Joni Mitchell Special

The Monday Sampler

by Ed Mellnik
KBOO
November 5, 2018

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Hosted by: Ed Mellnik
Produced by: KBOO
Program: The Monday Sampler
Air date: Mon, 11/05/2018 - 2:00pm to 4:00pm
Joni Mitchell Special

The Singer Songwriter Edition

Join us for the 75th birthday celebration of Joni Mitchell with a special program of her music.

Your Host - Ed Mellnik

KBOO's Ken Jones and founder of the Piano and Guitar DataBase on Joni's web site -Sue Tierney, will also join Ed to add some sweet comments.

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This is KBOO Portland.

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[2:38] [Intro music] Welcome to the singer-songwriter edition of the Monday Sampler, I am Ed Mellnik. I have put together a special programme in celebration of Joni Mitchell's 75th birthday. I will be featuring mostly Joni's early work. Also joining me for part of the show will be Ken Jones who is another Joni enthusiast here at KBOO. Sue Tierney who was the founder of the guitar and the piano database on the Joni Mitchell website will join us in the second half of the program. Stay with us for the next two hours as we explore the work of one of the greatest songwriters in the last 50 years, Joni Mitchell.

[03:40] [music - Chelsea Morning by Joni Mitchell]

[06:00] Born Roberta Joan Anderson, November 7, 1943, she contracted polio at the age of 9, they told her she would never walk again but she didn't buy it and eventually taught herself to walk. While her first passion was painting and responding badly to piano lessons she started playing the ukulele and eventually took up the guitar. In 1964 at the age of 20 she left home to become a folk singer.

[06:34] [Music - Born to Take the Highway by Joni Mitchell]

[10:26] [Ed] You have just heard a cut from the recent release of a performance at the Second Fret Club in 1966. Well I am here with Ken Jones, another Joni Mitchell enthusiast.

[Ken] I am.

[ Ed] Welcome to the show Ken.

[Ken] Oh, thanks for inviting me Ed. This is a very special program, Joni's 75th birthday.

[Ed] Yeah, and you do a couple of other shows.

[Ken] Yeah, I co-anchor the Monday news, I do some author interviews on Between the Covers, some Radio-zines, I have two shows of my own that are on infrequently... but it is a privilege to be here with you and to celebrate Joni's life and career.

[Ed] Right. Well, you know one of my favorite albums is her first.

[Ken] Oh, without a doubt.

[Ed] You know, it's just David Crosby produced it and he has said many times, the best thing that he ever did is to leave it alone. Is to leave her alone and not do a lot of extra stuff.

[Ken] At least in the past year or so that is probably the Joni album I listen to more than any other, even though objectively one could say that Blue and For the Roses are probably better albums altogether but it is just there is a sweetness to it and an innocence that you don't get and the songs are beautiful.

[Ed] So Ken, I think I am going to play two cuts off of the first album, called Song to A Seagull and we will start out with I Had a King and then Marcie.

[11:51] [Music - I Had a King by Joni Mitchell]

[15:27] [Music - Marcie by Joni Mitchell]

[19:55] [Ed] That was Marcie and before that I Had a King from Joni's first album, Song to a Seagull. Well, I think we could probably jump right into her second album, Clouds, which was well received as well and of course Chelsea Morning, we heard that at the very beginning of the programme.

[Ken] Yeah, One of my favorites, but also it has probably her most recorded song if not most famous song.

[Ed] Yes, Both Sides Now was recorded 1256 times by other artists.

[Ken] And wasn't there one recording in particular that helped make her career was Judy Collins version of Both Sides Now was a big hit.

[Ed] That's right. I am going to play a couple cuts off that album and one is called Songs to Aging Children Come and the other one is called Tin Angel

[20:47] [Music - Songs to Aging Children Come by Joni Mitchell

[23:50] [Music - Tin Angel - by Joni Mitchell]

[27:55] [Ed] From the Clouds album, Tin Angel and before that Songs to Aging Children Come. Of course the next album that she came out with was called Ladies of the Canyon.

[Ken] And she lived in Lauryl Canon so was about that.

[Ed] Yeah

[Ken] Her neighborhood there and of course Lauryl Canon is legendary in the history of music and especially music in Los Angels.

