Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (9 page)

The rest of the story reads like the final act of a Hollywood movie: Gibb gets an information package from the adoption registry that describes her mother as someone who left Canada to become a folksinger in the U.S.; Gibb's friends tell her about Mitchell's quest for her kid, but there's no biographical material in the library for her to peruse or compare notes with; she turns to the Internet, where Wally Breese and, now, Les Irvin, have created an exhaustive Mitchell archive. Before long, she's on the phone with Mitchell's Vancouver-based manager and there can be no doubt: their voices are identical.

The mother-daughter reunion took place in March 1997 in Los Angeles, at Mitchell's Bel Air home. The two women compared faces, looked at photos, and attempted to bridge the chasm between sameness and strangeness. “She has my mother's stature,” Joni told Bill Higgins of the
Los Angeles Times
in April of the same year. “We've got cheekbones galore. She's got cheekbones down every part of her family.”
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Meeting her daughter filled “the hole” that the adoption had left inside Mitchell, but the latent mother-daughter relationship has gone through its share of turmoil. Mitchell allegedly slapped Kilauren after she sassed back on some unsolicited parenting advice. The police were called, but no charges were ever laid. The two were estranged at one point, and it's not clear where the relationship currently stands. In a Facebook video posted by Gibb in December 2010, she plays out a rather pathos-laden family drama with nutcrackers and tequila bottles. It seems to be a slap in Mitchell's face for being “an absentee” parent. In one of her last interviews, Mitchell didn't want to discuss the matter, saying only that it was “a work in progress.”
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Joni Mitchell never told her mother she had a baby. She kept the secret for decades, suggesting a sensitive relationship. Myrtle McKee Anderson and her daughter, Joan, had their own mother-daughter dynamic, with the perceived threat of shame and embarrassment running as a central theme. When “Joni's Big Secret” was splashed across newsprint in 1997, Mitchell told Bill Higgins of the
Los Angeles Times
she'd concealed the episode because “the scandal was so intense.” She also said: “A daughter could do nothing more disgraceful. It ruined you in a social sense. You have no idea what the stigma was. It was like you murdered somebody.”
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To compare an unwanted pregnancy to homicide might seem melodramatic in these days of delivery-room DVDs and eat-your-own-placenta parties, but North America was on a very different cultural page in 1965. This was before the landmark 1973
Roe v. Wade
case pulled abortion out of the back alleys and into the medical system and Madonna redesigned the modern crèche as a testament to single motherhood. Fear of parental rejection was a clear factor in Mitchell's decision-making process, and despite some hindsight revisionism in the wake of the 1997 reunion with her daughter, it was probably justified. A decade before she passed away on March 20, 2007, at the age of ninety-five, Myrtle acknowledged the hard edges of the Anderson parenting style. “We were very strict about [Joan's] upbringing,” she told Reola Daniel of
Western Report
in 1997.
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Myrtle and Joni had discussed the possibility of an unwanted pregnancy before she left for art school in Calgary. “We had talked about this type of problem beforehand,” Myrtle told Daniel. “I think [Joan] thought we would be quite disappointed... In retrospect, we're sorry she had to have a baby without our support. If we had known, things would have been different.” Myrtle was described by a friend as “very Calvinistic,” and is on the record as a person who did not believe in abortion—a position she shared with her daughter, who said it “wasn't an option.” It also wasn't legal. Myrtle told Laila Fulton of the
Calgary Sun
in 1996,
“It's Joni's fault this is coming out now; she's too open and frank about it. This is really embarrassing.”
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Myrtle was red-faced with shame several more times, even though Mitchell talks about trying to hold back and be good: “If I'm censoring for anyone, it's for my parents,” she told Cameron Crowe. “They are very old-fashioned and moral people. They still don't understand me that well.”
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This idea of being a source of shame for her parents seems to stretch back to Mitchell's youth, when the typical locus of rebellion was clothes—whether it be a boyish Roy Rogers shirt or the rhinestone-studded getup she put together for her first concert, a Ray Charles show. To attend the show, Mitchell told
Rolling Stone
's David Wild in 2002, she bought some rhinestones and clipped them to her “slim jeans,” then donned her father's jacket. “My mother wasn't going to let me go out of the house dressed like that,” she said.
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Beyond the guilt, the embarrassment, and the possibility of disappointing her parents, there was another factor that played a role in Mitchell's decision to surrender the baby for adoption, and that was a legacy of lost female potential. When
Inside Connection
's Steve Matteo spoke to Mitchell in 2000, he asked her where her fount of creativity originated. She answered:

