Diamond in the Rough (16 page)

First I tackled the USA and learned about the real job of being a salesman. Radio was still a key factor in the success of an artist like me, that and relentless touring in hopes of creating a grassroots following built on hard work, not hype, of loyal fans, station by station and city by city. We reached out primarily to an album-cut-oriented format called Triple A radio, but Columbia believed I could possibly cross over to other, wider-reaching formats, like Top 40, which produced hits. The record company had radio representatives that covered different areas of the country. I would travel from one major market to another, and even some not-so-major ones, visiting any radio station that would see me, and thanks to Columbia a lot of them would. Once there I’d usually sing a couple songs live on the air and do a short interview. I’d do two or three of these a day. Then there was press, which meant taking up residence in a hotel bar and speaking with any publication that might be willing to talk to me. (I think my personal record was nineteen interviews in a row in Oslo.) At night I would do a show, sometimes in a tiny club where nobody came out to see me. That’s how you did it in those days. It was about making literal connections instead of virtual ones. It was a crazy amount of work, but it’s what you signed up to do, and thank God for it, because building my career slowly and steadily is at least part of the reason I’ve had some longevity.

But all the years of climbing into vans and going to crummy little dives and staying in worse motels didn’t prepare me for this. Maybe it was the isolation, maybe it was the pressure of finally getting my shot, or the weirdness of selling myself, or the inevitable exhaustion, but I wore down quick. After two months of it, I got a break at Christmas and just cratered. The depression was back, and instead of feeling rejuvenated because of the time-out, I actually sank further down. I remember sitting in the kitchen on West Fourth Street frantically talking on the phone to my friends, perusing self-help books. I was plagued by bleak thoughts, daily crying jags, and the undeniable sense that I did not have another round of promo in me. I might have been able to manage it if I could just have stopped, but now was definitely not the time to stop. This was it. I’d worked all my life for this.

My therapist, Myra, insisted I see someone who could prescribe an antidepressant for me, so I went to some pasty psychiatrist who gave me Prozac. Just like magic, three weeks later I was not only well, I was supercharged. Did most people walk around feeling this sense of overall well-being and optimism? I mean, it was really heaven.

Prozac was a great gift to me. I had many, many productive years writing songs, making and promoting records, traveling the world under its effect. The notion that this kind of drug can take away one’s creative spirit is caca to me. I thrived on it.

With the New Year, 1990, came new promise and new goals—I was going global. I went on my first international promotional trip, which I will never forget. The label was having a big conference in Sydney, Australia, and I was one of the new artists picked to go. It was a dream before I even got there—I was flown first class on Qantas. I could write this whole book about flying first class on Qantas. I had never flown first class
anywhere.
I was in a massive seat in the nose of a 747 with lovely Australian flight attendants feeding me and doting on me. I was thirty-two, but I might as well have been five. After being given steak and ice cream and chocolate for dinner, I was tucked in for the night. We flew over the South Pacific, and I woke up to a steaming cup of coffee with a view of the sun rising over Fiji out my window.

We came in to land over the red rooftops of Sydney, and I was shown how real men party. I will only say that there were goats in hotel rooms and that the mantra of the convention was “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” I was thoroughly charmed by the Australians and by the country itself—it was February and high summer, and Sydney was a tropical paradise. The convention moved at one point from Sydney to Hamilton Island on the Gold Coast, and I took a helicopter to the Great Barrier Reef to snorkel. Honestly, I still can’t believe it. We got dropped off on a plank in the middle of the ocean, where they tossed us some snorkel gear and dumped us overboard. It was spectacular.

From Australia I flew to Stockholm (the worst jet lag of all time; I was practically hallucinating) and all through Europe, doing much the same drill as I had in America, but with more exotic locations and languages. It was grueling, but so utterly enchanting. I was on stages in London and Amsterdam and Milan and Dublin and Glasgow and Oslo and Madrid and Hamburg, doing my show and my songs. By the time I got back to New York, I’d been nominated for a Grammy in the Best Contemporary Folk category.

On February 21, 1990, I took Stokes with me to the Grammy Awards at Radio City Music Hall. I won. I still have the cassette tape from my answering machine that night. I just listened to it. Congratulations from so many! John, Kim, of course. My lawyer and my therapist! Buddy and Julie yelling “Yeehaw!” T-Bone Wolk, folks from back home in Carbondale. I’m struck by the outpouring of joy for me in these messages, and I feel so much pride in this achievement, more now than then, in fact. Just an award, yeah, but it was a proclamation. I turned out all right.

First Grammy night, 1990

(Photograph courtesy of Stokes Howell)

At a function the night before the awards show, I ran into Bonnie Raitt backstage—I’d never met her—and she grabbed my arm. “I voted for you,” she whispered. The secret’s out, Bon! Holy, holy, holy shit. You know what? It just doesn’t get any better than that.

13

Days Go By

Larry Klein, 1991

All this time we’ve been a face in the crowd,

Now we’re living in color and laughing out loud.

