Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (16 page)

The plan was noble enough, but the angel of inspiration came to her in the form a “red red rogue” and a “bright red devil” who kept her in the increasingly touristy town. Cary Raditz was an American bon vivant who had done a variety of odd jobs, including art gallery dealer in Chapel Hill, before landing with the hippie hordes in Matala. He was the big man in town because he had the best hash. He also cooked in the local café and proved rather rude to Mitchell and her pal when they first arrived. The bad attitude won Mitchell's interest—perhaps because she was looking for anyone who wouldn't kiss her ass.

“He's got sort of a flaming red personality, and flaming red hair and a flaming red appetite for red wine and he fancied himself to be a gourmet cook,” Mitchell says. “He announced to my girlfriend and I the day that we met him that he was the best cook in the area, and he actually was working at the time I met him—he was working at this place called the Delphini restaurant [AKA the Mermaid Café]—until it exploded, singed half of the hair off of his beard and his legs, and scorched his turban, melted down his golden earrings.”
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With a new designer handbag laden with sketching supplies and a gorgeous new instrument, a dulcimer handcrafted by L.A.-based luthier Joellen Lapidus, Mitchell soon shacked up with the twenty-four-year-old former ad copywriter from North Carolina for a creatively enriched six weeks of cave dwelling and hash-smoking in one of the sandstone hollows along the shores. He was the inspiration for her song “Carey.”

In Matala, Mitchell also met another oddball named Yogi Joe, who later lectured Mitchell on the importance of friendship when he crashed the Isle of Wight Festival—and became one of the more interesting parts of the documentary film about the pop party that went wrong. Mitchell was thirsty for eccentrics, and Matala was a freak parade of rich material. “Variety is the spice of life,” says Mitchell, ever the explorer of emotion. “I prefer fun, all in all. But the light without the dark, and even negative situations, are not as valuable. And great beauty can come out of the negative. If you go through a bad space in your life and you're able to turn it into something—that's a wonderful thrill. You've turned it around in the yin yang of it all; you've made the best of a bad situation.”
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The trip to Greece was therapeutic to Mitchell's creative soul and paved the way for what is arguably the best album of all time:
Blue
speaks to the artistic soul in everyone because it comes from an undeniably true place. Proving that great art and suffering often go hand in hand, the rawness of the record came at a price: Mitchell had just blown up her life. She thought she could be happy with the safe and supportive Graham Nash. But she needed her freedom. Nash wanted to marry her, but she couldn't be “crown-and-anchored.” By the time Mitchell got back to North America, she'd already sent him a formal goodbye note via telegram that read: “If you hold sand too tightly in your hand it will run through your fingers.” She also had an album's worth of new material.
Blue
begins on a decidedly Odyssean note: “I am on a lonely road and traveling, traveling, traveling, looking for something. What can it be?”

Mitchell says one of the things she learned on her European journey was the importance of the moment and revelling in the experiences as they unfold because the rest is simply beyond one's control. The destination doesn't really matter. And, in most cases, it's a disappointment.

As she told Penny Valentine upon her return to the public eye in 1972:

I think that there's a new thing to discover in the development of fulfillment. I don't think it necessarily means trading the search, which is more exciting than the actual fulfillment... drifting through lives quickly and cities quickly you know, you never really get to understand a person or a place very deeply... you can be in a place until you feel completely familiar with it, or stay with a person until you may feel very bored. Then all of a sudden, if you're there long enough, it'll just open up and flash you all over again. But so many people who are searching and travelling come to that point where it's stealing out on them and they just can't handle that and have to move on.
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Conjuring a line from Kris Kristofferson's “Me and Bobby McGee,” she said, “freedom is deceptive... just another [word] for nothing left to lose,” and added that it implies “a lot of loneliness.”

Fittingly, Kristofferson was one of the first people who heard the finished recording of
Blue
, and it blew him away. It wasn't the music that had the Rhodes Scholar's jaw on the floor but the clarity of the whole record. “I remember when
Blue
was first recorded... It was like, nothing left to lose, let's spit it out. And when it was finished, I went over to a friend's house and Kris Kristofferson was there,” Mitchell told Bill Flanagan for
Musician
magazine
in 1985. “I played it. He said, ‘Joni, save something for yourself.' It was hard for him to look at it. There was an odd sense of respect. Like it was a Diane Arbus photo book or something. I've heard some of the writing called that, and yet I find it hard to relate to those images. These are not strange people in the basement of apartment buildings. These are all of us.”
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She's right.
Blue
is the classic it is because it was so truthful that it nailed the universal. Mitchell acknowledges
Blue
was probably her most naked record, but she had to go there—she needed to get naked and crucify her own celebrity so people could see her humanity. It worked, but it involved suffering. “I'll just tell you, though, about what you have to go through to get an album like that,” she said. “That album is probably the purest emotional record that I will ever make in my life. In order to get that clean...” she paused, pondering,

You wouldn't want to go around like that. To survive in the world you've got to have defenses... but they are in themselves a kind of pretension. And at that time in my life, mine just went... Actually, it was a great spiritual opportunity, but nobody around me knew what was happening. All I knew was that everything became kind of transparent. I could see through myself so clearly. And I saw others so clearly that I couldn't be around people. I heard every bit of artifice in a voice. Maybe it was brought on by nervous exhaustion. Whatever brought it on, it was a different, undrug-induced, consciousness.

