It's taken me a long time to get round to assessing Blue. I
wrote
my first series of Joni album reviews in 2012. Today, prompted by a recent evening discussion of the album
at
a small theatre in Hampstead, London, and a second time seeing the
captivating
Rainee Blake's one-woman show at the Edinburgh Fringe, I'm fully engaged in the task.
In assessing Blue and the background to the making of the record, it's important to state - if it wasn't obvious from the material - that this was not an emotionally stable period of Joni's life.
The lines from California: "Will you take me as I am, strung out another man," were indicative of the insecurities underlying her creativity at this point.
One of the key characteristics of Joni Mitchell's music of
the late 1960s and early 70s was its emotional honesty. There were certainly lighter moments, and some of her early songs like The Circle Game have a child-like quality. The most intriguing songs, though, were the ones about women and men in unhappy relationships, or struggling to communicate. Joni's audience responded
to the deep sentiments expressed in songs such as Conversation
or TheArrangement (both from her previous album Ladies of the Canyon) in some ways because they were relatable to the issues in their own lives.
Ladies of the Canyon was an essential stepping stone to Blue, showing Joni it was OK to be open and honest about feelings of jealousy and romantic complication. The success of Ladies of The Canyon and the hit single Big Yellow Taxi gave her the confidence to keep pushing further into her own emotional drama.
On the back cover of the recent RSD vinyl album of outtakes and demos, Blue Highlights, is a quote from Joni about her mental state at the time.
"I felt exposed. I couldn't really be around people. I felt too vulnerable. I felt like everybody could see into me and see that I was suffering. I don't remember even why I was suffering so much. A lot of the album was written in that frame of mind."
It wasn't all doom and gloom. Joni also wrote upbeat love
songs and celebrated the joys of community. But with Blue, people tended to focus on the sadness, which is understandable. Taken as a whole, it is a sad album.
1970 was the pivotal year in the gestation of Blue. Joni won a Grammy award (Best Folk Performance) in early 1970 for her second record, Clouds. But as her fame grew, she lamented the lack of privacy and time she had to work on new songs uninterrupted.
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| Grammy winner, 1970 |
The words were different now and more personal, beginning on
Ladies of the Canyon with songs like
Willy (Graham Nash's nickname) that drew her listeners closer to her, wondering about the meaning behind these love letters.
Naively perhaps, she hadn't anticipated the scrutiny of her love life: "I felt that the music spoke for itself and the gossip was unimportant. I hang my laundry on the line when I write. People make judgements and it’s none of their business. It almost makes me decide not to write anything but fiction, but I have to do my thing.”
In January, Joni played in London, then decided to take the rest of the year off. After she finished recording Ladies of the Canyon, she said, "I need new things to say in order to perform, so there’s something in it for me.”
Graham Nash had proposed marriage, but Joni somehow saw this as
a compromise of her artistic freedom. She felt she owed it to previous less fortunate generations to go out and live life to the full. The domestic bliss Nash wrote about in
Our House became something to run away from as the relationship
grew more intense.
Joni had seen this coming; the male adoration
and the need for men to possess her. The song Cactus Tree on her first
album Song To A Seagull, contains the lyric:
"Now she rallies her defenses
For she fears that one will ask her for eternity
And she's so busy being free"
As Ladies Of The Canyon was climbing the charts, Joni was looking to escape. Emotionally bruised after turning away from Nash, and conflicted about fame, Joni retreated from the Laurel Canyon community that had sustained her.
She travelled to Europe with a friend in the Spring of 1970, hiding away for a while with a bunch of cave-dwelling hippies on the Greek island of Crete. Out of her comfort zone, her songwriting naturally reflected that.
"My fingernails are filthy
I've got beach tar on my feet
And I miss my clean white line
And my fancy French cologne"
Joni did an interview with Rolling Stone when she returned from her travels. She was clearly re-energised.
“I’ve been to Greece, Spain, France and from Jamaica to Panama. Some of my friends were moving their boat from Fort Lauderdale up to San Francisco. I joined them in Jamaica and sailed down through the Canal. It was really an experience.”
With memories of the vacation still fresh in her mind, Joni booked time at A&M Studios in Hollywood that summer of 1970, with trusted engineer Henry Lewy. The first fruits of these sessions were demos for A Case Of You, with some interesting lyrical differences from the master, and California.
