The Hissing of a Living Legend
Slices of afternoon sun cut through the blinds of a darkened second-floor room in the Hollywood Athletic Club as Joni Mitchell, cigarette hanging limply from her thick lips, bends over a pool table and meticulously lines up a shot to sink the solid yellow ball.
''You're stripes,'' one of her pool partners yells.
''Oh,'' she exclaims and switches angles. She is distracted. There is too much going on. Present in the room are a mixture of friends and family members. Her friends are all men, mostly younger, outdoor, athletic types. Her family members, by contrast, are more cerebral and artistic. Her daughter, Kilauren Gibb, whom she met for the first time a year and a half ago after giving her up for adoption in 1965, is a model (as her mother once was) whose real wish was always to be on the other side of the camera (like her biological father, a Toronto photographer). Now she takes pictures of her 5-year-old son, Marlon, who seems like a model and actor in the making.
''Now pretend like Joni's going away,'' he says. Marlon pauses for a moment, and then pulls a forlorn, drooping face. A faux photo is snapped again.
''That was hard,'' Marlon says. ''I couldn't imagine why Joni would be going away.''
Suddenly, at 54, Mitchell has settled down. In the last two years, she has become a mother and grandmother simultaneously. Seeing the family together, one would never know that she, her daughter and grandson had ever been apart. Some musicians feel that they must sacrifice the joy of raising a family because of their commitment to their work. Mitchell always seemed like this type of artist, but now she seems to be relishing her new role. For someone whose art and life have always been intertwined, this development is bound to have implications for her music.
''The coming of the kids hasn't come out in my art yet,'' she says, referring to her latest projects -- a new album, ''Taming the Tiger,'' a television special and a book of poetry. But she has recorded music with Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter and ''they're convinced,'' she said, ''they can hear my family in my tone. It has a more full-bodied femininity.''
That's just the beginning of the new, complete, ever-changing Joni, one of the most influential and immodest songwriters of the last 30 years. Since inheriting her new family, Mitchell has suddenly become acquainted with pop culture. She watches ''Taxi'' reruns, reads kids' books to her grandson, spends more time shooting pool and hanging out with her family and has rediscovered Disney movies.
''I used to be monastic, almost,'' she explains with a touch of wistfulness. ''Now I'm like a Tibetan that has discovered hamburgers and television. I'm catching up on Americana.''
Disney, in many ways, is responsible for Mitchell's career. Watching Bambi as a child in Saskatchewan, she says, made an artist out of her, inspiring her to pick up crayons and draw forest fires, which led to art school, which led to an unwanted pregnancy (with Kilauren) that forced her to drop out and take up music in Canada's folk clubs.
Between pool shots, Mitchell, wearing a loose-knit sweater and jeans, speaks words that fans of more complex albums like ''Hejira'' and ''Don Juan's Reckless Daughter'' thought they'd never hear: ''I don't like to make fluffy little songs but now I want to make some light songs,'' she says. ''I think that comes from watching a lot of comedy. People will probably not enjoy it as much as the deep suffering that I've done in the past. And I don't even know if I can do it.''
When it comes to her music, Mitchell can be humorless. People describe her as ''bitter'' and a ''loose cannon,'' and those are her friends. Over the course of three days of conversations, Mitchell will compare herself to Mozart, Blake and Picasso; she will say that the lyrics to one of her songs ''have a lot of symbolic depth, like the Bible'' and describe her music as so new it needs its own genre name. In discussing her autobiography in the works, she will explain that there is no way to fit her life into one volume. She needs to do it in four. (She already knows the first line: I was the only black man at the party; colleagues say she sometimes feels ''like a black man in a white woman's body.)
Mitchell is not a forgetful woman. Like Santa Claus, she remembers who's been naughty and who's been nice. Speaking of a New York Times profile written in 1996, she recalls that there were ''seven errors of observation in the piece.'' On the nice side, she let Janet Jackson sample her song ''Big Yellow Taxi'' for the hook of ''Got 'Til It's Gone'' because Jackson had once spoken favorably of Mitchell's album ''Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm.'' And she distinctly remembers being excited by seeing the chins of four people of different ages quiver during her performance of ''Summertime'' this summer on the original Woodstock site.
''You think I got a trap mind or something?'' Mitchell asks when I make the Santa Claus comparison. ''I guess I do.''
Howie Klein, the president of Reprise, her recording label, says it can be a challenge working for Mitchell. ''She distinctly feels her music belongs on black radio,'' he says. ''Sometimes I get the feeling that she thinks I'm keeping it off black radio. We may not see eye to eye on every detail, but I have so much respect for her that I'm willing to subsume my own way of thinking to hers.''
