Joni Mitchell: Every Album, Every Song

Joni Mitchell

Every Album, Every Song

On Track

Peter Kearns

Sonicbond Publishing Limited

www.sonicbondpublishing.co.uk

Email: info@sonicbondpublishing.co.uk

First Published in the United Kingdom 2021 First Published in the United States 2021

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:

A Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright Peter Kearns 2020

ISBN 978-1-78952-081-1

The right of Peter Kearns to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him

in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Sonicbond Publishing Limited

Contents

Acknowledgments

Write In Your Own Blood

1. Song to a Seagull (1968)

2. Clouds (1969)

3. Ladies of the Canyon (1970)

4. Blue (1971)

5. For the Roses (1972)

6. Court and Spark (1974)

7. The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975)

8. Hejira (1976)

9. Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter (1977)

10. Mingus (1979)

11. Wild Things Run Fast (1982)

12. Dog Eat Dog (1985)

13. Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm (1988)

14. Night Ride Home (1991)

15. Turbulent Indigo (1994)

16. Taming the Tiger (1998)

17. Both Sides Now (2000)

18. Travelogue (2002)

19. Shine (2007)

Epilogue: Fractions of Faith and Hope

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Stephen Lambe.

This book is dedicated to the memory of musicians Jaco Pastorius and Charles Mingus.

Write In Your Own Blood

A print of a colourful Joni Mitchell painting once hung on jazz legend Miles Davis’ bathroom wall. Mere weeks before his passing in 1991, he moved it to his bedside. In the weeks after, Joni produced a stirring Davis portrait in tribute, which, from an intuitive place of no-mind, rendered him in a kind of blue. Rumours of a musical collaboration between the two had circulated for years.

Uncertain whether Davis was keen on her music, Joni discovered only after his death that he preferred working on instrumentals. She would’ve gladly given him instrumental tracks to blow over. Davis’ opinion of her was, in fact, reverential. All of her albums were to be found in his collection. The combined respect Joni garnered not only from Davis, but her regular collaborator, jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter; the mighty composer Charles Mingus, and an ongoing list of jazz luminaries, was a virtually unequalled accomplishment for a recording artist operating ostensibly from a pop base outward.

To her, it was all music, and it was the quality of the music that mattered, not the arbitrary categorisation. Borderlines were non-existent. Music and painting were one. In interviews, she would often mix artistic metaphors, making it impossible to tell which medium she referred to. Throughout her recording career, she considered herself a painter first, but her mind was open to possibilities, her next move perpetually unpredictable.

Even at birth, all preparations were for a Robert John Anderson. The arrival of Roberta Joan on Sunday 7 November 1943 at Fort Macleod, Alberta Canada, changed everything. Her parents were Myrtle Anderson, a teacher, and William Anderson, an Air Force lieutenant and trumpet player. Music was established in the home early. At the age of seven, Joni wrote her first piece, a piano instrumental she called ‘Robin Walk’. Piano lessons came later, but a stern tutor who would rap her over the knuckles for playing by ear put a stop to further composition for a number of years.

Contracting polio at the age of ten, Joni was cared for at home for a year before recovering. As a result, she was restricted to never lifting anything heavier than five pounds. The disease was also responsible for hand weakness, eventually requiring the need to adopt alternative guitar tunings.

Moving a few times, the family eventually settled 600 miles from Fort Macleod, in Saskatoon (The bridge city), Saskatchewan, the place Joni thereafter considered her home town. By the age of twelve she’d developed a passion for art and poetry. When seen one day by her English teacher Mr Kratzman, pinning a painting on a school wall, he stopped her, saying, ‘If you can paint with a brush, you can paint with words’. But an epic poem she soon submitted – about a Mustang being chased and tamed – Kratzman flatly rejected, with the now-famous advice; ‘Write in your own blood’.

At sixteen, Joni wrote ‘The Fish Bowl’, an anti-fame poem titled out of sympathy for the famous couple, Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee, whose marriage misadventures had become ubiquitous magazine fodder.

