Joni Mitchell channels her angst over Jackson Browne and Warren Beatty into her bestselling album, after finding a band that can keep up with her.
Joni Mitchell was the quintessential free spirit—writing the anthem “Woodstock,” living in a cave with hippies in Greece, posing nude on the inside gatefold of For the Roses. She challenged herself to be completely transparent in her lyrics, inspired by Brando’s method acting.1 She turned down Graham Nash’s marriage proposal because “I just started thinking, ‘My grandmother was a frustrated poet and musician. She kicked the kitchen door off the hinges.’ And I thought maybe I’m the one that got the gene who has to make it happen.… As much as I cared for Graham, I thought, ‘I’ll end up like my grandmother, kicking the door off the hinges.’”2 In Court and Spark’s biggest hit, “Help Me,” she sang of loving her freedom.
But in the same song she worries that she’s falling for a “sweet talking ladies’ man” who loves freedom even more than she does.
In 1972, Jackson Browne opened for her as she toured the US, the UK, Canada, and Europe. In Court and Spark’s title track, she describes a singer busking on the sidewalk until the “glory train” passes through him—perhaps a reference to how Browne’s “Doctor, My Eyes” broke into the Top 10 during the middle of the tour. The busker takes the coins he makes and buries them in People’s Park, perhaps a reference to Browne’s long-standing political activism. The park was the Berkeley cause célèbre in which hippies usurped 2.8 acres owned by the University of California and transformed them into a public park, reversing the trajectory in Mitchell’s protest song “Big Yellow Taxi,” in which nature was paved to put up a parking lot.
Along with political idealism, she and Browne shared a close friend in David Geffen and an early champion in David Crosby (who sang backup on “Doctor, My Eyes”). Here was someone who could help her forget the singer-songwriter who inspired much of her last album, For the Roses, and had left her for Carly Simon. Drummer Russ Kunkel commented, “Jackson was a West Coast version of James [Taylor]; James was an East Coast version of Jackson.”3 In the spring she told former flame Roy Blumenthal that “Jackson and I are in love.”4
Mitchell biographer Sheila Weller said Jackson “was the one guy who really seriously got to her in a very painful way. They met and she fell in love with him at her near-nadir, depression-wise. He was just becoming famous, he was younger than she (about five years), and he was very good looking.”
But Weller also noted, “They fought quite a bit.”5 His friend singer Pamela Polland observed, “It became too heavy for Jackson to be with someone who was so much more prolific than he. She was creative in so many ways, and it came out of her so easily, that to face his own struggle with his craft, his own slowness with his craft—to have those two mirrored against each other—I think was very painful for him.”6 (One example was “Take It Easy.” Browne wrote the first verse, and Eagle Glenn Frey was eager to record it. Frey waited for weeks for Browne to write the second verse, then finally asked if he could finish it himself.)
Mitchell played electric piano on “Sing My Songs to Me” on Browne’s second album, For Everyman, but during the sessions he met model Phyllis Major at the Troubadour. He describes the evolution of their relationship in “Ready or Not.” At the Troubadour he gets into a fight with an “unemployed actor” while “defending her dignity.” He tells Major that he wants his freedom (echoing “Help Me”), but she does his laundry and cooks (which, presumably, Mitchell did not), and before he knows it she’s moved in with him, pregnant with their son, Ethan (born November 1973).
Thus most of Court and Spark deals with Mitchell processing rejection. “Raised on Robbery” looks at it from a humorous angle. A lady takes a seat at the bar and tries to encourage the man sitting next to her to come home with her, but he walks off. In a way, the song is a jovial celebration of liberated women’s freedom to get shot down without shame at singles bars just like men. Robbie Robertson adds the Band’s funky humor with his guitar. Mitchell overdubs her own voice to add a hint of Andrews Sisters, recently revived by Bette Midler. (Both Midler and Mitchell covered Lambert, Hendricks and Ross’s “Twisted” that year as well.)
“Car on a Hill” also sounds upbeat—you could almost dance to it in parts—with guitar by Wayne Perkins (who worked with Bob Marley and later the Stones) and smooth jazz reed by Tom Scott. But the track recounts a night she waited for three hours for Browne to show and he never did. Though the lyrics do not reflect it, Weller writes in Girls like Us that “one confidante says she ‘took pills. She cut herself up and threw herself against a wall and got completely bloodied—glass broke. She vomited up the pills.’” Weller later told journalist Lois Alter Mark, “David Geffen rescued her and, having hit bottom, her healing then began.”7
A third of the way into the song, a ghostly heavenly choir (comprised of overdubbed Mitchell voices) interrupts the groove, perhaps the release of death calling to her, or perhaps an epiphany that the relationship is over.
