Joni Mitchell

by Angela LaGreca
Rock Photo
June 1985

Portrait of the artist as a singer, songwriter, musician, poet, painter, graphic designer, and, yes, Photographer.

The drive along this California freeway is (thankfully) smooth, and, after a wrong turn and a couple of "Private Property - No Trespassing" signs, I finally get to the last part of the directions; 'a grey house behind a market.' A wedgewood blue Mercedes is parked in the driveway. As I approach the house, the automatic door to the garage flips up to reveal another Mercedes (this one's grey) and Larry Klein, bass player and co-habitant of the ocean front home. He's on his way out, guitar in hand. "Hi, Joan is inside," he says pointing to a gate, "just go through there."

I make my way past the flowers and greenery that surround the back entrance, being careful to side-step what seems like an unusually strong current of water flowing in criss-crossing patters from an unseen source. A quick right past a lemon tree and I've made it to the door, which is open. Joni Mitchell is standing in the kitchen, rinsing out the glass pot from a coffee maker. "A pipe broke," she explains with an unhappy smile, "it's like a flood out there."

We leave plumbing problems behind and head towards a stack of mounted colour photographs that lie on a table past the kitchen. I hand her a gift from Rock Photo's art director, a colourful hand-painted silk scarf which she immediately tries on. "Ooh, is that ever nice," she says, striking various poses like a model with a high sense of dramatic fashion, "it's nice and bright with all this drab grey, right?" In terms of colour, I realise she is right: the house is grey (and white), much of the furniture is grey, the vase holding the red roses on the table is grey, the table is grey, the persian cat sitting on a chair next to me is grey, even Joni is dressed to match in grey cotton jeans and a crisp grey shirt unbuttoned over a grey t-shirt.

None of it, though, is dull, least of all Joni herself. For to look at Joni Mitchell just as a singer/songwriter, no matter how acclaimed, is to ignore the visual elements that are integral to her successful career. The self-portraits she has painted for some of her album covers are as familiar as her best known lyrics. And where the execution of the album or sleeve involves other artists, Joni is there with the conceptual eye and the graphic hand. She also takes pictures.

"When I was a kid I got a camera in the seventh grade and I shot all my friends just hanging around in the basement playing ping-pong and dancing. It was the early fifties, you know, people stacked up in a pyramid or just hanging in front of a café, and you'd put your pictures in a wallet - that was the point of it," she says.

In 1970 Graham Nash gave Joni her first 35mm camera. "He had taken up the camera and was having so much fun with it that he gave me one for Christmas. He said, 'You've got to get into this Joan, you'll love doing this.' So he got me this incredible camera. It was a Leicaflex with a 28mm lens - you couldn't do anything wrong." Even the blurry shots when the light was off pleased Joni. "Though I wasn't a pro I enjoyed everything. I thought, 'It's blurry, so what, so were the Impressionists, right?'" She laughs and then jumps up to show me some of her pictures.

Joni began photographing everywhere, especially in 1970-71 while touring the U.S. and Europe, double billed with Jackson Browne. He became her main model during that period. "We used to go to the movies on the road," she says, "he had a camera and got into it too." Together she and Jackson would sit in the movie theatre and try and shoot the cross fades (dissolves) between scenes, "pushing the film speed to the nth degree."

Ten years later, Joni, working with photographer Joel Bernstein, employed a similar technique involving cross-fades. By shooting black and white stills from movies such as "Rock Around The Clock" and "Rebel Without A Cause," and then sandwiching them with colour footage from one of her live concerts, the "Shadows And Light" video (which Joni describes as "primitive with good moments") was created. From this video she selected the exact frames which make up the colour stills on the "Shadows And Light" album.

It wasn't the first time that Joni collaborated with Bernstein (as well as photographer Norman Seeff and art director Glen Christiansen) to produce an LP cover or sleeve that "wrapped up the ideas inside the album conceptually."

