Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (4 page)

Joni has suggested that Chuck Mitchell's shortcomings as a husband made her a musician, but she takes ownership of her own talent for self-creation. She creates her own mythology—a fact not lost on the
Toronto Star
's Marci McDonald. “She writes her own press releases,” McDonald said, depicting Mitchell as a “myth spun in vinyl and remembered spotlights. In swirling soprano self-portraits and worshipful press clippings, all cornsilk flashes and free-spirit poetry. There's no myth in the top of pop quite like it.”
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Indeed, there's no myth like it because no other artist—to my knowledge—entered the music business with the ability to write her own narrative. Most biographies accompanying a record's release are written by PR people at the label or impoverished rock writers looking for extra cash. Mitchell is one of the few—in fact, before the age of blogging, I knew of none other—who wrote her own bumph. McDonald saw this piece of self-penned biography, written in “her child-like loopy longhand,” as “a little short on details and little long on preserving the mythology.”

“I was born in Fort Macleod, Alberta, in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies—an area of extreme temperatures and mirages,” writes Mitchell. “When I was two feet off the ground I collected broken glass and cats. When I was three feet off the ground I made drawings of animals and forest fires. When I was four feet off the ground I began to dance to rock 'n' roll and sing the top ten and bawdy service songs around camp fires and someone turned me on to Lambert, Hendricks and Ross and Miles Davis. And later Bob Dylan.” The self-penned history continues: “Through these vertical spurts there was briefly the church choir, grade one piano, bowling, art college, the twist, a marriage, runs in the nylons and always romance—extremes in temperature and mirages.”

That's a rather hasty take on a rather extended career arc, even up to that early point, so let's fill in the details while we're still talking about the creation of personal identity.

Roberta Joan Anderson was born under a blue Alberta sky. Her father was a flight lieutenant with the Royal Canadian Air Force. Her parents—who were clearly expecting a boy they could name Robert John—had met a year earlier, when the thirty-year-old Myrtle McKee was working in a bank in Regina. “Mickey”—as she was known to her girlfriends, and is credited in the liner notes for
Clouds
—didn't think she'd find any men in town, since the war had vacuumed up all the good specimens. But after a tea leaf reading, Myrtle was told she would fall in love, marry within the year, and die of a long, slow disease. (The first two were correct but not the third: Myrtle died in her nineties without protracted pain.) Myrtle thought Bill looked cute in his uniform (as Joni sings in her filial tribute “The Tea Leaf Prophecy”), and they were married after a quickie courtship. Joan remembers her crib and watching the dust swirl in the beams of light poking through an old plastic blind. She has since described herself as “born materialistic” and “like a crow” because she enjoyed picking up shards of broken glass and holding them up to the light—back when parents allowed kids to handle sharp objects and blow stuff up.

Stints in small-town Saskatchewan followed as the Andersons moved from Fort Macleod to Maidstone, then North Battleford, and eventually the “big city” of Saskatoon. Mitchell's childhood was rather charmed: she played outside and roughhoused with the fellas, whom she tended to identify with more than the girls.

Mitchell says she's always considered herself “one of the boys.” She's moved back and forth across the gender divide most of her life, even when it was considered cultural taboo. When she was growing up on the wheat fields of the Canadian prairie, her playmates would choose a new Roy Rogers stand-in to lead the day's play agenda. Joan wanted to be Roy, but the boys wouldn't let her, so she begged her parents to buy her a Roy Rogers shirt and hat for Christmas. Her father finally relented, but when Joan showed up ready to lead the boys in her red shirt and hat, complete with “Roy” stitched on the pocket, they told her she couldn't be Roy. She could only be Dale. And Dale stayed home and cooked.

