Joni Mitchell

by Debbie Pead
Record Collector
October 1984

Influential Singer and Songwriter whose recent work has taken in rock, folk, pop and jazz

For Joni Mitchell, folk music was the starting point of an incredibly varied music al career which encompassed pop, rock and jazz; and while the public have not always been receptive to her work, her adventurous talent has earned her considerable respect amongst her peers in the music business.

Many of her compositions have been covered by other artists, and she herself has recorded 13 albums, and a number of singles, many of which are now very hard to obtain. Well-known on the L.A. music scene, she is featured as a session vocalist on albums by a number of other artists, including Joan Baez, Jackso0n Browne, Graham Nash and the L.A. Express. Most of these should be of interest to fans, and some to collectors, since not all of them are still readily available.

Roberta Joan, born 7th November, 1943 in Fort Macleod, Alberta, was the only child of Bill and Myrtle Anderson. Bill was an instructor with the Royal Canadian Academy and the family moved from Calgary to Yorkton in Saskatchewan, where they remained when the war ended. They settled first in North Battleford, where Anderson managed a store for a grocery chain, and his wife taught in school, and finally in Saskatoon, in the heart of the Canadian prairie.

Epidemic

Frequent childhood illnesses, including polio in the same epidemic that struck Neil Young, and convalescences gave the child a chance to indulge an already obvious creative talent, and she wrote poetry and painted prolifically. She began playing the ukulele in her senior year at high school, but art was her main interest, and she enrolled at Alberta College of Art with a view to becoming a commercial artist.

With the proceeds from a few gigs at a coffee house in Saskatoon, she purchased a baritone uke, a guitar and a Pete Seeger instruction manual; and by the age of 19, she even appeared on local TV - quite an achievement for an inexperienced performer, with no original material as yet.

She lasted only a year at Art College, though painting has remained a consuming interest (she has designed and painted most of her album covers.) Music was rapidly taking over her life, and she began to perfect her own style of guitar playing and pick up more work. At the end of her freshman year she made the three-day trip by Canadian Pacific Railroad to the Mariposa Folk Festival, during which she wrote her first song, "Day by Day", a bluesy number inspired by the rhythm of the train wheels. Although she had intended to return to Alberta, she made a minor impact at the Festival, and decided to stay in Toronto, and become a professional folk singer.

Folk music enjoyed a huge revival in the 60s, and artists as diverse as Dylan and Bowie began their performing careers in folk clubs. In the 30s and 40s, American/Canadian folk music had three fairly distinct forms. There was the classic, purist music, originally from the British Isles. This consisted of folk songs, sometimes known as Child Ballads after the American philologist who had collected them. The ubiquitous Alan Lomax recorded them, and artists such as Susan Reed, who accompanied herself on dulcimer and a variety of other archaic stringed instruments, and Richard Dyer Bennett, performed them in a somewhat highbrow manner. Favourites included "Greensleeves" and "The Golden Vanity."

Then there was the itinerant worker music of the Depression. This was the forerunner of the 60s protest songs, and its most notable exponents were Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, whose gutsy, left-wing ballads and talkin' blues influenced artists like Dylan enormously.

Thirdly, there was black folk music - a mixture of blues and work songs, spearheaded by artists like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Lightning Hopkins, and Josh White, who somehow brought this music to the chic white nightclubs and cafes; and Huddie "Leadbelly" Leadbetter, whose "Rock Island Line" was a smash for Lonnie Donegan in Britain.

In 1950, Peter Seeger, Lee Hayes and Ronnie Gilbert formed the Weavers -a raunchy, gritty, ebullient folk band, whose rendition of Leadbelly's "Goodnight Irene" was a Top 10 hit. In 1959, the first Newport Folk Festival was held, featuring Seeger, Terry/McGhee and Earl Scruggs, among others; and the Kingston Trio's No. 1 hit with "Tom Dooley" inspired Albert Grossman to form Peter, Paul and Mary, a highly successful folk trio, who paved the way for countless artists, like Joan Baez, Judy Collins and Tom Rush, in the 60s.

