No Borders Here

by Mary Dickie
Impact
December 1994

Joni Mitchell's determined refusal to fit into anyone's categories - musical or otherwise - has cost her commercial success and radio play over the years, but it's also led her into places where few others have dared to go, and resulted in some brilliantly original, genre-bending music.

Over her nearly 30-year recording career, Joni Mitchell has steadfastly avoided being pigeon-holed into any obvious music industry categories- ethereal Canadian folk singer, California hippie folk-rock chick, non-commercial jazz musician, serious artiste. Her work straddles the worlds of folk, rock and jazz without belonging to any of them; her lyrics range from dark social commentary through personal musings about relationship difficulties to off-the-wall humour; her guitar chords are virtually unique to her because of her idiosyncratic tunings. She has experienced both Top 10 success and commercial disappointment. Her songs, which on the surface seem to suit her alone, have been covered by such disparate performers as P.M. Dawn, Judy Collins, Nazareth, Johnny Cash and Sebadoh's Lou Barlow - not including an unfortunate tribute album on which Sloan's "A case of You" was one of the few non-embarrassing tracks. Meanwhile, she has collaborated on record with Charles Mingus, James Taylor, Seal, Cheech and Chong, Jose Feliciano and Thomas Dolby. She is also a painter who has considered giving up music for art. And, in a very non-Canadian, maybe even non-female way, she is fully aware of and more than confident in her abilities. She is fearless enough to have appeared disguised as a black man on the cover of one of her albums. And she has a wicked sense of humour.

Now, at the age of 51 and separated from Larry Klein, her husband and producer of more than a decade, Mitchell has released a new album, Turbulent Indigo, which is receiving rave reviews for its directness (taking on the Catholic church's hypocrisy, Jackson Browne's abusiveness and environmental disasters, among other things) and power. She also made a rare live appearance at the Edmonton Folk Festival this summer. Perhaps she was irked or inspired by Chrissie Hynde's pleas to "put down your brushes, Joni, we need you" in Rolling Stone's "women in rock" issue (in which Hynde recanted her "women can't play guitar" attitude by citing Mitchell as an example of guitar genius), but in any case, she even made a trip to Toronto to discuss her work.

You have described growing up in a restrictive small-town environment. How did you find the strength to follow your own path so determinedly?

I think it started with fashion! When I was a child you had to wear the same clothes for two or three years. There was a girl who lived kitty-corner to us, and it seemed like she'd wait till I got my winter coat and then get the same one. Somewhere at a very early age I developed a contempt for copycat-ism. In the coffee houses when everyone was raving about Bob Dylan, I was saying, "Oh, he's just a Woody Guthrie copycat." So very early I was fiercely interested in originality. I can't remember the origins unless it was this winter coat syndrome.

So what do you think when you hear echoes of yourself in someone else's work?

Oh, but I don't. Others do. There was a radio broadcast where this fellow had taken a lot of these new women and deemed them to be Joni clones, and he'd play them and say, "You can even tell what period of of Joni's music they're listening to. For instance, this girl is steeped in Court and Spark." And then he played it, and there was nothing of Court and Spark.

Of course there are some influence, for instance Prince had a playback party and in one of the songs there was a passage that interested me, and I said, "Where's that from?" And he said, "From you!" I didn't really recognize it. I later heard another thing he did that seemed slightly derivative of 'Circle Game', but it was so synthesized, so hybrid… if you're influenced by Sly and me, what comes out is bound to be unique!

People always see things that I don't see. At the end of every project I have a desire to create something that feels fresh. But where I see subtle change, a lot of times people see radical change. Going from Court and Spark to The Hissing of Summer Lawns, for instance. Since Court and Spark was my first project working with a band, I was very careful - I cut some people some freedom, but a lot of it was almost as written. When it came to Hissing, I allowed players to play more in their own style, and that was viewed as a tremendous departure, whereas to me it seemed natural and subtle.

That didn't seem as much of a change as there was between For the Roses and Court and Spark. What led to that - all of a sudden there was jazz, rock, all these instruments…

I would have had a band sooner if they could have played my music! There were groups that played with everyone - Carole King, James Taylor - but when I tried to play with them… my music was very intricate, and it seemed to be just a tangled mess. Finally the drummer Russ Kunkel said, "I think you're going to have to play with jazz musicians, because the subtleties you're asking for we can't really give you."

I didn't know the names of the chords, but when they're written out, because of the tunings, they're kind of inverted, so they're quite long - they look almost algebraic, some of them!! It's not jazz harmony, it's something that the tuning's coughed up, like ragas.

So it's almost like you need a more schooled musician.

