Joni Mitchell - an intimate portrait

by Reese Erlich
ABC RadioNational (Australia)
February 9, 2008

This is a rare personal portrait of one of this era's great artists. Joni Mitchell had a renewed burst of artistic energy in 2007, with a new CD, a ballet, and an exhibition of anti-war photo montages. Independent producer Reese Erlich caught up with Mitchell as she hung her show in New York, where she talked of her early life, her antipathy to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the close connections between her visual art and music. The program includes an interview with long-time collaborator Herbie Hancock, the acclaimed jazz musician whose CD River: The Joni Letters pays tribute to Joni Mitchell's musical vision and body of work.

Listen to the program

Reese Erlich: New York's Little Italy bustles with music and kids playing carnival games at the annual San Gennaro Festival. The festival was first celebrated by Italian immigrants newly arrived in New York. But on this day, tucked away from the cacophony, a Canadian immigrant named Joni Mitchell quietly prepares her own celebration. She is hanging an art show and releasing her first CD of original music in ten years, all on the same day. It's a time for intense work, but also for musing about her past. Joni tells me that when she began singing 45 years ago she appreciated other musical styles but even then wanted to develop something original.

Joni Mitchell: I didn't want to borrow black soul, although 99% of my business did. No matter what country you were from they sang with a black southern accent. I didn't want to falsify it, I wanted it to ease on out and become more organic. Because I loved it, eventually it would seep up and became my own without being imitative.

Reese Erlich: One of Joni's most familiar songs and biggest hits is Big Yellow Taxi. It doesn't sound much like blues or rock, so she surprised me by saying she borrowed the song's style from rock and roller Chuck Berry.

Joni Mitchell: Big Yellow Taxi is a nursery rhyme. But it's basically Chuck Berry but with my voice, and sometimes you wouldn't recognise necessarily the influences because they're not imitative per se. But rock and roll is just boogie woogie played on guitar.

Reese Erlich: What is it in Big Yellow Taxi that is derivative from him?

Joni Mitchell: It's like a Chuck Berry song in form and rhythm and everything, it's basically that genre. Like [sings] 'Maybellene, why can't you be true?' [Claps rhythm] 'Oh Maybellene...' Or [sings] 'Way back up in the woods...' 'They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.' I mean, it's the same stuff.

I can't sing in that helium register anymore. I used to have three octaves and because I wasn't a trained singer and I had these three octaves, I didn't know I'm really an alto and that that was falsetto.

Reese Erlich: Some critics have said years of smoking have taken their toll on Joni's voice. She argues that her voice has simply aged and also shows the after-effects of a childhood bout with polio.

Joni Mitchell: I've gone to throat specialists. I have singer's nodes from singing incorrectly like most of us do eventually, and also your high notes are tiny little muscles. Sopranos quit, sopranos wear out, altos don't. The alto muscles are still there. Something in the way I was carrying my head from this polio injury had done some damage there. So just by correcting my posture a little bit I've got a little bit of that back. So polio did play into it. I think I'm singing very well. I hope I don't hear that 'oh poor Joni and her smoking' crap. [laughs]

Reese Erlich: While her singing voice has changed, her poetic voice has not. Her political convictions have only gotten stronger over the years. She's written new songs opposing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Joni Mitchell: Why don't they learn from history? Didn't they notice Russia went broke in Afghanistan? You can't beat these people on their own turf. The whole thing is stupid, they just aren't observant. It's such a waste of money. In the meantime there are so many domestic problems. Like Machiavelli said, people don't know what to do with peace. It always degenerates into fashion and fornication. That's what we've got, these high fashion idiots showing their beaver everyday as they get out of the car. That's what happened in Germany. We're in an extremely decadent situation here. I was trying to get to the essence of it, and my conclusion was...theistically, when you have a concept that a male God created the world all by himself in seven days, you're in trouble immediately.

