Women Of Heart And Mind

by Steve Matteo
Inside Connection
October 2000

Joni Mitchell's boldness in experimenting on, rather than simply re-creating, her most successful albums, Blue (1971) and Court and Spark (1974), has led to a career filled with groundbreaking albums.

Mitchell, nee Roberta Joan Anderson, was born on November 7, 1943, in Fort McLeod in Alberta, Canada. In the mid-1960s, she moved to Toronto and played in small clubs. She married folk singer Chuck Mitchell in 1965 (they later separated), and relocated to Detroit a year later. Her stellar performances at folk clubs in that city led to national attention and caught the ear of Byrds guitarist David Crosby, who discovered her playing in a club.

In 1967, Mitchell signed with Reprise and began work on her debut, Joni Mitchell (also called Song to a Seagull). Produced by Crosby, the album featured beautiful, poetic songs filled with vivid imagery. Quickly, a host of the era's most well-known folk singers began covering her songs. Judy Collins made "Both Sides Now" a hit in 1968. Tom Rush recorded "The Circle Game." "Woodstock" - covered by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young as well as Ian Matthews' Southern Comfort - became the anthem of the hippie counterculture.

Blue and Court and Spark became instant classics. The former may be the album to which all singer/songwriters works are compared. It boasts a stark simplicity and brutal honesty that have yet to be duplicated. Court, meanwhile, spawned Mitchell's biggest single, "Help Me." Other career highlights include her jazzy 1976 release, Hejira, and Mingus, recorded in 1979 as a tribute to the jazz legend. As it turned out, Mingus was the last album on which Charles Mingus played.

With groundbreaking albums and a unique and artistic musical vision, albums that were released in the mid-1980s from Sting and Paul Simon shed light on Mitchell's forays into jazz and African music on earlier albums. More recent albums, such as Turbulent Indigo, clearly show that Mitchell's musical and artistic powers are still strongly evident.

Over the years, Mitchell's ups and downs have been chronicled extensively. She's now divorced from producer/musician Larry Klein, with whom she still works and remains very close, and her need for privacy and for change have sometimes received more ink than her music. She was recently reunited with the daughter she gave up for adoption.

Mitchell's most recent album, Both Sides Now, is a collection of mostly jazz standards. It was brought to the stage with the backing of a full orchestra, in Mitchell's first tour in years.

Mitchell can be very reclusive; yet she is also, by her own admission, a real ham and loves to get up and "wreck [her] stockings in some jukebox dive." She rarely gives interviews; when she does, she is open and honest, and it seems she loves to talk. In an interview from her home in California, Mitchell, despite having slight hoarseness from having just spent five hours talking with L.A. Times writer Robert Hilbum, chatted for nearly three hours about topics ranging from her music, her painting and her photography to pinball, politics and "stoking the star-maker machinery behind the popular song."

Inside Connection: I once read an interview where you were talking about keeping journals. Do you still do that?

Joni: Not as much as I did when I was just beginning and life was simpler. Back then, I didn't have a big organization around me. I was just a kid with a guitar, traveling around. My responsibility basically was to the art, and I had extra time on my hands. There is no extra time now. There isn't enough time. Today, everything's a journal in a certain way. I take photographs, and that's a journal - it's what I see in a given period of time. It's a document of where my eyes have come to rest. My songs to a certain degree contain a document of incidents that happened. Sometimes it takes many years to write about them - they're not necessarily chronological. I think I'm a habitual documenter, visually and [sonically]. I think the chords I choose are a document of where I'm at at any given time, that they depict - if not the state I'm in at the time that I create it - at least the companion for the story.

Is there ever a time that there's something you're trying to communicate in a song, or even in your paintings or photography, and you can't do it?

Oh, sure - that's when you try to force it. But you have to be really patient. And it's easy for me to be patient in that I have a lot of balls in the air. So at the point where I'm trying to force something and it's not happening, and I'm getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar. And if it seems like all I'm coughing up on the guitar is the same-old-same-old, I just twiddle. I've got 50 different tunings in the guitar.

You seem to have a lot of energy, considering that you're active in music, painting and photography.

At best, it's child's play, isn't it? It's pleasurable and agonizing.

Where does the agonizing part come from?

It mostly seems to be external. It probably comes from misunderstanding - especially when [your work] is high-spirited, and when you're trying to pass on the best of the stuff you're culling to what should be a hungry culture but you have it diminished [by the media]. That's kind of disappointing. You think, "It's too bad this guy just backhanded this thing in a really stupid, negative way. He thinks he's smart." And unfortunately, because of him, a certain amount of sheep are going to [follow].

What do you think gave you the drive to do what you do?

I assume there must be some kind of genetic thrust. My two grandmothers were very different, but both of them were frustrated musicians. My paternal grandmother had a hard life - baby after baby after baby. She was not a martyr, but she was a total self-sacrificing animal to her many babies. She cried for the last time in her life when she was 14, I'm told. The last thing she cried for was that she wanted a piano, and she told herself, "You silly girl. You'll never have a piano. Dry your eyes." I forget which aunt told me this, but to me it's incredible that if that was the main turning point in her life - "I want to play this thing so bad, but I can't; it's not my destiny" - then there's a possibility that that urge went into the genetic pool. She had a lot of children who then had smaller families ... maybe three or four children. One of them has got to get that gene, don't you think?

On the other side, my mother's mother, Sadie, came from a line of classical musicians. She came east with a homesteader to the prairie; they were the first farmers on that plain after the buffalo and the Indians. That's how young that country [central Canada] is. She had an organ in the farmhouse and she played classical piano and wrote poetry, mostly celebrating her father. And she was a tempest. She always felt she was the opposite of the other long-suffering, good-natured ones. She was always having fiery fits that she was too good, that she was a poet and a musician stuck on a farm. Perhaps [I inherited] the thrust of those two women.

The other thing I would say is that I would have been an athlete, but I had a lot of childhood illnesses that developed a solitude and a deepening and fostered "artisticness." I had polio when I was 9, and I remember that there was a boy in the bed next to mine in the polio ward who was really depressed. He didn't even have polio as bad as I did, but he wasn't fighting it - he wasn't fighting to go on with what he had left. Polio is the disease that eats muscles. If it eats the muscle of your heart, it kills you; if it eats the muscles that control the flexing of your lungs, you end up in an iron lung; if it eats the muscle of your leg, it withers, or of your arm, it withers. In my case, it ate muscles in my back - the same thing happened with Neil Young. I had to learn to stand, and then to walk. Through all of this, I drew like crazy and sang Christmas carols. I think that the creative process was an urgency then, that it was a survival instinct. I left that ward long before that boy, who had a mild case of polio in one leg. He lay with his back to the wall, sulking. When the spirit of child's play enters into the creative process, it's a wonderful force and something to be nurtured.