Will You Take Me As I Am

Joni Mitchell's Blue Period

Michelle Mercer

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781416559306
• eBook ISBN: 9781416566557
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

Joni Mitchell is one of the most celebrated artists of the last half century, and her landmark 1971 album, Blue, is one of her most beloved and revered works. Generations of people have come of age listening to the album, inspired by the way it clarified their own difficult emotions. Critics and musicians admire the idiosyncratic virtuosity of its compositions. Will You Take Me As I Am -- the first book about Joni Mitchell to include original interviews with her -- looks at Blue to explore the development of an extraordinary artist, the history of songwriting, and much more. In extensive conversations with Mitchell, Michelle Mercer heard firsthand about Joni's internal and external journeys as she composed the largely autobiographical albums of what Mercer calls her Blue Period, which lasted through the mid-1970s. Incorporating biography, memoir, reportage, criticism, and interviews into an illuminating narrative, Mercer moves beyond the "making of an album" genre to arrive at a new form of music writing. In 1970, Mitchell was living with Graham Nash in Laurel Canyon and had made a name for herself as a so-called folk singer notable for her soaring voice and skillful compositions. Soon, though, feeling hemmed in, she fled to the hippie cave community of Matala, Greece. Here and on further travels, her compositions were freshly inspired by the lands and people she encountered as well as by her own radically changing interior landscape. After returning home to record Blue, Mitchell retreated to British Columbia, eventually reemerging as the leader of a successful jazz-rock group and turning outward in her songwriting toward social commentary. Finally, a stint with Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue and a pivotal meeting with the Tibetan lama ChÖgyam Trungpa prompted Mitchell's return to personal songwriting, which resulted in her 1976 masterpiece album, Hejira. Mercer interlaces this fascinating account of Mitchell's Blue Period with meditations on topics related to her work, including the impact of landscape on music, the value of autobiographical songwriting for artist and listener, and the literary history of confessionalism. Mercer also provides rich analyses of Mitchell's creative achievements: her innovative manner of marrying lyrics to melody; her inventive, highly expressive chords that achieve her signature blend of wonder and melancholy; how she pioneered personal songwriting and, along with Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, brought a new literacy to the popular song. Fans will appreciate the previously unpublished photos and a coda of Mitchell's unedited commentary on the places, books, music, pastimes, and philosophies she holds dear. This utterly original book offers a unique portrait of a great musician and her remarkable work, as well as new perspectives on the art of songwriting itself.

1

In the Manner of the Ancients

THE SPRING OF 1970 WAS A LITTLE LATE FOR Joni Mitchell to be dropping in on Matala. In 1968, Life magazine had printed a lavishly illustrated seven-page cover story on the town’s flourishing expatriate hippie culture. In a rocky beach cove just outside the village of about seventy-five people, Life reported, America’s disaffected youth was taking up residence in a merry beehive of cliff caves. The freckled and wholesome Rick Heckler and Cathy Goldman, a kind of countercultural Adam and Eve, adorned the cover: “Young American nomads abroad, two Californians at home in a cave in Matala, Crete.” Some of the kids were “merely off on a lark, doing what the young have done for generations,” sympathized Life writer Thomas Thompson. But there were “too many others caught up in some sort of aimless journey toward an unknown destination.” Even Ulysses, who was fabled to have stopped off at Matala, had been trying to get home. This self-indulgent generation, the writer’s tone suggested, was rejecting everything his readers had struggled to build. These kids were running off to live in caves after all.

But a lot had changed in the two years since the Matala cave colony received such prominent mainstream coverage. By the time Mitchell arrived, parents were not shocked so much as disappointed when their promising college graduate children eschewed gainful employment for a rocky cave somewhere in Greece. Some of those parents were even beginning to work a Matala hippie tour into their sightseeing swings through the islands. Enterprising Greek villagers had put up a concrete parking lot in the muddy town square for the tourists.

If you had to arrive after they paved paradise, it was even more unfashionable to come as Joni Mitchell did, in pleated pants, looking like the successful California recording artist she was. It was pretty fancy attire for a place where kids would drive fifty miles to sell their blood for 350 drachma at the Iráklion hospital. Of course, some of those kids were only playing at poverty; others would be living with it more permanently. The appeal of Matala was that these two kinds of cave dwellers—the middle-class dropouts and the poor kids—could enjoy the same low-rent, high-principled existence there. Idealism was the great leveler.