The album's opening song All I Want was first aired at a BBC In Concert programme in September 1970. Joni expressing her desires in the most joyous fashion, giving the record an upbeat feel, despite the opening lines, "I am on a lonely road, and I am travelling..."
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| With Graham Nash |
"I wanna be strong, I wanna laugh along
I wanna belong to the living
Alive, alive, I want to get up and jive
I want to wreck my stockings in some jukebox dive
Do you want, do you want, do you wanna dance with me, baby?"
On track two of Blue, My Old Man, presumably written about Nash
- "the warmest chord I ever heard" - she shifts the
mood from happy to sad with a piano modulation in the middle section:
"But when he's gone
Me and them lonesome blues collide
The bed's too big
The frying pan's too wide"
The dissonant piano lines after this refrain are also indicative of Joni's advanced musicality. She wasn't afraid to stretch out on the piano. For example, the song The Last Time I Saw Richard, the last track on Blue, has a piano intro that lasts for a full minute.
I don’t think the proficiency and individuality she demonstrates on each instrument is fully appreciated. Much of that comes down to her unique tunings for the guitar, and her deeply melodic and full-sounding piano lines.
Back in the 1970s, no one knew that Joni had given up a
child for adoption. She kept the 1965 birth of her daughter, Kelly, a strict
secret for nearly three decades. She talked later of how scandalous this all was for her family in Canada:
"A daughter could do nothing more disgraceful. You have no idea of the
stigma at that time."
The child's father, a fellow art student, moved from Canada
to California, leaving Joni alone and penniless as she prepared to give birth. “I
had no money for diapers, no room to take her to. There was no career on the
horizon.”
So, the lyric of Little Green took on a greater significance retrospectively.
"Child, with a child pretending
Weary of lies you are sending home
So you sign all the papers in the family name
You're sad and you're sorry, but you're not ashamed
Little green, have a happy ending"
Kelly was put up for adoption when she was six months old. These
details didn’t become public until 1993, when a former art school roommate from
the 1960s sold the adoption story to a newspaper.
Those of us listening to the song in the 1970s could not have known how painfully personal the song was. For Joni, this was a
momentous, heartbreaking event in her young life and she laid it out in a
suitably cryptic lyric.
Interestingly, the song dates back to at least 1967. Here is Joni performing the song live in New York.
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| With 'Carey' |
On Crete, she had befriended a “redneck” named Cary Raditz, who “gave me back my smile, but he took my camera to sell”.
Of the Grecian isle experience, she said, “To me it was a
lovely life. I lived for five weeks in a cave there. The only trouble was it
was very commercialised. The magazines were writing it up. As a result, you had
a lot of prying tourists all the time.”
Joni caught the irony of this. “That was kinda funny,
because most of the people living in the caves were Canadian, America, Swiss or
French. They’d say, ‘Oh, here come the tourists’.”
Then, she noted things started to get a little crazy at Matala, with “everybody
getting more and more into open nudity. They were really going back to the
caveman. The Greeks couldn’t understand what was happening. The cops came in
and kicked everyone out of the caves.”
“The wind is in from Africa
Last night I couldn't sleep
Oh, you know it sure is hard to leave here, Carey
But it's really not my home”
And she moved on, to Ibiza.
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| Joni in Ibiza |
So I bought me a ticket, I caught a plane to Spain
Went to a party down a red dirt road...
The stories from Joni's travels in the spring of 1970 found their way into the recording sessions that began in the summer and carried on for the rest of the year.
Another key event that informed the songs on Blue was Joni's romance with James Taylor.
In July 1970, Joni did her first show in six months at the
Mariposa Folk Festival in Toronto, where James Taylor was also appearing. They
had met the previous year at the Newport Folk Festival, but it was at this point, after her
travels in Europe, that she became romantically involved with him.
Taylor ended up playing a key role on Blue. He played guitar on ‘All I Want’, ‘Carey’, ‘A
Case of You’ and ‘California’ as well as being the subject of some of the songs.
In October, Taylor appeared as Joni's guest at the Vancouver
Greenpeace benefit and later that month, she and Taylor performed together
for a BBC In Concert recording.
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| On stage in London with James Taylor |
Listening back to
Blue at the Hampstead theatre this
year, I was struck by the harmonic richness delivered by the guitar accompaniment
from James Taylor, the spare use of bass and drums and the pedal steel
flourishes of Sneaky Pete Kleinow.
