The Useful Human Truth: Nine Lessons from Joni Mitchell

Joel Bernstein www.joelbernstein.com

‘In order to get the right spirit into the music, there’s got to be more than a working relationship. There has to be a sense of passion. There has to be something there for the heart, there has to be something there for the intellect, there has to be something for sensuality and sensation.’
Joni Mitchell

I recently watched a documentary about the singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell (2003’s ‘A Woman of Heart and Mind,’ directed by Susan Lacy).

Since the late 1960s Joni has woven a musical tapestry of tuneful melodies, complex chords and conversational lyrics. She has related her own personal narratives in elegant streams of consciousness. Her songs have been rooted in particular times and places, embellished with rich, imaginative imagery. In crystal clear tones, she has sung about love and independence, the spiritual and the sensual; about illusion and heartbreak, isolation and social justice. She has been honest, articulate and wise; fragile and strong; confessional and allusive. She has been ‘unfettered and alive.’

'I've looked at love from both sides now,
From give and take, and still somehow
It's love's illusions I recall.
I really don't know love at all.’
'Both Sides, Now'

There’s a good deal that we can learn from Joni’s life and work about the craft of creativity.

1. Don’t End Up Kicking the Door Off the Hinges

Roberta Joan ’Joni’ Anderson was born in 1943 in Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada. Her mother was a teacher, her father an officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force.  On leaving the service, her dad became a grocer and the family settled in Saskatoon.

‘When the war ended my father found us a little house by the highway with a picture window. And I think that set up a permanent longing in me to take off and go somewhere. Things coming and going past that window left an impression upon me. Here they come. Where are they going?’

At age 9 Joni contracted polio, was hospitalized for weeks and spent a lot of time recuperating alone. She struggled academically and her main interest was painting. When she finished high school, she enrolled at the Alberta College of Art.

Joni also taught herself guitar and played folk gigs at her college and local coffeehouses. She determined that music would be her career.

‘My grandmother was a frustrated poet musician and she kicked the door off of the hinges on the farm. I thought of my paternal grandmother who wept for the last time in her life at 14 behind some barn because she wanted a piano… And I thought: maybe I’m the one that got the gene that has to make it happen for these two women…I just thought: I’m gonna end up like my grandmother, kicking the door off the hinges…I better not.’

Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images

2. Be Grateful for Your Troubles

‘Depression can be the sand that makes the pearl. Most of my best work came out of it… There is a possibility in that mire of an epiphany.’

In 1964 Joni discovered that she was pregnant. Unable to provide for her baby girl, she placed her for adoption. She met American singer Chuck Mitchell, toured the United States with him and soon the couple were married. Joni, 21 and penniless, thought the union would offer a way out of her problems.

‘I was emotionally weak with a lot of things pulling me in all sorts of unattractive directions. And this was a strong pull in a certain direction and somewhat of a solution. So we married each other for all the wrong reasons.’

The marriage didn’t work out. Chuck wasn’t prepared to raise another man’s child. He insisted on Joni performing with him as a duo and on controlling their finances. She felt betrayed. The couple divorced in 1967, and Joni moved to New York, a solo artist once more.

‘I feel every bit of trouble I’m grateful for. Bad fortune changed the course of my destiny. I became a musician.’

'I can't go back there anymore.
You know my keys won't fit the door.
You know my thoughts don't fit the man.
They never can.’
'I Had a King'

3. Develop Your Own ‘Chords of Enquiry’

Joni took to performing in the small clubs and bars of Greenwich Village and touring up and down the East Coast. She also dedicated herself to composing her own songs.

‘I started writing just to develop my own private world.’

Being self-taught, Joni had a distinctive way of playing the guitar. Polio had weakened her left hand, so she devised alternative open tunings to compensate. Some observers remarked on her ‘weird chords.’

‘How can there be weird chords? Chords are depictions of emotions…They feel like my feelings. I call them chords of enquiry. They have a question mark in them. There were so many unresolved things in me that these chords suited me.’

4. Personalise Your Work

While in New York, Joni was greatly impressed by the storytelling quality of Bob Dylan’s songs.

‘His influence was to personalise my work: I feel this - for you, from you, or because of you.’

But Joni also admired old-fashioned crooners, and wanted her songs to be tuneful too. 

‘It was my job to distil a hybrid that allowed for a certain amount of melodic movement and harmonic movement, but with a certain amount of plateau in order to make the longer statement – to be able to say more.’

5. Be Open to Encounter

In 1967 David Crosby of the Byrds saw Joni perform in a club in Florida. Thoroughly impressed, he introduced her to the LA music scene, and she was signed to the Reprise label. Crosby went on to produce her debut album, ‘Song to a Seagull,’ which was released in 1968.

‘How does a person write a song? A lot of it is being open to encounter and in a way in touch with the miraculous.’

Joni settled in Laurel Canyon in LA, embracing the camaraderie, collaboration and counterculture; the spirit of peace and love, art and poetry. With her long, straight, centre-parted, flaxen hair, her fresh face, high cheekbones and toothy smile; with her flowing dresses, knitted shawls and crocheted berets, she was the community’s spiritual leader.

Joni’s subsequent albums, ‘Clouds’ and ‘Ladies of the Canyon,’ earned her increasing critical and commercial success. The latter included the definitive Woodstock anthem, despite the fact that she missed out on the festival.

'We are stardust,
We are golden,
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.’
'Woodstock'

6. Engage in Crop Rotation

‘Any time I make a record, it’s followed by a painting period. It’s good crop rotation.’

Exhausted by relentless performing and the pressures of fame, depressed by her break-up with singer-songwriter Graham Nash, Joni decided to stop touring for a year and focus on writing and painting.

‘My individual psychological descent coincided ironically with my ascent in the public eye. They were putting me on a pedestal and I was wobbling.’

The songs she wrote at this time appeared on her essential album, ‘Blue.’ Released in 1971, it was an intensely personal work.

‘I was demanding of myself a deeper and greater honesty: more and more revelation in my work in order to give it back to the people.’

'I remember that time you told me,
You said, "Love is touching souls."
Surely you touched mine,
'Cause part of you pours out of me
In these lines from time to time.
Oh, you're in my blood like holy wine.
You taste so bitter and so sweet.
Oh, I could drink a case of you, darling.
And still I'd be on my feet.
I would still be on my feet.’
‘I Could Drink a Case of You'

People were shocked by ‘Blue’. Was Joni revealing too much of herself? Was she being too candid?

'At that period of my life, I had no personal defences. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes.’

Joni had already established that her creativity needed rest and recuperation. She retreated once again, this time to Canada, immersing herself in nature, solitude and reflection. This regeneration led to 1972’s ‘For the Roses.’

‘I isolated myself and made my attempt to get back to the garden.’

7. Stay in Control

Although Joni’s work exposed her vulnerability, she had to be strong willed to succeed and survive in the music business. Throughout her career she demonstrated a steely determination to impose her own independent vision. She wrote her own songs, produced most of her own albums, designed most of her own sleeves. In the early days she even booked her own tours.

‘Creatively she knew where she wanted it to go and what she wanted it to be. She had a vision. She wasn’t looking for input.’
Elliot Roberts, Manager

‘She would not be marketed and she would not let the marketing effect what she was going to do.’
Tom Manoff, Critic

8. Ignore the Lines

As the 1970s progressed, Joni demonstrated a thirst to evolve her sound.

