Barney Hoskyns, previously unpublished, 14 September 1994
Barney: I really like Turbulent Indigo.
Joni: Thank you very much.
And that’s not just a diplomatic way to start an interview. I think it’s really great and I want to start with the last song, which must be one of the most harrowing things you’ve ever written.
Well, I collaborated with God, you know. [Laughs]
Tell me what else went into making it as powerful as it is.
Well, I’ll tell you the catalyst for it was – I’m separated from my husband now but we’re very good friends –
Is he on the album?
Oh, yes. We separated and then we began the album the next day, if you can imagine. It was tense for a few weeks. We bought kittens to put in the studio to lighten it up, and even under what should have been extremely difficult conditions we worked very well together. There was a certain amount of, I would say, normal separation perversity, like withholding of understanding – ‘I don’t know what you mean by that.’ ‘Well, you do so!’ You know, that kind of silly stuff. But for the most part it was a wonderful growth experience, I think, for both of us. Klein would say the friction created a pearl. It made me lay down tighter boundaries on his playing: ‘Oh, don’t play like that, you played like that last time.’ [Laughs] And my guitar playing had become more percussive, more orchestral.
So Klein had to play very stretched-out, minimal, and with the tinge of depression that accompanies a separation, the loss of a long-term friend – he’d spent a third of his life with me. I spent a quarter of mine with him, you know, so it shouldn’t have been the most inspiring of times. I played some of the percussion myself, Indian shaman rattles and things, but still, all in all, it’s fairly sparse. It’s basically three guests: Wayne Shorter, Greg Leisz and Bill Dillon, who played the guitorgan, that organish sounding thing on ‘Yvette in English’. And then some of the keyboards behind that are samples of Bill, what we call the ‘Billatron’. The Billatron is a collaboration between Bill Dillon, Larry Klein and myself. Bill Dillon played it, Klein synthesised it, changed it sonically considerably, and then I accessed the construction or the architecture by a keyboard.
When you say that you and Klein split up the day before you went in the studio, do you literally mean that?
Moved into two houses.
Really?
Yeah. Strange way to start a project. But getting back to ‘Job’, Klein had gone to visit his grandmother. She had become a Christian at a certain point in her life and she was reading the Psalms. He came back and said Grandma Mary was all in a reverie about how beautiful the Psalms were and I thought, you know, ‘I’m an old Bible reader from many years on the road – the Gideons in hotel rooms, you know? It makes a scholar out of you after a while.’ So I thought, Gee, the Psalms, I only know the twenty-third Psalm, which is a beautiful poem. It’s a strength-giving poem, doesn’t matter what your religious background is: ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…’ You know, it’s a poem I’ve found myself reciting when walking down dark alleys [laughs]. So I read the Psalms or I intended to, but they’re right next to the Book of Job. So I took a scouring glance at the Book of Job, and then I got the St James’ and the New Jerusalem and the Gideons, all three translations. It’s quite a massive poem and has a lot of redundancy in it – there are a lot of lines that say the same thing slightly differently – so you take your favourite way of stating that thought from the many that are chosen in each translation.
Then I searched among them for rhymes, so I had to rearrange much of the thinking sequentially, but I don’t think I disturbed the general idea or condition of this man being tried for his soul. And I think everyone in a lifetime, at one time or another, sinks to the pits – or as God says in his speech, ‘sees the janitors of Shadowland’. I think it’s a good life that sinks that low, because without that you don’t really have powers of empathy. You may be sympathetic, which is a little shallower, but empathy, having been to the bottom, gives you the opportunity to be a more compassionate person.
I was mad – I’d had a lot of trouble, as women do with doctors, you know, and so the physician aspect, these friends of Job’s who come first as mourners and then as antagonists –
‘Pompous physicians’, you call them –
Yeah. ‘What carelessness’, I think I added that. I added a little bit of personal thought sometimes, and sometimes I had to paraphrase to get a rhyme. But for the most part it’s from the Book of Job, three translations, restructured.
