Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (7 page)

Mitchell's familiarity with Jungian theory is part of the historical record. At her publisher's urging, she read Jung's autobiography,
Memories, Dreams
,
Reflections
. But I'm not going to assert the theory that Mitchell and her highly creative cohorts are beings from another planet. I've already declared my skepticism. However, at the very least, I do believe there's a significant connection between the creative creature and the collective unconscious, and this renders artists a brand of alien because they can see, hear, and feel things the rest of us cannot. They live in an alternative universe, where they can find the creative distance required for truly original thought.

Joni and Neil have both used alien and spaceman imagery to articulate their feelings, in interviews as well as in their lyrics. Listen to the words for Young's “After the Gold Rush” (1970) and you will hear a whole story of humanity's next exodus into space, a tale that prompted Linda Ronstadt, who covered the tune with glass harps, to say: “I would think, ‘This is the future. Neil's humans leave the planet and go off to start a new space colony.' I've always felt Neil had a great deal of really uncanny prescience in his writing.”
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“Well, I dreamed I saw the silver space ships flying in the yellow haze of the sun,” read Young's lyrics. “There were children crying and colours flying all around the chosen ones. / All in a dream, all in a dream, the loading had begun. / They were flying Mother Nature's silver seed to a new home in the sun.”

The year before “Gold Rush,” Mitchell penned the anthem for a generation in the song “Woodstock,” which contained the lyric fragment, “We are stardust / Billion year old carbon / We are golden.” A little over four years later, she wrote “The Same Situation,” which contained a reference to astronauts: “Still I sent up my prayer, wondering where it had to go / With heaven full of astronauts and the Lord on death row / While the millions of his lost and lonely ones call out and clamour to be found / Caught in their struggle for higher positions.”

In his Neil Young biography, Jimmy McDonough uses the word “aliens” in his description of the first meeting between Mitchell and Young in the aptly named Fourth Dimension club: “Mitchell and Young were kindred souls of a sort; both young, intense and painfully unique. It must have been like two aliens recognizing each other out on the open prairie... Both are essentially loners.”
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A half-century after Young and Mitchell first laid eyes on each other, we can safely say they're both musical legends and widely regarded as two of the most talented artists to ever strut across the planet, even if their legs didn't work that well as a result of polio. Both have been scrutinized, idolized, and dissed for taking artistic risks that baffled their fans, but each time they just get back in their creative capsule and blast off.

As Mitchell put it to Alice Echols in 1994, “I see like an alien. I don't have the soul of a white woman. I have the soul of a Martian, because I wander through this world as if I'm not of it, which I suppose is the perspective of an artist in the first place—the alien outlook.
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Years later, she reiterated the spaceman metaphor when she appeared on MuchMusic's
Intimate and Interactive
with Jana Lynne White in 2000: “An artist is born. They're born with an artistic attitude. They're born to be the axe for the frozen sea within us. They're born to be in conflict; they're born to be an alien and an outsider.”
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“The net with which you capture [creativity] is made up of the threads of your alertness.”
—Joni Mitchell

You may have had your doubts, but there was a purpose behind the preceding alien tangent—and not just as an exaggerated way of saying that artists are outsiders. I felt it was important to set up this section and give it creative context, because if there's one single story in the Joni Mitchell annals that really perplexes people, it's the one you're about to read.

In 2006, a number of people in the Los Angeles area complained about a mysterious skin condition they dubbed “Morgellons syndrome.” The cluster of cases prompted news attention and a public statement from the L.A. County health authority, which dismissed any health risk to the general population. Victims of the condition described their symptoms as “bugs crawling beneath the skin” and “threads and fibers” wriggling around under their dermis. Such “unexplained dermopathies” have been recorded throughout human history and largely written off as delusional, but when Joni Mitchell told the media she suffered from the mystery ailment in 2009, Morgellons syndrome hit the mainstream.

