This was a pretty amazing show...for me the second time around but just as powerful & moving. Jerry, you'll be so proud of me - not ONE tear! I watched it with my Dad while I was taping it at his house...this was significant for me as we have shared so much good music together, he showing me an obscure Irving Berlin song or a clever Larry Hart lyric, and me playing Joni for him. Even if we don't share a specific passion, we both know that music, that creative art, is VITAL.
Like Chris said so well, this kind of broadcast validates that WE know what so many don't, or won't take the time to get, and it makes me very special to know all of you. And of course I fell in love all over again with this amazing incredible woman. My wife's uncle in Madison WI sent me this e-mail immediately after the show ended. I have to share it: "I just finished watching the PBS American Masters bio on Joni MItchell. It was a very good music bio, which wove her music and her life experiences together very effectively. And for Joni that is of course the only way to understand her music. As much as you appreciate and understand Joni and her music, you can't quite understand what it was like to go through the societal experiences and hear her music contemporaneously. I liked the PBS show a great deal mostly because it helped me recapture the sense of what I was going though as each of her albums came out from 1967 through 1994. Since I am roughly the same age, much of what she struggled with at each stage resonated with me and what I was going through. I also learned a great deal about her jazz experiences, which only made me appreciate her more, as I become increasingly interested in jazz artists from the 50s and 60s, including Mingus, Monk, Davis and such. But most of all, I came away from the TV show feeling that there really are no modern counterparts to the singer-songwriters of that era. There are good solo artists who write good songs with intelligent lyrics; but there is something missing...maybe the paring away of the layers of the onion, as Joni described it. The show and the music created more than a sense of nostalgia for me; they triggered some very real and very immediate feelings that were co-mingled with the remembered feeling triggered by the songs. The result was some perspective on the intervening 35 years and what has happened to me. That is all we can ask of art, I think. I came away feeling that Joni Mitchell rnaks even higher in the pop music pantheon than I had previously thought, and I had thought a great deal of her. " Bob
