5
Joni Mitchell was admitted to hospital by ambulance last week. She had recovered consciousness by the time she got there, but things didn’t sound too promising.
Social media immediately went into overdrive, as they tend to in such circumstances. Favorite Mitchell songs were posted. Get-well messages were exchanged competitively. And there was great speculation as to the nature of Mitchell’s incapacitation, based on no medical information whatsoever other than the fact that the musician/writer/painter is known to have smoked like a chimney since childhood and suffers from a self-diagnosed but not medically recognized condition called Morgellons disease, which creates in its victims the illusion that their flesh is infested with parasites.
There was superheated prose knocking around, too. Eve Barlow, writing on the British internet platform The Pool, threw herself down upon the cold linoleum floor beside Joni’s bed in Intensive Care: “We haven’t exhausted her candid wisdom yet,” she keened. “Joni knows us better than we know ourselves. She’s our mother, complete with answers to questions we haven’t yet thought to ask. I’m intimidated just writing down the name ‘Joni Mitchell.’ She would write it down better, somehow making the words even more profound.”
Me, I just felt sad—but also slightly confused and disorientated, as if “sad” were inadequate somehow. In fact I felt really quite odd. I got pictures in my head of Mitchell coming to in the ambulance, her pharaoh’s overbite working crossly and her pale eyes flashing distress, one hand—her better hand—perhaps flapping impatiently at the non-arrival of the words she wants to say. I wondered what she registered in that moment of regained consciousness, and whether she thought about herself in the second person. I wondered whether she was filled with poetry or just curses and banality, the whole damn farrago being one prosaic experience too many, not to be dignified with careful language. I got into my car to go to Sainsbury’s and listened to Hejira to remind myself of her genius.
It didn’t help. Hejira just said the usual stuff, about flight, about sex, about the urge to keep on going. I pushed a trolley around Sainsbury’s and experienced the low-frequency hum of anticipatory mourning while I counted bananas. How does one lament the passing into shade of a force like that? How does one let go of Joni Mitchell?
With difficulty, I find, because she has seemed so real and concrete and permanent in life, so much a part of one’s own fabric, and yet also so manifestly a creature of invention, her own diligent invention: a woman apparently self-conceived and created and then reimagined by herself over and over again in her slippy fight with her self-loathing, almost as full of detail in the memory as one’s own mother. Not that I have ever felt mothered by Joni. Over the decades she has seemed as narratable as Helen of Troy, but rather less warm to the touch.
In fact, to be entirely fair, I have never had any interest at all in her personal life and still less any authentic concern for her legend, which has seldom seemed all that attractive to me, expressing, as it does, so many of the least appealing aspects of West Coast American countercultural celebrity. Despite the feeling that I “know” her well, I have never felt the slightest inclination to wonder what she’d be like to have as a friend or neighbor in some parched canyon, still less felt sexual stirring at the thought of her. I haven’t always liked her voice much either. I have been wholly immune to her as a person and have only ever taken in her songs selfishly.
Yet she has occupied my psyche for nearly forty years with a tenancy more robust and demanding than that of any other singer-songwriter. She has occupied it passively, but tenaciously. I cannot shake her out of there. She will not leave. It’s as if she took up residence in my chambers at some unnameable point in the distant past and just settled in, with a sense of entitlement you might expect only from family. Heaven only knows what I’ll feel when she actually dies and leaves me to deal with what’s left behind. Doubtless, it will amount to more than a terracotta army of pot plants and a manky cat.
* * *
Mitchell settled in the imaginations of pop listeners in the early seventies. In the UK, “Big Yellow Taxi” was a biggish hit in the summer of 1970, its glassily sardonic reflections upon humanity’s relationship with the environment marking out the flaxen-haired Scando-Canadian hippie-chick who sang it as a poster girl for a certain kind of wholesome big-R Romanticism. She was fey, frowning, Nordically bony, the perfect package for the deal: a one-take archetype. What the songs didn’t articulate and the voice didn’t swoop upon like a slender bird, the hair flowed over in a river of molten gold. Like nature busily abhorring a vacuum, Mitchell flooded space that ought perhaps to have been filled by an array of other women before her: the role of thoughtful, poetically articulate, unsentimental, insubordinate, self-expressive female countercultural pop icon. It was a tough job and maybe Mitchell didn’t ask for it, but she certainly got it and then did it with never less than questioning commitment.
She’d already done the itinerant North American folk thing for most of the previous decade—silvery footage of her tooting “Urge For Going” on mid-sixties Canadian folk TV is easily traced on YouTube. But she was already leaving that world by the time David Crosby of the Byrds hitched her to the Californian counterculture wagon. By then, other people had had hits with her songs—notably Judy Collins’s “Both Sides, Now”—and LA’s Laurel Canyon had become Mitchell’s home and her cathedral, along with the rest of her adopted tribe of nesting longhairs. As a kinship group, they were quietly intent on contemplating the devolution of the sixties “dream,” cannily accepting their status as seers of a disappointed new age and settling into mellow self-absorption, as into a great wicker armchair on the stoop at sunset. Mitchell seemed at the time to be the established priestess of the tribe, consecrated into her role.
But she was nothing of the kind. She had management—Elliot Roberts and David Geffen—and she had an urge for going.
Blue in 1971 is where you feel the clutch start to bite. It is a stark record for a golden girl to make. It came out the year after “Big Yellow Taxi” was a hit and it became an instant archetype of the “confessional” singer-songwriting style (a term Mitchell despises, incidentally, for its implicit associations with guilt and religious coercion). A cult arose around it. If Mitchell herself represented a certain archetype of hippie femininity, Blue was an archetype of female expressivity: inward-looking, self-exposing, delicate, emotionally forensic, anti-triumphal . . . On first contact with it, you feel almost obliged to sit down and close your eyes, hands together, head inclined, all the better to experience the searching sensitivity of it all. And while it’s true that Blue contains passages of brilliant writing and is without real rival for the rawness of its excavations of the soul wounded by love, it is easy now to feel that it was always destined to be une vache sacrée. Perhaps even that it was designed that way. Some of the melodies feel arched for display, like the tail feathers of a courting bird; some of them skim the ceiling of the singer’s vocal range and threaten to leave by the window, as if the real motive for their creation were to demonstrate that Joni’s supple contralto had other more exciting places to go than might be reached in all our dreariest two-a-penny dreams. Beat that, it seems to say. Try going there.
