For a long time I have worried about where I will be
when I hear the announcement of Joni Mitchell’s death. I don’t want it to be
when I am in transit, or about to do a literary festival or attend a
family celebration. I need to be on my own. I need to close down the
internet, draw the curtains and spend the next two days repeatedly listening to
the albums Hejira,
The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Court and Spark and Blue. I am going
to be traumatised. This won’t be just a death; it is going to feel
like an emotional amputation. No other artist has meant as much to me, or
has taught me so much about myself. This week the news broke that
Mitchell, now 71, had
been found unconscious and was in intensive care. A childhood
survivor of polio, her health has not been good for a long time. She has, by
her own admission, wrecked her voice through smoking and is suffering from a
mysterious skin condition called Morgellons disease. She is not
in great shape, and I worry that our long ride together may soon come to an
end.
You start out being a fan of some
teenybop star when you are 12 or 13 and then grow out of it. You cringe
and shudder when you remember those hot, passionate feelings for the little
doe-eyed boy-man, deny that you ever had a Smash Hits centrefold of Donny
Osmond or One
Direction on your bedroom
wall. But what if you started to listen to someone when you were 17, someone
who was one of the greatest of their generation and of the century, who
articulated that particular moment when opposing longings for love and for
artistic self-expression are waging war in you? And nearly 50 years later, you
are still a fan, and the person whose music means everything to you is
hospitalised and in danger and you’re holding your breath; you’re ready to be
heartbroken.
Mitchell is one of
the greats – as great as Bob Dylan, maybe greater, but it’s not a contest; she
just means more to me than he does. If she means nothing to you, too bad, your
loss. Just don’t persecute her. One element of my devotion is anger at the raw and
rawer deal she has received from the music press, since the contemptuous
awarding of the title “Old lady of the year” by Rolling Stone, as if she were
more of a groupie than a great lyricist. Mention Joni Mitchell today and
you may still be greeted by a sarcastic falsetto imitation of her song Woodstock,
from the early years before the cigs introduced gravel into her voice. She was
at her height in the early 70s, a decade of bad clothes and celebrity sex
pests, of overblown prog-rock and a general political malaise. Punk came
along and kicked in anything with nuance, sophistication, feeling, lyricism.
She was shunted into the same derisory cul de sac as, say, Peter, Paul and
Mary or Donovan – hippy and drippy – when she was a jazz singer,
a consummate composer, a poet and a thinker.
What she always lacked, to oppose all that dismissive
contempt, was the obsessiveness of the male fanbase: the Deadheads and
Dylanologists who catalogue and compete for record-collection kudos among a
fraternity of admirers. Where are the dry, 1,000-page volumes of musical
Joni-trivia, the conferences, the PhD dissertations? We just locked the
door and listened on our own. On hearing the news of her hospitalisation,
the crime writer Val McDermid tweeted: “Distraught to hear Joni
Mitchell in intensive
care. Her music inhabits my heart, my very soul.”
I accept that Mitchell has not been the
easiest star to love. She gives little back to her fans and her
views on feminism have
been disheartening to say the least. She seems to have lately rejected
everything her generation stood for, from its ideals to its clothes. There is a
tendency to think that if you could only meet the person of whom you are a fan,
you would inevitably become friends. For a long time I imagined that I would be
hitchhiking one day and Joni would pick me up and we’d drive along under
a limitless sky talking about the men we had loved and the trap of
marriage and the perhaps unavoidable tendency of romantics to become cynics,
and the desire for Paris gowns and lacy dresses and skating on a frozen lake in
a snow storm … and I wouldn’t need to tell Joni a thing about me. She already
knew. She’d written my emotional biography. “I am a woman of heart and
mind / With time on her hands / No child to raise”. “Sharon, I
left my man / At a North Dakota Junction / And I came out to the
Big Apple here / To face the dream’s malfunction.” And, definitively,
“Nothing is capsulised in me / On either side of town / The streets
were never really mine / Not mine these glamour gowns.” If I could express
any of that in a novel, so succinctly, I would have done. But she’s the
genius, not me.
I hate the media and the music business for their disgraceful
treatment of an artist of her stature. And I have to concede, when I read interviews
with her, that these blows have not been borne graciously. They have not been
borne at all. She seems lonely, angry, bitter, paranoid and afraid. I worry
about her. Had she been a man, she would be on her third or fourth considerably
younger partner, with a new young family, that complacent second act that women
are denied. Maybe if she’d been a Buddhist or got into some faith system, been
born again into a cult or the church, she’d have found peace. But in
a recent interview in the Sunday Times, she laid into hippies, all
contemporary music, Bob Dylan, and again, feminists. She
nixed a biopic starring Taylor Swift because all the young star could
offer was cheekbones. Her reunion with the daughter she had given up for
adoption went sour. Her tone is autocratic, arrogant and angry. She reminds me,
in a way, of Philip
Roth, another raging titan of the American arts.
She has called herself “a scientist
of love”; how to love is what she’s trying to get to the bottom of.
Like Jean
Rhys, she has drawn the anatomy of a woman’s heart, the men we
fall for, the loneliness, the fatal choices. The accretion of age, the
disappointments of living, are part of the journey we’ve all been on with
her, so this life-long fandom can’t have a happy ending. Or even a happy
middle. Pity the poor children with an indelible online record of the day they
wept when they heard Zayn
Malik was leaving One Direction. Perhaps the lifelong experience of
being a fan, an admirer, an acolyte or a student of an artist will
turn out to have been a fluke, a small window of privilege,
and from now on careers will burn up in a year or two, the experience
fleeting for the adorer and the adored alike. I don’t think she knows
how much she’s venerated. Or maybe she knows and it doesn’t matter.
It fulfils nothing. It makes no difference. She’s as alone with her music
as we are.
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