Yet even as she lives up to the stereotype of the difficult artist, Mitchell is ''a good-time Charlie,'' as she puts it, in her private life. This is evident in her friends' comments about her as well as in the good-natured way she loses her pool games. Though Mitchell's most-loved work is her most melancholy (particularly her introspective ''Blue'' album), her music, and particularly her newest album, is also filled with joy. ''I'm not a pitiable creature,'' she says. ''It's just that I suffer very eloquently.''
''Taming the Tiger'' is a beautifully sung jazz, rock and classical fusion album, neatly extending Mitchell's body of work. In the tradition of ''The Hissing of Summer Lawns'' and ''Hejira,'' it is a self-produced, meticulous album that incorporates jazz musicians and harmonies, but stands on its own as a complete composition. Like her more recent Night Ride Home, the overall sound is sparse, reverberation-drenched, highbrow and contemporary. The album is simultaneously beautiful and frustrating, with moments of pitch-perfect poignance as well as moments of overwrought mood music that makes you wish that Mitchell would be more open to outside input while recording. When I dare make a comparison to New Age, she bristles, ''It's composed music.
After 19 albums, many of which have been heavily criticized upon their release only to be hailed as classics years later, Mitchell is upset by the album's mixed reviews. She blames Charles Mingus, the seminal jazz bassist, and her 1979 collaboration with him, ''Mingus,'' which succeeded in confusing both her fans and his. (She has a habit of trying to perfect musical standards, whether putting words to Mingus's compositions or, more recently, tinkering with lyrics to Gershwin songs.)
''When I did the Mingus project, I was advised what it would cost me,'' she remembers. ''I took that seriously but I couldn't believe that I would lose my airplay. It kicked me right out of the game. It was a great experience, one of my fondest.. . .I would do it today even knowing what it costs, but it certainly cost me. It took me some years to get back in it. And my work is still reviewed but radio stations don't play me. VH1 and MTV don't even touch me.''
Despite her growing weakness for pop culture, ''Taming the Tiger'' is filled with disdain for the entertainment world. The title is an allusion to success and the music industry, and the difficulty of controlling them. To compose the title song, she forced herself to listen to pop radio for several days and then came up with lyrics like ''I'm a runaway from the record biz/From the hoods in the hood/And the whiny white kids/Boring!''
Although Mitchell is credited as the godmother of current female singer-songwriters and the spiritual muse of the Lilith Fair, the successful all-female summer tour put together by Sarah McLachlan, she has always held such sisterhood, particularly with imitators, somewhat in contempt. (''Girlie guile/Genuine junk food for juveniles,'' she sings in ''Taming the Tiger.'') All of her life she has been considered the grande dame of female singer-songwriters, and all of her life she has tried to be so much more.
''One guy came up to me and said, 'You're the best female singer-songwriter in the world,''' she remembers. ''I was thinking: 'What do you mean female? That's like saying you're the best Negro.' Don't put a lid on it: it transcends boundaries.''
Not only is Mitchell an influence on female songwriters from Jewel to Madonna to Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders, she is also an influence on male songwriters from the Artist Formerly Known as Prince to Elvis Costello to Beck, who all sing her praises.
Yet, despite such recognition, Mitchell is remarkably discontent. Even the mention of a positive article merits the response, ''It broke my heart to read it.'' Her ego is a complex thing. In her mind, she feels that she's one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Yet in her heart, she must have doubts or she wouldn't need the affirmation. Much of it stems from a frustration that even as she has done better work, she still can't eclipse the popularity of her earliest music.
At lunch at the Daily Grill in Brentwood, her home away from home, we talk about the trappings of the popular-music game over smelly tuna fish sandwiches. For years, she rightly complained of a lack of recognition and appreciation compared with that of the male musicians of her era. But in the past four years, she has won a Grammy Award for Best Pop Album, been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and been honored with a Century Award from Billboard magazine. Still, she categorizes many of her awards as ''dubious.''
''It's like that line of Dylan's: 'You know something is happening here but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?' That's what most of my honors felt like,'' she explains. ''They knew they had to do it but they . . . weren't quite sure what to illuminate in the work.''
It antagonizes her no end that the songs that have made her famous -- most notably ''Big Yellow Taxi'' -- are her least complex and innovative ones. After all, Paul Simon was praised for bringing together world music and pop in ''Graceland,'' and Sting bragged of doing the same for jazz in ''The Dream of the Blue Turtles.'' Mitchell beat them all to the punch with albums like ''The Hissing of Summer Lawns,'' ''Hejira,'' ''Don Juan's Reckless Daughter'' and the live album ''Shadows and Light'' by making music in whatever style and tuning best suited her songs.
'' 'Big Yellow Taxi' is nice,'' she says. ''It's like Chuck Berry kind of skipping rope. It's a good little workhorse of a song and it's got some content. But it's a nursery rhyme. Of all the creations that are there, if you reduce it to this thing, it's a tragedy.
''Picasso was restless,'' she adds, her face half-shaded by a straw sun hat. ''I mean, he just kept changing and changing and changing.'' She mentions Miles Davis as well. ''So those are my heroes. The ones that change a lot.''