I assume there must be some kind of genetic thrust. My two grandmothers were very different, but both of them were frustrated musicians. My paternal grandmother had a hard life—baby after baby after baby. She was not a martyr, but she was a total self-sacrificing animal to her many babies. She cried for the last time in her life when she was fourteen, I'm told. The last thing she cried for was that she wanted a piano, and she told herself, “You silly girl. You'll never have a piano. Dry your eyes”... if that was the main turning point in her life—‘I want to play this thing so bad, but I can't; it's not my destiny'—then there's a possibility that that urge went into the genetic pool. She had a lot of children who then had smaller families, maybe three or four children. One of them has got to get that gene, don't you think?
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As for Mitchell's other grandmother, Sadie, Joni told Matteo: “She came from a line of classical musicians... She had an organ in the farmhouse and she played classical piano and wrote poetry, mostly celebrating her father. And she was a tempest. She always felt she was the opposite of the other long-suffering, good-natured ones. She was always having fiery fits that she was too good, that she was a poet and a musician stuck on a farm. Perhaps [I inherited] the thrust of those two women.”

Mitchell's gifts would not linger around the milk pail. She took possession of her musicianship, and through her many instruments learned to express her many truths—often inventing a language of her own in order to do so. “At seven, I begged for a piano,” she told Jenny Boyd. “I was given piano lessons. The lessons used to coincide with the television broadcast of
Wild Bill Hickok
, this was bad timing, plus the piano teacher used to rap my knuckles because I could memorize and play by ear quicker than I could read. So she made the education process extremely unpleasant.” As a teenager, Mitchell quit the lessons and focussed on creating original music: “I still used to sit down and compose my own little melodies; that's what I wanted to do, to compose. In that town, it was unheard of, considered inferior. The thing was to learn the masters and play them. I knew I could make up music; I heard it in my head.” When she was ready to turn her attention from piano to guitar, her parents balked. “Since they weren't really supportive, I had to buy my first instrument myself,” she said.
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Mitchell bought a baritone ukulele for $36—money she earned at Ricki's. She wanted to bring music to the prairie bonfire and beer-chugging parties, and, eventually, she moved on to guitar. She taught herself to play using Pete Seeger's
How to Play Folk-Style Guitar
. It wasn't easy for the polio survivor to find the hand strength and dexterity to make the chords ring, but she improvised and, in the process, developed a unique style—and a tuning scheme that baffled just about everyone.

“I went straight to the Cotten picking,” she told Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers of
Acoustic Guitar
magazine in 1996. “Your thumb went from the sixth string, fifth string, sixth string, fifth string... I couldn't do that, so I ended up playing mostly the sixth string but banging it into the fifth string. So Elizabeth Cotten definitely is an influence; it's me not being able to play like her. If I could have I would have, but good thing I couldn't,” she said. “Because it came out original.”
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Original, indeed. Only two songs in Mitchell's catalogue are written in standard tuning: “Urge for Going” and “Tin Angel”—two of her earliest compositions. After that, she adopted the open tunings that were first introduced to her by fellow musician and friend Eric Andersen—at the time a relatively successful act on the folk circuit who hung out at the Mitchells' boho-chic digs in Detroit. Tom Rush was another musician who heard something compelling in Mitchell's nascent songwriting. “She knocked my socks off!... My colleagues and I at that time were mainly doing traditional folk tunes, which in my book, is the only kind of folk tune there is,” he told Karen O'Brien, author of
Joni Mitchell: Shadows and Light
in 2000. “[Joni's songs] had a folk sensibility to them yet they were fresh and had a literate veneer... They were very exciting, they had a voice that had universal appeal,” Rush continued. He liked “Urge for Going” so much, he recorded it himself and turned it into a hit. Encouraged by Rush's appreciation, Mitchell recorded a few more songs on a demo, including “The Circle Game,” which she issued a disclaimer for right up front: “It sucks and you're going to hate it and I don't know why I'm putting it on.”
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Clearly, the confidence in her inner voice had yet to be cemented, but this was a Joni just emerging from her own creative uterus—all wet and soft and needy. Rush's validation of her music gave her the strength and conviction to continue her explorations. He also taught her the fine art of open tunings.

