There's not a great deal of durability in the field of rock 'n 'roll. "It's a long road up, a short time at the top, and then, me brothers, you better know the way home." Joe Crocker said, as he gazed over the top.
Yet Joni Mitchell, mistress of the inner muses, master of the sweet, brittle melody, has been with us for about a decade, and in that time has given us a collection of music that is unsurpassed by any others, and rivaled by only a few. Her album, Court and Spark (Asylum 7E-1001), affords yet another opportunity to look at life from her side now. It provides no disappointment.
From the very beginning, Mitchell's works have born a close, corresponding link, and direct rise and fall, with her inner emotional condition. At times she has been overcome with her self, at others she has gazed outward with clear, uninterrupted vision.
Her early albums, Joni Mitchell and Clouds, seem fresh and innocent, oozing the sweet taste of early experience, of initial recognitions, of the passing of illusions. A remarkable cogency in both her verse and her music characterizes this period. Words fall together cleverly, proceeding and closing with penetrating insight and an undeniable sense of poetic logic. The frail, porcelain melodies which carry them seem as if they might shatter at the slightest jar - but they don't. Instead, they have proven durable and lifting their melodic accessibility provides the perfect compliment to her musings. The song "Clouds" is a good example of the stylistic togetherness of this period, but it is by no means the only one.
The culmination of her early work is the magnificent Ladies of the Canyon, a masterful testimony to her capabilities as a stylist. It is a joyous album, one of emotional serenity and, consequently, given to speculations and considerations far less personal than her later works. "Morning Morgantown," the album's first song, twinkles like the morning star, then yawns and stretches, heralding the new day simply because it has arrived. "Come on" she beckons, "we'll put on the day and wear it 'till the night comes," and suddenly the day is much more than just another space to fill with mundane obligations.
Ladies of the Canyon also provides some excellent samples of the innovative vocal techniques that Mitchell has used so effectively. One of her favorites, one which recurs throughout her subsequent albums as well, is getting the vibrato on her overdubbed background harmonies in perfect unison and using the result as a dynamic embellishment. The title song from this album employs this technique dramatically.
Sudden changes in register at the end of a sustained note, such as in "Woodstock", and deliberate stretching of words, as in "Rainy Night House" accomplish a double function, expanding the meaning of a phrase. "So you packed your tent and went/To live out in the Airrrrrrizona sand," she sings in "Rainy Night House." These are not accidents, they are calculated, deliberate and used strategically to emphasize or distract, to lead or finish a phrase, or to accent or de-emphasize any point in a song. Nobody is better at it than Joni Mitchell.
In retrospect, however, Ladies of the Canyon for all its sweet sensibilities, is a period piece. As Mitchell would observe herself, three albums later, "Everything comes and goes." The joy that spawned Ladies of the Canyon and the two earlier albums gave way to something far more somber, something almost exclusively and depressingly introspective, something very blue. It doesn't take a great deal of listening to Blue, or For the Roses, her next albums, to recognize the personal torment she was going through, probably the result of the unsatisfactory conclusions of her love affairs.
Blue offers the initial changes in both lyrical direction and style. It is a series of lamentations, of second thoughts, of insecurities, of escape wishes. Gone are those clever characterizations of times, places and easily recognizable social situations. In their place are longing for past securities ("California, I'm comin' home") or an easy way out ("I wish I had a river to skate away on").
As the subjects evolve to correspond to a clouded atmosphere, so do the cadences of the verses and music. The logical closings and neat resolutions that had marked them both give way to a meandering, extemporaneous, sometimes nearly directionless feeling. Mitchell's performances were not slipping, however; her style was still developing, and Blue was simply the immature period of a new, more diffuse and personal expressiveness.
But if Blue is blue, For the Roses is bluer. Her affair with the one-shot troubadour, James Taylor, had hit the rocks and depression had degenerated into despondency. She considers the ultimate escape, or destruction, with a stoic fatalism on "Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire": "Sparks fly up from sweet fire/Black soot of Lady Release…Does it really matter/If you come now/Or if you come later?"
Stylistic mutations notwithstanding, the directness of her expressions remain undiluted; and the causal inputs of For the Roses can hardly have been more explicit than they are on "See You Sometime" ("Pack your suspenders/I'll come meet your plane/No need to surrender/I just want to see you again") or "Blonde in the Bleachers" ("You can't hold the hand/Of a rock 'n' roll man" she lamented, "Very long".)
In theme and form, For the Roses is a logical extension of Blue, with her discovery of and infatuation with woodwind instruments adding another dimension. Actually, a hint of this can be found as far back as Ladies of the Canyon, where she pauses to weigh success against value with a song called "For Free." The song ends with an a cappella clarinet improvisation.
On For the Roses, Tom Scott's horns, clarinets, saxes and flutes take on a much more conspicuous and important role. And, as the case has always been with her use of resources, the result is fresh, creative and subtly effective.