[Ed] That's right.

[Ken] That's where a long singer-songwriters, even Frank Sabo lived there but I think Jackson Brown, Glenn Fry from the Eagles, JD Souther, a big community of musicians live in Lauryl Canon, it is probably a lot cheaper than it is now.

[Ed] Well, I wish we had time to play more from that album, What is your favorite one?

[Ken] My favorite Joni Mitchell song of all time is on there and it might not be the popular choice, but it is Morning Morgantown, which I can listen to over and over again.

[Ed] Lets do it

[28:54] [ Music - Morning Morgantown by Joni Mitchell]

[32:06] [Ed] That was Morning Morgantown from the Ladies of the Canyon album. There is other good stuff on this album.

[Ken] Is there any bad stuff?

[laughter]

[Ed] That's true. You were talking about Conversation.

[ken] Because I found out another weird thing about Joni Mitchell and this song in particular, conversation begins He comes for conversation
I comfort him sometimes
Comfort and consultation
He knows that's what he'll find

I figured that was somewhat autobiographical but I didn't know who she was having the conversation with. I found out, and you will never believe it, it's Mark Volman, the guy who was in the Turtles and then he was one of the guys in Flo and Eddy who sang with a number of groups, including Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. Joni and Mark Volman were good friends, I guess in Lauryl Canon and he would do that. He would come and he would kind of spill his guts and they would comfort each other and that is what this song is about.

[33:07] [Music - Conversation by Joni Mitchell]

[37:28] [Ed] Conversation on The Ladies of the Canyon album

Lets see, on to I guess, it's Blue that is the next album.

[Ken] Oh wow, and I think that was some what of a breakthrough for Joni Mitchell. I am not sure, you know I was very young at the time but I think that might be the first Joni Mitchell album that I really connected with and then really went back and listed to the first three. So Blue was her fourth album and again there is no weak songs on it.

[Ed] She thought of herself as a painter, as a poet and an artist that really never felt that what she was doing really wedged in comfortably as the niche folk music and I think she was right.

[Ken] I agree with you. I think she started as a folk singer, maybe with Chuck Mitchell because that is what he was doing and then just branched out. Of course a lot, I mean Geri Garcia started as a folk singer, Neil Young I think started as a folk singer. Bob Dylan, definitely and then they kind of, the great artists, you know you can't hold them back with a genre. They are all over the place.

[Ed] Here is a short excerpt from a 1994 interview with Joni on not being a folk singer.

[38:47] [Joni Mitchell - previous interview] Only in Canada did they say that, it's the only place in the world they consider me a folk singer. Um, because I guess I started here as a folk singer, but the moment I crossed in 1967 into Detroit and began to write my own music, although I looked like a folk singer, a girl with a guitar, I did not sound like a folk singer. It was more like _____ classical song form, the chords are too modern to be considered folk music. But generally the guitar is looked upon as a folk instrument but you know, even with synthesizers and doing my own orchestration and so on people don't seem to notice that, they still seem to think that I am an interior decorator, _____ my own music and they want to peel that off and get back down to the folk singer that buried underneath of it. But it is ____ sound of my own..."]

[39:35] [Ed] So lets listen to this song from Blue

[39:38] [Music - All I Want by Joni Mitchell]

[43:14] [Music - California by Joni Mitchell]

[46:59] [Ken] Yeah, I am looking James Taylor and the California, All I Want, A Case of You, Steve Stills bass guitar on Carey. A guy named Sneaky Pete on petal steel. Russ Kunkel on Drums, on three of the songs, she doesn't always have drums and recorded in LA.

[Ed] We talked a little bit about Blue and her raw autobiographical poetry and she writes "I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes/I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world and I couldn't pretend in my life to be strong or to be happy but the advantage of it in music is that there was no defenses there either" and that is what Joni wrote.

[Ken] I think it is true with a lot of great artists that the more specific they are about the details in their own life, the more universal the work seems to be. Cause a lot of us, if not all of us, go through a lot of the same things.

