163: Joni Mitchell, ‘For Free’

Joni Mitchell — ‘For Free’

The singer-songwriters who emerged in the late 1960s were the most honest of artists – candor was their stock in trade, intimate angst their grist, true confession their mode of expression. They were among the greatest artists of our times, Bob and Paul and James and Joni and Laura, as well as Neil and Cat and Jackson and myriad others.

Every one of them made a career of exposing himself to us hordes of devotees, whether at the mass festivals and concerts or (my preference) in the privacy of my room, just me and him. Him baring his soul, sharing his pain and insecurities and heartbreaks, me lapping up every word from this older brother. They were all just a little older than me: seven years, seven years, six months, five years, one year, three years, and four months, respectively. I beat Jackson Browne into the world by one month, but he was from California (“the most world-weary 16-year old in the universe”). It was from them that I learned the game and applied the names.

All of them suffered from their stardom. You don’t even need to scratch the surface to find songs bemoaning the isolation of idolization, their disaffection from the spotlight. James’ ‘Hey, Mister, That’s Me Up on the Jukebox’ or the harrowing ‘Daddy’s All Gone’; Paul’s ‘Homeward Bound’; the Band’s ‘Stage Fright’; or our Song of The Week, Joni Mitchell’s ‘For Free’, from her third album, “Ladies of the Canyon” (1970). She was just breaking through, becoming recognized, ‘stoking the star-making machinery behind a popular song’.

Then, and now, I sympathized with the exposure, the nakedness, the price of fame and fortune. Joni: “[R]emember the days when you sat and made up tunes for yourself and played in small clubs where there was still some contact and when people came up and said they loved a song, and you were really glad they loved it. After a while, when people come up, it begins to sound hollow.”

You may not have noticed, but I’ve begun walking through Joni Mitchell’s albums in order, as is befitting an anal-obsessive flower-power baby boomer of arrested development. One song from each album, that’s the mandate. But it’s not as easy as it sounds. You see, the first album (1968) was very much a unified whole, and our choice of ‘Cactus Tree’ there seemed pretty representative of the wide-eyed wonder the innocent felt at her newly discovered big city independence. The sophomore album (“Clouds”, 1969) was also rather uniform, and ‘I Don’t Know Where I Stand’ a good example of the disillusion of broken sophomoric relationships.

But “Ladies of the Canyon”, like life, is multifaceted and variegated and confusing. It’s a transitional album, one with fine songs and lots of admirable experimentation – some bullseyes, some flops. Joni was growing in leaps and bounds both personally and artistically, developing her arsenal of musical tools and creative sensibility. We all know what would come next: “Blue” (1970), one of the finest works to come out of that very fruitful time, mature and focused and profoundly emotionally indelible. But we get ahead of ourselves.

“Ladies of the Canyon” in comparison is fragmented, disjointed. Songs 1 and 3 belong to the past: ‘Morning, Morgantown’ is a hippie-happy piece that would have fit better on the first album; ‘The Conversation’ would have been comfortably at home on “Clouds” musically and thematically (someone else’s guy visiting her flat, an intimate but a bad choice, a soul buddy she’ll never have, full of love and regret and compulsive attraction). Even the title song is a narrative of our wide-eyed innocent, having moved now from Greenwich Village to Laurel Canyon. What distinguishes it most from the first two albums is the very engaging recording itself, the clarity and directness of the vocal, the lovely game she plays with the warbling multitracked harmonies as an expression of this chorus of canyon belles. If the sound palette on the first two albums was dry, here you can feel her breath. She’s exercising her ability to employ studio technique to serve her artistic vision.

