Current Biography

Current Biography
October 1976

MITCHELL, JONI
Nov. 7, 1943- Singer; songwriter
ADDRESS: b. c/o Elliott Roberts, Lookout Management,
9120 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, Calif. 90069

Perhaps the best-known and most durable of the current crop of female singer-composers, Canadian-born Joni Mitchell has for more than a decade enchanted her listeners with the magical imagery and universal truths of her lyrics, the unanticipated musical shifts of her fluid melodies, and the staggering, two-and-one-half octave range of her expressive voice. Miss Mitchell has described songwriting as similar to "going into a trance." "I sit down with a melody and reminisce," she told Susan Gordon Lydon in an interview for the New York TIMES (April 20, 1969). "I find it easier to think about my feelings in retrospect." On another occasion she said, "The most important thing is to write in your own blood. I bare intimate feelings because people should know how other people feel." In recent years, she has shed her "damsel with the dulcimer" image for one of a mature, sensitive artist comfortable in jazz, rock, and blues as well as in folk.

Joni Mitchell was born Roberta Joan Anderson in Fort MacLeod, Alberta Province, Canada, on November 7, 1943 to William A. and Myrtle M. (McKee) Anderson. Mr. Anderson, a former Royal Canadian Air Force officer, managed a grocery store; his wife was a school teacher. "My mother was a romantic woman," Joni Mitchell remembered, as quoted in NEWSWEEK (July 14, 1969). "She raised me on Shakespeare as other parents quoted from the Bible. She encouraged me in old-fashioned things. I kept pressed-flower scrapbooks." Miss Mitchell was particularly close to her maternal grandmother, Sadie McKee, to whom she dedicated her first record album. Mrs. McKee has been fondly described by her granddaughter as a lady who "loved Robbie Burns and minor-key music and married a farmer who didn't understand."

A few years after her birth, Miss Mitchell moved with her family to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where she attended the public schools. Always interested in music, she took piano lessons for a few years and, with the help of a Pete Seeger instruction book, taught herself to play the guitar. Following her graduation from secondary school, she enrolled at the Alberta College of Art in Calgary to study commercial art. Disillusioned by a succession of "meaningless" and "not particularly creative" courses, she left school at the end of her first year and moved to Toronto to try her luck as a folk singer. During the three-day trip east on the Canadian Pacific Railroad, she wrote her first song, "Day After Day," a ballad set to the rhythmic clacking of the train wheels.

Unable to afford the requisite membership in the musicians' union, she worked as a salesgirl in a Toronto department store until she scraped together the $140 entrance fee. She eventually landed a string of jobs singing at small folk clubs, such as the Riverboat, in Toronto's bohemian Yorkville district. Another regular on the local folk circuit was Chuck Mitchell, a singer and cabaret performer from Detroit. The two young singers were married in June, 1965, just thirty-six hours after they met, according to one report. The following year, the Mitchells moved to Detroit and set up housekeeping near Wayne State University. Settling comfortably into campus life, Joni Mitchell spent her days reading Bellow and Brecht and her nights performing with her husband in local coffeehouses and folk clubs. After about a year the Mitchells' marriage broke up and Joni Mitchell, eager to continue her career as a solo artist, moved to New York City.

During the late 1960's folk clubs all over the country were shuttered as young people turned to hard rock. "It was like an epidemic," Miss Mitchell told Susan Gordon Lydon. "The only people being hired were people who had records out. I was always bringing up the rear. In those days, if you only played acoustical guitar, club owners treated you as though you were a dinosaur." Reprise recording executives, however, were sufficiently impressed by Miss Mitchell's talent to release her first single disc, "I Had a King," in January 1968. A few months later, Reprise issued the LP JONI MITCHELL, retitled SONG TO A SEAGULL in subsequent pressings. In addition to "I Had a King," a backward glance at her marriage ("I had a king dressed in drip-dry and paisley/Lately he's taken to saying I'm crazy and blind.../I had a king in a salt-rusted carriage/Who carried me off to his country for marriage too soon"), the album included "Michael From the Mountains," [sic] an affecting portrait of an imaginative little boy; "Nathan La Freneer," a depressing look at New York City through the eyes of an embittered taxi driver; and "Cactus Tree," a "grocery list" of the different men in the singer's life. The LP, which Miss Mitchell has since described as "sock-it-to-me-softly music," never hit the pop charts, then dominated by such acid rock groups as the Doors, the Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane. In her review for the New York TIMES (December 29, 1968), Ellen Landers criticized the album's "uneven engineering," occasionally "shaky" vocals, and unsuitable arrangements. "The effect is monotony, albeit a gentle monotony," she wrote. "Any one of these frailties would ruin an album of a lesser talent."