In talking to some of the people who were in Matala at the time, I discovered something about the culture of the place. On the island back then, cave dwellers loved to talk about Matala’s history, bypassing America’s recent troubled past for nostalgic refuge in the birthplace of Western civilization. Hippies would refer with equal credulity and confidence to the myth that Ulysses himself had stopped there and the fact that the caves had been cut into the accommodating sandstone in Neolithic times. The ancients had used the caves as burial sites, someone had heard. Pirates stored their spoils there. At one time it was a leper colony. The point was, the cave dwellers were the latest in a long lineage of outcasts and freaks, the kind of people who make their own way. The sheer yellow-gray cliff reaching out like a long cradling arm into the Mediterranean was a visual reminder that hippies had come there to “put out,” as the New Testament said metaphorically, “into deep water.” That water as seen from the caves was emerald or sapphire or turquoise, depending on the day or who was looking. Always a rich, jewel-toned hue—in the cave dwellers’ estimation, it was such an elemental place that the water seemed to be its own reward.

In the caves, last names had as little meaning as time. One guy went by Proteus. Another was known as Yogi Joe. In spite of her striking Scandinavian beauty—infinite blond hair, tall, lean frame—and fine, well-pressed clothes, the practice of dressing for a trip a holdover from her small-town Saskatchewan youth, Mitchell arrived pretty anonymously too. Most of the cave dwellers had been checked out of the culture since Joni had achieved some success. Just that month Mitchell had received a Grammy for “Best Folk Performance” for her album Clouds. Even back in the United States, many people didn’t know she was the one who’d written their generational anthem, “Woodstock,” capturing in it the alluring prelapsarian notion of getting “back to the garden.” Crosby, Stills and Nash sang and owned the song just as various other performers were largely credited with Mitchell’s other popular songs: Tom Rush for “Urge for Going,” Buffy Sainte-Marie for “The Circle Game,” and Judy Collins for “Both Sides, Now.” It would be a couple of years before Joni Mitchell posters would grace thousands of dorm room walls.

Mitchell was hoping to blend in with the crowd. She was looking for an escape, as well as a little fun. She was in crisis. In January, she had announced a break from touring, canceling appearances at Carnegie and Constitution halls. She played a final show at Royal Festival Hall in London and returned home to finish Ladies of the Canyon. She thought she’d retreat in Laurel Canyon, her leafy eucalyptus haven rising into the hillside, home to her friends, who happened to be some of rock’s strongest talents, including her lover Graham Nash.

“I was being isolated, starting to feel like a bird in a gilded cage,” she told Rolling Stone reporter Larry LeBlanc later that year at the Mariposa Festival, after she had returned from her travels. “I wasn’t getting a chance to meet people. A certain amount of success cuts you off in a lot of ways. You can’t move freely. I like to live, be on the streets, to be in a crowd and moving freely.” Already, some of her best music had been stimulated by travel. A clarinetist whom she saw playing on a London street inspired “For Free.” “Big Yellow Taxi,” which along with “The Circle Game” was the closest she had ever come to a sing-along hit, was composed when she was on vacation in Hawaii and looked out her hotel window to see a parking lot in paradise. Life in the studio and on tour could become self-referential, and Mitchell was keen to escape the industry for a while. “The experiences I was having were so related to my work. It was reflected in the music,” she said. “I thought I’d like to write on other themes. In order to do this, I had to have other experiences.” She wanted to become her own muse again. Travel would force her to greet each day, person, and scene with a fresh perspective.

There were other reasons Mitchell wished she “had a river to skate away on,” as she sang in “River,” a song she’d written that winter. She couldn’t shake her reputation as an angelic folksinger, which had plagued her ever since Rolling Stone had called her the “penny yellow blonde with a vanilla voice” upon her recording debut in 1968. Also annoying was the constant confusion with Joan Baez and Judy Collins, which had something do with the similarity of their names, true, but Mitchell also saw it as proof that no one was interested in hearing the growing musical complexity that distinguished her from those folk maidens. Worse, her record label, Reprise Records, was making it its business to sell her as a countercultural mascot. Upon the release of Ladies of the Canyon, Reprise took out an advertorial in Rolling Stone with a fictional story about a very hip chick—the sort who tie-dyes curtains for her Volkswagen van—who’s been through a bad breakup but finds solace in the combination of a strong joint and Mitchell’s new record. No hippie Madonna, Mitchell needed a break from her own love life: her life with Graham Nash had certainly seemed idyllic in his 1969 song “Our House,” but she had turned down Graham’s marriage proposal, realizing she couldn’t settle down with him. Maybe she’d find out exactly why on the road.

