Joni Mitchell's turbulent times, and tough-minded art

Joni Mitchell is on the comeback trail — even though she never really went anywhere. After emerging in the late '60s as one of the seminal singer-songwriters of her generation, with such classic acoustic albums as Ladies of the Canyon, Blue and For the Roses, Mitchell crystallized her critical and commercial appeal with Court and Spark [1974], an album that yielded two top-40 singles, including her biggest hit, "Help Me," and revealed the growing influence of jazz in her music.

Then, according to Mitchell, "it came [her] time to die." When she released The Hissing of Summer Lawns the following year, critics savaged the record, claiming that Mitchell's world music and jazz explorations made her sound "too difficult, obscure and jazzy," to be appreciated by pop audiences. Mitchell's popularity plummeted, and for the next 20 years, as she continued to define her sound in such albums as Hejira, Don Juan's Reckless Daughter and Mingus, her airplay evaporated, leaving Mitchell in the uncomfortable position of watching the younger artists she had influenced — Rickie Lee Jones, Prince, Sting and Jewel — climb the pop charts while she struggled to get her own records released.

After suffering through poor health and poor music sales during the '80s, Mitchell's fortunes lifted with the release of 1991's critically acclaimed Night Ride Home, a CD that featured some of her finest songs, including "Passion Play," "Cherokee Louise" and her adaptation of William Butler Yeats' poem, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem."

While Mitchell worked on her next album, Turbulent Indigo [1994], she had to cope with some unexpected turmoil in her personal life. First, her 10-year marriage to her frequent musical collaborator, Larry Klein, disintegrated. Also, at around the same time, Mitchell began searching for her only child, a daughter she had given up for adoption as a penniless unwed mother in 1965, just a few short years before Judy Collins and Tom Rush recorded Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" and "The Circle Game," respectively, and catapulted her to stardom. After Mitchell's private quest to find her lost child had become tabloid fodder over the next year, three miracles occurred: first, Turbulent Indigo won two Grammies, including Best Pop Album, giving her some long-overdue recognition; then, she fell in love again, bonding with the son of a family friend in her native Canada; finally, Mitchell and her daughter, Kilauren, were reunited for the first time in 32 years.

Now, at 54, Mitchell has released her third CD of the 1990's, Taming the Tiger, a work that bridges her recent frustrations ["Taming The Tiger," "Lead Balloon"] and joys ["Crazy Cries Of Love"] while showcasing her love for music of the Swing Era ["Harlem In Havana," "My Best To You"] with some of the finest, bluesiest singing of her career.

We met in Mitchell's hotel suite at the St. Francis Hotel the day after she had performed at a private fundraiser to save Thoreau's Walden Pond.

In person, Mitchell is a force of nature. Between spoonfuls of cold French onion soup, she gradually warmed up to the proceedings, her mind often tangentially free-associating from one topic to another, revealing a funny, obsessive, compassionate, erudite intelligence whose artistic integrity is beyond reproach. Though her candor sometimes has created friction between herself and other artists, I found Mitchell to be warm and sincere, certainly not the mean-spirited Harpy the media has portrayed. And she is learning to be more careful about what she says in public: "I'm not a diplomat. If we're going to get into my real opinions on the arts, I'm a monster!" she said, laughing. "I don't mind being myself, but it doesn't always look good in print and it hurts people." Nevertheless, no one will ever accuse Joni Mitchell of being too careful. Her wandering spirit will not allow it.

TOM MCINTYRE: Let's talk about your new album, Taming the Tiger. It has a more hopeful feeling than a lot of your more recent records...

JONI MITCHELL: Yeah, well, the '80s were really hard on me. A lot happened to me — I was robbed from every direction, betrayed for money again and again and again by everyone close up who could rob me. So there's a certain amount of bitterness I had to come back from. My idea of life's work is to die with a good heart, not the biggest bank account, but it made it very difficult to trust people. And simultaneously, I had a lot of health problems, a lot of physical pain, and a lot of incompetent medical attention.

Psychologically, the '80s were almost like being a prisoner of war for me. If you knew the details, it's not even that melodramatic a statement. So to exorcise all that and get back on the beam...especially going into a new relationship, you don't want to be carrying all that baggage. In some ways, this album was an attempt to exorcise that bitterness. But it was also to be a swan song, because I had no respect for the business at all left.