Mitchell described her condition in detail to the
Los Angeles Times
: “I have this weird, incurable disease that seems like it's from outer space, but my health's the best it's been in a while.” She said,

Two nights ago, I went out... I don't look so bad under incandescent light, but I look scary under daylight. Garbo and Dietrich hid away just because people became so upset watching them age, but this is worse. Fibers in a variety of colors protrude out of my skin like mushrooms after a rainstorm: they cannot be forensically identified as animal, vegetable or mineral. Morgellons is a slow, unpredictable killer—a terrorist disease: it will blow up one of your organs, leaving you in bed for a year. But I have a tremendous will to live: I've been through another pandemic—I'm a polio survivor, so I know how conservative the medical body can be. In America, the Morgellons is always diagnosed as “delusion of parasites,” and they send you to a psychiatrist. I'm actually trying to get out of the music business to battle for Morgellons sufferers to receive the credibility that's owed to them.
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Mitchell did exactly that. She spent several years lobbying various organizations and speaking publicly about the disease. She even bowed out of performing for the opening ceremonies of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, citing her medical condition.

In 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta launched a formal study. They examined 108 reported cases of Morgellons and found every single case could be explained as entirely normal. Every fiber was put under the microscope, every scab examined, and the only parasites found were on a patient suffering from pubic lice.

I haven't seen any reaction from Mitchell to this study, but I'm sure it hasn't miraculously cleared up her condition. If she's feeling it, it may as well be real, because our bodies and our brains are one and the same system. In fact, early on in utero, brain cells and skin cells are the same thing—just a mass of undifferentiated nerve cells. Moreover, as an artist, Mitchell's body is essentially the corporeal “space ship” that contains her creative soul. Like Captain James T. Kirk, Mitchell feels an innate responsibility to “boldly go where no man has gone before.”

Mitchell told Iain Blair of
Rock Express
that if artists are doing their job well, they are “the antennae of the planet—[and] they should be more sensitive to change, and by their very nature and predilection and interest should wade in where others fear to tread.”
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This brings up another central set of metaphors in Mitchell's “Martian” medical files: “sensitivity” and “antennae.” These two words speak to the organic interface between Mitchell's mind and the physical reality around her; they speak to the skin, the nerve cells that form the corporeal barrier, the personal body envelope. When Mitchell talked about her work with Mingus, she emphasized their common ground as artists and she used a prophetic metaphor: “Well, let's make an assumption here that an artist has a fine nervous system, okay? Now there are also a lot of people with fine nervous systems, more sensitive spinal columns or whatever, who are not artists, who have no outlet of expression. I think the nuance-y observations an artist makes are going to get picked up first by these sensitive people. Eventually they'll be picked up by people intellectually and then passed down through the culture,” she told Vic Garbarini. “There's a sensitivity lag. Some statements that are made by artists in their desire to look at the world in a fresh way have traditionally come up against a shocking reception,” she said. “When Stravinsky first played, people jumped up out of their seats and booed and hissed. People were infuriated by even less dramatic changes, like Dylan going electric.”
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Couple this fully articulated image of the artist with the “fine nervous system” and the “sensitive spinal column” with Mitchell's frequent use of adjectives like “nervy” and “sensitive”—or, less frequently, “thin-skinned”—and we see a common thread concerning the notion of “skin.” Symbolically, it's the physical manifestation of Mitchell's relationship to the outside world.

When Susan Sontag was diagnosed with cancer, she attempted to channel the anxiety and face her disease through her art: writing. In the resulting book,
Illness as Metaphor,
Sontag quotes lines from W.H. Auden's poem about terminal illness, “Miss Gee.” I think it speaks directly to Mitchell's condition, so I will end the chapter here:

[Illness is] like some hidden assassin
Waiting to strike at you.
Childless women get it,
And men when they retire;
It's as if there had to be some outlet
For their foiled creative fire.

