Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (56 page)

Her near-simultaneously written “The Same Situation” is thought by at least one of her subsequent boyfriends, Dave Naylor, to be Joni's Warren Beatty song, just as “You're So Vain” was Carly's. Tucked inside this sensitive song about her unceasing “search for love” lies a Me Decade celebrity-romance chess game. A bored playboy who's gone through an infinite number of desirable women now fixes his “gaze” on her.
She's
blasé as well, having been, “for so many years” now, in that “same situation” of being desired and narcissistically pampered (those ringing phones, those proffered mirrors), and she assumes they're equal. The man is an earnest, cerebral, let's-really-communicate sort. With Joni, brutal candor is best withheld for her songs, where she keeps all the power, so his pseudo-caring entreaty that they be “truthful” is as threatening as if it had come from “the church…a cop…[or] a mother.” When she obligingly lets down her guard, he turns around and uses her candor as a “weapon” against her. By now, she's snared; she craves his “approval.” Game over.

Meanwhile, as Joni was recovering from her breakdown in the sophisticated, hip Hollywood fishbowl, Jackson was making a life with Phyllis Major. Phyllis had quickly become pregnant, and their baby boy, Ethan, was born in early November 1973.

Joni remained deeply angry at Jackson for years. Said percussionist Don Alias, who became her serious boyfriend for several years in the late 1970s, “She really had this hatred of Jackson Browne; the whole Jackson Browne thing was really heavy for her.” A woman very close to Joni was left with the belief that “you may have to be very strong to take on Jackson—from what I've heard he's a classic example of someone who has a Madonna-and-whore complex.” (However, Jackson's pre-Joni girlfriend Salli Sachse experienced nothing negative in their relationship.)

The Jackson Browne story had a tragic dimension that kept it smoldering for Joni. Shortly before or after she married Jackson (in December 1975, two years after their son was born), Phyllis Major attempted suicide. People in their immediate circle knew about the attempt; among other things, she'd discreetly stolen drugs from them for that purpose. “Phyllis went around and gathered up everything,” says one woman who was a close friend. “I had some chloral hydrate”—a sedative—“and a little vial of opium, and she just scooped up everything. She left notes for everybody—to me, to Jackson—saying ‘I'm sorry' and words to the effect of, ‘I can't stand the pain.'” Phyllis was revived in time. But then, on March 25, 1976, with two-and-a-half-year-old Ethan and the nanny in an adjacent room, Phyllis succeeded in taking enough drugs to kill herself. “It was terrible, just terrible,” says the friend. The tragedy was a brushfire through their circle, which Joni memorialized in a coded reference in her 1976 “Song for Sharon” on
Hejira.
Their friend had “drowned” herself—perhaps, Joni noted with an esoteric pointedness, to “
punis[h]
somebody.”
*

Joni attended Phyllis Major Browne's funeral in Santa Barbara (Jackson was angry that she'd come), and the parallel struck her deeply and bitterly.
She
had made a suicide attempt over Jackson; Phyllis had tried and failed. And now Phyllis had succeeded.

Years after that, in September 1992, Jackson Browne's longtime girlfriend, actress Daryl Hannah, accused him of beating her up. The widely reported alleged incident (its notoriety had spiked when Daryl's ex- and future boyfriend John Kennedy Jr. came to her rescue and flew her back to New York) remained murky for months after, with no charges ever pressed by Hannah, with Browne and his friends denying he'd struck her (the incident was “grievously misreported,” says a Browne fan site), and with a flurry of contradictory accounts by after-the-fact witnesses and authorities.
**
It was after this scandal that Joni went public with her anger at Jackson Browne (though not the secret, personal, original reason for it), by way of “Not to Blame,” her song about domestic violence on
Turbulent Indigo.
It mentions his recent news-making fight with Hannah, his denial of beating her, and his friends' support of him.
Obviously
—Joni sings, with hurt and anger—he was “not to blame”; surely, the woman brought it on herself. The song is unusually biting. (In a questionable move, Joni describes a child seemingly meant to be three-year-old Ethan Browne in a gratuitously negative light.) It then moves from (the unnamed) Daryl to (the unnamed) Phyllis, and recalls a scene at Phyllis's “lonely little grave,” where the funeral guests didn't shed tears for their friend and didn't blame Jackson for her death. Listeners had no idea how personal were the biting lines about the man “dri[ving]” the vulnerable woman “to suicide.” Joni wasn't just writing about Phyllis; she was writing about her late-1972 self.
*

• • •

Joni went back to living with Geffen, and she planned her next album,
Court and Spark,
which would include the three veiled songs about the Jackson-centered breakdown, as well as the baleful “The Same Situation.” The album's title song opened with some of the most arresting images she'd ever conceived, describing love as showing up like a scavenger on a porch, “with a sleeping roll and a madman's soul.”