TM: It's hard to have a good attitude when you listen to what's played on pop radio. When you look at the hits of the late '60s and early '70s — Dylan had a few, and the Beatles, of course, were the big hit-makers. By comparison, the pop music of today is pathetic.

JM: It is. It's formulated, it's generational and it's already been done better.

TM: Is that the fault of the record companies?

JM: Yes. The young artists coming in have a producer sicced on them. They aim for a market, and the producer keeps them on course. It's product-training. I've talked to young artists who came to [L.A.] from other places, and they'll tell you what they really loved in music and their influences. And they had good taste, like Miles Davis, or myself, or Bob Dylan. But then the record company will say, "No, we want to make you like the Red Hot Chili Peppers."

I never thought of myself as a head of lettuce. I made 13 albums without a producer to avoid that and was able to pull it off because I made my records cheaply enough that they were able to see a profit. But you can't make records cheap anymore because there are so many middlemen, so many gizmos. When you used to do television, there would be one boom mike hanging over you with one guy behind it, and the sound would be excellent. Now anytime you come near a guy, he's got wires coming out of you.

Everyone thinks they're a singer-songwriter, and they're not. In order to make money, you have to write your own stuff. But very few have the gift. In the old days, somebody wrote the music, somebody wrote the words and somebody sang it. Now everybody thinks they have all three gifts — and they don't. So the producer is called in to interior-decorate the music into some kind of formula that radio and the powers that be will sponsor, and they won't sponsor anything that isn't already tried and true. As a result, everything sounds like a cheap copy.

TM: I've heard it took you about 212 years to make Taming the Tiger.

JM: The writing and recording were very intermittent because in the midst of it my family was returned to me. So we would take three weeks off and go somewhere...

TM: How exactly were you and your daughter reunited?

JM: Well, it kind of began with a betrayal. My roommate from art school, for reasons known only to herself, sold me to The Enquirer as a gossip story: "Rock Star Searches for Love Child." So began my infamy! (Laughs.) But in the meantime, [my daughter] Kilauren, who wasn't told that she was adopted, had a son. And while she was pregnant with Marlon, her adoptive parents told her that she was adopted, which she always suspected, but they always denied. So she set out to look for me, which is not an easy thing to do. After '67, they began to destroy the information — and she was born in '65 — and I wrote out quite an elaborate description of what I knew about her father's family's interests and traits. So she was studying the computer and...Well, this story has all been told, really.

TM: I don't mind hearing it.

JM: It's a long story. How could I capsulize it? The reunion was joyous. Kilauren managed to meet somebody who worked in an agency that attempted to put parents together with their children. She was way down in the files. It would have probably been four or five years until she came to the top. The service was only open for a few hours a week. And so she met someone who worked there and said, "Go in and look and see where my files are and move them up." So he moved them up to the surface. His wife was kind of a self- proclaimed mystic, and she said, "Wouldn't it be funny if you were Joni Mitchell's daughter? Joni Mitchell is looking for her kid." So, just on a whim, Kilauren took the bio and compared it against my net information, and it matched. She approached my managers, but there were other girls also approaching them at the same time, so they backburnered her. But eventually, in spite of all this, we were reunited. We've been together about two years.

TM: You've always written in a seemingly open, almost confessional style. Do you still put as much of yourself in your songs?

JM: All the way along, I've been trying to express myself honestly. But I'd been picking topics that perhaps someone might interpret as whining or complaining. A lot of my projects prior to this record were really kind of rich people's problems. They wanted to throw starving beggars in my face. Well, I've been a starving beggar! There was no sympathy for these problems; therefore they had no universality. People are fascinated with celebrity: The press is more interested in the artist than the art. They always want to know whether something you're writing is autobiographical. It may be at first, but once you've written that song for yourself, you've got to interpret it so that others will appreciate it and hopefully identify. It's like holding up a mirror for them to look at.

TM: One of my favorite tracks on the new CD is "Taming the Tiger," the title track. You describe yourself at one point as being "a runaway from the record biz." There's another line that struck me, "The time to watch the beast the best/Is when it's purring at your side/Accolades and honors/One false move/And you're a goner!"

In the past few years, you've received a number of awards, including a couple of Grammies. How does it feel to be receiving all this recognition after being criticized so stringently for the musical directions you've taken for the last 20 years?