“Chair in the Sky”
from
Mingus

“God Must be a Boogie Man”
from
Mingus

“For the creator himself to be the child new-born he must also be willing to be the mother and endure the mother's pain.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Blissful Islands,”
Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Mother-child dynamics have an undeniable impact on any creative experience, because “mother” is “the mother of all creation.” We've already talked about the fort-da game witnessed by Freud and seen how a child learns to cope with a mother's absence using his or her own powers of imagination. Pediatrician and psychologist D.W. Winnicott took this idea a step further. He braided bits of Freud, Jung, his instructor Melanie Klein, and personal observation to create a detailed theory about the relationship between mother-infant bonding and the creative experience. Picking up on the work of Klein, who described a “depressive position” for an infant as one where he/she has to accept the fact that he/she and the mother are no longer one, he asserted the creative importance of the split—which is typically associated with weaning.

Separation is both terrifying and exciting for the young mind, but it forces conflicting feelings to coexist—and that marks the birth of the creative dynamic. For that potential to be truly nurtured, Winnicott asserted, there had to be a “good enough mother” and a “good enough facilitating environment.” In short, the kid has to feel there's a fundamental level of safety in order to move forward and evolve creatively.

“The good enough mother is relatively successful at adapting to the infant's gestures and needs... The good enough mother provides the child with a feeling of omnipotence,” writes Ellen Levine, paraphrasing Winnicott. “At the very beginning, the mother fosters the illusion that her breast is part of the infant and under the infant's magical control, that the breast is created by the infant out of his/her capacity to love and to need,” she continues.
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Or, as Winnicott says, “The mother places the actual breast just where the infant is ready to create, and at the right moment,”
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leaving the child with the impression that the external world corresponds to his or her own creative capacity.

Indeed, like so many things, it comes down to the boob almighty, and in this particular narrative, there are two big boobs to consider: the breast that nurtured Joni Mitchell, and the breast that Joni Mitchell couldn't use to nurture the child she birthed but did not raise.

Before we address the issue of Mitchell's maternity, it's worth exploring the expected contours of the female experience at that particular moment in history, because things were changing quickly for women. The image of the stay-at-home mom was beginning to shift after the Second World War, thanks to the wartime integration of women in the workforce, as well as the publication of Simone de Beauvoir's
The Second Sex
(1949). Right before this “second wave” of feminism crested in the sixties and seventies, a new doll with grown-up curves and long blond hair was introduced to the masses, establishing a new binary for the expression of womanhood.

Barbara Millicent Roberts was born on March 9, 1959. She was of German extraction but found loving parents in Ruth and Elliot Handler, two Americans from California who were into toys. She was born wearing a zebra-stripe swimsuit and had enormous breasts protruding from a plastic toothpick body. “Barbie” would go on to mold as many young minds as there were molded Barbie bodies. A year after Barbie's unreal frame was placed in the hands of an entire generation, the oral contraceptive pill was introduced to women in North America.

For Mitchell, as for other members of her generation, trying to straddle the incredible distance between burgeoning notions of femininity and traditional, sexist values would prove challenging. But that's only once self-awareness kicked in. When Mitchell first entered show business, cradling her baritone ukulele at a moose-hunting show in Prince Albert in 1962, she had no problem with—let alone any awareness of—female stereotypes and the so-called hegemonic structure we live within.

Joni was a pliant participant—in the beginning. Over time, she started to question her place in the bigger picture and her relationship to established gender roles. She became more assertive in every aspect of her life. But most changes that are deep and profound aren't all that visible from the outside unless you're looking for them. So with that in mind, it's time to survey the exterior and get a good look at the Joni facade.

