Both Sides Now: Two New Takes on Joni Mitchell
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
I DREAM OF JONI: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell in 53 Snapshots, by Henry Alford
SONG SO WILD AND BLUE: A Life With the Music of Joni Mitchell, by Paul Lisicky
On one of her signature songs, the restless, almost phosphorescent 1976 anthem “Hejira,” Joni Mitchell sits in some cafe, sketching out a life philosophy: “We all come and go unknown/Each so deep and superficial/Between the forceps and the stone.” She sounds majestic but weary, like an eagle or an off-duty Valkyrie. Who are we flightless birds to disagree?
And yet: Such is the enduring lure of Joni-ology, the secular religion of her fandom, that two new meditations on Mitchell have already landed in this youngish year, just over a month apart. Henry Alford’s “I Dream of Joni” and Paul Lisicky’s “Song So Wild and Blue” are not really traditional works of scholarship or biography; footnotes are wielded gently. Instead, Mitchell mostly serves as a mirror and a muse, a blond godhead on which to pin the authors’ respective forms and fascinations.
With a title as pun-perfect as “I Dream of Joni,” you almost can’t blame Alford, the puckish longtime New Yorker writer and humorist, for writing an entire book to justify it. The subtitle, “A Portrait of Joni Mitchell in 53 Snapshots,” provides a structure and format that suits his tone: cheerful anecdotes, trivia and freewheeling commentary, buoyed by interviews. (Among others, Alford spoke to Mitchell’s prom date, the woman who makes her dulcimers and a recent mayor of her hometown, the Canadian prairie city Saskatoon.)
The Joni portrayed here in droll, chatty interludes, some as short as a page or two, is composed of the usual canonical parts: Saskatchewan rebel, lady of the Canyon, pop-culture eminence covered in glory. There are odes to her wardrobe, her bowling skills and the black-box mysticism of her songwriting process.
But the uneasier aspects of Mitchell’s history are also probed: her complicated and sometimes combative relationship with the daughter she gave up for adoption at 21, and wouldn’t meet again for more than 30 years; a childhood battle with polio and the brain aneurysm she suffered much later, both physically and emotionally devastating; even her bizarre embrace of blackface in the ’70s and ’80s, and her peculiar, stubborn refusal to view that as problematic in any way to this day.
Chronology is not this book’s particular concern. The timeline swings blithely from a 2007 interview with Charlie Rose to Mitchell’s fondness for designing her own culottes in high school, and then on to a tense confrontation with a Rolling Stone reporter in the midst of Bob Dylan’s chaotic, cocaine-soaked Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975.
In his attempts to make galaxy-brain connections, Alford sometimes gets lost in the proverbial weeds — lesser vignettes in which he constructs his own fridge-magnet free verse from various Mitchell quotes, catalogs the Facebook posts of her semi-estranged daughter or draws up a list of traits shared with the singer-songwriter Carole King. (Both women have blue eyes, put cats on their album covers and appeared in Gap ads? Spooky. )
But he is also a wry, cleareyed chronicler whose obvious affection for his subject doesn’t keep him from acknowledging the acutely human flaws and peccadilloes of an artist who has too often been written about with Mach 10 earnestness. (When the warbling-banshee outro on her recording of “Woodstock” hits at full volume, he winkingly concedes, “it is possible to clear a room of pets and heterosexual men.”)
Like Alford, Paul Lisicky is a gay man of a certain age and literary pedigree, though sexuality is often more than subtext in “Song So Wild and Blue,” a quasi memoir over which Mitchell hangs cool and a little unreachable, like the moon.
While the book opens as if it is inside her head many decades ago, deep in the act of puzzling out a song (“The smell of struck nickel came up from the strings. It was already past 4 in the morning …”), within several paragraphs the narrative has shifted to Lisicky in circa-2020s Brooklyn, texting a new friend and potential lover.