Reese Erlich: Her new music project began spontaneously. She suddenly felt the need to write music again. She hadn't intended to compose socially conscious songs, but they just seemed to emerge.

Joni Mitchell: I was mad, I was mad at Bush, I was mad at Americans for being so complacent, for being so quick to try expel Clinton for kinky sex in an elevator and so slow to move on this Hitler. So I had an anger problem. The songs just started coming out in the studio as I explored these sounds on the synthesizer. My attitude was 'oh God, not another one' because one of the things that made me quit was I said I'm not going to write any more social commentary, I'm not going to write this. So I was mad at America. I thought, you know, c'mon, wake up! Wake 'em, shake 'em. But I didn't want to be the one.

Reese Erlich: Joni Mitchell came by her rebellion at an early age. Her maiden name was Joan Anderson and she was born in 1943 in a small town in Alberta, Canada. She quickly showed musical talent, but refused to follow the rules. She has bitter childhood memories.

Joni Mitchell: I'd come to hate music. Twice in my life I've lost my love of music; once as a child when a teacher hit me with a ruler for playing by ear. I didn't know but that's...all teachers used to hit with the ruler for whatever they wanted to, it was the way it was taught, it was corporal piano lessons. But I took it kind of personally and...I had this desire to compose when I was seven, and I lost that until I was in my 20s.

I could read when I was seven and eight, and then they hit me with ruler and I quit. When I started up again I was 18, I took up the ukulele because I couldn't afford a guitar, $36 for a baritone uke, and you didn't need to read for that. When I got into recording, when I began to create my own music I didn't need to read for that. As I began to add band members, what I did was I sang the guitar lines, I sang the horn sections and then I had them transcribed. You can hear it on Court and Spark. I leave some of the voices in with the horns.

Reese Erlich: While Joni never took music lessons as an adult, she did receive formal training as a visual artist. In fact, she originally planned on a painting career. Folk singing was just a sideline while attending art school in Calgary. But then there was that problem with customs and rules. She came to school in a skirt and high heels while everyone else dressed like a bohemian.

Joni Mitchell: I got honours marks, but no, I did a lot of things unbecoming of an artist.

Reese Erlich: Like what?

Joni Mitchell: Well, I didn't dress right. Like Charlie Parker, you know, he came into town in a good suit and they were all wearing the bohemian uniform; sandals, striped t-shirts, berets and goatees. He comes in from a small town in a good suit and they ridiculed him. So I came in, and I had modelled in order to get money to go to art school, so I came in kind of Jackie Kennedy high heels. We were housed in a technical institute also, so there weren't many women in the school, there was a lot of cafeteria cooks and mechanics. That's the way art schools are usually...you know, they are considered trades.

Reese Erlich: Joni soon discovered that she had a real talent for music. She hung out in local coffee houses and taught herself guitar. She began to ride the wave of folk music then becoming popular in North America and around the world. But Joni had no local role models.

Joni Mitchell: I'm a mimic, you know, I do people's voices and things, I'm a mimic by nature. So I kind of mimicked my way into folk music. It was fun, it was easy, but it wasn't really where I lived, it wasn't the music of my soul which was way out of my reach at that point.

I started with folk music because it was fadistic. Collage kids sat around and sang but nobody played guitar back then. It's not like...there were no local musicians to speak of. Maybe a standard playing piano player or something. So I came in on folk music because I was a pro in six months, it was easy. But my real music influences, Billie Holiday and all this, they took a while to develop.

Reese Erlich: And you've got a jazz sensibility in your composing and your writing.

Joni Mitchell: Oh yes, I'm a jazzer at heart. I've made my best friendships in that camp. You know, rock and rollers can't...I'm kind of a freak in that camp. Miles and I used to play those festivals and we were always, 'What's wrong with this picture?' We were the two odd people out, you know?

Reese Erlich: Joni became known for incorporating her own experiences into the music. Long-time musical collaborator Herbie Hancock, who recently issued a jazz CD of Joni's music, chose to record her famous song Tea Leaf Prophesy.

