Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (27 page)

The record does just that, with Mitchell's throaty alto pouring into the crevices of the classics and lifting them off the page anew. The cover track, which revisits her first taste of success as a songwriter, sounds like a completely different tune. The heavy strings and swooping winds bring it the gravitas it deserves, and Mitchell's voice, originally so high and pure, now has the texture of age and worldly wisdom. It feels like the song it was always supposed to be: slow, emotionally laden, yet joyful all at the same time. The tune brings Mitchell full circle musically, but the whole record nods to the beginning of her career, from her time with Leonard Cohen to her childhood memories listening to the radio.

And since we're going in circles, we can now come back to the ever-offending
Rolling Stone
love chart. It doesn't matter whether it was homage or slag; it made an impression on Mitchell regardless and affected the course of her personal and public life. She stopped giving interviews to
Rolling Stone
, felt abused by the sexist bent, and became defensive about her desire to explore humanity with a sexual appetite. To Mitchell, the chart was the stone hurled from the rabble—the big challenge to her creative nobility. No wonder it's a fixture in the Mitchell archive. She brings it up again in 2010 in an interview with Matt Diehl of the
Los Angeles Times
. When she attempts to explain her incredible creative courage, she says: “I never actually tried to be shocking... The madonna-whore thing was very prevalent, though, even in the ‘Summer of Love.'
Rolling Stone
even called me ‘Old Lady of the Year,' and made a graph of all these hearts I'd theoretically broken. Grace [Slick] and Janis Joplin were [sleeping with] their whole bands and falling down drunk, and nobody came after them!”
35

Mitchell's quotes were lifted out of context by several outlets, which felt the girl-fight aspect of the story was sexy, again frustrating Mitchell's relationship with the media and pushing her further into the cave of self-exile. At least on the topic of sex and love, Mitchell did find some tangible lessons—and, in turn, used them to guide her creative progress. “In spite of all my yelling at my lovers in public (laughs), I've received a lot of affection in my time. People have been as good to me as they could, but... yeah, I guess it is all about compatible madnesses,” she told Vic Garbarini. “There are pockets where people flat-out don't understand each other, they come to impasses. And they stubbornly hold to one side or another, conflicting points of view. So, yeah, those paradoxes are dramatized in love relationships. All along I guess

I've been trying to figure out (sings) ‘What is this thing called love... this crazy thing called love?'”
36

Mitchell is still scratching her head on that one. She hasn't found her love for the ages, but in one of her last interviews, with Robert Hilburn in 2004, she said she was very happy: “So happy. So much in love with life, but romantic love is over for me. I'm very happy about this leg of my life.”
37

“Blue”

“Court and Spark”

“Song for Sharon”

“Car on a Hill”

“A Case of You”

“Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression. It is so spontaneous. And after singing, I think the violin. Since I cannot sing, I paint.”
—Georgia O'Keeffe

When the name “Joni Mitchell” echoed through the red-carpeted Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on February 28, 1996, there was an audible gasp in the press room. “What?” said a woman from an unidentified publication. “That's total bullshit! Why does everybody hate Mariah?” Joni Mitchell had just won the Grammy for best pop album for
Turbulent Indigo
, beating out the odds-on favourite Mariah Carey (
Daydream
), as well as the Eagles (
Hell Freezes Over
), Madonna (
Bedtime Stories
), and Annie Lennox (
Medusa
). For Carey, who was shut out completely for
Daydream
, it was the beginning of a nightmare. For Mitchell, it was a fortuitous collision of two creative worlds: she didn't just win the award for best pop album, she also won the Grammy for best album art (with art director Robbie Cavolina) for the cover design—a portrait of herself as Van Gogh.

A recreation of his post-ear-amputation portrait, the image shows Mitchell with a bandage wrapped around her head. It could be read as a funny nod to the injustice she felt at the hands of the record industry, which didn't recognize her genius and kept asking her to repeat successes of the past. But it could also be seen as a challenge to Mitchell's own view of herself as an artist—since, after all, that's exactly what the painting is: Joni Mitchell painting herself as a famed artist. The Dutch artist who hung out in Arles in 1888 and painted some of the most important works of the twentieth century famously cut his ear off after a fight with his patronizing buddy, Paul Gauguin. The act was proof of Van Gogh's deteriorating mental state and alienation. But it was also a testament to his commitment to being an artist: he argued with Gauguin about starting an artist colony to embrace the act of creation for creation's sake. His wound was symbolic of his desire to shut out the voices of the naysayers (and no doubt the deafening cicadas), so for Joni Mitchell—a singer and musician—to symbolically slice off an ear on canvas in faux martyrdom made for an even deeper subtext.

