Joni on Joni: Interviews and Encounters with Joni Mitchell

OTHER BOOKS IN THE MUSICIANS IN THEIR OWN WORDS SERIES

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The Clash on the Clash: Interviews and Encounters

Cobain on Cobain: Interview and Encounters

Coltrane on Coltrane: The John Coltrane Interviews

Dolly on Dolly: Interviews and Encounters with Dolly Parton

Dylan on Dylan: Interviews and Encounters

Fleetwood Mac on Fleetwood Mac: Interviews and Encounters

Hendrix on Hendrix: Interviews and Encounters with Jimi Hendrix

Judy Garland on Judy Garland: Interviews and Encounters

Keith Richards on Keith Richards: Interviews and Encounters

Led Zeppelin on Led Zeppelin: Interviews and Encounters

Lennon on Lennon: Conversations with John Lennon

Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen: Interviews and Encounters

Miles on Miles: Interviews and Encounters with Miles Davis

Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters

Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters

The Who on the Who: Interviews and Encounters

Copyright © 2019 by Susan Whitall

All rights reserved

Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated

814 North Franklin Street

Chicago, Illinois 60610

A list of credits and copyright notices for the individual pieces in this collection can be found on pages 381–383.

ISBN 978-0-914090-44-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mitchell, Joni, interviewee. | Whitall, Susan.

Title: Joni on Joni : interviews and encounters with Joni Mitchell / Susan Whitall.

Description: Chicago, Illinois : Chicago Review Press, [2019] | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018021888 (print) | LCCN 2018022334 (ebook) | ISBN

9780914090366 (Pdf) | ISBN 9780914090403 (Mobipocket) | ISBN

9780914090441 (Epub) | ISBN 9780914090359 (cloth)

Subjects: LCSH: Mitchell, Joni. | Women singers—Canada—Interviews. | Singers—Canada—Interviews. | Women composers—Canada—Interviews. | Composers—Canada—Interviews.

Classification: LCC ML420.M542 (ebook) | LCC ML420.M542 A5 2019 (print) | DDC 782.42164092 [B] —dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021888

Cover and interior design: Jonathan Hahn

Interior layout: Nord Compo

Printed in the United States of America

5 4 3 2 1

This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

For all good dreamers

Contents

Title Page

Other Books in the Musicians in Their Own Words Series

Copyright Page

Dedication Page

Introduction | Susan Whitall

Part I • We Are Stardust

Two Single Acts Survive a Marriage | A. L. MCCLAIN

February 6, 1966 | Detroit News (US)

Urbanity Revisited: Mode Is Mod for City Living | JO ANN MERCER

March 20, 1966 | Detroit News (US)

An Interview With Joni Mitchell | DAVE WILSON

February 14–27, 1968 | Broadside (US)

Part II • Stoking the Star-Making Machinery

Joni: Let’s Make Life More Romantic | JACOBA ATLAS

June 20, 1970 | Melody Maker (UK)

Joni Mitchell: Glimpses of Joni | MICHAEL WATTS

September 19, 1970 | Melody Maker (UK)

Joni Takes a Break | LARRY LEBLANC

March 4, 1971 | Rolling Stone (US)

Joni Mitchell: An Interview, Part One | PENNY VALENTINE

June 3, 1972 | Sounds (UK)

Joni Mitchell: An Interview, Part Two | PENNY VALENTINE

June 10, 1972 | Sounds (UK)

The Education of Joni Mitchell | STEWART BRAND

Summer 1976 |CoEvolution Quarterly (US)

Joni Mitchell Defends Herself | CAMERON CROWE

July 26, 1979 | Rolling Stone (US)

Part III • Sweet Bird of Time and Change

Joni Mitchell Is a Nervy Broad | VIC GARBARINI

January 1983 | Musician (US)

Joni Mitchell | ALANNA NASH

March 1986 | Stereo Review (US)

An Interview with Joni Mitchell | SYLVIE SIMMONS

1988 | Musik Express (Germany)

Joni Mitchell: Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter | PHIL SUTCLIFFE

May 1988 | Q (UK)

Joni Mitchell | JEFF PLUMMER AND MARTY GETZ

1989 | Quintessential Covina Cable Access Interview (US)

