Black and Blond

by Greg Tate
Vibe
December 1998

Domepiece: Joni Mitchell. As told to Greg Tate

My buddy Craig Street and I used to joke that the only people we knew who liked Joni Mitchell were black people – like ourselves and the Artist and Seal and Cassandra Wilson. Younger readers may only know her music from the sample of “Big Yellow Taxi” (Reprise 1970) Janet Jackson used on last year’s “Got ‘Till It’s Gone,” (Virgin). But Mitchell – a Grammy winner and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee – has been an enduring influence and inspiration on modern music for some 30 years now. Again and again, she has stretched the “folk singer” tag she received early in career beyond recognition. Listening to her tell her life’s curious, circuitous tale by phone from her native Canada, I was reminded of how peculiarly “black”, one could say, and even “hip hop” her sensibility and attitude are. Mitchell has absorbed from the culture and sometimes stepped deep up in it – like her fearless foray into jazz and Brazilian rhythms, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter (Asylum, 1977), or when she collaborated with the mercurial and then dying bass legend Charles Mingus for a 1979 album, Mingus (Asylum). But she’s not a parrot, a pirate, or a parody. In point of fact she’s her own damn genre. Joni Mitchell is hardcore, Sun. And like you, she couldn’t stand poetry in school but has always had lyrics to go. And at age 55, she just keeps going and going and going.

"At a certain point in my career, only blacks and women understood what I was doing. The white male rock ‘n’ roll press really didn’t get it. They’d go, “There’s no rhythm here!” When in fact there was a lot. Or they’d say that it was too “jazzy.” That fear of jazz thing….And the harmony eluded them from Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter on. The album got reviewed in a black magazine – accidentally, I think, because I was dressed like a brother on the cover – and they got everything about it, from the cover on. Whereas the white press said, “What’s she trying to say, that black people have more fun?” When Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter came out, Charles Mingus found out about it somehow. I think, for one thing, that he was intrigued that I dressed up as a brother on the cover…so he was curious about me. Around the same time he found out he was dying [of Lou Gehrig’s disease], Charles composed six pieces of music and flattered me by calling them “Joni One,” “Joni Two,” “Joni Three,” and so forth. I’d been told he was a racist, but I was intrigued, so I flew out to New York to meet him. I thought, How much of a racist can he be, he’s got a red-headed Irish wife? So anyway, I went up to his room, and he was in a wheelchair with his back to me. When I came into the room, he turned around and he said, “The strings on ‘Paprika Plains’ from Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter are out of tune.”

"He had a sly and mischievous quality to him that I really liked. From the beginning we hit it off. So I set about trying to parquet words to his material that would be a suitable epitaph for him. [Mingus died five months before Mitchell’s Mingus was released.]

"In the school system I went to growing up, poetry was taught very badly. On examinations, they’d give you a piece of poetry and then ask you to paraphrase it. And then they’d say, “No, that’s wrong.” Usually it was according to some authority, not even the poet themselves. We weren’t taught the poetic spirit so much as correct interpretation. But more than that, I found a lot of poetry vague. Not all of it though. I liked the things that gave me more of a direct image and a direct picture, like Carl Sandburg saying “The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking…on silent haunches and them moves on.” That stuck with me. Anything that was pictorial like that. I like metaphor. I’ve got Irish blood, and a love for metaphor seems to come along with the DNA. But a lot of the themes on the poetry they taught us seemed to have nothing to do with my life as a young person. It had a lot of Latin in it with references to Greek gods. It was poetry for people who had read other books. It didn’t come right off the page and directly into your life.

"But I always wrote poetry. I wrote poetry that I never showed to anybody. Like when there was some kind of disturbing incident, like when the pheromones hit. There was a kid in our group who committed suicide, and I wrote about that and then put it in a drawer. It seemed to me that I could perceive something that I would call now, the poetic stance. That’s the soul patting itself. As opposed to coming from an idea of what a poet should say. If you ever read the poetry in the New Yorker, it’s really awful. You go, Hmmmph…so what? Or you have to dig too hard to get the message. People say, “Isn’t that profound?” and I’ll think, No, you know, it doesn’t say anything to me. I didn’t really like Shakespeare’s poetry either. I always felt that it seemed to be written on commission. He wrote these poems of seduction, basically saying, “You’re so beautiful, you should reproduce yourself and let me be the guy.” And I think he was gay.

"As a writer I’m more interested in what passes before my eyes than I am in second-generation realities. I think the reason I don’t like the obliqueness or the vagary of what a lot of people consider to be great poetry is that I prefer the direct hit of cinema. I think a lot of my music is just frustrated filmmaking. It’s an attempt to get that in music. And black people get it. At the last Grammys, this black woman, who was the hairdresser, came up to me and said, “Girl, you make me see pictures in my head.” And I thought, that’s one of my favorite things anybody’s ever said to me. Like, All right, somebody gets it. Don’t try to analyze it. Just let the picture come as if it was projected right in front of you.