“Basically, I relate to his frustration,” she said.
1
The painting meant a lot to her. She even brushed up her brush skills to execute the work as sentient homage. “I wanted to get my chops up to do that spoof on Van Gogh for the cover of
Turbulent Indigo
,” she told
Vogue's
Charles Gandee in 1995 (for a piece titled “Triumph of the Will”). “It's true, a lot of people don't know what a Van Gogh painting looks like, so they're not going to get a big guffaw out of it. I wanted to help them by having little tin ears fall out of the album, but it was too expensive.”
2

Van Gogh was a frequent source of inspiration. The only terrain Joni Mitchell has revisited on practically every outing is her own reflection. Her album covers offer a continuous chronicle of Mitchell's evolution as an artist, not just technically as a painter but as a self-aware creator who recognizes the role of self-perception. Her consciousness of the subject comes out in a conversation relayed by photographer Joel Bernstein, who quotes Mitchell on the subject of the double-exposures in her photographic work: “I'm the observer, it's putting the viewer in the viewed; it's just illustrating that those two things are happening at once, rather than simply, as usual, giving you the point of view out of the camera.”
3

Mitchell is comfortable with the idea of “two things happening at once” because her oeuvre has been unfolding in twin arcs of creation. Music was the public sacrifice, but painting was the private pleasure. Each time Joni Mitchell painted herself for the cover of an album, she let the two worlds bleed together. The result, as one critic noted, and not so nicely, was Mitchell's artwork is “a mini-autobiography without a shred of darkness; the kind of mementoes you find stuck to refrigerators.”
4

The satirical Van Gogh portrait seems to be a silent “screw you” to all that posturing, and it tells us exactly where Mitchell was at the moment of
Turbulent Indigo
's creation: technically adept with her brush, artistically assured—given she paints herself as a modern master—and capable of seeing herself in a context where commerce and art are familiar sparring partners.

When Mitchell hit the backstage scrum at the Shrine that Grammy night, she looked a little shell-shocked. “I'm so stunned,” she said. When asked which award meant more—the best album or best artwork—she stared into the middle distance for a while, then answered: “That's a good question... I've been known for making music, but not as a painter. And I think of myself as a painter first, really. I was thinking of quitting music and going into painting—I'm glad I didn't... I'm very proud—maybe more proud of winning prizes for my music.”
5

There was validation in the double-barrelled win. More importantly, it allowed her to re-laminate a part of herself professionally: she could reunite the singer and the artist, at least for one victorious moment in the spotlight, after a lifetime of malingering cleavage.

The original schism—and the critical moment of departure—happened at the inception of Mitchell's career, when she had to drop out of art school as a result of getting pregnant. She says she had no ambition to become a singer but assumed the identity of a folkie in front of the mike and made money. Meanwhile, there was a part she left behind—the lonely painter hiding away in the attic with a box of paints. The musical side “wrote the sorrow” and the “frustration.” The unfettered artist “painted the joy.” And the human Joan chain-smoked and observed her warring muses.

Mitchell has always said she was a visual artist first. It's how her brain is wired. Even when she speaks to her session players, because she is not musically trained and cannot explain things clinically, she uses painterly metaphor to get a point across. “I'm a painter, so I tend to think in pictures and store pictorial information,” she says, “like an autistic person.”
6
She drew and doodled from as early as she can remember—no matter where she was, no matter what the surface or the tool. She would prop up mirrors so she could watch TV and draw at the same time. This constant source of creative expression proved an early coping mechanism and helped the young Roberta Joan Anderson deal with life's irreconcilable equations at a young age. She says
Bambi
was one of her first inspirations: “I always drew, but being a sensitive child, the fire in [
Bambi
] haunted me. The downside of sensitivity is that when you get stuck on a topic, you can't get off it—it's another quality artistic and autistic people share. I was down on my knees for about three days after that movie, drawing forest fires and deer running.”

This reaction suggests Mitchell was already adept at administering her own mode of art therapy. The rest of us who were traumatized by
Bambi
simply chewed the sheets and clutched our stuffies hoping the house wouldn't burn down and our mothers wouldn't be shot by faceless hunters. Mitchell painted it and owned it. She revisited the same themes in the 1990s when she painted more forest fires as a gesture of mourning for the planet and, somewhat compellingly, a self-portrait with a deer. The image, titled
In the Park of the Golden Buddha
, features Mitchell in profile on the left side of the frame and a deer on the right. As she describes it in a radio interview with KCSN-FM's Rene Ingle: “Both of the animals—me animal and deer animal here—are calm, but there's a suspension of, you know, like an impending kind of feeling. [The deer is] going to take his cue from me, and so instead of the movement taking place only on the flat surface of the painting, it seems to have a volume that sticks out that I don't recall seeing in another image, because the two eyes belong to two different creatures. I think that...”
7
Mitchell either stops talking, or she's cut off by the host, because the thought is never finished. No matter. She gave us a crucial insight: both eyes belong to different creatures; this is another sign of cleavage—but also creative integration.

