Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (58 page)

Joni stayed with her friend Neil Young for a while to sort out her life; then, around late spring, she embarked on a cross-country road trip, traversing the northern part of America, west to east, with two male friends. One of her road mates, in the midst of a custody battle, was picking up his young daughter from the child's grandmother in Maine; the other, who was considerably younger than Joni and with whom she became briefly involved, was the inscrutable near-juvenile (“he lives with his family…”) that Joni describes in “A Strange Boy.”

After her road companions remained on the East Coast, Joni rented a white Mercedes, donned a red wig, renamed herself “Charlene Lattimer,” and drove herself back across the country, this time taking the southern route. But the trip—her
hejira
—was undeniably symbolic, from the brassy red wig (denoting a female performance-art-like adventure) to the fact that she was undertaking it all by herself: the contemplation-breeding solitude; the arduous, unshared driving. To the fact that she was making it while America was celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence: freedom for the thirteen colonies; freedom (yet again) for the Cactus Tree girl. The long trip seemed to highlight how out on a limb she'd chosen to climb. As with more than a few other women in their early thirties, the indecisiveness that had started as a temporary principled rebellion had become her life. Six years ago she'd journeyed through Europe—sleeping in Matala caves and Ibiza
fincas
—to shake off a relationship with Graham. Now, in shaking off John, cold-water interstate restrooms, blue motel rooms, and Winn-Dixie cold cuts formed the starker backdrop and sustenance for her advanced reflections.

As she drove and stopped and drove and stopped, she wrote song-postcards from the road, many of them puzzling out the breakup. The half tongue-in-cheek 1940s torch-style “Blue Motel Room” mused about getting back with John. In the title song, “Hejira” (literally, “Mohammed's flight from danger”), Joni embraces her “melancholy,” as she has so many times before, but this time—months from turning thirty-three—thoughts of mortality encroach; while she's visiting a church in one of the cities, the wax from the devotional candles “rolls down like tears.” Continuing on, she falls “in with some drifters cast upon a beach town” on the Gulf of Mexico; “Charlene Lattimer” ends up making them dinner (it's not only the likes of Geffen, Dylan, Cher, and Sarah Vaughan that she'd cook for) and thinks fondly of them as she drives on. We eavesdrop as she seeks relief from her oppressive analytic thinking and her deep self-absorption. She is grateful when she succeeds at ditching the former (in a forest, she marvels at the “muscular” clouds and exhorts the sun to “shine on your witness!”). She also overcomes the latter: while gassing up at a service station, she is riveted by a tacked-up photo of the earth taken from the moon and by the fact that “you couldn't see a city / on that marbled bowling ball…[emphasis added] or
me here,
least of all.” “Westbound and rolling,” she's finding solace in the “refuge of the roads”—that line, the title of the song.

The trip's profound epiphany comes near journey's end. Nine years earlier, Roy Blumenfeld had thought of Joni as “Dorothy, trying to find her way home.” Now a different storied female—not naïve, like the fluffy-dog-toting victim of the Kansas tornado, but rather a skilled woman who
chose
her risks—comes into play. Traversing a strip of highway “through the burning desert” of the Southwest, the silence is broken by an overhead burst of “six jet planes”—probably a test formation from a nearby military base. Those thin metal stripes in the sky remind Joni of “the strings of my guitar,” and she—solo-piloting her vehicle across the perilously empty hot sand—feels a sharp kinship with another solo pilot: Amelia Earhart. Joni checks into “the Cactus Tree Motel, to shower off the dust” of all that journeying, literal and figurative; she sets her head on the “pillows of my wanderlust.” The song she writes that night braids Earhart's disappearance with her own protracted wrestling with her vulnerability in affairs of the heart and her ever-reasserting need for independence. Six words about dashed anticipation—“It was just a false alarm”—end every stanza. For Earhart, the “false alarm”—the thing that never came—was a rescue vessel. Joni's “false alarm” is disproof of the fear she'd expressed in “River,” that she is incapable of love, destined to spend her whole emotional life “in clouds at icy altitudes.” “Clouds,” “planes,” “cactus tree,” “wanderlust,” “roads,” “picture-postcard charms”: ten years of her images and preoccupations woven into one penetrating hymn. Conceived at the end of the long drive that capped off six years of fraught relationships, the tour de force “Amelia” would be the last deeply soul-baring song the young Joni Mitchell would ever write. She'd said it all.

