How to Hug a Cactus Tree

Paul Allen Anderson reviews Ann Powers’s “Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell.”

By Paul Allen AndersonAugust 19, 2024

• Music

• Cultural Studies

ANN POWERS INSISTS that her major new book, Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell, is not a biography. Still, the legendary artist stands alone on the book’s cover, and its chapters unfold to the rhythm of Mitchell’s career from the 1960s to the present. The difference is that Traveling doesn’t train its spotlight exclusively on one star. Powers forces Mitchell to share the spotlight with many others—friends, collaborators, musicians, authors, Powers herself in confessional mode—and a sprawling backdrop of cultural and musical change. As a result, the pioneering singer-songwriter appears less singular and more life-size than ever. 

“Becoming legendary is a strange process of both expansion and reduction—the knotty totality of a person is smoothed out into one official portrait, and in a way, the legend becomes a former person, at least in the public view,” Powers observes. “She’s now a vessel, an embodiment, an interface. Even more endangered is any clear memory of that person as they were before this process of abstraction began.” Powers addresses and dismantles assorted Joni Mitchell legends, carves a new path through the legendary artist’s life and work, and invites readers to walk beside her as she shares her own intimate revelations. One could hardly find a better tour guide into Mitchell’s music and eras than Powers, one of the most admired and widely read music critics of this century. A reader might expect Traveling’s demythologizing approach to diminish the artist’s work. Somehow the opposite happens. In cracking the jewel-encrusted legends of Mitchell’s genius—legends reinforced by the artist’s own defensive and sometimes off-putting history of self-mythologization—Powers clears space for a nonhagiographic but largely admiring interpretation of Mitchell’s decades of trailblazing and deeply influential music.

The early chapters on Joni Mitchell and the Laurel Canyon scene are among the best in Traveling. Joni Mitchell—born Roberta Joan Anderson in Alberta—arrived in Los Angeles in 1967 at the invitation of David Crosby, who had recently been fired by folk-rock superstars the Byrds. She had a soprano voice reminiscent of folk queens Joan Baez and Judy Collins, looked like a blonde fashion model, and wrote stunning songs. She had sold a few instant classics already (“The Circle Game” and “Both Sides Now”) and had more in the tank. The white and mostly male troubadours who populated the Canyon’s burgeoning singer-songwriter scene embraced the Canadian import. Young men like David Crosby, Graham Nash, and James Taylor aided her career, celebrated her triumphs, learned and lifted alternative guitar tunings from her, and served up fresh relationship dilemmas for her growing treasure box of sharply observed songs about bad couplings and the problem of love. 

The Laurel Canyon scene in which Mitchell traveled was an informal boys’ club, Powers argues. Unlike the men who fawned over her talent and beauty while still leaning into a full complement of gendered privileges, Mitchell “sincerely believed that in the space of art-making, gender divisions dissolved.” In public, she cultivated the soft femininity of a doe-eyed ingénue. At the same time, she refused to be slotted into any minor role on account of gender. Mitchell may have been “queen of the hippies” for a period, but she chafed against counterculture celebrations of the hippie nymph, the lovely silent muse, the nurturing earth mother, and the rocker’s wife. Her views were closer to those of older generations of female artists who struggled to “transcend the norms that would entrap” them. By the mid-1970s, her luxe fashion style embraced a degree of androgyny as she turned to black berets and tailored menswear. It recalled how women of the Beat Generation took up an androgynous uniform of dungarees, dark turtlenecks, simple makeup, and flat shoes under a loose painter’s smock. 

The twentysomething Mitchell played the role of nonthreatening ingénue even as her introspective songs and protofeminist ambitions pushed hard past diminutive gender archetypes. For decades, Mitchell suggested that her reputation had suffered great harm at the hands of sexist writers at Rolling Stone magazine. Powers carefully read through the relevant years from the gossipy rock rag to evaluate the claim. Casual sexism and misogyny suffused the magazine’s editorial content and advertising—as was the case everywhere in the rock press and beyond. The hippie counterculture was hardly a feminist space. Powers’s conclusions, however, deflate Mitchell’s complaint about victimization. “[O]ver the course of half a decade,” the critic observes, there were “a few insensitive jokes about her love life—that’s the sum of Mitchell’s supposedly horrific treatment in Rolling Stone.” 