‘The need to innovate, or to be fresh, or to be original is very strong in me.’

To support her 1974 ‘Court and Spark’ album, she embarked on her first tour with backing musicians, enlisting the jazz-fusion band LA Express.

‘I shouldn’t be stereotyped as a magic princess as I got earlier in my career – the sort of ‘twinkle, twinkle, little star’ kind of attitude. I didn’t like that feeling, and I think that the band will only show that there is another side to the music. I think it’s a good expansion.’

Increasingly Joni embraced the world of jazz. She enjoyed working with other artists, exploring the freedom of creation and breaking down traditional genre definitions. This resulted in 1974’s ‘The Hissing of Summer Lawns’ and 1976’s ‘Hejira.’

‘I never really liked lines. Class lines, social structure lines. And I ignored them always.’

'There's no comprehending
Just how close to the bone and the skin and the eyes
And the lips you can get,
And still feel so alone,
And still feel related.’
‘Coyote'

9. Locate Your Useful Human Truth

Through the ‘80s and ‘90s Joni continued collaborating with other musicians and experimenting - with synthesizers, drum machines and sequencers. She had made allusions to her daughter in some of her past compositions (such as 1971’s ‘Little Green’). At last in 1997 they were reunited. 

In recent years Joni has suffered from ill health. We are blessed that she is still with us. She recently celebrated her 78th birthday (7 November).

‘It’s been a very subjective journey, but hopefully universal. That was always my optimism: that if I described my own changes through whatever the decade was throwing at us, that there were others like me. And it turns out that there were.’

We cannot learn to write songs like Joni Mitchell. She is unique, a genius. However we can learn a good deal about the process of creativity. In particular we can better understand the imperative of clarity and honesty, the quest to find ‘the useful human truth.’

'The writing has been an exercise – trying to work my way towards clarity. Get out the pen and face the beast yourself... What’s bothering you? Well, that’s not exactly it... OK, let’s go a little deeper. That’s not exactly it... It’s very hard peeling back the layers of your own onion…This is now useful, because we’ve hit upon a human truth.’

'Everything comes and goes,
Marked by lovers and styles of clothes.
Things that you held high
And told yourself were true
Lost or changing as the days come down to you.

Down to You

No. 345

Cecil Beaton: Preserving the Fleeting Moment

Cecil Beaton by Paul Tanqueray, 1937. National Portrait Gallery, London. © Estate of Paul Tanqueray

‘I exposed thousands of rolls of film, wrote hundreds of thousands of words, in a futile attempt to preserve the fleeting moment.’
Cecil Beaton

I recently watched a splendid film documenting the life and work of the photographer, designer, artist and writer Cecil Beaton: ‘Love, Cecil’ (2017) by Lisa Vreeland.

Beaton recorded the flamboyant lives of the Bright Young Things. He took glamorous photographs of Vogue fashion models, Hollywood movie stars and British royalty. He supported the war effort with touching portraits of people in peril. He designed fabulous costumes and sets for stage and screen. He was an aesthete and a modernist, a dandy and a diarist. He was a man on a relentless quest for beauty.

‘I think that beauty is only static for so long. And then we move on.’

Let us consider what Beaton has to teach us.

1. ‘Wander in the Labyrinth of Choice’

A portrait of Baba Beaton, the photographer’s sister. Photograph: Cecil Beaton/National Portrait Gallery/PA

Cecil Beaton was born in 1904 in Hampstead, England. His father was a timber merchant and he had a comfortable middle-class childhood. From an early age he collected cinema magazines, theatre programmes and postcards of stage performers. At 11 he was given his first camera, a Box-Brownie, and taught how to use it by his nurse Ninnie. He refined his skills by photographing his two sisters, Nancy and Barbara, arranging them in the elegant fashions and poses he’d observed in his magazines.

Beaton did not enjoy school. He was a poor scholar and was bullied - by Evelyn Waugh amongst others. 

‘I learned a lot at school, but nothing to do with the things I should have learned.’

At Cambridge University he dedicated his time to the Amateur Dramatic Club and to his love of the arts. 

‘I set about becoming a rabid aesthete. I took a passionate interest in the Italian renaissance, in Diaghalev’s Russian ballet, and of course in the theatre and in photography.’ 

Beaton left Cambridge without a degree. A brief period in the family timber business didn’t work out, and he was a source of some frustration to his father.

Interviewer: What was it that made it difficult to get on with your father?
Beaton: Well I think it was very difficult for my father to get on with me.

Beaton had many creative interests, but was at a loss what to do with himself.

‘Some people tend to know their vocation instinctively and follow a single path their whole lives. Others wander in the labyrinth of choice.’

 2. ‘Attempt to Preserve the Fleeting Moment’

The Bright Young Things

Interviewer: What were your ambitions at that time?
Beaton: To be able to demonstrate that I was not just an ordinary, anonymous person.

Through his friend Stephen Tennant, the son of a Scottish peer, Beaton gained access to the group of patrician socialites popularly known as the Bright Young Things. 

Beaton photographed this hedonistic set at Bloomsbury costume parties and charity pageants; at country house weekends and on treasure hunts. He photographed them in glittering gowns against sequinned curtains; with feathered fans, beaded skullcaps and strings of pearls; in medieval, regency and nautical fancy dress; against backdrops of flora and fauna, of gypsophila and cellophane. Here’s Rex Whistler playing a wandering minstrel; Tallulah Bankhead with a witch’s ball; Georgia Sitwell with her borzoi; Lady Loughborough under a bell jar. 

‘Our activities were all done with zest and originality. What a rush life had become.’

In his images Beaton created an escapist realm of dreams and fantasy, tinged with surreal strangeness. He sought not to reveal the world as he found it, but as he wished it to be. Above all he endeavoured to capture fleeting moments of beauty.

‘What a marvellous thing great physical beauty is. It’s nothing less than a living miracle. It’s not the result of achievement, skill, patience or endeavour. It’s just a divine happening.’

Beaton’s society photographs helped to build his reputation, and in 1928 he travelled to New York where he got a job with Vogue that sustained him for the next ten years. 

Marlene Dietrich, 1930

Employing the same techniques of artifice and allure that he had applied to the Bright Young Things, Beaton photographed Hepburn, Welles and Dietrich; Gary Cooper, Judy Garland and Douglas Fairbanks Jnr; fashion models surrounded by flowers, masks, hat boxes and hat stands, interacting with newspaper headlines, artists’ illustrations and expressionist shadows; set against polka dots, chiffon and lace.

Buoyed up by his success, in 1930 Beaton leased Ashcombe House in Wiltshire, where he set about entertaining a glittering circle of artists, actors and aristocrats.

 3. ‘Appreciate Beauty in Very Much Wider Fields’

Eileen Dunne in The Hospital for Sick Children, 1940. (detail) by Cecil Beaton

In 1938 Beaton's time with Vogue came to an abrupt end when he inserted a small-but-legible anti-Semitic slur into an illustration for a magazine piece about New York society. The issue was withdrawn. Beaton was forced to publish a statement of apology and then fired. He left New York in disgrace.

Back in England, with the outbreak of the Second World War, Beaton was offered a job at the Ministry of Information. 

‘It was clear that in anything connected with soldiering I would be a real sad sack. But I wanted to be useful.’

