While gathering information for Entertainment Weekly's special issue about the greatest moments in rock, the magazine's writers consulted some of the people who wrote rock history with their own guitars and vocal cords -- Keith Richards, Joni Mitchell, R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, and many others. All of these performers had more to say than we could fit into one issue of the magazine. So we've collected the quotes that didn't make it into print in the following online-only interviews.

Though she's best known for creating such intimate anthems as 'Both Sides Now,' Joni Mitchell's mix of folk, rock, classical, and jazz -- and her unusual tunings and complex chords -- always made her an anomaly even within the singer/songwriter category she came to represent. Today, Mitchell discusses her role in rock history and her disillusionment with the current state of pop.

EW Online: How do you think rock & roll has changed over the years?

Joni Mitchell: Well, rock & roll was kind of rhythm & blues and boogie woogie and swing era. It swung. But when white musicians started to play it, it didn't swing. They just rocked it, so the beat got very vertical. White rhythmic history is pretty much funerals, polkas, and waltzes. Most of the grooves, the drums come out for death -- either marching to war or marching to the grave. So when whites took over rock & roll, the joy went out of it. I never liked white rock & roll per se.

Yet people consider Bob Dylan -- whom you toured with last year -- rock & roll. Is that something different to you?

It's not rock & roll, because it doesn't swing. It's more like country-rock . . . This is an industry of pigeonholing. For instance, I was called a folk singer when I came into the scene. But when I began to write, I wasn't a folk musician. My first album is not folk music. It looks like a folk singer because it's an acoustic guitar, but there's a lot of classical music involved in my compositions, and there's jazz involved in them, and a lot of rock & roll. Some of the shuffles that I do, that's more rock & roll than most of the stuff that they call rock & roll, even though it's not as loud.

Did you ever think of yourself as a rock star?

No, I always thought of myself as a painter in show business. (laughs) How did I end up here? I never identified myself for years, really, even as a musician. I just thought of myself as a painter who played. But I did have a compositional gift. And I've been at it so long that I have a certain amount of identity as a musician. (laughs)

What are your earliest memories of rock & roll?

I was a pre-teener when it hit. I shifted my love of classical music to my love of rock & roll from 11 to 16. And then came the folk movement while I was still in high school, and people gathered around and sang folk songs, which I kind of liked. It was a different way of partying -- kind of fun to sit in a group of people and sing for the fun of it. We'd been dancing to rock & roll for the fun of it, but singing for the fun of it was an interesting concept. There were no guitar players around to accompany anybody, so that's in a way how I got started in it, just singing for fun.

But where I came from, in the time that I came up in, there was no inkling or desire for a career in it. There was a stigma to playing guitar back then. My mother thought it was hickish, low-class. No parent now would think that because it's a part of our culture, but the guitar was a fairly obscure instrument when I was coming into my teens.

Do you remember the first record you ever bought?

I remember the first record I wanted to buy, but we didn't have the money for it. It was the theme for a Kirk Douglas movie called 'The Story of Three Loves,' and it was Rachmaninoff's 'Variations on a Theme by Paganini.' That is the piece of music that inspired me to want to be a musician. I used to go down to a store on King St.in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, take it out of the brown paper wrapper, go in the booth and play it and swoon. And I would dream that I could play the piano beautifully like that.

I finally convinced my parents to allow me to take piano lessons, but I wanted to compose, and I was only 7 or 8, and the teacher there didn't understand that. I ended up quitting and it killed my love of music for quite a ways on -- until the guitar, which was just kind of a hobby. I didn't have the same lust, so to speak, to create for the guitar, because it was so foreign. The piano is so logical -- it's all laid out, you can find all of the notes. But the neck of the guitar, the chords I heard in my head, I couldn't find them in there. That's why I had to go into the tunings. You can't get those chords out of standard tunings.

How did rock change the culture?

In the black churches, they were alarmed in the beginning, calling it the devil's music, because [rock] basically took the joyous element of the church music and turned it to the carnal. But that was a necessary liberation from victorian times, and at that point the change was positive.

Then when my generation came along, it became a vehicle for social commentary with Dylan at the vanguard. I thought that it was terrific, his contribution in opening up the possibilities of what could be said in song.

When I began to write, women's songs were written by men, generally. And they were what men thought women should sing. You know, doormat songs. 'Someday My Prince Will Come.' They carried the old feminine values according to the master, right? My songs were of a different order, beginning to reveal feminine insecurities, doubts, recognition that the old order was falling apart. So I depicted my times, and many of those descriptions still hold because the times are still unraveling in that way.

What happened after that?

The music that came next, trying to be more shocking, more devilish, evolved into something that I think has been universally harmful to the culture. That circus act that spread into rock & roll got darker and darker until it finally was influencing children to kill themselves. At that point rock & roll is a demon. It's an anti-life force. Chuck Berry was a pro-life force -- naughty, but not wicked. I don't know if you can go back, because everybody's like so into "edge" and "dark" and "attitude." But that stuff makes vandals and killers out of kids.

Do you think that the Littleton shootings were partly a product of the rock culture, then?

Yes, I do, definitely. Because they proseletyze drugs and guns. Where it used to be kissing and dancing and cars, in its early formation, now it's killing and degrading females and killing chic, sexual perversion. As opposed to romantic sex, which was what early rock & roll was, this is violent, degrading, humiliating, dark, loveless sex ...

What do you think of current rock music?

These people that we tout as great writers in the song arena now, it's a joke. They don't even have a command of English. They're not saying anything, and nobody seems to notice; it's repetitive, hammering in stupid phrases and half-baked thoughts. Song of the year: 'What if God was one of us?' Are you kidding me? This is the arena that I find myself in. I'm absolutely contemptuous of it, and I'm getting a rep for that, right? So I should really get out! (laugh) But I've been saying that since day one, like I've been trying, but I'm stuck here. (laugh)