The obvious question is how much personal experience and feeling is being vented through the adaptation.
Oh, I identify with Job completely. I played the track for an ex-LA city cop who’d had his family killed, a good cop who found something rotten within the force and wanted to cure it. Of course I identified with it. I identify with everything I write. ‘I am Lakota.’ I’m not a Lakota Indian, but I’m a Sami. I don’t think I could write anything or sing it without understanding it to a certain degree. And I have had a difficult life, as most people have, but it has been peculiarly difficult: a life of very good luck, very bad luck, a lot of health problems, therefore a lot of contact with medical carelessness and so on. So on that level I identify. I don’t think I’ve ever become faithless. I’ve never been an atheist. I can’t say what orthodoxy I belong to. I’m kind of a student of religion, comparatively speaking, and I like bits and pieces of all of them.
Early in the song you talk about spitting out your bitterness. It made me think of things you’ve said about perceiving hate in your heart. I wondered to what extent you still feel you have bitterness in you that you want to spit out.
Oh, yeah, you’ve got to cleanse yourself. I mean, here’s the thing: I want to be happy. Therefore I want to be affectionate and receive affection. Krishnamurti said something interesting: ‘The man who hates his boss hates his wife.’ And I believe that’s true. If you’re holding resentment or dark feelings for anyone, it carries over into your relationship, you burden them with your bitterness and so on. The ’80s were really difficult for me physically and emotionally – a lot of betrayals for money and simultaneously bad health and bad medicine. Without going into detail, the ’80s were really like being a prisoner of war.
Have the ’90s been better so far?
Oh, yeah. Much of it came to an end in the ’80s. I think even the Yuppies noticed that goodies only make you so happy, you know. The toys aren’t the answer, you know. And, you know, all of the human relationships are so malformed at this point. The heterosexual relationship is extremely malformed. We come up on it in ‘Not to Blame’. Every other woman is raped in her lifetime. Generally, if she’s raped once she’s raped many times, because rape occurs by a brother or a father or a priest and they have access repeatedly. That’s every other woman. If she’s raped as a child, she will not be a well-formed adult woman.
So, you know, you have to wonder why it is that men are so frustrated that they’re beating on women, why they feel they have the licence. Contemporary music is very, very full of woman-hatred. You know, I’ve never been a feminist. I like men’s company. I never go ‘Oh, men!’ I might say, ‘That man’s an asshole,’ but I don’t – it’s never gotten to the general with me, nor do I like the traditional directions of feminism because it’s too apartheid; it’s them and us, whereas my thing has always been the relationship, you know: ‘Why are we doing this? I like this about your action but not this.’ I believe in the beauty of closeness across the barrier of difference, be it man-woman or across the barrier of race.
I was very struck by ‘Not to Blame’. Apart from anything else, it seemed to empathise with the lot of womankind in a way that I can’t recall any of your earlier songs quite doing.
No, because I’m more of a companion to men; I’m a tomboy. So, you know, as I get older I have more women friends. And also the thing between the man and the woman has gotten so out of line, especially in pop music, between the maltreatment of doctors, most of whom as a group seem to be woman-haters, and the popularity of rap, which came out of the pimp’s tradition of ‘My bitch is badder than yours’. I mean, in America wife-battering is a national pastime: the day the hospitals are spilling over with bleeding women is the Rose Bowl game. So violent sports and wife-battering are synonymous.
There’s a huskiness about your voice now – and a sense of vulnerability that’s very moving on this record. How do you feel about your singing at the moment?
I’m finally developing enough character in my voice, I think, to play the roles that I write for myself. Like, ‘Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire’ I could probably sing better now because it’s about the seduction of heroin. I never did heroin but I was around people who were doing it. There are some songs that I think that I was miscast in, in that I performed them as an ingénue. Even ‘Both Sides Now’, which was one of my first songs I wrote when I was twenty-one, I think it’s better sung by someone in their fifties or sixties reflecting back on their life.