Herbie Hancock: It's biographical. It's about her mother and experiences her mother had before she got married.

Reese Erlich: In the 1960s Joni's career skyrocketed. She became part of the folk panoply that included Joan Baez, Judy Collins and Bob Dylan. Mitchell became known as much for her poetic lyrics as for her innovative music, and yet she writes the melodies before the words.

Joni Mitchell: It's a harder puzzle going that way, but it coughs up...it's like you do the score and then you make the movie. But by the score you know where your climactic statements fall and where your descriptive passages can go, and you get a more unusual rhyme scheme, which people may or may not like. It annoys the French because they're still kind of iambic pentameter people, so they get annoyed with my rhyme schemes, but they come out of the music in the same way Jon Hendricks parkeyed saxophone solos. So it's more like the way Jon Hendricks works.

Reese Erlich: By the 1970s, Joni started expanding beyond her folk roots into other musical styles. A number of her albums were not commercially successful at the time, but have won praise from critics and musicians in the intervening years. In 1978, jazz bassist Charles Mingus wrote six songs for Joni and asked her to compose the lyrics. The resulting 1979 album, called simply Mingus, showed she had chops as a jazz singer as well as composer.

Jazz musicians have long appreciated Joni's music. I asked Herbie Hancock why he chose to make a CD of her songs.

Herbie Hancock: I would think jazz musicians would recognise the structure of the chords that Joni uses as being totally familiar, her melodies too, they have notes in them that sounds like notes that jazz players would use. The approach is similar to the choices that jazz players would make. Edith and the Kingpin or Tea Leaf Prophecy from the new record, the chord structure is more like what jazz musicians would use.

My experience with paying attention to words is nil. I never paid attention to the words. We pay attention to harmony, to textures, to melodies. I'm not the only one who's guilty. It's very typical of jazz instrumentalists to do that. But I didn't want to do that this time. I really felt the extreme necessity to make the words first.

Many of her lyrics are narrative, they're descriptive of a scene, something happening in the scene, not just intuitive. So it's treated almost like doing a movie score. If I'm going to do Joni Mitchell's music, because I've known her and been her friend for a number of years now, knowing that the foundation of her music is really her poetry, if I want to attempt to do justice to her music I have to begin with the words.

Reese Erlich: In preparing for the recording session, Herbie did something he had never done before. He gathered saxophonist Wayne Shorter and the other musicians to talk about the words.

Herbie Hancock: We gave all of the musicians a copy of the lyrics before we recorded each of the songs. We would sit in the engineer's booth and discuss the lyrics and ask questions about the meaning of the lyrics. Her words are so brilliant, the metaphors and imagery are incredible.

Reese Erlich: Did that change how people play the music?

Herbie Hancock: Absolutely, absolutely, and that's why I wanted to do it that way. That's why I went to great lengths to try to figure out how can we get closer to the words and the meaning of the words. This happened for a number of months, just poured into them. Before we recorded each of the songs we would look at the words for that song, all the musicians; Dave Holland, Wayne Shorter, Lionel Loueke, the guitarist, and Vinnie Colaiuta. Vinnie was the drummer. We all sat in the engineer's booth and we took 10 minutes, 15 minutes to discuss the words. What do they mean? And it's a process that none of us had ever done before. Wayne Shorter, who I'm sure...he just has this sixth sense about words and the meaning of words and metaphors, he hadn't gone through this process either. Everybody enjoyed going through that.

Edith and the Kingpin, it starts off in a club. We discussed all of that and we discussed the characters that were in the lyrics, but not only the characters in the lyrics but what characters might be in that scene. Wayne Shorter, for example, mentioned before we did Edith and the Kingpin, he says this is a club scene in a small town and there's the big man who is the pimp and there are the prostitutes. The band is playing and the lyrics said the band sounds like typewriters. So I guess the band wasn't very good.

