Bohemian Footnotes #3 – The Boho Dance

The Boho Dance, Joni Mitchell.

Joni Mitchell moved to Bel Air, one of the three platinum-gated suburbs of Los Angeles, in 1975. Her previous album^4. had provided her greatest commercial success and generated enough sales to move her out of Bohemian Laurel Canyon. She maintained both houses across town, but lived beside the magistrates and politicians instead of the handcrafters of wooden jewellery. The Bel Air mansion itself was memorialised on the back cover of The Hissing of Summer Lawns, flanked, for some reason, by Burundi natives schlepping a giant snake. The Laurel Canyon house was immortalised in song^5..

In the same year, Tom Wolfe wrote, in The Painted Word, about the Boho Dance^6., a condition with which Ms. Mitchell must have been acquainted. It is, he observed, the series of frantic movements and contorted gestures through which the artist must put themselves to make a living: with one hand, they must flip the Bourgeoisie an offensive, avant-garde gesture, while clasping the middle-class shoulder with the other, lest the Bourgeoisie and their money get away. Who else but the reasonably well-to-do could afford to keep an artist anyway?

Those who impress achieve the act of The Consummation^7., by which they get to move to bigger houses in Bel Air or Manhattan or both. Still, they must try even harder to arrive at the opera in paint-spattered jeans or otherwise show they do not belong with the Bourgeoisie, now that money no longer marks the difference. Even a gruff declaration of genius in an interview may do the job^8..

The musician doesn’t have it so bad as the painter, as they can sell several million copies of a single album. Some even do so. One could hardly do the Boho Dance in 2/4 anyway, but the folkies tried. Ms. Mitchell claimed that she had always been a painter first and foremost^9.; Leonard Cohen was a poet^10.; Phil Ochs was a singing journalist^11.. Each one denying that they were really pop musicians with millions of adoring fans. And, even when those fans wanted Bob Dylan to be the earnest folk artiste, he betrayed them with a Gretsch^12.. He said, with tongue in cheek, that he was “just a Song & Dance man^13..” Fans should listen to you, but never you to them.

People like pop songs only if they sound good, but they like popstars for more complex reasons. Like Mr. Wolfe in the art world, a star is invisible without a theory behind them^14.. There must be some place, some myth, or some imaginary scape where the artist and listener can meet on equal terms. It’s certainly not Ms. Mitchell’s Bel Air palace or her 80 acres in British Columbia. She and her contemporaries, however, are eternally associated with the counter-culture Bohemias of the 60s and 70s.

All the appropriate locales are valourised in song: Greenwich Village^15., Chelsea^16., Laurel Canyon^17., and Haight-Ashbury^18., each with charm or poignancy. Even when Mitchell critiques the Boho Dance from afar, she presents the Greenwich setting as affected but sweet. There are no such paeans to neighbouring^19. Bel Air townhouses or Manhattan penthouses; no one wants to hear about a millionaire’s quality of life. At most, the wealthy suburb is lambasted for being stifling and for the disapproving hiss of summer lawns^20.. No artist ever wants to appear to be on the side of the Bourgeoisie, even if they are the same side of the platinum gate.