By the time Joni Mitchell arrived in Toronto, the folk scene was well-proven as a commercial viability. Yorkville had become the home of many folk artists - among them Gordon Lightfoot and David Clayton-Thomas; while Buffy Sainte-Marie wrote "Universal Soldier" and Phil Ochs "Changes" there. Mitchell applied for a job at the Riverboat Club but the owner, Bernie Fiedler, told her that the only vacancy at the time was for a dishwasher. Furthermore, it cost $140 to join the musicians union, a prerequisite of playing clubs. Mitchell worked as a salesgirl to pay the fee, then did the rounds of clubs and coffee houses, meanwhile writing intensively.

Married

While playing at the Penny Farthing she met an American folk singer some seven years older than herself - Chuck Mitchell, whom she married in June 1965. They moved to Detroit , and played as a duo in clubs on the Toronto/N.Y./Philadelphia/Detroit circuit, including the Gaslight in Greenwich Village. Around this time, they met Neil young in Winnipeg. Joni's career in particular began to flourish - she got the gig at the Riverboat, and wrote the title theme for a programme for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, "The Way it is".

In 1966, she was asked to do a guest spot at the Checkmate Club, where Tom Rush and his band were the featured artists. Rush was so impressed that he asked to add "Urge for Going" to his set, and he later included it with "Tin Angel" on his LP "The Circle Game", named after another Mitchell song.

As with so many other singer/songwriters, Joni's material was covered before she had an opportunity to record it herself. She had attracted the attention of performers like Buffy Sainte-Marie, who also recorded "The Circle Game" and "Ode to a Seagull", and Judy Collins, who had a million-seller with "Both Sides Now", by the time she was "discovered" in her own right. Indeed, she wrote far more in the early days than she ever recorded. Early bootlegs feature songs that appear nowhere else; Fairport Convention included "Eastern Rain" on "What We Did On Our Holidays"; and a songbook of sheet music published in 1969, entitled "Clouds" includ3es compositions such as "Jeremy" and "Winter Lady" which she never put on vinyl.

Her marriage to Chuck Mitchell could not weather her increasing professional success, and after little mor4 than a year, she left him and moved to New York. In 1967, she was working at the Café-au-Go-Go in Greenwich Village, opening for Ritchie Havens. In the audience was an up-and-coming agent-manager named Elliot Roberts, who had been persuaded to attend by Sainte-Marie. Roberts was so convinced of her potential, that he gave up his other clients to devote his energies entirely to furthering her career. He now has a long and impressive roster of famous artists, but their partnership endures to this day. It is a heartening 4example of excellent management, in a business riddled with mud, slime and hard-luck stories. By 1969, Mitchell owned a music publishing corporation, worth at least $1.6m, and by 1973, she owned two such corporations, as well as a good deal of valuable real estate.

Reprise

Roberts polished her act, and persuaded Andy Wickham to sign her to Reprise. He took her to L.A., where she played at one of the most prestigious clubs, the Troubadour, and recorded her first album, "Songs to a Seagull", released in 1968.

Dedicated to Mr. Kratzmann, her English teacher in High School "who taught me to love words", the album was produced by David Crosby. Crosby was criticized in some quarters for his "indifferent": treatment, or rather, lack of it, of Mitchell's work;' but in fact her did her an enormous favour. His name guaranteed her sales and autonomy, and instead of playing with an unfamiliar four-piece band, or having to force her songs through a welter or harpsichords and strings (like James Taylor on his first album), Mitchell has the stage almost entirely to herself. Stephen Stills plays bass on selected tracks, and Lee Keefer banshee on "Nathan La Franeer", but most of the songs contain only Mitchell's guitar (displaying the array of open tunings which make her so difficult to imitate!) and piano. Though some of the lyrics now belong to another era, the songs are original and quite beautiful at times, and the performance was surprisingly mature for a first album. "I Had A King" chronicles the breakdown of her marriage, while others ("Nathan", "Ode To A Seagull" and "Night in the City") describe her transition and reactions to the city.

The album was highly praised, and brought her to a wider audience; and she began to make an impression on the contemporary music scene. In 1969 she played the Miami Pop Festival, appeared at the Newport Folk Festival and shared a stage with Tim Hardin at the Schaefer Folk Festival in New York, receiving good reviews for each. She also did a personal tour as the opening act for Crosby, Stills and Nash, and is featured in the film "Celebration" at the 1969 Big Sur Folk Festival, with CSNU and Mama Cass.