In the beginning, Joni looked like a Barbie. Even through the grainy buffering strains of a YouTube stream, her early TV appearances are compelling because she's got natural charisma. She also had ownership of the material. These were her songs. This was her voice. This was her real face. And what a mug it was! Glowing under the scorching TV lights, her blond hair picking up the hot glint with every cock and spin, she looked like the fairest maiden folk music had ever seen. Oscar Brand of the CBC's
Let's Sing Out
pointed out the obvious in his introduction to an October 1966 broadcast: “The young lady's been writing songs since she moved here [Ontario—the show was shot at Sudbury's Laurentian University] from Saskatoon a few years ago. She writes them beautifully, and she sings them beautifully, and she looks beautifully at the camera, too... [snigger] Here's Joni Mitchell with her own song ‘Just Like Me.'”
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As Mitchell sings her tune, which never made it onto an album, she smiles. She engages with the camera as it captures her gaze. Once in a while, you get a hint of the doe-in-the-headlights stare. It's hard not to: she looks like Bambi up there, with her big dark eyelashes and her wide-open, fragile face. The audience, filled with college kids in cardigans, was mesmerized.

Joni Mitchell was brokering her good looks, and it was working. Just about anyone who came into contact with her during these early years would talk about how stunning she was, how otherworldly, how haunting. Rock promoter Joe Boyd remembered the first time he saw Mitchell onstage in London: “In her miniskirt and long straight hair, she stole the show completely... She dazzled the crowd.”
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In one of the early show reviews,
Washington Post
critic William Rice could barely contain himself in the opening paragraph: “A girl in a flowing long gown with long blonde hair and a magically flowing voice cast a spell at the Cellar Door Monday evening that will not soon be forgot. Her name is Joni Mitchell.”
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Calgary club owner John Uren remembered the day she walked into his newly opened coffee house, the Depression. “She looked just tremendous... with all that blond hair. I brought Peter Elbing in from Toronto to open the place. And he listened to Joni and said she should sing [instead of him].”
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Mitchell became known as the “winsome bittersweet blonde from Fort Macleod, Alberta.”
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According to Leah Cohen Kunkel, who was part of the Laurel Canyon scene as the wife of drummer Russ and the sister of Mama Cass Elliot, when Mitchell “would sing over that guitar, men were riveted—they stopped what they were doing, they were absolutely enamored... She was drop-dead beautiful.” Cohen Kunkel went on to say, “Before that, it was always women [of the Canyon] riveted by the male guitarist—this was the first time it changed.”
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It changed because Mitchell had a physical billboard that drew attention right off the bat. And once she had people's attention, she blew them away. The voice and material hit it out of the park, but those first impressions, a crucial anchor point in the Mitchell mythology, were largely based on looks.

There should be no judgement here: that's the way the world worked in the 1960s. More importantly, Mitchell's understanding of appearance—and how to play it—was one of the many tools in her creative tool box.

She may have been perceived as an otherworldly earth goddess, but she sincerely loved fashion. She still does. It's an integral part of her personality and a means of expression. Her worldly style was one of the first things that made her stand out from the crowd in humble, grain-fed Saskatoon. As her old French teacher Robert Hinitt told biographer Michelle Mercer for
Will You Take Me As I Am
, Mitchell was “very popular with the boys” but “she was very popular with the girls, too. I remember she worked at a lady's clothing shop on Saturdays, she wore a red plaid skirt and red sweater and brown and white saddle shoes, and the ankle socks. The other parents used to complain about her beautiful wardrobe, and I used to say she earned that money by herself, so, you know, don't blame me for her clothes. She was very style conscious. Yes, dressed to the nines.”
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Mitchell became the fashionista of her high school. She wrote a column called “Fads and Fashions” for the school paper, and she financed her closet through her after-school job at Ricki's Ladies Wear.