Beaton captured compelling images of the City in ruins after the Blitz; a woman welder at a shipyard; a sailor repairing a signal flag; a pilot in the cockpit of a Wellington bomber; an injured child in hospital holding her teddy bear. He travelled to Burma, China and Egypt and photographed troops in gasmasks; soldiers sharing a consoling cigarette; contorted tank wreckage buried in the sand.

‘In the hangers of an aerodrome I found more thrilling sets than in the Hollywood studios.’

Beaton had grown to appreciate that visions of beauty can be found in the ordinary and everyday; in times of crisis and despair.

‘I think with experience, looking around in life, the photographer gets to appreciate beauty in very much wider fields.’

Gradually Beaton rebuilt his reputation. His rehabilitation was further assisted by royal patronage. In 1937 he had taken the wedding pictures of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and in 1939 he was invited to photograph Queen Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother). He went on to record the birth of Prince Charles and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. In all, he photographed some 30 members of the British royal family.

4. Be Neither Bored Nor Boring

Audrey Hepburn on set for the film of My Fair Lady, 1963

Beaton patched up his relationship with Vogue, and after the War he received a stream of commissions for fashion spreads and celebrity portraits. In 1947 he bought his own home and gardens, Reddish House in Wiltshire.

'All I want is the best of everything and there's very little of that left.'

Beaton turned his attention to designing sets, costumes and lighting for the Broadway stage. His theatre work led to assignments on two Lerner and Loewe film musicals, ‘Gigi’ (1958) and ‘My Fair Lady’ (1964), each of which earned him the Oscar for Best Costume Design. ‘My Fair Lady’ was particularly memorable for the way that it presented an enhanced, contemporised vision of the Edwardian grandeur of his childhood. 

‘The visual really guides my life more than anything.’

Beaton had boundless energy for work and play, a restless visual appetite. Through the ‘60s and ‘70s he continued to seek out new and interesting talent, creating memorable images of Warhol and Hockney; Jagger and Streisand; Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton and Penelope Tree.

‘I have always complimented myself on my stamina, and can wear out even my younger friends when it comes to work or play. I can still think of myself as a rather appealing Bright Young Thing.’

Mick Jagger

Beaton compiled scrapbooks of visual delights and published six volumes of diaries, covering the years 1922–1974. He had affairs with both men and women, and he once proposed to Greta Garbo. But ultimately he was unhappy in love. He was of course a social climber. He could be snobbish, insecure and vindictive, and he was always falling out with people. His list of adversaries included George Cukor, Noel Coward, Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

‘He gathers enemies like other people gather roses.’
Truman Capote

Occasionally, in more reflective moments, Beaton expressed a note of regret.

‘I think perhaps I’ve been much too outspoken on rather trivial subjects.’

In the twilight of his career Beaton’s contribution to photography, theatre, film and fashion was celebrated in exhibitions at the V&A and the National Portrait Gallery, and in 1972 he was knighted. 

Two years later Beaton suffered a stroke. He died in 1980 at home at Reddish House, four days after his 76th birthday.

'Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.’

We spend a good deal of time nowadays celebrating authenticity and gritty realism; endeavouring to reflect the world as it truly is. Beaton reminds us that sometimes it is appropriate to suspend disbelief; that there is also merit in artifice and romance, glamour and fantasy, taste and style; that there is value in seeking and preserving beauty in its purest forms.

‘Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.’

'Every duke and earl and peer is here.
Everyone who should be here is here.
What a smashing, positively dashing
Spectacle: the Ascot opening day.

What a frenzied moment that was!
Didn't they maintain an exhausting pace?
'Twas a thrilling, absolutely chilling running of the
Ascot opening race.’

Ascot Gavotte, ‘My Fair Lady’ (A Lerner / F Loewe)

No. 344

‘The Best Way Out Is Always Through’: The Lessons I Learned from Back Pain

Perugino, St Sebastian

Pop!

‘Did you hear that? Let’s see if we can do it again.’

Pop!

My chiropractor bent over me with fierce intent, twisting my arm and thorax into awkward angles. After a time I became concerned that his objective was not to relieve my back pain at all; but rather to prompt an exclamation from my distressed vertebrae. Each crack was greeted with the satisfaction of a child crunching bubble wrap. 

Pop!

‘That’s fantastic. Listen to that!’

He was wearing a white coat, but was he really a medical professional?

My backache had been tormenting me for several weeks now. I was visiting the chiropractor in tandem with an acupuncturist who experimented with incense, warm needles and whale music. Despite my rather old fashioned approach to health matters, I confess I found this all rather soothing. I kept falling asleep with the needles in. 

Nonetheless, once outside the acupuncturist’s studio, the agony continued. Nagging, insistent, ever-present. During the day I found it difficult to concentrate on anything else. At night I lay awake in a fog of self-pity. On a couple of occasions I found I was speaking to myself - promising to make a new start in life, if only the pain would go away.

I spent a good deal of time trying to establish what had caused all this grief. But I could recall no stumble or fall, no gym incident or trouble moving boxes. Why had this torture descended on me all of a sudden? 

A doctor prescribed some specially contoured soles to wear inside my shoes.

‘They probably won’t do you any good, but some people like them.’

I became unnaturally obsessed with chair construction. My wife had purchased a claret-coloured contemporary Italian sofa. It certainly looked good in the living room with its low back, aluminium legs and inverted L shape. But it seemed designed for lolling and lounging, for curling up like a feline; for all manner of relaxation apart from sitting up straight. 

‘Sit up like a Catholic,’ my Dad used to say to me with wearying frequency. If only I could right now.

I measured my hip-to-knee distance and discovered that the horizontal seat length of the claret-coloured contemporary Italian sofa exceeded it by some margin. Perhaps this was the source of my problems. I took a tape measure to Habitat and Heals on a quest for superior hip-to-knee delivery and came back with a recommendation for an Edwardian armchair. This was swiftly rejected.

The backache stayed with me like a malicious companion. Whispering, goading, badgering. 

‘Why me?’ I asked. ‘Why now?’

And then one day the pain was gone. Just like that. It had arrived unannounced and it departed without warning.

'Turn your wounds into wisdom.’
Oprah Winfrey

Once liberated from the agony, I spent a good while reflecting on its origins.

At length I realised that the true cause of my back pain was not physical at all. My malady coincided with a lengthy redundancy process at work. I’d been drawn into extensive conversations about names and numbers; long lists and short lists; factional disputes and interdepartmental negotiations. 

I think I had been suffering from stress.

'And you may ask yourself, "What is that beautiful job?"
And you may ask yourself, "Where does that career go to?"
And you may ask yourself, "Am I right? Am I wrong?"
And you may say to yourself, "My God! What have I done?”'
Paraphrasing Talking Heads,’Once in a Lifetime'

I took three lessons from my prolonged period of back pain. 

The first is that some trials cannot be escaped. They must be endured. We just have to let them run their course. We need patience, resilience and a philosophical nature. The best way out is always through.

'Len says one steady pull more ought to do it.                    
He says the best way out is always through.’
Robert Frost, ‘A Servant to Servants'

Secondly I concluded that too often in life and business we focus on relieving the pain rather than addressing the source of that pain. We treat the symptom, not the cause. Sometimes the origins of an ailment are not obvious. They are hidden, psychological, adjacent.

