Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (59 page)

Approaching Joni's lily-white social world, Don took a deep, wary breath. “It was a big, powerhouse scene of Jack Nicholson, of Crosby, Stills and Nash, of Linda Ronstadt—and here
I
am, the black guy coming into this thing.” Even though her character Art Nouveau had nothing to do with Don, he was certain that “a great deal of those people thought that Art Nouveau had been based on me, that
I
was a
pimp,
and that I was using Joni—the black cat capitalizing on the white woman with the money.” Since she was recently known to date musicians, such as Perkins and Guerin, who were lower down in the star hierarchy than she—something that, needless to say, wouldn't be an oddity for a male star—“it was ‘Oh, here comes another one of Joni's toys,'” Don felt—made worse when the “toy” was African-American. Through their years together, even though Joni considered him, as one friend says, “the real deal: a brilliant musician who she learned from, and such a musically connected guy,” Don had a seasoned skepticism about these supposedly black-music-worshiping rich white musical stars. His radar picked up their masked appraisals of him, and he was sensitive when he was not officially acknowledged as what he was: one of the major men in Joni's life.
*

The “one guy” on the scene who Don felt never viewed him negatively was Jack Nicholson, who, from the first time they met, knew that Don had worked with Miles Davis and who, along with his girlfriend Anjelica Huston, unfailingly respected him as a social peer and a serious musician. With just about everyone else, Don felt he had to maneuver a little. “Stephen Stills was an asshole, unequivocally”—though not for any racial attitude. “Bob Dylan and Stephen Stills would be sitting around at Joni's house, talking mainly about themselves, their careers, and how good they were. Dylan was a quiet dude, but Stills was
always
talking about himself. Don Henley was also a real obnoxious guy—‘me, me, me.' Graham Nash, on the other hand, was always a gentleman.” Don said that Joni would protect him from having to endure the egomaniacal Stills and Henley. “I would be coming downstairs and Stephen would want to include me, and Joni would say, ‘No, he doesn't get involved in stuff like that'—which I'm so glad she said; she kind of stood up for me.”

Don viewed Linda Ronstadt as “the intellectual”; Betsy Asher, Joni's best friend, “was beautiful and in torment, always talking about Peter and [John Phillips's daughter] Mackenzie Phillips.” The Ashers had recently ended their marriage. For the last eight years Betsy had been the L.A. rock world's premier hostess, mediator, and confidante (“Betsy knew about everything and could have
been
anything—she could have been a Sherry Lansing,” says Danny Kortchmar), but now, alone, she fell into a downward spiral—cocaine abuse, paranoia, agoraphobia—that eventually resulted in years spent in a sanitarium, from which she is now fully recovered. (James Taylor's hit song “Her Town, Too”—written with J. D. Souther—detailed Betsy's emotional vulnerability during this time and the couple's divorce.)

As for Warren Beatty, Don marveled at what the others were long used to: “Every time I saw Warren, he was hitting on somebody.” Don had a tactic when Beatty walked into Joni's house. “I used to always stand up—because, within that crowd, Warren was Mr. Man and he was the tallest, and,” at six feet five “
I
was taller than him, so that way he wouldn't feel so kingpin-ish.” (But at least one form of more blatant masculine one-upping Don Alias did
not
want, though Joni certainly did. As she had with Jackson and other lovers, Joni painted a portrait of Don. But this was a different kind of portrait: “It was me, with my bathrobe open with—bang! like this—a hard-on sticking out. I said, ‘Joni, what are you
doing
?'” when she hung it “smack-dab in the middle of the living room” of the loft they would soon share in New York. Don was embarrassed. “My friends would come over and they'd go,
huh?
Joni said, ‘What's wrong with it?'” He said she said it was a “testament to his sexuality,” to which he replied, “It's not a testament to anything—it's annoying; it's an embarrassment!” Don wanted her to repaint it with the bathrobe closed, “and she fought me on it, all the way,
all
the way.” Finally, they compromised: She repainted part of the painting, making the penis tumescent, not erect.)