"Joel has taken pictures of me since he was 15 and has great energy for a photographer," she says. "He has the art of invisibility; he can sneak in and take a picture without disturbing the setting and get things to look like they were set up." On the making of the "Hejira" cover, Joni explains: "We had talked photos for years and the one thing we had in the back of our minds was 'I wish I had a river I could skate away on' (a line from the song "River" from the "Blue" album). We said if the opportunity came up on tour we would get this shot." The image they originally had was of a classic Hans Brinker pose, "with silver skates and a muff, skating on one leg on a frozen river." It took a series of photographs with Bernstein and a session with Seeff before Joni was satisfied with a design that summarised the album's themes of travel and romantic winter.

"I didn't know what I was looking for," she explains, "but I knew what I wasn't looking for. It's part of my process - you're looking for the magic and it's up to me to conceptually recognise it when it happens. You have an idea, but you want something even better than your idea, so that's what the magic is - even better than your own idea.

A chance encounter led to the cover of "Don Juan's Reckless Daughter." "I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard, in search of a costume for a Halloween party when I saw this black guy with a beautiful spirit walking with a bop" which she demonstrates with elan. "As he went by me he turned around and said, "Ummmm, mmm….looking good sister, lookin' good!" Well I just felt so good after he said that. It was as if this spirit went into me. So I started walking like him. I bought a black wig, I bought sideburns, a moustache. I bought some pancake makeup. It was like 'I'm goin' as him!'"

It was a great Halloween costume. So good, in fact, that she found she could do this character and even people who had known her for a long time couldn't tell it was a woman underneath. "Even the makeup went on like it grew on me; the patina of it didn't look chalky, it looked like it was there," she says.

Joni enjoyed the transformation so much that she used the character during the shooting session for "Don Juan," at first to "kind of pull Norman's (Seeff's) leg because he is always waiting for surprises in the studio," she says. When the album came out, though, several critics were less than amused, if not downright confused. As Joni recalls, "I remember they wrote, 'What is she trying to say - that blacks have more fun?' Regardless of what I was trying to say - because a lot of it is instinct - the important point is the chain of events. I was just going on the hottest impulses I had, the creative ideas."

Since instinct plays such an important part in her process of selection, Joni prefers to shoot whatever catches her eye - which is why she likes the perspective she gets from the 28mm lens. The depth of field and the wide-angle view seem truer to her memory of the picture. Because she is very drawn to colour and geometric composition, the exoticism of Jamaica's urban landscape had a special appeal for her, but her photographic experiences on the island were a mixture of fondness and fear. "It seemed to me that every place I looked I was seeing things…and the island physically wouldn't let me take pictures. I tried but I couldn't get up the nerve. I'd see incredible shots and someone would glare at me," she recalls. "I couldn't snipe at the culture even though everything I saw was like a feast.

She put down her camera and went back to the drawing board to diagram the scenes which she would memorise, but felt she could not record on film.

Drawing and painting are other mediums through which she has always expressed herself and the many canvases inside her home are testaments to her perception of herself as a "compulsively creative person." It's almost no surprise, then, when she discusses who has influenced and inspired her. "Picasso comes to mind more than anybody, just for the overall lust for art," her voice lowers, "he's like my patron saint…."

And there were "innumerable" musical influences, says Joni. "It's amazing, every time you like something it sneaks up and influences you sooner or later. It may take 15 years for it to come up in your work. I've always liked very romantic, melodic stuff - the Shirelles rendition of Carole King's "Will you still love me, tomorrow" - I pumped one jukebox in my neighbourhood full of quarters on that tune when it first came out.

"Then there are people I was directly associated with, CSN, CSNY (Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young). We were a group so we counter-inspired each other. Tunings with (David) Crosby and Buffy Saint- Marie. Eric Andersen taught me my first open tunings - open E and open G - after that I never played in standard tuning again so I'd have to count him as an important influence. Leonard Cohen was another; his poetry seemed so much more capable of deeper thought that it made my work seem merely descriptive. (Bob) Dylan, an incredible influence on everybody, all the singer/songwriter types, so you gotta tip your hat to him. African music, particularly Burundi - I learned a lot of vocal things from that."