While appearing at the Cafe Au Go-Go in Greenwich Village, Miss Mitchell met David Geffen and Elliot Roberts, the two show business agents who became, respectively, her record company president and her personal manager. Under their guidance, and with the invaluable assistance of David Crosby, who taught her the complicated method of guitar tuning which makes her sound unique, Joni Mitchell recorded CLOUDS (Reprise, 1969). The album took its name from the alternate title of "Both Sides, Now" ("Rows and flows of angel hair/And ice cream castles in the air/And feathered canyons ev'rywhere/I've looked at clouds that way"), the song about life's bewildering ambiguities that sold more than one million singles in a cover version by Judy Collins. Among the more memorable songs on the LP were "Chelsea Morning," a delightful celebration of personal freedom ("And the sun poured in like butterscotch and/Stuck to all my senses./Oh, won't you stay,/We'll put on the day/And we'll talk in present tenses."), and "The Fiddle and the Drum," a foreigner's view of the United States' role in the world. CLOUDS earned for Miss Mitchell a Grammy award as the best folk performance of 1970.

Preceded by her growing reputation as a songwriter of singular ability, Joni Mitchell toured the United States, Great Britain, and Canada in the late '60s and early '70s, giving SRO concerts in such dissimilar arenas as the Miami Pop Festival, Carnegie Hall in New York City, and Festival Hall in London. Commenting on her Festival Hall appearance for the GUARDIAN (April 28, 1970), Geoffrey Cannon confessed that he had "never before experienced such a close communion between a singer and an audience." "I believe that Joni Mitchell is better able to describe...what it means, and should mean, to be alive today than any other singer," the awed critic wrote. "She, alone of every singer I've heard, reclaims the sense of the holiness of every human being."

Disenchanted with New York City, Miss Mitchell fled to the West Coast in the late 1960's, settling in Laurel Canyon, a favored retreat of artists and musicians near Los Angeles. "I'm ruralizing myself again," she explained to one reporter. "I owe it to myself to live where there's greenery." She celebrated her regained rural heritage in LADIES OF THE CANYON (Reprise, 1970), which included "Big Yellow Taxi" ("They paved paradise/And put up a parking lot,"), "The Circle Game," and "Woodstock," a paean to the 1968 [sic] pop musical festival ("We are stardust/We are golden/And we've got to get ourselves/Back to the garden"). To a man, rock music critics hailed LADIES OF THE CANYON as a major step forward in Miss Mitchell's career. "Her crystal clear imagery is as shining bright as ever, and her melodies, if anything, seem to be improving," Don Heckman wrote in his highly favorable review for the New York TIMES (April 15, 1970). "She always has been a fine guitarist and, surprisingly, she is becoming a growingly powerful singer, too...She uses epiglottal stops, wide, headtone vibrato and resonant chest tones - a range of vocalizing that would be remarkable even if [she] hadn't written all the songs on the album."

Joni Mitchell followed LADIES OF THE CANYON with BLUE, issued by Reprise in the summer of 1971, and FOR THE ROSES, a 1972 Asylum release. More introspective and somber than her earlier records, BLUE showcased the unconventional rhythms and intricate inner rhymes of such songs as "The Last Time I Saw Richard" and "A Case of You." One prescient reviewer predicted that BLUE would prove to be less successful commercially than her previous efforts. "The audience for art songs is far smaller than that for folk ballads, and Joni Mitchell is on the verge of having to make a decision between the two," the critic observed in the New York TIMES (August 8, 1971). Most reviewers considered FOR THE ROSES, which is in many ways a technical and thematic elaboration of BLUE, to be the better of the two albums. The songs, most of them acerbic comments on the hectic life of a popular singer or her highly publicized affair with James Taylor, the rock singer, included "Woman of Heart and Fire," [sic] "See You Sometime," and "Lesson in Survival." Totally captivated by the LP, Ellen Willis, the NEW YORKER's rock music critic, went so far as to compare the witty, playful "Turn Me On (I'm a Radio)" [sic] to a "metaphysical poem" in the tradition of John Donne. "With this set, she becomes her own art form," Morgan Ames concluded in the March 1973 edition of HIGH FIDELITY magazine. "No one else comes near her or even tries."

The following year, Asylum released COURT AND SPARK, Joni Mitchell's sixth album in as many years. Recorded with the assistance of musician-arranger Tom Scott, COURT AND SPARK contained few musical surprises - the exception being "Twisted," the jazz classic made famous by Annie Ross of Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross - but displayed an artistic and emotional control often missing in earlier recordings. Among the songs included on the LP are the two smash hits, "Help Me" ("We love our lovin'/But not like we love our freedom.") and the rousing "Raised on Robbery"; "The Same Situation," an agonizing appraisal of the conflict between "I" and "we"; "Car on a Hill," the random thoughts of a woman anxiously awaiting a tardy lover; and "Free Man in Paris," reminiscences of a Paris holiday.

After an absence of two years, Miss Mitchell went on the road in 1972, playing to sold-out houses from coast to coast. "I like to retire a lot, take a bit of a sabbatical to keep my life alive and to keep my writing alive," she told Malka, the Canadian entertainer and television personality, in an interview for MACLEAN'S MAGAZINE (June 1974). "If I tour regularly and constantly, I'm afraid that my experience would be too limited, so I like to lay back for periods of time and come back to it when I have new material to play. I don't like to go over the old periods that much. I feel miscast in some of the songs that I wrote as a younger woman."