Mecca

Mitchell bought a house in Laurel Canyon, which she shared with Graham Nash. The house became something of a mecca for musicians living in and around Laurel Canyon, an LA suburb popular with aspiring trendies; and CSN was reputedly formed there. Nash affectionately pays tribute to it in "Our House" and during the highly creative period they spent there, Mitchell worked on her second album, "Clouds".

"Clouds" sold 100,000 copies in advance of its release in October 1969. As well as the inclusion of "Both Sides", since recorded by everyone from Judy Collins to Frank Sinatra, and "Tin Angel", it contained "Songs to Aging Children", which appeared in Arlo Guthrie's film, "Alice's' Restaurant", "That Song About The Midway" (supposedly written about Leonard Cohen), and the haunted "Gallery", among others. "Fiddle And The Drum" is an unaccompanied protest song, a kind of gentle antidote to "God Bless America", but it is alone of its type here, the songs concerning themselves with personal relationships - as indeed, with some exceptions, her work has done every since. Again, the arrangements were simple with not even a bass player in the background, and the performance was excellent; though Mitchell now says of the album that she finds some of the vocal phrasing irritating, it being too reminiscent of stylized harmony singing - the result of working with CSN.

The LP won a Grammy award for "Best Folk Performance" of 1969. Furthermore, her song "Woodstock" was a huge hit in the States for CSNU, appearing later on "Déjà vu", and Matthews Southern Comfort took it to No. 1 in Britain in September 1970. Though Mitchell had not attended the festival, the song perfectly encapsulates the atmosphere both of the festival and the end of the flower-power era - the desire to "find" oneself in a world free of pollution and war.

However, in the midst of all this fame and fortune, Joni's personal life was suffering. She had no privacy, and her love relationship with Nash broke up, though they remained good friends. The confessional nature of her work provoked an endless upsetting speculation about her romantic liaisons with other famous artists, something which was to become the base of her career for a long while, though she probably became used to it eventually. "Rolling Stone" later voted her "Old Lady of the Year" and "Queen of El Lay" - unfair, when the promiscuous antics of male counterparts attracted little or no comment.

The gossip, the break with Nash, and the extra strain of spending about 50 weeks a year on the road, led her to go into semi-retirement over 1970-71. She played her last concert in London in January 1970, completed her third album in February, and though she broke her retreat by appearing at the Mariposa Folk Festival and the Isle of Wight, where she was less than ecstatically received, she did not return to the concert stage until 1972.

Wealth

Depressed, doubting her motivation about performing, and in a quandary about her newfound wealth, Joni traveled extensively, and continued writing. Her third album, "Ladies of the Canyon", was released in May 1970 and it included "Woodstock", performed in an ethereal manner with the sole accompaniment of a Fender Rhodes, and "Big Yellow Taxi". The latter song, covered by Dylan, was a hit in both the States and Britain, her first chart entry in this country. Instrumentally, the album was more adventurous, featuring clarinets, flute, sax and cellos, as well as backing vocals by the Saskatunes and the Lookout Mountain United Downstairs Choir (alias CSN). "For Free" was later covered by David Crosby, and "The Circle Fame" had already been snapped up by Rush and Sainte-Marie. The songs had a more commercial style than the delicate folk of previous LPs, and the album was engineered by Henry Lewy, who has had a hand in most of her work since.

While popular guesses about her love life settled on "Willy" (Nash) and others, Mitchell's travels took her round Cape Horn with Crosby and Nash, and then on a long trip to Crete, the inspiration behind much of her work on her fourth album, the ever-popular (and perhaps most accessible of all her LPs) "Blue". This was released in 1972, and coincided with her return to live work, a tour with Jackson Browne, then virtually unknown. Both she and Browne were subsequently nominated to Esquire's "Heavy Hundred", the magazine commenting "somehow all other folkie girl singers seem to be in eclipse. Joni doesn't work much, but her records are superior, tougher".

"Blue" was an emotional reflection of her crises over the preceding year, and the songs range from the straightforward, bluesy love song "My Old Man', to the heartrending anguish of "Case of You" and "I Wish I Had A River"; from the simple country feel of "California", about travel and homesickness, to foot-stompers like "Carey". There is "Little Green", a sad veiled reference to the illegitimate daughter she had had adopted, and the title track "Blue", an elegy on hedonism and its destruction of people and relationships.

Featuring pedal-steel and James Taylor on guitar, as well as the now-familiar LA session team, the lighter songs set a tone widely imitated, and incorporated into West Coast rock.

