Joni Mitchell Gives Peace a Chance

by Kim France
US
November 1988

The Hotel Bel-Air is very L.A. - a lush, hydrangea-scented Eden with Bulgari toileteries in the guest bungalows, a place where stars of stage and film sit at the pool under big straw hats and carefully re-apply lipstick. It seems a bit high affect for the relatively earthy Joni Mitchell, but the 54-year-old singer-songwriter lives just down the road, and the Bel Air has become something of a second home to her - a place where she prefers to conduct interviews. Today, out on a private patio of her suite for the day, the kitchen staff has laid out a beautiful lunch: carrot-ginger soup, endive salad, grilled swordfish. But for Mitchell, whose graceful new album Taming The Tiger, was released last month, food is never the main attraction. Fish has got to swim, and Joni Mitchell has got to smoke, and she does so to the exclusion of almost all other activities. She smokes not in the hopped-up, frenetic manner we associate with true addicts, but calmly and with a great deal of entitlement, as though it was the most natural thing since breathing.

Mitchell, though friendly enough, carries herself with the imperiousness of someone who knows she is a legend. After starting life as Roberta Joan Anderson in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Mitchell went on to set the standard for all female singer-songwriters with her album Ladies of the Canyon (which features classics like Big Yellow Taxi and Woodstock). Her intimate folk-pop music has inspired many of today's artists, including k.d. lang and Courtney Love. "Her arrangements and use of jazz chords and her lyrics were specifically influential to us," says Luscious Jackson singer Jill Cunniff. "We combine it with other stuff like rap, but she's definitely there." Mitchell is also famously outspoken, something that has not always made her particularly popular. ("I am an arrogant artist," she told Details in 1996 "And I'm sick of the false humility.") After achieving fame in the late '60s and early '70s with confessional songs like Both Sides Now and Help Me, Mitchell spent the next two decades following a more esoteric muse, experimenting with jazz and world music long before it was stylish to do so. Critics were underwhelmed, and Mitchell lashed out at them for failing to recognize the genius of her work. And in a business where feuds are often conducted behind the scenes, she publicly accused her former record label Geffen of holding back royalties it owed her.

But these days, Mitchell has few complaints. "I feel really good," she says. "I'm very pleased with this album. And I don't feel undervalued or thrown out for the new, supposedly improved Joni." Mitchell's re-emergence began in 1994 when she released the Grammy-winning Turbulent Indigo, her best and most accessible album in years. Taming the Tiger is a worthy follow-up: a subdued, slightly jazzy album, that is, like her best work, painterly in its attention to detail - and one that examines the perils and exhilarations of middle-aged love affairs. Reviews of the album have been good, but Mitchell has learned to accept both criticism and praise with a grain of salt. "It's almost arbitrary," she says, "like, 'Oh, we said something nice last time; prepare to roast this time.' [But] I think there's been a bit of a reprieve. I think the climate has changed."

It is in her personal life, however, that the real seismic shifts have occurred. Four years ago, a former friend from her art-school days, told a reporter that in 1965, Mitchell, flat broke, had given birth to a daughter in Toronto and put her up for adoption a few weeks later (the father was Mitchell's boyfriend at the time, photographer Brad MacMath). Having her most closely guarded secret made public in a tabloid newspaper was a jolt, Mitchell says, "but I decided that I had nothing to hide." She confirmed the story to the press and announced that she would like to find her daughter. As luck would have it, Kilauren Gibb, a 33-year old former model living in Toronto, had been searching for her biological mother since the age of 27, when her parents, both retired academics, told her she was adopted. Gibb had received a limited amount of information about the birth parents from Canada's Children's Aid Society. She knew that her mother grew up in Saskatoon, had polio as a child (Mitchell still suffers from post-polio syndrome, a mild recurrence of the disease, which is similar to multiple sclerosis) and was a successful Canadian folk singer. Friends told Gibb that Mitchell was looking for her daughter, so Gibb - who wasn't even very familiar with Mitchell's music - logged on to the Joni Mitchell Web site and was stunned by the similarities to the information that she had received, as well as by such cosmetic similarities as high cheekbones and blond hair. She contacted Mitchell's manager - who was suspicious at first, since more than 30 other women had also come forward - and told him her story. When the news reached Mitchell, she phoned Gibb and asked to see one of her baby pictures. Soon after receiving the photo, a reunion was planned. On March 13, 1997, Gibb arrived at Mitchell's house in L.A. with her son, Marlin, then 4 years old. (Gibb is separated from Marlin's father, a Toronto-based drummer). "The coming of my family changed me completely," Mitchell says, then pauses to light another American Spirit. "During the first visit, which was about three weeks long, we just gave ourselves over to the celebration of this miracle."

