Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (17 page)

“With writing,” she told Jenny Boyd, “you have to plumb into the subconscious, and there's a lot of scary things down there, like a bad dream sometimes. If you can extricate yourself from it and face up to it, you come back with a lot of self-knowledge, which then gives you greater human knowledge... To know yourself is to know the world; everything, good, bad, and indifferent is in each one of us to varying degrees... So in that way, the writing process is fantastic psychotherapy—if you can survive.”

“Lead Balloon”

“For Free”

“For the Roses”

“Both Sides Now”
from
Miles of Aisles

“He is three...
Which one do you think he'd want the world to see
Well world opinion's not a lot of help
When a man's only trying to find out
How to feel about himself
In the plan oh
The cock-eyed plan
God must be a boogie man!”
—Joni Mitchell, “God Must Be a Boogie Man,”
Mingus

The first half of this book probed the primary creative question of identity: “Who Am I?” The second half will endeavour to take it one step further, because we can't truly understand ourselves as creators without questioning our relationship to creation and the great Creator—or the concept we commonly refer to as God.

From the moment we are born, we're exposed to the fundamental dynamic of creator and creation: God-human, parent-child, state-citizen. The lines of power are clearly drawn within this dynamic, and it's familiar and comforting to feel like the perpetual child who will be cared for, nurtured, and loved for simply obeying the rules. This is one of the reasons why religious texts have proven so successful for the past millennia: they create crisp boundaries around the concept of creator and creation, ensuring we understand our place in the universe as small, corporeal creatures with a limited ability to grasp truth. In return for our unquestioning belief, we're promised salvation, a joyous family reunion in the afterlife, and a sense of connection to the throbbing mystery of the galaxy.

Religious texts do not encourage us to be creators. That divine act is reserved for the ultimate and omnipotent Creator. However, when we allow ourselves to become the artist, what was once a one-sided, fixed equation becomes dynamic. As an artist, the human being can be both creation and creator—thawing the fluid life force of the creative impulse and giving us a new sense of personal control through free will.

The creative act can lift us into a new understanding of the god-state. Jenny Boyd describes such a moment in her introduction to
Musicians in Tune
, as she relates the story of her “spiritual awakening”:

The traditional Christian beliefs I had been taught as a child crumbled as I suddenly recognized that there was no God above or hell below. God was everywhere, inside each one of us, I saw everything as a circle: life, death and rebirth, or reincarnation,” she says. “The circle represented the spiraling journey of the spirit, reaching toward a state of union with God. It was as if a veil had been lifted to show me something I had somehow known all along. It was my first truly intuitive moment and would one day influence my creativity.
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One could describe Boyd's sensation as an epiphanic moment: she saw the world through a new set of lenses and it changed her feelings about herself. She gained a new sense of trust in her creative potential: she could feel God around her and within in her—not above or below her—but as a part of her. Quite simply, by becoming creative, we channel the creative spirit of the universe and, in so doing, feel “at one” with the spheres.

This link is achieved through the process we call “inspiration,” a moment where we are so deeply moved, we feel a compulsion to create. The root of the word reminds us that this is very much a physical phenomenon: “inspiration” comes from
inspirare
, which is Latin for “breathe”—the basic autonomic function of being alive.

