Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (20 page)

Mitchell knew there were circus elephants in the room: “I studied ego, that's all I did on Rolling Thunder,” she told Michelle Mercer. “I watched these malformed egos as they interacted with my own and ended up delving into my own malformed ego.”

Perhaps one of the problems was the rampant use of cocaine on the tour. Mitchell says she had never been a serious coke user until she signed on.
Reader's Digest
quoted her as saying: “They asked me how I wanted to be paid, and [it was like] I ran away to join the circus: Clowns used to get paid in wine—pay me in cocaine because everybody was strung out on cocaine.”
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As fate—or her will—would have it, her brief addiction to coke and the big E—Ego—came with its own remedy: Jack Kerouac was also on Rolling Thunder and would often bring up the name of his friend, a Buddhist master by the name of Chögyam Trungpa. When Mitchell finally wrapped up her stint with Dylan, she went home but headed out on the road almost immediately afterward. A friend of hers was travelling to Maine to assertively settle a custody issue, and Mitchell was a prisoner of the white lines once more. Along the way, just before Easter, she was cajoled into seeing Trungpa. He asked her if she believed in God, and as she told Michelle Mercer: “I said ‘Yes'—and then—this was such an asshole comment—I produce this bag of coke and say, ‘This is my God and this is my prayer.' He didn't flinch, but his nose started to flare. And then I thought: Does he want some [coke]? That's when he started breathing, and... I didn't notice I was being zapped.” For three days, Mitchell says in Mercer's biography, she was back in the metaphysical garden. “My mind was back in Eden, the mind before the fall. With the ‘I' gone, you no longer have a divisional mind that goes ‘good, bad, right, wrong.'” She says what brought her out of it was an awareness of self: her first “I” thought. The three days felt “simple-minded, blessedly simple-minded. And then the ‘I' came back, and the first thought I had was, Oh, my god. He enlightened me. Boom. Back to normal—or what we call normal but they call insanity.”
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The Mitchell-Dylan dynamic produced more golden moments. The two reunited onstage in 1976 for
The Last Waltz
, Martin Scorsese's concert film about the Band's “final show” at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. Band member Levon Helm said, “The film was more or less shoved down our throats... do it, puke, get out.”
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Dylan, who at Geffen's urging had been on tour with Robbie Robertson and company just two years earlier, was supposed to show up for rehearsals and never did. Mitchell, however, was a keener. She rehearsed with the Band, but no one could figure out her tunings. The show, as the movie proves, was a collection of so-so musical performances but now-legendary rock 'n' roll moments—particularly the grand finale, which features the entire ensemble singing “I Shall Be Released.” You can see Mitchell in a Neil sandwich (between Neil Young—with a giant chunk of coke famously dangling from his nose—and Neil Diamond), looking uninterested as Dylan hurls his voice into the microphone.

At least they were standing far apart. When they shared a microphone in Nara, Japan, for the 1994 Great Music Experience concert, Mitchell complained about Bobby's halitosis to a
Mojo
reporter: “Oh, he's such a little brat, you know. He really is,” she said of Dylan. “He's never been very complimentary to my face—most of the boys haven't. But he loved ‘Sex Kills,' and was very effusive about it. Anyway, we played three concerts, and they kept shifting my position on the mikes and which verses of the songs I was going to sing,” she said. “On the third night they stuck Bob at the mike with me, and that's the one that went out on tape. And if you look closely at it, you can see the little brat, he's up in my face—and he never brushes his teeth, so his breath was like... right in my face—and he's mouthing the words at me like a prompter, and he's pushing me off the mike. It's like he's basically dipping my pigtail in ink. The press picked up on it and said, ‘Bobby Smiles!' Yeah sure, because he was having a go at me out there.”
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What goes around comes around. Mitchell, Dylan, and Van Morrison shared a bill in 1998 at the Gorge in Washington State—probably the most beautiful venue in the world, thanks to its natural slope amphitheatre with expansive views of the Columbia River valley. Mitchell decided it was time for some payback—and cajoled Van Morrison into crashing Dylan's final set. They both jumped onstage for his encore, “I Shall Be Released.”