Mitchell did have one standout hippie prop on hand in Matala. A few months earlier, she had commissioned a mountain dulcimer from a local Los Angeles artisan, Joellen Lapidus, and she took her new instrument on the road. The dulcimer’s soft but bright drone served Mitchell well in the nightly cave music circles, where she held it across her lap, strumming melodies with a flat pick and sliding depressions of the strings to create her own accompaniment while she sang. There was no room for dancing in the caves, so Yogi Joe performed hand dances that cast surreal shadows on the cave walls.

In Matala, Mitchell sometimes borrowed a Gibson guitar from Johnny McKenzie. When he played his songs for her, he remembers her commenting that David Crosby would have liked them. They’d hike together through the fields, looking at peasants walking donkeys in the rustic countryside. Johnny told Mitchell he’d chased a woman across Europe and was sad because he knew she’d never belong to him. “If you want that girl,” he also remembers her saying, “give her a baby.” He’s glad he didn’t do that, no matter how heartbroken he was then.

By mid-April, five weeks into her stay, Mitchell—along with the promise of free food—was the main draw of a highly anticipated event advertised as the “Matala Hippie Convention,” which worried the local Cretan authorities. But pretty much just the same old cave crowd showed up to hear Mitchell sing Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” a tune she’d never consent to do back home. By then she was ready to go. When you’re running away it’s easy to run in the wrong direction. Matala was the kind of place where you went to get free but ended up a prisoner in something like Plato’s cave allegory. Ensconced in the countercultural lifestyle, the shapes of the outside world began to appear less real than hand shadows on the cave walls. Back in 1968, when the Life magazine reporter had relayed the news of Bobby Kennedy’s death and met with no reaction, let alone the stunned grief he expected, he asked, “Is this the new phenomenon? Running away from America and running away from emotion?” “Back to the Garden” had bucolic overtones. But back to the caves? “Everybody was getting a little crazy there,” Mitchell said. “Everybody was getting more and more into open nudity. They were really going back to the caveman. They were wearing little loincloths.”

It didn’t look like the free-spirited vagabond role suited her any better than those of iconic folk maiden or someone’s old lady. She’d have to keep trying to get out from under the myths that other people imposed on her—and that she sometimes imposed on herself. Mitchell knew the caves’ communal life was too distracting for an artist. Now, work would come more easily away from Crete, back in the city. As Annie Dillard wrote, sometimes artists need a room with no view, a place where imagination can meet memory in the dark.

Mitchell arrived late to Matala but left just in time. As Johnny McKenzie remembers it, that was “just after the tourists climbed down the one-bucket well” to bathe, and “just before electricity came.” Often on trips to Crete, the Greek island shuttle boat seemed as if it would sink in the sea’s huge waves. McKenzie and Joni took the same boat on the return trip, and he says the Mediterranean was so calm that it reflected Mitchell’s face like a mirror. After so many salt baths, she was looking scruffy enough to resemble the hippie Madonna she was reputed to be.

But Mitchell’s listeners already know this. Or at least have sensed it. The hippie travel, the escape from the bonds of marriage, the grand dance between romance and disillusionment, the emerging realization that one’s true motives and feelings are not as pure as hoped. We know what she was fighting and seeking as she left Matala and headed to maybe Amsterdam, or maybe Rome, where she’d rent a grand piano and put some flowers round her room. It’s there in the confidences and professions of her music.

“Blue is partly a diary,” Joni told me. “It’s me moving through the backdrop of our changing times. I was in Matala and we got beach tar on our feet and then I went to Ibiza and I went to a party down a red dirt road, then I went to Paris where it was too old and cold and everything was done. But it’s also more than a diary. It’s one chapter in the Great American Novel of my work.”

THE SOUND OF “ALL I WANT” is earthy, strong, and high-toned, attuned to a Mediterranean landscape. You might think you hear a rhythm section. It’s actually just Mitchell alone, slapping her dulcimer’s strings in a calypso beat while a drone adds a tinge of contemplation. After a few bars of these rhythm chords, she brings in some harmony at an odd interval, a fourth, its sense of suspension heightened by the dulcimer’s thin tone. The music moves in a headlong rush, on an exuberant, high-strung search for something.

When Mitchell begins singing, the music has already conveyed mood so vividly that even the simplest lyrics register great poetic impact.

I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, traveling, traveling, traveling

Looking for something, what can it be?

Lyrics and music are so intricately combined that listening is a pleasant confusion of word and sound. The splitting open of self in the lyrics is like a minor chord with no possibility or need of resolution. This is an aural postcard from the edge of feeling, and its intensity is expressed in odd intervals, rhythmic energy, and the strangely thin over-strummed timbre of the dulcimer.