The deer looks at Mitchell, but Mitchell looks at the viewer from the corner of her eye, which translates into a hint of editorial detachment. She stands in the foreground while the deer cranes its head into the warping, sun-dappled centre. There is an odd, unspoken recognition as well as a desire for separation. Mitchell does not belong to either world— neither the deer's forest nor the small group of human silhouettes clustered in the distance. Mitchell seems to belong to the world of the canvas itself, the very fabric that supports and carries the creative message. Like a creative Dorian Gray, Mitchell inserts bits and pieces of herself into her self-portraits, giving us freeze-frame glimpses into her evolving sense of identity through works of art.

Mitchell says her first sense of personal identity came about as a result of discovering her artistic talent in grade two. She told Camille Paglia there were so many baby boomers cramped into the tight corridors of Queen Elizabeth School in Saskatoon that they dragged a teacher out of retirement and put Mitchell's class in the parish hall. She seated students by academic rank—and Mitchell, never a scholastic standout, was seated with the kids in the C row—the “wrens.” She says she didn't like any of the kids in the A row anyway. They were “so smug,” she says, adding that she preferred “the ones who were bored and not trying or even the ones who were a little simple.”
8
From that time onward, Mitchell has maintained a healthy mistrust of external evaluations. “I have this prejudice against the illusory sense of attainment associated with the educational system on this continent,” she says in a 1976 interview with Stewart Brand of the
CoEvolution Quarterly
. “The best you can do is regurgitate what they tell you.” Mitchell had a bright moment in that bleak grade two year, however, and it came as the teacher asked the class to draw a three-dimensional doghouse. “I drew the best one, and I drew security from that. At that moment I forged my identity as a visual artist. I also pissed off the educational system by spacing out, squeaking by, and finally flunking chemistry and math in grade 12 and having to repeat it,” she told Paglia. “[The doghouse event] gave me the courage to become an artist.”
9

Mr. Kratzman helped Mitchell continue her creative odyssey with encouragement, and a caution against cliché. “He was a great disciplinarian in his own punk style,” she told Brand. “He was more a social worker and a renegade priest... I laboured to impress him.”

Mitchell says her artistic skills pumped up her self-esteem again in art school: in her first year, the C-row “wren” landed on the honour roll for the first time in her life. She found inspiration in the work of Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Rembrandt, Picasso, and Georgia O'Keeffe—with the latter two becoming lifetime heroes and personal icons. In fact, they are the only two public personalities Mitchell ever tried to contact as a fan.

In a November 2007 interview, Charlie Rose asks Mitchell if there's anyone—living or dead—she would like to meet: “I would have liked to have met Picasso,” she says. Why? “His constant creativity, his restlessness. You know, like Miles [Davis], I met. I knew Miles a little bit. You know, but Picasso and Miles and myself, we were all long-distance runner types. And also, we craved innovation, but we also craved change. You know, [it's] the appetite that makes Picasso interesting to me to have known. Nietzsche: I would have liked to have known Nietzsche. He didn't have many friends, I think.” Rose asks Mitchell what she would have asked Nietzsche, and she says it's not like that: “I just think we're kindred... I think we could have gotten along, and he didn't have a lot of friends.”
10

The central thread that runs through Mitchell's inspirations, from Picasso to Nietzsche, is the bulletproof fiber of creative originality—and the frequent consequence of coming under fire for stepping outside the trenches. Mitchell is acutely aware of her otherness, and the fact that so few people really understand her life's work, which is why she's sought communion with her heroes—the same way her fans have sought communion with her.

“I wanted so badly to go and visit Picasso... even with the possibility that I would be turned away,” she tells Rose. “Picasso is one of my teachers. Although I never met the man, I have applied some of his philosophy of painting to my songwriting.” Picasso pushed a lot of buttons with his work, not only as granddaddy of dada but also as an artist possessed with enough arrogance to do exactly as he pleased. Mitchell found affirmation in stories like Picasso's, because they affirmed her originality, as well as the split between her two creative outlets. She explains, “At art school innovation is everything, but in music, you're just a weird loner. So I have a painter's ego or approach, which is to make fresh, individuated stuff that has my blood in it and on the tracks.”

Mitchell never got a chance to meet Picasso, but she did get a chance to meet another hero—actually, heroine—in Georgia O'Keeffe. She and Don Alias took to the road in the flush of their romance and in 1977 headed to Abiquiu, New Mexico, in search of the famed painter of flowers. Even though it was something Mitchell would have been loath to experience in her own backyard after a long history with tenacious stalkers, she took her cues from old buddy Warren Beatty, who used his fame as an entry into others' lives.

The cold call with a famous face “is a wonderful way to do it,” says Mitchell of the fame-loves-fame idea. Warren Beatty, she says, “also approaches things that way. He calls people that interest him and flies to meet them. Warren and Marlon [Brando] have that ability. Who's going to turn them away from the door?” she says. “That's why I was hoping Picasso would like my music, and wouldn't turn me away... I lack the chutzpah to just go up and knock at somebody's door.”
11