And thirdly I resolved that wholesale redundancy, however sound commercially and imperative financially, was not something I wanted to get involved with again.

The claret-coloured contemporary Italian sofa still resides in our living room. I’ve grown rather fond of it now. But it still won’t let me sit like a Catholic.

'Broken heart again,
Another lesson learned.
Better know your friends,
Or else you will get burnt.
Gotta count on me,
Cause I can guarantee that I'll be fine.
No more pain.
No more pain.
No drama.
No one's gonna make me hurt again.’
Mary J Blige, ‘No More Drama’ (P Botkin / B De Vorzon / J Harris III / T Lewis)

No. 343

Shane: Locating Drama at the Frontier of Change

A lone rider makes his way down wooded slopes into a beautiful sunlit valley. To swooning strings he steers his chestnut horse across the plain. A young blue-eyed boy with a rifle is stalking a deer that drinks at the stream. Both boy and deer look up as the rider approaches. The boy runs back to a log cabin where his mother sings as she prepares supper. Outside his father is chopping wood. 

‘Somebody's comin', Pa!’
‘Well, let him come.’

The rider is white-hatted and golden haired, and wears a fringed buckskin jacket and an ornate gun belt. He is Shane (Alan Ladd), a drifter with a past he’s trying to forget.

Shane accepts the offer of the homesteader, Joe Starrett (Van Heflin), to help out around the farm. Soon he has tidied away his six-shooter, and swapped his buckskins for everyday shirt and trousers. But Shane finds himself caught up in a bitter land dispute between the local farmers and ranchers. Ruthless cattle baron Rufus Ryker has hired a gang of bearded ruffians to harass the humble homesteaders out of the valley, and the newcomer feels compelled to intervene.

Can brooding, enigmatic Shane escape his past? Will he return to his brutal life as a gunslinger? Is there any other way?

Shane: A gun is a tool, Marian; no better or no worse than any other tool: an axe, a shovel or anything. A gun is as good or as bad as the man using it. Remember that.

Marian: We'd all be much better off if there wasn't a single gun left in this valley - including yours.

The splendid 1953 movie ‘Shane’ was directed by George Stevens. A number of factors set it apart from more run-of-the-mill Westerns. 

First there is the glorious cinematography. The big blue skies and snow-capped Teton mountains just look stunning. 

Then there are the tender relationships: between Shane and Starrett’s son Joey (Brandon De Wilde) who so admires the stranger; between Shane and Starrett, who respect each other despite their obvious differences; between Shane and Starrett’s wife Marian (Jean Arthur), who both recognise they cannot act on their instinctive attraction.

‘Joe, hold me. Don't say anything, just hold me – tight.’

There are also the brilliant set-pieces: the welcoming supper served up by Marian culminating in a generous portion of lattice-topped apple pie; young Joey’s wide-eyed look of amazement as Shane noisily demonstrates how to shoot a revolver; the cold-blooded killing of homesteader Torrey by a black-hatted, black-gloved gunman (Jack Pallance); Torrey’s funeral on Cemetery Hill - hats off, ‘Abide with Me’, children fidgeting and a dog whimpering over the coffin.

‘We can't give up this valley and we ain't gonna do it. This is farmin' country, a place where people can come and bring up their families. Who is Ruf Ryker or anyone else to run us away from our own homes? He only wants to grow his beef. And what we want to grow up is families, to grow 'em good and grow 'em up strong, the way they was meant to be grown.’

Finally there is the awareness that ‘Shane’ is a fiction located in historical events: the Wyoming range wars of the late 19th century. Most of the disputed territory had been settled by ranchers that herded their cattle freely on the open range. But the Homestead Acts of the 1860s brought an influx of small farmers who fenced off their properties, leading to competition for land and water. The ranchers accused the homesteaders of rustling and embarked on a campaign of intimidation.

In ‘Shane’ Starrett articulates the point of view of the homesteaders. He is the voice of change and progress.

'These old-timers, they just can't see it yet, but runnin' cattle on an open range just can't go on forever. It takes too much space for too little results. Those herds aren't any good, they're all horns and bone. Now cattle that is bred for meat and fenced in and fed right - that's the thing. You gotta pick your spot, get your land, your own land. Now a homesteader, he can't run but a few beef. But he can sure grow grain and cut hay. And then what with his garden and the hogs and milk, well, he'll make out all right.' 

Although Ryker is clearly a villain, he is still given an opportunity to put the counter argument; to set out the ranchers’ case.

'Look, Starrett, when I come to this country, you weren't much older than your boy there. We had rough times, me and other men that are mostly dead now. I got a bad shoulder yet from a Cheyenne arrowhead. We made this country. Found it and we made it. With blood and empty bellies. The cattle we brought in were hazed off by Indians and rustlers. They don't bother you much anymore because we handled 'em. We made a safe range out of this. Some of us died doin' it, but we made it. And then people move in who've never had to rawhide it through the old days. They fence off my range, and fence me off from water. Some of 'em like you plough ditches, take out irrigation water. And so the creek runs dry sometimes and I've got to move my stock because of it. And you say we have no right to the range. The men that did the work and ran the risks have no rights?'

‘Shane’ is a memorable drama in part because the action occurs at the frontier of social change. The upheaval and unrest give the story extra resonance and meaning. This was a real human conflict.

'You talk about rights. You think you've got the right to say that nobody else has got any.'

It’s notable that a number of other great Westerns are similarly set around historical transition: ‘Red River’ (1948) relates the story of the first cattle drive from Texas to Kansas along the Chisholm Trail; the dark events in ‘The Searchers’ (1956) are set in the aftermath of the Civil War; ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ (1962) marks the end of the Old West with the arrival of law and order, the railroad and statehood.

I would often advise young Planners embarking on a Pitch first to identify the cultural change that was impacting their sector – because where there is change, you’ll also find energy, interest and attention. If you can locate the brand at the vanguard of this change, characterising it as pioneer, as a vehicle to the future, then you’ll be set fair.

At the end of ‘Shane’ our hero is forced to pick up his six-shooter once more in order to defend the cause of the homesteaders. He realises he cannot escape his past or his destiny.

'A man has to be what he is, Joey. Can't break the mould. I tried it and it didn't work for me… Joey, there's no living with a killing. There's no going back from one. Right or wrong, it's a brand. A brand sticks. There's no going back.’ 

Shane rides off into the darkness. In tears young Joey shouts after him:

'Shane. Shane! Come back! Bye, Shane.’

'Tribal War,
We don't want no more of that.
I give Jah praises in the morning,
When I hear the people sing.
They start sittin' up and lickin' a puff.
One by one, they take a lickel sup,
Say that the war is over.
We now see ourselves in unity,
Celebratin' with better coli,
Now that the war is over.’
George Nooks, ‘Tribal War’ (Joe Gibbs)

No. 342

Nina Hamnett, the Queen of Bohemia: What Lies Beneath

Nina Hamnett, ‘Portrait of a Woman’ 1917

I recently visited a fine retrospective of the work of Nina Hamnett at Charleston, East Sussex.

Born of military stock in Tenby, Wales in 1890, Hamnett rebelled against formal education and found a haven in art. She studied at the Pelham Art School and then the London School of Art, earned money as a life model and found a job as a designer at the Bloomsbury-run Omega Workshops. 

