Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (26 page)

The verse is a thematic coda to “Both Sides Now” in its flight imagery, as well the idea of emotional aloofness. “Amelia” picks up these airborne ghosts and reasserts Mitchell's suspicion that she's spent her whole life at “icy altitudes,” unable to truly ground herself in the terrestrial forces of domestic life.

Not that she doesn't keep trying: Mitchell hooked up with Don Alias in 1977, after they met on the sessions for
Don Juan's Reckless Daughter
. Alias told Weller they fell in love dancing at On the Rox, a private club above the Roxy: “I fell in love with her childlikeness, that wide-eyed childlike quality.” Eventually, though, he grew tired of being awoken at all hours of the morning by a creatively frenetic girlfriend. “I got swallowed up in the Mr. Joni Mitchell syndrome,” he told Weller. “At four, or five in the morning, she's like asking me, ‘What do you think of this? What do you think of that?' I'm like, Jesus Christ, give me a break!”
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The relationship couldn't handle the creative tension, and this is true in many artist partnerships: each partner is competing against another love and another passionate obsession—the oeuvre itself. There's no denying the intertwining of art and the sexual urge, because they're both inherently creative.

Mitchell understands the primal connection we have to her art and the romantic impulse, but she's also aware of her own boundaries. “If some people had their way, they'd just want me to weep and suffer for them for the rest of my life, because people live vicariously through their artists. And I had that grand theme for a long time: Where is my mate? Where is my mate? Where is my mate? I got rid of that one,” Mitchell told
Rolling Stone
's David Wild in 1991. “For a while it was assumed that I was writing women's songs. Then men began to notice that they saw themselves in the songs, too. A good piece of art would be androgynous.”
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Mitchell reaffirms this idea in an earlier interview with Bill Flanagan, in which she talks about love's expanding horizons and how it reaches outward as one grows older, from the domestic and specific to the civic and universal: “In the natural order of things, your instinct as an animal is to find your mate. When you settle into your family, then you turn your attentions to the civic. You begin to expand. Love is taken care of. I'm a late bloomer—I didn't find my mate till I was almost forty.”
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Mitchell's “mate” at this time (1988) was Larry Klein, a kid from the “deep suburbia” of California. A bassist who became disenchanted with “a real narrowness of the jazz world,”
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Klein met Mitchell when he was enlisted to record sessions for
Wild Things Run Fast
in 1982. They bonded early, thanks to a shared passion for pinball and Nietzschean philosophy. Says Klein: “She was a whole other species for me... able to hold rambling discourses on everything from Beethoven to Nietzsche to politics to the environment.” Klein found his years with Mitchell to be creatively enlightening: he'd never worked with anyone who strove so ceaselessly to get things right. She had “that incessant and unfailing way of seeking out how to get to the core of a song and really make something that was fresh and new and true.”
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Creatively speaking, Mitchell felt very alive while recording
Wild Things Run Fast
. The love buzz was palpable. Even long-time engineer Henry Lewy noted the sessions felt substantially different. “She was very happy while she was making this album,” he told
Rolling Stone
. “The records are always reflections of her mental attitude and she really found the groove for this record about halfway through, when she got a new boyfriend and everything in her life solidified.”
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People have called
Wild Things Run Fast
the “I Love Larry Album,” but it was
Dog Eat Dog
(1985) that proved the relationship solid: for the first time in years, Mitchell shared producer credits—not only with her new hubby and bass player Klein but also with engineer Mike Shipley and electro-pop's enfant-savant Thomas Dolby. When asked about the others by Iain Blair of the
Chicago Tribune
in 1985, Mitchell got prickly. “If I'd had my way, there'd be no producer listed at all,” said the woman who once noted that neither Mozart nor Beethoven needed producers. “I'm basically unproduceable, and used to letting my albums take their own eccentric course for better or worse, making my own mistakes.”
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Bringing in Thomas Dolby was the idea of Elliot Roberts, who felt Mitchell needed to reboot her career with some new programming. Dolby blinded everyone with his science: he was an expert at the then-cutting-edge Fairlight CMI (Computer Musical Instrument), a device that gave the eighties their mechanical-kazoo sonic edge and an instrument Klein was beginning to learn in the hope of broadening his musical horizons with new sounds and rhythms. He felt he'd been stagnating in his session work, so he took classes and put his knowledge to work in a new Fairlight-equipped studio that he and Mitchell built in their Malibu home and dubbed the Kiva.

