Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell (2017)
By David Jaffe
Sarah Crichton Books
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 376 pages
★★★★
The only 20th century painter Joni Mitchell admires
is Picasso. Asking someone if they like Joni Mitchell is akin to asking if you
like Picasso. The only appropriate response is, "Which one?" If you
need your Joni Mitchell to be the shy, mini-skirted ingénue from Saskatchewan,
do not read David Jaffe's biography. If she has to be the Court and Spark rock queen, steer clear. If you need to worship
Mitchell, don't touch it.
Jaffe, a humanities professor at Syracuse University and award-winning
critic, has written an authorized biography of Mitchell that's true to its
title. He references a Mitchell song and the title of a 1977 album, one whose
cover art features three Mitchell images—including Mitchell in blackface posing
as a male African-American hipster, and that's not even the most controversial
thing about her. The song includes this lyric: I come from open prairie/Given some wisdom and a lot of jive/Last night
the ghosts of my old ideas/reran on channel five…. She made five folk
recordings between 1968-72, one of which, Blue
(1971), is acclaimed as one of
the top 50 albums of all-time. Then she swung from folk to rock; 1974's Court and Spark, became her all-time
best seller. She pivoted again in 1976, for the jazz-rock fusion Heijira, which critics loved but
confused the public, and—against all industry advice—collaborated with dying
jazz legend Charles Mingus, Jr. (1922-79) on a 1979 record that sold well in
Britain, but nowhere else. Mitchell then tumbled off the charts for more than a
decade. Her last top-100 single came in 1984, "Sex Kills" from Turbulent Indigo.
If you wonder what happened, the answer is just about
everything. Jaffe's portrait is that of a difficult, angry, and unlikable
artist, one who always saw herself as a painter first and a musician second. David
Crosby once remarked, "Joni hates everybody," and if Jaffe is to be
believed, that's close to being true. By my reading, the only people she never
dissed were Graham Nash, Neil Young, and bass player Jaco Pastorius. Jaffe does
a masterful job of simultaneously admiring his subject, but showing Mitchell's
true colors, which are mostly shades of blue—for aloofness, confidence,
coldness, depression, snobbishness, profanity….
Remember Mitchell's line from "Case of You" in
which she sang, "On the back
of a cartoon coaster/In the blue TV screen light/I drew a map of Canada?"
She was born Joan Anderson (1943) left her conservative parents, got pregnant
and gave up her daughter for adoption, married too young, and eventually landed
in Los Angeles. When one observer dubbed her the "Queen of El-Lay,"
it wasn't a compliment. Blue is also the color seeking harmony in romance.
Mitchell has been married twice, but she's had a veritable who's who of
disastrous celebrity hookups; among them:
Leonard Cohen, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Sam Shepard, David Crosby,
Don Alias, Pastorius…. The last was bipolar, Alias battered her, several were
married, and it's never a good idea to sleep with Crosby. It's possible,
though, that between 1975 and the 1980s, Mitchell's cocaine intake rivaled his.
Mitchell has
indeed been a reckless daughter, starting with the fact that she's been a
four-pack a day smoker. Officially, her voice "changed" around 1975;
in truth, the smokes and drugs hastened the shift from soprano to contralto. It
remained a glorious voice, but some of its ornaments got broken. Crosby is ultimately
correct in his assessment of Mitchell's misanthropy. There is, for example, the
petty jealousy toward people who popularized her music (Judy Collins, Joan
Baez) and would-be fans (Prince, Robert Plant). Mitchell called Dylan a
"fake," insinuated that Cohen "plagiarized" some of his
lines, and dismissed Crosby, Stills and Nash as "always out of tune."
Her rap on Dylan stems from his
aloofness (shocking, eh?) during the 1975 Rolling Thunder tour, and she flat
out misunderstood Cohen's use of homage in making oblique Shakespeare
references. She was sometimes right about CSN, but she overlooked their sublime
moments. Mostly, Mitchell noticed the motes in the eyes of others and ignored
the beam in her own. Her blackface get up, for instance, is inexcusable—even if
she was hanging out with black jazz musicians. For a person who claims to care
mostly about her painting, there's also an overprotective defense of her own
music at the expense of others. Mitchell does not read music but, aside from
jazz musicians such as Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock, she's been withering
in her contempt of the music industry and other folk and rock musicians.
(Ironically, many jazz aficionados see her as a poseur.)
This is a gutsy
book on Jaffe's part, though he too sometimes falls prey to Mitchell's
braggadocio tendencies. He is very knowledgeable about music theory and, on
occasion, there is a sense of showing off his chops. Casual readers will be
more drawn to his anecdotes about Mitchell songs—check out the connections
between "Circle Game" and Young's "Sugar Mountain"—than his
discourses on their sonic complexities, but I give Jaffe credit for trying to strike
a balance. I'll leave it to you to decide whether his encounters with
Mitchell's unpleasant sides are antiseptic where they should have been
analytical.
As you no doubt
know, Mitchell suffered a brain aneurysm in 2015 and, reportedly, has not yet
regained speech. Mitchell has also claimed to suffer from Morgellons Syndrome,
skin lesions allegedly caused by fibers and/or bug bites. Many psychologists
and doctors deny the very existence of Morgellons. Given the enigma that is
Joni Mitchell, you'll have to make up your mind on that contradiction as well.
Is Joni Mitchell a genius, a jerk, a reckless daughter, a folk goddess, a
musical savant, or a damaged girl from the prairie? The correct question is, of
course, "Which one?"
Rob Weir
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