Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (57 page)

Joni and John Guerin reunited shortly afterward.

Court and Spark
was released in January 1974, and the pleading, scatty “Help Me” was released in March, becoming Joni's first—and only—Top 10 single. The critics were even more ecstatic than they'd been with
For the Roses.
Robert Hilburn called it “a virtually flawless album that may well contain the most finely honed collection of songs and most fully realized arrangements in the singer-songwriter's distinguished career.” Robert Christgau of
The Village Voice
decreed Joni “the best singer-songwriter there is right now.”
Rolling Stone
's Jon Landau called the album “the first truly great album of 1974” (granted, 1974 was only two months old when he wrote that). The
Chicago Tribune
's Lynn Van Matre, who always lent a bit of feminism to her reviews (and who paired her review of Joni's sixth album to Carly's near-simultaneously released fourth one,
Hotcakes
—giving Joni points for depth and Carly points for humor, and having the good sense to
not
mention James Taylor), agreed.
Court and Spark,
Van Matre said, was “pure Mitchell,” but with “clearer lyrics” than before, Joni “connec[ting]” to the listeners “beautifully.” At this point, though, reviewers were painstakingly trying to figure out what Joni's songs
meant,
other than the eternal balance between love and freedom. Landau says, “The lyrics lead us through concentric circles that define an almost Zen-like dilemma: The freer the writer becomes, the more unhappy she finds herself.” And: “No thought or emotion is expressed without some equally forceful statement of its negation.” His effort and tolerance reveal what would be a problem: you can't keep writing endlessly about the ups and downs of love; freedom has its limits as a subject. Joni would have (after
Court and Spark
) one masterful exploration of that theme left in her—
Hejira
—and then, like Carole after
Tapestry,
where she would choose to go and where her fans
wanted
her to go would, painfully, diverge.

Court and Spark
was Joni's first smash hit. It charted at #2 and stayed there for four weeks, then went platinum, with over a million copies sold. It received Grammy nominations for Album of the Year and Record of the Year (“Help Me”), and Joni for Best Pop Female Vocalist. (When Olivia Newton-John won instead, there was audible dismay from the audience.) Joni and her boys went on a fifty-city tour, from which was produced a live album,
Miles of Aisles,
which, in November,
also
reached #2. This rush of mainstream success was new for Joni, and road life had been grinding. She let her friend Ron Stone remain at her Lookout Mountain house, and, by the end of 1974, she bought an elegant Spanish home built in 1929 atop a private Bel Air road. Its intricate wrought-iron gates opened into a fountained courtyard, and there was a pool, of course. John Guerin packed up his drums and jazz records and moved in with her.

Over the next year and a half, working with a decorator, Joni would turn the home into a Mediterranean palazzo of warmth and glamour. She hired a live-in South American maid, Dora, who would become her life manager and who enjoyed Joni's largesse—driving around town in a little red sports car, taking Club Med vacations—while putting up with her boss's temper. (In the middle of one argument, Joni struck Dora.)

Despite the luxury, Joni continued to think of herself as “a ‘seeker,'” John said. “She had this image of herself as being an artist who'd go up to Canada and be a hermit and starve herself—and
that
I
wouldn't
let her do. She was driven; she'd get tunnel-visioned: She'd be up all night honing lyrics, and she'd hone them again and again. I'd say, ‘Joan, that's beautiful!' The next night she'd rehone it. I'd say, ‘Damn, Joan, I love it!' Tomorrow it's a little different, and I usually loved it more.”

John helped her have fun—they went to Rio and Bahia during Carnival and had wild nights dancing the samba. They were crazy in their different ways. “He was this wild man who would give big bashes; one time Sarah Vaughan came, and the party went on for days,” a friend says, while Joni was the pushy adventurer (“She just put herself out there, got herself in there…,” John said, bemused): dragging him along on explorations that often led to her being bawled out or run out of town. They were screamed away from the doorstep of an Indian turquoise craftsman she'd insisted on visiting in the middle of the night; the next day she was angrily stared down by Hopi kids whose pictures she tried to take. Another time, Joni was snapping pictures of the old people “who didn't know who she was” in rural Canadian luncheonettes. John expected one of them to take her camera and smash it. And, through a Beale Street pawnbroker, Joni sleuthed out the great Furry Lewis and arrived at his house bearing gifts: a fifth of Jack Daniel's and a carton of Pall Malls. But while he was sitting there (“propped up in his bed, with his dentures and his leg removed”), something popped out of Joni's mouth that made the cranky old bluesman turn nasty. He loudly snarled to another person present, “I don't like her.” (Joni used the line in “Furry Sings the Blues,” on
Hejira
and—in certain cases, she could get as well as she could give—Furry claimed she owed him royalties.)

Joni's next album,
The Hissing of Summer Lawns,
was released in November 1975, and it embodied the duality between the wealthy mansion dweller and the gleefully nosy provocateur. The awkward title (named for the sound of Bel Air sprinklers in the title song about a trophy wife) shouted “upper middle class.” But like a conceptual artist, Joni
played
with this fact. The album's internal photo showed her submerged in her Bel Air pool, and the Joni-painted cover—a miragelike downtown L.A. in the backdrop of a surreal pea-soup-green megalawn on which African tribesmen are carrying a long, snakelike communal drum (illustrating the album's most innovative—and strange—cut, “The Jungle Line,” featuring drummers from the African nation of Burundi)—announced that she was mocking her own affluence with intentionally controversial symbols.