[Ed]. Right. Ken I wasn't planning to play Blue, but it is such a signature piece to the album that I have decided to include it. Blue

[48:09] [Music - Blue by Joni Mitchell]

[51:06] [Ed] Well Ken, here we are at the album after Blue, For the Roses. Now that was a 1972 release and that was her fifth studio album.

[Ken] So, For the Roses, it came out, I think my first year of college and I was a big Joni Mitchell fan, even then. And I went out to buy it and it was, you know, an LP in those days. They don't have them too much, well they do have vinyl now. And it had a fold out, and in the middle of the fold out was a picture of kind of a far shot of Joni Mitchell naked, standing on rock overlooking the ocean.

[Ed] Right

[Ken] and

[Ed] But all we see is the back of her

[Ken] All we see is the back of her, but boy, that image was just burned into my adolescent, well I guess I was a little older than adolescent at the time, but so Joni Mitchell, so I was a fan of Joni Mitchell many different ways at the time there and kind of as a lot of young men too, I think we fell in love with her and we fell in love with her music.

[52:09] [Music - Electricity by Joni Mitchell]

[55:13] [Music - Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire by Joni Mitchell]

[59:25] [Ed] We just heard Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire and Before that Electricity, both on Joni's For the Roses Album.

Well Ken Jones, thanks for joining me today for Part 1 of today's celebration of Joni Mitchell's 75 birthday. It has been fun.

[Ken] Oh, I just love Joni Mitchell and her music. Thanks for inviting me in.

[59:49] Music - You Turn Me On, I'm The Radio by Joni Mitchell] (not full song)

[1:00:46] [Ed] Well, stay tuned for Part 2 of the Joni Mitchell special, coming up shortly. It is time to tell you that this is KBOO in Portland and I have got a pair of tickets to give away for Friday Nov. 9, it's an all ages concert over at the _____ Ballroom. A trio called The Devil Makes Three. So If you call me and you can tell me Joni Mitchell's name before she got married to Chuck Mitchell, that is her born name, her first middle and last name, I gave that at the beginning of the program, you may not have caught it, maybe you have, or maybe you already knew. Give me a call at 231-8187. I will take the first correct answer for those pair of tickets for the Devil Makes Three Friday.

Lets get back to part 2

You are listening to the 75th Birthday special on Joni Mitchell

[1:01:58] [Music - Carey by Joni Mitchell]

[01:05:05] [Ed] That was Carey, originally released on Blue but performed here live on the Miles of Isles album with the LA Express.

Well, I have Sue Tierney on the phone and she is the founder of the guitar and piano database on Joni Mitchell's site. Welcome to the show Sue.

[Sue] Thank you very much, I am so happy to be here.

[Ed] So, can you tell us a little bit about the guitar and piano database and why it is on Joni Mitchell's site.

[Sue] Yeah, sure. So, when I started playing Joni Mitchell songs, I really had a hard time making them sound like the way she plays, because I was playing out of these very bad Easy For Guitar books.

[Ed] Right

[Sue] So I found in 1995, I found a Joni Mitchell website, run by a guy named Wally Breeze and he had a list of all of Joni's alternate tunings. He didn't have any transcriptions or anything, he just had the tuning and then the name of the song. So, I started listening to the albums and trying to, you know, putting my guitar in that tuning and then trying to figure out how she was playing the song. And one of the first songs that I figured out was People's Parties from Court and Spark which is just, you know, it's actually a very simple song. The tuning is just so dramatic, you know. So I started emailing with a bunch of people who also had like this kind of a yearning how to figure out how to play her songs on guitar. Unfortunately the guy who originally created jonimitchell.com passed away. He had already contacted Joni and Joni was using his site as her official site and then when Wally passed away, Les Irvin who runs the site now, got ahold of Jonimitchell.com and all the information that Wally had, which was almost like a huge biography of her. And we added our guitar database, and you know and then we met a guy named Dave Blackburn who has a Joni Mitchell tribute band down in San Diego and he started transcribing all the piano songs for us, which he is a musician. So now it's not only the guitar, it is the guitar and the piano website.

I was at first very intimidated by the tunings, you know. That first time I played People's Parties, from the tab that I found on the Internet, I started playing it and I felt like my fairy godmother had just hit me with a wand. It just sounded so amazing, the drone of the strings and how it sounded just like the way she was playing. I found that, like learning any other song, you have to practice. It seems intimidating but once you get into it, a lot of these songs are manageable, I mean you play them and I just get so much joy from it.