Eventually, the idea of working with Thomas Dolby didn't seem like such a bad idea. Mitchell agreed to the collaboration with the synth-whiz, but the sessions soon spiralled. “Well, I'm very fond of him, but man!” she told Blair. “He was very quiet—and stubborn—and when we disagreed, we'd have these discussions and he'd say, ‘Well, I'm not getting anything out of these adult talks, Joan,' and then I'd say, ‘Well, then, neither am I,' and we'd be stalemated.”
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Needless to say, things with Dolby didn't go down so well. He was forced into the “more menial” task of assistant while Mitchell essentially regained control of the final product—with Klein backing her up. Most of the tracks Dolby designed were never used. Said Mitchell: “I just can't work that way, and I couldn't give over that much territory. I felt very mixed up about it, I must confess. On one level, I thought perhaps I'm not being very cooperative about it, but on the other, I thought, ‘No, this is composition, and if my structure is radically altered at the beginning, I don't want to be interior-decorated out of my own music.' I've always had the luxury of making my own mistakes, and that's something important to protect.”
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Mitchell was following her instincts. She had surrendered to love with Larry, and she even relinquished controls in the studio, but she wasn't about to let an interloper like Dolby meddle with her music. For Mitchell to cede an inch creatively, you had to share the sheets—and even that was no guarantee. Mitchell never compromised her creative vision, but she did give Klein the keys to the machine, and the albums the couple made together feel different than the rest.

Dog Eat Dog
enters fresh, politically charged lyrical terrain and features a variety of cameos, including Rod Steiger's holy roller (because long-time Mitchell buddy Jack Nicholson couldn't get past security at the studio). Other players include former lover James Taylor, as well as Eagle Don Henley and Doobie Brother Michael McDonald. Even the cigarette machine at the studio got a chance to play star on the track “Smokin' (Empty, Try Another).” It's a brave and wacky record that gave Mitchell a taste for casting roles in songs—while maintaining deed and title to her work. But of all her albums, it's one of the very few that feel dated—only as a result of the instrumentation, specifically that Fairlight CMI.

Dog Eat Dog
wasn't well received by critics, and it was the beginning of the end of Mitchell's partnership with Elliot Roberts, but it proved Klein and Mitchell could weather a storm together. By the time they made
Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm
three years later, they were in synch—even if everyone around them was out of the loop. As Mitchell told Divina Infusino in 1988:

People working with you need to know where you're going with an idea. But I don't have an intellectual plan. So there are times when people working with me think I'm lost. But part of my process is to get good and lost. I start to work in random mode and try out crazy ideas. I put my critic to sleep during that process. But if I'm surrounded by minds with their critic wide awake, it's frustrating for me, for everyone. That's one of the reasons I like working with Larry, my husband. We've worked together on three albums now. He knows how I work. Recording together has also brought us closer in our marriage as well.
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Well, at least for a little while. As Mitchell herself is all too aware, romance can only last so long before it starts to wear: “Part of this is permanent / Part of this is passing,” she writes on
Taming the Tiger
's “Stay in Touch.”