The fishbowl is a world reversed Where fishermen with hooks that dangle from the bottom up

Reel down their catch on gilded bait without a fight

Pike, pickerel, bass, the common fish

Ogle through distorting glass

See only glitter, glamour, gaiety

Fog up the bowl with lusty breath

Lunge towards the bait and miss

And weep for fortune lost

Envy the goldfish?

Why?

His bubble break ‘round the rim

While silly fishes faint for him and say

‘Oh, look there, he winked his eye at me’

A life-defining event occurred after Joni drew a Christmas card for a boy at school. She was in turn rewarded with a copy of the Lambert, Hendricks & Ross album, The Hottest New Group in Jazz. The vocal group’s adventurous take on the standards was to be a lifelong inspiration, Joni eventually claiming the album to be the only one on which she knew every song, including her own.

Just before a year’s attendance at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology at Calgary, she bought a baritone ukulele. Later, she taught herself guitar from a Pete Seeger instruction record. But not wanting to copy someone else’s style, she quickly abandoned the disc. Her first real gigs came in the form of a few months work in late 1963, performing for free at the art school coffee house, The Depression. After friend and folk singer, Eric Anderson, demonstrated open-G tuning, Joni slowly developed her own individual tuning style, which in performance often required her to re-tune for every song.

The art education itself was a disappointment. The professors were interested only in the abstract, while Joni was seeking traditional knowledge. She has maintained that more tutelage around her preferred areas of interest might’ve resulted in a life 100% devoted to painting.

In August 1964, she took a three-day train journey to the Mariposa Folk Festival in Ontario, where she saw fellow Saskatchewan singer/songwriter, Buffy Sainte-Marie, perform. This journey inspired Joni’s second song, ‘Day After Day’. She’d forgotten one piece written six months earlier, so she came to refer to the new song as her first. Years later she would claim ‘Urge For Going’ to be, if not the first, then at least the first she took seriously. In order to cover the musician’s union fees required to get gigs on the circuit, she took on a job in womenswear. Around this time she began writing songs at the rate of about four a week. In the fall, she spent several weeks gigging in the vibrant music hub of Yorkville, Toronto.

Fate stepped in in May 1965 when Joni met musician, Chuck Mitchell, at a shared gig at Toronto’s Penny Farthing coffeehouse. One month later they were married in Chuck’s parents’ back yard in Rochester, Detroit, to the strains of a string quartet.

Basing themselves in Detroit in summer 1966, they lived in Chuck’s fifth-floor apartment of the Verona building in Cass Corridor – a walk-up due to a busted elevator. They earned a living playing around the circuit as a duo; the show put together in a collage-like fashion. Chuck’s repertoire had a heavy Brechtian bent in contrast to Joni’s introspective songs of love-lost. Covers of folk artists like Gordon Lightfoot provided a middle ground. At Detroit’s Chess Mate blues and folk club, they shared some gigs with folk singer, Tom Rush. He convinced them to move to New York, securing the duo a two-week engagement at Greenwich Village’s Gaslight Cafe. Moving into a small apartment north of the village, they immersed themselves in the scene. But the pair disagreed on repertoire, and they separated within a year.

Joni had never thought combining some level of poetry with music was a possibility, considering the non-poetic lyrics of rock & roll songs. The exception was Chuck Berry, whose poetic imagery enlivened his songs. It wasn’t until Joni heard Bob Dylan’s ‘Positively 4th Street’ in late 1965 that a light bulb went off and she realised you could write about anything now. It was the song’s anger that struck her – ‘You’ve got a lotta nerve to say you are my friend’ – the kind of emotion most pop lyrics till then had insulated against.

From that point on, Joni’s lyrics became more adventurous.

Travelling to the UK in August 1967, she conducted a short tour of clubs as a support act, commencing on Wednesday 23rd at London’s Marquee, leading to a September appearance at The Speakeasy where she opened for The Incredible String Band. Returning to the USA, she undertook a week of dates at Florida’s Gaslight Cafe at Coconut Grove, where on Friday 29 September she first encountered musician David Crosby. Freshly-flown from The Byrds, and in between serious projects, Crosby walked into the coffee house and was instantly floored by what he heard. Joni was singing many of the songs that would populate her first albums, including ‘Both Sides, Now’ which was already six months old. Crosby couldn’t believe there was anybody around that was that good. Joni’s act was by now finely-honed and she was ready for something.