• • •

One day in late 1977, when J. D. Souther walked into Peter and Betsy Asher's house on Summit Ridge Drive, he was introduced by the Ashers to a trim black man, his face half-hidden by big shades and a wide, thick mustache. The dude's name was Claude, and Souther took him to be a pimp. He was nattily attired in dark creased pants, white vest, light, pointy-collared shirt, and white jacket. His fluffy Afro was topped by a slick chapeau. For ten minutes there was minimal small talk among the group—the Ashers, Souther, Claude, Danny Kortchmar. Claude didn't say much; yeah, well, pimps, y'know.

Claude took off his hat. And then he took off his
wig.
Claude was
Joni,
in blackface. Souther and Joni had been lovers, but he hadn't recognized her under the costume. This was her new alter ego, a character she would imminently name “Art Nouveau,” her “inner black person,” as her friend and archivist Joel Bernstein wryly puts it.

Like many young white people of her generation, Joni romanticized being black (without the disadvantages of being black, of course). She would increasingly insist that her music was “black” and that, as it progressed deeply into jazz, it should be played on black stations (it rarely was). “My harmonies were not very ‘white,' like James Taylor's or Carole King's,” she would later say (wrongly, in the case of Carole, whose music is largely R&B-based). “I gravitated toward…‘black' voicings out of gospel and jazz, because they mirrored what I was feeling.” Joni has repeatedly said that she has already written the first line of her autobiography, and (perhaps referring to the day at the Ashers') it is this: “I was the only black man in the room.”

It is easy to take the insistence by a blond granddaughter of Nordic-Scottish-French-Irish Canadian farmers that she is somehow “black” as an offensive delusion, or at best a dry performance art conceit. But such crossover hubris wasn't only quintessentially '60s-generation (à la Ellen Willis's remark); it was also timelessly
American,
in the opinion of cultural critic Stanley Crouch. The heroine of Crouch's novel
Don't the Moon Look Lonesome
is a young blond woman from (Saskatoon-longitude) South Dakota, whose jazz singing and long relationship with a black jazz musician represents both an attempt to embrace racial Otherness
and
a confrontation with the limits of doing so. When Crouch's novel was published in 2000, the character was compared to Peggy Lee. In a way, it is Joni—Joni from 1977 to 1980.

After
Hejira
was released in late November 1976 to good sales (peaking at #13 in
Billboard
) and reviews (with
The New York Times
's Stephen Holden later noting that “Miss Mitchell refined Bob Dylan's elongated narrative line into a folk pop poetry of unprecedented density and sophistication”), Joni discarded confessionalism. She picked up where
Hissing
had left off, with an album she called
Don Juan's Reckless Daughter,
the cover of which bore, among others, the image of Joni as the black pimp Art Nouveau. It was during the making of this album that Joni met Don Alias, the jazz musician with whom she would have a serious three-and-a-half-year relationship.

Born in Harlem and a pre-med graduate of Pennsylvania's Gannon University, Don Alias was in many ways uncannily like John Guerin. Both were almost exactly four years older than Joni; both were drummers and total jazzmen from whom Joni learned a great deal about the idiom; and both were men of whom, despite having had “tempestuous” relationships with them, Joni remained fond. (Another sad similarity: both Guerin and Alias died, in 2004 and 2006, respectively, of heart failure.)

A handsome, very tall, dark-copper-skinned man with a trim Afro and a wide mustache, Alias was a percussionist who eventually specialized in an Afro-Cuban sound. He'd played with Dizzy Gillespie and with Eartha Kitt's dance troupe in the late 1950s; then he'd been Nina Simone's musical director for three years. From 1969 to 1971, he'd worked with Miles Davis—his congas can be heard on
Bitches Brew
—and he toured with Miles. Jaco Pastorius, considered the best jazz bass player in the business, was working with Joni on
Don Juan's Reckless Daughter.
Pastorius's input was crucial on the album; in the same way she needed a jazz drummer for
Court and Spark,
she needed a jazz
bassist
now. Pastorius had called in Alias. Don's reaction to the prospect of working with Joni Mitchell was close to what Guerin's had been. “I thought, ‘Oh, another one of those skinny-ass folksingers,'” he recalled, in an interview he gave for this book, two years before his death. As with Guerin, once Alias got into the studio, he was stunningly disabused of his condescension. “What a genius of a musician Joni was! And intuitive! And eloquent!” As she had to Wayne Perkins and Tom Scott on “Car on a Hill,” she told Don, “Sound like a garbage can!” “Sound like something's falling down the stairs!” He quickly came around to viewing
Don Juan's
as “just one of those great artistic Joni Mitchell albums.” Winning over jazz musicians was now her point of pride.