Joni Mitchell, James Taylor

Songs 5 (‘Willy’, i.e. Graham Nash), 6 (‘The Arrangement’), 7 (‘Rainy Night House’), 8 (‘The Priest’) and 9 (‘Blue Boy’) are a string of relationship-intense romans a clef. I have Katherine Monk’s biography of Joni on my shelf waiting to be read (as soon as I finish the bios of Ella and Laura –  is there a pattern here?), so I assume I’ll learn just whose mother went to Florida and which rock star was the blue boy and at what airport she met the priest with the hands. You see, Joni was famously pairing up with the entire pantheon of artists of the time (JT, CSN&Y), and chronicling the most intimate of details for each. That’s ok. I’ll settle for the songs, regardless of the identity of the object. What’s interesting about these five songs is that she plays piano for the first time on record on four of them. Joni’s piano songs and her guitar songs are different musically and conceptually. The piano lends itself to more expansive explorations, and we already hear some extended instrumental passages precursing her forays into jazz and the orchestral vision that comes to fruition in her other masterpiece album, “Court and Spark”. But to tell the truth, none of these five is a real keeper. Perhaps her heart was in the relationship more than her head was in the art.

Joni Mitchell, David Crosby

But then there are these four other very individual, memorable songs. Three of them, the last three on the album, are among her best-known and best loved. ‘The Circle Game’ is perhaps the ultimate sophisticated post-folk singalong campfire song, all about life and maturing and gushy and optimistic and nostalgic and—I wish I could disparage it more, but it’s a really good song. I know. I played and sang it at a thousand campfires and everyone held hands and swayed and got all misty-eyed. And ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, the charming, disarming paean to organic farming and who-gives-a-damn breakups, four quick verses full of good will and good spirits and good music, from the irresistible shoop-shoop to the endearing acrobatics of her vocal in the last phrase. It almost abuts, after a notably short pause, the iconic ‘Woodstock’, the album’s closing piece. The jarring juxtaposition between the levity and the gravity is brilliant.

James Taylor, Joni Mitchell

I have too much to say about ‘Woodstock’ to toss it off in a sentence or two. You probably already know that Joni wasn’t at the festival (her handlers kept her away because the crowd situation was out of control), but her imagined portrayal quickly became an anthem for the festival, as recorded by her paramours Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (who were there). It’s quite a remarkable song, different from the other three ‘hits’ in that you can’t get it all in one listening. There’s lots of nuance and complexity and depth there, much more so than in the other three. Yet they’re all fully realized, time-tried, resilient and loved.

So of course out of these four standout songs from Joni’s third album, for our Song of The Week we’ll pick The Other, while neither a rarity or an obscurity perhaps less heard: ‘For Free’, or as it is sometimes referred to, ‘He Played Real Good for Free’.

In 1970, Joni was becoming a star, playing larger venues, gaining a public profile, and being forced to deal with celebrity. Not only the isolation, but also the irony of the contract with her listeners. On the one hand, she’s marketing the intimacies of her life. On the other hand, she’s uncomfortable with it. One could say, ‘Joni, no one’s forcing you to go out there.’ Laura Nyro shied away. Dylan said ‘Fuck You’. James retreated further into drugs. Joni crafted songs about it.

Joni, on becoming a star: “Affection like that usually doesn’t come without some kind of intimacy, like in a one-on-one relationship. So I thought, you better know who you’re grinning at up here. And then I began to unveil more and more of my inner conflicts and feelings…[But] it became harder and harder to sing these intimate songs at rock festivals.”

And that would become her genius, to take those innermost feelings and craft them into works of art. The song has its weaknesses—the self-conscious artiness of ‘jew-ells’, ‘the walking green’, the mixed metaphor of ‘velvet curtain calls’. Even the clarinet at the end. But she pulls it off with her candor. We love you, Joni.

It’s a great song to sing. I’ve done so myself, and it’s a winner. Here’s Joni doing a fine live version from 1970.  Here she is singing it through a crazy heckler and then telling a story about herself and the song and her naivete. And here she is with her then-boyfriend James Taylor in a joint performance from 1970, James with his characteristic hilarious droll humor and uncharacteristically out-of-tune guitar. Here’s her mentor David Crosby singing it in the 1973 Byrds reunion album.

And here’s the original. Sit back, count the blessings your own life has been graced with, and enjoy it. For free.