Mitchell has always defined herself as being not who others have expected her to be. She came down with polio when she was 9. Five years later, having beaten the odds and recovered, she wasn't just walking, she was dancing. In her paintings, she has purposely made it part of her style to break the rules that she was taught at the Alberta College of Art (focusing on the same kind of stylistic combinations that can make her records seem difficult). When she dropped out of art school and committed to the folk circuit, where she traveled from Toronto to Detroit to New York City, she denied that she was ever a folk singer.
''I came into the game looking like a folk singer but I was really playing classical art songs,'' she explained as she checked her watch to make sure she wasn't late to meet a friend. ''Those weren't like the chords that folkies played. But I looked like a folk singer, like the girl with the guitar. And at that point I had already been a lover of classical music in my pre-teens, a rock-and-roll dancer in high school, and I had discovered jazz. So folk music was easy and I needed money for art school just because we were all on students' wages. It wasn't until I was 21 and the desire to compose and create came back . . . that I got caught between being pigeonholed by critics and laboring for the sake of commercial exploitation.''
Mitchell traces her feeling of being misunderstood back to the first music she made, at age 7. ''I had music killed by my piano teacher,'' she says. ''She rapped my knuckles with a ruler, which was the way they taught everybody in that era anyway, and said, 'Why would you want to play by ear' -- that's what they called composing -- 'when you could have the masters under your fingertips, when you could copy.' So you go to art school and innovation is everything, but in music, you're just a weird loner. So I have more of a painter's ego or approach, which is to make fresh, individuated stuff that has my blood in it and on the tracks.''
Given all her anxiety about her career, it's perhaps understandable that the musician's life is not one she professes to relish. She regards touring as a violation of her muse and says record labels treat musicians like dumb prizefighters built to earn them purse money.
''I feel pregnant with creativity, and all that touring represents to me is a delay until I can be creative,'' she explained as we wrapped up lunch. ''I'm responsible to the company, and the company wants me to tour. In the meantime I'm probably going to lose 20 songs, by being cooperative to the game. To be responsible to the creativity, I should go on strike right now and get into my pajamas. Most of my career right after I made an album I would run away; I'd go to Europe. I'm glad I did. While I was running away from the last record, I'd be writing the new one because I'd be having a life.''
Speaking of her new album, she continues, ''I'm already out of what this record is about.'' She pauses and lights her 5th or 11th cigarette and exhales. ''I'm involved with family and the socializing process, which is something very exciting and very different.''
The night after we wrap up our interviews, I run into Mitchell at Dominick's, a new Los Angeles restaurant so trendy that it fills up every night despite its awful food. Mitchell is sitting in the middle of a table surrounded by her daughter, grandson and friends, celebrating her friend Paul Starr's birthday. When I see her, she loops her arm around my elbow like an Auntie Mame and spirits me into the foyer.
As we walk, we talk about astrology. According to a book she has been reading, her daughter was born on the day of the explorer and she was born on the day of the discoverer. ''She's a natural follower, I'm a natural leader,'' she says. ''I can't help it, the stars put me there.''
Mitchell says that their birth dates interact in a way best suited to siblings and that, in fact, they have a sisterly relationship. Not by design, they have the same handbags and shoes, wear similar clothes and share what she describes as a ''crazy bravado that comes from the Irish blood.''
Throughout her career, Mitchell dropped hints in her songs for her only child to find. Although Gibb knew the biography of her birth mother -- that she was a Canadian folk singer -- she never dreamed that she was Mitchell's child. Then, in 1996, The New York Times described Mitchell's search for her daughter. A friend of Gibb's, who saw the story, joked that Mitchell could be Gibb's birth mother. Gibb had only recently been told that she was adopted, and she already had a son. She decided to investigate. Eventually, she and Mitchell were united.
As for the adoptive parents, Mitchell says: ''We worked through all of that. I'm totally grateful to them, and Kilauren hasn't forgotten about them.''
At Dominick's, we sit down in two adjacent chairs, and she places her hand over mine on the armrest. She then proceeds to clarify comments she made in our previous interviews. Clearly, she has replayed the conversations and has tried to pinpoint where her natural frankness and expansiveness may have got her into trouble.
There is a lyric on her new album that complains, ''I'm up to my neck in alligator jaws gnashing at me.'' She is trying to figure out if I am an alligator, too. Her fears, however, seem dated. The alligators are gnashing less and less, and at the dinner table around the corner, she has found something to protect her from them.
''I used to be too much of an illuminated scribe locked in my attic with a responsibility to my gifts,'' she says, laughing for once at herself. She stubs out a cigarette. Now, she says: ''I long to live in a Chekhov play with relatives and aunties and the long white tables with green bottles on them, under the apple tree. That's really where I should be.''