60 Minutes with Joni Mitchell | VIC GARBARINI

September 1996 | Guitar World (US)

Alternate Tunings | JOHN EPHLAND

December 1996 | Down Beat (US)

The Unfiltered Joni Mitchell | DAVE DIMARTINO

August 1998 | Mojo (UK)

Radio Interview | JODY DENBERG

September 8, 1998 | KGSR-FM, Austin (US)

Jazz Romance | JASON KORANSKY

May 2000 | Down Beat (US)

Part IV • A Defector from the Petty Wars

Heart of a Prairie Girl | MARY S. AIKINS

July 2005 | Reader’s Digest (Canada)

Joni Mitchell’s Fighting Words | DOUG FISCHER

October 7, 2006 | Ottawa Citizen (Canada)

The Trouble She’s Seen | DOUG FISCHER

October 8, 2006 | Ottawa Citizen (Canada)

Tv Interview | TAVIS SMILEY

November 9, 2007 | Tavis Smiley on PBS (US)

Music and Lyrics | GEOFFREY HIMES

December 2007 | JazzTimes (US)

Film Interview | MICHAEL BUDAY

August 20, 2008 | Grammy Museum (Los Angeles, California)

Tv Interview | TAVIS SMILEY

November 25, 2014 | Tavis Smiley on PBS (US)

About the contributors

About the editor

Credits

Index

Photos Insert

INTRODUCTION

We need goddesses, but I don’t want to be one.

—Joni Mitchell to CBC’s Jian Ghomeshi

Joni Mitchell is a goddess to her most ardent fans, whether she likes it or not, and to some critics, too—those who have been effusive in their praise for her mid-career albums, anyway—Blue, Court and Spark, and Hejira.

In the summer of 2017, a group of National Public Radio contributors voted Blue number one on its list of The 150 Greatest Albums Made by Women. It was just the latest in a flood of accolades that have come her way since the turn of the century, partially soothing an ego bruised by her dismissal from a star-making machinery that prefers younger, more pliant women.

Joni earned her status as a pop legend with earthy, poetic images such as geese in chevron flight in Urge for Going, and the effortless way she could define a cultural moment with a lyric: They paved paradise and put up a parking lot. All this, and those unusual melodic intervals traced by that lissome voice.

In the ’60s, Joni’s writing saved her from being just another pretty coffeehouse blonde. She scribbled lyrics on any paper she could find, and these scraps bearing painterly words would fall out of her guitar case like confetti, delighting her manager, Elliot Roberts.

She was a pioneer, because it was impossible to identify women who had done what she wanted to do. It was business as usual when the male-dominated music industry tried to box her up in a more acceptable, understandable feminine persona. There were consequences for refusing to live a conventional feminine life. During her Laurel Canyon years, at a time in hip society when the line between friend and lover wasn’t always sharply defined, Rolling Stone printed a chart with Joni’s name in the center of a lipstick print. Lines pointed out from her name to those of Stephen Stills, David Crosby, and James Taylor. It got worse: later in 1971 the magazine proclaimed her Old Lady of the Year. Almost as bad were the Women in Rock features, when she was lumped in with female artists whose careers were almost entirely designed by men.

Born November 7, 1943, in Fort Macleod, Alberta, Joni bounced around several other dusty prairie towns with her parents, Bill and Myrtle Anderson, before they settled in Saskatoon. She was an artistic and musical child. Her first instrument was a hurdy-gurdy—played backwards, of course. She swooned over Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini when she heard it in the 1953 movie A Story of Three Loves. Because her mother believed that guitars were the province of hillbillies, Joni bought a ukulele.

She was always singing, and not everybody was happy about it. While in the hospital in 1952, recovering from polio, Joni was ordered by the boy in the next bed to stop singing Christmas carols. She sang louder. Soon after, she joined a church choir where she volunteered to sing the descant, or countermelody—even then, she was drawn to the less obvious, prettier melody.

Joni replaced the ukulele with a guitar while attending art college in Calgary, and with a friend, plunked out folk songs in coffeehouses for cigarette money. After moving to Toronto, she discovered that she was pregnant, but when her boyfriend (or, by her account, friend) Brad MacMath left her on her own and took off for California, she eked out a living working for a department store and playing in the lower rung of Toronto coffeehouses.