JM: Well, mixed. Practically speaking, it boded well. I said, "Aha! My stock is rising!" I've been blacklisted, conspicuously I think, and nobody can explain why, for nearly 25 years. Basically, since Court and Spark.

The tradition [of the music press] is, "We liked the last one so let's kiss her off now." So the next album, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, was not very well-received, generally. It was in England, and there were others who liked it. Prince, for instance, was young then and that was his first album of mine that he liked, whereas, for Madonna, Court and Spark was the last album she liked. But the general press began to dismiss me on a permanent basis.

TM: I wonder if part of the reason critics have largely dismissed your later work is because they don't take the time to give it attentive enough listening. It doesn't have those easy pop hooks...

JM: Or it has too many notes. "Take some out!"

TM: Some people ask, "Where's the melody in Joni Mitchell's music?"

JM: Well, that's just foolish. Where's the melody in Marvin Gaye's music? That's a very white opinion. A white male opinion. It's a prejudice.

TM: It's like asking where's the melody in an Eric Dolphy saxophone solo. Almost the entire solo is pure melody, but it may not adhere to a predictable song structure that goes around and around and keeps coming back to the beginning.

JM: But these do. The things that I absorbed as I went along...like Marvin Gaye: You cannot say that he is not melodic. But you couldn't write out what he sings on a lead sheet, either. You'd have to write it out differently for every verse because he, like myself, likes jazz. That influence, generally speaking, is the devil to most white pop reviewers. They just don't get it. It's a form of musical bigotry, and like all bigotry, it's ignorance.

TM: Has the way you write songs and then shape them in the studio evolved as your songs became more complex?

JM: Well, when it came my time to die after The Hissing of Summer Lawns, I then did Hejira, which is now considered a masterpiece. But it was kissed off. I said, "Okay, I'm kissed off. I'm still in the game, but not of the game." So I stretched even further. Well, that experimentation attracted the attention of (jazz bassist) Charles Mingus, who was then dying, and he invited me to collaborate on his last project, which was a great opportunity. At that point, my work didn't have a lot of blues base. It was Celtic in origin and white classical. But Charles pulled me through the dye of blues-based jazz, and the blues opened up to me on the other side. But that completely confused everybody and cost me my airplay, and I never got back on the airwaves. I don't know what happened exactly. Nobody can explain it to me. The door closed, and it never really opened again, and maybe never will.

In the meantime, there's still a modest group of listeners out there, enough to keep the record company from dropping me, but not enough for me to ever see a royalty. So it puts me in a position similar to being a foreign filmmaker: heralded and lauded, but...I make my living as a songwriter.

The record companies always kept me as a procurer. They even said, "We don't care whether you sell records or not, Joni." I was attractive to young artists. I gave the label prestige. They could use me as a tax write-off. But financially, the job was not particularly rewarding.

TM: Around your Hejira period, you said that "the poet took over the singer at the cost of melody to a certain degree." Could you describe how jazz gradually started to flavor your songs? Had you been listening to jazz for years?

JM: When I was in high school I was the school artist, and so I'd be given projects: murals on people's walls, UNICEF Christmas cards. Frequently, I was paid in jazz records because that was the beatnik Kerouac period. That whole pocket of modern art is my least favorite in art history. I was kind of a Dadaist to the Beats in a certain way. Musically, they annoyed me. In painting, they annoyed me, and I made no bones about it.

TM: I thought that maybe you'd like them because they have this irreverent, anarchistic spirit.

JM: I never was an anarchist. Never. No, that's probably why I don't like them. You need rules and regulations, but you need just ones. Socrates' justice is ridiculous to me too. It boggles the mind to come up with something wise enough that is just to all people. Socrates' utopia is totally unjust to me. It's anti-Renaissance. It's a society of specialists. It's fascist.

TM: That sounds like the kind of world we live in today...

JM: The foundations of Western white thought are fascist. I'm not a fan of Freud or Socrates. I'm not really a fan of white thought, except for Dickens and Kipling, and some of the work during that era when the novel was a new form at the time of the Impressionists. That particular pocket of time: I like the Germans too. My favorite is Nietzsche.

TM: We've strayed a little bit from what I was initially asking (laughs), which was whether you'd been listening to jazz for years before bringing the sound into your music. You seemed to be gradually moving in that direction even with selected tracks on Blue and For the Roses. Then, of course, Court and Spark was kind of a synthesis of your pop and jazz interests.