“Bob got a big kick out of it,” Mitchell told Jody Denberg of the
Austin Chronicle
. “It was really rough and I blew the words on it and blew the rhyme and had to make one up. And Bobby was looking at me grinning, ‘What is she going to rhyme with it,' because I got the first rhyming line wrong.”
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The correct lyrics are: “Yet I swear I see my own reflection / Some place so high above this wall / I see my light come shining / From the west unto the east / any day now, any day now / I shall be released.” Mitchell's impromptu appearance resulted in a spontaneous rewrite, which, according to a spectator, went like this: “I see my own reflection / Right above the mighty beast.” The accidental recreation couldn't be more telling, because it encapsulates the Mitchell/Dylan dynamic. In Dylan, Mitchell saw her reflection as an artist, but she also saw the mighty beast of ego and the burden of being a “folk icon”—two anti-creative forces from which she would eventually “be released.”

Sometime around the summer of 1997, Joni Mitchell lost one of her favourite cats: a little, yellow-eyed “part ocelot,” part Abyssinian mix. His name was Nietzsche, but she also called him “Man from Mars” because “he's a little lavender lion who looks like an alien and walks on his hind legs as an expression of affection for me.”
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The two had a ritual that involved petting, exchanging “deep long looks,” gentle hair chewing, and climbing the stairs in tandem. “We stop at the top, he stands on his hind legs, I swoop down, he takes my fingers in his mouth and he chews on them,” Mitchell told KCSN radio's Rene Ingle in 1999. “Then we skip the next three steps, and he stands on his hind legs on the third [step]. Then we skip the next two [steps] and he stands up again and sometimes he stands up twice on each stair if he really loves me a lot that day.”
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The kitty was “wild” and known to pee on furniture, but Mitchell was unfazed by most of it until “he got mad at me about something, and he got up on this chair and he peed right close to my ear.” She told the story to Elvis Costello in their 2004 marathon chat for
Vanity Fair
, which yielded fifty thousand words of transcript:
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He jumped off from there and ran with his belly to the floor. He knew he did wrong. I caught up to him and I took him by the tip of his tail and the scruff of the neck and I held him at arm's length so he couldn't scratch me, because he's really strong. I said, “O.K. If you're going to act like an animal, you can live like an animal.” I put him outside for the night, which I would never do [normally, because of the coyotes]. Well, he's very sensitive, you know. I hurt his feelings. And he didn't come back the first night. He didn't come back the second night.

Mitchell soon realized how much she missed the cat: “With him absent, the stairs became a painful place. I mean every time I went down them, there was hole in me.”

Intent on finding the missing feline now roaming the arid hills of affluent Los Angeles, she decided to issue a public notice to her neighbours. First, she needed to find a picture of the cat but discovered the only snap of the MIA mewler had been taken when he was a kitten. Moreover, it used the wrong type of film—daylight balanced, not tungsten—resulting in lilac-tinted fur. “It didn't look like him. I thought, I'll never get him back from this. So I painted him,” she told Costello. “I had to make him grow into an adult from the picture, the source material I had.” Mitchell found the right colours for the pelt on her palette, and a day and a half later, she had a finished canvas of the lost cat. She photographed it and took it to a printer. She got it back “in laminate form on the fifth day, and hand-delivered it into everybody's mailbox in a three-mile radius. On the back it said, ‘Have you seen my Nietzsche?' and gave the phone number to call.”

Mitchell says Nietzsche was gone for eighteen days, and like a “method actor I took the pain of his absence and wrote the song ‘Man from Mars.' Even in the mix [of the recording] you can hear it. I had been out there listening for him and my ear was hearing three miles away. It is the deepest mix that I ever did, with little sounds going way, way, way back into the mix,” she says. “So I finished the song. It took me seven days... He stayed away just long enough for me to write [it].” In the song's poignant lyrics, “Since I lost you / I can't get through the day / Without at least one big boo-hoo / The pain won't go away... There is no center to my life now / No grace in my heart.” The deep listening Mitchell described to Costello is also present in the lyrics: “I call and call / The silence is so full of sounds / You're in them all / I hear you in the water / And the wiring in the walls.”