That autumn she met her managers, Joel Dean and Elliot Roberts. After Reprise Records’ A&R representative Andy Wickham saw Joni perform, Roberts negotiated a deal, which set Joni on the path to Los Angeles and cutting her first album, Song to a Seagull.

Upon arrival in Los Angeles in late 1967, Joni moved in with David Crosby, who would drive her around in his Mercedes, The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour album as a soundtrack. At first put off by the dead pavements of a city that lived in automobiles, she was struck by how rural Laurel Canyon was despite its close proximity to the city. Its emancipation from the grid reminded her of Canadian lake neighbourhoods. The people were friendly, it was safe and no one locked their doors.

Many people took a shine to Joni. But it’s beyond this book’s scope to detail her romantic relationships any further than is necessary to outline a particular song. The focus is on the music. To reinforce her 1991 Boston Globe quote re music in general; ‘Too much attention has been given to the artist, and not enough to the song’.

Further to that, seeming autobiographical traces throughout the lyrics are often erroneous. Joni has stated on many occasions her habit of taking details from her own and other people’s lives, mixing up tenses and perspectives, in many cases authoring outright fiction where countless listeners and critics repeatedly professed revealing autobiography to dwell. Her songwriting was invariably approached as a form of theatre. In one interview, she confirmed this with the phrase that slammed the door on the subject; ‘It is showbiz after all.’.

Some scrutiny of lyric is obviously unavoidable in an overview of this discography. But attempts to glean all-encompassing profundity have been largely passed over in favour of lean and tight quotes, the occasional one more closely examined. The lyrics are only half the story. In Joni’s case, the harmonic and instrumental aspects of the work were equally as vital and worthy of discussion as the lyrics. Some tangled-up lyric theories as proffered by some critics and chroniclers of her key 40-year work period could be thought of as ‘second-generation realities’ – a term she coined when once referring to her early, sometimes oblique lyrics. As the years progressed, her preference was for the more direct shot of cinema. It became more a showing than a telling – more about the what than the who.

The search for the deeper meaning within this astonishing catalogue was once temporarily satiated when Joni threw us a bone with the admission that her favourite songwriting subject was ‘the anatomy of the love crime’. The ‘what’ was really the thing from the beginning. The ‘who’ was occasionally Joni herself (but not as frequently as you might think), sometimes a friend, fictional character or all of the above. More often, the ‘who’ was the listener themselves.

Thanks to Joni taking her old English teacher’s advice to heart and bleeding in her songs, an open-minded listener was in the ideal position to experience some self-realisation, and benefit through Joni’s graceful axioms.

Chapter 1

Song to a Seagull (1968)

Personnel:

Vocals, Guitar, Piano, Banshee: Joni Mitchell

Banshee: Lee Keefer

Bass: Stephen Stills

Recorded in December 1967 and early 1968 at Sunset Sound Recorders, Hollywood, California.

Producer: David Crosby

Engineer: Art Cryst

Label: Reprise

US Release date: 23 March 1968.

UK Release date: June 1968.

Chart placings: US: 189.

In Los Angeles in late 1967, David Crosby introduced Joni to the head of Warner-Reprise Records, Mo Ostin. A deal was struck with Crosby as producer. Crosby had warned Joni against using a name producer in the fear that they might decorate the songs with lavish string sections and who knows what manner of elaborate overdubbing. He’d inserted himself as watchdog in the first place to preserve the music’s integrity.

The recording location was to be Sunset Sound Recorders on Sunset Boulevard. Waiting for a gap in the sessions for the final Buffalo Springfield album, Last Time Around, Joni was sidetracked to the newly-opened Studio 2. Song to a Seagull would be the first album recorded there.

