William (AKA Willy the Shake) asked me to repost this because it didn't make it into the Joni-Only digest. Les assures me it's not a censorship issue. ====================== "Joni Mitchell's Four Periods", an essay for the Internet community ======================
Contrary to popular opinion, I believe Joni Mitchell's recording career should be divided into four periods so far, not three. 1. Early Portraits 2. Master Storyteller 3. Intellect Engaged 4. In Pain No More --- I apologize in advance for the amateur psychology contained presented here. If one finds this kind of thing offensive, one is invited to delete it, unread. Joni Mitchell is a person, of course, and I respect that very much, but reviewers have always been allowed a certain amount of latitude. As you will see, I've taken considerable liberty with mine. "And so, I sit up here, the critic." (1) --- In historical context, here's my argument. From the beginning, Joni was an artist. As a child, she sang and painted. Her Mom developed her intellect and discipline. At 9, her backbone was twisted up with polio. She underwent "the application of scalding compresses to her legs. The compresses were then removed, bringing the raw skin to the brink of blistering. Many doctors would later question the efficacy of this method, believing that its most lasting effect was not the physiological but psychological: the memory of the searing pain." (2) To escape the pain she took refuge in art. In the next passage from Karen O'Brien's book the emphasis is mine. "She'd been sent a colouring book to keep her occupied; the pictures were of old-fashioned English carol *singers*, with the *lyrics* printed alongside. Joan used cotton swabs - stained purple from the gentian violet used to treat her mouth ulcers - to *colour the illustrations*." (3) I am sure that Karen did not notice when she wrote her book how much is in those two sentences. Joni's whole career is right there. Nine-year-old Joan was meditating on singing, lyrics, and painting to offset her pain. It's all right there, at nine years old. Joan, nicknamed "Joni", evolved into a teenaged performer then began playing in coffee houses. As an art college student she obviously had tons of undeveloped talent but couldn't raise the dues to become a unionized nightclub singer. Her career was deadlocked. Then came Kelly/Kilauren. Joni kept an enormous and painful secret; she kept her daughter a secret from her parents. Ultimately, there was only one solution for her; she gave up Kelly/Kilauren for adoption. She must have been in severe anguish. She coped exactly as she did when she was nine. Joni meditated on singing, lyrics, and painting to offset her pain. Carrying an unbearable secret compelled Joni to become the exact opposite of a secret-keeper. She became the epitome of, the very embodiment of, the overtly open poet. I believe that withholding information was so disturbing that it empowered her to compensate by beautifully saying what was left. "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away..."(4) It was impossible to express a single secret to her mother, but she became a vividly gifted lyricist, expressing everything else to the whole English speaking world. "In the beginning," Joni said, "I had a soprano voice so everyone compared me to Baez. I'd written a couple of songs but I just decided that the only way that I was going to be able to differentiate myself from any other of the singers was to have original material."(5) When others picked up on the quality of the early songs, some were covered by others in the coffeehouse circuit. A few, like "Both Sides, Now", had lives as a singles on the radio way before Joni had a recording contract. "The cover versions of her songs had inevitably brought interest from the recording industry, but the offers were far from irresistible: 'Record companies offered me terrible slave labour deals in the beginning and I turned them down. I turned down [independent folk label] Vanguard. They wanted three albums a year or something. In the folk tradition, they come and stick a mike on the table in front of you, and they collect it in an hour and that's the album. And that output - I already saw Buffy [Saint-Marie] struggling under the weight of it. So I thought, no way.'" (6) She hired Elliot Roberts as her manager and apparently, assigned to him the task of getting the "right" deal. He said, ".... It was a transitional period in society and in history and you either *got* it or you didn't get it. We had to search for people who got it and once we did and found them, we found that there were an awful lot of them but they were just either underground or just coming [up], society was just changing, the long-hairs were just coming in, the war was just becoming a major issue, civil rights were [in] transition... we didn't have a niche yet, there was a very small underground, [Greenwich] Village, everyone had their little quaint, Bohemian areas, but there were very few forums for artists like Joan or for poetry or poets." (7) So Elliot kept looking for an understanding and flexible company. Karen noted, "Major labels like Columbia - an obvious choice given that it was home to Bob Dylan - and RCA turned him down."