It’s also a record that extended the range and depth of Mitchell’s pianistic songwriting. Writing at the piano (as opposed to guitar) makes different demands on the compositional mind. You can hear her on Blue adjusting her methods to put “The Last Time I Saw Richard” and “My Old Man” together—sitting there on the piano stool, poised in a pall of artful creativity, breaking the chords into arpeggios, fingering them methodically out, trying to think big and artistic as befits the elevated status of the ivory keyboard.
Please do not misunderstand me: I think Blue is a marvel. “All I Want,” “A Case of You,” “River,” “Blue”—these are songs for the ages. If she’d stopped there, Blue would surely have been sufficient to cement Joni into the structure of her times. But she didn’t stop there, because she had much bigger explorations to conduct and longer roads to travel. Other places to reach.
For the Roses appeared the following year, and it sounds like what it is—a hard second-gear acceleration for the horizon. This is no gilded folkie delving into the ruins of her life from the comfort of the wicker armchair but a woman feeling a need to accord with expectation. Mitchell now has jazzers and cellists at her disposal. And she has a selfhood to firm up. We are ushered into a room in which we observe a proud, assertive, judgmental Joni at the piano, exploring the spread of her poetic reach as if it were fanned out in front of her like her hands at the keyboard. The tunes and their arrangements are artful. The voice swoops imperiously. She has plenty to lament. Robert Christgau wrote in the Village Voice: “Sometimes her complaints about the men who have failed her sound petulant, but the appearance of petulance is one of the prices of liberation.” He loved the record.
Meanwhile, on the inside of the gatefold sleeve, an apparently naked Joni stands on a rock, one knee crooked, gazing out into the Pacific, a West Coast parody of Friedrich’s Alpine Wanderer Above the Mists—or perhaps a reverse angle on Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. On the record, she sometimes addresses herself in the second person. She is beginning to enjoy her sophistication.
Then, in 1974, came Court and Spark, which took sophistication by the hand and led it into a newly landscaped uptown park, where it spread out a giant square of French linen on the grass and hosted it to a picnic, a proper West Coast Déjeuner sur l’herbe. The sessions were held with an array of fully clothed musicians, some of them kind-of-jazzers, some of them sort-of-rockers, some of them a cultivated hybrid of the two, and they locked into the uptown-downtime groove like men of the world. What a picnic. Mitchell’s voice now found itself, by its own volition, at the center of a high-tone ensemble and the tastefulness all around was as a frame to the naked elegance of her phrasing. The cellos were joined by reeds. The reeds were teased out into choric eloquence by arrangements that might have sat well with Sondheim. In fact it now appeared that Mitchell was unable to cadence a phrase without approaching the notes like a hostess at a cocktail party, swooping up to them with a swish in an airburst of expensive perfume.
Court and Spark is a brilliant parade of accomplishments, both musical and literary. The album radiates a cool, artful, bodiless glow, making a case for itself as the most soigné musical achievement of its era—so knowing and refined is its range, in fact, that it’s not always possible to hear where Mitchell’s internal landscape ends and where LA begins. It’s a continuum, from she to shining sea. The songs might profess disdain for the superficial and the shallow but both irony and sincerity, as well as old-fashioned heart, are sometimes lost in the shimmer. The voice merely hosts the soirée—and swoops graciously up to its desired notes from below, to remind you of its silken command.
* * *
Just what was all this sophistication doing in 1970s mass-market rock music anyway? Was it just hanging around, hoping to be admired? Or did it have more sinister things in mind? Was this “rock music” at all, in fact, or something else altogether? It certainly had nothing to do with “folk,” and not all that much in common with “jazz,” despite one or two superficial borrowings from the book of jazz texture and harmony. It certainly didn’t swing. Perhaps this was some new departure into a void that had always existed in between the real stuff and the even more real stuff—a sort of musical half-world where genre lines blur to the point at which nothing can be seen clearly any more, just vague shapes and hinted-at implications, neutered sensations, half-glimpsed exits and redrawn lines in the sand: the encroaching fog of fusion. Perhaps bodiless was the new naked.
While I am meditating so indulgently upon the nature of the prevailing musical zeitgeist forty years ago, it might also be worth pausing to reflect for a moment on where popular music had been since that first outbreak of teenage rebellion in the 1950s. Perhaps it might help to describe, in the lithest possible terms, the trajectory of the arc connecting Little Richard and Bony Joni—from camped-up male hysteria to tasteful female self-contemplation.
You might say that, in psychological terms at least, pop had undergone a quite logical, even systematic process of maturation, and taken its time over it.
It had enjoyed its first unfettered hormonal outburst in the 1950s, the decade that began with austerity and concluded with the first exploration of outer space. That furtive probing of the cosmos had reached an early climax with Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut, and coincided with pop’s sudden retreat from the rock ’n’ roll esprit into showbiz convention and the cult of the hygienic juvenile lead. Pop was then in the earliest stages of its own industrialization and was hugely self-conscious and in no sense prepared to go all the way with anyone—not if it was to maximize its social appeal. The very early sixties, then, was an era of light petting enjoyed by girl gangs and boys with drippy voices plus insistent, barely audible offstage noises made by the ultra-lively but still largely segregated “race market.” Plus novelty instrumentals.
