Kearns Joni Mitchell

Every Album, Every Song
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78952-126-9
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

In her long career, Canadian songstress Joni Mitchell has been hailed as everything from a 1960s folk icon to 20th century cultural figure, artistic iconoclast to musical heroine, extreme romantic confessor to both outspoken commentator and lyrical painter. Eschewing commercial considerations, she simply viewed her trajectory as that of any artist serious about the integrity of their work. But whatever musical position she took, she was always one step ahead of the game, making eclectic and innovative music. Albums like The Ladies Of The Canyon, Blue, Hejira and Mingus helped define each era of the 1970s, as she moved from exquisitely pitched singer-songwriter material towards jazz. By the 1980s, her influence was really beginning to show via a host of imitators, many of them big names in their own right. He profound influence continues in popular music to this day.
This book revisits her studio albums in detail from 1968's Song to a Seagull to 2007's Shine, providing anecdote and insight into the recording sessions. It also includes an in-depth analysis both of her lyrics and the way her music developed stylistically over such a lengthy career, making this the most comprehensive book on this remarkable artist yet written.

Peter Kearns is an independent recording artist and writer. Since the '80s he has performed live as keyboardist or recorded with acts including New Zealand's Shona Laing, the UK's Judie Tzuke, and New Yorker John Tabacco, being half of the duo Tabacco & Kearns. He has released two solo albums. As a writer he's contributed to Witchdoctor.co.nz - New Zealand's technology and music website for grownups, and New Zealand Musician magazine. Joni Mitchell On Track is his third book for Sonicbond Publishing after books on Elton John and 10cc and Godley and Creme. He lives in Amberley, New Zealand.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kearns, Peter

Leseproben

Introduction

Write In Your Own Blood

A print of a colourful Joni Mitchell painting once hung on jazz legend Miles Davis’ bathroom wall. Mere weeks before his passing in 1991, he moved it to his bedside. In the weeks after, Joni produced a stirring Davis portrait in tribute, which, from an intuitive place of no-mind, rendered him in a kind of blue. Rumours of a musical collaboration between the two had circulated for years.

Uncertain whether Davis was keen on her music, Joni discovered only after his death that he preferred working on instrumentals. She would’ve gladly given him instrumental tracks to blow over. Davis’ opinion of her was, in fact, reverential. All of her albums were to be found in his collection. The combined respect Joni garnered not only from Davis, but her regular collaborator, jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter; the mighty composer Charles Mingus, and an ongoing list of jazz luminaries, was a virtually unequalled accomplishment for a recording artist operating ostensibly from a pop base outward.

To her, it was all music, and it was the quality of the music that mattered, not the arbitrary categorisation. Borderlines were non-existent. Music and painting were one. In interviews, she would often mix artistic metaphors, making it impossible to tell which medium she referred to. Throughout her recording career, she considered herself a painter first, but her mind was open to possibilities, her next move perpetually unpredictable.

Even at birth, all preparations were for a Robert John Anderson. The arrival of Roberta Joan on Sunday 7 November 1943 at Fort Macleod, Alberta Canada, changed everything. Her parents were Myrtle Anderson, a teacher, and William Anderson, an Air Force lieutenant and trumpet player. Music was established in the home early. At the age of seven, Joni wrote her first piece, a piano instrumental she called ‘Robin Walk’. Piano lessons came later, but a stern tutor who would rap her over the knuckles for playing by ear put a stop to further composition for a number of years.

Contracting polio at the age of ten, Joni was cared for at home for a year before recovering. As a result, she was restricted to never lifting anything heavier than five pounds. The disease was also responsible for hand weakness, eventually requiring the need to adopt alternative guitar tunings.

Moving a few times, the family eventually settled 600 miles from Fort Macleod, in Saskatoon (The bridge city), Saskatchewan, the place Joni thereafter considered her home town. By the age of twelve she’d developed a passion for art and poetry. When seen one day by her English teacher Mr Kratzman, pinning a painting on a school wall, he stopped her, saying, ‘If you can paint with a brush, you can paint with words’. But an epic poem she soon submitted – about a Mustang being chased and tamed – Kratzman flatly rejected, with the now-famous advice; ‘Write in your own blood’.

At sixteen, Joni wrote ‘The Fish Bowl’, an anti-fame poem titled out of sympathy for the famous couple, Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee, whose marriage misadventures had become ubiquitous magazine fodder.

The fishbowl is a world reversed

Where fishermen with hooks that dangle from the bottom up

Reel down their catch on gilded bait without a fight

Pike, pickerel, bass, the common fish

Ogle through distorting glass

See only glitter, glamour, gaiety

Fog up the bowl with lusty breath

Lunge towards the bait and miss

And weep for fortune lost

Envy the goldfish?

Why?