I slept last night in a good hotel, I went shopping today for jewels.
The wind rushed around in the dirty town and the children let out from the schools.
I was standing on a noisy corner waiting for the walking green–
Across the street he stood and he played real good on his clarinet, for free.

Now me I play for fortunes and those velvet curtain calls.
I’ve got a black limousine and two gentlemen escorting me to the halls.
And I play if you have the money or if you’re a friend to me.
But the one man band by the quick lunch stand, he was playing real good, for free.

Nobody stopped to hear him, though he played so sweet and high.
They knew he had never been on their T.V., so they passed his music by.
I meant to go over and ask for a song, maybe put on a harmony…
I heard his refrain as the signal changed. He was playing real good, for free.

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141: Joni Mitchell, ‘I Don’t Know Where I Stand’

Joni Mitchell, 1970 (Photo by Martin Mills/Getty Images)

Joni Mitchell, ‘I Don’t Know Where I Stand’

“Hey, how come it’s been so long since you’ve written about Joni Mitchell?” said the note I got from reader J.M. this week. Turns out he’s right – I’ve written about her only once, and that about a relatively minor song from a relatively minor album: ‘Cactus Tree’, from her very first venture, “Songs to a Seagull”. Well, one can’t pay too much attention to Joni Mitchell, the unchallenged poetess laureate of popular music, so methodical we are going to visit her second, the much-more commercially successful “Clouds”.  And of course we’ll go for a lesser-known song, ‘I Don’t Know Where I Stand’.

“Clouds” is an album I don’t listen to often, populated by songs I know too well (‘Chelsea Morning’, ‘Both Sides Now’), songs I find inaccessible (‘Tin Soldier’, ‘Roses Blue’, ‘The Fiddle and the Drum’), and a number I find attractive but not overwhelming (‘The Gallery’, ‘Songs to Aging Children Come’). Still, I gave it a few serious relistenings, and reached the same old conclusion: damn, she’s one fine artist.

Self-Portrait

Even the songs I’m less drawn to – you look at them seriously and you find them brimming with impeccable craftsmanship, passion, humor, elegance, intelligence, wisdom.

Joni’s not a poetess, she’s a singer-songwriter. Poetry is a medium in which the words themselves are the materials. For a long time now we’ve related to poetry as words on the page, even though it was once a performance medium. Songs are a combination of words and melody and harmony and arrangement and recording and performance. The lyrics, fine as they may be, are not conceived to exist in a context devoid of at least some of those other elements.

Joni Mitchell, 1969

What about Dylan? Dylan’s a genius. He’s written some damn good prose poetry (the liner notes to “Bringing It All Back Home” and “John Wesley Harding” are both well worth spending a lot of time on). His lyrics are the standard by which serious lyrics are measured. But they’re not poetry. They’re an essential part of a complex called Song. Don’t try to sell ‘Chimes of Freedom’ on the page. It wasn’t written for the page, it was written to be nasaled and shouted and banged on the guitar.

What about Leonard Cohen? Well, he was a published poet before he became a singer/songwriter. “Suzanne Takes You Down” was from his first book, “Parasites of Heaven”. From my vague memory, there are discrepancies between the lyrics and the poems, but who cares? An exception to prove the rule, and let’s get back to the fairer Canadian.

Joni’s sometimes deceptive, because her songs are so often so darn pretty, and singable, and full of hooks and melodies and all that stuff that makes pop songs so attractive. But if we look beyond that, we’ll see just how much of an artisan she is. Each and every song is a carefully crafted work, the product of a mistressful artist who happens to possess a magnanimous soul.

