Okay, rock-and-roll is an integral part of songpoetry. But there's more to rock-and-roll than one might think. It's not just a rhythm-and-blues beat, or a sound filled with electricity and extended with simplicity. It is more a feeling and a sense of strength. Even the most inane rock-and-roll actors of the early '50s stood centre stage and belted their numbers. This is part of the charm of the music, for it originated in a time when few American teenagers were capable of speaking strongly about anything. There was a self-confidence to much of early rock that was catching, and even the silliest lyrics can sometimes seem important and pressing when presented with authority and an obvious feeling of self-esteem.
The best songpoets learned this lesson from rock, and they gained strength from it. It does something to music when this confidence permeates your work, your writing and your performance. I, for one, believe that a singer doesn't stand a chance of getting an audience to listen if he does not assert himself on stage. Not just in his performance, but in his material as well.
Joni Mitchell, a Canadian songpoet, has learned the lesson well, and in recent years the feeling of strength that exudes from her work has been startling and wonderful. In a few years, she had moved from an introverted writer and performer who turned out weak songs to a songpoet whose work is rich and strong and full of that special confidence I've been discussing here.
Not that Mitchell's early work was ineffective. Her songs even then had imagery and humour and wisdom, and they were recognized and recorded by a number of the best interpreters we have. Judy Collins finally found her way to a hit record with a Joni Mitchell tune, 'Both Sides Now', and Tom Rush was provided one of his best performances with 'Circle Game'.
With all this pre-release publicity, Mitchell's first album had a great deal to live up to, and in many ways it justified the expectations of this writer and many others. But I remember the moment when I realized that there were deeper possibilities in a Joni Mitchell song than I had realized. It was at a club where Dave Van Ronk, the legendary white blues singer, was appearing. In the midst of a bunch of dirty blues, Van Ronk attempted an interpretation of 'Both Sides Now'. He pushed his low, growling voice to a falsetto, and the lyrics were lent a new weight, a new importance. Van Ronk's is far and away the most moving interpretation of that song I've ever heard, and the reason is clear: He had injected strong emotions into what others had treated as a slightly precious poem. Instead of emphasizing the poetic qualities, he went for the guts, and it worked. He added a new power to the song, and I realized then that if Mitchell could find a way to do the same (without severing her vocal chords trying to imitate Van Ronk's raspy voice), she would have found her groove as an artist.
Blue is one of the best albums of songpoetry we have– Mitchell's masterpiece, and a triumph of rock-and-roll. With this album she managed to reconcile her poetry, with its strong imagery and strong emotional outlook, to the assertiveness and power of rock. In the process she has moved from folk singer to songpoet.
I can almost hear the rock purists groaning out there as they contemplate Joni Mitchell as rock-and-roller. But rockand-roll is more than a screaming electric guitar; it is more than minimal lyrics and sequined capes; it is a feeling, a looseness and a self-confidence. I contend that Joni Mitchell has all these qualities and intelligence as well – and further, that this combination is the future of rock.
The primary change between Blue and Mitchell's earlier albums involves relaxation. She has learned to ease up on her vocals, to employ intricate and varied timing, instead of relying on the high folky sound that Joan Baez popularized more than a decade ago. Baez herself has apparently changed her mind, for her most recent releases do not have the hair-raising high notes that sent chills up the spines of folk listeners in the early '60s. In abandoning folk classicism, Mitchell has achieved an immediate effect: her lyrics are much more accessible to the casual listener. Before, her vocalizations often interfered with a simple understanding of her lines. This can be fatal. It is self-defeating to sweat out a lyric of merit and then bury it under a vocal style.
Not that on Blue Joni Mitchell does not fully use her wonderful voice. It's in full power – a tool of many emotions. It is one of the most expressive voices I have ever heard, capable of sudden flights of sound that seem impossible. But now she is delivering up these sounds within an easier context, and they are sudden surprises instead of required pyrotechnics.
Blue starts off with a song titled 'All I Want' that sets the tone for the entire album. It is a rhythmic delight, with guitars setting a calypso beat and Mitchell's voice soaring above it all with a declaration of desire for freedom from greed and jealousy. 'Alive, alive, I want to get up and jive / I want to wreck my stockings in some jukebox dive,' she sings with strength and warmth, the two characteristics of Blue.