“Romance is like, ‘Oh God, I'm so nervous, so excited, I hope he loves me,'” she told Robert Hilburn. “I had a pattern of going through very brief relationships where the romance never had a chance to develop into anything else. If you have set up a certain kind of promiscuousness, the buzz is eventually gone and you move on. That's the world of Don Juans and Don Juanettes and I was a part of it.” She said her love with Larry was significantly different: “It's not built on insecurity, it's built on caring.” To complete her point, Mitchell quoted Corinthians: “Love is kind. Love has no evil in mind, love gives without asking in return.”
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The two creative souls found an artistic union through the work, but everything wasn't unfolding the way Mitchell thought it should. The production in the studio was creative but slightly off the Mitchell mark: “There is that period when all of a sudden everything was extraordinarily bright. I think it was all the cocaine or something. It was fingernails-on-the-blackboard bright,” she told Costello of the production values on her work from the 1980s. “I didn't really like that. However, the drum machines did afford me the ability, right or wrong, to dictate the rhythm and where the major pushes were. Some of them are eccentric, I admit... but even in the use of programs, it was still really creative.”
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Klein echoes the creative and romantic collision that marked their time together. “I started out just being the bass player on
Wild Things Run Fast
, but when Joni and I became involved romantically, she wanted my opinion as that project was being finished. We ended up working somewhat as a team. Making a record together is not much different than raising a child. You have to do your job really, really well or else it affects a lot of other parts of your life. On the positive side, it's incredibly gratifying to create something together and share the satisfaction of making something of beauty and putting it out in the world.”
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When the relationship started to sputter a decade later, Klein says he and Mitchell never lost respect for each other, but it wasn't easy working together: “I'd be lying if I said it was an easy thing to collaborate since we've separated. The three records we've made together since then have been difficult records to make, but some pearls have come out of the difficulty.”
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Mitchell cut the romantic cord with Larry in 1993, shortly before beginning work on what would be her finest record in a number of years:
Turbulent Indigo
. Mitchell said she had to let him go. “My main criterion is, am I good for this man? If at a certain point, I feel I'm causing him more problems than growth, then if he doesn't have the sense to get out, I have to kick him out!”
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Mitchell kicked Klein from her life, and she was reawakened creatively, with
Turbulent Indigo
becoming the most decorated album of her career.

The two attended the Grammys together, each with a different date, and as Mitchell relates the story in
JazzTimes
, it was a bittersweet and surreal moment when they went up to accept the prize. “I hadn't slept in fifty-eight hours, so I was delirious when the thing hit. Klein grabbed me and swung me around and we went onto the stage and I was kind of in a dream state. I let him talk, and he went, ‘Uh, uh, uh,' and in my delirium all I could think was ‘Gee, this is why we got divorced: I always have to finish his sentences.'”
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Moments of great romantic crisis and disillusionment often add up to timeless love songs, and what this says about the dynamic between true love and creative output is a tad depressing, because it suggests pain is more prolific and far more successful with the masses than bliss. It suggests the most beautiful melodies are mournful—which we can almost sense intuitively to be true. However, there are a great many songs that have romantic value on both sides of the win-loss column, and most of the great songs known to humankind have been written about love. The investigation into the very fibers of romance is often what keeps an artist going, and Mitchell is no different.

In 2000, she released
Both Sides Now
—a compilation of her own material, as well as torch song classics such as “You're My Thrill,” “Comes Love,” and “You've Changed”—all recorded with a full orchestra. Mitchell says it was one of the high points of her career to hear her songs with a full symphony. She also says reinterpreting romantic standards helped her bring some magic back to love. Although one reviewer called it “pointless,” in Mitchell's view
Both Sides Now
was “one of the most romantic albums... that was ever made.”
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No critic likes too much earnestness, and Mitchell literally wore her heart on her sleeve: the album cover self-portrait features a heart painted into Mitchell's green sleeve. The original self-portrait had been painted years earlier, but Mitchell says she needed a cover and she just happened to see an old painting “lying around.” Heartened by former lover Don Alias's fondness for the image, she repainted her face to age it (with a modest jowl job) and used the final product to package her symphonic ode to Cupid's joy. “I went, heart on the sleeve, that's romantic, that'll do!”
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Mitchell wanted to share the pulsing spirit of love's beauty through classical means, and reunite the heart and mind. “Science has reduced romance to a trick of nature,” Mitchell told her audience for the live show in Philadelphia. Her hope was to reclaim “love's mysteries” and to celebrate them.