Hamnett embarked on a flamboyant life of clubs and cafes, pubs and parties in London and Paris. Cutting a dash in her modernist bob, she socialised with Fry and Pound; Modigliani and Picasso; Diaghilev, Stein and Cocteau. She sang sea shanties to Gide, danced for Satie, ate caviar with Stravinsky and took laudanum with the occultist Aleister Crowley. She drank prodigiously, had wild affairs with both genders, and jigged nude on a restaurant table in Montparnasse. 

‘A lady was the last thing I wanted to be.’

Nina Hamnett, ‘Still Life’ 1918

Having read of Hamnett’s reputation as ‘the Queen of Bohemia’, it was surprising to encounter her work. 

Her still lives are quiet, austere and understated. Jugs, cups, notepads and newspapers are carefully assembled on the table; a glass throws a shadow; a book asks to be picked up. These are close-cropped, intense meditations on familiar objects and everyday routines.

Her portraits are similarly reflective. A woman in her study reads intently, her head supported on one hand, a bottle of wine at her side. A man in a shirt and tie reclines on a bed and looks us straight in the eye. A female student in a smart blue dress rests a protective hand on her notebook. A formidable landlady sits behind a defensive wall of lamp, cup and saucer, music stand and rolling pin. A slender, fine-boned male dancer regards us with pursed lips.  

Ignoring social status, Hamnett seems intent on revealing something of the sitter’s interior life. We are meeting each of them uninhibited and alone.

‘My ambition is to paint psychological portraits that shall accurately represent the spirit of the age.’

Nina Hamnett, The Student

The dancer and author Lady Constance Stewart-Richardson had developed a scandalous reputation for wearing risqué costumes. Hamnett painted her serious, soberly dressed and pensive.

‘They all flocked to my portrait expecting to see an almost nude woman. They were bitterly disappointed, and Constance and I laughed.’

I left the exhibition considering the distance between reputation and reality.

Hamnett was indeed a hedonist, an icon of the Roaring Twenties. But, as the show reveals, she was also a thoughtful, psychological painter with a penetrating insight into her subjects. 

In my career I have known great wits that were entirely serious about their work. I have been acquainted with cavalier characters that created little of any worth. I have encountered luminous talent with the disposition of an accountant. We must learn to separate the painting from the performance; the personality from the product; the life from the lifestyle.

Sadly in her later years Hamnett spent too much time propping up the bar at the Fitzroy Tavern, and her career went into decline. She died in 1956, having fallen from her bedsit window and been impaled on the railings below. She was 66.

Myself, 1920, Photograph of Nina Hamnett (London Library)

'Sometimes I want you close.
Sometimes I want my space.
Just know I'm gonna call if I need you.
But it's not my job to please you.
Never been your average girl.’

Mahalia, 'Simmer’ (W Hector / J Harding / F Joseph / D Ogulu / J Christian / M Burkmar / K Radical)

No 341

‘I Like You’: The Challenges of Expressing Affection

Henri Fantin-Latour, La Lecture

'Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.’
E M Forster

Like many people I came out of lockdown with a new-found fondness for my neighbours and local storekeepers; with a commitment to embark on a fresh chapter of cordiality and kindness. 

I found, however, that writing that fresh chapter would be rather challenging.

Lying in bed one morning, reflecting on my pandemic experiences, I determined that, broadly speaking, the mass of the population is warm-hearted and well-intentioned. People are amiable. I like people.

Perhaps I could put a figure on human affability.

‘That’s it!’ I decided to myself. ‘I like 95% of people.’

This is not to say that I think 95% of the public are paradigms of good behaviour, charismatic characters and potential pals. Just that it’s completely possible to have a pleasant conversation with the vast majority of them – about the variable weather, the participants on Gogglebox, the return of ABBA or plans for supper this evening.

When I revealed my new positive perspective at a dinner party, it was greeted with disbelief. 

‘You’re naïve, Jim. Humanity is really not that nice.’

Being somewhat timid in my convictions, I promptly adjusted the figure down to 80%. Nonetheless I still felt the theme worth pursuing. 

Next I decided that if people are so amiable, I ought to evolve my own engagement with the world.

I suspect I have a tendency to sceptical glances, sharp remarks and ironic gestures. My conversation is littered with parentheses and I communicate my feelings in cautious, caveated ways. I find it difficult to express affection. 

I resolved that I should emerge from the pandemic a more direct, open and honest individual. I would do away with artifice and affectation, cynicism and sarcasm. I would smile at strangers and be genial towards pets. I would be attentive when people spoke about minor ailments, travel routes, parking and bins. I would tell friends and acquaintances how much I liked them.

'I was born with an enormous need for affection, and a terrible need to give it.’
Audrey Hepburn

I decided I would test out my new bonhomie at Michelle’s drinks party, an event that was attended by a good many former colleagues and associates.

Across a crowded room I spotted Toby.

Although Toby had worked for another agency, through many encounters at client meetings and industry events I had established that he was charming, intelligent, quick witted and funny. I liked Toby.

At an opportune moment I strode up to him and announced: ‘Toby, I just wanted to say: I like you.’ 

He was somewhat taken aback. 

‘I like you too, Jim’, he said, with a look of unease, as he turned to fetch himself another lager. 

He didn’t come back.

Later that same evening I told Natasha that I liked her too. That didn’t go down particularly well either. 

My experiment had failed. It’s really not that easy to express fondness in a frank and forthright fashion. Sincerity provokes suspicion. It comes across as dubious and strange.

I would have to return to circumlocution; to euphemism, intimation and assumption; to subtle gestures and coded compliments.

'Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?'
Leo Tolstoy, ‘Anna Karenina’

I realise now that the challenges of conveying affection also extend to the workplace. 

I’m not sure I was ever very good at telling the teams that worked for me that I was impressed; that they’d done a good job; that they’d exceeded my expectations. I was worried perhaps that it would all seem rather awkward, superfluous and empty. 

And then the moment passed.

And yet I know that if I had been better at expressing gratitude and appreciation, it would have led to more confident, motivated, loyal employees. It would have created more effective teams.

I wish I’d found the time.

Perhaps we should all commit to articulating our admiration and approval with greater frequency, alacrity and clarity. 

Though I would not now recommend the candid, unfiltered approach. Probably better to start with a little small talk - about the weather, Gogglebox, ABBA and plans for supper this evening.

'When you cycled by
Here began all my dreams,
The saddest thing I've ever seen.
And you never knew
How much I really liked you.
Because I never even told you.
Oh, and I meant to.’

The Smiths, ‘Back to the Old House’ (S Morrissey / J Marr)

No. 340

Rodin: ‘Patience is Also a Form of Action’

Auguste Rodin Main droite de Pierre et Jacques de Wissant 1885–86 Musée Rodin, S.00332

'Sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump.'
Auguste Rodin

I recently attended an exhibition of the work of Auguste Rodin, considered by many to be the founder of modern sculpture. (‘The Making of Rodin’ is at Tate Modern, London until 21 November.) 

‘I began as an artisan to become an artist. That is the good, the only, method.’

On entering the gallery, we are greeted by ‘The Age of Bronze’, a nude male figure caught in a moment of crisis. The sculpture, created by Rodin in his mid-30s, is so life-like that when it was first exhibited in Brussels in 1877, some accused the artist of having made the cast directly from the model’s body. 