The use of rhythm of this cut is unusual, as if Mitchell had reached out into the world of rhythm and found for herself something unique and new. James Taylor supplies the second guitar on 'All I Want' with great subtlety, never intruding on the strong lyrics. Taylor plays on three of the best cuts on this album, all up-tempo numbers, and he never once hits a bad note or interferes with the presence of the star. Stephen Stills provides the bass and guitar tracks on 'Carey', perhaps the best and most jubilant of the songs on Blue, with equal politeness and taste. One of the qualities that Mitchell clearly shows is the ability to choose the right people to do the right musical jobs on her records. Unlike many of today's artists, she has been in a progression toward simplicity of arrangement and instrumentation. This takes a special kind of courage, for it indicates a real and justified confidence in her own presence.
Another singular aspect of her talent is Mitchell's ability to vary the length of her lyric lines without ruining the flow. Her phrasing is so loose, and she is in such clear control, that she makes it seem effortless to squeeze an extra phrase or two into any line. Only a few vocalists – for instance, Dylan and Van Morrison – can pull this off. The effect is of great ease and fluidity, but the performer is flirting with disaster, for a skipped phrase could ruin the metre.
'All I Want' is played on the dulcimer, an instrument that has had little real impact on the recent musical scene. Only the late Richard Fariña seemed able to adapt the special sound of this ancient traditional instrument to the new music. Fariña died before he could make his dulcimer work known to the greater public. Now Joni Mitchell has revived the instrument, this time as a purely rhythmic tool, and it is this ancient sound that weaves throughout this album. On stage, she seems able to create an entire rhythm section, a little band, with it.
The next tune on Blue features Mitchell on piano and is a love song titled 'My Old Man'. The song focuses in on the tiniest elements of a relationship in order to capture the feeling of loneliness: 'The bed's too big / The frying pan's too wide,' Mitchell sings. Her voice slides around the lyric, bursting into sunspots of sound, exploding with warmth and love and capturing, for one moment, an essence of feeling about another person.
Mitchell has the ability to put a lot of her own experience into short statements in both her lyrics and her music. Although nearly all of her songs focus upon relationships and the interactions between a woman and her lovers, they manage to dramatize aspects of these relationships that seem fresh. There are few clichés and no cop-outs. In 'My Old Man' Mitchell writes of the sad discovery of many little facts that remind one of a lover's absence and convey the rediscovery of the joy of a lover's returning.
'Little Green', the next cut on Blue, is the weakest here. Not that it is a weak song, but it is a weak Joni Mitchell song – which would make it exceptional on the albums of any one of a hundred other artists. She fails to keep up the rhythmic intensity, and the lyric about a child is too vague and too short to make an effective statement.
But even here there are style and warmth far beyond the usual.
'Carey', in which Mitchell returns to the rock-calypso beat she introduced on her Ladies of the Canyon album, is the best example of how she has reconciled herself with rock-and-roll. This song is dependent on rhythm for its success. The vocal is piquant and rich at the same time, and the lyrics are constructed like an early rock hit, with a repeated chorus that sticks with you. The bass and guitar tracks, again provided by Stephen Stills, are perfect foils for the singer. Mitchell makes it all seem so easy, but 'Carey' is full of vocal intricacies and tricks that would stagger and choke most singers. Through it all there is a sense of an intimacy, contributed to by a production that pushes the vocal so far in front that you could believe Mitchell was singing from your lap. The clarity is remarkable, and since no producer is listed, one can only chalk this up to Joni Mitchell and what she has learned about the recording process through four albums.
Here again the lyric focuses on small things to make a more general statement. The music matches the words, and the song is, like the sirocco in the first line, full of the feeling of a hot wind blowing in from Africa. There is vitality here, tremendous energy, and it spills over on to one of the best tracks that Mitchell has ever recorded.
Much of her appeal is a quality of confronting reality from a certain innocence as she stands there with her long hair and pure face. In 'Blue', the next cut on the album, she does just that with great effectiveness and charm. In a clear, sweet voice, she lines out a lyric that is quintessential to the dilemma faced by thinking young persons. Rather than condemning drugs, the song goes through the emotion a young person would feel confronted with the devil and his limitless temptations. 'Acid, booze and ass / Needles, guns and grass / ... Everybody's saying / That hell's the hippest way to go / Well, I don't think so / But I'm gonna take a look around it, though.' Four lines and she's said as much about being young today, the pressures and temptations, as anybody I've heard or read. Her language is vernacular and precise; there is not a wasted word here or anywhere else on this extraordinary album.