(8) This next bit is crucial to understanding what releasing records means to Joni. "Electra had another chance to sign Joni but again opted out. Danny Fields, an Electra A&R man, had urged the company to take her on. Electra's high profile and acclaimed roster of folk-rock and neo-folk artists seemed to hold out the promise of fame and fortune - until, says Fields, Joni asked to design her own album covers. The Electra art department refused and the corporate hierarchy supported the decision. 'They said, no way. Our art department does the covers. You write the songs, you sing the songs. That's as far as it goes,' Fields recalled."(9) "Elliot Roberts flew out to California armed with twenty of Mitchell's songs - almost all of the material that would later appear on her first two albums, including 'Both Sides, Now', 'Chelsea Morning', 'Michael From Mountains', 'That Song About The Midway', 'I Had A King', and 'I Don't Know Where I Stand'. He didn't have to do much persuading: 'Those are some of the greatest songs in history. How could you not hear that and go, 'I'd take a risk on that person'? And that's really what it was... the songs spoke for themselves literally, they really did.' The success of the cover versions of Mitchell's songs had also put Roberts in a strong bargaining position and he was able to negotiate an almost unprecedented concession, particularly for a new artist; his client was given complete artistic control over her albums, ranging from the cover art to sleeve notes and musical content: 'That was the hard part. They were not used to anyone saying, 'It has nothing to do with the money, we need creative control.' We had a long-term goal, Joan had a long-term goal and knew how her record should sound. She hadn't learned the craft yet but she knew she was going to. It was new and a bit different for [Warners] to give up control but they could see that times were changing drastically... Mo [Ostin] was an innovative man, he did the same for Hendrix and Van Morrison and Van Dyke Parks in that era, where he let them have pretty much creative control. No one understood the music, there were all these young kids, ... [the major labels] understood that there was a whole new generation and they looked a lot different [from] the generations they had previously been selling music to.'" (10) She naively and rightfully saw the albums as art projects. Each one a whole. With the early albums, her palette of colors was with words and open tunings on acoustic guitar. On the debut album, "Song To A Seagull", Joni plays guitar almost exclusively. Later, her new palette was different instruments, including dulcimer and a fully-exploited piano. The first period I'll call "Early Portraits". The lyrics were largely about personal reflection or portraits of a single person. The characters, like "Nathan LaFraneer", were usually set in isolation, not in interaction. In the second period, "Master Storyteller", she rendered exquisitely detailed stories and worked with a larger palette of players and layers. The stories were often about love engaged, entangled, dissolving, or disassembled. She included "found" objects like the Burundi warrior drummers. She consciously sought out a jazz-rock band then recruited particular players who had been innovators from Miles Davis's work. The "Master Storyteller" period includes an long, unbroken string of brilliant and innovative albums that no solo Beatle has yet matched. Her collaborators pushed her musically, taking her albums far beyond the beautiful-chick-with-a-guitar clichi to which she is forever bound in the public's eye. The third period, "Intellect Engaged", saw her create 'thinking-woman' takes on poverty, famine, AIDS, and the myriad collection of what the modern world considers problems. Joni had come to an uneasy but long-lasting truce with her secrets. She often reflected on irony. Her main collaborator during this period, her long-time husband Larry Klein, brought a cool reserve and technical polish to these albums. These are very much studio creations; she commissioned countless sax solos, and moved them around as desired. This period was characterized by guest vocals from artists who happened to be renting studio time down the hall. As if the "kiln" had cool, each project took longer to "fire" than the last. The third phase was nearing an end when the divorce with Larry was happening and Turbulent Indigo was being formed in 1994. Divorce is never easy. Ripe to revisit her own pain, Joni immediately became inspired by a tabloid article and wrote about the societal misery inflicted upon unwed mothers in a bygone era. Kelly/Kilauren was in the foreground again. The third and fourth eras overlap but they are very different. In my opinion, 'hits' and 'misses' were the beginning of the fourth phase, "In Pain No More". Gone is the studied art work. Instead of