“The moment I began to write, I took the black blues tunings which were floating around,” she told William Ruhlmann. “Tom [Rush] played in open C. Eric Andersen showed me an open G, which I think is Keith Richards' tuning, he mainly writes in that. Then there was D modal. Buffy [Sainte-Marie] had a couple of original tunings. But I began to experiment because my left hand is somewhat clumsy because of polio. I had to simplify the shapes of the left hand, but I craved chordal movement that I couldn't get out of standard tuning without an extremely articulate left hand. So, to compensate for it, I found the tunings were a godsend,” she said of the open formations. “Not only that, they made the guitar an unstable thing; an instrument of exploration.”
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People noticed her “non-standard,” “California kitchen” tunings. Musicians, in particular, were baffled because they weren't like anything anyone had ever seen, or heard. Mitchell calls her results the “chords of inquiry”—unique palettes of sound to paint each song. She's created more than fifty tunings for her guitar over the years, earning her the dubious honour of being the “James Joyce of tunings,” according to ex-husband Larry Klein. Former beau John Guerin was kinder and said she was a “whole orchestra” with one guitar. The same way Mitchell played with her physical identity, she played with her musical identity.

The desire to experiment pulled Mitchell into strange places—not just creatively but literally. Briefly, Mitchell recreated herself anew with an identity she dubbed “Mademoiselle Oink.” The name was a nod to the police—a gentle coda to the “sunset pig” she describes in the song “California”—but Mademoiselle Oink had a specific job title and duty. According to Mitchell's 1988 interview with
Q
's Phil Sutcliffe, it was “liaison officer between rock 'n' roll and the cops.”
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One of Mademoiselle Oink's favourite pastimes was to finagle police paraphernalia from officers using her fame and feminine wiles. When she got to Memphis, Mademoiselle Oink was sitting on a small trove of badges and hats, tie clips and jackets. She was looking to expand her collection when she talked up a cop, who was happy to trade a badge for a record. They decided to meet on old Beale Street, the once-thriving spawning ground for Memphis blues that now lay derelict, with the exception of pawn shops, a statue of W.C. Handy, and an old movie theatre playing a Blaxploitation double bill. It was 1976, after all.

As Mitchell cruised the empty streets—which she swears actually had rolling tumbleweeds—a pawn shop owner recognized her. “You Joni Mitchell?” he asked. Mitchell was gobsmacked: “Culturally, this is impossible,” she told Sutcliffe. “This guy should not know my name.” They struck up a conversation, and Mitchell asked him about a largely forgotten blues legend named Furry Lewis. The man said he was a friend of the reclusive player and set up a meeting, instructing Mitchell to bring a bottle of Jack Daniel's and a carton of Pall Malls. “It was quite a nice visit,” said Mitchell, “until I said to him, meaning to be close to him—meaning ‘we have this in common'—‘I play in open tunings too.'” The comment was entirely benign and friendly, but Lewis immediately became defensive. “He leaned on the bed and said ‘Ah kin play in Spanish tonnin'... Somehow or other I insulted him,” Mitchell said. “From then on, it was downhill. He just said, ‘I don't like her.'”

The experience haunted Mitchell. She felt she was a kindred spirit with Lewis, but he blew her off. She was just a well-intentioned white lady chatting with a one-legged black man living in a hovel. He didn't understand her mission, but Mitchell felt like a pioneer. She was “discovering” her music like a scientist fiddling with flasks in the lab, attempting to decipher the alchemy of her own existence, as well as her own expression. There was mystery to the exercise but also a deep sense of purpose.