Notes
^1. “So no wonder that in certain cities of America, in New York of course, and New Orleans, in Chicago and San Francisco and Los Angeles, in such American cities as Paris and Mexico, D.F., this particular part of a generation was attracted to what the Negro had to offer. In such places as Greenwich Village. a menage-a-trois was completed—the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life.” Norman Mailer, The White Negro, 1957. This before Ms. Mitchell’s jazz collaborations, most notably with Charlie Mingus in 1979.
^2. Scènes de la vie de bohème, Henry Murger, 1851.
^3. The Subterraneans, Jack Kerouac, 1958.
^4. Court and Spark, Joni Mitchell, 1974.
^5. “Our house is a very, very fine house/With two cats in the yard/Life used to be so hard/Now everything is easy/’Cause of you.” Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, Our House, 1970; documenting the affair between Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell and the house they shared in Laurel Canyon.
^6. “(1) The Boho Dance, in which the artist shows his stuff within the cirles, coteries, movements, isms, of the home neighbourhood, Bohemia itself, as if he doesn’t care about anything else; as if, in face, he has a knife in his teeth against the fashionable world uptown.” Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word, 1975.
^7. “(2) The Consummation, in which culturati from that very same world, le monde, scout the various new movements and new artist of Bohemia, select those who seem the most exciting, original, important, by whatever standards–and shower themwith all the rewards of celebrity.” ibid.
^8. “Well, sometimes you do get arrogant because there’s no one defending you but yourself. I mean, that’s where my arrogance lives in, you know, defending my work.” Joni Mitchell, in interview with Tavis Smiley, 2007.
^9. “I have always thought of myself as a painter derailed by circumstance.” Attributed and quoted on www.jonimitchell.com
^10. ‘The Poet of Rock Music’ – Subtitle on Leonard Cohen tour posters, 1976. Although, everything that Mr. Cohen says must be considered with the bend of his brow. Like Mr. Dylan, there is the possibility that, while one can snub the fans be claiming to be something other than a pop singer, one can also snub their fanaticism by claiming to be only a pop singer. Mr. Cohen began as a published poet before learning to play guitar in the 60s, reading poetry at his shows throughout his career: “a man in elfin boots, long hair and a cloak who stands up in one of those moments of pregnant, reverential silence which punctuate a Cohen performance and shouts out ‘God bless you, Leonard’ to crackle of sympathetic applause from the rest of the audience; an audience which, in short, substantiates the tag ‘The Poet’ more than it does the description ‘Of Rock and Roll…’” Mick Brown, The Return of Leonard Cohen, Sounds magazine, July 1976.
^11. “Before the days of television and mass media, the folksinger was often a traveling newspaper spreading tales through music. There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.” Phil Ochs’ introduction to The Marines Have Landed on the Shores of Santo Domingo from Phil Ochs in Concert, 1966.
^12. “Judas,” audience member at the Newport Folk Festival, 1965, when Dylan first played an electrc guitar as part of his live set. It was a Fender Stratocaster, not a Gretsch, but that rhymes even less with the word kiss.
^13. “I’m just a song and dance man.” Bob Dylan, 1965, in repsonse to accusations that he was the ‘voice of a generation.’
^14. “What I saw before me was the critic-in-chief of the New York Times saying: In looking at a picture today, ‘to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial.’ I read it again. It didn’t say ‘something helpful’ or ‘enriching’ or even ‘extremely valuable.’ No, the word was crucial. In short, frankly these days, without a theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting.” Tom Wolfe, ibid.
^15. Bleeker Street – Simon & Garfunkel, Greenwich Village Folk Song Salesman – Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazelwood, Positively 4th Street – Bob Dylan, Talkin’ New York – Bob Dylan, etc.
^16. Chelsea Hotel #2 – Leonard Cohen, Chelsea Girls (album and song) – Nico, Chelsea Morning – Joni Mitchell, etc.
^17. Laurel Canyon Blvd. – Van Dyke Parks, Laurel Canyon (album and song) – Jackie DeShannon, Ladies of the Canyon (album and song) – Joni Mitchell, etc.
^18. (If You’re Going to) San Fransisco – Scott McKenzie, Haight-Ashbury, the Beautiful– Ashleigh Brilliant, etc.
^19. “For getting away from the Bourgeoisie there’s nothing like packing up your paints and easel and heading for Tahiti, or even Brittany, which was Gauguin’s first stop. But who else even got as far as Brittany? Nobody. The rest got no further than the heights of Montmartre and Montparnasse, which are what?–perhaps two miles from the Champs Elysees. Likewise in the United States: belive me, you can get all the tubes of Winsor & Newton paint you want in Cincinnati, but the artists keep migrating to New York all the same…” Tom Wolfe, ibid. The Boho is the inverse of the Hobo; one is free of place, the other dependent on it.
^20. “He gave her his darkness to regret/And good reason to quit him/He gave her a roomful of Chippendale/That nobody sits in/Still she stays with a love of some kind/It’s the lady’s choice/The hissing of summer lawns.” Joni Mitchell, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, 1975.