Gossip added Taylor and Beatty to the hit-list of Joni's lovers; Mitchell in the meantime sold the property in Laurel Canyon and had a house built by the sea near Vancouver, where she recovered her privacy. In this setting, she put together "For The Roses", her first album for Asylum, David Geffen's label. The world of "For The Roses" is the narrow one of the pop-star, seen through an analytical, slightly jaded eye. Introspective at times, the general tone was more philosophical and calm than her preceding work. The songs range from the light country feel of "You Turn Me On", the acoustic understatement of "For The Roses", and the fine "Woman Of Heart And Mind" (later an album track for Minnie Ripperton) to the grander conception of "Judgment…" and "Let the Wind Carry Me". The arrangements revealed the beginnings of her move towards rock and jazz, with Tom Scott on woodwind and reeds, Bobby Notkoff on strings, Wilton Felder on bass, Kunkel on drums, and Bobbye Hall on percussion. "Blonde In The Bleachers" was backed by Stephen Stills;' rock band, while Stills played bass on one or two tracks and James Burton played electric guitar and Graham Nash appeared on harmonica.

"You Turn Me On" was a hit single in the states, and "Cold Blue Steel", a chilling song on heroin addiction, received a fair amount of airplay in this country, but gained no great chart success.

Though "Blue" was hard to follow, "For The Roses" was well-received and Mitchell recovered her poise. There were murmured accusations of narcissism about the inside sleeve - a Mitchell drawing of roses folded back to reveal a photograph of her, naked, looked out to sea (in keeping with the sea/creative angst concept of the album. Rejecting the criticism, Mitchell told Rolling Stone:

"We were originally going to set the photo in a circle, and replace the daylight sky with the starry, starry night, so it would be like a Magritte. At that time, no one was paying homage to Magritte. Then Elliot said, "Joan, how would you like to see $5.98 plastered across your ass?' - so it became the inside."

Jazz Rock

Having worked with Tom Scott on "For The Roses", Joni went to see the LA Express and, suitably impressed, asked them to appear on her next session. After some initial difficulty blending her one woman-band style with this excellent group pf jazz/rock musicians, the combination suddenly gelled, and Mitchell's style altered dramatically.

"Court & Spark", released in March 1974k was an enormous musical step forward. Her biggest production yet, she was backed and complemented by members of the LA Express, and also such awesome session men as Larry Carlton, Chuck Findley and Joe Sample, with Robbie Robertson also playing on one track ("Raised On Robbery"). Mitchell's vocals begin to draw more extensively on jazz and rock phrasing, with a certain amount of the play between guitar and voice which reached perfection on "Hejira". Three singles were taken from "Court And Spark" - "Raised on Robbery", "Free Man" and "Help Me" and each was a hit in America.

Though Dylan apparently fell asleep when Mitchell first aired the tapes at a party, the album is one of her most consistent and the one where perhaps she succeeded in blending commercial appeal with art. It was her most hard-hitting to date, containing several very danceable, though always melodic, rock songs. Even the quiet numbers have the power of organized emotional chaos behind them. Lyrically, she reveals a talent that no longer uses fairytale imagery, but which packs an adult punch.

Unity

While other songs have been more profound, "Just Like This Train" is one of her finest songs, achieving a real unity of musical ad lyrical ideas. Set in a station and on a train, the rhythm and atmosphere of the music perfectly dramatizes the perceptive details of the lyrics, the metre is echoed by the band, and Larry Carlton's guitar superbly conjures the whistle of the train and the lonely feeling of traveling alone.

Gems abound on this album, which included her first cover version, "Twisted". Mitchell had reached 30, and had attained maturity as an artist and performer. "Court and Spark" achieved universal acclaim, as did "Miles of Aisles", a double album recorded live on her long tour with the LA Express - during which she appeared at Wembley with CSNY. There was nothing from the new album on "Miles", all the material being drawn and reworked from previous albums; but two new songs were included: "Love Nor Money", which appears only here, and "Jericho", which was issued much later on "Don Juan".

Mitchell returned from the tour to settle in Bel Air with John Guerin, drummer with the LA Express. The partnership resulted in a fair amount of session work, for the likes of Tom Scott and others, and her next album, "The Hissing of Summer Lawns".