It didn’t work out well. Pregnant and alone, she was reduced to accepting food from friends and strangers at her rooming house. So in February 1965, after Joni gave birth to a daughter, Kelly Dale, she surrendered her to foster care—under pressure, she said, from hospital staff who were cruel and scornful of her unwed status. But Joni had realistic fears that she couldn’t support the baby.

That spring, Joni met Detroit folksinger Chuck Mitchell at a Toronto club. After a whirlwind courtship, they married in June at his parents’ suburban Detroit home, and she moved into his apartment in the inner city. Joni has said many caustic things about the marriage, and about Detroit (decadent and internally decaying, she said to the London Evening Standard in 1970), but the close to three years she spent in the Motor City with Chuck was when she found her voice as a songwriter.

Such early songs as Both Sides, Now and Circle Game sound as if they were written under endless prairie skies, or in hippie California, but it was in gritty Detroit that Joni scribbled their lyrics in a coffee shop. (A waitress advised her, just before the 1967 riots, that it wasn’t safe for her to go there anymore.) Some of those songs, among the most iconic pop/folk anthems of the 1960s, were transcribed by a jazz musician with Motown credentials.

Only Chuck and Joni can say what really went on in their marriage. Joni did credit her first husband with setting up her publishing company, a strong clue that he took her writing seriously and knew she needed to protect it. Chuck also got her into the recording studio. The couple recorded several numbers at the Jam Handy studio on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit, produced by Chuck’s father, Scott Mitchell, who worked there.

In some interviews, Joni complained that Chuck, an English literature major, made her feel stupid for not having read the right books. But she also admitted that she probably wouldn’t have read Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, which led to Both Sides, Now, if not for her husband’s prodding. Chuck also remembers suggesting J. R. R. Tolkien, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy was an enduring influence on her.

Living in Detroit as a married woman enabled Joni to have a green card so that she could tour and build her reputation in the United States as a singer/songwriter. Later, it allowed her to settle in California, where she forged a career as one of the defining voices of the West Coast folk rock scene.

There is a binary split in the public consciousness of Joni Mitchell, between her early folk music days and the later jazz years. But her career should really be divided into at least three segments, with her most commercially successful time being the middle years, anchored by Blue and Court and Spark.

Joni’s jazzy experimentation on albums such as The Hissing of Summer Lawns, coming right after the irresistible pop genius of Court and Spark, alienated many of her fans. And then there were the critics. In Rolling Stone, Stephen Holden complained of Hissing, There are no tunes to speak of and dismissed the uninspired jazz/rock style of Tom Scott and the L.A. Express, who backed her up. Mingus’s biographer dismissed her Mingus album as the kind of bland fusion music that Mingus didn’t like. (Joni admitted she was glad Mingus was physically unable to sock her over the work but had no creative regrets.)

The collective disappointment over her musical direction led to grievances Joni accumulated over the years—against the music business, disapproving fans, and society in general. But she never turned away from her jazz collaborators. Joni may have been patronized as a girl singer by a huge swath of the rock world, but she felt that jazz players such as Jaco Pastorius, Charles Mingus, and Wayne Shorter got her, and in interviews, she basks in the warmth of their mutual esteem. You can hear her dancer’s love of rhythm in her earliest recordings, but when she teamed with Pastorius, his singing bass lines brought that out even more.

After Joni did it, it became a well-trod path for rock stars to bring jazz musicians into the studio to infuse their songs with musical depth and gravitas, whether it was a jazz solo leading up to the bridge or a hip, dissonant chord in an unexpected place. But Joni’s collaborations with jazz players stood apart from the usual pop-jazz hybrid; she connected with the musicians on a deeper, peer level. Was she right to move away from what brought her platinum sales, from Blue and Court and Spark? She had no choice, as she told Cameron Crowe. Whether or not her fans were ready to follow, she was dreaming her way to a new sound.