Powers doesn’t excuse the magazine’s pervasive mistreatment of women. To the contrary, she wants to highlight how “other women suffered much worse” in the magazine’s pages, including Mitchell’s contemporaries Joan Baez, Cass Elliot, Janis Joplin, and Linda Ronstadt. In fact, Powers concludes, Rolling Stone treated Mitchell better than any other woman on or near the rock scene. This is where things get really interesting in Traveling. Why, then, did Mitchell care so much—and for so many years—about “a few insensitive jokes”? Powers concludes that “Mitchell’s ire did not rise because she was treated differently than other women. She was mad because she very occasionally received the same insults or questionable praise that they did.” Mitchell didn’t want to be perceived as similar to any of her female peers; she wanted to be in the boys’ club and felt she belonged in the same supposedly ungendered “genius” (but really boygenius) category as, say, Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen. “In the years when she was first defining herself,” Powers explains, “people thought of ‘genius’ as synonymous with ‘man.’” Earning membership in the boys’ club “worked for her” by “free[ing] her from the femininity that threatened to hold her back.” 

“Can you tell,” Powers asks, “that I’m a little bit angry at Joni for trying to genius her way beyond gender?” What a phrase—“genius her way beyond gender.” Rubbing salt into the wound of rejected solidarity, Mitchell, for decades, expressed prickly, superior, and nonsupportive attitudes about other women on the scene, with rare exceptions. Powers is disinclined to make excuses or defend Mitchell’s “sometimes gleeful arrogance.” Along these lines, the critic detects a condescending “mean girl” tone in numerous songs from 1970’s Ladies of the Canyon, Mitchell’s third and most hippie-flavored album. Being the token female star of the Laurel Canyon boys’ club or rock’s boygenius club only ever provided partial insulation. To “transcend” a sexist context, Mitchell clung hard to a notion of ungendered “genius” while figuratively kicking other talented women who attempted to climb the greased ladder to artistic respect. Flush with fame in the 1970s, Mitchell proclaimed herself against the feminists, even as her songs spoke to the inner lives of many women aspiring to the feminist ideals of independence, equality in love, and creative self-realization. 

One of Powers’s best case studies of how Mitchell’s “genius” self-mythologization backfired comes with the artist’s beloved Blue (1971). Mitchell crafted an official account of how listeners should approach her fourth album. She wrote and recorded Blue in an extreme state of vulnerability after a catastrophic breakup. The songs hit so hard, she explained, because she felt as emotionally undefended, honest, and transparent during their composition as a cigarette pack’s spent “cellophane wrapper.” Mitchell repeated the cellophane metaphor over the years. 

There’s a “problem with ‘cellophane’ as the main explanation for the greatness of Blue,” Powers counters. Almost everyone feels like shit after the breakup of a promising romantic alliance. Many of us turn to making or listening to sad music as a salve. Feeling raw and vulnerable, however, is only a tiny part of creating a masterpiece like Blue. Mitchell’s preferred “cellophane” metaphor, Powers argues, “gets to an essence by downplaying the long process that distilled it.” All the talk of a genius’s shocking flashes of extreme vulnerability and guilelessness obscures the obvious effort, craft, innovation, and collaborative spirit that made possible the album’s concentrated evocation of romantic euphoria and the piercing dejection of heartache. To shift the discussion away from this confessional dimension, Powers revisits Blue in musical terms as an implicit response to Kind of Blue, the 1959 masterpiece by Mitchell’s all-time favorite jazz artist, Miles Davis. Like the Davis sextet’s modal experiment, the utterly exploratory and collaborative sound of Blue is uncluttered, nonfrenetic, and achingly poignant in a new way. 

Even more compelling is Powers’s contextualization of how female sorrow is represented on Blue in relation to second-wave 1970s feminist writing as well as the stylish sad girl aesthetic associated with British and European pop stars like Marianne Faithful, Nico, and Françoise Hardy. Powers explores why so many white feminists and women’s liberationists of the 1970s were hesitant to address publicly the grief that often accompanied the grueling pursuit of equality and freedom. Then as now, hostile men and women brayed that these independent feminists represented an abject and pathetic minority of the ugly and unlovable, the queer, the intellectual, and the neurotic—a miserable army of childless cat ladies and tortured poet wannabes. In response, second-wave pioneers put on a brave and defiant face in public; everyone was free to unburden and recollect themselves as a whole person emotionally while listening to the sad tracks on Mitchell’s Blue or other saturnine favorites at home.

“In her music and through her presence,” Powers writes, “Mitchell tapped into the vitality of a space opening up, one that she in part created: a clearing in which women could fully be themselves and claim the power of that wholeness, while also acknowledging the risks and the pain of shaking off old ways.” In an adjacent practice of “opening up” new spaces for women’s liberation through beautiful art lined with introspection and sadness, leading Black feminist voices, artists, and authors of the 1970s such as Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Toni Cade Bambara, Audre Lorde, and Alice Walker faced down and elaborated the reality of sadness, grief, and intergenerational trauma in Black women’s lives. Although one won’t hear any 12-bar blues songs, throaty growls, fears of homelessness, or spicy innuendos on Blue, Joni Mitchell tapped into the Black blues tradition’s genius for facing down the devils of grief and despair. She responded heroically to the blue devils while capturing the euphoric highs of fresh love in the rearview mirror. Mitchell’s dramatic success in this effort—especially as represented in 1971’s Blue and the exquisite Hejira from five years later—secured her reputation for all time. 