It took the intellectual clout and independent-mindedness of the Beatles and Bob Dylan, not to mention the rocket-fueled counter-corporatism of Motown, to change the picture, by which time in the middle of the 1960s it was feasible for any self-respecting twentysomething pop consumer to feel that his or her needs were being addressed, face to face, mano a mano, man to woman, and not in a patronizing way. Pop was no longer an exclusively juvenile preserve, nor were the strings of its industrial control quite so visible, as creative power devolved more and more conspicuously in the direction of artists, producers, and their personal advisers and away from the chubby fingers of corporate management and its agents. By the middle of the decade, pop looked like the only game in town worth playing, and such was its social and cultural cachet that even corporate management bowed to the time-honored reality, observed by parents of every generation, that if your baby has outgrown its childhood, then you must, perforce, give it a measure of freedom—otherwise you might lose it altogether.
Meanwhile, ordnance rained down upon the Far East. There was fighting on the streets of Europe. Americans were preparing to set foot upon the Moon. Blacks and Irish still weren’t welcome in parts of Cricklewood. Pop music gave rise to rock, and rock’s social and intellectual scope sought new horizons to expand into. Sex was no longer hidden, and barely even encoded. Books were read and regurgitated in the name of self-affirmation. The psychedelic playbook gave way to folk mythology and then to darkening personal angst. New chops and styles and attitudes toward creativity were co-opted from classical music, folk and jazz, and from public schools. Meanwhile, the music created by African Americans was consumed for the first time in largish quantities by white people. As one decade gave wriggle-room to the next, rock and soul were bywords for seriousness and reach—far more so then, incidentally, than they are today—and they appeared for a season to be singing from the same hymn sheet.
It seemed then, surely, that even if the Age of Aquarius were not about to dawn any time soon, then at least the age of majority was about to come to popular music. Now, the kids who’d bought Elvis records in 1956 and then Kinks records in 1965 were churning through their thirties. And the hipsters who had bought Miles Davis records in 1959 were even older than that. And they still had money. In fact, in very many cases, they had a lot more of it than they used to have. By the middle years of the 1970s they had children of their own, too, or were thinking about it, or had decided not to have them and were enjoying their money in all its exciting disposability. They felt grown-up and as if they had arrived in life. They had survived the wilding of the previous decade and now they were ready to claim the ultimate prize in a socially mobile world in which old class barriers had been breached or blurred or simply flattened. In 1974, the ultimate prize of any newly formed adult, whatever his or her station in the class system, was the feeling that he or she might at last have earned the right to feel sophisticated.
The markets responded. They responded by conceding that it must surely follow in any mature discourse about the serious things in life—as well as the somewhat melancholy nature of life itself—that women really ought to be involved.
Women had of course been involved in pop all along, once the initial testosteronal rush of rock ’n’ roll had dissipated. True, they had been in an extreme minority, but they had punched above their weight in the great song factory of the Brill Building (thank you, Carole King, Ellie Greenwich, Cynthia Weil . . .) and they had fronted up the pop conceits of male producers, composers, and arrangers since time almost immemorial. Some had even achieved diva status (Dusty, Dionne, Diana . . .), capable of timeless statements of great artistic authority but without proper authorial control over their singing careers—and without the license to sing unequivocally about their own lives from their own texts. By the end of the 1960s, women who were visibly in creative charge of their own texts were long overdue in pop.
But once the door had opened a crack, they were through in a flash. Lots of them. The social modulations of the previous decade had counted for something at least. Pop had grown up at last. And by the middle of the 1970s, authorial women were everywhere and they were making a huge difference to the way pop sounded. They were even accorded their own designation: “female singer-songwriter.”
Joni Mitchell, the doyenne, even produced her own records. This was not usual.
* * *
I was fourteen when Court and Spark came out. In 1974 I was still a creature of English prog rock, glam, and the Rolling Stones; Joni Mitchell was not speaking to my desires at all. Yet, through the agency of friends and their elder sisters, I was made aware of the album. I wasn’t all that impressed. In fact I despised the musicians who played on “Raised on Robbery” for their flappy, uncogent rocking; disliked their employer for sponsoring such a feeble parody in the first place. Sophisticated worldliness meant little to me—almost as little as the inner worlds of females. And so I disregarded the shimmer of Court and Spark, as I disregarded many things that appeared to have no direct bearing on my immediate experience.
Then, right at the very end of 1975, when I was fifteen, The Hissing of Summer Lawns came out.
Hissing changed the picture, and not only because my hormones had settled down somewhat and I had given the prog project the old heave-ho. There was more to it than that. This was not for me a political or a feminist moment, but a moment of authentic enquiry predicated rather less on ideological rectitude than on the pleasure of self-exploration. Not so much “how do women feel?” as “how do I feel about how women feel?”
My great friend Lorry—himself a Joni neophyte—was the first to lay out the sterling. And I followed, entranced by the shifting, fruited tonality of the new music, its ambiguous minor keys and Mitchell’s newly levelled-off melodic style. There was no preening on Hissing, no self-congratulatory jumping through melodic hoops to show the extent of Joni’s reach (precious little, once you’d got past her exuberant opening gambit, “In France They Kiss on Main Street”); she seemed to be fashioning the music out of some need not to fulfill expectation but to settle, searchingly, into melancholy, as if abandoning a raft for the deeper draught below. This music had body. It snaked, much as the anaconda on the cover snaked, in and out of the grasp of its portaging “natives” on the very edge of the jungle, close to where it becomes a city.
And for once, the tunes and the heft of the voice and the swirling musical arrangements were not the only objects of scrutiny: I found myself listening with attention to the stories Hissing contained about women, about Scarlett and Edith and the “anima rising” of “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow,” which sounded to me like a description of magma pushing through the chimneys of the Earth. I listened to them and wondered. These were not politicized stories, exactly—not overtly, anyway—and they were way too thought-through to be exhibitions of petulance. They seemed to be more like the exercise of existential feeling through acute observation: descriptions of used women, kept women, women who are willfully trapped; women with “impossibly gentle hands” who “must have everything”; women who note the bubbling of their magma as a matter of daily routine. Most of the songs did not seem, on the surface at least, to be about Joni at all. The Hissing of Summer Lawns felt immensely real to me, and not like some position. It felt grown-up.