Joni was leaving behind the confessionalism that had intensely defined
Blue, For the Roses,
and
Court and Spark.
This new album, as Stephen Holden put it, was Joni doing “social philosophy. All the characters are American stereotypes who act out socially determined rituals of power and submission in exquisitely described settings. Mitchell's eye for detail is…precise and…panoramic.” The intellectual substance Holden saw in
Hissing
(for which Guerin played drums) was small comfort to her bewildered fans, who had come to Joni to
feel.
There are hum-along-with cuts—the lovely “Shades of Scarlett Conquering,” which presents (a disguised) Ronee Blakley, who had just had a star turn in Robert Altman's
Nashville,
as a diva coquette; and the bubbly, sexy “In France They Kiss on Main Street,” which evokes her teen years at the Y dances and Commodore Cafe, and which became a moderate hit. But others—“The Boho Dance,” about starving-artist hypocrisy; the pretentious, semiliturgical “Shadows and Light”; and “Harry's House,” about a wealthy man and woman separating—seem preachy or (odd for Joni)
wordy,
though a Lambert, Hendricks and Ross song inset on that latter song is wittily sublime. Joni had recently been the subject of a major
Time
profile, in which she said, apparently unfacetiously, that her “lover was a man named Art.” Despite the fact that her real lover was meat-and-potatoes-and-
Monday-Night-Football
Guerin, with whom she talked shop (they had endless arguments about “the root of the chord”), that self-seriousness on
Hissing
was undisguised. Although
Hissing
shot to #4—
Court and Spark
's wake was strong—the negative reviews (the
Detroit News,
for example, called it “sometimes so smug that it is downright irritating”) upset her.

“Joni was very self-involved and thin-skinned,” John recalled. “Elliot would keep the bad reviews away from her, which I thought was really dumb—I thought it was abnormal; she should have been way past that. But Joan remembers everything any critic said about her.” Joni was vulnerable in general. “There were days where she'd lose her self-confidence—and days when she didn't feel like the prettiest girl on the block.”

At some point in 1975, Joni and John became quietly engaged. “We had wedding rings made,” he said. “Joan designed them—gold, with a kind of hieroglyphic that meant ‘lasting relationship' in some Eastern language.” (John, who was married twice after his breakup from Joni, kept his ring until he died.) “We had dinner with her folks and discussed where the wedding was going to be.” A baby was not in the picture, John said. As for the baby she'd already had—“there were times she would feel maternal, but she didn't dwell on it. It was gone. Who knows what kind of guilt she really felt, but she had set up a defense mechanism a long time ago and that's the way she handled it.”

• • •

At the same time that
Hissing
was released, in November 1975, Joni flew to the East Coast to join Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue, an intentionally nostalgic coast-to-coast rock tour that doubled as a fund-raiser for imprisoned prizefighter Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, who was seeking a retrial after having been convicted of murder. The tour, which featured Dylan and Baez singing “Blowin' in the Wind” as if it were 1963 all over again, was tinged with historical symbolism (it kicked off near Plymouth Rock, for one thing). It was also, behind the scenes, full of drugs, angst, and misunderstandings—as Joni would put it, in song, the participants were indulging in “pills and powders to get them through this passion play.” (It was during the tour that Joni's friendship with Ronee Blakley was severed.) Along on the tour—he would cowrite, with Dylan, the movie
Renaldo and Clara
that essentially came out of it—was Sam Shepard.

Shepard was one of the most award-winning of Off-Broadway play-wrights (he later won a Pulitzer), a sometime musician, film actor, former downtown Manhattan scene-maker, self-styled cowboy—and a devastatingly attractive man. Shepard and Joni were exactly two days apart in age; they both turned thirty-two during their time on the tour. He was a physical type she had cottoned to before; like Eric Andersen, Tom Rush, James Taylor, and Jackson Browne, he was, under his long hair and scowly sensitivity, as neatly WASP-handsome as any debutante-escorting Wall Street scion out of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Joni had planned to follow the tour for only three cities, and, at that, as an observer. But, for what she has called “mystical reasons of my own,” she stayed on for the duration of its '75 leg. (There was a 1976 leg as well, which did not include her.) A song started “coming” to her, and she wrote pieces of it during the bus rides. Called “Coyote,” it would be one of her wittiest, sexiest, and most un-self-pitying, telling the story of a woman in a transient situation who meets a stranger from a beguilingly different background: a cowboy. (What Joni was writing, of course, Carole was living.) A brief, humorous but avariciously erotic affair seems to ensue in funky roadhouses and hotels with lots of “keyholes and numbered doors.”

For years, fans who loved the casual, devil-may-care-about-feminism abandon of the song, which would lead off her 1977 album
Hejira,
have wondered
who
“Coyote” was. Who was the man who has
two
other women but, Joni sang in a flattered flush, still wants her? And the one who inspired one of Joni's ten best lines ever: in a coffee shop in the morning, right after their tryst, the sexy brooder is “staring a hole in his scrambled eggs”; then he “picks up my scent on his fingers while he watches the waitress's legs.”

“Coyote” was Sam Shepard.

Joni's breezy adieu of a hook—“No regrets, Coyote!”—is a sort of ten-years-later version of “Cactus Tree” 's “She will love them when she sees them.” And it is how any sophisticated woman in her early thirties would want an affair to end. But whether or not that interlude with Coyote/ Shepard was so blithely inconsequential is questionable.

Joni and John and her band embarked on the
Hissing
tour in mid-January 1976. Joni sang the deliciously suggestive “Coyote” on the tour and told audiences that it had come to her during Rolling Thunder. Before the end of the
Hissing
tour, for reasons that may or may not have had to do with the source of the song, Joni and John had such a big fight that the rest of the tour (including its international leg) was canceled. They broke up—this time (they thought) for good. His version of events: “I finally left. There was too much water under the bridge—I'm not gonna cite a certain thing, an ‘I did this, she did that.' We had our differences, but it was a buildup.”