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Powers shifts gears again when tackling Mitchell’s remarkable outpouring of the mid-1970s—not just the obvious winners Court and Spark (1974) and Hejira but also the more challenging The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975), Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter (1977), and Mingus (1979). After traversing Laurel Canyon’s white folk-rock scene and providing brilliant musical and social commentary all along the way, Powers watches Mitchell spread her wings and travel far, at least musically. In reality, she only moved 15 miles from Laurel Canyon to Bel Air. Though the jazzy Court and Spark went multiplatinum and yielded Mitchell’s biggest hit (the sublime “Help Me”), her next albums aimed to soar outside the restrictive pop demand for sing-along choruses and melodic hooks. These more challenging albums—which define Mitchell’s so-called jazz fusion phase (ca. 1974–79)—still sold in the hundreds of thousands. Nevertheless, by her mid-thirties, she was fighting for relevance while following her experiment-loving muse into a prolonged engagement with what musicologist Samuel A. Floyd Jr. dubbed “the power of Black music.” Even once-fawning critics were starting to divide over Mitchell’s new genre-blending experiments. The legendary jazz composer, bassist, and bandleader Charles Mingus declared her a “nervy broad”—and he meant it as the highest compliment. They would soon collaborate. Powers writes admiringly of Mitchell’s output in this period, which she places alongside the era’s other ambitious pop-jazz fusions, especially those coming from the genre-jumping Black innovators that Mitchell studied and admired. These included Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and the world-historical jazz superstars Mitchell collaborated with, like electric bassist Jaco Pastorius, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, and keyboardist Herbie Hancock. 

While reviewing Mitchell’s fusion years, Powers drills down on the centrality of collaboration in Mitchell’s oeuvre. It’s a deeply revisionist theme because it disrupts the mythology of Mitchell as a singular genius and visionary—a mythology pushed by her record companies, friends, admiring critics, prior chroniclers, and the artist herself. Powers takes up collaboration not only as a theme within Mitchell’s classic songs but also as crucial to how she built studio tracks. In these years, Mitchell turned away from predictable popular song structures. Choruses disappeared in favor of longer stanzas. Melodic hooks dissipated into a gorgeous blur of long conversational melodies. Even Mitchell’s biggest swings, like the sprawling double album Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter and the “straight” jazz album Mingus, managed to come out sounding like assured blends of the intimate, the interrogative, and the experimental. During this great run of albums, Powers convincingly argues, Mitchell essentially reshaped “the song form to reveal her inner journeys.” These journeys no longer followed a typical verse-chorus-bridge structure. Mitchell’s “conversational vocal style,” Powers writes,

became a means for embodying rumination, that mental state in which thoughts unspool and recombine, dragging a person down until she can identify which of them might be a lifeline. To accommodate her intuitive writing style, she abandoned hooks and clear refrains in favor of soliloquies and sonic meltdowns, all serving insights that paid off without resolving. More than any other music of the time, this was the sound of a brain inquiring about itself.

The representation of intimate talk, interior monologues, and self-inquiry in Mitchell’s daring albums “has its own rhythms, choreography, moments of sublime synchronicity and painful, even fatal stumbles.” While the focus on intimate talk and the interior monologue may sound de rigueur for a singer-songwriter operating in the therapeutic “‘Me’ Decade,” Powers clarifies how Mitchell “managed something unique” in her daring and emotionally resonant formal experiments. 

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By the early 1980s, Mitchell’s generation was struggling in a pop marketplace where, as always, younger acts and new sounds reigned. Powers wrote brilliantly on the rise and significance of Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Prince in the twinned eras of MTV and the AIDS catastrophe in her book Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul (2017). A 40-year-old in 1983, Mitchell pulled back from her jazz adventures, studied and enjoyed New Wave, and remained dead set against becoming a nostalgia act. One model was Miles Davis, who emerged from a long 1970s hibernation with an up-to-date electric band. In public, at least, he showed no concern when old fans and critics who longed for the sleek sound of his classic acoustic ensembles disparaged his funky and sprawling new style. On her three 1980s albums, Mitchell put away her acoustic guitar and experimented with a more electronic, synth-heavy, and (sometimes) flat-out rock sound. The new era yielded neither radio hits nor a serious commercial recovery. 

Mitchell has spoken of the phase as an artistic failure and thus discouraged listeners from taking it seriously. Ever the contrarian, Powers disagrees and fires up her revisionist engine. She defends Mitchell’s often-overlooked 1980s albums—her “problem children, loved but disappointing”—in terms of their future-facing sonic collages and as evidence of an inspiring collaboration between Mitchell and Larry Klein, her co-producer, bassist, and then-husband. “True to her zeitgeist-savvy ways, Joni shacked up with Klein” in the early 1980s “just as marriage was making a comeback, in popular culture at least.” Mitchell’s first album of the decade, Wild Things Run Fast (1982), featured a virtual “love explosion” in line with a waning divorce rate and a popular wave of pro-marriage discourse. The album sounds uneven and occasionally dated in retrospect, but Powers does her best to lean on its best tracks and most zeitgeisty aspects. 