In
Minstrels of the Soul
, Paolo Knill, Helen Barba, and Margot Fuchs outline what happens at the moment of inspiration: “An aesthetic response... a distinct response, with a bodily origin, to an occurrence in the imagination, to an artistic act, or to the perception of an art work. When the response is profound and soul-stirring, we describe it as ‘moving,' or ‘breath-taking' (in German
Atem beraubend
)... revealing itself in the quick in-breath—or ‘inspiration'—we might experience in the presence of beauty.”
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Negotiating the metaphysical significance of inspiration takes us to the biggest question of all: “Why Am I Here?” Joni Mitchell asked herself this question over the course of her creative life. Dancing on both sides of the creator-creation equation, she found the power to recreate herself without losing faith in the larger mystery. In the process, she bumped up against many god-related questions. As she told Barney Hoskyns in a 1994 interview for the forthcoming
Turbulent Indigo
: “In a lifetime, I think everyone sinks to the pits, and without that you don't really have powers of empathy. You may have powers of sympathy, but if you've been to the bottom you have an opportunity to be a more compassionate person. I have had a difficult life... no more difficult than anyone else's but peculiarly difficult all the same. A life of very good luck and very bad luck, with a lot of health problems,” she said. “But I don't think I've ever become faithless; I've never been an atheist, although I can't say what orthodoxy I belong to.”
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Before Mitchell could use her creative power to reconcile her place in the universe, she needed the “inspiration” of others. So let's take a deep, collective breath, and look at the sources of Mitchell's creative expression. She told
Rolling Stone
's David Wild in 1991 that “most of my heroes are monsters, unfortunately, and they are men.”
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She didn't list them off in that interview, but in reading the vast Mitchell archive, three names emerge more prominently than any others: Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Of the former two, she said: “The only poets who influenced me were Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan,” adding they were both “points of departure.” Of the latter she said: “Nietzsche was a hero, especially with
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
. He gets a bad rap; he's very misunderstood. He's a maker of individuals, and he was a teacher of teachers.”
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There's no question Cohen, Dylan, and Nietzsche make for a rather odd triumvirate of spiritual and creative power—especially given the inherent religious connections to each, with Cohen being a good Jew (at least in the beginning), Dylan being a lapsed Jew who turned to Christianity (at least in the beginning), and Nietzsche having been connected with the rise of fascism and the Third Reich. And yet, as we shall soon see, the former polio victim who beat the iron lung found a way to inhale all three as inspirations and express them in her own unique breath.

“And the poets lie too much.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Blissful Islands,”
Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Joni Mitchell says Leonard Cohen “owns the words ‘naked body,'” and she believes he may be incapable of inspiring his own priapic brand of poetry without dipping into his deep well of past loves. She should know. She was one of the many—many, many, many. The fact that Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell had a brief encounter is not only a handsome part of Canadian lore, but the connection seems destined: they were two Canadians with poetry and sex appeal pumping through their veins, circulating through the smoky folk circuit at the same time. They were opposites, but together they found a creative dynamic tension: one a lanky blond WASP from the prairies who could sing prettier than a songbird, the other an urban Jew poet with the croak of a crow who wore sex on his black sleeves. Their meeting had every reason to be transformative, and for Mitchell—at least—it was. She said Cohen was a “mirror to my work,” who showed her “how to plumb the depths of my own experience.”
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Mitchell's use of the term “mirror” is key to understanding the process of inspiration, because it's about seeing who you are and feeling the urge to recreate yourself.

“Chuck Mitchell had had a degree in literature and I had flunked grade 12,” Mitchell told Michelle Mercer. “So he had the pride of the educated, and he basically thought I was stupid. I came out of the marriage with a chip on my shoulder. Shortly after that, I met Leonard and I said to him, ‘I'm illiterate, basically. I haven't read anything, give me a reading list.'”
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Cohen complied and offered a get-literate-quick series of titles that included works by Lorca, Camus, and the I Ching.

But recent years have seen a diminishing of her reverence for the man who was almost broke until “Hallelujah” saved his Jewish bacon. She told Mercer she now finds him superficial and reductive: “I used to give Leonard and Dylan credit for growing up the pop song. After I read Camus and Lorca, I started to realize that Leonard had stolen a lot of their lines—I mean, he handed me the source of his plagiarism in the reading list that he gave me. That was very disappointing to me,” said Mitchell. “‘Walk me to the corner, our steps...' That's a direct lift out of Camus.”

The comment may seem like one of those fabulous Joni paradoxes, given Mitchell has also borrowed large swaths of prose from the likes of Yeats and Kipling. Yet, where Cohen—and, as we've already noted, Dylan—incorporated others' stanzas into their own work without specific attribution for the material, Mitchell credits all her sources in the liner notes. She's consistently untainted when it comes to creation, which gives her good reason to be a little self-righteous, and just a tad disappointed by the creative posturing of her peers.

In the beginning, though, Joni Mitchell was downright adoring. The love story began at the 1967 Newport Folk Festival, two years after Dylan first plugged in and sent an electrified shiver down the collective spine of the folk movement. Mitchell had yet to record an album, but her songs were gaining attention—thanks to people like Dave Van Ronk, one of the fixtures on the New York music scene who not only covered the recent divorcee's tunes but also introduced her to the community. It was through Van Ronk that Mitchell met Steve Katz and Roy Blumenfeld, two members of a band called the Blues Project—shortly after her departure from the matrimonial nest, Mitchell woke up to a Chelsea morning and dated both of them.