Released in December 1977, the double album
Don Juan's Reckless Daughter
was intensely ambitious and contrarian music: jazz-based, experimental. Its centerpiece was the sixteen-minute-long “Paprika Plains” (in which Joni reminisces about the prairies of her childhood), a Gershwin-like opera (with Laura Nyro–like turns at the piano)—part Philip Glass, part-melodramatic old movie score—with splashes of great risk and beauty. But what Joni's fans had always related to so deeply
wasn't
her trying to be Philip Glass; it was music that had made so many women say, as Danny Kortchmar puts it “‘I was so depressed, I was going to slit my wrists, and then I heard one of your songs.'” With this album, people felt Joni deserved either applause for leaving the comfort of her feathered nest (one critic later called it a “masterpiece”) or dismissal as cold, pretentious, and irrelevant. Years later, Steve Pond in
Rolling Stone
would recap its reception by calling it “four widely dismissed sides of sometimes forbidding jazz” and saying that Joni had become “a jazz dilettante.” How the public was coming to feel is represented by a fan's recent confession on a Web site devoted to discussion of Joni's work: “I've struggled to enjoy much of Joni's output after 1977, but the albums prior to that were perfection.”

Three months after the album's release, in March 1978, Janet Maslin, writing in
Rolling Stone,
delivered a review whose thrust was hinted at in its headline—“Joni Mitchell's Reckless and Shapeless
Daughter
”—only gently, for Maslin's opinion was devastating, and all the more so for being thoughtfully reasoned. Calling the album “an instructive failure,” she said, “Mitchell appears bent on repudiating her own flair for popular songwriting, and on staking her claim to the kind of artistry that when it's real doesn't need to announce itself so stridently.” That review, and others like it, would leave Joni angered and wounded. For a tough, confident woman who could dictate to and win over session after session of skeptical old-hand jazz musicians, and for a recording artist of whom studio executives would (having learned the hard way) sigh, “You don't tell Joni Mitchell what to do,” she was surprisingly needy—she wanted her fans' love. And, like others who had (as she'd prophetically put it in “For the Roses”) gotten “a taste for worship,” she was presumptuous, expecting those fans to follow her away from the bargain they had struck: that she was describing life for both of them. The album reached only #25 in
Billboard,
but it went gold (as with Carole's
Simple Things
of that same year, her previous momentum assured as much); still, like Carole's, it would be Joni's last album to do so. Joni had been lacerated critically the same year as Carole—Carole for being too sappy and self-derivative; Joni for being removed and pompous. It wasn't just that staying at the top was harder than getting to the top; more to the point, rock and pop music belonged to shining youth, and they were no longer young.

In late 1978, Joni rented a New York loft on Varick Street, at the western juncture of SoHo and the Village, and despite his initial protests (“Joni, you know goddamn well I'm not going to be able to pay any kind of rent on this space!”), Don moved in with her. (It was on these walls that the argued-about bathrobe portrait of Don by Joni hung.) Don had a group called the Stone Alliance, and the loft was his base of operations. Joni wanted to go to Don's mother and grandmother's Harlem apartment for Thanksgiving, but Don was nervous. His family's knowledge of Joni Mitchell was “practically nil. I thought they'd think, ‘What are you doing, bringing a white girl in here?'” On Thanksgiving Day, “Joni walked in and my grandmother wanted her to take off her shoes, and Joni did—and
right away
there was a love affair between my grandmother and Joni. She really,
really
loved Joni. My mom did, too. And…a black family in Harlem and a white woman?” Even well into the 1970s, Alias recalled in no uncertain terms that, at least within his family, that “was taboo.
Taboo!
But this thing between her and my grandmother was really special. It touches me now, just thinking about it. They
really loved
each other. We went there a lot. Joni loved being accepted.”

