The Passion of Joni Mitchell

by Liam Lacey
Toronto Globe and Mail
October 22, 1994

With a brisk rap-tap-tap on the door, Joni Mitchell breezes into the hotel suite. She's wrapped in a teal trench coat, looking rather like a well-heeled shopper returning from a long day on the fashion hunt. Her face is drawn and made up, the famous blonde hair falls full to below her shoulders. Sorry, she says, as she settles down on the sofa. She's not quite herself this afternoon.

You see, she usually goes to bed at eight or nine  in the morning. Last night, in an effort to join the daylight crowd, she took a couple of sleeping pills. Her head's still fuzzy. Is there coffee? Good.

She holds up the CD cover of her latest recording, Turbulent Indigo, for inspection. The painting on the cover is a copy of Van Gogh's Self-Portrait with Pipe and Bandaged Ear, the one where the blue cast of his eyes is set level with the bloody- red horizon. But the face is not Vincent's, it's Joni's. Her wide-spaced ice-blue eyes gaze out above the high cheekbones and severe down-turned mouth, the famous art martyr's bandage runs across the right side of her head. In person, her face calls to mind a pre-Columbian carving, not some post-Impressionist masterpiece.

"For the first 10,000 copies, we'll have a little ear that falls out," she says. A girlish peal of laughter follows. Then her face turns somber again. "You'd think the ears would be two or three cents each, like Cracker Jack prizes," she says. "But they're about 35 cents each, so we don't put them in every copy&"

Does Joni Mitchell see herself as a kind of modern Van Gogh? Well, self- importance is certainly a prominent part of her makeup  along with a sense of mischief and the sort of calculation that lets her know exactly where the pennies go. If she's not gone down Van Gogh's path of poverty, madness, and suicide, she's at least made a career of bumping up against life's sharp corners and nursing her psychic bruises with a blend of tenderness and resentment.

"A fine artist in a pop medium" is her description of her career, and she is obviously stimulated by the friction. The germ of her new recording comes directly from these collisions between fine and pop tastes. As a "fine" artist, she has followed her own muse, at least since the mid-seventies, often leaving her fans behind in jazzy experiments and synthesizer rock. Turbulent Indigo, by contrast, is already being hailed as a return to form, meaning a return to "popular" music, to the music "old" Joni Mitchell fans cherish.

Mitchell belongs in a long-standing American romantic tradition that, from Walt Whitman through the Beats, to Bob Dylan, exalts the individual poet's ego in a highly public way. Indeed, her old friend David Crosby once reportedly said that Joni Mitchell is about as "humble as Mussolini."

Thus, she can say, without a hint of irony: "I fancy I could have been a sort of Mozart, given the right opportunities and training&." Or, "I'm always out of synch. I'm three or four years ahead of my time. It's the imitators who get all the attention."

She tells of a dinner conversation with Georgia O'Keeffe, the painter, in which O'Keeffe said, "I wish I'd been a musician, but I don't suppose you can do two things." And Mitchell replied, "Yes you can." O'Keeffe, Mitchell says, leaned forward and said in surprise, "Really?"

"She was 92 years old," Mitchell reports, "and for the first time she was given permission. I think permission is far more important to an artist than encouragement."

A listener is left nodding awkwardly and wondering at these displays of seeming egotism. Then again, aren't there male rock stars of less talent and greater arrogance whose overweening nature is sometimes pooh-poohed (or praised) as "attitude"? And isn't there a solid case for Mitchell's having a high opinion of herself? Her influence on other musicians, after all, is both widespread and deep: Bob Dylan; Judy Collins; Fairport Convention; Gordon Lightfoot; Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, hell, even Nazareth, have sung her songs and she has been the subject of one of the new ubiquitous "tribute" albums. Her songwriting and guitar work have been heralded by players as diverse as Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, Prince, The Pretenders' Chrissie Hynde, Suzanne Vega, Tori Amos, and Jane Siberry.

The protective ego shell, the habit of constantly cheering herself up with affirmations, may also be a reasonable reaction to having her talent ignored and underrated. She does not yet, for example rate a separate essay in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock, although every male artist of approximately equal stature (not to mention doo-wop, bubblegum and The Beatles' solo albums) does.

She has been the victim of some particularly nasty sexism at the hands off the rock press, especially in the early seventies, when Rolling Stone ran a chart of all her supposed lovers and declared her the "old lady of rock an droll." (Before an interview, a reporter must sign an improbable agreement: "The interview you will conduct is to remain of a musical nature and is not to include any questions regarding Joni Mitchell's personal life, past or present."

For the record, Mitchell recently separated from her husband, the producer and bassist Larry Klein, and has been seen in the company of Don Freed, a singer-songwriter from Saskatoon. Before Klein, Mitchell had involvements variously with jazz drummers John Guerin and Dan Alias as well as singers James Taylor and Graham Nash, among others.)

Yet somehow, resolutely led by her muse or ambition, Mitchell has prevailed in a male-worshipping world with her ego more than intact.

And sometimes the clashes between Joni Mitchell's large sense of self and the world's edges cause creative sparks. In the spring of 1991, Mitchell was invited to her hometown of Saskatoon to deliver the keynote address to the Canadian Conference of the Arts symposium on Arts in Education. The title of the conference, chosen with self- conscious irony, was Educating Van Gogh. The conference was held in the cradle of North American socialism, attended by teachers and administrators who regarded arts education as social engineering.

Joni Mitchell, the self-regarding chronicler of the so-called Me generation, was an inspired choice. She spoke without notes  and unsurprisingly, out of her own experience. Perhaps with Van Gogh's example in mind, she suggested "discouragement" might actually help artists. If exposure to the arts were all that mattered, then Florence would be full or artists. As inadequate as her education was, she said, she thought it was probably as good as it could have been.

Some delegates to the conference found her views refreshingly provocative; others treated them as about as welcome as a hailstorm at harvest time. A few walked out, then spoke bitterly to the press the next day about the pampered pop star and her "stream- of-consciousness" ramblings.

Mitchell, who had been generous with her time and praise for her hometown, felt betrayed.

"What did they want?" she asks in exasperation. "Was I supposed to clear my throat, and shake my jowls like John Diefenbaker? Of course art has come from emotional disturbance. The ignorant demand that we all conform, but the truth is, we're all mad&as long as this thing called 'I' is still ranting."