JM: The "Swing Era" was a jazz era. It was basically white impressions of Duke Ellington and Count Basie because the white music dominated.

TM: "Swing" as in Benny Goodman?

JM: Yeah. That was the popular stuff. The best of it was the black music where they took it from. But when I started in the coffee houses, these places had different hours for rock and roll, folk music and jazz. When I lived in Detroit, I was a resident folkie in a duo at this club called the Chess Mate, which had jazz after hours, and I had to have my lead sheets done. So the jazzers did my lead sheets for me for a small fee, and they began to play my music in the sets. So the black audiences who would come for jazz would come a little earlier to see this apparition, this white chick playing kazoo. (Laughs.) But in the set that would follow, the jazz musicians would play my music as if it were a standard. These first songs that I wrote never even made it on a record; they sounded more like '40s and '50s pop, because that was what I heard for the most part as a kid growing up, and as a singer, the most natural singing for me still is Gershwin, and all of those great pop tunes. That's probably what flatters my voice the most.

TM: I noticed on Taming the Tiger you've got this great rhythmic, sinewy phrasing...

JM: Oh, thank you. My musical taste has become so narrow, particularly with pop music as it's gotten more formulated with the athleticism of black pop and the over-embellishment of instruments that can have a beautiful display but are not at all touching. It's like "arms-length" singing, kind of like Harlequin romance novels. It's the kind of music that teenage girls get pregnant to, you know what I mean? (Laughs.)

TM: Are there any new artists in any musical genre right now that you feel are breaking new ground?

JM: I think Bjork is an original. I don't know about new ground or anything. New ground is something you learn about in hindsight. Everything seems to be recycled.

TM: Have you listened to Beck's Odelay?

JM: No, I haven't listened to a whole album of his. I've seen excerpts. He's more writerly than most.

TM: That CD seems to be a synthesis of a lot of different kinds of musical forms. I think it's kind of a critical mass point for pop music right now.

JM: I'll have to check that out. I'd love to like something, believe me. It's embarrassing to me because all these interviewers are grilling me, and it puts you in the spot of insulting someone whom you don't even know. You don't have anything personal against them, but I'm looking for inspiration and growth, and I'm not going to get it there. It's all derivative of something that either I did or somebody else did better. So why would you like it? Why would they even ask and put you on the spot?

TM: "No Apologies" [from Taming the Tiger] talks about the arrogance of the male leaders who are tearing apart the world. You say, "So what makes a man a man/In these tough times/As drug lords buy up the banks/And warlords radiate the oceans/ Ecosystems fail!" Do you think there is too much testosterone in the power-making positions in America right now?

JM: (Laughs.) Oh, yeah. Obviously. Power corrupts and there is too much wanking on the secretaries' desks going on everywhere within the record companies, and all the other high places.

TM: From the top on down.

JM: Yeah, it's just monkey business. It's gotten out of hand. I don't think the men are entirely to blame. It used to be that women had some consideration for men's sensitivity to visual stimulation. Just being practical about it. Women were covered up for a reason. Men are easily excited. (Laughs.) It was a kind of courtesy to them...

TM: Was there a lot of music played in your house?

JM: We had about seven records. My dad had trumpet records: one by Leroy Anderson and one by Harry James. And my mother had Debussy's

Romantic Melodies. But people didn't have records like they do now. It was a novelty, really.

I had friends who were studying classical music. One was studying voice: he's in some Italian opera company now. Another girlfriend, Sharon...I don't know if you know that song, "Song for Sharon" from Hejira...She studied voice, and I used to go to hear her sing in an adjudicated competition. I'd never really thought of myself as a musician, but I went to see a movie called The Story of Three Loves, starring Kirk Douglas. The theme song from it was "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini" by Rachmaninoff, and I fell in love with it. It gave me dreams that I could play the piano beautifully. Our town was small, and at that time you could go in and take records out of their brown sleeves and go into a listening booth to hear them. Money was tight, with people coming back from the war, so every time I would go down to my dad's store, I would walk across to the department store, play the record and swoon. Then, I requested piano lessons.

TM: So you started playing piano before guitar?

JM: Yes. At about 7. But I wanted to compose, and I got my knuckles rapped. I wrote a piece called "Robin's Walk" and the teacher would rap my knuckles saying, "Why would you want to play by ear when you could have the masters under your fingers?" I took it personally that she rapped my fingers because I could learn it faster by ear than I could read. So that kind of killed my love for music for quite some time. It was the tail end of that master-disciple thing: teaching by hurting.