A lot of girls have this earth-shattering experience at a young age, when they're suddenly denied the chance to do something because of their sex. For Mitchell, whose father had raised her in many ways like a boy, encouraging her to build things and go outside in the fresh air, there was a sense of betrayal and frustration that would linger into adulthood. “I had a good relationship with my father. He taught me a lot of things that, had he had a son, he would have taught a boy. How to make bows and arrows and so on,” she told the
New Musical Express
in 1985. “I enjoy men's company, and I grew up enjoying it.”
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Mitchell says she has female friends, but she tends to relate better to men because she's driven. “Sometimes I remind [women] of their inability to get going.” That's on the good days. The bad days look different: “I'm a little afraid of women,” she told Cameron Crowe in a 1979
Rolling Stone
interview. “In my observation, what passes for feminine camaraderie is conspiracy.”
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This distrust of other women is proof of Mitchell's gender alienation. She doesn't feel like she belongs to either camp, and although this no doubt amped up her existential angst, it freed her from a singular perspective calibrated to the status quo. She could dress up as a pimp in blackface. She could wear a Roy Rogers shirt. And she could own her sexual power, sharing her body with the men she wanted, and at times even objectifying them sexually. When she dated percussionist Don Alias, she painted his portrait. This isn't such a big surprise, considering Mitchell painted a lot of her partners—as well as her cats. What made the Alias painting so unique was the decision to paint him wearing a bathrobe, with a full erection. “It was me, with my bathrobe open with—bang!—like this hard-on sticking out,” Alias told Sheila Weller, author of
Girls Like Us,
before his death in 2006.
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The musician was embarrassed, especially when Mitchell hung the portrait in the middle of the living room. He must have felt a little used, maybe even a little exposed and dirty, because he demanded Mitchell perform an artistic castration: he wanted his genitals removed from the canvas. Mitchell refused, eventually compromising on a semi-excited schlong. While this may be the only documented case of Mitchell compromising her artistic integrity, it proves once more how willing she is to step outside the box of expectation.

“I believe that I am male and I am female,” she once told Crowe. In 1987, Bob Dylan echoed this take on Mitchell. When asked by
Rolling Stone
reporter Kurt Loder what he thought of women onstage, Dylan said: “I hate to see chicks perform. Hate it... because they whore themselves.” When asked if he thought the same thing about Joni Mitchell, Dylan replied: “Well, no. But then, Joni Mitchell is almost like a man. I mean, I love Joni, too. But Joni's got a strange sense of rhythm that's all her own and she lives on that timetable. Joni Mitchell is in her own world all by herself.”
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Leave it to Dylan to place gender in a musical context, where time and metre are the ticking social rules measuring out gender expectation and success. It's a very workable metaphor, and one that parallels a relatively new landmark in gender studies: Judith Butler's 1990 book,
Gender Trouble
. Butler is a professor of rhetorical studies and comparative literature at UC Berkeley, and one of her central concerns in
Gender Trouble
is untangling the many strands of personal and public identity.

From uprooting the potentially sexist foundations of language itself to deconstructing the forces that shape our current reality, Butler tries to understand gender “outside the box”—or, in Dylan's terminology, she tries to hear the beats as entities separate from the time signature. Butler's book is a dense read, but her conclusions are mind-altering—and for our purposes highly relevant—because she comes to believe gender is a function of performance. Gender is not a noun as much as it's a verb—a series of actions that are socially equated with one sex or the other.

Gender “is always a doing... the ‘doer' is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything,” she writes, echoing Nietzsche's idea that “I” is an act of performance. “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions' that are said to be its results”—in other words, there is no solid, immutable, universal force defining human beings as one or other. We are what we do.

I was heartened to discover that someone else had made the link between Judith Butler and Joni Mitchell. When I found Stuart Henderson's 2005 essay “Gendering Joni Mitchell” online, I felt a wave of relief—I wasn't the only one to look at the creative importance of gender-bending, especially as it applies to Mitchell. Henderson draws detailed observations to apply Butler's theory to Mitchell's life. He argues that Mitchell's identity is not solid and that “Joni Mitchell” is a function of performance—a mix of performances so vast and varied, it defies classification at every level: musically, stylistically, instrumentally, or even in terms of gender.