We started to talk about the characters that are on the scene; the pimp and the prostitutes, and Edith who is kind of a new young prostitute that's come into town. And Wayne said, 'I'm going to be the guys that are at the bar that are kind of looking at the chicks and kind of whispering to each other.' So Wayne was talking about characters that weren't even depicted in the words but would be in the scene. I said this is fantastic. Yeah, let's do all of that. Let's paint. So we used a process that's a more minimalist process where less is more, hopefully.

Reese Erlich: While fellow musicians always recognised Joni Mitchell's talent, for many years the US recording industry didn't. Music companies considered her poetry obtuse and later music as not commercially viable. Joni's strong independent ways quickly clashed with the industry's male-dominated, profit-oriented ethic. On her second recording, the record company provided a producer who supposedly understood what would sell.

Joni Mitchell: He was like the way they were back then, he was like a heckler. They'd break in on you in the middle of a performance. I said to the engineer afterwards, 'This is going to kill my love of music if I have to go through this. He's going away for two weeks, do you think we can get this done before he gets back?' And he said yes, Henry Lewy, so Henry and I made 13 albums together and I never worked with a producer after that, except on the classical material, I got my then ex-husband Klein to help me.

Reese Erlich: Joni says that prior to the 1970s the music industry was dominated by entrepreneurs who exploited artists, but also understood good music. She praises Ahmet Ertegun, the head of Atlantic Records who, among other achievements, promoted the career of Ray Charles. She says that all changed as the industry became dominated by fewer and fewer corporate owners.

Joni Mitchell: The old guys like Ahmet Ertegun, they genuinely...Ahmet loved music. So the old crooks still respected an innovator. Look at the Ray Charles movie, you see Ahmet saying to Ray Charles, 'No, no, we don't want another Nat King Cole. Who are you?' That is when the owner of the company loves music. But it's a bean-counter's business, so they don't want that, they don't want anything too original because it doesn't sell. They want it all to sound the same on the radio station so the commercials pop out. So music is ick now, the muse is gone, all that's left is ick.

Music would date, it won't hold up if you get caught up in that game. And they want it to date and be disposed of every decade, that's the racket, so they can get a young artist and they don't have to get them to second contract and they don't have to pay them anything. Now they don't even look for talent. They admit, we're not looking for talent, we're looking for a look, the producer can take care of it, Pro Tools, they can fix it, as long as they look good. And then they can throw them out before they get to second contract and they never have to pay them much. So it's all a racket.

It's the nature of the business, they train people to kill you off after you get a decade. You see that, you know, 'that artist from the 70s' or something. For a while they called me 'that artist from the 60s'...well, that's crazy because I got in late in the 60s, I didn't start making music until '64 and I didn't get a record deal until the late 60s. So basically you're stigmatised as an artist of a decade, they only want you to go a decade because then they don't have to be fair.

This girl came up to me the other day and said, 'I love your music. I guess I shouldn't.' I said, 'Listen to you.' I'm used to hearing that from boys; oh I'm the wrong demographic but I like it. You've been brainwashed by fear, to be afraid. Another kid told me he had a record of mine in the car and somebody said, 'Are you still listening to that old stuff?' And he yanked it out. They're so fearful to be unhip. And nobody even knows how to dress themselves now without a dresser. They're afraid to make a statement for fear that they're uncool. It's terrible, it's the death of individuality.

Reese Erlich: Joni says the recording industry definitely treats women artists differently than men.

Joni Mitchell: We are paid less, of course. That's like everything, and women have their own problems. I didn't show my tits so they didn't really know how to market me. [laughs]

Reese Erlich: Oh darn!

Joni Mitchell: Every time I made a record and it got trashed I'd say, well, I'll just get better. You have to be 100 times as good to be considered half as good because I'm a girl, so I'll just get better. So I'd think, that's even better. And there was a lot of growth, but they were still elevating this early stuff and lamenting my lost youth and everything. So the criticism and the understanding of my work was so ignorant and it was so frustrating. You know, growth was occurring on all levels, as a writer and as a musician, and it was not being acknowledged publicly. There were still loyal fans that were following the whole journey, enough to keep me in the business, but basically the record company was saying 'you didn't give us anything'.