His bubble break ‘round the rim

While silly fishes faint for him and say

‘Oh, look there, he winked his eye at me’

A life-defining event occurred after Joni drew a Christmas card for a boy at school. She was in turn rewarded with a copy of the Lambert, Hendricks & Ross album, The Hottest New Group in Jazz. The vocal group’s adventurous take on the standards was to be a lifelong inspiration, Joni eventually claiming the album to be the only one on which she knew every song, including her own.

Just before a year’s attendance at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology at Calgary, she bought a baritone ukulele. Later, she taught herself guitar from a Pete Seeger instruction record. But not wanting to copy someone else’s style, she quickly abandoned the disc. Her first real gigs came in the form of a few months work in late 1963, performing for free at the art school coffee house, The Depression. After friend and folk singer, Eric Anderson, demonstrated open-G tuning, Joni slowly developed her own individual tuning style, which in performance often required her to re-tune for every song.

The art education itself was a disappointment. The professors were interested only in the abstract, while Joni was seeking traditional knowledge. She has maintained that more tutelage around her preferred areas of interest might’ve resulted in a life 100% devoted to painting.

In August 1964, she took a three-day train journey to the Mariposa Folk Festival in Ontario, where she saw fellow Saskatchewan singer/songwriter, Buffy Sainte-Marie, perform. This journey inspired Joni’s second song, ‘Day After Day’. She’d forgotten one piece written six months earlier, so she came to refer to the new song as her first. Years later she would claim ‘Urge For Going’ to be, if not the first, then at least the first she took seriously. In order to cover the musician’s union fees required to get gigs on the circuit, she took on a job in womenswear. Around this time she began writing songs at the rate of about four a week. In the fall, she spent several weeks gigging in the vibrant music hub of Yorkville, Toronto.

Fate stepped in in May 1965 when Joni met musician, Chuck Mitchell, at a shared gig at Toronto’s Penny Farthing coffeehouse. One month later they were married in Chuck’s parents’ back yard in Rochester, Detroit, to the strains of a string quartet.

Basing themselves in Detroit in summer 1966, they lived in Chuck’s fifth-floor apartment of the Verona building in Cass Corridor – a walk-up due to a busted elevator. They earned a living playing around the circuit as a duo; the show put together in a collage-like fashion. Chuck’s repertoire had a heavy Brechtian bent in contrast to Joni’s introspective songs of love-lost. Covers of folk artists like Gordon Lightfoot provided a middle ground. At Detroit’s Chess Mate blues and folk club, they shared some gigs with folk singer, Tom Rush. He convinced them to move to New York, securing the duo a two-week engagement at Greenwich Village’s Gaslight Cafe. Moving into a small apartment north of the village, they immersed themselves in the scene. But the pair disagreed on repertoire, and they separated within a year.

Joni had never thought combining some level of poetry with music was a possibility, considering the non-poetic lyrics of rock & roll songs. The exception was Chuck Berry, whose poetic imagery enlivened his songs. It wasn’t until Joni heard Bob Dylan’s ‘Positively 4th Street’ in late 1965 that a light bulb went off and she realised you could write about anything now. It was the song’s anger that struck her – ‘You’ve got a lotta nerve to say you are my friend’ – the kind of emotion most pop lyrics till then had insulated against. From that point on, Joni’s lyrics became more adventurous.

Travelling to the UK in August 1967, she conducted a short tour of clubs as a support act, commencing on Wednesday 23rd at London’s Marquee, leading to a September appearance at The Speakeasy where she opened for The Incredible String Band. Returning to the USA, she undertook a week of dates at Florida’s Gaslight Cafe at Coconut Grove, where on Friday 29 September she first encountered musician David Crosby. Freshly-flown from The Byrds, and in between serious projects, Crosby walked into the coffee house and was instantly floored by what he heard. Joni was singing many of the songs that would populate her first albums, including ‘Both Sides, Now’ which was already six months old. Crosby couldn’t believe there was anybody around that was that good. Joni’s act was by now finely-honed and she was ready for something.

That autumn she met her managers, Joel Dean and Elliot Roberts. After Reprise Records’ A&R representative Andy Wickham saw Joni perform, Roberts negotiated a deal, which set Joni on the path to Los Angeles and cutting her first album, Song to a Seagull.

Upon arrival in Los Angeles in late 1967, Joni moved in with David Crosby, who would drive her around in his Mercedes, The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour album as a soundtrack. At first put off by the dead pavements of a city that lived in automobiles, she was struck by how rural Laurel Canyon was despite its close proximity to the city. Its emancipation from the grid reminded her of Canadian lake neighbourhoods. The people were friendly, it was safe and no one locked their doors.

Many people took a shine to Joni. But it’s beyond this book’s scope to detail her romantic relationships any further than is necessary to outline a particular song. The focus is on the music. To reinforce her 1991 Boston Globe quote re music in general; ‘Too much...