Leonard Cohen (left) and Joni Mitchell, Newport Folk Festival, 1967

Let’s take for example “The Gallery” describing her painter-lover, three stanzas and a coda, a narrative of the curve of their relationship, deftly employing an extended metaphor. It’s clever and a half, even when forced (When I first saw your gallery/I liked the ones of ladies/Then you began to hang up me/You studied to portray me). Heck, she was only 26. But there are also lyrics that begin to transcend the cute and the clever and the honest: I was left to winter here/While you went west for pleasure/And now you’re flying bock this way/Like some lost homing pigeon/They’ve monitored your brain, you say/And changed you with religion. Now, that’s interesting! It’s also emotionally naked and a bit frighteningly honest.

They say that Joni’s intimates (and there were apparently many) were frequently shaken by the directness of the references to the details their lives. I’m no expert on Joni’s bio, but I was raised in the school of critical reading that says “I don’t really give a hoot about the relationship to the artist’s life, the work either stands on its own terms or it doesn’t.” I’m perfectly content to let my imagination wander through the very rich and evocative and intriguing and convincing world that Joni creates.

“Clouds” is a major step past “Songs to a Seagull”. Even ‘Chelsea Morning’, the song most reminiscent of the ebullient excitement of her new life in The City is more refined musically and artistically than anything on the first album. It’s a virtuoso performance vocally and instrumentally, showcasing among other elements her use of open tuning.

Guitars are usually tuned in such a way that you need to press down on strings to create a chord, but there are a variety of non-standard tunings make all six strings accord harmonically into, for example, a major chord. This enables the musician to strum more vigorously, to play a series of chords by simply barring the neck rather than fingering chords. This gives different voicings to the chords, including a distinct resonance from all open strings. It’s often used on slide guitars and in the blues; Keith and Brian Jones and The Allmans and even Dylan have used it in rock; but Joni uses it exclusively.

She’s also a stunning pianist, though these first two albums use only guitar (one cut excepted). I won’t be spoiling anything if I say that these two albums comprise her freshman year. Next will come “Ladies of the Canyon”, a treasure chest of widely varied songs thematically and stylistically. Less consistent perhaps, more exploratory. And then comes–yeah, you knew it before I said it–“Blue”. But we get ahead of ourselves.

Joni Mitchell, 1970 (Photo by Martin Mills/Getty Images)

There’s a lot of emotional growth here in “Clouds” as well. ‘Both Sides Now’, the iconic paean to disillusionment, is the underbelly of all that manic elation.  I have trouble with the song today. It’s hackneyed for me, it’s been performed to death. But truisms are true. Herbie Hancock won a Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo on his treatment of the song in his tribute album to Joni, “River: The Joni Letters” (Thom Jurek says it “feels like it is being played from the inside out”). Note also Wayne Shorter’s contribution. So who cares if I have problems with the song?

Joni chooses to open “Clouds” with ‘Tin Soldier’, a love song on paper, a dirge in performance. There are songs about Viet Nam (‘The Fiddle and The Drum’), mental illness (‘I Think I Understand’), the lunacy of the nouveau-religious (‘Roses Blue’) and a quasi-traditional folk/art gem that defies description (‘Songs to Aging Children Come’)

One expression of that new maturity is our Song of The Week, ‘I Don’t Know Where I Stand’. It’s perhaps less of a showpiece in terms of craftsmanship, but it’s harrowingly honest, and it’s beautiful.

She has strong feelings towards him. She wants to express them, but she’s unsure of herself. I come back to one of my recurrent thoughts about Joni, quoting myself from SoTW 106: “Much of the little I understand of the female psyche I’ve learned from Joni Mitchell. I don’t take her to be emblematic of Womanhood. She’s an individual, with a unique vision of the world, but one that is profoundly female. She has thoughts and feelings and desires and disinclinations that seem to me engendered in that other side of the fence, visions and versions that would never cross my testeronic landscape.”

‘I Don’t Know Where I Stand’ could never be written by a male. But it sure does give me a glimpse of illumination of that most profound of mysteries, what goes on inside a woman. Perhaps the persona knows not where she stands, but the artist certainly does.