The First Avenue uptown bus from East Third Street to Thirty-fourth Street was my mode of transport to visit my therapist, Myra. I’d been seeing her since 1985, after trying and firing several numbskulls in the mental-health profession. One, for example, upon hearing me profess to feeling pretty bad, quipped, “What else is new?” Sacked her. No doubt I was boring, but she was getting paid to be bored. I’d also seen an intimidating, butch woman who informed me, as a matter of course, during our first—and last—session that I wasn’t allowed to hit her. Oh, okay. Then there was the one who proudly told me I had a “scrappy” personality. She ended sessions by getting up to wash dishes—her office was in her kitchen.

Myra Friedman was smart, funny, perceptive, and grounded, a bubbly Jewish redhead with patience and empathy to spare for all of us neurotic fools. Her place felt safe, I suppose because she felt safe. She has been able all these years to witness and validate my external successes and failures, along with my internal milestones and setbacks, while still managing to confront me gently and steer me carefully toward autonomy and self-awareness.

The time had come for a follow-up record to
Steady On.
I felt then, as I do now, that if
Steady On
were the only record I ever made, I’d be content with that. But clearly another album was expected, which was both thrilling and terrifying. While promoting the first record, I made attempts to remember snippets and bits of lyrics and melodies, some of my own and some from John, so I’d have a slight head start when it came to getting twelve new tracks together. I was on the bus ride to Myra’s office, and I was thinking,
God, why can’t I just feel the pure, unconditional love of the archetypal mother and be done with this shit?
Then I heard a lyric—“Please no more therapy / Mother take care of me”—and although I didn’t have the breakthrough with Myra I was hoping for that day, the line I’d heard in my head and the rhythm to it were locked in. That song became “Polaroids,” and it was the last song I would ever debut at Passim. I recall sitting backstage there sometime in 1990, putting the finishing touches on it. I had to have the song ready for my people at Passim so they could see I wasn’t a slacker.

The writing process for my sophomore effort had begun, but I didn’t know what to do about a producer. Musically the obvious choice was John, but personally I wasn’t so sure. We did go into the studio together at one point to begin the next project, but I found I couldn’t do it, could not work alongside him or even be in the same room with him. John was over the breakup, but I wasn’t. I had to look for another producer.

The only candidate I chose to have a meeting with was Larry Klein, Joni Mitchell’s producer, bass player, and husband at the time, which didn’t hurt his case. They were making exquisite records, and I had to figure that Joni would suffer no fools—Klein must be sharp. I met with him in New York in late 1990, and he was
quite
sharp, actually.

What I hadn’t bargained for was his sense of humor. Klein is a complete and utter goofball who will lean into you and lock eyeballs intensely, then whisper whatever the movie quote of the day is—like “Is it safe?” from
Marathon Man
—followed by gales of laughter. During my tenure with Larry, I was to be inundated with all manner of novelty tapes, from the Jerky Boys’ prank calls, to Orson Welles losing it as he does a frozen-peas voice-over, to an extremely blue sexual guide to the signs of the zodiac by Rudy Ray Moore. Larry might, in the middle of a serious discussion, turn to me and say, “Uh, Shawny-Shawn-Shawn, uh, what would you do if, right now, I shat, pissed, came, sneezed, puked, laughed, and cried, all at the same time, what would you do?” He never waited for an answer, being too busy cracking himself up. I managed to throw him once—he was nursing a terrific pimple on his nose, an absolute monstrosity. I looked at him and asked casually, “Are you planning to have a flea circus on that thing?” For a moment he was stumped, until he realized I was referring to the Big Top bulging on the end of his schnozzle. Flustered, and not amused, he said, “Fuck you,” and swiveled his chair around to the recording console while the engineer and I rolled on the floor for days.

Larry had a studio, called the Kiva, in his home in Bel Air, and we agreed that this would be the best place to record
Fat City.
Let’s just cut to at least part of the chase: Joni Mitchell lived there, too. I was hardly oblivious to that; in fact, I was in a bit of a stupor about it. I wasn’t sure I could handle being in such close proximity to my undisputed hero without losing consciousness. I needn’t have worried. There’s never a lull in the conversation with Joni around. She is an expert storyteller, a master of language, and it was pure joy to listen to her speak in the same poetic yet down-to-earth, streetwise vernacular she used in her songs. She commands your undivided attention, which you’re happy to give. Joni is endlessly fascinating, funny, and intense, still like royalty to me, although she will tell you anything. I found out more about her than I could ever have dreamed, about her boyfriends, her career, and her experiences. She’s low on bullshit, high on opinions.

I saw her writing a song. Her notebooks were not dissimilar to mine—basic lined paper, notes and lyrics written by hand, but still I could hardly take it in—she was human. I got to see her come into the studio having just woken up, still in her pajamas. We all went out to dinner every night, sometimes to a vegetarian hot spot called À Votre Santé, which Joni referred to as “Mow de Lawn.”

When I asked her advice about the fact that my boyfriend had called a live-sex 900 number, she swiftly brought out the I Ching and threw it for me, simultaneously confessing that she once had a perv boyfriend, too. She gave me presents—a photograph from an exhibit she had up at the time and an antique Native American silver necklace of hers. We took a lot of Polaroids and had a technique of peeling the backing off while the photo was still developing so we could mark it up with the side of a nickel. I have a Polaroid of Joni hand-decorated by the lady herself—she embellished her clothed image with breasts and pubic hair.