The press were less than enthusiastic about this LP - it was more jazz-orientated than the last, and her lyrical perspective was more general and detached, and less autobiograph8ical. Mitchell said in 1979 that she felt the album had dated somewhat, but that she couldn't understand why it had been labeled 'difficult' or 'inaccessible'. At the time, however, she clearly felt the need for some kind of explanation, since the cover is inscribed with a long preamble, giving 'clues' to the contents, and stating that the album was conceived as a whole "graphically, musically and accidentally"

With its cover design of natives dragging a headless anaconda towards an American urban landscape, the album itself showed Mitchell's increasing fascination with African and Third World culture. It is a kind of song-cycle with an array of characters and subjects ranging from nostalgia ("In France"), through dramas of sexual and human relationsh8ps ("Edith", "Scarlet" and "Harry") and their shortcomings; to exploitation both personal ("Don't Interrupt") and national ("Jungle Line"); to a kind of mysticism ("Sweet Bird"), and finally a form of moralizing ("Shadows and Light").

Some nine years later, it seems incredible that the album was considered baffling - when Steely Dan released "Aja", and Weather Report "Heavy Weather", both were deservedly acclaimed, and musically at least, the album could be seen to foreshadow both of these. Mitchell used some of the LA Express and Carlton, Sample and Felder from the Crusaders, and the playing is excellent, though clearly of its era. On "Jungle Line", Mitchell plays guitar and moog, but the underlying rhythm track is provided the Warrior drums of the Burundi tribe (now extinct). The track is entitled simply "Drum Ensemble" on a recording made by the French Govt. in 1967, which included various examples of Burundi music. The track was released as a single, "Burundi Black", and long after Mitchell used it on "Jungle Line", a variety of bands, such as Adam and the Ants, picked it up and it became the beginning of the overblown drum sound of the 80s.

Ambitious

There were some find songs on the album, even if the ambitious nature of its concepts meant that it was bound to fall short in places; it sold well, despite the critics. Mitchell was back on the road, during 1975-6 - she went on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour as a spectator. Though she did perform, she asked not to be included in the film "Renaldo and Clara" - though, in fact, she does appear in a couple of sequences. The tour took its toll of her health, and she acquired a reputation for canceling dates. The breakup of her relationship with Guerin sent her traveling across the States by car, and she wrote the LP "Hejira" during this period - the album features no keyboards as a consequence. "Hejira" means escape, or flight, "running away honourably," as Mitchell put it, "but without the sense of failure that accompanied the breakup of my previous relationships. I felt that it was not necessary anybody's fault. It was a new attitude."

Artistically, "Hejira" is perhaps Mitchell's finest achievement. Again, thematically consistent, the familiar issues of the breakdown of love are dealt with in an intense but stoic manner - the album begins with the words "No regrets". It is a view of her life as a whole, a search seen as taking years, and though "A Song for Sharon" explodes at one point "All I really want to do right now/ is find another lover", the quest is ultimately for a broader fulfillment. Though the vision is often dark, her struggles, translated into the models of bride and groom, become universal - and the final song "Refuge of the Roads" puts the personal into perspective. She describes a photo of the earth taken from space, where the seemingly important physical and emotional features of the planets are scarcely visible in the cosmic order.

The musical arrangements are sparse to perfection and usually there is no more than a core of Mitchell's scratchy, chorused guitar plus leading guitar and bass. The texture is rich and varied, with an eerie interplay between the vocals, Carlton's haunting guitar, and Pastorius' melodic bass-lines. Alas for Mitchell, the absence of catchy singles further alienated the public, and the critics were merely polite, not ecstatic.

If Mitchell had used too many polysyllabic words on "Hejira", however, she seemed in imminent danger of disappearing up the proverbial anal passage on "Don Juan". She was widely, and not unfairly, criticized for issuing a double album where one would have sufficed - and the poetic and occasionally pretentious profusion of words confirmed many fans' belief that she should have stuck with "Blue". Nonetheless, there are some excellent tracks on the album - the outrageous, brilliant "Talk to me", and the beautiful reworking of "Jericho", underpinned by the marvelous interpretative playing of Pastorius are good examples. The structurally simple yet powerful "Dreamland" she ha originally given to Roger McGuinn at the end of the Rolling Thunder tout - he released it in June 1976 on his LP "Cardiff Rose". The version on "Don Juan", with its unaccompanied vocals from Mitchell, backed by Chaka Khan and others, over the sound of African percussion, makes exciting listening.

