Transcribed by Lindsay Moon

Andy Peebles: Delighted to have with us this Sunday afternoon as our guest on My Top 12, Joni Mitchell. Joni, thank you very much indeed for joining us.

Joni Mitchell: Oh, it's nice to be here. .

AP: I don't think it's been a very easy task to compile 12 records. I say this every week on the program, but you have spent quite a long time putting these records together. Is it an enjoyable experience actually trying to sort out 12 records?

JM: Well it's very nostalgic. You know, the selection of songs that I've chosen stretches back to my early childhood, things that struck me along the way, and there are a lot of things missing obviously. Twelve songs is difficult to choose.

AP: What age were you when you really realized that music was something that was going to be very special? Do you remember exactly how old you were when you decided that perhaps music might be important?

JM: Well, um, I can remember -- I have a very early memory of being walked on a leash. You know, they used to put children on those leashes -- I don't know if they still do --

AP: That's right. Toddlers' reigns.

JM: -- and I had on a little white kind of snow suit and we passed a Woolworth's and Woolworth's had a wedge-shaped opening to it, and in the roof of the exterior of the building was kind of a speaker, a tin speaker, and there was some kind of music, I don't know what it would be, spilling out there. And I stopped on my leash and began to bounce up and down and sing with great enthusiasm. My mother gave me a good tug, you know, and I remember thinking that was very insensitive of her (laughs).

So, you know, at an early age, you know, music was a great pocket to be in.

AP: Well, let's open the pockets and have a look at what you've got for us with 12 records that you've chosen. And we start with Edith Piaf, I think I'm correct in saying.

JM: This song I heard at a birthday party. It was a French girl who lived on the outskirts of our town had thrown this party. Her mother was not well and there was no evidence of a husband. She had a mouth that kind of went off to one side, and there was pink showing around underneath her eyes and she cooked up a delicious birthday cake from a cake mix with pink frosting on it. And we were all seated at this table when suddenly on the radio came Edith Piaf and Les Campignons des Chansons singing this song, and I remember, like, as her voice entered into the male choir, I had goosebumps, you know. I think I probably dropped my cake fork.

AP: How old were you? Do you remember?

JM: Well, I'd be about six or seven.

(Plays "Les Trois Cloches.")

AP: The voice of Edith Piaf and "Les Trois Cloches." My French pronunciation is as appalling as ever. Joni, it goes without saying that I suppose France and the language of France has a lot to do with Canada. Are people over there staunchly bilingual these days?

JM: Well, in the area that I was raised in, there wasn't a large French population, but it was big enough to afford at least one French radio station. But I never heard the language spoken. We would just see it on the cornflakes boxes at the breakfast table, you know.

AP: But you had no real interest in picking up French and learning it in those days?

JM: The English were very stubborn, you know, about keeping theirs and the French --

AP: So was it a diversity of opinion as far as its validity was concerned?

JM: Yes.

AP: We're now going to play a track which you very kindly brought with you. There are all sorts of packages musicly coming up in this hour of My Top 12 with Joni Mitchell here with me on a Sunday afternoon, and we don't often play material by the artist who sat opposite me, but we're going to now. Tell me a little about this.

JM: Well, I'll just play a snippet of this just mainly to illustrate how long sometimes it takes for influences to seep in. Last summer, I saw a clip of Piaf. I'm a big fan of hers. And it included a performance of this song. And shortly afterwards I wrote a song just sitting down to the keyboards that didn't have a melody, and we went in and cut the track even though the melody hadn't been born.

That night I thought, well, I'll just put a rough melody down on it. I went in and I did two takes. The melody that you would hear on this tape is the second take. There's nothing that exists on record of this particular part of the development of a song and that is the discovery of your melody. This is the birth of the melody and it has no words. And it's full of French diphthong. It's full of (sounds out) "long-long", you know like (phonetic) "dawn-say." There's no English words to go to these syllables, so I don't know how I'm going to sit -- set language to it. So I just call it "Speechless." I'll just give you a little sneak preview of it.