Rodin was aggrieved. Henceforth his work would spurn conventional classical themes and idealised beauty. Rather he would celebrate raw physicality and pure emotion: the character of the individual as revealed by his or her bodily features; the direct imprint of the artist’s hand in the act of creation.

'An artist worthy of the name should express all the truth of nature, not only the exterior truth, but also, and above all, the inner truth.’

The exhibition looks particularly at Rodin’s process. 

It was very much a team effort. First the artist sculpted by hand in clay. Then skilled assistants created plaster casts, and a device called a pantograph was used to scale them up. Finally carvers reproduced the works in marble, and founders cast them in bronze.

'The work of art is already within the block of marble. I just chop off whatever isn't needed.’

Auguste Rodin Study for The Thinker 1881 Musée Rodin, S.01168

We walk through a recreation of a pavilion designed by Rodin for a 1900 Paris retrospective. He specifically sought to shine a light on his practice, and so he presented plaster versions of his major sculptures alongside a multitude of preparatory models. The imposing ‘Monument to Balzac’ is surrounded by different sized busts, by a naked figure of the great novelist, and even a mock-up for his dressing gown. ‘The Thinker’ is accompanied by plaster limbs, heads, hands and feet. And there’s a simple clay study in which Rodin first explores his distinctive posture.

'What makes my ‘Thinker’ think is that he thinks not only with his brain, with his knitted brow, his distended nostrils and compressed lips, but with every muscle of his arms, back, and legs, with his clenched fist and gripping toes.’

Rodin was clearly obsessive about preparation. He commissioned black and white photographs to capture the dynamics of the body. He used drawing to study movement. And as we progress through the rooms we encounter trays of plaster hands and feet; drawers of arms, legs and heads. He called these small body parts his ‘giblets’ (‘abattis’).

Rodin in his studio in Meudon c.1902. Photo by Eugène Druet, Musée Rodin

Rodin would often produce multiple copies of a single model so that he could explore subtly different postures and attitudes. He dismantled and reassembled existing sculptures.

One can’t help but be struck by Rodin’s fastidiousness, his attention to detail; his intense planning and preparation; his restlessly open mind.

'I invent nothing, I rediscover.'

It prompts us to consider our own working practices.

In the modern age speed is of the essence. We are always looking to compress schedules and save time; to cut to the chase and race to the finish line. But often it is the thinking time that is sacrificed.

Auguste Rodin, limbs, circa 1880–1917 | plaster and terracotta | musée rodin | photo © agence photographique du musee rodin – jerome manoukian

'Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.'

Rodin suggests that we should not regard preparation and production as tedious stages of the process to be shaved and trimmed; accelerated and streamlined. Rather we should see them as a critical part of the creative journey. When we prepare, we explore, we learn, we think, we observe. We see opportunities and possibilities where previously there was none. Preparation produces better, more distinctive work. 

If only we were employed in workshops rather than offices; studios rather than agencies. Surely we would allocate time more appropriately. As the great man said:

‘Patience is also a form of action.’

'I never met a girl
Who makes me feel the way that you do.
You're alright!
Whenever I'm asked who makes my dreams real,
I say that you do.
You're outta sight!
So, fee-fi-fo-fum,
Look out baby, 'cause here I come.
And I'm bringing you a love that's true,
So get ready, so get ready.
I'm gonna try to make you love me too,
So get ready, so get ready.
'cause here I come.’

The Temptations, ‘Get Ready’ (S Robinson)

No. 339

Paula Rego: Strategies for Subversion

Snare, 1987 by Paula Rego. Photograph: British Council Collection © Paula Rego

‘My mother used to say a change is always good, even if it's for the worse. Every change is a form of liberation.’
Paula Rego

I recently attended an excellent exhibition of the work of Paula Rego (Tate Britain, London until 24 October).

Through her art Rego has raged against the injustices she encountered in her native Portugal. She has fought the oppression of women. She has put strong females at the centre of narratives that express powerful, raw emotions; hidden feelings and conflicting desires. She has taught us strategies for subversion.

‘The picture allows you to do all sorts of forbidden things. And that is why you do pictures.’

1. Laugh in the Face of Your Oppressor

In 1935 Rego was born into a comfortable middle-class Lisbon family. Portugal was at the time ruled by the Estado Novo (New State) dictatorship and Rego’s anti-fascist, Anglophile parents wanted their child to have a liberal education. They sent her to an English language school, then a finishing school in Sevenoaks. And she went on to attend the Slade School of Fine Art from 1952 to 1956.

The Family, 1988, Paula Rego © Paula Rego

Rego grew up hating the authoritarianism of the Estado Novo regime. 

‘People talked about football a lot and behaved themselves.’

She resented the lack of political freedom, the constraints that were placed on women, and the limited possibilities that were available to her mother, who had been a talented artist.

‘My mother was really a casualty of the society she lived in. That society was a deadly killer society for women and I despised it for that. You see, they encouraged women to do nothing, and the less they did the more they were admired for it… That is women of a certain class – the poor women had to do bloody everything.’

Through the ‘60s and ‘70s Rego poured her anger into her work, creating visceral surrealist collages representing the evil soul of President Salazar; the corruption of the Church and the elite; the crimes of colonialism. 

Rego found it liberating to laugh in the face of the oppressor.

‘The Portuguese streak of perversity often came out in humour. Jokes were difficult to control. They were a form of rebellion.’

Paula Rego

2. Put on a Brave Face

In 1959 Rego married fellow artist Victor Willing whom she had met at the Slade. The couple lived and worked between Portugal and Britain, settling eventually in Camden, London in 1972.

In the 1980s Rego abandoned collage, in favour of bright, colourful paintings that featured animal characters and revisited her childhood memories and fantasies. She found that through this work she could explore her feelings towards Willing. He had been unfaithful and, having developed multiple sclerosis, required increasing care. 

A resolute girl chains a brown dog, another shaves it with a cut-throat razor, another lifts her striped skirt towards it. A serene girl plucks a goose, another concentrates as she polishes a policeman’s jackboot, another takes a firm grip of a garrotte. There are sharp shadows. A cat climbs the wall, a stork sits atop a chair, a bird flies overhead. 

The pictures are disturbing, ambiguous, menacing and darkly sexual. 

Three female family members undress a man at the edge of a bed. Are they helping or harming him? Nothing is as it seems.

'If you put frightening things into a picture, then they can't harm you. In fact, you end becoming quite fond of them.’

At the heart of all these paintings Rego places strong, independent, rebellious girls and young women. They are smartly dressed, with neat hair and serious expressions. And they set about their business with grim determination.

3. Rewrite the Narrative

Rego had always been fascinated by nursery rhymes, fairy stories and folk myths. She took to researching them in the Reading Room of the British Museum.

‘I read Italian stories, French stories, Portuguese stories. Portuguese stories were the most cruel and the most close to me.’

For Rego these traditional tales conveyed truths: about the world’s strangeness, cruelty and corruption; about the fundamental doubts and desires that animate people.

'We interpret the world through stories... Everybody makes in their own way sense of things, but if you have stories it helps.’

Through her own pictorial narratives Rego could articulate her anxieties and fantasies. She could reconfigure the world around her particular experience and perception.