“Once critics were forced to take her more seriously, her woman-ness became conflated with an apparent maleness,” Henderson notes. “It was undeniable that [Mitchell] was never merely a pretender to the male role—with every record, Mitchell was demonstrating her idiosyncratic vision of the art of composition.”
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Mitchell transcends gender because she's become a creative force unbound by thick black borders. Henderson's essay is undeniably thorough, but it only covers 1966 to 1974 and so omits Mitchell's truly adventurous gender explorations, such as the cover of
Don Juan's Reckless Daughter
and, more recently, her support and appreciation for John Kelly, the Obie-winning performer who's earned fame playing Mitchell in a one-man show. Kelly tried on Mitchell's identity for size at the Wigstock drag festival in the late 1990s, donning a long blond wig, flowing dresses, and an acoustic guitar. “Really, it's the idea of [Joni] that I present on stage,” he told Brian Jewell of
Bay Windows
in 2007. “This clever, sometimes seemingly spacey goddess. She tells crazy, outrageous stories that have you wondering where she's going with it. She's a riot.”
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In one of the last published interviews Mitchell granted, with Matt Diehl for the
Los Angeles Times
in April 2010, she shared the spotlight with Kelly and described herself as a big fan of the show. A friend of hers had told her she might not like it, but when she decided to check it out for herself at New York's Fez, she was pleasantly surprised. “It was really a fun, unique experience—more homage than a normal drag show. It was like being a ghost at your own funeral,” she said. “The audience responded to John as if he were me.”
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Mitchell's words reaffirm the two central points of this chapter. First, personal identity is an act of self-creation and performance: Kelly can conjure Mitchell's soul by “doing” what Mitchell does, and Mitchell herself recognized the performance aspect of her identity in the same interview when she said, “I'm a method actress in my songs, which is why it's hard to sing them.” Second, Mitchell is a happy gendernaut, content to veer over the double yellow line on the gender highway, peering over the edge of the abyss with a giggle in the back of her throat. After all, what could be more threatening to an iconic artist such as Mitchell than a drag queen appropriating the repertoire and making it his own? I mean, it could have been hissy mockery—a queen lip-synching “A Case of You” with a bottle of Stoli—but the fact that Kelly is a man seems to have no effect on Mitchell's psyche. He could play her as easily as any woman could. “I'm usually the playwright and the actress,” she said, giving the performance-based theory of identity an added punch in the arm. “But in this case, with John, we now have a new actress! Right?”

It was in the same interview with the
Los Angeles Times
that Joni Mitchell accused Bob Dylan of being “a plagiarist”—a comment that eclipsed the rest of the content and set off a chain reaction of anti-Joni comments from the legions of Bobby faithful.

Citing Mitchell's assumption of persona on the album cover of
Don Juan's Reckless Daughter
, as well as the name change from Joan to Joni, Diehl probably thought he was navigating safe waters when he said: “You've had experience becoming a character outside yourself. The folk scene you came out of had fun creating personas. You were born Roberta Joan Anderson, and someone named Bobby Zimmerman became Bob Dylan.”

Mitchell's response is now destined for the annals of rock 'n' roll history: “Bob is not authentic at all. He's a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I.”

By calling Dylan “fake” and insisting that she and he are “like night and day,” Mitchell asserts her authenticity—and, in turn, her superiority over the iconic tambourine man with the nasal drawl.

Many people who enter a creative field are steeped in self-doubt about the depth of their ability. What made Mitchell different?

In 1978, two psychologists coined the term “impostor syndrome” to describe professionals who believe their success is accidental, or even unearned. In the opening salvo of their landmark paper, “The Impostor Phenomenon in High-Achieving Women,” Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes declare the phenomenon to be largely female: “In our clinical experience, we have found that the phenomenon occurs with much less frequency in men and that when it does occur, it is with much less intensity.”
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