Yeah. You have to be able to understand the point of departure, and for that you need to be somewhat educated. So I would have played with bands earlier, except the intricacy was getting smothered by chords and rhythms that were more simplistically voiced. One drummer, still to this day when he sees me he'll say, "Seven, nine, 14, 12." I said to him in my frustration, "No, no, no - you're playing two-four-six-eight-who-do-we-appreciate! Couldn't you play three, 11, 12, nine, seven?" What I meant, not really having the language to articulate it, was I'm playing subtle upbeats, It's not just the-downbeat-you-can't-lose-it; there are pushed beats that are accented more, like Latin music, and if you make it so vertical you'll make it too white. It's like I must have been African in another life or something! The history of white rhythm is basically the waltz and the march and the funeral dirge - the drum doesn't have the calligraphy that it has in the African culture. For some reason I feel rhythmically intricate, and, um, not white at all!

Is it that jazz has fewer boundaries?

No, the harmony is wider, but it has its own rules. I had a song called "Moon at the Window", and when I was recording it, there was a fellow playing vibes named Victor Feldman. Victor literally wrote the textbook on jazz harmony, and he was gritting his teeth. I assumed, since he was a happy family man, that it was in the lyric that he was having this problem. I thought the music was more like jazz than anything I'd written, or at least like the kind of standard that jazz musicians had taken to interpreting. But he really didn't like the harmonic movement. I could tell - he was having a hell of a time, and the reason was because he adhered rigidly to his idiom, which was jazz.

And Mingus was the same. He was an acoustic jazz musician, and he was prejudiced against electricity. Well I'd already gone through that in the coffeehouses - you remember the famous day that Dylan plugged in and Pete Seeger wept? So there are lines and barriers and prejudices in all schools of music. Here's another one: a young virtuoso in England decided to include among formal classical composers - certified dead people! - a couple of my compositions, and he was called to task, and he said I had the musical sophistication of Faure. Well, I got some of his records, and I was insulted! It was very clichéd… I didn't see anything fresh in it, not compared to the collaborations between Gil Evans and Miles Davis, or even Debussy or Satie or Stravinsky. These are classical people who sound fresh to me. But a lot of it sounds mathematical and predictable.

Did your desire to travel between genres come out of the same things that led you to use open tuning?

Yeah. The use of open tunings opened the orchestral range of the instrument - gave it more bass. And there are chords that you just can't make on a standard tuning. Also, as you slap the strings, they begin to flap, they have a rubbery thing to them, so you have to kind of catch them and damp them. There's a certain way to keep them from going too atonal. Sometimes it's almost as atonal as a snare drum, or it starts to sound tonally primitive, like an African thumb piano.

Did you ever feel trapped by the female folk singer image?

By the time I learned guitar the woman with the acoustic guitar was out of vogue; the folk boom was kind of at an end, and folk-rock had become fashionable, and that was a different look. We're talking about a business that is not as much musical as it is physical. The image is, generally speaking, more important than the sound, whether the business would admit it or not. I started as a folk singer, but by 1965, when I crossed the border and began to write, these were not folk songs. But I still looked like a folk singer, and the record companies weren't interested in a folk singer. When I was contracted to Reprise, they didn't know what to do with me. There was no overt sexuality, and I think the executive mentality found that difficult to market. Always women have had to burlesque it up, and I had no penchant for that, and I didn't think it was necessary. I thought we were liberated, and I guess I bought a lie and proceeded accordingly.

Did working in jazz mean exile from the pop world?

It's inevitable that you go out of vogue and it has nothing to do with your work. I'm a fine artist working in the pop arena. I don't pander; I don't consider an audience when I work; I consider the music and the words themselves, more like a painter.

I knew that I was going to lose an audience and gain an audience when I headed more in a jazz direction. Everything was so departmentalized. You had to play with rock musicians, who had a limited palette in terms of harmony, or with jazz musicians, who had a light touch, and the two camps were contemptuous of each other. It was an either/or situation, but I liked elements of both, and that made me kind of peculiar.

Music is still very apartheid. People like Seal come along, and they get, "You're not quite black enough." There's a pressure to conform to this narrow band on the radio which is so boring, it keeps you twisting the dial. I don't know who could leave it set on one of those stations all day. It's just so… dull. I hate to sound like a fogey, but in the old days, when the DJ had some creative power, radio was more diversified, more inspiring.

When you write a song, do you always know whether you're going to use piano or guitar?

I haven't played the piano much in a few years. I think it's because we had this studio in the house and the piano is near the studio, so if Larry was producing someone and I played it, I would cause interference. So I would go to the other end of the house and pick up the guitar. Usually I would pick it up in the same way you would pet a cat - it's soothing and pleasurable - and sometimes I would put it in a turning. There's an element of discovery, so that's fun, it's exciting. It makes the neck unstable and it makes it difficult for performances, and you really have to rehearse it a lot or your fingers could go into the wrong shape and cough up a clam. It makes for more holes in your virtuosity, since the neck has to be learned 50 different ways instead of one and… what was your question? (laughs)

On an album like Blue, it goes from guitar song to piano song…

Well, that was written in Laurel Canyon, and I had a little house with a piano and I was just really discovering it. It was exciting; there seemed to be so much to discover, melodically. Also I was listening to Laura Nyro and I found her music very interesting. I think that did influence me to play the piano more - not that I played anything like her.