'California' continues this idiosyncratic combination of innocence and worldliness. What grabs me most about this song is its pragmatism and realism. When Mitchell sings of California, it is not of rolling hills and spacious skies. She sings of 'Sunset Pigs' – the over-eager cops along the Sunset Strip in Hollywood – and rock-and-roll bands, and the heat. She speaks of homesickness when one reads news from home, even when the news is of the war and its 'bloody changes'. This song is not fantasy but a piece of honest rock, and it is a vivid little portrait of a moment of loneliness and of homesickness. Again we have the rock-tinged sound, with the addition of one of the creamiest pedal-steel solos. With the pedal steel appearing on the word 'lonely', Mitchell approaches the border of sentimentality, but as usual, she manages to avoid it by the facts of reality.
From 'California', with its images of returning, we move on to 'This Flight Tonight', a song about leaving. This is one more love song presented in a very personal way, and the theme still manages to seem fresh and unused. But then, how can you place a song with lines like 'You got the touch so gentle and sweet / But you've got the look so critical / I can't talk to you, baby, I get so weak / Sometimes I think love is just mythical' into a single category with all the mush that has passed as love poetry in pop music for so long?
'River' is an odd Christmas song – another love song, and a plea for forgiveness even if only from oneself. Mitchell takes to the piano here, and the vocal is a bit more expansive than on the earlier cuts, but the effect is much the same. The honesty is forceful –a personal crisis against the commerciality of modern Christmases. Again this is music without fantasy, music that makes the world a little clearer.
'A Case of You' is perhaps the subtlest offering on Blue. It is another example of the integration of rock feeling into Mitchell's work, but more as well. Here is a love song about total devotion, surely a familiar commodity on the pop scene, but it is so rich with imagery and wisdom that it seems criminal to compare it to most of the love songs on the market. The mood is of resignation and of a wonder at the joy that another person can bring into one's life. There is fear here, and regret that love brings such total emotional domination, but there are also acceptance and contentment. The vocal is subdued throughout most of the song, but suddenly takes off at one moment like a soaring bird of colour, and the intensity of emotion bursts out in a short sound.
Finally we have one of Mitchell's strangest songs, and one of her most telling. 'The Last Time I Saw Richard' is about a failed romantic, and it tells the story with wit. The character is drawn quickly, with few details, and the situation is revealed through conversation. Since the conversational tone is constant throughout Mitchell's recent work, she has no problem adapting it here. The song has humour and intelligence, much in the style of Randy Newman. But behind the humour one can feel the bitterness of the true romantic doomed to continual disappointment. Even the self-deprecation of the humour cannot hide the message. Mitchell seems to be resigning herself here to the description of her given by Richard – a hopeless and ageing romantic, whose life is a series of ordeals and disappointments and 'dark café days'.
And Blue is finished. Looking back over Joni Mitchell's earlier albums, with their folk-art quality and their high, unnecessary vocalizations and their overly dramatic lyrics, it is hard to believe that she has come so far. She has developed into something like a national resource, and the Canadians ought to put up a monument in her first English classroom or something like that. Here we have a poetry of honesty and precision, delivered over music that draws on rhythms that reach for the gut. This songpoet has a warm and charming way with the language, yet she uses this to say things that would seem almost too harsh to hear if they were coming from a less beautiful person.
There must be something in the air up in Canada that produces such good musicians. Robbie Robertson, Neil Young, Ronnie Hawkins and Joni Mitchell are among many Canadians who grace the American musical scene. Joni Mitchell is a native of Calgary and a former art student in Alberta. She was born in 1943 and made her performing debut at the Mariposa Folk Festival, a homey affair that annually draws some of the best folk talent to Canada. She was signed by Warner Brothers' – Reprise label in 1967, but had developed a reputation in this country long before that on the basis of others' recording her songs. Tom Rush and Judy Collins were two of the first to record Mitchell songs, and many others have followed suit.
Her first album, Joni Mitchell, established her as one of the better writers on the folk scene. Yet it also established her in many minds as the epitome of a certain kind of folk preciousness, an almost ultrafemininity, in both her imagery and her vocals. It is true that there was much in the way of coyness and preciousness on this first album, which was produced by David Crosby, but there are also much wit and signs of a poetic sensibility. The imagery in songs like 'Michael from Mountains' and 'Sisotowbell Lane' is a bit reminiscent of college-literary-magazine poetry, but it often hits home. The album had a loose concept to it, with one side devoted to 'city' songs and the other to 'country' songs; a couple of the songs supported this idea, but most did not, and the concept fell flat. Perhaps the most important song on this debut album comes in a short, throwaway song titled 'Night in the City'. Here Mitchell breaks into a sort of semi-rock boogie beat, behind some bright lyrics about getting out and living in the night city. The song is definitely indicative of better things to come.