(Plays "Speechless.")

AP: Presuming that you solve the difficult problem of deciding what to do with that lyrically, will we find that on your next album for Geffen Records?

JM: Either on the next one or the next one after that.

AP: You're giving yourself a bit of longevity there. It's an interesting situation, isn't it, as to what to do with it lyrically? I mean do you see that you'll have French lyrics to that in the end?

JM: I really like the French diphthong, that sound, you know. It's so much a part of the melody in my mind that I, you know, I don't know what vowel you could put in there. So we'll see what happens with it. Maybe it will just come out that way.

AP: If you put an album together these days, do you find you write specifically for it, or do you find at the end that perhaps there are songs left over which we may hear in the months and years to come? Or do you look at each album as a sort of finite, finished product?

JM: In the past, you know, I've mostly done conceptual albums so there was, you know, by the time I got to recording it was hopefully all lean meat and the fat was, you know, finally discarded.

This last album I had four songs left over, though, which I think are valuable but just didn't suit that particular project.

AP: Let us move to the next one, and we get into the realms, I think, of rock and roll. I've got my list; you've got yours. Let's hope they're the same. Have we got Little Richard next?

JM: Here comes Little Richard now.

AP: Here comes Little Richard. Why does little Richard come up at all on a Sunday with you?

JM: Well, Little Richard and Chuck Berry were like the call of the wild, you know, like the radio was for many years, as a child, was full of ballads and classical programming and Montovanni, and it was fairly bland, although there was a lot of melody on the radio in those days --

AP: And then along came Alan Freed.

JM: Wow. Then came rock and roll.

(Plays "Lucille.")

AP: Little Richard. Fascinating character, well known as the Georgia Peach for many years, better known I suppose nowadays as being a born-again Christian.

JM: Yeah, I guess he's got the preaching thing now, hasn't he?

AP: A lot of people in America have got the preaching thing recently. Does that interest you? It seems to be a sort of cultural outburst in the States of born-again Christianity.

JM: Well, I'm sure some people are quite sincere, but, you know, it is kind of the new drug.

AP: It's lovely to have you here in this country. How do you feel about the British market these days? I mean is it still of great value to you, as a record market?

JM: I always thought the British were very, you know, loyal to me and insightful. Perhaps it's because of the stiff upper lip thing, you know, that they -- they made observations regarding my art that I thought were intelligent that might perhaps be missed in the win/lose syndrome of the Americans. You know, that they seem to have -- I always imagined the British audiences having knowledge of and an interest in subtleties that lie between, you know, success and failure.

AP: Very interesting looking at the sort of people when I came to see you in Birmingham at the beginning of this tour of yours -- I suppose it is fair to say without being cynical, that Woodstock was almost reincarnated in certain areas of the stadium. There were some extraordinary characters there, the like of which I hadn't seen for quite a long time. Do you actually notice that sort of thing, the sort of people that are actually out there?

JM: Well, for the most part, our audiences have been very young everywhere. We've played -- there have been a few towns where, you know, hippie-looking people, middle-aged hippies, arrived, you know. But for the most part, the audiences have been a good cross-section. I always think that my ideal audience would be, you know, like a hippie sitting next to an orange cockatoo hairdo --

AP: The Mohican haircut that we have here, yes.

JM: -- right. You know, like a flaming parakeet 'do,' you know, next to basic black and pearls. That's what I would like to see, you know. I like to see gatherings of class mixtures and people -- there are people in the audience that prefer different pockets of my career.

AP: Well, there's many different pockets of your musical choice here. And we now move now to Lambert, Hendricks and Ross.

(Plays "Cloudburst.")

AP: Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, and "Cloudburst," superbly performed. I was just saying to Joni while that was being performed you need to have a very good dentist to sing like that in case any of your teeth come out during the course of singing it. It's marvelous stuff.