The critic plays with an idealistic vision of Mitchell and Klein in the 1980s as a swashbuckling duo along the lines of Harrison Ford and Karen Allen in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) or Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone (1984). Mitchell and Klein were newly in love, and they loved making music with new toys like the Fairlight CMI digital synthesizer, a miraculous and very pricey tool for manipulating sounds and samples. Continuing the book’s long autocritical thread, Powers confesses, “I found this thrillingly romantic. After all, that’s one way I think about my marriage. The way Joni and Klein speak to each other in these interviews shows how a creative couple devises its own means of mutual translation.” While many dismissed Dog Eat Dog (1985) “as a failed experiment,” Powers looks to “its crucial role in the evolution of Mitchell’s songwriting.” “It is the album that takes her beyond a common idea of the personal,” the critic argues, “not only via the subject matter its songs address—most of the album’s tracks are protest songs that apply poetic logic to issues ranging from yuppie consumerism to mass-media overload—but through its sound.” While some listeners would still long for the stripped-down sound of the sad, philosophical Joni Mitchell, Powers hears and applauds forward progress. 

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Restless to forge ahead, Mitchell developed yet another era in three strong albums from the 1990s, including the masterpiece Night Ride Home (1991). The acoustic guitar returned to prominence as she blended aspects of her protest and portrait (rather than self-portrait) songs and political lamentations from the 1980s with the hushed intimacy and reflectiveness of earlier eras. In interviews, Mitchell groused that the music industry didn’t know what to do with a legend in her early fifties, so it just started throwing lifetime achievement awards at her—while otherwise ignoring her new music. Despite the garlands, she felt like a racehorse forcibly put out to pasture—a grim scenario Mitchell already prophesied for herself on the 1972 album For the Roses. She had to witness what her artistic heroes like van Gogh, Picasso, and Miles Davis never endured: her restless and spiky legacy was repackaged into a sentimental commodity, a gentle monument, a therapeutic hug, a sweet sing-along. The culture wanted the edges sanded off. Powers tracks Mitchell’s partial retreat from recording in the 2000s and the devastating health crises of the 2010s. Put into high gear during her heroic return from the brink, the process of Mitchell’s commemoration often avoided or smoothed over the features of the artist’s music that Powers, quite rightly, most admires: its spikiness, emotional ambivalence and refusal of easy sentimentality; its tolerance for irresolution; and its ambitious experimentalism, “the way it always took unexpected turns, its perfectly contained audaciousness.”

The funny thing about overidealization, hagiographic adoration, and self-mythologization is how often they backfire. Overidealization creates a gleaming fantasy worthy of worship—but the image is always too smooth, too perfect, and ultimately fragile. Everything can collapse once the lover or fantasist detects the slightest ick or “speck of imperfection” in the beloved. What happens when we find out, for example, that Joni Mitchell liked to strut in blackface makeup and a pimp costume now and then—including on a 1977 album cover? Ann Powers, for one, refuses to let Mitchell off the hook for her participation in the long, ugly history of racial appropriation. She gives it a whole tough chapter in Traveling. (The original album cover has recently been replaced with an inoffensive canine image recalling Dog Eat Dog.) Or what happens when we learn that Mitchell, one of our quintessential public models of female liberation, artistic bravery, and independence, long preferred being one of the boys over cultivating female friendship, solidarity, or rising talents? Powers brilliantly weaves between expressing disappointment in the artist’s earlier evasions of feminism and her long history (since rescinded) of rebuffing female solidarity, on one hand, and elucidating much of the art’s poignant and implicitly feminist and protofeminist themes, on the other.

Traveling studies overidealization and makes it a theme in order to avoid it. In the book’s final pages, Powers airs her unease at the sentimental and sometimes overidealizing “apotheosis” of Mitchell in the last half-decade. As a true student of Joni Mitchell, Ann Powers feels ambivalent and unresolved. The latest phase of Mitchell’s music—performed by and alongside virtuosic and much younger acolytes like Brandi Carlile—leaves us with a late style that salutes, sweetens, and monumentalizes the artist but also brushes to the side the restlessness, the cutting-edge collaborations, and the recombinant experiments beyond genre categories that Powers hears in the artist’s best work across the decades. The spikiness and urge to self-explore and improve move back and forth between the music and life. 

How do you hug a cactus tree? You take stock of the beauty that first drew you in, and then respect the spines that will—and should—still draw blood.