Blumenfeld told Sheila Weller that Mitchell was like “a Canadian Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz,” and he was happy to have nabbed the “perfect shiksa... [with] the high cheekbones, the sculpted face”
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until his fiery French girlfriend, Marie, returned from the land of Gauloises and forced him to fold his manly poker hand. Mitchell was dumped like a cold latke. To ease her pain, she headed to a bar—the Tin Angel (which would earn its own song)—and hung out with Blues Project keyboardist Al Kooper, a kid who found fame at fourteen when he penned “Short Shorts” and later formed the band Blood, Sweat & Tears.

Kooper is also credited with the opening Hammond organ swirl on Dylan's “Like a Rolling Stone,” and he was onstage for that infamous 1965 Newport set when Bob Dylan decided to amp up (incurring the wrath of Pete Seeger, who said if he'd had an ax, he would have cut the cables).
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On this particular night, Kooper would earn his rock 'n' roll chevrons for palling around with the moping Joni and heading back to her apartment to hear her sing. It hardly seems like a noble calling—more like a booty calling—but Kooper was so impressed by Mitchell's songs, he called up his friend Judy Collins in the middle of the night.

Collins didn't hang up. She needed material to round out her album
Wildflowers
, which already contained two Cohen-penned tunes: “Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye” and “Sisters of Mercy.” She told Kooper she could pick up Mitchell on her way to Newport, where she was booked to play and lead a workshop the following day. Collins was taken by a tune called “Both Sides Now” and wanted to hear the rest of Mitchell's repertoire.

Bubbling with enthusiasm, Mitchell packed her bags and waited for Collins to show up at her apartment door—but she never did. She completely bailed on the young ingenue, leaving Mitchell's ego a little bruised after she waited at the curb for a car that never came. It was only after Collins arrived at the folk festival and heard someone butcher one of Mitchell's tunes that she sent a car for the singer and made good on the promise.

The only thing standing in the way of Mitchell and a Newport audience now was Joan Baez's mother, Joan Bridge Baez, who apparently had little time for the fair-haired—and striking—Mitchell, lest she steal the limelight from her own girls, Joan Jr. and Mimi Farina. Mama Joan tried to stop Mitchell from taking the stage in what would prove to be the first of several showdowns—she is a recurring character in the annals of Mitchell's backstage life, and a rather comic one at that.

Born in Scotland, “Joan Senior,” or “Big Joan,” as she was frequently called, kept a close eye on her daughters, but Joan in particular. Maybe her penchant for keeping a very, very close eye on her progeny came from her husband, Albert Baez, a Mexican-born physicist credited with co-inventing the X-ray microscope (he also wrote one of the bibles of university physics,
The New College Physics: A Spiral Approach
). Either way, Big Joan's stage-mother instincts went rabid whenever Mitchell was around. Even Baby Joan Baez remarked on it years later, when she and Mitchell were sharing a stage once more on the Rolling Thunder Revue, a gypsy caravan of a rock tour initiated by Dylan in 1975, with the likes of Ronee Blakley, Roger McGuinn, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and Kinky Friedman. Baby Joan pulled journalist Larry “Ratso” Sloman aside backstage during Mitchell's set and said: “My mother will be showing high signs of disinterest at this point 'cause I'm her daughter.”
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Mitchell was aware of the dislike and felt it was shared by both Joan generations, saying Baby Joan Baez “would have broken my leg if she could.”
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But in keeping with her creativity-matters-more-than-ego pattern, she never let either of the Joans get under her skin, and she has never slagged the earnest protest singer's talent. But back in 1967, Mitchell wasn't so confident about her place in the limelight. She needed backup, and she got it from Judy Collins—who threatened Big Joan with a public scene if Mitchell didn't get her chance at the mike. If Mitchell didn't go onstage, nor would Collins or Cohen. Big Mama Joan relented, allowing Cohen to make his performance debut and Mitchell to embrace a big audience of new fans.