JM: You could really shake out a filling on those words. The reason that I've included "Cloudburst" in here was -- just getting back to a little bit of history -- when rock and roll came roaring onto the scene with all the controversy that it included, you know, it was mostly Black, and it was raw and raging. "Lucille" would be a good example of that or "What'd I Say," Ray Charles; "Johnny B. Good," and it was great. I mean it stirred up your feet; it stirred up your whole body. Next thing you knew, you wanted to go to three or four dances a week and nothing else was so important.

After a few years, the music scene shifted, and with the coming of a lot of white rock and roll, some of it was excellent and some of it got very formulated, and then you got your Annette Funicellos, your Fabians, and your kind of media-made artists. And the spirit got more, well, I guess middle-class or more genteel. It made it palatable. Rock and roll became respectable in a certain way. And it made for a very kind of dull pocket of music. And it really was The Beatles that lifted that out. Everybody was waiting for a Messiah, and although I don't have a Beatles song included here, I would, you know -- everybody knows that they were the Messiah.

During that bland kind of period, my interests began to search through other styles of music, and "Cloudburst," Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, were kind of my heroes in that time.

Then with The Beatles opening up the music again, lyrics began to become important. With The Beatles bringing the beat back strongly and jazz and folk music providing a kind of an introspective vacation so to say from rock and roll in the middle. And along came Dylan. He kind of put the two things together. And one of my favorite tunes of this period of his writing was "Memphis Blues Again."

(Plays "Memphis Blues Again.")

AP: "Memphis Blues Again" from Bob Dylan on a Sunday afternoon on this edition of Top 12, Joni Mitchell here with me in the studio.

Bob Dylan has been through a few interesting relgious processes over the last few years, hasn't he? Do you like everything he's done over the last few years?

JM: I'm waiting for the Christian period to subside, you know, so I haven't really given it fair ear, you know, the last few projects. I can't really speak about them, having not listened to them. But I still return to these -- it sounds like New Wave, doesn't it? That one? I mean there are so many people that take so much from him, you know, I hear 'listen to how new this group is and new that group is' but so much is derivitive of him and lacks some of the excellence, you know.

AP: The next choice is from Laura Nyro, desperately underplayed on the radio in this country. Really is.

JM: Another great artist.

AP: But why great to you? What is it that particularly appeals about her work?

JM: Well, when I was first starting out, there weren't that many women that were writing, and I was pitted in the press in various combinations. You know, they try to put you into groups and schools, like to put you in some kind of neat filing system. Of all of the filing systems that I went into, she was one of the rare ones whose company I enjoyed. She's a great artist, you know, a complete original. You see a lot of her influence coming down now through the pop charts. Rickie Lee Jones has borrowed a lot from her, but somehow or other the way she put it together was all her own.

AP: And this is "Captain for a Dark Morning."

(Plays "Captain for a Dark Morning.")

AP: The haunting voice of Laura Nyro. She really is a superb vocalist, isn't she?

JM: Oh, yeah. She's got so much dynamic range and sense of theatre and composition. She's a great one.

AP: We're going to play some of Miles Davis music now, and I'm not surprised. Let me just very briefly say to you everybody knows that you had an involvement with Charles Mingus. Your interest in jazz is obviously an interest and a love of music, but working with somebody like Mingus, did you feel there was pressure on you, or did you feel perhaps you were putting pressure on him in that combination?

JM: Well, he called for me, you know, he called out to me to do a project with him. The first project that he approached me with I passed on because I couldn't see how I could do it. Then he proceeded to write six new melodies which he called Joni 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. So then he kind of inveigled me to New York City with flattery (laughs).

AP: Were you nervous?

JM: I was very nervous. You know, he had a reputation for being a very, very hard taskmaster, you know, like his apprentices, you know, were used to black eyes, and he'd take a swing at them if he felt that they were playing -- I don't know, I guess emotionally dishonest or whatever, you know. He could be pretty lethal, you know.

AP: Did you feel you were treading into a new world in some small way though or --

JM: Yes.

AP: -- or -- or it was something that you'd always wanted to do and you thought now is the opportunity, this is great.