The story has a happy ending. Not only did Mitchell find a way to cope with the loss of the cat through an act of artistic creation, but she was also reunited with the rogue tinkler. “A gardener called up and said, ‘He's in our yard.' So I went down and [Nietzsche] yelled at me. He was so skinny and had such a hurt look. And he yelled and he yelled and he yelled. And I yelled back and I noticed that he wanted to duck and belly up but then he changed his mind. No, he still had more madness to get out,” she says. “So he yelled at me some more, but I softened my tone, you know, into a pleading tone, and finally he bellied up and I took him home with me. So that painting actually saved him from the wild because he was too proud to come home. I hurt his feelings so bad.”
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Joni Mitchell has owned many cats over the years, but none has been given as much ink in the annals as Nietzsche, nor has she talked about them in such detail. She and Nietzsche clearly had a special bond. It's been sewn into the rich quilt of Mitchell iconography because she put a self-portrait featuring the prodigal kitty on the cover of the 1998 release
Taming the Tiger
, her first collection of new material since 1994's double-Grammy winner,
Turbulent Indigo
.

“Have you seen my Nietzsche?” is a question I'd like to answer myself, because I have seen Joni's Nietzsche, and what a furry beast it is. Mitchell's Nietzsche is everywhere—even if he is one of the “monsters” she mentions as an inspiration. The man who gave her feline Martian his name, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900), was a noted German philosopher who infamously offed God. In his legendary tome
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Nietzsche sounds a bit like a Monty Python sketch when he asserts: “This old god no longer lives... He is quite dead.”
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Killing God in print, and in theory, was probably the most revolutionary and scandalous act of the nineteenth century, but Nietzsche felt a compulsion to recreate the paradigm of the human condition because he thought man was in a state of moral and creative stagnation. He believed we were denying the very essence of our divine nature by worshipping a creator larger and more important than ourselves. By removing God from the human equation, Nietzsche believed, we wouldn't just be removing the wire cage of religious limitations and dogma; we'd be forced to take full responsibility for our own actions: “No longer to bury the head in the sand of heavenly things, but to carry it freely, an earthly head that creates meaning for the earth!”
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In short, killing God allows us to redefine the fundamental relationship between the creator and the creation. If we become the creators, we become the masters of our own destiny. It's not easy cutting your own path in the tangled garden of spirituality or creating your own identity in a cacophony of consumerism. It takes the courage of a lion to counter the old laws. But “the will is a creator,” says Nietzsche. One must learn to “unharness the will from its own folly” as well as the “spirit of revenge and all teeth-gnashing” in order to free it and, in so doing, “become the redeemer and bringer of joy.” This is what Nietzsche called “the will that is the will to power.” And it got him in a lot of trouble. Fortunately, he was dead for most of it.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra
has been called the work of a heretic, a Satanist, and the Antichrist—the latter designation was self-dubbed, because Nietzsche wasn't without a sense of humour, or drama. What really stains his reputation is his association with Adolf Hitler, a man he never met and most certainly would not have liked. Nietzsche was long dead before the Nazi rise to power, but thanks in part to his nutty supremacist sister, who had control over his creative output, “the will to power” was a tagline the Nazis glommed onto—giving rise to Leni Riefenstahl's creepy-but-beautiful
Triumph of the Will
and other warped interpretations of Nietzsche's call to creative arms. For this reason, not to mention the God thing, Nietzsche is considered “a monster” or “the bad guy.”
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Most benevolently, we can look at
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
as Nietzsche's “how-to” book for spiritual recreation—or “chicken soup for the godless soul.” It urges the reader to ask, “What are we?” and “Why are we here?” without looking up to the heavens for answers but into the mirror, where we must find our own.

Nietzsche had a huge effect on Mitchell. She mentions
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
throughout her career, saying she's “a fan” of the book and that it became a personal “bible.” “Nietzsche was a hero, especially with
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
,” she told Jody Denberg in 1998. “I discovered Nietzsche, who's the bible for the godless, really... but you have to really kind of sink into the pits to understand Nietzsche because he looks at more truth than most people could. Even Carl Jung opened up his writings, slammed it shut, and said, ‘Whew! He'll have no friends.'”
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