Both Lorry and I later congratulated ourselves on our unexpected but entirely genuine enjoyment of the record, and chiefly on the personal sophistication we felt bubbling in our own flues and chimneys as we listened privately to the music; and we mesmerized ourselves with the thought that perhaps we were beginning to know everything.
Of course we knew nothing. We weren’t even born.
* * *
Within days of finishing my A-levels in the summer of 1978, I left the family home wherein I’d done all my growing up since the age of four. I moved into the box room of a semi-detached dump on the very edge of town, where the city’s sprawl gives way to nothing whatsoever, and began immediately to feel the loneliness of freedom. I was living with a couple of friends, and glad of it; really very happy to, in fact—I was more than weary of the routines and constraints of family life. But it was still a leap into the unknown.
I had decided to defer my university entrance for a year and was determined in the meantime to acquire a job in town that would get me into the grain of things, get my hands dirty-ish. And miraculously, I’d landed a gig working in the back room and sometimes behind the counter of the best record shop in town (there were, on retrospective calculation, at least seven record shops servicing a town populated then by perhaps 90,000 souls). I was extremely pleased about this. It felt as if I had arrived at some new gateway in life that just required a push and I’d be on my way, if not to untold happiness, riches, and high social status, then certainly into the grain.
But the box room in the dump on the edge of town was tiny and cold, even in summer, and it remained for a few weeks more at least the official residence of another guy, who was due to move out soon—but would I take over the lease while he enjoyed the rest of the summer elsewhere in warmer climes? I think his name might have been Chris; it usually was in 1970s East Anglia. So I duly moved in and sat on Chris’s cream candlewick bedspread and felt the world gape. And for the first few days all I could listen to was Hejira, which had come out a year or so after Hissing and felt, at least nominally, like Hissing’s slightly less gorgeous older sister. This temporal paradox did not stand up to much scrutiny, of course—but nothing else in my growing record collection seemed right for the moment, so I listened and listened.
It may not come as a surprise to you, dear reader, if you are yourself sophisticated and already familiar with the nature of Hejira and its relevance to my new situation, teetering as I was on the very edge of the rest of my life, as well as the edge of the bedspread—but I was clueless. I’d heard the thing on numerous occasions since its release and had acquired the record only a matter of weeks before—and I had got nowhere near to coming to grips with its expressed themes, let alone its deeper psychological swells. I was into Siouxsie and the Banshees, not psychological swells. I certainly had no idea that Hejira was precisely the music that a “sensitive but not entirely unworldly” boy ought to be listening to in the moment of his leaving home. So I listened to it in total innocence, as one listens at first to most pop music—as a textural adjunct to life in the hope that the new texture might make life feel more textured for a moment. In addition, I listened to Hejira for its beautiful, comforting sound and for its openness and slowness and for what impressions I could scrape together from my half-focused apprehension of Mitchell’s words, which on first, second, third, and even ninth contact appeared to be mostly about what fun it is to travel, and to have sex and not have sex with people you meet while on the hoof.
I observed the vapor trails of 747s. I listened in on the ghostly clatter of old Beale Street, Memphis. I imagined what a chicken must look like as it scratches for its immortality. I appreciated the soft, low undulations of the music and the way it seemed to elicit a rocking motion in the narrow spaces contained within my body. I particularly appreciated the importance of Jaco Pastorius’s fretless bass as a vocalistic counterpoint to the quartering melodies of Mitchell’s voice on top, a voice that was no longer swooping from a regal height but moving carefully forward in simple strides, inviting you to follow. I heard in the thrum of Mitchell’s open-tuned guitar the thrum of wheels. My listening was uncomplicated. I did not imagine that this was the sound a woman makes when she is doing the greatest thing she will ever do.
“Hejira” (or Hijra or Hegira) is an Arabic word associated with the journey of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina. It means flight from danger or trouble. It implies that flight or the act of travelling away from a threat is itself an activity alive with special meaning. Hejira the album was the by-product of a return journey made alone in a car, in Mitchell’s own elasticated time, across country from New York back to her usual place of residence, Los Angeles. She did not travel in a straight line. It was not clear what, if anything, she was in flight from. But, after a fashion, she was quartering America.
So far, so conventional. This “lighting out for the territory” (à la Huck Finn) had been a trope of American literary self-esteem for decades; arguably for centuries, if you want to go back to the foundations of an American literary and song tradition which abounds with accounts of journeying into the wilderness beyond the ordered, familiar world to embellish existing myths, to establish new ones, and perhaps to enable a spot of personal myth-burnishing on the way. Jack Kerouac had done precisely that in the 1950s and his literary shadow lay long over American pop culture, with the result that both average and much-better-than-average songwriters had for years, long before the arrival of Hejira, exercised their right to self-actualization through the idea if not the actuality of American exploration—Bob Dylan being but one of them. Indeed, it was a widely held assumption that the US cultural imperium was itself in part built on that kind of impulse, the solitary soul finding itself alone in the expanse of the American heartland and calling it—and the soul—into being, by narrating it. The actualization of Manifest Destiny.
But Hejira is not a narration of the American heartland, or of any of its other expanses, for all the vividness of its burning deserts and farms and its wistful imaginings of Darktown society in old, concreted-over Memphis.
Hejira narrates the revelation of a woman’s selfhood as she discovers it through the abandoned act of hard, solitary travel. In this vision, it is fugitive movement, not love, which brings the woman to herself. The travelling entailed might just as well have been done in rural France or the Greek islands—both favored Mitchell destinations of the past—or it might have been on the Moon, but it would not have altered the substance of the discovery. Place is not the discovery. The heartland of the self is. America is only the incidental location of the story. The agency of Mitchell’s self-discovery is not place but flight, not location but locomotion. And the point of the story is to explain the soul’s long-abiding “urge for going” not as a neurotic desire to escape from the world but as a need to turn to face it more honestly: the only place she can be truly at home, in “the refuge of the roads.”
