My last "Favorite Artists" essay was a difficult one, as I tried to tease apart how I feel about Bruce Springsteen's politics from how I feel about his music. This one is only slightly less difficult, because it's a tale of two Joni's, one of whom I love, and the other whom I've mostly been indifferent too.
Now all of the artists I've written about thus far have had long careers, and all have had high points and low points. And almost all of them did their strongest work in their early-to-mid careers, only to tail off a bit at the end. But for my taste (and that of the general public's, too, judging by album sales), Joni Mitchell is the most extreme example of this that I'll deal with.
There are two things that separate the amazing Joni from the meh Joni. One of these is her voice. As happens to many (if not most) singers, Joni's voice changed over the years. On the early albums, her voice was high and angelic, with an amazing little treble. As the years passed, however, her voice deepened, some say by as much as an octave, due to a combination of aging and way, way too many cigarettes. It's not her voice was bad later in her career -- she never reached the depths of, say, a Marianne Faithful. But early Joni could often carry a song on the sheer beauty of her voice, before you even considered the quality of her songwriting. Later Joni couldn't do this.
The change in vocal pitch by itself wouldn't have been a deal breaker for me, though. No, what broke Joni and I up was that her music itself, and her musical interests, changed and changed drastically. But I'll come back to this.
First, let me do what I usually do, and go back to the beginning. You'll notice that this essay, which is Part 8 in my "Favorite Artists" series, is the first about a female artist. There's a reason for this, and as you'll discover as the series continues, it's not that I don't like female singers. Far from it.
But back in the '70s, there was slim pickens as far as female artists went on the radio stations I listened to. Sometimes you'd hear the Motown girl groups, but they weren't really my thing. And while I liked Gracie Slick, Janis Joplin and Heart's Wilson sisters, I didn't like any of them as much as I loved bands like The Who, Jethro Tull and Pink Floyd.
But WNEW-FM, my radio station of choice, used to periodically play the King Biscuit Flower Hour, a syndicated radio show that featured concert performances by many of the artists the station normally played. And on this one night, the Flower Hour broadcast a show by two solo artists, one who was familiar to me and one who wasn't. The singer I knew was James Taylor, riding high on the success of a series of singles from the albums Sweet Baby James and Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon. The other, as you've probably guessed, was Joni Mitchell. (Apparently they were an item at the time, which I never even knew until I looked it up today, although I did know about her relationships with men like Graham Nash and Warren Beatty.)
I don't remember too much about the show, except that Joni blew me away. I think the format was that Taylor would do a couple of songs, and then Joni would do a couple of songs, and they might have eventually even done some together. I think the first song she performed was "The Gallery", and she had me right away. I'm pretty sure she also played "Conversation" that night, and probably "For Free", "Big Yellow Taxi", "Michael From the Mountains" and "The Circle Game" as well. JT was good that night, but Joni was amazing.
As it turned out, I soon learned that I already knew and loved several Joni Mitchell songs that had been recorded by other people, "Both Sides Now" by Judy Collins, and "Woodstock" by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. And before long, I picked up a copy of Joni's Ladies of the Canyon LP, and played it into the ground.
In the end, I came to love Joni's music way more than I ever loved James Taylor's. (Sorry, JT.)
I've talked before about runs, like the Pink Floyd run from Dark Side of the Moon through The Wall, or The Who's 3-LP run from Tommy through Quadrophenia. Joni had a pretty great one, too, although in her case, it wasn't a straight run -- it was more of a four-out-five situation.
Joni's first LP, Song to a Seagull came out in 1968, after she was already a successful songwriter (with songs having been recorded by Tom Rush, George Hamilton IV, Buffy St. Marie, and Dave Van Ronk, among others). The album, which was produced by David Crosby and featured Stephen Stills playing bass on one track, received mostly positive reviews, and made the back of the charts at # 189. The most acclaimed songs from the effort are probably "Michael from the Mountains", the excellent "Cactus Tree", and the single "Night in the City".
The second album, Clouds (1969), though, is the one where she first really hit her stride. This is actually my favorite Joni LP, serving up treats, as it does, such as "Chelsea Morning" (which might be my favorite Joni Mitchell song), "That Song About the Midway", "The Gallery" and Joni's version of "Both Sides Now". This one charted at # 31 in the US and # 22 in Canada, and was Joni's first Gold Album.
What followed were Ladies of the Canyon (1970), which featured numbers like "For Free", "Conversation", "Big Yellow Taxi" and "The Circle Game", and Blue (1971) (probably Joni's most critically acclaimed album), which showcased classic tracks such as "Carey", "California", the title track "Blue", and Joni's melancholic nod to Christmas, "River". Ladies demonstrated a change in shift from guitar-based songs to piano-based songs (which was fine with me), while Blue is probably Joni's most personal album (and her most morose one).
For me, her next effort, For the Roses (1972) was a step down, although I'm sure many would disagree. It was her most successful effort to date chart-wise, hitting # 5 in Canada and # 11 in the U.S. But it was also her only album released between the years of 1970 through 1974 that didn't go higher than Gold -- all three of her other releases reached at least Platinum status. It did contain the most successful single of her career, the clever "You Turn Me On, I'm A Radio", and some other minor favorites such as "Woman of Heart and Mind" and "Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire", so it certainly wasn't a bad album. It's probably her least impressive album from her best creative years, though.