Don remembered, “There was definitely a warmth being built up during the session, definitely a
thing.
” One night Joni suggested going dancing at On the Rox, the Roxy's upstairs private club. “And it happened there; it happened there as we danced. I fell in love with her. I fell in love with her openness—what openness! I fell in love with her childlikeness, that wide-eyed childlike quality. And her independence and intelligence.”

They became a couple. In a trip that Don said was “supposed to be our kind of honeymoon,” he and Joni rented an RV and drove from L.A. to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Joni had found out the address of her hero, ninety-year-old Georgia O'Keeffe. As usual, she was going to just show up, uninvited, at a doorstep. Don hadn't heard of O'Keeffe before he met Joni, “and then she showed me some of those paintings—how naturally erotic those flowers were.” On the drive down, Don wrote a song in honor of the legendary painter. “
Geor
-gia O'
Keeffe! Geor
-gia O'
Keeffe!
” he sang, rhythmically slapping the congas while Joni drove. And they both laughed when, finding themselves starved, in the desolate area of desert where the movie
Giant
had been filmed, it took them an hour to drive to the closest restaurant for some (very bad) Chinese food.

When they got to O'Keeffe's gate, “this was her moment,” Don recalled. “I said, ‘You go ahead, Joni.' I just nodded and went back to the RV.”

Joni—who considered herself “a painter first” and who turned out paintings (which would soon fill numerous shows) as steadily as she did songs—walked to the compound's gate. Inside was not just a hero, but a kind of mirror. Like Joni, O'Keeffe was the child of a northern midwestern farm family (Wisconsin, in her case). Like the young Joni, the young O'Keeffe had been a beauty. Like Joni, who'd started painting when girls in art school (like her classmate Beverly Nodwell) were warned that they could merely
teach,
not
make
art, O'Keeffe had defied such an etched-in-stone fate. With her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and their friends, such as Paul Strand and Edward Steichen, O'Keeffe was at the center of the Modernist culture of the 1920s and 1930s, in the same way that male-musician-ensconced Joni was at the center of the popular culture of the last ten years. And, like Joni, O'Keeffe had produced a paean to clouds, inspired by what she, like Bellow's Henderson, who had inspired Joni, had viewed from airplane windows.

Don sat in the car and played his congas. When Joni returned, “she was in heaven!” he recalled. She had not been turned away. (A correspondence would develop, and the following year, Joni would visit O'Keeffe for five days. During this talk, O'Keeffe mused to Joni, “I would have liked to have been a painter and a musician, but you can't do both.” On the basis of her own life, Joni replied, “Oh, yes,
you can
!” only later realizing that it was
O'Keeffe
who'd “ploughed the grain” that had eased Joni's journey.)

When Joni told John Guerin about her unrebuffed visit to O'Keeffe, he smiled.

Joni wanted Don Alias to move in to her Bel Air home, but he refused. “I said, ‘
No
way!' That mansion was the princess's palace. I'd always be ‘Mr. Mitchell' if I lived there. What was I going to do?—tell her maid, ‘Do my shirts, Dora'? With all that money that was rolling around, I really fought hard not to get involved with that.” Instead, he insisted that they divide their time between her Bel Air home and his apartment in a modest neighborhood—on Sepulveda, between National and Pico. Joni obliged. His not wanting to be “Mr. Mitchell” was a big issue in their relationship, she would tell friends. And on one of their first dates, he became incensed that a wealthy male fan, noticing her at the restaurant, sent a bottle of wine to their table. (Joni was hurt by his reaction, which he realized was excessive and gratuitously proprietary.)