* * *
Not everyone likes Joni Mitchell’s voice. In fact, in my experience, most people don’t. “Yeah, she’s great, I can see that,” people often say, “but I just don’t like her voice.”
I know where they’re coming from. I don’t always like it either. I am certainly not fond of the prim trill with which she elucidated her concerns in “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Both Sides, Now,” while the desperate alto-to-soprano arcing of so much of Blue does not encourage me to enter the bounds of her broken interior so much as create objections to my entering it, on the grounds that I may be too coarse a bacterium for that inflamed and lesioned place. And I have always hated her singing on Court and Spark. There, I’ve said it.
But suddenly, on Hissing and Hejira, everything changed. It was as if the Scando-Canadian ex-hippie woman of means put everything she’d learned behind her and began to sing with a new voice, one she’d been driving toward but never yet found the courage to use: a voice not stretched by the agonies of failed love or burnished into stylish self-parody by the imperatives of sophistication; a voice matured out of all recognition from the girlish purity of her folk beginnings. It’s just . . . her voice, a true voice, or so it seems: a deep, linear, narrating voice which succeeds in conveying you first, in Hissing, into the inner worlds of other women and then, with Hejira, into the real world of the author’s flight—the world as she experiences it literally in passing.
The tunes on Hejira, though shapely, exhibit none of the heart-monitor spikiness of prior creations. Instead they drive with great suppleness and candour into the substance of real thought and feeling, as if this too were a place, just like America, the voice following the contours of the melodies without apparent effort but amazing metrical precision—not for show but to get the substance of the songs across, quiet and clear, to the listener. What we’re listening to here is not the careful enunciations of a poet, keen that you miss none of the nuances of her language, but the deep moment-by-moment involvement of the soul singer who wants to feel the click of those nuances herself, as if she needs to actually live them out to force sense out of them. It is, in the end, the singing of a woman who has arrived at her idiom—a mode of self-expression that appears to come to her as naturally as breathing and does not belong to any other creature in creation. There are no arch-backed vertical takeoffs in Hissing and absolutely nothing in Hejira that even hints at a swoop.
But there is a song on it so marvelous that it can make me weep, mostly, I think, because it is so marvelous. It’s called “Song for Sharon” and it finds Mitchell recalling the day she went to Staten Island to buy a mandolin. While there, she saw a lacy white wedding dress in a shop window, waiting quietly there like a magnet to draw the inchoate cravings of “some girl”—and out of that passing snapshot, a skein of reflection looped Joni back into her childhood and her friendship with the eponymous Sharon, and then deeper into her own “illusions” about love and craving and the futility of craving. It is one of the greatest songs of reflection ever written, not only because of the poetic quality of its observations or the rawness of its honesty about matters it is very hard to be honest about, but because of the way the song and its singing make you feel the slippages implicit in every syllable of Mitchell’s thinking and feeling. Somehow, you register the song as a sequence of emotional and intellectual events in real time, and as you go, you experience those ambivalences as if they were your own. You are not excused from any of it.
It isn’t all dismal stuff either; not by any means. The landscape changes with the shifting of the recollective light. There is even a little buck up, when, at the start of the fourth verse, Mitchell explains to Sharon how she separated from “my man” at a rail station in North Dakota prior to heading for New York, and for the duration of that three-bar incident, the drummer—who has hitherto done nothing much apart from click along in time—syncopates the kickdrum and hi-hat barely perceptibly into a quirky hump of subtle new rhythm. Just for a moment. Mitchell responds by riding the hump as if it belonged to a camel. She goes with it, swings with it effortlessly, and the entire complexion of the song changes for perhaps five seconds. It is the tiniest, least exuberant expression of joy I think I have ever heard in music, but it casts its patch of light across the undulations of the song like a break in cloud.
And then it’s gone.
What do I mean, “arrived at her idiom”?
I suppose I mean that, with Hejira, Mitchell alighted on a form of musical expression that agreed absolutely with the content of what she had to say, so that no seams were visible and the showy stylistic mannerisms that had lent so much exaggerated shape, intensity, and high tone to earlier works just melted into nonexistence. Irrelevance, even. In this new account of the world there was no need for such self-conscious artfulness, no need for show. Whether this departure was the result of stratagem or serendipity is moot and not all that important, to my mind—although it is worth noting that, because the songs on Hejira were all written “on the road,” Mitchell was forced to put them together on guitar alone, without the option of retreat to the highbrow fastness of the piano.
Should one be bothered to notice such things? Possibly not. But it is certainly worth pointing out that this “idiom” was in part shaped by the necessity of having to play guitar in a variety of open tunings; the result, or so it has been said, of childhood polio, which limited the dexterity of Mitchell’s fingering hand. Certainly there is a kind of chord voicing that can be identified as Mitchellesque, though you’d need a musicologist to demonstrate what those augmentations and diminutions are, precisely. Yet still, still there’s more to the Mitchell sound than the pitch of the notes themselves. The physical impact of her playing—the way she strikes the strings—carries a shaping force that orders the overall sound and camber of the music as substantively as, say, Keith Richards’ string-striking used to shape the sound and camber of the Rolling Stones. It is that important to her music, her guitar-playing. Or at least it is on Hejira.
But, again, when I refer to Mitchell’s “idiom” I don’t just mean sound: I also mean what we conventionally think of as content—the substance of her lyrics and the style of her writing. The songs on Hejira—even the more stylistically biased ones, “Blue Motel Room” and “Black Crow”—lay themselves out before you with an even distribution of weight and beauty as if they had been discovered, not composed. There is, on Hejira, a sense that Mitchell’s block of sheened, translucent marble has at last been chiseled down to its essential form; that all extraneous material has been removed to reveal the meat of the matter, the poised and tensile figure that lies on the inside of every virgin block of stone. This is the essential Joni. These are the stories she has it within herself to tell most cogently—the result of willed detachment from the familiar world and its expectations, its obligations, its vanities, and its responsibilities.