Backed by Tom Scott's five-piece jazz-rock band, the L.A. Express, she embarked on a second tour of the United States, Canada, and Europe in 1974. By that time her popularity had grown to such an extent that she was forced to perform in huge auditoriums and outdoor arenas, including the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles, the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, and Wembley Stadium in London. Some reviewers felt that the very size of her audiences diminished her performances. One complained that the "ersatz jazz" of the L.A. Express echoing around the hall overpowered her voice; another grumbled that it was impossible to concentrate on her lyrics, "a task difficult enough in cloistered settings." On the other hand, in an acoustically adequate arena, such as Avery Fisher Hall in New York City, Miss Mitchell's "seemingly delicate" voice easily cut through the energetic backing of the L.A. Express, "making her folk-rock's Ethel Merman," in the words of one critic. Although she is not given to sophisticated stage patter, she has, over the years, acquired an air of assured self-confidence and an enviable skill at repartee. For example, to quiet a particularly persistent fan who repeatedly shouted the name of his favorite song, she once remarked, "There's one thing that's always been a difference between the performing arts and being a painter. A painter does a painting and it hangs on a wall somewhere and that's it...Nobody ever said to Van Gogh, 'Paint A STARRY NIGHT again, man!'"

MILES OF AISLES (Asylum 1975), a four-sided LP which includes some of her biggest hits in updated arrangements as well as two new songs, "Jericho" and "Love or Money," was certified a Gold Record before its release. The long awaited "live" album was most appreciated by those critics already in the Mitchell camp. In a long, thoughtful review for the CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR (January 16, 1975), Lynde McCormick observed that some of Miss Mitchell's old songs, especially the introspective "The Last Time I Saw Richard," suffered from their new, big-band arrangements and lost their "basic theatrical qualities." Others such as "Carey" and "Big Yellow Taxi," were suggestive of the old standbys in the repertory of a "middle-of-the-road nightclub singer." "The music of her six studio LPs, however naive or sparse it might have been, always sounded fresh and heartfelt," McCormick wrote. "It expressed the lyrical content of her songs without losing its striking originality. Her uniqueness seems to be lost on the new record where a rather banal back-up turns the original into the ordinary."

Similar charges were leveled against THE HISSING OF SUMMER LAWNS (Asylum, 1975), a disc rock critic John Rockwell thought likely to annoy by its very title those who already consider Joni Mitchell to be a "shallow and self-indulgent mannerist." Recorded in the "piano-bar jazz idiom" of COURT AND SPARK, SUMMER LAWNS documents the amazing variety of Miss Mitchell's music, from the sermonizing of "Harry's House" to the fantasizing of "The Jungle Line." "This really is the 'total work' she tells us it is," Rockwell concluded in his somewhat ambivalent review for the New York TIMES (November 28, 1975), "and if that means she shows her warts, her warts are slicker, more glamorous, and more interesting than almost anybody else's."

Joni Mitchell is a slim woman of medium height. She has a finely chiseled face, with prominent cheekbones, pale blue eyes, and corn-silk yellow hair, usually worn long and straight. One reporter described her as resembling "the gentle lady...you would find in a medieval castle." She dislikes giving interviews and seldom reveals to the press any intimate details of her life. A few years ago, pop music magazines devoted considerable space to the latest gossip about Miss Mitchell and her long succession of famous boyfriends. ROLLING STONE went so far as to publish a chart listing her alleged lovers, among them fellow rock artists David Crosby, James Taylor, Graham Nash, and Jackson Browne. "The rock 'n' roll industry is very incestuous," Miss Mitchell admitted in the MACLEAN'S interview. "We have all been close at one time or another, and I think that a lot of beautiful music came from it. A lot of beautiful times came from it, too, through that mutual understanding. A lot of pain, too, because, inevitably, different relationships broke up."

Miss Mitchell, who considers herself to be "definitely Canadian," visits her family in Saskatoon twice a year and often retreats to her stone farmhouse in the wilderness north of Vancouver, British Columbia. "I simply hired a stonemason and we built it ourselves," she said as quoted in the July/August 1976 issue of ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST, which featured a spread on her homes. "The place itself is sheltered by trees that block out the view....I like to go up there three or four times a year and stay a couple of weeks - to get recycled." She also owns a sixteen-room, Spanish-style house in Bel Air, California. Her hobbies are cooking, collecting Navajo baskets, and painting. (Several of her paintings, including a striking self-portrait, have adorned her LP jackets.) Miss Mitchell does not expect to remarry. "I feel like I'm married to this guy named Art," she told Malka. "I'm responsible to my Art above all else...My family consists of pieces of work that go out into the world. Instead of hanging around for nineteen years they leave the nest early."

REFERENCES:
Look 34;33+ Ja 27 '70 pors
Macleans Mag 87:28+ Je '74 pors
Newsday II p16 Ja 7 '73 por
Newsweek 74:68+ Jl 14 '69 pors
Time 93:78+ Ap 4 '69 por; 104:63+ D 16 '74 pors
Who's Who in America, 1976-77