Joni

Jacoba Atlas, Melody Maker, 20 June 1970

Joni Mitchell is a poet whose time has come. Because she uses the vehicle of music, her words and thoughts reach out to countless minds. With Joni, there is no restriction of reading or schooling; she sings her poetry and brings it to the people.

In the past year, Joni has emerged as a major force in music. Her songs, once the exclusive property of a few, have become the catchword of many. No longer is she only known to the few connoisseurs who read album credits; instead her creations are sought after and her work applauded. Her songs are reflections of a very feminine way of looking at life. All too seldom in music and, indeed, in any art form, is the female view of the world set down. Joni does just that.

One critic suggested that women think in a complicated manner and speak in simple terms. This could certainly be said of Joni’s material; but her simplicity reveals a sensitivity and awareness that few composers possess today. With phrases like ‘Know that I will know you’ and ‘While she’s so busy being free’, we are given an entire picture of a woman’s mind and heart at work.

Joni has been seeing situations and storing them in her memory and in her music since her birth in Canada some twenty-five years ago.

She originally wanted to be an artist, a desire she still retains. Interestingly enough, most of her musical adjectives relate directly to a painter’s vocabulary: ‘Umbrellas bright on a grey background’. Joni describes her home as ‘a musical one’ and her interest in writing ‘was there since I was nine’.

In the mid-’60s Joni came to America and played in clubs, travelling the folk circuit in the east, bravely waiting out her turn to make the mark. But the single folk singer was on the way out – rock was coming in and managers figured that, with Joan Baez and Judy Collins, who needed a Joni Mitchell?

Fortunately, fellow folk singer Tom Rush heard Joni’s songs and introduced her material to his following and the writer to Judy Collins. The result was an invitation to sing at the Newport Folk Festival and Miss Collins’ recordings of ‘Both Sides Now’ and ‘Michael From Mountains’.

Her present manager, Elliot Roberts, brought her to the attention of Reprise records. Her first album was Song to a Seagull. It sold only moderately but she became an underground ‘find’. With Clouds, Joni’s second album, it was evident that she had arrived; with Ladies of the Canyon, her third album, it is evident that she is exalted. With each album there has been more music, more of an effort to bring in other musicians but, despite added instruments and group singing on various stages, Joni remains forcefully a loner.

‘I used to be in a duo and that was the last time I played with anyone else except for my friends. I like to play with Graham [Nash] and Judy [Collins], but we sing together for fun. I flat-pick my music and I know there are places to be filled in. There could be more texture to it. When I finger-pick, I play the melody line and in many cases that’s the way it stays. When I’ve finished a song, I’ve honed it to a point where it’s a completed song to me. And anything that is added … might to other people sound better and more complete but to me it sounds extraneous.

‘I’m very serious about my music and so I like that seriousness to remain. When I play with other people I like that to be for fun. It’s on another level … a looser level where a sense of my own imperfections doesn’t enter into it because it’s just for my own pleasure. It would be difficult for me now to learn to play with other people, like teaching an old dog new tricks.’

Until Ladies of the Canyon, Joni’s melodies emphasised her past association with folk music: simple and straightforward, they encompassed little of what rock has brought to the music scene. However, her present association with rock musicians has somewhat liberated Joni from the confines of the folk idiom and you can hear that change in Ladies. ‘I guess there will just come a time when I’m hearing more music than I’m able to play and then the change will come about naturally.’

Joni does not see adding musicians as back-up men as a step toward co-writing. ‘I don’t think I could do that for the same reasons I can’t play professionally with other people. I know what colours I want to use, I’m too opinionated … no, that’s not the word I want. It’s just that I feel too strongly about what the finished thing should be, whether it’s music or a painting. I mean, how many times do you hear about painters working together? The Fool are three painters who paint together, but how many times do you hear of that? I feel very much about my music like I feel about my painting. If I were working for a master and he came up to me and said, “Well, if you put a brush stroke of red in that corner, you’ll save it,” I would have to reject his way of saving it or improving it until I could find a solution of my own which was equally right.’

Joni’s strong desire to be independent and an entity unto herself can seem at times a contradiction with her own gentleness and music. However, it somehow isn’t. Early on, Joni was criticised for being too feminine, too romantic (‘secrets and sharing sodas, that’s how our time began’).

But just how a woman can be too feminine isn’t really clear to Joni, who sees the lack of womanliness in her contemporaries as one of the worst aspects of progress.

‘I think there’s a lack of romance in everything today. I went to see the film version of Romeo and Juliet, which is supposed to be the epitome of romance, and I thought it was very unromantic. Everything was too perfect. I think that women are getting a bum deal. I think we are being misguided. It’s just, follow the leader. Like, for a long time I wouldn’t go out without wearing my false eyelashes, because I thought that without them I was plain. You know, that’s really silly, isn’t it? But that’s what happened.’

‘There’s the fear of the big hurt, we’re taught to be very cool. And be noncommittal. That’s the thing about places like Italy. Like they’re encouraged to say, “Oh, I love you, my darling,” and then if it doesn’t work out they all say, “Poor little Emilio, his heart is breaking,” and nobody puts him down. You know, they’re all very kind, they shelter him because he’s mourning openly for the loss of someone. Whereas in America you stifle that so much … well, anything that’s repressed and goes underground really gets distorted. You don’t know what you want after a while if it’s repressed.’

‘Even if I’m writing about myself, I try to stand back and write about myself as if I were writing about another person. From a perspective. I wrote this one song – I can’t remember the name of it now – a triangular story where I wrote about myself from the point of another woman. It’s written about one person and myself, and still another rolled into one. To give the person more dimensions. It’s really tough because I want to explain to you how I write, but I can’t. It’s just standing back and getting another perspective on it. I step back and carry on a conversation with myself. It’s almost schizophrenic. You lay out a case and argue with yourself about it and with no conclusions. But I have to write a long time after something has happened, because when I’m in the middle of something I’m totally emotional and blind. I can’t get a perspective on it.’

Like many poets, Joni insists that her lyrics be worked over until every word is absolutely necessary and cannot be altered. She admires both Dylan and Leonard Cohen, although each for their differences.

‘Leonard’s economical, he never wastes a word. I can go through Leonard’s work and it’s just like silk. Dylan is coarse and beautiful in a rougher way. I love that in him. I think I’m a belated fan, at least my enthusiasm is growing the more I live in urban places. The last two years have made me a very strong fan, but before I lived in cities I couldn’t see what he meant. I’d never know what the street meant. I was sheltered, I hadn’t seen the injustices. Now I can understand him.’

Her ability to understand and transform has made her almost a legend in the United States. Critics and listeners alike rhapsodise over her songs and her psyche. She is fulfilling something of a ‘goddess’ need in American rock, a woman who is more than a woman; a poet who expresses a full range of emotions without embarrassment.

Her legend is beginning to obscure her work; because she is virtually without competition (Joan Baez and Judy Collins don’t have the output; Buffy Sainte-Marie doesn’t have the immediate newness), she is without comparison. Her work, for now, goes almost totally without question, without debate.

Success has worked its hardships on Joni’s life as well. With sold-out concerts come demands on personal time and involvement. After Ladies of the Canyon she split to Greece for sun and silence. She said she needed the time to be alone and find her creativity again.

Her house, redwood and hand-honed, high in Laurel Canyon, stands empty and waiting. One of her many treasures within the house is a grandfather clock which refuses to tick … it’s too old to be repaired … it stands idle, useless, and beautiful.

That in itself tells us as much about the lady as anything she might write.