taking months to paint cover art for 'hits', she used the first pun that popped into her head- a person who has been "hit" by a car. For "misses", she decided that mooning the viewer was a good way to express her distain for a public who had ignored her bravest work. The photo shoot for both albums was done in one day, as if on a single roll of film. The sudden, even reckless packaging decisions are certainly a break with the studied and endless polishing of the "Intellect Engaged" phase. The person who worked and reworked "Turbulent Indigo" is not the same person who pasted up deliberately skewed, misshapen letters for her greatest hits cover. Known in the past to take deliberate pains with sequencing an album, she swiftly, even recklessly, chose the cuts for "Misses" in a single day. In the past, she revisited canvases over and over again, tweaking and daubing. Not now. The perfectionism is gone. Joni delights now in delegating and making decisions quickly. The greatest hits collection helped the press and the public "put a frame around her" so to speak, to see her in the context of artists who have made rich contributions. Joni's career began to get recognition again as an innovator. By September 1996, she had won Billboard Magazine's Century Award, a Grammy for Turbulent Indigo, and was reluctantly inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame. To steal a line from Shawn Colvin, Joni was "knee deep in accolades". I suggest that something eased inside her. Perhaps more confident than ever, in December 1996, she suddenly granted lots of interviews and talked at length about an old topic that was suddenly open for public discussion: Joni was searching for Kelly/Kilauren. Joni was looking to stop running, to right a wrong, to move on, to get past the pain. Next came the album, "Taming The Tiger", and the rapid-fire approach continued. She invented a spirited carnival sound in "Harlem In Havana", swallowed Donald Freed's words for "The Crazy Cries Of Love", and threw a drink in "Lead Balloon". The cohesiveness of the lyrics from the "Master Storyteller" phase has been replaced with broad brush strokes. Taking a scattershot approach to modern ills, Joni swipes attorneys, rapists, sunshine, pawnbrokers, and astronauts in "No Apologies". Ironically, she even insults those who provided reefer in the old days, fearing that "Drug lords" are buying up the banks. The old brilliance shone through though. Read as text, this lyric beautifully expresses a new kinship, possibly a reunion. 'This is really something. People will be envious, But our roles aren't clear, So we musn't rush. Still, we're burning brightly, Clinging like fire to fuel. I'm grinning like a fool. Stay in touch. We should stay in touch. Oh! Stay in touch In touch Part of this is permanent. Part of this is passing. So we must be loyal and wary Not to give away too much Till we build a firm foundation.' (11) Joni's secret daughter was revealed to the world in an AP story on March 20, 1997. The reunion brought a resolution to her pain of giving up her Kelly/Kilauren. She was relieved of hiding from her mother. Pain-free, her interest in writing began to wane. Who needs catharsis if you don't have a problem? Joni has often said, "I sing my sorrow and I paint my joy." Here's the proof. Joni decided not to write for the next project. She hired Vince Mendoza to write new arrangements. She even delegated to Larry Klein the joy of picking songs. "Both Sides Now" was a critical success. Still under contract and possibly without the 'fire in her belly' to write new songs, suddenly her first-ever sequel sounded like a good idea. The Internet community is wondering if "the next one in the nest will glitter for them so." (12) The audience tapes of the "Both Sides Now" tour clearly show that Vince has done some more wonderful arrangements. My personal favorite is the upcoming "Judgement Of The Moon And Stars, (Ludwig's Tune)". Even if she never writes another word, she's given the world so much superlative work that her place in history is assured..... Not that she was aiming to secure a place in history. She was just working through her pain. Jim L'Hommedieu June 02, 2002 Sources ------------ 1. "For The Roses", JM 2. "Shadows and Light: The Definitive Biography", Karen O'Brien, Virgin Books Ltd, London 2001, p 24 3. Ibid, p 25 4. King James Bible, Job 1:21 5. "Shadows and Light: The Definitive Biography", p 48 6. Ibid, pp 63-64 7. Ibid, p 67 8. Ibid, p 66 9. Ibid, pp 66-67 10. Ibid, pp 68-69 11. "Stay In Touch", JM 12. "For The Roses", JM 13. "California", JM Thanks to Stephanie Morrison for getting me inspired. Thanks for the research assistance go out to Deb Messling, Brenda of JMDL, Jerry Notaro, Catherine McKay, and Vince Lavieri. As always thanks to Les Irvin, Jim Johanson, and the late Wally Breese for hosting the articles and discography (consulted but not noted, eh?) at jmdl.com & jonimitchell.com. All glories to Joni, always. "Will ya take me as I am? Will ya take me as I am? Will ya? Will ya take me as I am?" (13)
