Heart of Gold - 30 Years of Canadian Pop Music

by Martin Melhuish
CBC Enterprises
April 1983

Chapter 8
The Circle Game: Joni Mitchell

Of all of the singer/songwriters that Canada has produced over the years, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young stand as shining examples of the restless spirit inherent in most true artists who, unwilling to be pigeon-holed into one particular musical style, constantly strive to expand the boundaries of their own musical perceptions.

For Joni Mitchell, art is a male muse who lends her his key to what she poetically calls the "shrine of creativity." As she told Time magazine writer David DeVoss, her relationship with him is easily the most serious and enduring thing in her life. "I feel like I'm married to this guy named Art and I'm responsible to my Art above all else." As DeVoss observed, Art rules, and when he calls, Joni will abruptly leave parties or excuse lovers. It is not a relationship an earthling can easily crash. "My family consists of pieces of work that go out in the world," she said. "Instead of hanging around for nineteen years, they leave the nest early."

Born Roberta Joan Anderson on November 7, 1943, in Fort McLeod, Alberta, Mitchell spent her formative years moving from one place to another in the Canadian prairies. Her father, Bill, was with the RCAF during the war and stationed in the small town of Pierce, just outside of Fort McLeod. After the war they moved to Maidstone, Saskatchewan, where her father managed the local grocery store. When a chance for advancement came, they moved on to North Battleford. Joni was five at the time and just beginning school. She started singing at various local festivals and took piano for four years but by the time the family had moved to Saskatoon, she had abandoned her piano lessons in favour of art.

Attending grade seven in Saskatoon, she was inspired to take an active interest in poetry by her literature teacher, one Mr. Kratzman. He became a catalyst for her to put on paper some of the ideas and fantasies that were in her head at the time. As a tribute, she dedicated her first album to Kratzman with the simple inscription on the cover that she designed herself: "This album is dedicated to Mr. Kratzman, who taught me to love words."

At about the time that Mitchell graduated from high school in 1962, the first Saskatoon coffee house opened, called the Louis Riel. She worked there as a waitress for a while and her contact with the folk singers who played there, Bonnie Dobson for instance revived her interest in music.

With the money that she made from her part-time job, Mitchell bought a baritone ukulele and with the help of a Pete Seeger teach-yourself-the-guitar book she became quite proficient at the instrument.

In 1963, she enrolled in an art course at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Calgary and as she had done in Saskatoon, she worked at the local folk club, the Depression, during the two years she was in school there.

After art school, the old battle between art and music started to take on a new perspective as her performing was supplemented with the writing of songs that put her poetry together with music.

It was not long before she was looking for new horizons, and Toronto looked like the door upon which opporturnity was knocking. On her arrival in Toronto she worked at the Penny Farthing coffee house where she met Chuck Mitchell, a roving singer from Detroit. Their relationship blossomed both professionally and personally, and a month later they were married. They made Detroit their home base as they travelled the club and coffee-house circuit together on the east coast. As an artist in her own right, Mitchell was growing exceptionally quickly in those days and she felt cramped within the confines of marriage. Six months later she left to work on her own as a solo act and the marriage dissolved. The song I HAD A KING documents her feelings about her relationship with Chuck Mitchell.

Soon after working around Toronto on the folk-club circuit, including the Riverboat in Yorkville, Mitchell left for New York where, during a performance at the Cafe Au Go-Go, she met the people who would be influential in her career in the future - Elliot Roberts, Joel Dean, David Geffen and David Crosby. They were impressed with what they saw and heard and Roberts, Dean and Geffen started handling her business affairs, while Crosby became a close friend and a sounding board for many of her song ideas. When she signed with Reprise Records shortly afterwards, it was Crosby who produced her first album JONI MITCHELL (1968).

There were a number of other musical friends in New York at the time, including Buffy Sainte-Marie, Tom Rush and Judy Collins, who admired her work so much that they recorded many of her early songs. Rush recorded URGE FOR GOING and THE CIRCLE GAME. Judy Collins recorded MICHAEL FROM MOUNTAINS and BOTH SIDES NOW on her WILDFLOWERS album in 1967 and Fairport Convention recorded EASTERN RAIN. CHELSEA MORNING, a song inspired by her stay in New York, also made the rounds of a number of artists of the day.