How, then, does one find his or her own 'voice'? "You have to start with a hero," she says, "and then, for fun, you imitate him or her." For Joni the beginning was imitating Judy Collins, playing Canadian coffeehouses on the weekend during art school so she could make enough money "to buy some more cobalt blue and go to a movie." She laughs, then gets serious again. "one day you wake up and you hear people saying, 'Hey, you sound just like so-and-so' (whomever you've been imitating) - and it makes you mad."

Joni needed to find her own individuality, and songwriting became the vehicle of expression. Then came stylistic changes in her art. Tired of her detailed fine drawings, she took a tip from a guy who told her to draw him without looking at the paper.

Suddenly the drawing became more expressive, more abstract, and everything loosened up. "Once you crave simplicity," she says, "the craving tends to go across the board to other mediums." Her music became more rhythmic, the grace notes which she had found so appealing when she first started to record fell away. "Everything became bolder, from what attracted my eye, to the way I dressed - even the subjects that I was drawn to photograph, changed."

The doorbell rings. While Joni goes to answer it I realise that, for all our discussion about images, I haven't even opened my camera bag. She returns with more coffee for us, acknowledging the arrival of the plumber by singing 'Here he comes to save the day!' I tell her I want to take a picture before the sun goes down. "Of me?" she says, "Oh no, I hate having my picture taken." We go outside past the glass doors and the baby grand. Joni covers her eyes to block the late afternoon sun which has cast heavy shadows over the pool and the chaise-longes. She is a good sport and a good model. But when I say I want to switch cameras to take some colour shots, she objects; "That's enough; everything is more interesting in black and white, anyway." Or grey.

We discuss camera gear, which has certainly simplified for her. Over the past four years she's preferred to compose with an Instamatic or a Polaroid. The lack of detail from these 'drug store cameras' (as she calls them) doesn't bother her because she uses the photographs mainly as preliminary sketches for her paintings. The paintings, which range from bright pastel tones to swirling strokes of green, black, blue and purple, represents a creative direction to which she would like to devote more energy. "I have a lust to paint," she admits. "I just love it."

When I met with her, Joni was in the midst of getting some pieces ready for an 'Outer Space' theme show at Area, NY's trendy dance club. "It's wild," she says, "this guy came up to me there one night with leopard skin bra and a matching pill-box had with hair on his chest and lipstick and rhinestones all over him and said 'My wife just loves your music!'"

And then of course there's the music - album number 14 is in the works, to be followed by a tour. Of the American music scene she says: "This should be a great era for music - there's so much to be learned on these new instruments," referring to the synthesised sounds from electronic equipment that have mesmerised the 80s' "All the sampling, the use of 'found' sounds - these are the ideas I started working with back in the 70s. But there was no climate for them then and I was ridiculed in a way," she says with obvious reference to some of the material on "Hissing of Summer Lawns" and "Don Juan's Reckless Daughter" LPs. "now it's all open, so exciting. It makes me want to get back on that track and do some things I was kind of shocked out of."

Her audience, she says, is always a surprise to her - diverse in both age and appearance. "What I do is not really 'popular' even though it is presented in the popular field; it's not 'dig how groovy I am.' Sometimes I think I'm writing from the nerds-eye view. You know what I mean? It's not designed to make you look ten feet tall and rabidly sexy.

She reaches for a home demo of some of her songs from the next album. "Thomas Dolby's going to help, doing the programming, so I guess we're entering the world of manufactured sound," she says, heading for the tape deck. "These are just primitive sketches, okay?" she adds. The music begins with a strong clapping downbeat, a sweeping sound that is soon joined by chords from an electronic keyboard and finally the unmistakable vocals. I like it already. Joni's announcing the next part, "Okay, big chorus!" as she moves to the beat, at times singing along to the lyrics. The music fills the room. "You should do a good video," I suggest, smiling as she starts to imitate the drum sounds with exaggerated grunts. "Yeah, I'm gonna dance next time out, it's no more old folkie Joni," she says, "I'm not that old of a broad….I can move you know!"