* * *
It is three weeks—no, four—since Mitchell was carted off to hospital, and there has been no further word about her condition, apart from the usual dead-bat assurances from her people that she is making good progress and that all will be well. In that time I have listened to The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hejira at least a dozen times each, and mostly in the car when making spiritual journeys to Sainsbury’s or transporting the family to the Heath for a compulsory stroll under filthy London skies.
“C’mon!” chorus the other occupants of the car as “A Strange Boy” unwinds to its non-resolution, “haven’t you had enough of her yet?” To which I reply that, no, I haven’t. But, I say graciously, I will change the record if they will only stop complaining and tell me what it is that makes them so inhospitable to Joni.
None of them can ever say, though. Neither wife, nor children. It is as if Joni belongs to another universe, a universe that runs parallel to ours and is, by definition, not only not available as subject matter for discussion but is in fact by definition not a viable topic for discussion, like the Holy Ghost.
But I am pigheaded and stubborn.
“Come on,” I say. “You can give me more than that. Of course you can. If you want me to turn Joni off, then before I do so you have to justify it—I want to hear actual descriptions of how the sound of Joni Mitchell causes you pain and dissatisfaction.”
There usually follows some mumbling about Joni’s voice and how she sounds unrelaxed and swoony and a bit over-intense and such an obvious hippie, and how her tunes are long and wordy and artily shaped and they never seem to stop unwinding, as if the pain of life is unending and “she’s just pouring it out of a big jug” and couldn’t we have something on just a bit more cheerful and fun? Even jazz?
“It’s just not happy music,” says one naysayer, certain of her own cogency; then, convinced that this will nail it: “Plus, it doesn’t speak to me.” And I find it necessary at last to point out that a much younger Joni Mitchell than this one discovered that she was pregnant by an ex-boyfriend in her very early twenties, back in 1964, and that, after giving birth, she gave up the child for adoption because she was unable to provide for it and because there was enormous stigma back then attached to mothers who gave birth to children out of wedlock—and that every song she ever wrote after that was an act of expression growing directly out of an inability to talk to the one person in the world she wanted to talk to—but couldn’t.
The car fell quiet after that.
Then, after a while . . .
“So, Dad, why do you like it so much, then?”
And for once I realized that I had nothing relevant to say.
GRACE NOTES
JACKSON BROWNE: “FOUNTAIN OF SORROW”
Asylum Records, 1974
The same year that Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark alighted so graciously upon the world, another album made itself available rather more somberly but with no less sensitivity: Jackson Browne’s Late for the Sky.
Late for the Sky was not really meant for fourteen-year-old English boys and it should come as no surprise to the reader that fourteen-year-old boys in England did not show much interest in Late for the Sky either. In my city, we all became aware of it a couple of years later, around the time of the onset of punk, when we were sixteen and beginning to engage with girls in a way that they might not find wholly repellent. I am sad to say that the coincidence of punk made it very difficult, even quite shaming, to like Late for the Sky, despite the manifest attractions of its mournful, elegiac sound.
How come?
Let me offer you a brief account.
Jackson had long glossy hair, off-centrally parted. He was pretty. He looked incredibly clean. He read books. He sat at a piano as a poet hunches at a lectern. And all of this superficial image stuff stood in analogic relation to his music, which in turn stood for his social meaning. Jackson’s music was gentle, melancholic, wholesome, and full of words of regretful reflection—and there were loads of them. He appeared to be sensitive and generous spirited. He understood that perhaps he had made mistakes in life and that, where he hadn’t made them, fate and “changes” had intervened to bring disillusion. He lacked irony. Furthermore, he lived on the West Coast of America and appeared also to regret the lost hopes of the 1960s. He recorded on the Asylum label. He also had form, having written songs for the Eagles. And his voice was deliquescent like melting butter. Worst of all, girls found him desperately attractive and played his records in their bedrooms as auditory totems of their own sensitivity and availability to the right kind of chap—a chap like him, not you.
So chaps like me scorned Jackson Browne for a good couple of years, until it was safe to emerge as newly matured near-adults endowed with both the palate and the sophistication to accept that there was room in the world for both Siouxsie and Jackson. Interestingly, and no doubt purely coincidentally, this moment corresponded in life with the onset of rather more sex.
“Sophistication” is one thing, “melancholy” quite another. But it is in the work of Jackson Browne above all that we find the latter expressed not as a cosmetic feature of the former but as a driver of it. Oh dear, he seems to be saying, I know too much of the world and of you and of myself, and it is grievous to be so burdened. As a result, I am suffused with a close-to-biblical sense of helpless sadness that is, in fact, entirely secular and subtly political. Indeed my melancholy is the only thing that fits me for the world. Melancholy is my sophistication.
“Fountain of Sorrow” is a wonderful, insightful song, even as it is also a tiny bit self-romanticizing. A tiny bit? Completely self-romanticizing, actually, in a way that Joni Mitchell would no doubt scorn on grounds of ickiness. But that roseate, self-critical glow of sadness so beloved of Jacksonites is what makes the music sing, even as it soars unaided on its updraughts of not-wholly-repressed narcissism. This really is a beautiful song, whichever way you slice it; and Jackson really is a beautiful guy, however many pieces you want to chop him into.
It clicks along like the Eagles sometimes used to, on a propulsive West Coast piano, bass, acoustic guitar, and drum chassis. It has a high rate of harmonic turnover with an absolutely exquisite improvised Stratocaster descant looped and tied on top by regular Browne sideman David Lindley. (I recollect discussions taking place in pubs and sixth-form common rooms, which revolved chiefly around the unadulterated musicality of Lindley’s playing—it was much easier for an eighteen-year-old chap to engage with that than with the content of the songs. Some might say that Lindley gilds the lily unnecessarily, but I would argue that there is not a lily lolling around in a field anywhere in the world that would not be enhanced by a garland of Lindley—even if the lily were already as pretty as the twenty-five-year-old Jackson.)