Sinatra did it, didn’t he?
Oh, but poor Frank, though. They gave him this terrible arrangement that was all wrong for him. And on the album cover he has his hand over his face and he’s sitting on the curb. I felt for him. I wish he’d sung it like ‘It Was a Very Good Year’ – in his own genre rather than trying to make a folk-rocker out of him. [Laughs]
You sang ‘Woodstock’ at the Edmonton Festival. What have your thoughts been about the anniversary hype this year?
Oh, it’s silly.
Yeah?
Yeah. [Laughs]
Before Edmonton you told an interviewer you hoped people wouldn’t use you as a ‘sentimental journey’.
Well, I understand how that is. Usually people get intensely involved during their courtship years, which generally speaking for people is in their youth. And all their best years are wrapped up against that music and those times. And they tend to listen to music less and less as they get older, right? But I’m a maker of music and I have a painter’s spirit, really, more than a musician’s spirit and I like pioneering. I like to keep moving forward rather than getting stuck in a regurgitating situation, you know, where I’m painting the same thing over and over. I don’t want to become a duty player, as Miles Davis would say.
Is there any kind of justification for the Stones or the Eagles heading out on the road yet again?
I don’t know. People think we make a lot of money out there. I was out for nine months the last time I toured. I made $60,000, less than my roadie. The artist is the last to get paid when you take a big show. I heard the Eagles made a lot of money, but the gross and the net is an entirely different animal. I want to make money this time out. I’ve never been money-motivated but I never understood my finances. Unfortunately, I’m no longer ignorant and I’ve been burned a lot, so this time I’m going to try and make some money. Looking at it on paper, it’s very difficult. By the time you pay your lawyers and all the people that have a piece of you and your overhead, there’s not that much left. Unless you get a sponsor. And who’s going to sponsor me – tobacco companies?
How do you look back now on the folkie years? John Martyn said that, for him, the problem with folk was that it didn’t swing. Do you agree with that?
Well, I don’t know. I swing, but then I’m not really folk.
Yeah, but when you look back on the first two albums, there wasn’t a lot of swing there, was there?
But see, I was born in a swing era and I was a rock’n’roll dancer before I became a musician. Well, first of all I studied classical when I was a child. My playmates were classical child prodigies, ’cause they were the only creative kids where I came from, right? So my first musical love was classical music, and then rock’n’roll was born. And I had polio. I was paralysed, I had to learn to walk again. As Neil Young did.
Right, there was a big outbreak, wasn’t there, in Canada?
Right. I had my legs taken away and then when I got ’em back, by God I danced my way through my teens. And I think that gave me a sense of rhythm. But the first albums I made, as I began to write my first songs, were quite intricate and quite classical. My friends who only knew me as a party doll and dancer thought, What is this and where is this coming from? As I began to write, it got more Celtic, really. And even like German lieder when I added the piano back into it. And then it began to swing. Well, you know, like I say, I was born in the swing era, so I was steeped in it. Sometimes it takes a long time for your influences to show up and become your own. It’s all pretty pure stuff and it just kind of bubbles up and you say, ‘Oh, my God, listen to that note, that’s a Tony Bennett note.’ Or, you know, even people that you never really admired that much: occasionally the note will creep out and you’ll say, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve assimilated that too!’ [Laughs]
Do you ever look back on famous songs such as ‘Both Sides Now’ or ‘The Circle Game’ and think how far away that girl seems now? There’s something so kind of virginal and maidenly about that voice – the purity of the phrasing and the whole style.
Yeah, well, I sang ‘Circle Game’ as an encore in Edmonton, but I kind of avoid it because I think of it as ingénue. A lot of children learned ‘Circle Game’ in school. I got a letter from a boy who was twenty-one and he said, you know, ‘I sang that song, “Circle Game”, in summer camp year after year after year. I had to.’ He said, ‘I never understood it. I just turned twenty-one.’ You know. It was a nice letter to receive. So that and ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ have become culture. It’s taught to grade three-ers as a kind of a nursery rhyme. I’m very pleased. I didn’t write it as a child’s song but I’m very pleased to see it go into the culture at that age.