Mitchell was a little surprised by the awareness, because it made her realize her writing up to that point wasn't entirely honest. “The music that I was making was very different from the music I loved,” she told biographer Michelle Mercer. Mitchell was also more emotional than she was used to. As she recalled the moment with Bill Flanagan, she said: “When the guy from the union came to the studio to take his dues I couldn't look at him. I'd burst into tears. I was so thin-skinned. Just all nerve endings. As a result, there was no capability to fake. The things that people love now—attitude and artifice and posturing—there was no ability to do those things. I'll never be that way again and I'll never make an album like that again.”
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Mitchell never made an album like
Blue
again, although
Shine
, the last record in her catalogue (she's formally retired now, but she's done that so many times, it's hard to know for sure), comes awfully close to personal, as well as political, catharsis. After her year of travel, and after her artistic exhaustion on
Blue
, Mitchell needed to recharge her creative solar cell and figured she could “lead a ‘Heidi'-like existence, you know, with goats and an orchard.”
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She looked for the alpine feel on Canada's west coast, near a coastal hamlet called Pender Harbour. Located just north of Vancouver, the Sunshine Coast is home to rich retirees, pot growers, back-to-the-landers, and all brands of social misfits who can't live within the city limits. (And, yes, there are many “normal” people who live on the coast, too.) Geographically, the Sunshine Coast is part of the mainland, but thanks to the rugged Coast Mountain range that cleaves it from the Interior, and the endless indents of fjords and inlets, it's only accessible by float plane or ferry. This separation from the rest of the province lends it a feeling of remoteness and isolation—all of which helped the fragmenting folk icon reintegrate.

“The land has a rich melancholy about it,” she told Valentine. “Not in the summer because it's usually very clear, but in the spring and winter it's very brooding and it's conducive to a certain kind of thinking.” This “certain kind of thinking” is the creative space, the amorphous and indescribable inner landscape that nourishes and inspires the artistic soul with its chaos, grace, and immutable beauty.

Mitchell says she experienced a different type of recreation on the rugged Sunshine Coast: she rebuilt herself from the ground up, and at the same time, she built her artistic orthotic of a home that peers into the Pacific. “[The house is] almost like a monastery,” she said of the original seventies-era structure, which has since been renovated. “All stone and hardwood floors and hardwood benches, everything that would be corrective. No mirrors. Fighting for all that good virtue in myself,” she said. “When I left my house in Laurel Canyon I looked around and it seemed too soft, too comfortable, too dimly lit, too much red upholstery,” she said. “It was really ridiculous. [So] I just made this place really uncomfortable, like a corrective shoe.”
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Building the house wasn't just a physical act that gave her a sense of belonging and safety; it was the symbolic rebirth of her identity: she literally built her own house and lived in it.

Her new sense of wholeness came across when she talked to Marci McDonald after her return to public life in 1974: “An artist needs a certain amount of turmoil and confusion and I've created out of that—even severe depression. But I had a lot of questions about myself, the way I was conducting my lives... life,” she said, betraying her self-diagnosed multi-phrenia. “Most of it was moral confusion.”

The cover of her next album,
For the Roses
, features a photograph of Mitchell on the Sunshine Coast property. She's hanging out fully clothed on a rock, but on the inside gatefold, she's completely naked. (She originally wanted to have the nude on the front, but Elliot Roberts cautioned her against it, saying: “Joan, how are you going to like it when you see ‘$2.98' plastered across your ass?”). She told radio host Pete Fornatale: “I withdrew—I went into my hermitage there. I retreated to a piece of property that was infinitely interesting. The light was different on the water every day. There was a lot of wildlife. I got myself back to the garden,” she said, picking up her own lyric. “I thought, you know, I took my own advice... with the optimism of living off the land. Well, I am too urban as it turns out and in a year or so I was back in the cities again. But it was a good—it was a good period of retreat.”
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In Timothy White's interview, she described her time in retreat as “a solitary period; a melancholy exile—there was a sense of failure to it.”
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According to most creativity experts, a sense of failure makes for very bad creative kindling: it's too damp, too green, and too absorbed in self to make a crackling blaze in the brain. The fresh cuttings need to dry out for a bit in the sun before they can be useful, and Mitchell gave herself the time to heal. Most people don't have the privilege of taking a year off to think about their creative potential, but thanks to her previous successes, Mitchell did just that, and successfully bellowed the burning embers into a bonfire. That year may have been the most important moment in Mitchell's creative life because it took her from a place of perceived failure—over her love life, her conflicting feelings about the business, and her abandoned maternity—to a place of creative liberation.

In her book
Tending the Fire
, psychologist Ellen Levine writes that art therapy is particularly useful for treating depression because it gives a shape and form to experience. “This shaping of experience into an artistic form provides the container,” whether it is a painting, a dance, a poem, a song, or a piece of theatre. The creative products “hold the internal world of the artist” in “external form.” However, the process must begin in formlessness. “Before the dance can emerge, there is play and experimentation with different possibilities.” In other words, there are going to be many drafts, many misses, before the perfect piece of prose hits the page. But these “failures” are a crucial part of the process. “To really play at this stage means to give up any sense of a fixed idea of what will happen or of knowing anything beforehand. This attitude of letting go must be practiced and cultivated,” Levine says. “It comes more easily to some than to others. Entering the chaos of formlessness and letting go can be frightening. Order, structure or form for experience thus needs to emerge organically out of playful experimentation.”
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Mitchell's time on the B.C. coast was playful and profoundly life-altering. She learned to let go and discovered she was just fine exactly the way she was. “One day about a year after I started my retreat in Canada, I went out swimming. I jumped off a rock into this dark emerald green water with yellow kelp in it and purple starfish at the bottom. It was very beautiful,” she says. “And as I broke up to the surface of the water, which was black and reflective, I started laughing. Joy had just suddenly come over me, you know? And I remember that as a turning point. First feeling like a loony because I was out there laughing all by myself in this beautiful environment. And then, right on top of it, was the realization that whatever my social burdens were, my inner happiness was still intact.”
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This epiphany blasted a ray of light into every corner of Mitchell's existence. She recovered her ability to play in the chaos and release her true creative spirit.