What if their shared love of Joni, he wonders, diverges too much in the details? Or maybe worse, brings too much closeness too quickly? The man on the other side of the phone doesn’t fully know yet what she meant to Lisicky as a lonely boy growing up in Cherry Hill, N.J., in the late 1960s and ’70s, tall and awkward and generally terrified of being seen as himself.
Access to the family piano and Mitchell’s 1972 album “For the Roses” served as gateway drugs; in high school, Lisicky started to compose his own songs, and when that proved too intimidating, shifted to writing stories without music. But the singer’s fluid singularity, her refusal to apologize or conform, made him feel electric and understood.
What follows plays out mostly in an intimate, impressionistic “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” mode, interwoven with Mitchell myths and parallels. Lisicky’s talents eventually earned him a spot at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and he went on to become a well-respected teacher and author, even the partner of a famous poet, with homes in Provincetown and New York. His devotion to Mitchell ebbed and flowed. (“The late ’80s didn’t seem to know what to do with Joni, nor she with the late ’80s.”)
Her presence in the pages of “Song So Wild and Blue” can feel similarly unresolved, tangled up in an unwieldy mix of musical critique, creative speculation — at one point, a whole inner monologue for Mitchell’s disapproving mother is conjured as she watches her daughter perform at Carnegie Hall — and tribute. There’s a lovely coalescence, though, in the book’s finale, a fraught cross-country trip to see Mitchell perform, post-aneurysm, at a spectacular outdoor concert bowl in Washington State in 2023.
If Alford is the witty friend leaning in to share good gossip at a dinner party and Lisicky is the ardent, eloquent professor, riffing on quarter notes and the petty politics of academia, they aren’t so far apart in the end. In a time when anyone who’s heard “A Case of You” at the drugstore or rewatched “Love Actually” at Christmas has at least some passing knowledge of Mitchell’s existence, to be a hard-core devotee still implies certain qualities: that one is soulful and a little against the grain, a defender of open tunings and difficult truths. (Also, yes, inordinately fond of cloud metaphors.)
At 81, Mitchell, though still vital and out in the world, is further from the forceps than the stone. She is stardust, she is golden; uncountable fans and self-styled experts have already tilled that garden. To go all in anyway as these two writers do, to keep trying to make art and sense of such a known, unknowable life, feels like about the most Joni thing you could do.
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Joni is the real Queen of Canada.
iconic joni, 6 decades of artistry ...
I was working part time on the weekends for a regional airline that the tour had chartered for the hop from denver to ft collins. the entourage had carelessly left behind a lot of party favors on the plane that we had to clean. I loved the 70's ...
I'm going to add a little history about Joni. I knew her. In 1964 I was living in my hometown of Hamilton, Ontario, which is at the western tip of Lake Ontario, which is about 40 miles from Toronto, in order to serve under articles (i.e. apprentice) for a year with a Hamilton lawyer who later was appointed to be a Justice of the Supreme Court of Ontario, my having just received my Bachelor of Laws degree before writing my exams for bar admission. I was already involved with folk music during my years at law school in Toronto, and having become a friend of Estelle Klein who soon became the Head Director of the Mariposa Folk Festival. During my year in Hamilton I frequented a coffee house there called The Black Swan run by Harry Finley and Jim Neff who became my friends. The three of us decided to attend the 1964 Mariposa Folk Festival that had just been kicked out of its previous location of Orillia, Ontario, and was being held in Toronto's professional baseball stadium. The evening before the festival I drove them to Toronto and the three of us checked into a rooming house on Madison Avenue in Toronto, which was near the University of Toronto, where Harry and Jim shared the last available bedroom and I laid down on the couch in the living room.
Soon after I laid down on the couch a tall slim big-toothed girl with long straight blond hair walked into the room with a backpack and carrying a guitar case. It was Joni Anderson from Saskatoon, her first time in Toronto, and it was for the purpose of attending the Mariposa Folk Festival that was starting the next day, and she had nowhere to stay. I told her she could stay in the room with me and she could sleep on the couch and I would sleep on the floor, which I did. She took out her guitar, put it into a really weird tuning and played a few of her songs for me. The next day I introduced her to Harry and Jim and she played her songs for them and they hired her for a paid gig at the Black Swan, her first gig in Ontario.