As for Myrtle and Bill, they were “flabbergasted”—a confidante says—to learn their daughter had a black boyfriend. But Don didn't care. “I was so damn in love with Joni—so crazy about her—I was willing to meet Myrtle and Bill; I was willing to break down a wall.” When the meeting did take place, “they never gave me the impression” they had any negative feelings about him, Don said. They ended up liking him just fine.

In late 1978, the legendary jazz composer, bassist, and orchestra leader Charles Mingus asked Joni to collaborate on an album with him (an honor that made John Guerin a little jealous). Mingus wrote six melodies (flatteringly, initially, called “Joni I” to “Joni VI”) to which Joni would write the lyrics—a new situation, and one she would likely not have consented to from a lesser musician. Mingus was in the final stages of painful, paralyzing amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and he was wheelchair-bound. He was lovingly tended by his wife, Sue Graham Mingus, who in a very real sense personified that “Americanness” of Stanley Crouch's novelized high-plains-raised white jazz singer. A Martha Stewart lookalike, Sue was the debutante daughter of a Midwestern family so straitlaced that (as she put it in her memoir
Tonight at Noon
) “Desire was an undercurrent, folded away with the linen. We were a formal and modest family…The rawness of our bodies was barely acknowledged—soft mollusks safe inside our casing.” A family, in short, like Joni's.

Sue had been drawn to the volatile, tempestuous, Watts-born Mingus, and their union was passionate and committed. Since Mingus's death, Sue has devoted her whole life to furthering Mingus's legacy and getting his music heard. Joni (often with Don) worked with Mingus in New York, and, later, in Cuernavaca, where Sue was nursing her frail husband through last-ditch faith healing. Here was Sue Mingus, the blond, pretty, heavily relied-upon behind-the-scenes spouse of her famous, divalike, and indulged black artist husband; and here was Joni Mitchell, the blond, pretty, famous, divalike, indulged artist (and jazz
novice
) who had an accomplished black male jazz musician boyfriend on whom
she
heavily relied behind the scenes. It's hard not to wonder how Sue and Joni regarded each other: as day-for-night opposites
or
sisters in spirit?
*

Joni composed the lyrics for four of the pieces; recording commenced; then, after Mingus's death in early January, Joni fully composed two other songs, “God Must Be a Boogie Man” and “The Wolf That Lives in Lindsey.” In “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” for which she wrote the lyrics (Rahsaan Roland Kirk had composed an earlier set) and Mingus wrote the music, Joni—utilizing images from Mingus's biography
Beneath the Underdog
—makes statements about the dangers to black men of interracial relationships. Joni had an all-star cast of jazz sidemen: not just Pastorius and Alias, but Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter. Released in June 1979, the album was obviously a risk—her fan base was already confused by
Don Juan's
(and, to some extent,
Hissing
). But, as she told Cameron Crowe in a long interview in
Rolling Stone:
“You have two options. You can stay the same and protect the formula that gave you your initial success. They're going to crucify you for staying the same. If you change, they're going to crucify you for changing. But staying the same is boring. And change is interesting. So of the two options, I'd rather be crucified for changing.”

Reviewing the album for that same publication, Ariel Swartley didn't seem to know what to make of it and chose to focus on its well-touted riskiness rather than its satisfactions. Noting an “angry edge” to Joni's guitar and the “taste for dissonance” that make “it see[m] as if the tensions [that] Mitchell's courting [are] star[ting] to drive her crazy,” Swartley concluded, “Joni Mitchell keeps asking the hard questions, touching nerves. And the pressure she applies is increasingly brutal, increasingly deft. It's been a long time since her songs had much to do with whatever's current in popular music.” Reviewing it later,
The Village Voice
's Robert Christgau called the album a “brave experiment” that had failed.

Joni launched a tour called
Shadows and Light,
for which Don—wisely taking control—played both drums and percussion. In the fashionably ripply perm that had for the last few years replaced her lank, straight hair, she performed with the neo-doo-wop group the Persuasions, and the live album included the beautiful tour-title composition, with its soul-stentorian refrain: “Blind-
ness
!
Blind
-ness, and sight!”