Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell

by David Yaffe

In his 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon originally used a verse from “Cactus Tree” as the epigraph to section 4, “The Counterforce.” After much anarchy and war, Pynchon’s book ends with apocalypse, without the philosophical comfort of the counterculture. These lines are a kind of apolitical declaration of freedom: “She has brought them to her senses, They have laughed inside her laughter, Now she rallies her defenses, For she fears someone will ask her For eternity—

And she’s so busy being free…” —Joni Mitchell Although this appeared in the reviewers’ galleys for the novel, it was replaced in the finished book with “What?” —Richard M. Nixon

And yet there is one song on Dog Eat Dog that somehow survived the production, where the sonic choices made sense with everything else, and that song is “Ethiopia.” Nina Simone once saw Joni at the Beverly Center shopping mall. They had never met before, but Joni had respect for her and her work, particularly based on what Don Alias, who had been Simone’s drummer, had told her. No matter how much Simone seemed to be losing her stability, she always, Alias maintained, treated her musicians with the utmost dignity. Simone spotted Joni after the release and the negative press of Dog Eat Dog. There she was, the great and notoriously hard to please Nina Simone, past her prime, but still. Simone lifted her arms like a Y, approached Joni, and said, “Joni Mitchell! Joni Mitchell! ‘Ethiopia’!” Then she was gone.

“Ethiopia” faces a complex human calamity with startling chords. The song touched a nerve so deep, its structures confounded even Joni’s most knowing and sympathetic listeners. Wayne Shorter, who had always gone the distance for Joni, was troubled by the chords. Joni recalls he told her that at the Berklee School of Music, they said that you weren’t supposed to follow a suspended chord with another suspended chord. “What kinds of chords are these?” he asked. “These are not guitar chords. These are not piano chords.” (Wayne Shorter, incidentally, has a music education degree from NYU and an honorary doctorate from the Berklee School, but did not actually attend the Berklee School.) All she could say was “This is a song about people starving to death. What is it supposed to sound like? ‘Wake Up Little Susie’?”

Joni’s friendship with Gabriel and his wife would not last long. Pretty soon, he was saying things she considered to be stupid and petty. Plus, Joni felt snubbed by his wife at a restaurant. How disappointing!

(And when the muse went out of music, Joni would say, all that was left was the “ick.”)