The next thing that inspired me was Edith Piaf. I was about 8, and when I heard her the hair stood up on my arms. She just killed me. So great. When you think of Judy Garland and [Barbra] Streisand... everybody was a tributary from her. But then rock and roll hit, and in the meantime, I had polio and lost my ability to walk or even stand. But through strong will and luck or magic or whatever I regained my ability to walk, and I celebrated the return of my legs by becoming a rock and roll dancer.

TM: You actually went to clubs all the time to dance?

JM: Three times a week. Swing dancing, which is coming back today. Partner dancing. I started to acquire records by winning them in dance contests. So I went through a rock and roll dance period in my teens. And the year before I went to art school, folk music — like Peter, Paul and Mary — appeared. But I was a party animal. (Laughs.) I just thought it was ridiculous pseudo-intellectual nonsense that you would sit around and talk about these dreary things when you could be dancing.

TM: But there must have been a time when suddenly it clicked for you. You started out in the folk world...

JM: No, I never had any ambition to be a folk singer. My ambition was to be a classical composer, but it was thwarted. So I worked at a coffee house and modeled to earn money to go to art college. At this coffee house, there were folk musicians coming in and out, and one day, I just decided I wanted to learn how to play the guitar. I had no money to buy a guitar so I bought a baritone ukulele for $36, and a Pete Seeger How to Play Folk Style Guitar record. None of it interested me stylistically except this one thing: Elizabeth Cotton­style finger picking, which I couldn't master. I couldn't get my thumb to do the alternate stroke. Every house folkie could do it: alternating from the sixth string to the fifth string. But I couldn't. My thumb had a mind of its own, going "dah-doonk, dah-doonk, dah-doonk." It just started setting up more irregular patterns, which is why my music to this day is very eccentric and heading toward jazz.

TM: You briefly went to art school but quit. Do you think formal education prevents emerging artists from finding their own true voice?

JM: Yes. Those that can't do, teach. You may luck out and find an extraordinary teacher who encourages your individuality, but I didn't find that in art school. I didn't respect them, and they didn't respect me. I dressed like a small-town model. They didn't think I dressed like an artist, just the way the same kinds of people didn't think Charlie Parker dressed right when he hit New York. They were all in their hip uniforms of sandals and striped T-shirts and berets and goatees, and Charlie came in wearing a good suit, thinking he was going to a big city, you know? So after he gave birth to be-bop, everybody dressed like him. All the way up to the Beatles.

TM: You've said that when you made the Blue album you "felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes." Why do you think that particular record resonates with so many people?

JM: Blue was shocking at the time, especially to my male fellow singer-songwriters. I remember Kris Kristofferson saying, "Oh, Joni. Keep something of yourself." He felt I'd laid myself too bare.

TM: You do seem emotionally naked. How do you feel about Blue now? Is it one of your favorites?

JM: My favorite is always the one I want to do next. It's like Sophie's Choice, right? (Laughs.) You can't say which one you would save. They're all for different moods. Blue is a good album, it seems, as is For the Roses and Court and Spark, to a degree, for people who are suffering low self-esteem, which is a useful thing to go through at least once in your life.

TM: Why do so many musicians seem to crest artistically at such an early age? I don't think it's happened with you, but when I think about a lot of musicians from the '60s, most experienced their creative peak by the end of the '70s. Most don't seem to be as inspired or work as hard at writing really good lyrics as they used to. But in the literary world, for instance, some people may not even write their first novel until they're over 40...

JM: Well, a friend of mine, who was Harvard-educated, was taught this notion that in your teens and your twenties, a writer is going through a "lyric period," going through heightened revelation all the time. There's a profundity and a romance. Your lyric poetry belongs to your teens and 20s, then you begin to enter into an epic period where you're going over the same changes again. That lasts through your 30s and 40s and then in your 50s, you become a tragedian. So I became a lyric tragedian in my 20s! (Laughs.)