Mitchell's second album, Clouds, features some of her best early songs, including 'Chelsea Morning', 'Both Sides Now' and 'Tin Angel', but is weighed down with a number of melodramatic attempts at complicated narrative poetry. These include 'The Gallery', which almost works as a bittersweet, cold-eyed examination of a dead relationship, but bogs down in words and more words, and 'That Song About the Midway', which stumbles into needless ambiguity and is possibly the worst song Mitchell has ever recorded. It should be noted that Mitchell took over the production here, except for Paul Rothchild's work on 'Tin Angel', and that this marks the point at which she began to develop her skill as a producer of intimate music.
The third album, Ladies of the Canyon, marks a major turning point in Mitchell's recording career. Here she begins to loosen up her vocals, although she still spends too much time trying to send her voice to the moon or beyond with high and most unnecessary howlings. But what is most noticeably an improvement here involves the lyrics, which are much more economical and much less ambiguous. Here we are introduced to a bunch of characters who are succinctly summarized. There are three clear gems on the album. First is 'For Free', a tribute to a street clarinetist and a very honest comment on the difficult art of performing for fees. The next is 'Big Yellow Taxi', a sweet little throwaway of a tune in which Mitchell cuts loose, finally, into a pure rock-and-roll beat. The chorus goes: 'They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot' and provides one of the best slogans for the new ecology movement. It may not be political rhetoric, but it sure makes its point. Last we have 'Woodstock', which, although a bit overblown, captures much of the feeling of almost religious unity that bubbled up after the Woodstock Festival of 1969. Crosby, Stills and Nash turned this one into a respectable rocker soon after.
With For the Roses, released in early 1973, Joni Mitchell continues her attempt at further expanding the musical variety of her work. Although this album suffers from the repetition of one theme – the loss of a rock-and-roll-star lover – in a number of songs, it is still musically ahead of much of what is released today. The album's strongest cuts include 'You Turn Me On (I'm a Radio)' and the title song.
It has been known for some time that Joni Mitchell is not the most willing of stage performers, and that is easily understandable. It can be a great drain for a writer to go out on the road and to make her most personal statements to crowds of thousands, appreciative or not. Many writers find the road conducive to writing, but the great majority with whom I've discussed this find the atmosphere of the countless Holiday Inns that form the rock and roll trail too impersonal and too sterile for anything more than imbibing, sleep and late-night phone calls home.
Knowing Mitchell's feelings about performing and being on the road, it was with great surprise and much delight that I saw her perform at Carnegie Hall, on a bill with Jackson Browne, himself an important figure in the new songwriting. From the first second on stage, it was clear that Mitchell was in command. She came out unaccompanied, a thin, lanky figure in velvet with long blonde hair dipping to her shoulders and beyond.
With a minimum of talk, she launched into a stunning presentation of the songs from Blue, some newer material and some of her best-known numbers from her earlier albums on Reprise. What is most striking about the woman's stage performance is the way she manages to reproduce the sound of her album cuts on stage with no help from other musicians. She plays a strong rhythm guitar, and although she is no single-string-folk-guitar genius, she holds her audience with every chord. She played 'Carey' with just the accompaniment of a dulcimer, and by the response of the audience, which stood and cheered, it was clear that no one felt deprived because of the missing bass and guitar sounds.
When Mitchell performs, feelings of ease seem to flow through the auditorium. In this case, at Carnegie Hall, she was faced with an audience that was surprisingly rowdy oddly similar to the audiences that usually show up for concerts of much 'heavier' music, the Ripple-and-reds crowds. But she confronted even the rowdiest elements of this audience and quieted them with grace and charm. It is, in fact, her secret weapon, this grace with which she surrounds some of the most concrete and strong-minded lyrics around. She catches her audience by surprise, and once captured, it is enraptured. Mitchell is truly a magical performer. Anyone who feels that live music has been somehow cheapened by the recent abundance of 'studio' albums should go to hear her in person.
From the book "Turn it up! I Can't Hear the Words" by Bob Sarlin.
Coronet Books, London 1975
First published 1973 by Simon and Schuster, New York
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