For the Roses also has a lot of piano on it. I wrote that in a cabin in B.C. while I was building my house, and I had a piano, and it just seemed my interests went into that instrument at that time, and continued into Court and Spark. And then with The Hissing of Summer Lawns I met my first synthesizer, the Farfisa, and it had some strange little preset sounds on it. Prior to that, with these instruments you had to be kind of a jet pilot; there were all these dials and levers. So that kind of kicked me off in another direction.

And even on guitar-oriented albums, the keyboards and the background coloration I'm playing, I'm using it as orchestration, so I'm still a keyboard person. I've never lost that. Dog Eat Dog was a synthetic keyboard album, but I'm playing most of it. People think somebody has smeared all of this over me, but it is me, playing with a wider palette.

You hear this music all around you, and you have to participate. Some will view it as desperate to belong, which is ridiculous. I mean, if you're a living, breathing musician, you're bound to be influenced by the sounds of your time. I try to remain somewhat classical, and in my true heart I like the pure, more resonant sounds. But I don't want to limit myself, like Mingus or Pete Seeger. You want to keep an open mind to contemporary experiments. Like Miles, or Picasso - those people are heroes of mine; I think of them as restless explorers, they remained contemporary and cutting edge.

How did the Mingus project come about? He was said to be anti-white, maybe anti-woman as well as anti-electric - was it hard to break down those barriers, or did you just have a simpatico thing with him?

Oh, yeah. He had a very wide emotionality. He cried easily, he fought easily, and he was an angry man. He had a reputation for being a racist, but he had a white wife, and I think he was intrigued with me for a couple of reasons. Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, which was very unpopular in the white community, was understood by the black community, and I picked up a black following with it. World beat had not yet happened, and white people were just not ready, especially in pop music, for this. I was dressed as a black man on the cover, and because of that I was reviewed in black magazines, and when they discovered the error they didn't seem to turn back.

Mingus was intrigued by that disguise. Part of the reason I think he sent for me was that he liked my acoustic playing, and the first project he had in mind was to set T.S. Eliot's Quartet to music - with an upper crusty English voice reading excerpts, and me paraphrasing it in the vernacular. His analogy was in the Baptist church sometimes you'll have two preachers - one reading the thee, thou, traditional text, and the other translating it into street slang. I called him back and said it'd be easier for me to condense the Bible. Anyway, I declined! Then he sent me six songs, named "Joni One", "Joni Two", etc., so he flattered me into it.

I finally flew to New York to met him, and he was in a wheelchair with his back to me, but when he turned around he had a real mischievous look on his face and I thought, "Uh-oh, he's really going to fuck with me, this guy, but in the best way!" One of the first things he said to me was, "Those strings on 'Paprika Plains' are out of tune!" And this was true! I was really pleased that he heard this, and immediately the project became challenging and fun. I knew it would be difficult, but this was an opportunity to e pulled through the die of black classical music with one of the masters.

The funny thing was I wasn't a huge fan of Mingus; he was too rooted in the blues for me. I had to be pulled through jazz blues with more complex melodies before I could appreciate the simple blues that were the roots of his composition. It opened me up to another block of music. So it was worth it, but it cost me my airplay. I was excommunicated - from that point on, I was considered a jazzer by the rockers and a rocker by the jazzers, except the great ones. They are less bound by boundaries, as a rule.

Do you think it's true that Turbulent Indigo is lyrically a bit darker than other albums, or is it just more direct?

Well, yeah, this is more serious than the last one, not that I'm more serious! What you choose to portray at any given time is just whatever strikes you strongly. The last album was relatively light. And I think my next album is going to be light. I have three songs already. Who knows why, you know? They just seem to stack up in a certain way. Critics always attribute it to your psychology, but history is full of simplistic reasoning and a lot of it's just crap - forgive me, but journalistic crap, guesswork stated as fact, and air, rampant with air. You can't tell what my psychology was at the time I wrote Court and Spark and I forget what the other project was, but it was completely ass backwards. I could show you two paintings and you could go, "Oh, you did that in a terrible mood, and this was done in a light mood," and you'd be completely wrong. One was completely in pain, and it's as lyrical as Monet's Water Lilies, and the other one I painted with my tongue firmly in my cheek, in the style of De Kooning and the abstract expressionist boys, and art dealers go [lowers voice], "That's a very good painting!" Everything about it seems authentically demented, but … it's a joke!" (laughs)