But you have to understand that I gave up my child at 21. Then, almost immediately after giving her up, I was in the public eye. I went from absolute poverty, like being homeless, to having a house and a car and a career. When I was 16, I was precocious in a way: I was a closet thinker, disguised as a party animal. I remember I had to write a poem, and I wrote about how hard it was to be a star because it cost you your privacy. So with the power of empathy, I was able to look at Sandra Dee and Bobby Darin and think, the poor things! Everybody is meddling in their business. I wouldn't want that to happen to me.

TM: How has that been for you since you became a "public person?"

JM: Well, I'm not really cut out for it. I do it because it's part of my responsibility to promote the work, which I believe in. Thank God I had some real life in my youth. Most people who get trapped into this game spend all their time on the road and go crazy and don't know why and take too many drugs to escape.

The roar of the crowd: when it was about 40 people, it was kind of pleasant to be the life of a small party. But the big stage is a blood sport, and always has been. I read the reviews. I probably shouldn't, and some jerk gets up there and dismisses some really fine virtuosic playing as "too jazzy."

TM: If you had had this fame a little bit earlier and then became pregnant, do you think you would have held on to your child?

JM: Oh, yeah. When you go to the hospital with no money and you go through a poor people's clinic, they do experimental things, and that's a whole other nightmare. I had for part of my pregnancy a room that was $15 a week and that was the cheapest you could get. No one would hire me. I didn't have the money to get in the union.

TM: Where were you living at the time?

JM: Toronto. It cost $160 to join the music union, which would be the equivalent of $1,600 now, and I didn't have the money to get in. So no one would hire me. Besides, at that time, Canada had a tendency to eat its young. They would hire Americans, even though they were contemptuous of them, because they were exotic and imported. But they didn't have much stock in the locals. The moment I crossed the border into Michigan, people thought I was wonderful. The work was bountiful.

TM: Maybe we could talk about the creation of some of your songs. "Woodstock?"

JM: I got to the airport on a Sunday and was supposed to get on the plane with Crosby, Stills and Nash. We're standing at the airport with our manager and our agent, and we're told that it's a disaster area. I've got to do TV the next day, and my [then] agent, [David] Geffen, decides that he can't get me in and out of there so he takes me back to his apartment. I watch Woodstock on TV, I cry, I write. Three days later, I have the song. CSN hears it. Ambitious to be singing the title song for the movie, they say, "Oh, can we record it?"

TM: How do you feel about their version of it?

JM: I like covers. I liked their interpretation. They lost some of the melody. (Laughs.) Nobody ever complained about that. (Laughs.)

TM: Here's a song that's a sentimental favorite around my household: "Case of You."

JM: Hmm. It's a love song about falling in love with someone who is a depressive person who seems to like living in the dark and feeling that in spite of the fact that they were morbid and depressive that I was strong enough to take it, to handle being in love in that relationship. As it turned out, I wasn't. So that's basically the plot. (Laughs.) Yeah, I like that song. Why didn't they release that as a single?

TM: I noticed it was on your Misses CD.

JM: Right. Everything is basically a miss; there are only three hits. That's what's so ludicrous about putting out a Hits album: I had to pad it with all of this stuff that people think are hits: "Circle Game," for instance, because it's had a lot of exposure but not on the Hit Parade chart. Basically, it's a hit in summer camp.

TM: "Cactus Tree."

JM: Well, "Cactus Tree" was the questioning of my ability to bond for life. I was still a young woman, but I didn't seem to be able to stay in a relationship. I know now that I'm a serial monogamist. I've come to peace with that. My mother has still not come to peace with that. (Laughs.) It was [my parents'] 57th anniversary last week, and more power to them! That's what they chose.

I'm still enough of a traditional female that I feel I have to, not walk five paces behind or anything, but surrender my judgment to the male unit to a certain degree for their own comfortability. But I've got funny karma. There's danger that comes up, sequences of car accidents.... Tests. Mine is a life of dramatic trials from time to time, and I'm better to be my own guide through them, making my own decisions. For safety.

TM: But you still have a relationship with the people. It just changes.

JM: Yeah, like I said to my boyfriend, Donald, "We're not out of each other's lives. We're just out of each other's hair!"

TM: You've said that you admire innovators. What are some of the things that Joni Mitchell has contributed to the musical dialogue?

JM: Hmm. Well...(Pauses.)

TM: What is it about your own personal style that you think is unique?

JM: Well, certainly the way I play guitar. I've invented a lot of original ways of tuning the guitar that cough up a chordal movement that's uniquely mine. Let's talk about the things I took flak for. That's probably the best way to find innovation, right? (Laughs.)