[1:08:17] [Music - People's Parties by Joni Mitchell]

[1:10:54] [Ed] That was People's Parties off of the Miles of Isles concert recording.

Sue, what a treasure you have created with this database.

[Sue] It's a pretty amazing thing, it is like one of the first intense crowd source archives on the internet and I know a lot of musicians from people just learning, two people who are working with Joni Mitchell in some of her bands use that site. I am really proud of all of us for the amount of work we have done for it.

[Ed] Well, as you know, today we are celebrating here Joni's 75th birthday and I know it's really a couple days away but we are doing that here, so it is just great to talk to somebody who has been working with this material for such a long time.

[Sue] Yeah, absolutely. You know, I even I worked on transcribing a lot of her music from all her albums. I studied her life basically and why she kept on changing her style so much over her career. You know, you start with, at the beginning of her career, even the songs that she wrote before she started recording her albums, there is a whole, I'd say 25-30 songs that never made it to albums that we have looked at and transcribed and also then, the first 4 albums which were in one style, like folk, but then moving towards a singer-songwriter style and then For the Roses, Court and Spark, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, she starts to move into this more jazzy, you know more working with a whole band. So, like every section of her career has all these amazing changes. It is just so, it's like you are taking a journey with her going through all the beautiful music that she created.

[Ed] Here is the title track from Court and Spark

[1:13:04] [Music - Court and Spark by Joni Mitchell]

[1:15:50] [Sue] Once she met Chuck Mitchell in Detroit and started hanging out with people like Gordon Lightfoot and you know, Buffy Saint-Marie, and all these people on the circuit she realized she really wanted to be a songwriter and by that time she was writing amazing songs. It is almost like right out of the gate she was writing songs like Song to a Seagull which Buffy Saint-Marie picked up and Both Sides now which about three or four other artists including Judy Collins started singing. The first couple albums her guitar style was very regimented, kind of like very finger picking and very lush type. There is songs like I Had a King and Michael from Mountains, where her guitar style is very complicated. Then you get to the album, even Ladies of the Canyon, you can hear her start to loosen up, like she is having more fun, singing songs like Big Yellow Taxi and then that song from For the Roses, You Turn Me On (I'm The Radio), you could tell that she is really loosening up, the way that she is playing with the tunings and slapping the guitar, being more percussive.

[Ed] Uh huh.

[Sue] Yeah, so it is pretty interesting to watch her grow through those albums.

[Ed] It seems like the first, I don't know, at least 5 or 6 albums, they are almost so autobiographical in the sense that most of these songs since been published, that this one is about this lover and this was about this lover, you know. It's amazing

[Sue] Uh huh.

[1:17:28] [Music - Just Like This Train by Joni Mitchell]

[1:21:50] [Ed] Just Like This Train. Sue Court and Spark was kind of the beginning of her time with the LA Express, I think.

[Sue] All her ideas in her mind about how she wanted to compose her music was just going through the guitar and the piano. But know that she had the full band, especially all the horns and everything that was going on in Court and Spark. She composed all those background sounds for all those songs, so know she was making like these little symphonic things. One of the songs that really blows me away when I listen to it is Car on A Hill.

[Ed] Uh huh.

[Sue] Because of all the background vocals, which is her, 5 or 6 times with all these amazing harmonies and then Tom Scott Sachs and Larry Carlton was usually a guitar player on the album. All those added things really filled out her full conception of what a song could be.

[01:22:58] [Music - Car on A Hill by Joni Mitchell]

[01:25:55] [Ed] We're talking with Sue Tierney, founder of the Joni Mitchell guitar and piano database on the Joni Mitchell official website. Of course, Hejira was again a new chapter to her style and focus.