Rego also subverted familiar images from art, literature and film. She cast Snow White in a sinister light and explored the cruelty at the centre of the Pinocchio story. She took paintings by the mostly male artists in the National Gallery, freed the women of the idealised and stereotypical, and presented them as defiant, determined, driven by real and varying passions.

‘In my pictures I could do anything.’

By taking control of the narrative in this way, Rego could be fiercely political. She campaigned for abortion rights in Portugal; against female genital mutilation and the trafficking of women.

‘You can bring some justice where justice is needed.’

The Artist in Her Studio (1993), Paula Rego © Paula Rego. Leeds Art Gallery

4. ‘Go To the Origin’

For many years Rego underwent Jungian analysis to deal with her depression. Her work acted as therapy, as she sought constantly to explore how past feelings and experiences drove her current moods and behaviour. 

Sometimes, in stripping away culture and convention, she revealed our animal cravings, our primal desires.

‘To be bestial is good. It's physical. Eating, snarling, all activities to do with sensation are positive.’

Rego was always seeking the origins of things.

‘It was very important to go to the origin, the imaginative origin that provides the images of what we have inside us, without knowing what it is.’

Paula Rego, 86, is a supremely psychological artist. She shows how in the act of creation, by ‘going to the imaginative origin,’ we can better understand our fears and frailties, our doubts and desires. And she demonstrates how we can fight injustice through subversion: laughing in the face of the oppressor; putting on a brave face; and rewriting the narrative around ourselves. 

'This is the happy house - we're happy here.
In the happy house - oh it's such fun.
We've come to play in the happy house.
And waste a day in the happy house.
It never rains.
We've come to scream in the happy house.
We're in a dream in the happy house.'
We're all quite sane.’

Siouxsie and the Banshees, 'Happy House' (S Sioux / S Severin)

No. 338

‘Wrong Answer, Love. Try Again’: A Lesson Learned at the Romford Dole Office

Maynard Dixon, Forgotten Man

'Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right.'
Henry Ford

One summer in the early ‘80s I carefully completed the appropriate form and made my way to the Romford Dole Office. 

It was a pretty grim affair. All tatty linoleum, chipped woodwork and reinforced windows. At one end stood a row of intimidating booths protected by wire grills. Since we were in the midst of a recession, there were long lines for the counters – ranks of mostly shabbily dressed men with their heads hung low, dispirited by the bureaucratic pointlessness of it all. I joined a queue, trying to look inconspicuous. Students were not particularly popular at this time and place.

When I eventually got to the front, a rather frosty woman with thick spectacles grabbed my form without a greeting. She looked me up and down with a detached stare and read out one of the questions.

‘Are you willing to accept any work if it is offered to you?’

‘No.’ I replied honestly. 

I had had a good think about this beforehand. Though I was indeed prepared to try my hand at most jobs, I could conceive of a number of roles I’d struggle with: debt collector, football league referee, swimming instructor, children’s entertainer, for instance.

My inquisitor was not impressed.

‘Wrong answer, love. Try again.’

‘Alright then: Yes,’ I replied. 

Without a glance up in my direction, she adjusted my form, gave it a thunderous stamp and added it to a file.

‘Next!’

Many years later, when I was head of an Ad Agency Planning Department, I found myself sympathetic with my inquisitor from the Romford Dole Office.

Disgruntled colleagues would book an appointment to explain why a particular account or task did not quite fit their personal career plan; why this was a category or brand that didn’t really resonate for them; why they didn’t want to change team, or travel, or move desk.

'Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value.'
Albert Einstein

The truth is that, when you’re in the midst of a resource crisis; when you’re struggling with a dissatisfied Client, a forthcoming Pitch and a shortage of talent; when your Finance Director is asking for economies and everyone is pressed for time, you really value a little energy and enthusiasm, a willingness to take on any task. And what you don’t need is people picking and choosing the roles and responsibilities that will serve them best.

‘Wrong answer, love. Try again.’

My experience at the Romford Dole Office taught me a valuable lesson: a positive disposition and an adaptable attitude can take you a long way in your career.

'They just keep on saying I'm a lazy woman.
Don't love my children and I'm mentally unfit.
Society gave us no choice,
Tried to silence my voice,
Pushing me on the welfare. 
I'm so tired of trying to prove my equal rights,
Though I've made some mistakes, for goodness sakes.
Why should they help mess up my life?
So keep away from me, Mr. Welfare
Did you hear me? Keep away from me, Mr. Welfare.’

Gladys Knight & The Pips, 'Mr. Welfare Man’ (C Mayfield)

No. 337

‘The Truth Doesn’t Rhyme’: Laurel Canyon and the Characteristics of a Creative Community

‘Laurel Canyon was a place that gave you the permission to ask who you were, to find out what this life held for you, and not be scrambling for some regimented job in a regimented society.’
Jackson Browne

I recently watched a fine film directed by Alison Ellwood documenting the music scene that thrived around Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s (‘Laurel Canyon: A Place in Time’).

Laurel Canyon was home to various members of the Byrds, the Doors, Love and Buffalo Springfield; to Frank Zappa, the Mamas & the Papas, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Joni Mitchell. It gave us folk rock, country rock and a wealth of singer-songwriters. It hosted a second wave of artists: Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Little Feat and the Eagles. For the best part of a decade it was the focus of a creative community that was collaborative, countercultural, innovative and highly productive.

Let us consider the characteristics of the particular time and place that enabled this vibrant scene to flourish.

'There's something happening here,
But what it is ain't exactly clear.
There's a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware.
I think it's time we stop
Children, what's that sound?
Everybody look, what's going down?’
Buffalo Springfield, ‘For What It’s Worth' (S Stills)

1. Find Somewhere Secluded, Convenient and Cheap

‘It was serene. It was beautiful. Winding, hilly. It was like living in the country, but you were in the big city.’ 
Roger McGuinn, the Byrds

Laurel Canyon is a woody neighbourhood in the Hollywood Hills. Through its centre runs Laurel Canyon Boulevard, connecting the region to the more urban parts of Los Angeles to the north and south. With its dirt roads and hill-top views; traditional timber houses - large-windowed and spacious; green leafy gardens, fragrant with eucalyptus, it offered peace and tranquillity to young musicians hoping to write songs, whilst also being a short drive from big city life and performance venues. At night you could hear the sound of coyotes, owls and acoustic guitars.

‘It was so magical. Literally within 4 or 5 minutes you could be down on the Sunset Strip into Hollywood.’
David Crosby, the Byrds

Critically Laurel Canyon was affordable.

‘You didn’t move there because you were wealthy. You moved there because it was right in the middle of town. It was really cheap to live.’
Mark Volman, the Turtles

Buffalo Springfield in "Echo in the Canyon." (IMDB)

2. Locate Performance Spaces and Social Hubs

‘It was a very small community of musicians and long-haired weirdos.’
Micky Dolenz, the Monkees

The enclave began when Frank Zappa and an assortment of Byrds and Monkees settled there. Then, following the Byrds’ 1965 breakout hit, their electric cover of Dylan’s ‘Mr Tambourine Man,’ musicians from all over wanted to check out the emergent folk rock scene.

‘When I heard that music… it really inspired me to go to California to start a band.’
Richie Furay, Buffalo Springfield

Buffalo Springfield, for example, was born after Richie Furay from Ohio and Stephen Stills from Texas, ran into two Canadians, Neil Young and Bruce Palmer, driving a Pontiac hearse in the opposite direction on Sunset Boulevard. 