Even back in 1970, smoking has already thickened Mitchell’s vocal cords and brought her upper range down from the helium highs of earlier records like Clouds. But the awareness of her own imperfection gives her voice new grit and backbone: even up high she can no longer be mistaken for Snow White singing to birds, as was sometimes the case on her earlier folk-inflected records.

James Taylor joins in on guitar, mellowing and warming the tune. He plays chords, mostly, momentarily breaking those chords into chains of notes that relax the music and add a little leaf and vine to the landscape. Taylor and Mitchell were in love when the recording was made, but this is tempered by Mitchell’s lyrical admission that love can be tainted by other emotions.

Oh I hate you some, I hate you some, I love you some

Oh I love you when I forget about me.

Along with its spare arrangement, this animate truth makes “All I Want” as affecting now as it was when first released in 1971. Above all, there’s more raw emotion and nerve than anything Mitchell had done before. “I was demanding of myself a greater and greater honesty,” she said of the period in which she recorded the song in a 2003 PBS interview, “so that it strikes against the very nerves of people’s lives.” Like the other songs she wrote in 1970 and recorded on Blue, “All I Want” has the sound of dawning self-knowledge. The music has shades of an intensely interior existence confronting the big sky and open water of experience. Because that’s how Joni Mitchell’s life played out that year. Mitchell went out traveling to find herself and is telling us what she found. Just after the record was finished, she played it for some songwriter friends.

“At that time we were still young enough that we played our songs for each other. It horrified all the male singer-songwriters around me. I was amazed. They’d listen to it and they’d go [swallowing sound]. They were embarrassed for me. Because the popular song had been about posturing. It had been self-aggrandizing. The feminine appetite for intimacy is stronger than it is in men. So my songwriter friends listened and they all shut down, even Neil Young. The only one who spoke up was Kris Kristofferson. ‘Jesus, Joni,’ he said. ‘Save something for yourself.’”

ZEUS WAS BORN twelve miles north of Matala and about several hundred miles south of the place he proclaimed the center of the earth: Delphi, where heaven and earth met, where man was closest to the gods. In Delphi, the oracle received the god Apollo’s first commandment: “Know thyself.” This notion of the self as the passageway of spiritual ascent was so central to the Greek worldview that Apollo’s directive was inscribed over the oracle’s doorway.

Knowing yourself is one thing. Writing, or singing, or even just revealing that self-knowledge to others is another. How did we get from knowing yourself to baring yourself so nakedly that people recommend that you just clam up? For that, we have to look away from Delphi, south of Matala, as Mitchell did when she sang, “The wind is in from Africa / Last night I couldn’t sleep.” As a resident of the seaside cliff caves, you heard and felt the sorokos howling from the Sahara, carrying scorched dust or the rough dream-robbing phantom of it, all the way from Libya. While Mitchell’s self-observation stems from ancient Greece, the fact that she told us about her sleeplessness—her very act of letting us in on it—can be traced back across the Mediterranean to the North Africa of the fourth century. There was of course an intervening millennium or so and lots of significant literary and social history around the world. But essentially, it all goes back to Tagaste, near ancient Carthage, where St. Augustine of Hippo was born. It was Augustine who first defined and exemplified the practice of revealing the self and its history in words, thereby inventing autobiography in the Western world.

In 397, when Augustine began to write the thirteen books of his Confessions, he had been a baptized Catholic for ten years and a bishop for two. Ordination sat rather uneasily with Augustine. He wanted a monastic life rather than his bishop’s church service job, which carried a magistrate’s tedious responsibilities. By training, he was a rhetorician, the late Roman period’s equivalent of a man of letters, but that’s not why he wrote the Confessions. He addresses that issue, for God and for us, at the beginning of Book 1. “Why then do I put before you in order the stories of so many things?” Well, it’s because he’s lost. “I have become an enigma to myself,” he says, “and herein lies my sickness and inner struggle.” Since his own questing mind is his closest companion, Augustine has the bright idea of using that mind to objectify and understand himself. In merging Augustine the pro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• ALSO BY MICHELLE MERCER
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• A Note from the Author
• Introduction
• 1. In the Manner of the Ancients
• 2. Eyes on the Land and the Sky
• 3. Art Songs
• 4. Singing the Blues Makes You Bluer
• 5. Beyond Personal Songwriting
• 6. The Breadth of Extremities
• Coda: Stuff Joni Likes or Even Loves
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• NOTES
• Permissions
• About the Author
• Photographic Insert