In the 2017 biography Reckless Daughter, Mitchell denied the account in Weller’s book. “It said, when Jackson Browne dumped me, I attempted suicide and I became a cutter. A cutter! A self-mutilator!… I’m crazy but not that crazy.”8
When Browne played the Roxy club in October, they had a confrontation on the stairs, and she ran onto Sunset Boulevard without her shoes. Some retellings say he hit her. Years later Browne countered that she attacked him twice.9
The Daily Telegraph assumed Browne’s haunting “Fountain of Sorrow” was his take on their relationship.10 The song ended with the hopeful extension of an olive branch. But Mitchell was not so forgiving. After Daryl Hannah accused Browne of assaulting her in 1992 (a charge he denied), Mitchell released “Not to Blame,” which excoriated Browne for domestic abuse and for supposedly driving Major to suicide in 1976. (Though she had reportedly attempted suicide before Browne, once after a breakup with Keith Richards.11)
Movie star Warren Beatty inspired at least two songs on the album. Geffen met the actor when he considered buying Geffen’s house and soon introduced him to Mitchell.12 “People’s Parties” describes the Hollywood soirees they attended with Beatty’s friend Jack Nicholson (“Jack behind his joker”). The song was recorded at the same time Beatty began preproduction on Shampoo, his film about a sex addict adrift in Los Angeles. Mitchell had been the doyenne of the Laurel Canyon musician community, but Hollywood struck her as a colder scene. “Stars are hardly ever fun. They’re neurotic, they’re self-centered, they’re nervous, they’re insecure, especially movie stars. I’m more comfortable with farm people.”13
One night, Mitchell went to Hugh Hefner’s mansion with Nicholson and Beatty. “The three of us had been out to dinner together. All these girls came up to me, and if their ass was their best feature they stuck it forward. ‘Hi!’ they said and they stuck their bum out. ‘Hi!’ they said and they stuck their tits out. I felt so bad for these girls. At a certain point I just decided to sneak away. And I ran out of gas in the driveway! They were running with jerry cans to get me out of there—I couldn’t get out fast enough—and I burst into tears. The next time I went there I had adapted, but the first time I felt so sorry for who would live the brief part of their life—’cause old age is going to come on them all too soon and then what are they going to live their life for—for this one aspect of their physical contours. For many, the culture grooms this as all there is. A woman’s power is her beauty, or the illusion of it. And that’s tragic.”14
She sings of “Photo Beauty,” one minute “crying on someone’s knee,” the next “laughing it all away.” Mitchell overdubs herself singing the latter phrase like a shimmering chorus of sedated Stepford Wives in a record skipping on the run-out groove.
A later relationship of Mitchell’s, Dave Naylor, believed “The Same Situation” was about Beatty, “weighing beauty and imperfection to see if I’m worthy … tethered to a ringing telephone in a room full of mirrors.” When the character in the song says that he loves her, she asks, “Do you think this can be real?” She assumed he and Nicholson had a wager over who would seduce her first, so she always drove to parties separately from them in her own car.
“I knew the game [Beatty] was playing. He told [the psychiatrist they shared, Dr. Martin Gotjahn] that I was the only woman that beat him at his own game, and I said at that point, ‘I don’t know what the game is, but I don’t feel like a victor. If I won something, what did I win?’”15
In the song, she sends a prayer up to “the Lord on death row” to send her “somebody who’s strong, and somewhat sincere.” The violins arranged by Tom Scott swell like wind sweeping back her hair on a Hollywood balcony as the bass pulses and rim shots click like lost time ticking by.
“My problem was that I was sad. I wasn’t mentally ill. I was sad, trying to get something going in impossible situations. When someone’s undermining your self-worth, it’s not a healthy situation. Well, it’s not James (Taylor)’s fault he’s fucked up. And Jackson’s just a nasty bit of business. So to go from one to the other kind of scared me against going into another relationship.”16
On “Just like This Train,” she stares out a locomotive window at a desert as the slide guitar groans with melancholy. She’s given up trying to find “a strong cat without claws” and instead dreams of the pleasure she’ll have watching her vain man lose his hair. Mitchell recorded the song that fall just as Erica Jong released Fear of Flying. Jong’s protagonist yearns for a “zipless fuck” with a “stranger on a train,” but when she actually lives it out, Jong wrote that “instead of turning me on, it had revolted me! Puzzling, wasn’t it? A tribute to the mysteriousness of the psyche. Or maybe my psyche had begun to change in a way I hadn’t anticipated.”