The song tells the mournful story of the singer’s discovery in a drawer of an old snapshot of an ex-lover, and the array of challenging thoughts that arise from this chance encounter with his smiling, doubtful past—not the least of those thoughts being that the gaze is always contingent. “I was taken by a photograph of you,” he sings, managing narrowly to avoid sounding pleased with himself.
And there, right there, is the essence of JB: the deliquescent voice of sophisticated melancholy melting into seductive elegance before you’ve had the chance to feel anything real yourself. There is certainly very little purchase to be had in the moment-by-moment experience of Browne’s songs. You don’t enter them in any mode except that of the admiring emotional spectator: here be “sorrow,” and there be “regret.” See that purple passage over there? That’s “real emotional insight,” that is. It’s as if a deal has been struck: Jackson will do the thinking and feeling and phrasing and mourning for us, and we’ll play his ruminations back to ourselves in confirmation of our own sensitivity—and perhaps as a caution to ourselves to be more sensitive in the future.
When Jackson sings, we listen hard. But we do not experience his world so much as admire his account of it from a distance: it’s a world we might only aspire to be part of on our very best, most sensitized days. Jackson Browne certainly makes the world a better place, if “palatable” is what we mean by “better.”
PAUL SIMON: “HAVE A GOOD TIME”
Warner Bros. Records, 1975
At what point did rock music reach full maturity? Or, to put it more modernly, when was Peak Adult in pop? You can certainly make the case that Paul Simon’s 1975 album Still Crazy After All These Years was a spike.
Just look at that title. Just look at Paul on the cover in pouchy, pocketless jeans and fedora, leaning proprietorially on a New York fire escape with his sleeves rolled up neatly above the elbows, arm akimbo, a worldly man of all worlds, a thick moustache crawling across his face on its way home to the joke shop. All the image of Paul lacks is a portfolio of holdings (maybe it’s just out of shot, resting against the rungs of the fire escape). As for the graphics . . . Tinted photographic sepia on a beige ground? Epistolary script? You can’t get more Hannah and Her Sisters than that—and Hannah wouldn’t be out for another decade. Paul is smirking, literally smirking, with delight at his own sophistication.
He actually turned thirty-four in 1975, the year in which he declared that he was still crazy after all these years. All thirty-four of them. Then there’s “My Little Town,” which reaches all the way back to the place of the narrator’s upbringing in another smaller time, in another smaller place, a long time ago when things were so much smaller. And “Night Game,” which casts a rheumy eye over baseball’s ghosts, and “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover,” which is a hymn to sexual knowingness, and “You’re Kind,” which is a hymn to sexual self-knowledge. The musicians? They are top-liners from all over the country: mature, multidisciplinary exponents of the sessioneer’s craft, as much at ease with a genteel boogie as they are with difficult time signatures and sprung meter.
The point of all this? Partly, it would appear that the point is to assert the possibility that high-end contemporary pop music might take “maturity” and “sophistication” as themes, in addition to the music being itself mature and sophisticated. Still Crazy may or may not be pure memoir (I am pretty sure it isn’t), but it shows no interest whatsoever in that primary pop concern, the cult of youth; and having taken that decision, it shows real determination to wear the gesture as lightly as you might wear a fedora on a fire escape. To be sophisticated is to not be heavy. And so it is important, as the song says, to have a good time, while lolling on a counter-sunk Latinized funk groove propelled by Steve Gadd and Tony Levin, with a chorus of horns. God bless our standard of living, for it is the cornerstone not only of the American way of life, but of a developed sense of irony.
And never has Simon’s boyish acorn-cup of a voice sounded so insouciant a note. How do you trust so mature an innocent? “Have a Good Time” is worse than Randy Newman for not keeping you quite in the picture, by skewing it, by forcing your gaze to slide across its surface; it’s Randy Newman with the existential agony extracted with fine-pointed instruments and replaced with choirboy cherubism. Who’s really talking here? And does he mean what he says?
Simon is “voicing” a character, for sure, but he’s doing it so blithely it’s hard to tell whether he thinks shallow, consumerist complacency is a cancer or a boon. Or maybe it’s both! How’s that for sophistication? Perhaps he feels that we’d all be so much better off if only the shallow and the complacent among us would take responsibility for themselves and become sophisticated, just like Paul. The point is rammed home at the end, when the last word goes to an unresolved alto-sax cadenza by the venerable bop musician, Phil Woods. He rips into eternity without support, without explanation. The passage is open-ended, complex, linear, somehow obliquely ironical in the context, yet coolly effortless—and you really can’t get more sophisticated than that.
RICKIE LEE JONES: “THE LAST CHANCE TEXACO”
Warner Bros. Records, 1979
Vulnerability. Soul. Sophistication.
Bring me a pretty—but not too pretty—white woman who can embody all three of these qualities in a single persona with lashings of authenticity and hip charisma, and I will sell a million records for the company!
You can imagine the head of Warner Brothers’ A&R operation in the late seventies saying something like that to himself. Certainly Lenny Waronker, who had the job, pretty much fulfilled that aspiration when he signed Rickie Lee Jones. Warners had by then taken over from Columbia Records as the principal fount of sophistication in pop, and a lot of that was down to Waronker’s artist-centric A&R policy. He was a real old-school music guy, in it for the long haul, interested in quality over novelty—a man for his time, as the industry struggled to counter the global slump in sales that had turned the end of the seventies into a mire.
