 2002. “They're looking for a look and a willingness to cooperate... And I've never had a willingness to cooperate.”
8

Indeed, Mitchell has been called “difficult” several times and seems to revel in her intransigence. I think this is the crucial misperception in the Mitchell story: her insistence on creative purity has made her appear standoffish and bitchy; she is the stereotypical “difficult artist” whose “stubbornness” appears self-indulgent.

“I don't know if the axiom about geniuses being the toughest artists to work with has ever been proven or not, but I can gladly attest that Joni Mitchell's overwhelming artistic genius is not surpassed by anyone in our time,” said Howie Klein, then-president of Reprise Records, when he presented Mitchell with her 2002 Grammy Award for lifetime achievement. He continued:

This Lifetime Achievement Award isn't the result of a popularity contest and may in some ways be more significant than the various individual Grammys she has been awarded for specific work over the years. This recognition of Joni Mitchell aims to celebrate the achievements of a rare person whose creative gifts have profoundly impacted and enriched the collective consciousness of humanity. She is thoroughly original and her work—as a sophisticated poet, a pioneering musician, a powerful and unique vocal stylist, and a brilliant renaissance woman—continues to inspire countless artists around the world.
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It's not often you see a record industry executive credit an artist with enriching “the collective consciousness of humanity,” unless he/she is trying to sign an act by blowing smoke up its pants and the promise of hookers and coke didn't already work. But there was Klein, acknowledging her as a genius and contributor to the music community and the world at large.

Mitchell is widely recognized for her unflagging integrity in an age of fizzy-pop Britneys and Mileys, and her name will no doubt live on for centuries because it's based in genuine accomplishment, not sex, scandal, or overproduced pop singles. More to the point, Mitchell moved forward in the music industry without being obsessed with fame. If anything, she resisted the tug of celebrity because it interfered with the creative impulse.

“I never liked the big stage. I liked the coffee houses. I never liked the idea of separating myself from people, or being elevated. Maybe it's Canadian! You know, stick your head above the crowd and we'll be glad to lop it off!” she told Jana Lynne White of
SpeakEasy
. “But something in me made me not like the separation. As the stages got higher and higher, the fickleness of the crowds, suddenly this was being taken seriously and there were critics sitting out there,” she said. “I disliked the formalization of it as it went to the big stage and this need for perfection. In the coffee houses it was so experimental, so casual, so friendly. I could jump off the stage and sit down with them, stay at people's houses, go out to dinner. There was no inequity. I remember the first night when I heard someone suck in their breath when I went by. And I ran! It filled me so full of adrenaline that I ran for about six blocks in the opposite direction. ‘That's Joni Mitchell (gasp!)' Boom! I was outta there!”
10

In the face of fame, Mitchell's fight-or-flight survival mechanism usually resulted in flight. “I like to retire a lot,” she told Malka Marom in a 1974 feature interview for
Maclean's
.
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Mitchell first retired from show business at twenty-seven—an age with mythological significance in the world of rock 'n' roll. The “27 Club” was formed when Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison died at that age—all within the span of two years (1969–71), around the very time Mitchell stepped away from performance. Synchronistically, but sadly not surprisingly, Amy Winehouse joined the 27 Club during the writing of this book.

Mitchell says she's always been more excited by the creative burst of light than the suffocating darkness. She says she's never been a follower of the “suicide-chic” school of rock and that self-destruction isn't cool—or as she notes in the lyrics to “Blue,” “everybody's saying that hell's the hippest way to go, well I don't think so.”

As she once told the
New York Times
: “I cleared out the psychology and religious departments of several bookstores, searching for some explanation for what I was going through.”
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In her
Maclean's
interview, Mitchell told Malka (as the performer/interviewer preferred to be called) she had “difficulty at one point accepting my affluence, and my success and even the expression of it seemed to me distasteful at one time, like to suddenly be driving a fancy car.”

Success created a split in Mitchell's creative soul: “I had a lot of soul-searching to do as I felt somehow or other that living in elegance and luxury canceled creativity. I still had that stereotyped idea that success would deter creativity, would stop the gift, luxury would make you too comfortable and complacent and that the gift would suffer from it. But I found the only way that I could reconcile with myself and my art was to say this is what I'm going through now, my life is changing and I am too.”