JM: No, it wasn't so much that I'd always wanted to do it or even that I was a great fan of Mingus's music, you know, but I'm a curious person and also I have a lot of curiosity (laughs).

AP: Which is a very good way to approach a project like that, I'm sure.

JM: Yeah, well, I wondered -- well, what in blazes does he want with me, you know. So I went and as soon as I saw him, there was a look on his face which I tried to paint on the Mingus cover, that wry look over his shoulder, you know? Like just up to no good, you know, just delicious mischeif.

As soon as I saw that look on his face, I thought, oh, this will be fun, you know. He had a great spirit and it was an opportunity to apprentice under a great master. I know friends of mine who were jazz musicians -- I wasn't a jazz musician, but a folksinger that played with jazz musicians you might say, or God knows what.

So the idea of working with him made me the source of envy to many of my friends. John Guerin said, "Oh, you know, you rotten person, you know, he's my hero. Why don't I get to go?" And one by one, I brought a lot of those people in to play on the record. And it wasn't the way it finally came out, but there were a lot of people kind of lined up honored to be working on his last project.

AP: So let's talk for a moment about Miles Davis. Is he very much at the forefront of your love of jazz?

JM: Yes. Miles is one of the great singers in my opinion, you know. Like he has a very strong female presence in his tone, and a lot of my phrasing and, you know, a lot of my vocal styling comes from Miles.

The song that I want to play of Miles's is called "Nefertiti," and a friend of mine, a jazzer, introduced me to the song and he said that the structure of it was very innovative and I suppose it was in jazz circles because they were used to playing standards which had a lot of melodic construction. Nefertiti is a song cycle. It's a one-verse structure which repeats like an old folk song without a chorus. So it starts with a simple but very hard to hum one- verse melody with Miles and Wayne Shorter playing in tight unisons. And as the song progresses they begin to phrase more and more individually almost like a silkscreen where two colors have slipped on the plate and you begin to get an aura of one. Graphically, this song appealed to me.

And the other thing that I loved about it was Tony Williams's drumming on this is monstrous. It's some of greatest drumming I ever heard, with the drummer playing against a very simple structure, he is pretty much the lead musician.

(Plays "Nefertiti.")

AP: "Nefertiti" from Miles Davis with the great Tony Williams on drums. I know just what you mean about the drum part on that. Superb, isn't it?

JM: Well, we faded out a little bit of it, but to me, each verse is like pulling a silk screen, you know, like you pull off one print -- each verse, even those it's a repetitive form, it just has subtly different characeristics and as the piece progresses -- it's seven minutes long, time is prohibitive -- but, you know, Tony just gets wilder and wilder on it. It's a beautiful piece of music.

AP: Is that the sort of music that I might hear floating out of your kitchen window at home when you have free time?

JM: Yeah, I like that. I like "In a Silent Way," that romantic period of Miles's music and that particular band with Shorter and Herbie Hancock, people I later came to play with, that was always my idea of real musicianship.

AP: Wayne Shorter said he admires you greatly because in his mind you've broken down an awful lot of barriers. Was that ever in your mind when you approached anything sort of vaguely aligned to jazz that there were barriers to be broken down? Do you believe that barriers exist nowadays for musicians?

JM: Oh, my God. There are tremendous barriers, you know, and the press makes a lot of artificial barriers definitely. They love to try and squish things into compartments. But there are musicians now, my band for instance --

AP: Well, I was going to say that.

JM: -- they're all ambidextrous or they have no real orthodoxy. They have broad musical interests. So I'm meeting more and more people who are eclectic in their musical tastes.

AP: Does your husband Larry Klein's musical taste align itself fairly closely to yours or are there large discrepancies?

JM: No, no, they're very close. You know, we're close in spirit so it would stand to reason that we like similar books, we like similar movies, and, you know, we have enough differences to keep things spicy, but regarding the arts, I think we're very similar.

AP: Next choice musically, please, on your list.