In 1968, looking for new challenges, Mitchell moved west to Los Angeles and lived in the then-thriving centre of musical creativity in America. It was there that she wrote WOODSTOCK, a comment on the new age that seemed to be dawning and the song that brought her first real international recognition when Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young recorded it for their DEJA VU album in 1970. She recorded the song herself on the LADIES OF THE CANYON LP (1970), which also included the hit single BIG YELLOW TAXI.

The media made much of Mitchell's creative and personal relationship with people like James Taylor, Leonard Cohen, David Crosby, Graham Nash and Jackson Browne, often ignoring any comment on her music in favour of innuendo about her personal life. It was the kind of chauvinism that one has come to expect from certain segments of the media and when Rolling Stone published a chart mapping out her relationships with various male artists, the sublime had suddenly become the ridiculous. It was certainly one of the elements in her decision to take a sabbatical from the music business.

She temporarily moved back to Canada in the early seventies to some land she had bought in British Columbia. "There was an old squatter on the property I purchased and I thought he could teach me about the land," she revealed on the syndicated radio show Inner View. "Instead, he drank beer and watched TV all day. He was an old logger but he knew nothing about the environment. Nobody was living the rural life that I had envisioned. The communes were dirty and incestuous and I soon realized that I was an artist and not a farmer.

Through her albums up until 1974, which included JONI MITCHELL (1968), CLOUDS (1969), LADIES OF THE CANYON (1970), BLUE (1971), FOR THE ROSES (1972), and COURT AND SPARK (1974), the listener almost grew up with Mitchell as she matured and her life outlook went from almost Disney fantasy to an exploration of her own emotions, establishing her as one of the most significant of the confessional singer/songwriters. She dealt with life situations from a woman's point of view, which many found a ready market for many women who saw themselves in the scenarios of many of Mitchell's songs.

By the album COURT AND SPARK, instrumentation was playing a much larger role in her music, and she recorded both that LP and the subsequent double-album live set, MILES OF AISLES (1974), with Tom Scott and the L.A. Express. On the album HEJIRA (1976), she extended her explorations into jazz, working with bass player Jaco Pastorius.

Jazz was certainly not a new musical influence. As early as her high school years in Canada, when she heard the Lambert, Hendrix and Ross LP, THE HOTTEST NEW SOUND IN JAZZ, she had been selectively aware of various jazz artists like Miles Davis, whose albums NEFERTITI and IN A SILENT WAY became two of her all-time favourite LP's.

She has admitted that the Lambert, Hendrix and Ross LP was probably as influential to her as the Beatles were to other artists. She learned every song from it and later recorded TWISTED and CENTERPIECE.

Perhaps the most ambitious project of Joni Mitchell's career was her collaboration with Charles Mingus shortly before he died. He had been trying to reach her to discuss a musical concept that he had to write, a piece based on T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets with an orchestra, a narrator and Joni singing. When they did talk about the idea, she felt that it was just a little too ambitious for her at that point. He contacted her again a short time later and told her that he had written six songs for her that he wanted her to sing and write the lyrics for.

They met and immediately hit it off. By this time, Mingus was paralyzed and in a wheelchair and he was aware that he was dying form amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. As Mingus was unable to play when the project reached the recording studio, Jaco Pastorius was brought in to play bass. Mingus died at the age of fifty-six in Mexico before the album, entitled MINGUS, was released in the summer of 1979.

Her most recent album, WILD THINGS RUN FAST (1982), continues along jazz lines and features, among others, Pat Metheny on guitar.

Joni Mitchell once told her old friend Malka (one half of the singing duo of Malka and joso, with whom she became close during her days in Toronto) that she has always kept her goals a very short distance in front of her, "I said to myself, 'I would lke to play at a coffee house.' So I did. 'I would like to play at the Mariposa Folk Festival,' So I did. 'I would like to play in the U.S.' So I did."

She could probably have gone on - dreams can make a long shopping list. In the case of Joni Mitchell, the accomplishments are almost keeping pace.

The above text is a chapter of the book "Heart of Gold - 30 Years of Canadian Pop Music", published in 1983 by CBC Enterprises.
ISBN 0-88794-110-9