I’m more tempted to run by some of the songs that I felt maybe I never received a compliment on. ‘Moon at the Window’ is one, for instance, I did in Edmonton, and it was very well received. And no one ever really noticed it on Wild Things.
There was a review of that show by an Edmontonian who wrote about how much it meant to everybody that you went back there.
It was a sweet experience. There was a neighbourhood very close to the hotel and there were bike trails. My boyfriend, who’s also a prairie boy, rented bikes and we went down to this poor neighbourhood with wooden sidewalks, beautiful little clapboard grocery stores and everything. It was still fields with wild weeds that I remember from my childhood. It’s very well kept and neat, and tiny little houses, you know? We went cycling almost every day when we were there. We had popsicles at the little corner store. It was like, you know, reliving our childhoods.
The conflict between a fear of the crowd on the one hand and the temptations of fame on the other seems to be a preoccupation of some of the songs in the ’70s and maybe even the ’80s too …
Can you give me an example?
Well, I’m thinking of your being lured back to Los Angeles and –
Oh, ‘I couldn’t let go of LA’?
Yeah … and ‘it sounded like applause’, the sound of fame coming through the airwaves –
Well, I withdrew from society. The original cover of For the Roses was a horse’s ass. They made a billboard of it on Sunset, a cartoon of a horse’s ass with a wreath around his neck and a big balloon and a big horse grin and a balloon coming out of his mouth that said ‘For the roses’. Geffen wouldn’t let me use it for the album cover, but he did let me put it up as a billboard on Sunset. I was really mad at show business at that time.
I liked small clubs. I am a ham and I am an enjoyer, you know? I enjoy partying, so a club is kind of a party, it’s fairly loose. But on the big stage, you know, timing is of the essence. I work in fifty different tunings, you know, so there’s this interminable thing to get it right – and if I don’t get it tuned right in tight, I don’t enjoy myself. On the big stage your sound gives you sonic distortion. It’s very hard to tune when the thing has the juice running through it. I can tune real quickly in an acoustic environment in a small room. But on the big stage you get all these overtones – it’s like you’re getting an inaccurate feedback. You know, standard tuning would have been easier but then of course I wouldn’t have had all of that original chordal movement and, um … the tunings coughed up wonderful compositions.
So it’s a trade-off. At a certain point, yes, I became too contemptuous of the audience. Critics seemed to praise me when I felt I was poor and slam me when I felt that I was at my peak. So that also fed my bad attitude towards the business – and especially the performance aspect. I’ve always loved making the albums and the writing. That’s more like the painting process anyway. You know, painting and exhibiting. But the self-promotion used to be distasteful. Now it’s just kind of funny to me. It’s one of the beauties of getting older, you know: you have less energy to worry, you know? [Laughs]
You’ve said at various points in your career that you regard yourself as a painter first and foremost. Is that still true?
Oh, yeah.
What tipped you over the line towards becoming a performer?
Art school. You know, I drew and I wrote poems. I wrote poetry secretly and I drew all through my notebooks. Basically I was a poor scholar: like most poets I was a bad learner. I was always very involved in music but not in any kind of career direction. Like I say, as a dancer, mostly as a spirit-lifter. So the irony that I would become a confessional poet and a serious musician to people who knew me in my teens was kind of out of context.
Just before I went to art school, I picked up a ukulele with the intention of accompanying dirty drinking songs at wiener roasts, no more ambition than that – just for having a good time. When I got to art college there was a coffee house there and I went down to see if I could pick up some pin money because I was on a student’s budget. And they were willing to pay me, like, $15 a night or a weekend or whatever it was, and that had some buying power in those days. So I spent my weekends performing and the art education was extremely disappointing to me because all the profs were fans of De Kooning and Barnett Newman and the abstractionists and I wanted classical knowledge, you know? It was not given at that time. So I was in conflict with my profs, I wasn’t learning what I wanted to learn. I was making money with the music, and then I went east to hear the Mariposa folk festival and Buffy Sainte-Marie was the headliner. And in Toronto at that time there were seventeen coffee houses functioning but I didn’t have the money to get into the Musicians’ Union. So they wouldn’t hire me.