JM: Okay. There's an album out called "The Music of Burundi" which is just full of little gems of -- one of my favorite tracks to dance to is this Burundi war piece. It's just full of, like, licks that later isolated and repeated became pockets of rock and roll. For instance, on "Hissing of Summer Lawns," I did a piece and I isolated a Bo Diddly figure from this passage and looped it and ran it over and over again (sounds out a beat), and if you listen to it closely there are all kinds of Chuck Berry-isms and Little Richard-isms floating through it.

(Plays Burundi selection.)

JM: So that's rock and roll.

AP: Well, it is, isn't it really? Marvelous stuff. So, from the Burundi drums we move to, I suppose, one of the highest forms of American studio sophistication that it's ever been my pleasure to listen to, Steely Dan.

JM: I've chosen "Gaucho" although I love the "Aja" album in total. I think that "Aja" and "Gaucho" were both great and complete albums, but everything on that album to me is well-produced and contains a high degree of literary observation.

(Plays "Gaucho.")

AP: Steely Dan and "Gaucho." Joni, just before we go any further, having said that I saw your concert in Birmingham and one of your London concerts, interesting that you don't use back-up vocalists at all. I wonder whether there's a reason for that?

JM: On this particular tour?

AP: Mm.

JM: Well, I contemplated it because, you know, my music has so much background music on it. Actually, it's economical, you know. Like traveling -- there are 18 people in our party -- it's just prohibitive to carry any more. You know, we're honed down to as tight a crew as possible.

AP: Well, here's a man who doesn't always use back-up vocals; in fact, very rarely, Stevie Wonder. And you picked one of his vast repertoire which is an impossible situation really, isn't it?

JM: Impossible. I just chose the last one that grabbed me. There's a place where it pushes in a certain way and harmonically this -- in the chorus, it just kills me, you know. He's so inventive. He's, like, one of great composers of the century I think. I've chosen "That Girl."

(Plays "That Girl.")

AP: The genius of Stevie Wonder and "That Girl." There's not a lot left to say, really, I mean we've been saying it on radio over the years, and you run out of superlatives really, I think.

JM: Yeah. He's just too great, you know, he's a great composer.

AP: Joni Mitchell, our guest on this Sunday afternoon's edition of My Top 12. Delighted to have her here. We move now to Billie Holiday.

JM: Billie Holiday has to be on my list. You know, she's among a handful of female singers that I adore just for her emotional warmth. I mean there are so many people, like Mike McDonald is another person who sings with so much heart. Holiday, you know, and Mike McDonald more than anybody I can think of, really sing with their -- and Stevie, of course -- sing with their heart right up front, you know, in the vocal.

(Plays "You've Changed.")

AP: I'd hate you to think that while a singer of that stature ____________________ and you were saying that you don't find an awful lot of inspiration in radio.

JM: Well, the radio there has become market- oriented and they program conceptually like one station will take males between the age of 18 and 24 and it will be presenting mainly heavy metal, or MOR, you know, people over 30, you know, like the bottom end of their ear supposedly has burned out or, you know, it's all very pigeon-holed and even the new -- the stations that play New Wave, if you listen to it over and over again, there's a sameness about it and they'll only be playing maybe 20 bands in the course of a day over and over and over again.

So for someone who likes a lot of different kinds of music, there is no station and you have to constantly be dialing.

Although there's one little university station broadcasting from Santa Monica on a -- what is it, a low frequency or a small band -- when all the other radio stations go out as I hit the beach, that's the only one that comes in. And it's like the old days of radio with radio interviews and book reports and, you know, one-act plays and classical music and jazz pockets. And all day long the programming is constantly shifting so you never know when you find the station what's going to be on. And I think that's the only station that I consistently enjoy. I can leave it sitting on that and --

AP: And this is manned by university students I presume?

JM: Yeah. So it's free. It's not commercially destroyed, you know.

AP: So Joni Mitchell is listening to America's broadcasters of tomorrow perhaps --

JM: Yeah.

AP: -- when they leave college and progress and hit the heights on the big stations.

JM: Into the rat race, right?