Joni started doing demo recordings of the songs of
Court and Spark,
with Henry Lewy assisting as usual, in the summer of 1973. Russ Kunkel was signed on as drummer, but, with these new songs, something wasn't working. “I was trying to lead [Russ] through this piece of music, and there were grace notes and subtleties and things that I thought were getting kind of buried because Russell has a great, strong kind of rock style,” Joni has said. “Russ said, ‘Joni, I can't play to this music. I think you should get yourself a jazz drummer.'” So Joni went around to jazz clubs with Lewy, and at a club called the Hot Potato she listened to the jazz-rock fusion group L.A. Express, led by saxophonist Tom Scott (who'd played on
For the Roses
). Scott's group was brought in to work on
Court and Spark
(they were finishing up an album of their own in the adjacent studio); its drummer—Kunkel's replacement as the album's heartbeat—happened to be one of the best young jazz drummers in L.A., John Guerin.

Guerin, thirty-three, had grown up in San Diego after spending the first three years of his life in Hawaii, the son of a navy man. (Having been a toddler during the Japanese strike at Pearl Harbor, he recalled that for years after “whenever I heard a siren, I'd go looking for a tree to run under.”) Guerin played only jazz; he listened only to jazz; he was a “jazz snob” who had worked with most of the greats—Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra, Carmen McRae. “The only one I missed”—she'd died a year before he'd turned pro—“was Billie Holiday,” Guerin said (speaking, here and throughout, in an interview that he gave for this book four months before his January 2004 death). When Scott proposed they work with Joni, Guerin thought: What am I doing backing a
folk
singer?

But when he listened to her songs, he was awestruck. “She was the whole orchestra in one guitar!”

As they sat directly across from one another during the weeks of sessions—Joni in her glass half-isolation booth—an intense connection developed. John was a sexy guy with a wide, pug nose, toothy devilish grin (telegraphing his wild ways), and a mop of thick dark hair, like Warren Beatty would soon sport in
Shampoo,
only messier. He and Joni played to each other, voice to beat, eye to eye—a
click!
that, in Guerin's experience, was often struck between two bell-jarred session musicians, regardless of gender, who found themselves really cooking. Joni, he realized, was
no
folksinger—or
any
kind of conventional singer or composer. “You didn't go whistling Joni's tunes. They were much more complicated; not A-A-B-A form, not Gershwin. Joni's songs didn't have the usual hook; she would form the music to her lyrical thought and sometimes go across bars and in different time signatures—she didn't care.” Guerin and the others in the Express went along with her plan, puzzled at first. “But then it
all
made sense. It really did.”

“Court and Spark”—the stark a cappella opening lines of the poem (delivered in Joni's chain-smoking-lowered voice) unexpectedly opening up into a kick-ass, wailing-sax, full-band blow-out—announces right away that this is no typical Joni Mitchell album. For “Help Me” and “Free Man in Paris” she marries her signature vocal bends to a jazzy, commercial feel. “Raised on Robbery” is a boogie-woogie-bugle-boy-tinged rocker. “Car on a Hill” has movie sound effects; “Make it sound like cars and traffic!” Joni had ordered Tom Scott and slide guitarist Wayne Perkins—and they
did.
The juxtaposition of dark, crashing “car” horns with sugary, girl-group backup on the “
climb
-ing”s gives the song a mysterious, ironic, likable energy. One reviewer called it “wrenching.” Her three vulnerability songs (“The Same Situation,” “Trouble Child,” and “People's Parties”) are joined in pensiveness by “Down to You” and leavened by the balmy, bemused “Just Like This Train” (with its witty locomotive metaphor for her history of being emotionally high-maintenance—“shaking into town / with the brakes complaining”) and her Carly-esque fantasy of “dreaming of the pleasure” of taking a vain man down a peg. She closes by channeling her teenage role model, Annie Ross, in “Twisted”; she uses Cheech and Chong (
“No driver on the top?!”
) to have some bebop-chorus fun with it. Joni had needed a band of guys to shake her out of her blues (today, she has a group of pool-playing buddies she's dubbed the Sunday Boys, for this same reason), and the jazz-rock listener-friendliness (sometimes just barely skirting TV-soundtrack slickness) of this album lofted Joni to a new commercial dimension and buoyed her to emotional health.
This
was her plunge into the Canadian waters.