I heard a black kid on the radio going, 'Bob Dylan and Joni, they let them do what they wanted,' and I wanted to call and say no they didn't! You had to fight tooth and nail. I had it in my contract, 'no producer'. It was unprecedented.

Reese Erlich: Here at the New York art gallery, workers busily saw open crates and unwrap the huge photos. Joni Mitchell's artwork has arrived a day late and everyone is scrambling to get the show hung on time. Joni oversees the placement and hanging of each of some 40 pieces of art.

Joni Mitchell: Let's try the last two on that wall and bring the other two over.

Reese Erlich: Joni has created huge, triptych photomontages of international villains and celebrities, all melded together in an anti-war theme. She tells me that she paints the same way she creates music. Both involve putting down layers until something fully formed emerges.

Joni Mitchell: I paint music. I approach music visually in very much the same manner as I paint, layer it on. You do your preliminary sketch, you build your skeleton, and then you start putting an additional area there but not there, you know? It's like, okay, you put your first mark on your canvas, and then when you put your second one on, where do you put it? Well, your eye is drawn to put it to the upper right in the same way that you lay your first bed, whatever it might be, a bass part or a drum part, and then your ear is drawn to put a little bit there and not there. It's exactly the same process.

Reese Erlich: This exhibit is a departure for Mitchell, who had displayed paintings in the past. This time she used disposable cameras to shoot images on a broken big-screen TV. The photos came out as eerie negative images, with green and crimson tints. Then she grouped them together as triptych combinations. One, for example, shows washed out images of old Busby Berkeley musicals counter-posed with ominous tanks rolling down a street.

Joni Mitchell: All of these projects, my goal was I thought Charlie Chaplin, Busby Berkeley and Groucho all knew how to deal with heavy material in a palatable way that people didn't want...they got the message without wanting to slit their wrists. You know what I mean? It's like the art of delivering the truth in a manner that was still palatable. It would make you cry but wouldn't make you paranoid.

Gallery assistant: So whatever we do hang here it should be high.

Joni Mitchell: So maybe these two should be hung a little higher than the rest. And they're odd because, see here...

Reese Erlich: Joni Mitchell is hanging her art exhibit and launching her Shine CD both at the same time. She says this flurry of activity contrasts strongly with the past ten years.

Joni Mitchell: It's my music coming from what I love. But then I forgot what I loved, for ten years I forgot what I loved. Starbucks had this artists' choice collection thing, so most people just phoned it in, took the money, did the politically correct thing, named their friends and took the money and ran. So I'm, like...four months later and they're going, 'What are you doing?' And I said, look, to me it's kind of life or death, I'm listening to everything that ever knocked my socks off to see what holds up. Maybe if I can reacquaint myself with what I loved I can make music again. So it worked. I made my 'desert island' tape, which I wouldn't have done of my own volition. I still carry it when I travel. People went, 'but that sounds like it's all black artists.' I said no, but there's Duke Ellington and Miles and Billie Holiday, but Edith Piaf and Steely Dan.

Reese Erlich: Joni lives in remote home in British Colombia, north of Vancouver. As she was preparing photos for her art exhibit, she got inspired by the words of a neighbour.

Joni Mitchell: I just was so in love with ripple watching, looking out at the ocean and the privilege of having this beautiful property and this beautiful view. I went in that night, and my neighbour came over and said the line in the second song; 'When I get to heaven, if it's not like this I'm coming right back down here.' So we were both in agreement we were in the right place. That night that piece of music poured out, just the piano part, and then later I orchestrated it.

Reese Erlich: The CD also contains Joni's interpretation of Rudyard Kipling's famous poem If.