As I had during my years at Law School in Toronto become one of Toronto's leading proponents of Folk Music I eventually became a Director of the Mariposa Folk Festival, and later incorporated it into a charitable organization called the Mariposa Folk Foundation, and in 1972 was its President (but more of that later). The 1965 Mariposa Folk Festival was held in the countryside just north of Toronto, and I and others who had heard Joni talked Estelle Klein into putting Joni on the stage, which she did, and that was the event that sealed Joni's fate to become a famous folksinger. That summer I had also attended the Newport Folk Festival where I witnessed one of the most iconic moments in folk music history - I was in the audience when Bob Dylan went electric.
Sometime during that time Joni married an actor/folksinger from Detroit named Chuck Mitchell. The marriage didn't last long, but the name did. Joni soon came to another Mariposa festival when it was held on the Toronto Islands, and that time she brought with her then beau, David Crosby (from Crosby, Stills and Nash - and eventually "and Young"). Joni brought Crosby with her to my home in order to play for me some of her new songs. If you can believe it, she said she wanted my opinion about them. Crosby was such an asshole - in how he treated her and me as well. I'm glad that relationship didn't last. However, the last time I saw Joni was at the 1972 Mariposa Folk Festival, when I was in charge of it because Estelle Klein went on a trip to Europe. It was when Bob Dylan unexpectedly showed up with his wife and son Jessie, which is when I shook his hand and welcomed him to the festival and told him I hoped he was enjoying it. His reply to me I'll never forget: "I really dig your festival, man." Back to Joni - she was not scheduled to perform but one of the regular performers gave her some of his stage time so she could sing a few songs. We no longer used evening big concerts, but had seven smaller stages operating with different performers all day long. Neil Young also showed up although he too was not scheduled, and another regular gave up some time on stage for him. Neil asked me: "Buzz, what would you like me to play?" I told him "Helpless", and he played it. Joni's last words to me were: "We've both come a long way since back then, eh Buzz." I never heard from her again.
A footnote about Bob Dylan at the festival that nobody knows about. A contingent of our regular local musicians whom we needed to carry on the festival came to me and told me that if Dylan were to get on a stage all the audience for their performances would abandon them, and they would never agree to play the festival again. As much as I would have loved to have had Dylan play Mariposa, what it would mean to the festival, the buck stopped with me and I was the one who refused to allow Bob Dylan to play Mariposa. It was for the good of the continuation of the festival for years to come. The person I knew who ran a rock and roll festival near Toronto who knew what I had done told me later that anyone who ran a music festival would have given his eye teeth to have been in my position. But the reason I quit my involvement with that festival is because when Estelle Klein returned from Europe, she said I was wrong and would have put him on a stage with songwriters.
That is a little about Joni Mitchell and Folk Music History that very few know about. By the way, The Rolling Thunder Review is mentioned in the seed. When It played Toronto, my then wife and I attended it with tickets given to me by Neil Young's brother Bob, who was my client. It was a magnificent show.
Great addition Buzz!
Just sharing a little bit of history from a life of some great experiences and adventures - and I'm still living what is probably my last fantastic adventure with an amazing wife in a magical land.
I just read over what I wrote above and burst out laughing when I realized that I could say that I was surely the only member of NT who could honestly say he slept with Joni Mitchell (even though she was on the couch and I was on the floor beside it).
In case you could not get to the embedded site, Joni in blackface:
Holy smoke, that's an incredible disguise. However, it's brownface, not blackface.
She kinda looks like Justin.
Well, she sure doesn't look like Al Jolson. "Maaaaaaameee"
LOL
There are not enough superlatives that can be used to describe Joni Mitchell. I was lucky to see her perform twice early in here career - in 1969 at an event at UCLA and in 1971 in a small club in L.A. I've been a huge fan since she released her first album in 1968.