When, for example, she manages to look up from her blue funk for a moment, we are treated to "Barangrill," an idle, momentary dalliance with the value of simplicity. Its character is largely defined by Scott's breathy, punctual and carefully calculated flute adornments. Part of Mitchell's interest in the woodwinds probably stems from the tonal correspondence to her own voice. On "Let the Wind Carry Me" she imparts her own vocal characteristics to the horn arrangements, and overdubbed vocal and woodwind harmonies gambol together and mimic each other, leaving the listener, initially at least, wondering which is which.
On Court and Spark, there are changes again; changes in mood, in outlook, in style, in mode of expression. Emotionally, there is a bit of a depressive hangover from For the Roses, but she seems also to have leveled off somewhat, and even started back up again. The photo on the inner cover captures the look of sudden, neurotic relief streaming over her face, perhaps that tells the story.
The most obvious stylistic alteration underlying Court and Spark, is her commitment to a rock idiom, both as an instrumental format and as an expressive vehicle. "Raised on Robbery", her Top 40 hit, is her first full blown rock 'n' roll song. The song, about a hooker plying her trade (we are left wondering just who is being robbed?), includes some Andrews Sisters-like harmony and a guitar ride by The Band's Robbie Robertson. She wears the rock idiom well, using it to her own purposes. There is never a hint that it may overpower her, she drives it like a sports car.
Mitchell's adoption of this format, however, is not the radical departure that it may seem; bass and percussion have appeared in her music before, but always subtly and for effect. The first time that these elements came together in earnest is on "Blonde in the Bleachers" (For the Roses), but then they are used more to make a point than as a foundation. In addition to "Raised on Robbery," the first three songs on Court and Spark - the title song, "Help Me" and "Free Man in Paris" - are essentially rock 'n' roll pieces, and they sound as if she has been doing it for years.
Her adoption of rock elements aside, Court and Spark is a mixture of emotions and expressions, variously mildly depressed, mildly neutral or mildly uplifting. Feeling the bounds of her trade, she eulogizes her days in Paris; "I was a free man in Paris/I felt unfettered and alive…You know I'd go back there tomorrow/But for the work I've taken on/Stoking the star making machinery/Behind the popular song." A couple of albums back (Blue) it was a different story; then, on "California," she sang of Paris "But I wouldn't want to stay here/It's too old and cold and settled in its ways here."
Both "People's Parties" and "Same Situation," musical extensions of the Blue/For the Roses treatment, are, again, introspective and uncertain, but not quite as seriously as some earlier moments. On "Same Situation," she considers a religious petition, but finds "…heaven full of astronauts/And the Lord on death row."
"Down to You," the album's most neutral point and its emotional focus, is a pensive, revealing treatment of the emotional space between loves, and of the loneliness with which that space gets filled. This seems to be the turning point and almost as an afterthought, she offers "Help Me" (…."I think I'm falling in love again"), a kind of exhilarated, but cautious and reserved optimism.
The other significant point on Court and Spark is the increasing role of woodwindist Tom Scott. The liner notes credit all songs to "Joni Mitchell and Tom Scott," marking the first time that the honors have been shared. The two of them, however, seem acutely in tune, as they did on For the Roses. "Down to You" includes a moody blend of strings, Scott's reeds, and Mitchell's piano; there is a distinctive sax intro on "Free Man in Paris" and a rock 'n' roll soprano sax break on "Raised on Robbery." Their compatibility is most dramatically demonstrated on "Car on a Hill," which features some surrealistic, ecclesiastical choral effects, similar to some on Ladies of the Canyon and, as on For the Roses, an especially sensitive passage of horns and voices.
The album closes with a rambling, confused "Trouble Child," which segues into "Twisted" via a trumpet solo. This marks Mitchell's first use of trumpet, and the first appearance on her albums of a song she didn't write." "Twisted" by Ross and Gray, which also appears on Bette Midler's new album, reads like the anthem of a schizophrenic. It's a curious choice.
Like the last two, Court and Spark is a personal album, and, like all her work, an altogether excellent one. Everything is considered down to the smallest detail, and is as she would have it; over a span of six albums virtually nothing has been left to find its own way, and yet the result has almost never been stiff, overstructured or overbearing.
Perhaps, in a personal sense, such direct expressiveness is, or can be, a liability: listeners, however, can be selfish. Certainly everyone feels the same emotions - loneliness and joy, depression and relief, emptiness and fulfillment; no one gets left out on these things. But some, like Joni Mitchell, seem more acutely perceptive of them, more sensitive, more tauntly attuned to the harmonies and discords that hum within.
Court and Spark, like its predecessors, is testimony to her durability and growth. It leaves little doubt that Joni Mitchell could be pop music's most gifted, most…
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