Funny day, looking for laughter and finding it there

Sunny day, braiding wild flowers and leaves in my hair

Picked up a pencil and wrote “I love you” in my finest hand

Wanted to send it, but I don’t know where I stand

Telephone, even the sound of your voice is still new

All alone in California and talking to you

And feeling too foolish and strange to say the words that I had planned

I guess it’s too early, ’cause I don’t know where I stand

Crickets call, courting their ladies in star-dappled green

Thickets tall, until the morning comes up like a dream

All muted and misty, so drowsy now I’ll take what sleep I can

I know that I miss you, but I don’t know where I stand

I know that I miss you, but I don’t know where I stand

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Tags: Bob Dylan, Both Sides Now, Chelsea Morning, Clouds, Herbie Hancock, I Don't Know Where I Stand, Joni Letters, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Song to a Seagull, The Gallery

106: Joni Mitchell, ‘Cactus Tree’

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Joni Mitchell, Nashville, 1969 (Photo: Rod Pennington)

I often judge the quality of my state of mind in inverse proportion to the size of my New CDs folder–the larger it’s grown, the higher my stress level. Right now there’s a debilitating 16 Mb in there. Ok, some of it I’ll never get to (the 10-CD set of the Kronos Quartet, some Brazilian pre-bossa nova pop compilations); some I really should (36 CDs by artists I’ll be seeing in two weeks at the Red Sea Jazz Festival); some I will just out of compulsiveness and contrariness (Meredith Monk’s ‘extended vocals’ – she’s won two Guggenheim Fellowships, a MacArthur “Genius” Award, and she makes Yoko Ono sound like Diana Krall; Uri Caine’s inexplicable but engaging reworking of Gustav Mahler’s Jewish themes in a free jazz setting replete with hazanut and Three Blind Mice); and some I actually enjoy (my new infatuation, a 40-year old alto sax player/composer named David Binney, with his cohort pianist Edward Simon).

But when those 16 Mb become just too overwhelming (the pressure! the pressure!) I sometimes take refuge in an old, familiar friend. Which is what I’ve been doing for the past few days, Joni Mitchell’s first album, “Song to a Seagull” (1968), especially the last song, ‘Cactus Tree’.

Don’t ask me why that song. Just because it’s beautiful music.

Rebellious young Joni Anderson left Saskatoon, Saskatchewan at 21 for Toronto, to become a folk singer. She became pregnant, gave the baby away for adoption, married a folk singer named Chuck Mitchell, and began playing around Detroitand the East Coast. A prolific songwriter even then, a number of her songs were picked up in 1967 by well-known folkies – Tom Rush (‘Urge for Going’), Judy Collins (‘Both Sides Now’, ‘Michael from Mountains’, ‘Chelsea Morning’), Buffy Saint-Marie (‘The Circle Game’), Fairport Convention (‘Eastern Rain’). In early 1967 her marriage dissolved, and she moved by herself toNew York City. David Crosby, recently expelled from The Byrds for overall weirdness, heard her singing in a club inCoconut Grove,Florida, and convinced lean and hungry Reprise Records to let him produce her in an acoustic album.

Joni Mitchell, ‘Urge for Going’, CBC, 1966

Joni Mitchell, ‘Eastern Rain’, England, 1967 Read more…

Tags: Bob Dylan, Cactus Tree, David Crosby, Dawntreader, I Had a King, Johnny Cash Show, Joni Mitchell, Marcie, Michael from Mountains, Nathan La Franeer, Night in the City, Pirate of Penance, Rod Pennington, Sisotowbell Lane, Song to a Seagull, Stephen Stills

SoTW 14: Woodstock, the event (Hebrew); Joni Mitchell, ‘Woodstock’ (in English)

Dear SoTW Fans,
For those non-Hebrew readers amongst you, I sincerely apologize for this week’s offering arriving in unintelligible gibberish. It just popped out that way, sorry, it won’t happen again. Probably.
A short summary:
40 years ago the Woodstock festival took place in upstate New York. I was there. I got wet and muddy and cranky and went back home after one night to listen to some of the same artists on my headphones.
Have a hygienic week,
Jeff