Nevertheless, in 1974, Joni issued her most successful LP ever, the amazing Court and Spark. The album mixed Joni's classic folk stylings with pop and even a taste of jazz. (This last influence was a harbinger of worse days to come, but it worked here, at least.) The LP included a trio of popular singles, "Help Me", "Free Man in Paris" and "Raised on Robbery", as well as the excellent title track "Court and Spark", another vintage Joni track, "People's Parties", and her manic cover of Annie Ross and Wardell Grey's "Twisted". Court and Spark reached # 1 in Canada and # 2 in the United States, and went double platinum.
Later that same year, Joni followed up this success with one of the best live efforts ever, the double album Miles of Aisles. This one also went Gold, not bad for a live LP. However, although I love it dearly, it's here that I can really hear the signs of the changes to come. By this time, Joni's voice had clearly started to deepen, and as her backing band for the tour from which the recordings were drawn, she'd hired Tom Scott's L.A. Express, a well-respected jazz fusion band.
At this point, as the hiring of the L.A. Express might have led you to expect, Joni's musical leanings veered off into a much more jazz-oriented direction. Joni was always a rebel. She was a self-taught guitarist, and she was famous for employing a variety of open tunings that other musicians found challenging to play. (Watch the documentary film of The Band's last concert, The Last Waltz, and you'll hear some of the guys playfully grouse about it.) But from 1975 on, Joni's compositions got more and more out there. Her songs got more and more formless, and played around not only with jazz, but also with swing and various other influences.
Mind you, there were still some worthwhile numbers over her next three albums, The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975), Hejeira (1976) and Don Juan's Reckless Daughter (1977). Some of the best included "In France They Kiss on Main Street" and "Shadows and Light" from Hissing, "Coyote" and "Amelia" from Hejeira, and "Dreamland" and the title track from Don Juan. But to tell you truth, I never even bought the first two LPs back in the day (although I own them now), and while I liked Don Juan's Reckless Daughter somewhat, it paled in comparison with her earlier stuff. And the record sales showed it. Joni always retained a certain core audience. Maybe she even gained some of the jazz crowd. But a glance at the charts shows that while Hissing sold decently, each album after that sold progressively worse. At this point, many of Joni's most ardent fans, myself included, jumped off the bus and never really got back on.
Joni's next release was Mingus in 1979. I heard it was a collaboration with the aged jazz musician Charles Mingus, and this was enough to scare me off. In retrospect, that was a good thing. When I started writing this series almost two years ago, I also started buying up all of the albums I hadn't previously owned by the artists I planned to write about. Most of these LPs were late Joni Mitchell albums, pre-Stevie and Lindsey Fleetwood Mac LPs, and certain early and late Rush albums. I finally got around to listening to Mingus this last summer, and I hated it. I know others will disagree. The album did go silver, and it received at least middling reviews from places like Sputnik Music, AllMusic and The Rolling Stone Album Guide. But I think it's wretched, and it isn't helped any by the fact that the actual songs are interspersed throughout with snippets of conversation taped at Mingus's birthday party, shortly before his death later that same year.
Over the last few days, as preparation for writing this essay, I've been listening through all of Joni's other original albums, through her last one, 2007's Shine. Some of them are a little poppier than I expected, and I've heard a few songs here and there that I like. Of course, at this point, Joni is still with us, at age 76. But she had an aneurysm in 2015, and as of 2018, was still learning to walk again. And as I slowly begin to geeze out myself (I turn 63 next month), I plan to spend at least some of my remaining time on this planet listening to some of her later albums in greater depth and appreciating the gems I find therein. But damned, that 1968-through-1974 version of Joni was a pearl of great beauty. I've listened to literally dozens of female folk artists since then, and for me none of them has ever hit the heights that Joni Mitchell did during this time period. (Aimee Mann might come the closest.)
What was it I liked best about the Joni Mitchell from the late sixties through the mid-seventies? Some of it was just her sheer vocal beauty. Listen to that trill in the last chorus of "Conversation", where she sings, "He knows that's what he'll fi-i-i-ind", or the transitions from the verses into the choruses of "Chelsea Morning", and you'll hear what I mean. Janis, Gracie and the Wilsons never sounded like this.
It was also the poetry of her lyrics, (e.g., "The sun poured in like butterscotch and stuck to all my senses" - from "Chelsea Morning"), and the imagery therein, like the description of the protagonist of "Blue Boy", worshiping at the feet of the statue who was her lover, until she herself turned into a "lady statue". Priceless.
Finally, it was her unusual song structures. Listen to enough music, and you develop unconscious expectations that when you hear a certain line of music, the next line will go in a predictable direction. Joni's music tended to defy these expectations. Listen to the guitar from the first into the second line of "People's Parties", for example, or the line from "My Old Man" where she sings "We don't need no piece of paper/From the city hall". Or just listen to stresses of the various syllables in one of Joni's most famous lines, and you'll hear what I mean: "Don't it always seem to go/That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?".
All of these elements together are what made Joni Mitchell's music so special during this period of her career.
So that's my tale of two Joni's. I wish her love and happiness wherever she is right now, and I thank her for the many hours of happy listening she's given me over the years. I feel a little bad that I couldn't stay with her for her whole career, but her tastes and mine just diverged too much. I sure did love those folk/pop years, though.
The next article in this series will be a sharp change in direction, as I hit the beginning of the new wave years and write about one of my favorite bands from that period, The Cars.