Joni was hesitant and Canadian-polite in her early interviews, but after the El Lay coverage, her relationship with the press turned prickly. She could go for months or years refusing to do interviews, especially in the 1970s, icing out Rolling Stone for seven years after its 1971 offenses. She complained about the invasion of privacy that doing press interviews entailed and attacked reporters when she felt misquoted or misunderstood. But when she did agree to an interview, interviewee and journalist would end up talking and smoking and talking, for hours on end. Some of those crushes faded. Others endured; after Crowe profiled her for Rolling Stone in 1979 (an interview he allowed to be anthologized for the first time in this collection), they forged a friendship that continues to this day.

Joni was as candid in conversation as she was in her lyrics. She revealed her insecurities but also the supreme confidence that led her first husband to dub her Queen Joan. But early on, before the sun-washed, California mythmaking took hold, she was shy and unassuming, with only occasional flashes of the now-famous ego. She could be a fan girl when talking about artists such as Laura Nyro or Sinéad O’Connor but also sharply critical, dismissing Bob Dylan, and her female acolytes, as unoriginal.

In later interviews, she is often angry, railing about the white, straight men who controlled the press. But consider the backstory. Here is one of the most important songwriters of the twentieth century, but for much of her career Joni is depicted as the chick singer. She was, and still is, described in stories and books as beautiful, when that would never be the lead sentence about a man in the same position—think of Jackson Browne, or any of her more photogenic male peers. It seems to startle many writers that an attractive woman could also be an original talent, even, yes—a pop genius.

In 2010, Rolling Stone chose its 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. Joni ranked at number sixty-two. There were only eight female acts on the entire list. Of that eight, Madonna—whom Joni has both compared to the Roman emperor Nero and described as a living Barbie doll—was perched well above her, at thirty-six.

Joni’s talent wasn’t always received graciously by her male musical counterparts, either. Although those who put down her work or told her she was a groovy chick who should forget music and be a model usually had no qualms about asking for one of her songs.

As a young woman, and even as a cranky veteran, Joni could be mischievous, but that wry, Canadian humor didn’t always register with Americans. It’s been a problem through my life, to get men to do my bidding, she complained to a laughing Tavis Smiley.

In recent years, Joni’s health has been a concern. She suffered for years with post-polio syndrome, as well as Morgellons disease, in which the patient feels as if strings or foreign matter is coming in and out of the skin’s surface. In late March 2015, she was found unconscious at her home in Los Angeles, having suffered a brain aneurysm. After being released from the hospital, Joni went through a slow recovery, although she eventually regained her speech, and by 2017 she was walking again, with a cane. But during the long months of recovery there were no interviews and no public statements, which makes every past interview she’s done all the more precious.

There shouldn’t be a concern that Joni’s music will fade in relevance anytime soon. The meaning of her songs seems to evolve with time and affects each younger generation differently. River was a highlight of her album Blue for most fans, exposing her raw emotion over a romantic breakup. But in an intriguing, post-millennial phenomenon, the melancholy song has become part of the holiday music canon. Society may not have realized that it needed such a sad Christmas song, but young people have grown up in a world in which there is one, and we are better for it.

These interviews are culled from all parts of Joni’s career, starting when she barely had one. She often did a quick barrage in a month to promote an album she feared would otherwise sink, then she would happily disappear—especially in the 1970s. When Joni did talk, more often than not she would dispatch with the album promotion fairly quickly and go into general conversation, harking back to her childhood, righting the wrongs that had been done her, and telling wonderful stories. The topics would vary, depending upon the charisma of the interviewer and the phase of the moon.

Whether she is bragging and scornful, philosophical and deep—or a beguiling flirt—you’ll find all those Jonis and more, within these pages.

My sincere thanks are due to many, including Yuval Taylor and everyone at Chicago Review Press; David Dunton; Pam Shermeyer and Felecia Henderson at the Detroit News; Robert Hull; Steve Shepard; Les Irvin of jonimitchell.com; to Joni for never boring me in many months of research; and to her first husband, Chuck Mitchell, whom I met at a benefit concert in Detroit. Several years ago, Chuck sent me digital copies of the beautiful black-and-white images showing the young Mitchells at the Verona Apartments, photos that had disappeared from the Detroit News photo archives but are back now, thanks to his kindness.