“My identity, since it wasn't through the grade system, was that I was a good dancer and an artist. And also, I was very well-dressed. I made a lot of my own clothes,” she told Cameron Crowe for
Rolling Stone
. “I had access to sample clothes that were too fashionable for our community. I would go hang out on the streets dressed to the ‘T,' even in hat and gloves.” While Mitchell perfected her sartorial taste, she discovered her penchant for partying, dancing, and playing with the “rowdies” on the wrong side of town. “I was always in trouble,” she said. “I flunked math and was held up to terrible ridicule for the way I danced in bars. The local folks said it was downright wicked. I was always involved in a constant war to liberate myself.”
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Mitchell had no problem accommodating the idea of looking great and being a strong, independent woman, but when the school guidance counsellor suggested she become a hairdresser, she was deeply upset. Mitchell might have played into feminine expectation on one side of her life, but when it came to her long-term future, she saw a very different picture. She was determined not to end up a small-town matron like the ones she saw stroll into the clothing store on weekends, urgently seeking some big-city sophistication in the changing room. She spoofed such women in the high school yearbook: “I am a chronic sufferer of bargainitis—a disease with which every red-blooded female is afflicted,” she wrote. “For instance, last week I bought a brown-shantung dress at Blanche Buchanan's for $28 (a fraction of its former price!) At home, I surveyed myself before my vanity mirror. ‘Tres chic,' I muttered, although, somehow, without the cooing of the vendeuses, the creation seemed to give me the distinction and interesting contours of a large bran muffin.” This comic blurb reveals Mitchell's awareness of the socially affirming aspect of fashion, as well as her expert knowledge of fabric and textiles. She loves beautiful weaves, and she's even compared her music to the finest fruits of a loom: “My music is not designed to grab instantly. It's designed to wear for a lifetime, to hold up like a fine cloth,” she told Alice Echols.
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We often make the mistake of equating fashion with shallow concerns and ugly, vain men with ponytails, but for Mitchell—as it is now for the likes of Lady Gaga—the fashion world was one place that gave her licence to be free and establish a singular identity. “I'm a clothes horse,” Mitchell told
Washington Post
reporter Carla Hill in 1979. “I love fashion.”
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She's repeated this in several interviews. The former beauty pageant contestant talked about her early fascination with couture in an interview she did with Morrissey.
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The art rocker asked her about the perceived genre divide between her music and that of the Sex Pistols. She said there was no divide; it was all media manipulation. “When I met Johnny Rotten—I met him in Jamaica, and again I looked at him and I thought—I liked him immediately. He was a lot like I was—he was younger—but he was a lot like I was in high school: fashion conscious. There he sat, you know, in his red suede shoes and his black woolly... plaid jacket in the Jamaican heat all kind of pale and pimply, you know, like avoiding the sun,” said Mitchell, capturing the central paradox of the punk movement. Punk had the burning desire to set old values ablaze in a post-consumer pyre, but for all its piss and vinegar it spent a lot of time checking itself out in the mirror. After all, it was another art school fashion victim named Malcolm McLaren who created the punk look at the London clothing store he owned with Patrick Casey called, simply, SEX. The King's Road retailer was where Rotten auditioned for the band and where fetish items such as dog collars, harnesses, and studded leather made it out of the back room and onto the catwalks of Vivienne Westwood galas. The mixture of counter-culture and safety-pin couture gave young people in the 1970s a potent and highly visible identity to adopt via fashion, and Mitchell could relate: “I'm a punk. I've always been, you know—that irreverence. I've always been on the outside. I've never really been in the mainstream.”

It might sound petty to suggest that Mitchell's commitment to truthful expression is merely an offshoot of her clothes-consciousness, but we have to remember how few creative outlets women had at this time. Clothing was the most tangible manifestation of self, and Mitchell seemed to understand its importance. She broached the subject with Mary Dickie, who asked Mitchell how she found the strength to be herself in a small-town environment. “I think it started with fashion!” she replied.

When I was a child you had to wear the same clothes for two or three years. There was a girl who lived kitty-corner to us, and it seemed like she'd wait till I got my winter coat and then get the same one. Somewhere at a very early age I developed a contempt for copycat-ism. In the coffee houses when everyone was raving about Bob Dylan, I was saying, “Oh, he's just a Woody Guthrie copycat.” So very early I was fiercely interested in originality. I can't remember the origins [of that interest] unless it was this winter coat syndrome.
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