In “Down to You,” Mitchell goes to the “pick up station craving warmth and beauty,” waking in the morning to a stranger who leaves. But the sad horn leads into a healing orchestral arrangement, accepting the emptiness and gathering the strength to persevere. “Everything comes and goes,” but how you deal with it is “down to you. You can crawl, you can fly, too.” She and Scott won the Grammy for Best Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist for the song.
Had Court and Spark wrapped with “Down to You,” the climax would feel epic, bittersweet but empowering. Instead she closed with two songs inspired by her visit to a treatment center partially run by Dr. Grotjahn, the psychiatrist who treated her, Beatty, and Geffen.17 “Trouble Child” opens on her in a “sterilized room” in Malibu feeling spacey, recalling novels where the protagonist winds up institutionalized, like Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar or Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays. The bass moves slowly with a touch of funk, mirroring both her sedated mind and the chip on her shoulder about dealing with psychiatrists she doesn’t want to believe in. She knows she has to change her attitude in the aftermath of her confrontation with Browne (“some’ll try to clock you”) and purported suicide attempt (“you can’t live life and you can’t leave it”), but she sees the doctor as both friend and foe. Mainly she tries to figure out how she wound up in such a lonely place. “Why does it come as such a shock to know you really have no one?”
When Mitchell was nine, she was hospitalized for polio. Unable to go home for Christmas, she consoled herself with singing. In art school, when she lost her virginity to her boyfriend, she got pregnant. Both the Pill and abortion were unavailable in Saskatchewan at that time. “He left me three months pregnant in an attic room with no money and winter coming on and only a fireplace for heat.”18
Within a month of placing her daughter in a foster home, she began performing her own compositions for the first time. She married another folk singer who said he’d help get her child back. “Then, the moment we were married, he intimated strongly, he had no interest in raising another man’s child.… I started writing to develop my own private world and also because I was disturbed.”19
She referred to her daughter obliquely in the melancholy “The Circle Game” and “Little Green.” “Depression can be the sand that makes the pearl. Most of my best work came out of it. If you get rid of the demons and the disturbing things, then the angels fly off, too.”20
For the final track, Mitchell again sang of disagreeing with her analyst, but this time from a humorous angle by covering the satirical “Twisted,” from Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross’s 1952 album The Hottest New Group in Jazz. “I considered that album to be my Beatles. I learned every song off of it, and I don’t think there is another album anywhere—including my own—on which I know every note and word of every song.”21 She sings that her psychiatrist can’t understand her because she’s really a genius—and gets Cheech and Chong to guest star, bouncing back through comedy.
Initially she intended to work with the session musicians who played for Browne, Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, and CSNY, but “they couldn’t play my music, because it’s so eccentric. They would try, but the straight-ahead 2/4 rock & roll running through would steamroller right over it.… They couldn’t grasp the subtlety of the form. I’ve never studied music, so I’d always be talking in abstractions. And they’d laugh, ‘Aww, isn’t that cute? She’s trying to tell us how to play.’ Never negatively, but appeasingly, you know. And finally it was [drummer] Russ Kunkel who said, ‘Joni, you’d better get yourself a jazz drummer.’”22
Saxophonist Tom Scott had worked on her previous LP For the Roses, so she attended a show by his fusion band L.A. Express, then invited them to a session. “When they got in the studio, it was the same problem. They didn’t really know how heavy to play, and I was used to being the whole orchestra. Many nights I would be very discouraged. But one night we suddenly overcame the obstacles. The next thing we knew, we were all aware we were making something quite unique.”23
They practiced at Studio Equipment Rentals in August and September, while her old friend from the Canadian folk scene, Neil Young, was there recording Tonight’s the Night. The actual tracks were recorded at A&M Studios in Hollywood in October, where John Lennon and Phil Spector drunkenly floundered through Rock and Roll.
