IT was in the stillness of the car, driving along Bell
Street, where something happened to cause me to take a sharp, inward breath. A was
rustling in one of the back seats and I had the radio playing. The afternoon
news. Half listening. Drifting slightly, but still concentrating. The speaker
on the radio mentioning something about Joni Mitchell. Joni is never mentioned
on the news. It suddenly hit me that she might be dead. Then it registered. No,
not dead, but ill, in hospital, some sort of a collapse, like fainting perhaps.
It sounded ominous in its own way- it was big enough news to make it on
Melbourne radio, after all- but at least it wasn’t fatal.
I spoke to A in the back seat. A, although she is only six
years old, has her own special connection to Joni. She listened in her own
vague semi-conscious six year old way. She understood I was feeling stressed
and concerned and wanting to tell other people, adults, right away. “Oh my God,
I thought he was going to say she is dead.”
Naturally, after this, in fact for the next few weeks
leading up to today, April 22, I have been, in a sense, contemplating life
after Joni. The quietness about what has happened is extraordinary. No-one is
saying anything. Joni has been in hospital at least three weeks and no-one
knows anything. Every day I look at newspaper reports across the globe. These
are either infrequent or are saying the same thing. Privacy is a wonderful thing,
and in a way it is extraordinarily good that the whole world is dumb about
this. But on the other side of the coin, for me, it is troubling. I would just
like to know. I would like to be there, or at least send a message. Is Joni
dying? Or is she really recovering ok as www.jonimitchell.com
would have you believe.
Joni feels like some kind of relative. I have thought of her
every day during this ordeal. The self-portrait of her wearing her heart on her
sleeve on the cover of her orchestral album (Both Sides Now) is on my
screensaver. Her songs are in my head. I fancy that I know her or have met her…
The closest I ever came, and ever will come, to meeting Joni
Mitchell was when I was in London in 2002. I heard somewhere that she was
leasing George Martin’s AIR studio in Hampstead for this aforementioned record.
i soon discovered that I was two weeks too late. The man in charge saw that I
was dejected by this news, so he took me to the vocal booth where she had sung
so many of her songs just days earlier. “See”, he said, laughing, “you can
still smell the smoke from her cigarettes!” I then met one of the mixing men,
who explained that the songs were still in the stage of being finished. He played
me the orchestral beginning of one song, but I couldn’t make it out. “I must be
tone deaf”, I said. It turned out to be ‘The Circle Game’ which should be
fairly recognisable.
So I play her songs like I have, often, since about 1978. Discovering
new little things along the way, reading the book by Katherine Monk called ‘Joni’,
which was ok but a bit disjointed and a bit gossipy, hearing the song ‘Man From
Mars’ in a new way, knowing now that it is was written about her missing cat,
Nietzsche, who appears on the ‘Taming the Tiger’ cover, and generally waiting
and waiting, and hoping for good news, and wondering about the silence, reading
about Morgellon’s disease, thinking that ‘there’s comfort in melancholy, when
it’s so hard to explain.’
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