“What do you think?” says Joni, an hour and a half into Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue. “I think you gotta come on the stage right now,” says Bob, sexy and imposing. “OK, I’m coming.”
She doesn’t come. In Scorsese’s telling—he insists it’s his telling, the damn thing is subtitled A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese—Joni Mitchell never takes the stage. But the song she plays twenty minutes of screen time later, in a room, a room in Gordon Lightfoot’s house, a room full of mostly men, is an X-ray of the whole deal. It’s not that the other tour footage isn’t compelling, it’s just that for two and a half minutes the film glows in the dark.
The song is “Coyote.” It’s the lead tune of the 1976 album Hejira, the song she does play onstage in Scorsese’s The Last Waltz (1978)—the song in finished form there, germinal here—about her relationship with Sam Shepard on the 1975-76 Rolling Thunder tour. (Shepard’s lovely comments about Joni in his Rolling Thunder Logbook are worth consulting.) Hejira was the record of an extended, meditational solo road trip Mitchell made in the wake of her short stint with the tour in 1975. Rolling Thunder was a sort of vagabond carnival extravaganza with a constantly varying cast of performers including Joan Baez, Ronnie Hawkins, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Shepard, Allen Ginsberg, and many others; “Coyote” is the beautiful signature song of this period, addressing the affair with Shepard with a sort of wistful buoyancy. “No regrets, Coyote/We just come from such different sets of circumstance/I’m up all night in the studios/And you’re up early on your ranch/You’ll be brushing out a brood mare’s tail while the sun is ascending/And I’ll just be getting home with my reel-to-reel.” Mitchell had any number of such liaisons and kept right at her business, which, as here, often involved conjuring art out of them; that was part of the point, it was very much the persona and one of the reasons this moment in the film is so riveting—that she sang (as her song “Help Me” has it) about loving her loving but loving her freedom even more, even if it so often meant pain and isolation. Gayle Rubin famously wrote at this moment of the political economy of sex and its traffic in women. Joni, knowing for sure that is true, insists on driving her own car, says, effectively, that ain’t me, babe. No regrets.
The range of emotions that flicker across Joni’s face as she plays—memory, humor, play, deep feeling, determination, transport, that commanding half-smile—say a lot; the song says the other half. Roger McGuinn behind her photobombs for a second, then gets out of the way; Lightfoot paces in the back of the room. Dylan, playing along, sits there impassive but also rapt, respectful. She’s teaching him the song.