I went to work in women’s wear and I played occasionally here and there, like little hoots and things around, but Canada has a tendency to eat its young alive and they would hire mediocre Americans instead. That’s the unfortunate mental sickness of my people. Once I crossed the border I began to write and my voice even changed. I no longer was imitative of the folk style, really. My voice was then my real voice and with a slight folk influence but from the first album it was no longer folk music. It was just a girl with a guitar that made it look that way. And no section could play it, it was too intricate harmonically and rhythmically. I tried for four projects to find a band and I tried things with players but it always squashed it. Finally it was recommended to me by the players I was trying to work with that I look for jazz musicians. And I found the L.A. Express and that worked well on Court and Spark.
If the professors at Calgary had given you the classical knowledge you wanted, you might not have ended up performing.
I would have devoted myself to painting. But then if I had not had polio I would probably be an athlete and not an artist at all [laughs]. Also, the life of a painter is very isolated and there is not much feedback. You can do a masterpiece and everyone will stand there and go, ‘Mm-hmm,’ and rub their chin, whereas a good song will knock somebody off the back of their chair. With my early songs, I wasn’t sure what a song was. I used to get songbooks with ‘Tutti Frutti’ and all the words to the rock songs in it, and I never thought poetry and songwriting had anything to do with each other – except for Chuck Berry, who really was a kind of a folk-poet. And I loved ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’, which was Goffin and King, you know. But still that was great songwriting, not poetry.
It wasn’t until ‘Positively 4th Street’ that a lightbulb went off in my head. Up until then, Dylan seemed to me like a Woody Guthrie clone and I was a detractor. You know, I was always in debate in the coffee houses, ‘Oh, what’s the fuss over?’ you know; ‘he’s just second-generation Woody and it’s kind of silly, he’s a middle-class kid, you know, he’s not riding the boxcars.’ But then his stuff started to really come from his own blood, you know? And when he wrote that song I thought, ‘Oh, my God, we can write about anything now.’ It was just, ‘You got a lotta nerve/To say you are my friend…’ Just that one line, ‘Whoa, what an opener!’ So that changed my direction, and after that my songs got real, ‘He said/she said’, kind of like playlets and soliloquies.
You’ve claimed that David Geffen said that you were the only star he knew who wanted to be ordinary. Does that now seem a little disingenuous?
When I was a kid I started fads. If I did something, kids would follow suit. If I pasted stars all over my blue suede shoes, the other kids would all do it too. And in high school they gave me a column in the school paper called ‘Fads and Fashions’, so I played around with those games in my teens. What was the question? Focus me again.
Well, the idea that you wanted to be ordinary. Because you’d always been the opposite. I mean ‘the search for higher achievement’ and all that. Perhaps by a relatively young age you’d had enough of being the high achiever.
In New York, strangers on the street holler at me across the street like someone at school – you know, ‘Hey! Joni! When you gonna do a concert here?’ That is extraordinary but it’s ordinary. They don’t suck in their breath. When you were playing in the clubs, you could go down and have a drink with people and maybe even go over to their house and listen to music, you know. That’s what I mean: you’re not quite ordinary but you haven’t lost your access to life. Right?
I guess what Geffen meant was that in some areas I need exceptional treatment, you know; it’s a courtesy to offer me exceptional treatment, it’s practical to offer me exceptional treatment. But in other cases it’s stupid to offer me exceptional treatment – and lonely-making.
Tell me about moving back to Reprise after twenty-odd years.