Crosby planned on minimal instrumentation and took a hands-off approach to the recording. Not that there wasn’t some trial and error. At first, Joni, in her words, went crazy, adding all sorts of vocal harmonies before they realised they were ruining it and pulled back. One successful technique was Crosby’s suggestion that Joni sing into the grand piano with the sustain pedal down, causing the strings to naturally resonate with her voice. Frank Zappa had experimented with this several months earlier recording The Mothers of Invention album We’re Only In It for the Money over at New York’s Apostolic Studios. But most of Crosby’s exercise was lost due to him later discovering an audio engineering fault. The tapes had an issue with crackling noise which the engineer Art Cryst had insisted was only in the speakers. Excessive tape hiss was also present. It was removed but unfortunately resulted in the trade-off of the album lacking clear highs.

Crosby, though successful as a member of The Byrds, was an unknown quantity as a producer. He and Joni were in the deep end, and engineer Cryst, though helpful, was ill and nursing a marriage breakup via drinking. Sadly he passed soon after completing the project.

Joni described the album as a conflict between the city and the seaside, dividing it into two parts and titling the sides accordingly with title track lyric lines; Side A: I Came to the City, and Side B: Out of the City and Down to the Seaside. The songs mostly had pop verse/chorus formats with the exception of the deeper side two material like ‘The Dawntreader’, ‘Song to a Seagull’ and ‘Cactus Tree’, which all bore the repeating single-section strophic folk format. Cover artwork came courtesy of Joni. The record was dedicated to her old English teacher, ‘Mr Kratzman, who taught me to love words.’.

On cue with the album’s American March 1968 release, Joni purchased the ranch house at 8217 Lookout Mountain Road in Laurel Canyon, which would become immortal two years later in the Graham Nash-penned ‘Our House’ from the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young album, Déjà Vu. That single became an American top 40 and Canadian top 20 hit in 1970.

Four days before the Song to a Seagull release, and perhaps more auspicious in some ways, was the occasion of Joni’s gig of Tuesday 19 March 1968 at the Le Hibou coffeehouse in Ottawa, Canada. The gig was business as usual with the exception that prominent rock guitarist, Jimi Hendrix, attended the late show after his Capitol Theatre concert. With Joni’s permission, he set up a tape recorder. Sadly, both tape and recorder were stolen a few days later. A few months later, Joni would headline at the Capitol Theatre herself.

Side One: I Came to the City ‘I Had a King’ (Joni Mitchell)

Released as a single B-side, June 1968 (US and CA), 5 July 1968 (UK), b/w ‘Night in the City’.

The willingness to be emotionally bare was evident from the outset. Joni here wrote candidly about her and Chuck Mitchell’s marriage breakup in a pastoral folk style not unlike that of Joan Baez at the time. The acoustic guitar style was understated but forthright (and not merely because it was doubled), and deserving of as much attention as the perfectly-inflected singing.

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 they never can

1960s references contemporised the lyric, preventing too much marination in fairy tale whimsy which was still practised by many a folk artist in 1968(th ough Joni claimed not to be one), despite Bob Dylan’s brutal 1965 collision with electricity changing the face of folk music going forward. Once asked if the song was autobiographical, Joni replied, ‘Oh, sure. After I took half the furniture when I left, Chuck changed the lock on me.’.

‘Michael from Mountains’ (Joni Mitchell)

Michael was a friend of Joni’s, an artist who she described in 1968 as a child- man. After some distance came between them, his influence appeared in both her music and drawings – a typical delayed reaction she admitted was not unusual in her work.

It will not be the purpose of this book to analyse every lyric or indulge in prosodic detail, but it’s worth pointing out an early episode of this nature. Joni wrote songs well-imbued with the technical standards set down by the great musical composers such as Gilbert & Sullivan and Rodgers & Hammerstein, and the classic songwriters of the early 20th century like Irving Berlin and Cole Porter. In ‘Michael from Mountains’, the rhyme scheme from verse to verse was complex but locked in tight, with down/ground/found and an inner-line pattern of sweets/streets, tight/bright, and a triple rhyme of drain/arrange/ change – a pattern followed to the letter in all verses. In such a straitjacket it wasn’t surprising to find the weaker phrase ‘Their mothers will scold’ (Setting up the later cold/hold) sounding wedged-in after the fact, to make the triple rhyme work. This kind of fledgeling ambiguity would all but disappear from Joni’s lyrics before long, replaced by other