AP: Exactly. That's very interesting. Right. Billie Holiday, "You've Changed." No. 11, please.

JM: As I roll down to 11 and 12 spot, all through my head is just echoing with absent bands, you know, like Ray Charles is noticeably absent. Nat King Cole is noticeably absent. Judy Collins was a major influence on me when I was starting out. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. There's dozens of people. I also like Police very much, who I haven't even played anything by.

The next song I'd like to play is "I've Got the Touch" by Peter Gabriel. I especially like the drum sound. There's a lot of synthesized drums, you know, they can be a horrible cliche in a hurry. You know, they can sound -- well, you listen to them in 10 years from now and the dating will be horrendous as the technology progresses. But Gabriel on this particular band has got a drum sound that he's been very careful with and he's cross-pollinated it exquisitely. I like the content of the lyric too.

(Plays "I Have the Touch.")

AP: Before we play your final choice of the 12 records you've chosen for us, you've signed a record contract with the Geffen label, and I think probably alleviated perhaps the fears of a lot of your fans who over the years have felt perhaps that this next album was going to be the last one or perhaps you'd decided that you'd had enough and wanted to move more into the world of art or whatever.

You must be pretty happy with life, I would imagine, at the moment with a brand-new record contract.

JM: I'm happy that I re-signed. You know, I was ready to get off it. It is a bit of a rat race now, what with the radio stations in America locking in and the public attitude according to journalism being extremely fickle at the moment. But I don't think that the people are nearly as fickle as the writers would have us believe, but they love to put 'em up and tear 'em down at a rapid rate, and it's justifiable, I think, at this point to say, oh, you know, I'd rather paint, all things considered, I'd rather paint, you know.

AP: But the element of experimentation in your music over the years, I'm sure, is probably something which constantly enhances you to continue because you have done a great deal more than the average musician has been able to do by the very diversity of the sort of material, the artists, and the musicians that you've been involved with.

JM: Oh, I've still got loads of musical ideas and avenues to explore. It's not that I've run out of ideas or anything. And for that reason I'm glad that I did re-sign because it forces my hand at it, you know (laughs).

AP: Is that the best of situations? I mean, put like that, it sounds like more a threat than a pleasure.

JM: Once I begin to do it, you know, it's pleasurable and it's as pleasurable as the moment, you know? Like touring. Initially, I didn't really want to go out on tour, but once the rehearsal was behind us and we were out on the road, it's been fantastic. I've enjoyed it thoroughly. It's just switching gears. That's the part, I guess -- you know, that's where my laziness comes in.

AP: It's been marvelous having you here in Britain doing the dates, and even better to have had the time with you on this Sunday afternoon. The last choice, it comes from the world of classical music.

JM: I'm not a great fan of all classical music. A lot of it I can hear the horse and carriage rolling through it or it's too pastoral for my taste, but Stravinsky in this particular stretch of music, because it's so full of the cogs of machinery and the voices of the industrial revolution, is as modern to me as the day it was written and still fertile ground for stealing (laughs). Just a great piece of music. Even kind of New Wave-ish to me. This is like Mr. Stravinsky, the punk of classicism. I'd like to include a piece by him, the first movement of "The Rites of Spring."

AP: Joni, thank you very much indeed for joining us.

JM: Thank you.

(Plays "The Rites of Spring.")

AP: Part of the first movement of "The Rites of Spring" by Stravinsky played by the Moscow radio Symphony Orchestra concludes this week's edition of My Top 12.

Our guest was Joni Mitchell, and the program was produced by Jeff Griffin. This time next week here with me on My Top 12, American singer/songwriter Christopher Cross.

Announcer 2: Thanks, Andy, and I'm sure people would like to know that on Sunday, June 19th, at ten past nine in the evening, you will be able to see and hear in stereo Joni Mitchell in concert on BBC 2 and Radio 1 stereo. That's Joni Mitchell in concert on Sunday, June 19, at ten past nine p.m. on BBC 2 and Radio 1 in stereo.