I had my choice. You know, I could have given this record to Geffen and call it Swan Song, which I was tempted to do. But the feedback I got from everyone around me was that that would be a shame, you know? And Mo [Ostin] at Warners was very enthusiastic to have me back. There hasn’t been a lot of excitement for my albums coming out but there is for this one. People are ready to listen, you know; they’re ready to take something a little more to heart and mind than they have in the past. I’ve always been a couple of years ahead of people in my personal changes. When my records come out, people kind of dump on ’em, and then two years later they go through the changes and something becomes their favourite. But by then it’s too late. The child’s been bloodied on the playground, so to speak. A lot of them have been out of sync that way.
So I had to weigh a lot of things up. I really was tempted to get out, you know, and head up into the Canadian back bush and to garden and paint and get on with my life. On the other hand, I don’t feel like many of my peers. I haven’t hit a writer’s block. If I hit a writer’s block, I paint. That’s an old farmer’s trick – I just crop-rotate so that you never notice.
I’m over the middle-age hump, you know, with becoming an elder, but I wondered whether a woman could continue in this youth-oriented genre. As a painter you’re just beginning to ripen at fifty. As a musician there’s a lot of scrutiny on how you look, da-da-da-da, and it’s such a shallow, fickle business. Not that the art world is any bowl of cherries – it isn’t. It seemed almost economically sensible to reduce my holdings: like, you know, I have a house here and I have a house in Canada, taxes are going up, things are going up, and in this business everybody has their hand out, you know. It almost seemed wise to get out of the business, but on the other hand I did have a public voice, a somewhat rare public voice, and perhaps I was needed [laughs].
There’s a kind of full circle in the fact that you’re back on the label where you started, and also that David Crosby co-wrote ‘Yvette in English’.
That was the first song of this collection born. David called up; he wanted me to produce him. I didn’t feel I could so then he called up and asked if I had any songs. I didn’t have any, so he asked if I would look at something he’d written. I paraphrased some of it, kept some lines, restructured it, set it to music, and sent it back. He recorded it first.
What were your first impressions of Los Angeles at the time that Crosby produced your first album? We’re going back to the era of Mama Cass and B. Mitchel Reed.
I remember driving around up in the canyons in Crosby’s car with Magical Mystery Tour on a good stereo. There were no sidewalks, no regimented lines like the way I was used to cities being laid out. Having lived in New York and then coming here and having trees in the yard and ducks in my neighbour’s pond, the ruralness and friendliness of it was extraordinary. Two strange girls in the ’60s showed up at my door and asked for sanctuary. I gave them the keys to my house, told them to feed my cats and said I’d be back in two weeks. You did things like that.
You’re going to tell me they turned out to be two of the Manson girls –
No, no! But I did have some of the Manson clan in my garden, you know? There was one guy, I forget his name, but he had a parrot called Captain Blood and he was always scribbling things on the inside walls of my house – Neil Young’s, too. Real cryptic things. There were a lot of weird people around.
Are the accounts of Crosby sort of showing you off to his superstar pals accurate? There’s that famous Henry Diltz picture of Eric Clapton sitting there, watching you play.
I met David in Florida in a club and he came in and he loved the music. He was twinkly about it, very enthused, and his instincts were, ‘I’m going to pretend to produce you but I’m not actually going to do anything.’ Because at that time he was in the Byrds, he was the new wave – folk-rock was happening. So basically he was going to protect the music, because he liked it the way it was, you know? We just went in and went for the performance and I did a little bit of sweetening on it. I think perhaps without David’s protection they might have forced some kind of producer on me who would try to make an apple out of an orange.
I don’t think I would have survived it, because that’s what happened on the second record and it was such hell. I said, ‘This will kill my love for music – I’ll never want to record again if I have to go through this process.’ The producer, who was a hotshot, went away for two weeks and I said to Henry [Lewy, the engineer], ‘Could we get it done in two weeks before he gets back?’ That was the beginning of a relationship. Henry and I made thirteen albums without a producer, you know. I didn’t need a babysitter, I didn’t need an idea man. I worked in a focused way in the studio, so I didn’t need somebody reeling me in because I was wasting time.