I Dream Of Joni (4*)

Whenever I read a celebrity profile, I always mine it for interesting "tidbits."  For example, Prince told Rolling Stone in 1985 that The Hissing of Summer Lawns, released by Joni Mitchell a decade earlier, "was the last album I loved all the way through." I really took that comment to heart, as the recording always had been a favorite of mine even though many critics maligned it upon release because Mitchell clearly had left behind the folk music that made her reputation.

Henry Alford has taken the tidbit approach--he calls them snapshots--to Mitchell's entire life and I devoured them, one after the other, like a greedy dog ignoring his nutritious bowl of dry food while scarfing down table scraps.  I soon realized how little gossip I knew about the woman in spite of reading Shelia Weller's Girls Like Us which also chronicles the lives of Carole King and Carly Simon.  Mitchell, however, really is in a category all of her own, in terms of her music, her love life, her outspokenness and her grievance.  As much as I enjoyed I Dream of Joni, I can't really say Alford's dissection of her mystique--which puts her decision to prioritize career over motherhood front and center--left me liking her very much.

Liking her personally, of course, is beside the point as it is with many artists of her calibre. But snarky Alford--he began his career at Spy magazine--loves nothing better than to stir the pot.  He called a freelance journalist who had interviewed Mitchell for the Los Angeles Times in 2010, after she publicly ripped him a new one for his subsequent article even though he had quoted her accurately about Bob Dylan ("He's a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake.  Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I.").

It's better to be called an asshole by Joni Mitchell than not to be on her radar at all.  You know what I mean?  I think Joni Mitchell is a fucking genius, and if my name leaves her lips by any means . . . I mean, it might even be better to be bitched out by her than to be praised.

Yet Mitchell's "bitchiness" doesn't seem to have interfered with her love life, as fertile a territory for Alford as the Mississippi delta.  She remains coy about whether or not she slept with Warren Beatty ("I can't remember") who asked her to connect him with Georgia O'Keefe, but a list of her longer liaisons reads like a who's who of the Laurel Canyon scene, perhaps Alford's best snapshot:

Yikes, Laurel Canyon – just reading about you gives us a contact hi. Centered around one of the deeper fissures in the only mountain range to bisect a major city, this neighborhood was both a literal and metaphorical refuge for the creative folk who moved there in the sixties – as it had been for the film industry folk who lived their previously. Imagine a lite FM theme park populated by all your favorite peddlers of mellow – Carole King, Neil Young, James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt, Harry Nilsson, Glen Campbell, Paul Williams, and Jackson Browne lived in this enclave, as did members of the Eagles, the Byrds, the Turtles, Three Dog Night, the Doors and the Mamas and the Papas. The neighborhood smelled of eucalyptus and potential. 

Mitchell seems to have been the one to do most of the dumping in her relationships, but David Crosby, Graham Nash and James Taylor all remember their liaisons with fondness and respect.  She and Taylor think of Sting--who along with Harry Styles and Taylor Swift is name checked as a younger-generation fan--as the son they never had (OK Boomer!). Her break-up with Taylor, then an off-and-on-junkie ("Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire") about to become more famous than she sent Mitchell into bitter Canadian exile where she wrote the incomparable songs that comprise my first (and favorite) Mitchell album, For The Roses.

Alford also delves into the cringiest aspect of Mitchell's career, at least by today's standards.  She costumed herself in Black face for the cover of Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, the 1977 double album where she lost my unsophisticated ear, in a kind of literal expression of her musical commitment to freeform jazz.  More offensively, he includes an anecdote about Don Alias, a six-foot-five-inch Black percussionist who toured with her.  She "celebrated" their sexual relationship by painting him nude with an erection and displayed the portrait in the living room of the Soho loft where they lived together for three years. Embarrassed, Alias (deceased since 2006) asked Mitchell to remove his dick pic.  Her response?  She repainted his genitals without a soft penis but left the portrait hanging.  Is Alford, openly gay, implying that Mitchell is a size queen?  It sounds like hearsay, although a pretty strong case can me made that Mitchell's love life had more in common with gay men than most of her peers (just ask Angie Bowie!).

Which brings us to her relationship with David Geffen who dated Cher before he became Mitchell's part-time roommate and signed her to Asylum Records in 1972.  I'd long known that Geffen was Mitchell's "Free Man in Paris" and that he's gay (he briefly owned a beach house in the Pines during my tenure).  What I didn't know was that Geffen begged Mitchell not to include the song because he thought this lyric would "out" him:

I deal in dreamers and telephone screamers

Lately I wonder what I do it for

If l had my way, I'd just walk through those doors

And wander down the Champs-Élysées

Going café to cabaret

Thinking how I'll feel when I find

That very good friend of mine

Now that's what I call deep in the closet!  Geffen, of course, has changed his tune. According to Alford, he instructs his chauffeur to play the song in his limo to impress his much younger dates (meow), although it's hard to imagine David Armstrong humming along. And Mitchell's fondness for Geffen--who arguably contributed more to her commercial success than anyone before or since--has curdled into resentment of the "star making machinery" he represented:  when asked in 2010 why she painted a portrait of Geffen with a banana in his mouth, she complained that he had used her as a "beard."  

A pattern appears to emerge from Alford's snapshots, one that I would argue is more critical to understanding Mitchell than giving her daughter up for adoption:  her resentment of the patriarchy which consigned her to niche-artist status. It took her near-death from a brain aneurysm a decade ago for the culture at large to begin honoring Mitchell's innovative genius.  She's finally begun to get the recognition that she always craved--and deserved.

I Dream of Joni is by far the dishiest contribution to Mitchell's canonization; in fact, it's an absolute "Banquet."