Puerto Rican flamenco guitarist José Feliciano (“Feliz Navidad”) was playing on Lennon’s sessions when he heard Mitchell working on her portrait of David Geffen, “Free Man in Paris.” “I already knew Joni from when we both worked in Canada, so I walked in and said I thought I could play some good electric guitar for it. The great guitarist Larry Carlton of the L.A. Express was already on the track, but I knew I could hold my own with him. Joni didn’t try to direct me at all, just let me do what I do, and it turned out really good.”24
Afterward, however, he rubbed her the wrong way with some unsolicited advice. “She was playing with her guitar in an open tuning, so I pointed out that although open tunings are nice, they can be restrictive. I said that she’d be better off just to tune her guitar in the normal way. She didn’t like that. I think it put her off me a little.”25
She had taught herself guitar in art school listening to a Pete Seeger instruction record. The struggle with polio left her unable to press the strings with her left hand in the standard way, so she developed her own unique tunings, just as Jimi Hendrix, Keith Richards, and Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi had. Regardless of Feliciano’s opinion, Jimmy Page revered her, as he revealed to Rolling Stone a few years later when the magazine asked if he could top “Stairway to Heaven.” “I have to do a lot of hard work before I can get anywhere near those stages of consistent, total brilliance. I don’t think there are too many people who are capable of it. Maybe one. Joni Mitchell. That’s the music that I play at home all the time, Joni Mitchell. Court and Spark I love because I’d always hoped that she’d work with a band.… She brings tears to my eyes, what more can I say? It’s bloody eerie. I can relate so much to what she says.”26
Zeppelin’s “Going to California” was partially inspired by her “I Had a King.” When they performed it in concert, Robert Plant murmured “Joni” after the line “to find a queen.” Still, he was too shy to talk with Mitchell at parties, he revealed in the Zeppelin bio Hammer of the Gods.27
Graham Nash and David Crosby sang backup on “Free Man” as she pole-vaulted through her three-octave range, thrilled to sync her acoustic groove with the power of L.A. Express—drummer John Guerin in particular.
Guerin had worked sessions for artists ranging from Sinatra to Zappa, briefly served in the Byrds in the early ’70s, and most famously beat out the rhythm in the Hawaii Five-0 theme. He was initially unimpressed at the idea of working for the “folksinger,” until he realized, “She was the whole orchestra in one guitar!… You didn’t go whistling Joni’s tunes. They were much more complicated; not A-A-B-A form, not Gershwin. Joni’s songs didn’t have the usual hook; she would form the music to her lyrical thought and sometimes go across bars and in different time signatures—she didn’t care.”28
The way his drums dramatically fell into the intros of “Help Me” and “Free Man” gave her signature propulsive strumming an added kick. With thick black hair like Beatty’s and rugged good looks, he soon shared her bed, listening to artists they both loved like Davis and Coltrane. Maybe he inspired “Help Me” and not Browne. In a future song, “Refuge of the Road,” she paid tribute to Guerin as “a friend of the spirit” whose sanity “mirrored me back simplified” and got her to laugh again.29
“Joan’s a very complicated person and I’m a pretty straightahead guy,” he said. “I think she lightened up a lot with me.”30 She later married bassist Larry Klein. The rhythm section, it seemed, was more conducive to her happiness than tortured, competitive singer-songwriting heartthrobs.
Geffen’s Asylum label held back the album’s release till just after the holiday season in a strange coordinated assault on the pop charts by three of his acts: Court and Spark was released January 1, 1974, Carly Simon’s Hot Cakes January 11, and Dylan’s Planet Waves January 17. Mitchell’s went double platinum and peaked at No. 2, blocked by Dylan. Simon made No. 3. A year earlier Simon dominated the charts, but now “Help Me” went to No. 7 and topped easy listening, bringing a new level of wit, sensuality, and vulnerability to the radio and the dance floor. Mitchell had always loved to dance. “Free Man” went to No. 2 on easy listening.
Los Angeles Times critic Robert Hilburn dubbed the LP “virtually flawless.” The Village Voice named it the best album of the year. Rolling Stone later ranked it the 111th Greatest Album of All Time (Blue was No. 30).
The only one who didn’t seem wowed was Dylan. One night he, Mitchell, Geffen, and some friends listened to both new records. “There was all this fussing over Bobby’s project, ’cause he was new to [Geffen’s] label, and Court and Spark, which was a big breakthrough for me, was being entirely and almost rudely dismissed. Geffen’s excuse was, since I was living in a room in his house at the time, that he had heard it through all of its stages, and it was no longer any surprise to him. Dylan played his album, and everybody went, ‘Oh wow.’ I played mine, and everybody talked and Bobby fell asleep. I knew [Court] was good. I think Bobby was just being cute,” she told an interviewer with a laugh.31 She painted her own cover, as Dylan had.
Guerin cheated on Mitchell and they broke up, during which time she briefly dated Wayne Perkins. But she missed him, and when the L.A. Express joined her on tour mid-January, the couple reunited.
“It took me six records to find a band that could play my music,”32 she told Robert Hilburn, but now that she had found the right band, her joy was self-evident in film footage from the tour and in the live album, Miles of Aisles (which hit No. 2). After the tour Guerin moved into her new house in Bel Air.