Mitchell says the two discovered some similarities, like the fact that they both like to play pool, and she adds that she was startled to learn that Gibb's face was on bottles of Evian spritzer for a while. "I don't know how many times I borrowed my best friend Gloria's spritzer when we were doing press runs through Europe," she says, "and sprayed my face with my fingers over my daughter's face." She told her daughter that she'd "left a kind of bread-crumb trail" for her in certain of her songs (Little Green from Blue, is about parents who put a child up for adoption). "I just wanted to keep her in the pulse of my life - these mentions that I was thinking of her. And she said 'Joan, these things are so subtle, I would never have known it was about me.'"

The two are in close contact, but Mitchell allows that the relationship is not without its rough spots. "It's hard," she says. "Our situation is abnormal. We have a general affinity, but there are pockets of adjustments, and we've had a couple of skirmishes. But we've had some beautiful times, and yes, it's working. It's going along beautifully. I love my kid and my grandson. It's thrilling."

Gibb's existence helps to explain the air of mystery and moodiness that has always been part of Mitchell's image. After the rush of fame with Blue in 1971, she retreated to a house she had purchased in British Columbia. "To lose my daughter," she says, "and then to suddenly be catapulted into the public eye - the combination was disturbing. So I withdrew from people for a long time." What she learned out in the wilderness, she says, is how to use her pain to create art: "Depression is a teaching device. It's an opportunity. Depression drives you involuntarily into contemplation, whether you like it or not."

These days, Mitchell travels to the house in British Columbia about twice a year. "It's a place where I can kind of restore my soul," she says. "I'm the gardener and the cook and the housekeeper, and I'm alone in nature. I've had some colorful adventures up in that particular place. I've battled with bears and with my apple tree." She also spends time in her hometown of Saskatoon, where her boyfriend, musician and teacher Don Freed, lives. "He teaches mainly Indian reservation children to write songs," she says. "He's an interesting man with an interesting calling." They live in separate cities but get together when they can, and they often travel together. "We've been together five years," she says. "It's been quite an extraordinary relationship."

Though Mitchell said earlier this year on a Los Angeles radio show that the experience of discovering her family is still too new to write about, there are several songs on Taming the Tiger that are about her relationship with Freed. "Face Lift" is Mitchell's plea for her mother - who introduced the couple but didn't expect them to become intimate - to accept her happiness. Another song, Stay in Touch, "is about an attempt at wise conduct during the smitten period of your relationship, which is very, very difficult," says Mitchell, who has been married twice (to folk singer Chuck Mitchell in 1965 and to bassist and producer Larry Klein in 1982). "That song is, for me, going to be the most useful."

The album's title track is a love/hate note to the ephemeral nature of celebrity, and in it Mitchell sings of searching up and down the radio dial but finding only "Formula music/Girlie guile!/Genuine junk food/For juveniles!" Mitchell makes no secret of her distaste for current pop. "I can't really listen to the music of this generation," she says. "They have false cunning in their voices. It's melodrama, it's bad acting for the most part. Even the best of them are not sincere." One of the reasons she still records, she adds, is to give audiences an intelligent alternative to all the dross. "I don't need more fame, I don't need more fortune, but I believe in the ork," she says. "It's an altruistic thing. It's good for people, you know?" There has always been something of the prim schoolmarm in Mitchell. She feels that too many female singers have let their acts degenerate into nothing more than "peep shows" and that "there's just something ultimately more becoming about a little decorum on a female." Even when she goes out on the town, as she has more in recent years, she finds herself nonplussed. At this year's Vanity Fair post-Oscars bash in Los Angeles, she says, she was too bothered by the pounding disco beat to be able to have a real conversation. "The Judds and I led a revolution on the sound truck to change the music," she says. Mitchell is most happy when she is with her closest friends, new family and four cats. And she insists that she does, in fact, enjoy cutting loose from time to time. "You can't get too clean and self-righteous. Every once in a while I like to go out and get really drunk." And one can almost picture her dancing on the table.