[Sue] Hejira, ya, that's a great album. I mean that's another, what's very interesting about that, you talk about the autobiographical way that she writes, she always gets kind of burnt out in certain parts of her career and in this section after The Hissing of Summer Lawns, she goes on a road trip by herself. Actually there were two other people who came with her going east from LA, but then she drove back by herself and wrote those songs as she was driving across country and at the same time she met Jaco Pastorius and she really wanted a different type of sound on that album and he pretty much coalesced that album with his base and the song writing is just so amazing. I mean, they, I kind of call them like these ____ poems that are like these long, like the poetry is amazing and the guitar playing, the tunings are a little bit more abstract as she goes in. You take a song like Black Crow, that's a low B tuning, and all of the songs were written on electric guitar, which was a different thing too. I think every song on that album is just amazing. If somebody had a gun to my head, and say 'What's your favorite album?" I would probably wouldn't be able to say, but Court and Spark, Hejira and Turbulent Indigo, all of those albums are points of her career where she really hits a height as far as I am concerned.

[01:27:50] [Music - Coyote by Joni Mitchell]

[01:32:52] [Music - Hejira by Joni Mitchell]

[01:39:27] [Ed] We heard the title track, Hejira, and before that Coyote.

I am going to jump to 1984 to the title track of Joni's Wild Things Run Fast Album

[Sue] Well, she had recently married her husband Larry Klein and when she was writing the song she was madly in love, so this is kind of a song of what it is like for a woman to marry a younger man and you know, wild things run fast and takes off down the road in his car. It was meant to rock'n'roll you know. I think it's very lighthearted and fun.

[01:40:10] [Music - Wild Things Run Fast by Joni Mitchell]

[01:42:19] [Ed] Now, on Turbulent Indigo, it seems like even from the cover she is kind of playing with a van Gogh them.

[Sue] Oh yes, yes. The title song, Turbulent Indigo, is about van Gogh pretty much and she is basically saying that people don't know what it is like to live in Turbulent Indigo which is like living in an artists struggle.

[01:42:47] [Music - Turbulent Indigo by Joni Mitchell]

[01:46:18] [Ed] And I note, with one song on the album she didn't write How Do You Stop.

[Sue] Yeah, that's a song that she covered from James Brown. She really found that song really soulful, she really loved it, and so she wanted to cover it. In some of her past albums she did duets and for this one she did a duet with Feel, who is a great singer and I think the song really works.

[01:46:45] [Music - How Do You Stop by Joni Mitchell]3

[01:50:53] [Ed] You just heard How Do You Stop on the Turbulent Indigo album.

I hear there is going to be quite a soiree?

[Sue] Yup. November 6th and 7th in LA at the Dorthey Chandler Pavilion, me and a bunch of my friends are going. We are going to be at Joni Mitchell's big birthday party. They are calling it Joni 75. There are a lot of great artists that are going to be there. I have been to tribute concerts like this, especially the one in Luminato in 2013 when she was there with the same group of people who are producing the show. Lukas Wainwright and Brian Blade will be there with his band. It's going to be amazing. There is a lot of great artists like Feel, James Taylor will be there. Chaka Chan who is a really good friend of hers, and I think it is going to be fabulous.

[Ed] Well Sue, this has really been fun. Thank you so much for talking with us today about Joni.

[Sue] Oh, it's my pleasure. She has been a hero of mine my whole life, so I am really happy to do this.

[Ed] I would like to thank Ken Jones and Sue Tierny for their chat. I would also like to thank the webmaster of the Joni Mitchell website, Les Irvin, Joni interview cuts, taken from the 1994 Canadian TV series, The New Music. That about wraps it up for this special Joni Mitchell birthday celebration. For more of Joni's jazzy site check out Rich Mitchell's podcast on Joni in his series Jazz in the New Millennium on the KBOO website under audio, podcasts, Jazz in the New Millennium. Happy Birthday Joni. I am Ed Mellnik, thanks for listening.

[01:52:45] [Music - Both Sides Now by Joni Mitchell]

[01:58:09] [Ed] And for all you Joni Mitchell lovers out there, Molly Tentarelli will be hosting the Joni Mitchell Tribute show at the Alberta Street Pub November 8, that's Thursday. That's at 9:00 p.m. and she will be there with Mike Dolan on guitar and Mark Steel on piano and several other performing artists joining her. Check that out at the Alberta Street Pub, 9:00 p.m. Thursday night, November 8.

This is KBOO in Portland.