Infatuation

"Don Juan" was the peak of Mitchell's infatuation with African and Third World culture, with its hypnotic rhythms, and percussion instrumental ": The Third World". She apparently appeared at clubs 'disguised' as a black man (see the photograph on the cover, as usual self-designed). Her experiments with jazz culminated in "Mingus" (19790), a collaboration with Charles Mingus, the brilliant jazz bass player. Mingus was dying, and in fact never heard the complete finished product. His idea originally was for Mitchell to rework R.S. Eliot's "Quartet" to his music; but eventually, Mitchell put lyrics to some of his tunes, among them the classic "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat"; and wrote the song "God Must Be a Boogieman" about him, based on his autobiography "Beneath the Underdog". "The Drycleaner from Des Moines"/"Good Must Be a Boogieman" was released as a single - but the album was regarded by public and critics as a failure and reduced her to a minority interest. It won her a great deal of respect amongst modern jazz players, however, for the project was complex, challenging and, Mitchell says, rewarding, though it was the last of her jazz ventures.

In 1979, she toured with Pastorius and guitarist Pat Metheny; plus Dona Alias, Lyle Mays, Michael Brecker and the Persuasions. The resulting double LP "Shadows and Light" was impressive, containing one cover, "Why do Fools Fall in Love" (originally by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers), and a selection of material mostly from "Hissing" onwards. The accompanying video, with its 50s flashes of "Rebel without a Case" as introduction, cut with "Juvenile Delinquent", featured live recordings of the concerts, spliced with images reminiscent of the cover photo of "Hejira". Released in 1980, the album did something toward restoring Mitchell to public favour.

Her most recent LP was "Wild Things Run Fast' (1982), which marked the end of a writer's block, during which she had turned her attention to painting. The album is a return to the safety of rock, with the exception of "Moon in the Mirror", which has a modern jazz-type melody and Wayne Shorter on trumpet. Sadly, rock in modern America means Steve Lukather, and his screaming guitar predominates; as does the precocious bass of the man Mitchell married quietly in 1982 - Larry Klein, some 13 years her junior. Clearly the relationship was working well at the time, for the general mood of the album is optimistic, though there is still nostalgia, and the ever-present theme of the imbalance of the sexes in love. "Chinese Café" is perhaps the most accom0plished track on the album - moving and haunting, it is a nostalgic look-back from graceful middle age. While few of the tracks rival the classics of "Court & Spark", the album contains songs of a high standard pretty well throughout, which easily keeps pace with the 80s - and it caused many fans to heave a sigh of relief. The album sold well both here and in the States; and was closely followed by a world tour, which included two highly-praised nights at Wembley in April 1983, and a video of the concerts was released soon afterwards. "Wild Things" produced two singles, including a version of Elvis Presley's "Baby I Don't Care".

The most collectable of Mitchell's releases is undoubtedly the "You Turn Me On I'm A Radio" single, which includes on its B-side "Urge For Going", which although copyrighted in 1972 sounds very much like a 1968 or 1969 performance. Elsewhere, she appears on the soundtrack to the film of "The Last Waltz", performing "Coyote" (she also sang "Furry Sings The Blues" and "Shadows and Light" during that show) and adding backing vocals to Neil Young's "Helpless". Joni has also been featured as a backing singer and musician on countless albums by friends and associates, including David Crosby, James Taylor, Graham Nash, Carole King, Jimmy Webb, Tom Scott and the L.A. Express. Many of these performances are no longer available, and serous collections are incomplete without at least some of these releases.

What Mitchell will do next is anybody's guess - she has described her partnership with Klein as a creative one, and her contract with Geffen requires her to make at least four more albums. Her past work has established her as almost alone among women of her generation: she has not only survived, an achievement in itself, and surpassed the artists who brought her recognition, but has also developed into a formidable writer and performer. Her music has moved a long way from its modal folk beginnings, and as a lyric writer she has few rivals. Though her milieu is the rarified world of self, with little or no mention of politics or any other facts of life, save that relating to the opposite sex, she has certainly made her solipsism into an art form. The tantalizing scarcity of her bootlegs and different issues of singles lend an added interest to her appearances on work by other artists; and as a highly original and influential figure in pop since the late 60s, her records can only increase in value, with the best of them being essential to both fans and record collectors.