I took a lot of flak for Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, for all the drumming. There are all these pockets of hip, right? I've been fighting hip all the way along. I went through my hip thing when I was high school. I had a column called "Fads and Fashions" in the newspaper, and I would dress a certain way and everybody would dress that certain way. And I just got tired of the game young, which is good. I got it out of my system. So I learned about the mechanics of hip at quite a young age, which gave me the strength to not care about it.

Well, this is a business that's all about hip. That's what makes things sell. The way you get people to buy things is to make them feel unhip. Well, I'm not scared of being unhip, and neither was Charlie Parker or anybody with anything original to say.

TM: And people eventually started following them.

JM: Right. But my band is frequently afraid of being unhip, especially if they're young males. So I couldn't find a bassist to give me a big fat round sound, because it was unhip. And along came Jaco Pastorius and the hip sprang off of him, but he was considered a weirdo at the time. I remember when I was looking for a bassist, this guy said to me, "You should hear this one kid in Florida who plays with Bob Hope and Phyllis Diller. He's really weird. You'd probably like him." I sent for him sight unseen, and Jaco came and played on Hejira and was the bass player of my dreams.

Also, the drums I used were strange at the time, and then World Beat came along. In "The Jungle Line" [from The Hissing of Summer Lawns], I used a Burundi drum loop, one of the first of those House records, which is an also now a school of music. So I did a piece here and there, and then there came a school where everybody did that. [Paul Simon's] Graceland received a lot of acclaim — it was a beautiful record and worthy of it — but Don Juan's Reckless Daughter was completely trashed. What do you think my innovation is?

TM: I think that even though your early career was the more popular phase of your career, at least as far as the way most people recognize your work...

JM: It's viewed that way, but here's the irony: all of the records have sold the same! There is no "more popular." That's a myth! It's a myth perpetrated because people think it should be like that.

TM: I was just going to say that around the time of The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hejira when people started to dismiss it more, that's when your work truly —

JM: — they still sold the same —

TM: — became more innovative. It seems like that was when you defined your own unique vision. You sort of shed all the armor and said, "This is really the Joni Mitchell sound."

JM: But it's not shedding armor. Anything that you admire goes into your soul and becomes you. But when does it come out? You never know when your influences are mulched long enough to come out into your art. Initially, the work was very Celtic and white, and white audiences liked that. I 'd loved a lot of black art, but I didn't have the grease yet. I had it as a dancer, but I didn't have the touch on the piano. I was still working my way through white classicism. Most of the people that fell away from me when I fell from favor were white males. But I picked up a black audience. Nobody talks about that. Why did Prince get on when everybody else got off? Because the black music that I began to assimilate from living in a Southern climate long enough...I'm frying the White Nordic. (Laughs.) When I moved closer to the equator, I began to, not shed armor, but organically loosen up for warm weather.

TM: What advice would you give someone who likes only your earlier, more melodic music?

JM: The earlier music isn't more melodic. That's the thing. It's just more white.

TM: Do you think being "more white" is what made those songs hits...

JM: But they weren't hits! My biggest hit was my last album. There was this one critic who levied a complaint on the Dylan tour. We only had an hour and 15 minutes, and I think I did 12 songs. He said, "She played a couple of things from 'the masterpiece,' Hejira." Well, I played four things, I guess. "And there was very little early work." Well, I played three things. So that's what, seven songs? The hits aren't hits. "Help Me" [from Court and Spark] was the only Top Ten hit I had.

TM: What about "Big Yellow Taxi?"

JM: That was never really a hit. It never had any drums on it. Until Court and Spark, I didn't have drums so you couldn't get on to AM, where the hits were made. And "Blue" was not a hit when it came out; it took years for it to become a hit album. They all go platinum over time, but they don't ever go racing up the charts. I didn't even know until recently that I had any platinum albums.

TM: Well, I hope the record company gave you some platinum records.

JM: I found one in a black vinyl bin. "What's this?" I said. "Oh my God! 'Blue' went platinum!"

TM: With a bullet! A slow bullet. (Laughs.)

JM: A slow bullet, yeah! I'm Aesop's turtle, that's all. With Bugs Bunny as my guardian angel!

Tom McIntyre has previously written for the Magazine on Terence McKenna, William T. Vollmann, Abel Ferrara and Anjelica Huston.