Every artist has to have a certain reverence for live performance whenever they commit to a tour. Although anyone can work to refine their craft in the studio and see if they make something that no one else has heard before, it's a much greater challenge to find that magic moment onstage when every single note is perfect. While Joni Mitchell has had over a few shows throughout her career that felt like she was floating on air, she also had a good sense of when a show was well below her usual standards.

And looking through some of the biggest shows of her career, it's not like she had low expectations for what she wanted her music to sound like. It may have taken her a while to change her guitar tunings in those early days, but it was bound to be worth it when she played those immaculate guitar parts with a voice that could easily be comforting and heartbreaking within a single line.

When she eventually got a proper band behind her, though, she wouldn't settle for traditional rock and roll players. She had grown up listening to everyone from Charles Mingus to Miles Davis, and that meant getting the biggest names in fusion behind her, whether that was Larry Carlton playing the perfect solo for one of her tunes or Jaco Pastorius playing the bass runs that would have made Jimi Hendrix proud.

Despite Mitchell fading from the limelight in the 1980s, she was still on the radar when Roger Waters was putting together his latest incarnation of The Wall. After all, Pink Floyd's mammoth concept album was intended to have a bunch of different characters behind it, so bringing in Mitchell to sing some of the soothing elements of the record was a breath of fresh air from David Gilmour's voice.

Since Waters's voice has always been an acquired taste even for some Floyd fans, Mitchell's performance of 'Goodbye Blue Sky' with an orchestra is absolutely perfect. Artists like Van Morrison and Garth Hudson do a fine job at their respective parts, but a tune about the clouds growing around Pink and the dramatic orchestral backing feels like it was made for her voice in some respects.

But Mitchell was far from happy with the entire show. She had been used to working with many artists, but she was extremely disappointed watching everyone showing up that day behaving like children, saying, "The childish competitiveness, the lack of professionalism - I don't have a peer group. All of them, these spoiled children. It's not what I would have expected in any artistic community. Not one single adult in the whole pack."

Then again, the performance doesn't seem to show that bad blood. As much as Mitchell may have had some harsh feelings afterwards, hearing her join in with the rest of the group on the song 'The Tide is Turning' is a much better way of ending off the concert than 'Outside the Wall', especially considering the significance of the Berlin Wall being torn down only a few days before.

Given the cold reception that she got during the show, it's no surprise that Mitchell started moving towards non-commercial genres later, eventually becoming involved with jazz and easy-listening music that had much more musical weight to it than the stadium-rock brand of performances. While it's common for artists not to want to meet their heroes, this proved to Mitchell that it wasn't a walk in the park trying to meet your contemporaries, either.