If indeed that mythical siren was what he was looking for, he found it in Rickie Lee Jones, a blonde waif of a neo-beatnik from the palpitating heart of LA’s hipster scene. She was talented, gawky, wayward, and wore a beret. She smoked cheroots. She had benefited from all the dubious endowments of the itinerant hippie childhood and was the very definition of the expression “footloose.” And you could hear in her massive breakout hit, “Chuck E.’s in Love,” a kind of ditzy jazz-spiritedness that might parlay well into the highly evolved studio-production values in which Warner Bros. had invested so much in recent times. She was soulful, all right; she was vulnerable as cobwebs. And, framed with just the right degree of delicacy and dry candor, she would appeal to sophisticated tastes.
“Chuck E.’s” is charming, of course: a syncopated, swinging, elusively warm mumble of a record, big on heart, but equally big on Waronker’s (and his co-producer Russ Titelman’s) fabled production translucency. That entire debut album stands to this day as a minor classic of the kind of pre-digital close-miked technical perfection that made the LA sound of its period really sing. The production invited you to smile and feel warmth. But Rickie Lee’s voice made you shiver.
We’re all different, and we all have our own projections of how things really are. But for me the very center of the album, and therefore of the entire Rickie Lee oeuvre, is not “Chuck E.’s” or the tragic epic of lonesome inconsolability “Company” but “The Last Chance Texaco,” which drifts into your presence on wistfully strummed minor chords on acoustic guitar and then stalls into silence a little over four minutes later like an expired engine.
It is among the very greatest car-metaphor songs ever written and sung. You’d have to be made of something very stern and innately unresponsive not to be transfixed and perhaps a little humbled by this achingly sad failure to be straightforward about things.
The song is ostensibly a description not of the motive power of an automobile but of its familiar tendency to break down, the certainty that its fuel will run out, the unassailable truth that batteries die, and the creeping knowledge that rust will eat underpinnings until bits fall off. And yet . . . And yet there is always one last Texaco gas station, offering one last chance to get the old heap bodged back on the road—and the temptation to pull up on to that forecourt is impossible to resist, despite the sure knowledge in your breast that, this time, the game really is up. It’s over. Finished.
She’s talking about relationships, of course.
But she sings from the very bottom of her well of feeling, her high, keening, boyish wisp of a voice creeping out at first and barely enunciating the words—no one has ever rolled syllables around in her mouth with such a combination of hunger and suspicion—responding only to the pulses of emotion within her body. The music is sophisticated, tasteful, melancholy; the voice is raw vulnerability and very little else, for all its huge dynamic range and tensile strength. And at the end, she squats down on the edge of the forecourt among the weeds and tires, half in and half out of the light, and watches other, more reliable cars speed past her and vanish into the dusk, going about their business.
“Niiiiiiaaaaaoww,” she goes. “Niiiiiiiiiiiiaaaaaooooowwww.”
STEELY DAN: “HEY NINETEEN”
MCA Records, 1980
There’s another kind of sophistication: let’s call it “a sense of irony that runs so deep it no longer knows what sincerity is or what purpose it serves or how it feels to actually feel it.” In fact it can’t get it up for sincerity at all. But it can watch. In the case of “Hey Nineteen,” it’s an aging hipster—the former “dandy of Gamma Chi”—watching a nineteen-year-old girl dancing to ’Retha Franklin at a party, as if that is all he has left to connect him to the non-ironical realness of the world as he possibly once experienced it.
“She don’t remember the Queen of Soul.”
The Steely Dan joke has grown comfortably old without straining itself. Everyone’s easy about where Steely Dan is at now, ain’t they, now that Steely Dan are old too? Less of a rock band than a high-concept exercise in sophisticated, multi-level irony, no? After all, the Dan were only slightly more of a “band” back in 1972 in California when they first appeared to be one, than they were eight years later when “Hey Nineteen” bobbed so hygienically out of the shower cubicle of their seventh album, Gaucho (still half a decade shy of the widespread adoption of digital compact disc but recorded, for the most part, with OCD-ish proto-digital cleanliness in NYC), a band in name and more or less in conception, but in reality not a band at all. In fact after 1974 Steely Dan were not even pretending to be a band, and were quite content to be recognized as a conjuring trick performed by a pair of darkling sixties hipster-nerds who’d met at “liberal arts” college: Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. What a pair. They liked modern jazz a lot, and they thought there was a lot to be said for reflecting sardonically upon the layered superficialities of American materialism, as if they loved it all really. And in a way, they did love it really. In a way. In the same way that you love the bits about yourself that you hate the most.
So naturally Americans bought in at face value. And why wouldn’t they? The Dan started out sounding like a smooth West Coast pop operation but they evolved very rapidly, with the deployment of tricky jazz chords, supra-articulate guitar solos, and drummers who can really swing, into a generically slippery high-end rock band and then into the most perfectly buffed example of deluxe jazz-funkified studio art ever to be experienced on expensive hi-fi. Why wouldn’t you get from “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” the idea that all American lives, whether affluent or not, have the potential to be low lives? Huh?
Naturally, that neurotic technical perfectionism plus the narcotics and the industrial-strength hipster cynicism put a terrible strain on Becker and Fagen’s relationship, and it all came to grief in 1981. But for the best part of a decade Steely Dan’s was the best-kept secret joke in American music. And the funniest thing about it was that, even if you didn’t get the joke—even if you, the listener, were oblivious of the game being played and you took the Dan’s oblique songwriting strategies at FM radio face value—as a classy pop soundtrack studio-crafted for deluxe people—then you could still feel worldly as you listened. And that was all because of Donald Fagen’s voice, which was about as full of spontaneity and joy as a tapir nursing a headache in a shed.
He hooted and he sneered and the arrangement of the skinflaps around his larynx (not to mention the moisture content of his sinuses) ensured that no note ever went unsmeared. It was a sort of anti-cologne, Fagen’s voice. It splashed human corruptibility across the polished surfaces of Steely Dan’s music and ensured that no one ever came away from a Steely Dan record feeling anything less than the million dollars that they rather wished they hadn’t left behind by mistake in a plastic holdall in the wrong room in a motel on the beat-up side of town.