Guerin, who was divorced, had dated lots of singers, but they'd merely interpreted material. “Joan was a different kind of animal,” he said. She
created.
“A lot of” what he fell in love with “had to do with her out-and-out talent. I was amazed at her talent for most of our relationship. She didn't have patience for repetition or rules. I never paid attention to lyrics before; I listened to a singer's timbre or phrasing or the quality of her voice. Boy, she changed that for me! She opened up my ears to
words.
For Chrissakes, she turned me on to
James Taylor
”—whom he'd never listened to, on jazz-snob principle—“who I love!

“And I taught her things, in exchange. She learned what the rhythm section does—she'd never paid any attention to that, or to jazz, for that matter.” John played her a steady diet of Horace Silver and Miles Davis and “definitely Coltrane. She just drank it in—which she does; she's self-taught, like I am. It was a wonderful trade.”

But the key to the trade was their personalities. Joni was only half out of her depression when they met, and John's down-to-earth (and hell-raising) quality seemed to pull her the rest of the way out. As she later put it in “Refuge of the Roads” (one of her favorite of her own songs), he was the “friend of spirit” who “mirrored me back, simplified.” He, too, saw their fit that way; “Joan's a very complicated person and I'm a pretty straightahead guy. I think she lightened up a lot with me”—even though, as she put it in the song, their “perfection would always be denied.” Says a close friend, “It was a very turbulent, highly sexually charged relationship; they broke up six or seven times” over five years. John Guerin would be one of the great loves of her life. And, for increasingly grudge-holding Joni (“If you're in Joan's life, you're gonna get blamed,” says subsequent beau Dave Naylor; “Joan rewrites history really well, and once she tells a story once or twice in her head, it becomes true to her—I call it her ‘iron whim'”), Guerin was that rare lover “who she never said anything bad about,” says another friend. “She was
crazy
about John Guerin.”

One of their first breakups occurred just after
Court and Spark
was finished. John was unfaithful, which she would document in
Hejira
's “Blue Motel Room.” She paid him back by having a six-week liaison with session guitarist (and sometime Leon Russell bandmate) Wayne Perkins, a handsome half-Cherokee Alabaman. Perkins was just twenty-two, but having grown up in a big country-and-church-music-playing family, he had good music sense. He'd helped talk Joni into putting “Free Man in Paris” on the album, and he played her vintage discs of regional legends Lord Buckley, the Alabama State Troopers, and Furry Lewis, a seminal blues guitarist who started out as a protégé of W. C. Handy. Joni was very taken by Furry, who was still alive (though in decrepitude) in Memphis.

Joni's house-sharing with Geffen had a wacky eye-of-the-needle glamour, like an early-1970s elite Hollywood version of the TV show
Friends.
One night Joni and Wayne were on their way downstairs for a midnight swim in Geffen's pool when, on the stairs, they bumped into Geffen and his then-squeeze Cher—“bouncing off the walls, laughing like crazy,” Wayne remembers. “They couldn't get upstairs [to his bedroom] fast enough,” which only put Joni and Wayne in a hotter mood for skinny-dipping and its aftermath. (Geffen came out as a gay man after the Cher romance.) Another time, Wayne woke up to Joni's proffering of “this huge stein of tea, with milk and sugar, the way the English and Canadians serve it,” and went downstairs to find Bob Dylan on a bar stool reading
The New York Times
and talking with Geffen about their just-released
Planet Waves,
along with Joni's dulcimer maker, Joellen Lapidus. Joni made omelettes, and the morning turned into an all-star guitar-dulcimer-tambourine jam session.