Soon the creative colony reached critical mass.

‘Once you got above 30 of us living up there, it was a kind of a community.’
David Crosby, the Byrds

The young musicians were a short drive from clubs like the Whisky a Go Go and the Troubadour where they could meet up, watch other bands and perform. During the day they would bump into friends at the Laurel Canyon Country Store and after a show they could adjourn to Ben Frank’s diner.

‘We were playing at the Whisky a Go Go and ended up being on a double bill with The Doors and with Love.’
Richie Furay, Buffalo Springfield

‘I was writing songs and playing open mic night at the Troubadour. That was a fun hang too because you’d wind up waiting around for about four hours with a bunch of songwriters on the street, waiting for this window to open. I made a lot of friends there.’
Jackson Browne

Residents of the area would pop into each other’s houses to hang out. There were pool parties and ping pong tournaments. Cass Elliot of the Mamas & the Papas was ‘the Gertrude Stein of Laurel Canyon.’ When in 1968 Graham Nash arrived in LA from England without friends, he was scooped up by Cass and taken in her convertible Porsche to a party at her home. There he met David Crosby and Stephen Stills with whom he would subsequently form Crosby, Stills & Nash. 

3. Keep an Open Mind

‘I remember when I first got here driving around up in the Canyon with a good stereo. There were no sidewalks. There were no regimented lines. …No one locked their doors.’
Joni Mitchell

Part of the appeal of Laurel Canyon was that it stood apart from convention and conformity. Residents kept odd hours, grew their hair long, smoked a lot of weed and fell freely from one relationship to another. It had its own countercultural identity.

‘In the Laurel Canyon scene we were at the very centre of this beautiful bubble of creativity and friendship and sex and drugs and music.’
Graham Nash, Crosby, Stills & Nash

'I'll light the fire.
You place the flowers in the vase
That you bought today.
Staring at the fire
For hours and hours while I listen to you
Play your love songs all night long for me,
Only for me.’
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, ‘Our House’ (G Nash)

Joni Mitchell and Mama Cass - Henry Diltz

4. Get Access to Commercial Expertise

The Laurel Canyon scene did not just attract musicians. It was also a magnet for ambitious business people in search of the next big thing.

‘I was looking for a new direction. And I came out here. I would get a free magazine and I’d go through all the ads. And I came to one that said Love…I was gripped by the music. I went backstage and made them an offer. I said we’ve never done rock’n’roll. You strike me as a good place to start.’
Jac Holzman, Elektra Records

In 1971 David Geffen and Elliot Roberts founded Asylum Records and in their first year they signed Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell and Glenn Frey.

‘Elliot Roberts and I, we were coming across a lot of new artists that big record companies weren’t interested in.’
David Geffen, Co-Founder of Asylum Records

5. Offer Mutual Support and Collaboration

‘It wasn’t competitive… People were really encouraging each other: ‘Go for it. Do the best you can. Can’t wait to hear your next song.’’
Nurit Wilde, Photographer

We often think of creative people as secretive, paranoid and protective. But the community in Laurel Canyon was quite the reverse. They would trade ideas, experiences and contacts. And young artists could learn from the veterans.

‘I would sit with people [at the Troubadour] and I would ask questions… I was trying to collect as much information as possible that could help me get to where I wanted to be.’
Glenn Frey, the Eagles

The story of the Eagles illustrates this collaborative culture. They began life as Linda Ronstadt’s backing band. Their first hit single, ‘Take It Easy,’ was a song that Jackson Browne started and Glenn Frey finished. And when sales of their sophomore album, ‘Desperado’, were modest, Ronstadt kept them in the spotlight by releasing her own version of the title track.

‘It was great scene because a lot of people trying to write songs and trying to make records were very supportive of one another. Jackson Browne was a mentor to all of us because he had broken through first and we all aspired to what he was, to write like that, and have that kind of insight.’
Don Henley, the Eagles

6. Treat Every Ending as a New Beginning

Inevitably there was a good deal of volatility within this youthful creative scene. 

‘Well, we didn’t achieve anywhere near the success that we expected or wished to. It’s hard enough to live with yourself when you consider what you’ve done a failure. Living with four other guys is even harder.’
Neil Young, on leaving Buffalo Springfield

Often an ending led to a new beginning. When in 1967 Crosby was fired by the Byrds, he went on to form Crosby, Stills & Nash. When in 1968 Young walked out on Buffalo Springfield, he joined Crosby, Stills & Nash whilst also starting a solo career. When the Byrds took on Gram Parsons that same year, they were reborn as a country rock band, which in turn spawned the Flying Burrito Brothers.

'And the seasons, they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down.
We're captive on the carousel of time.
We can't return, we can only look
Behind, from where we came
And go round and round and round, in the circle game.’
Joni Mitchell, 'The Circle Game'

Jackson Browne

7. Beware the Corrosive Effects of Success

‘If you hold sand too tightly in your hand, it will run through your fingers.’
Telegram sent by Joni Mitchell to Graham Nash in 1970, terminating their relationship

Laurel Canyon also teaches us about how creative communities fall apart. 

Inevitably with success came wealth and an appetite for bigger homes in more affluent neighbourhoods.

 ‘John [Phillips] and I left Laurel Canyon and moved to Bel Air, three Rolls Royces in the garage. We were hippies, but we were rich hippies, there was no question about that. We’d been so innovative, but we had become the establishment.’
Michelle Phillips, the Mamas & the Papas

Prosperity and fame also led to fragmentation and eroded the culture of collaboration that had been so fruitful. 

‘Being successful we’ve all developed our own ways of life here in LA. And we don’t effect one another as creatively as we did when we all depended on one another.’
Cass Elliot, the Mamas & the Papas

‘As people became very, very successful the camaraderie changed. People started guarding their songs. You didn’t want to give up one of your melodies to somebody else.’
Elliot Roberts, Manager and Co-Founder of Asylum Records

In 1969 the Manson murders and the violence at the Altamont Free Concert shone a spotlight on the dark byways of the hippie scene. Doors were locked and guns were bought. Weed was replaced by cocaine. There was the sense of an ending.

Of course, there’s a tendency to mythologise history; to reflect on the past with rose tinted spectacles. Some of the witness testimonies about Laurel Canyon don’t exactly tally. 

‘A writer can move time around. You can take incidents that happened over the span of 15 years and make them occur in the same moment. Maybe the truth doesn’t rhyme.’
Joni Mitchell

Nonetheless, between the mid ‘60s and the early ‘70s the music community in Laurel Canyon produced some quite stunning music and set the direction of American rock for years to come. It teaches a great deal about the importance of place and of culture; about collaboration and the cross-pollination of ideas. These lessons may be all the more relevant as we reflect on the future of agencies, offices and departments in the wake of the pandemic; as we look to create our own creative cultures and communities.

‘Places become a focal point for breaking out of convention. What was happening in Laurel Canyon was the universe cracking open and revealing its secrets. It was just about a time, a creative awakening.’
Jackson Browne

'Well I've been out walking.
I don't do that much talking these days.
These days.
These days I seem to think a lot
About the things that I forgot to do
For you,
And all the times I had the chance to.’
Jackson Browne, ‘These Days'

No. 336