Joni Mitchell: Somebody read me the Kipling poem. I said, that's a great poem for these times. With a few changes, I got permission from the estate to make those changes, I disagreed with his ending and there was a couple of archaic things that I paraphrased. I didn't change it much.

If you can keep your head
While all about you
People are losing theirs and blaming you
If you can trust yourself
When everybody doubts you
And make allowance for their doubting too.

Reese Erlich: Kipling's poem portrays a father giving advice to his son. Mitchell uses most of the poem but also made some changes. She doesn't like Kipling's advice at the end of the poem.

Joni Mitchell: Basically what he tells the boy in the last stanza is, 'If you can endure you'll inherit the earth,' and I thought that's not what makes you inherit the earth. To inherit the earth...you can own things but if you don't see them you don't really own them. You know, maybe your servant who wipes them every day owns them more than you do because you just walk by them with a head full of business. You don't own things unless you give them your full attention, and you only own them for that moment that you give them your full attention. So how do you inherit the earth? By being awake.

Producer: Reese Erlich
Sound engineer: Louis Mitchell
Executive producer: Robyn Ravlich

Music details

Music details

Track 3 Big Yellow Taxi
Joni Mitchell
ASCAP
Reprise Records (Time Warner)
Hits
Joni Mitchell: Hits
2'10
e
Track 6 Big Yellow Taxi (2007)
Joni Mitchell
ASCAP
StarCom LLC (Starbucks) HMCD 30457
Joni Mitchell: Shine
2'35

Track 8 Strong and Wrong
Joni Mitchell
ASCAP
StarCom LLC (Starbucks) HMCD 30457
Joni Mitchell: Shine
3'35

Track 10 Help Me
Joni Mitchell
ASCAP
Reprise Records (Time Warner)
Hits
Joni Mitchell: Hits
2'30

Track 2 Chelsea Morning
Joni Mitchell
ASCAP
Reprise Records (Time Warner)
Joni Mitchell: Hits
1'56

Track 9 The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines
Joni Mitchell and Charles Mingus
ASCAP
Elektra Records 5E 505
Joni Mitchell: Mingus
1'40

Track 6 Tea Leaf Prophecy
Joni Mitchell - Larry Klein
Arranged by Larry Klein and Herbie Hancock
UMG Recordings
Verve B0009791-02
Herbie Hancock: River - The Joni Letters
2'54

Track 12 The River
Joni Mitchell
ASCAP
Reprise Records (Time Warner)
Joni Mitchell: Hits
2'25

Track 4 A Chair in the Sky
Joni Mitchell and Charles Mingus
ASCAP
Elektra Records, 5E 505
Joni Mitchell: Mingus
1'22

Track 1 Court and Spark
Joni Mitchell - Larry Klein
Arranged by Larry Klein and Herbie Hancock
UMG Recordings
Verve B0009791-02
Herbie Hancock: River - The Joni Letters
4'24

Track 2 Edith and the Kingpin
Joni Mitchell - Larry Klein
Arranged by Larry Klein and Herbie Hancock
UMG Recordings
Verve B0009791-02
Herbie Hancock: River - The Joni Letters
3'20

Track 4 Woodstock
Joni Mitchell
ASCAP
Reprise Records (Time Warner)
Joni Mitchell: Hits
6'31

Track 9 Shine,
Joni Mitchell
ASCAP
StarCom LLC, (Starbucks) HMCD 30457
Joni Mitchell: Shine
3'25

Track 1 One Week Last Summer
Joni Mitchell
ASCAP
StarCom LLC, (Starbucks) HMCD 30457
Joni Mitchell: Shine
2'37

Track 2 This Place
Joni Mitchell
ASCAP
StarCom LLC (Starbucks) HMCD 30457
Shine
4'03

Track 10 If
Words by Rudyard Kipling Adaptation by Joni Mitchell
Crazy Crow Music ASCAP
StarCom LLC (Starbucks) HMCD 30457
Joni Mitchell: Shine
2'54