Joni’s piano compositions throw some
heavy shade on the proceedings too. On the track
Blue, which ends side one of the vinyl album, the
mood is slow and ominous, with piano chords rising and falling like
the waves to match the opening lines.
Songs are like tattoos
You know I’ve been to sea before
This photo is of Joni in her Laurel Canyon home, sitting at the piano, pensive. It could be she is conceiving Blue in this very moment. Graham Nash used to say he would watch her as she became fully absorbed for hours in her music. Such intensity of composition and performance is rare. The only other artist I can think of who was occupying a similar space at the time was Laura Nyro.
The lyrics of
Blue are open to interpretation. She is reacting to the turbulent times; the anti-Vietnam war movement, Kent State, the drug culture that had just taken Jimi and Janis, and perhaps, closer to home, Taylor’s heroin addiction.
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| photo by Henry Diltz |
Well, there's so many sinking now
You gotta keep thinking
You can make it through these waves
Acid, booze, and ass
Needles, guns, and grass
Lots of laughs, lots of laughs
The other notable instrumentation on Blue is the Appalachian dulcimer, used on four tracks, All I Want, Carey, California and A Case Of You. Introducing the dulcimer to the audience on the BBC In Concert recording, Joni talked about the tuning she used on Carey as her Matala tuning.
She described to the audience the setting at Matala and how at night it looked like a primitive tenement, with fires burning in the different levels of cave dwelling.
She told how most of the 'freaks' would eat at the Mermaid Cafe and that the proprietor, Stelios, was one of the locals who was most welcoming to these foreigners, where perhaps others were not so accommodating.
On California, which opens side two
of the vinyl, she’s still in Europe, feeling homesick and lamenting the failure
of the peace movement.
Sitting in a park in Paris, France,
Reading the news and it sure looks bad
They won't give peace a chance
That was just a dream some of us had
The "sweet
loneliness of solitary travel" is something Joni returned
to later in the decade, on Hejira. For now, she sang
“Oh, it gets so lonely, when you're walking, and the streets
are full of strangers”
In some senses, California encapsulates the collective mood
of this album and it’s my
favourite for that reason. And I particularly love the “will you take me as I
am” refrain at the end.
The premise of the 'love that got lost' in A Case Of You is a conversation that preceded Joni’s split from Leonard Cohen, with him saying “I am as constant as the Northern Star.” He’s quoting Shakespeare,
from Julius Caesar, but Joni’s having none of it. “If you want me, I’ll be in
the bar”.
I can see why women like this album so much. Joni is laying
it all out for them to relate to in their own relationships. By the sounds of it, Cohen was 'a lot'.
I met a woman
She had a mouth like yours
She knew your life
She knew your devils and your deeds
And she said
"Go to him, stay with him if you can
But be prepared to bleed”
Work continued during the winter months and wrapped up in the spring of 1971 ahead of the album's release on June 22, 1971.
I’m not a great fan of the movie Love Actually, but it's undoubtedly a good thing that Joni’s song River has gained a much wider audience from being featured in it. So much so that it is now considered a Christmas standard, with its jazzed-up Jingle Bells piano intro. Joni's still hurting about her
failed relationships and she’s once again laying herself wide open.
I'm so hard to handle
I'm selfish and I'm sad
Now I've gone and lost the best baby that I ever had
I wish I had a river, I could skate away on.”
It proved too much for James Taylor. The line, "I made my baby say goodbye" is telling.
And consider these prophetic lines from the
first track on Taylor's breakthrough album, Mud Slide Slim and The Blue
Horizon, recorded in the winter of 1971.
"Don't come to me with your sorrows any more
I don't need to know how bad you're feeling
today
I declare I've had my share and I've heard it all before
It's time for me to be stealing away"
Coincidence? I think not.
When Joni was in her marriage of convenience with Chuck Mitchell in 1968, they had
lived in Detroit, so whoever Richard is in the song The Last Time I Saw Richard, he was apparently someone else from that time whose opinions Joni found disagreeable.
The last time I saw Richard was Detroit in '68
And he told me all romantics meet the same fate someday
Cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark café
As the album concludes, there’s no real
resolution. Just Joni affirming her belief that we're not all doomed to the same fate and that her depression would pass.
Only a dark cocoon before I get my gorgeous wings and fly
away
Only a phase these dark café days
It took her a couple of years to emerge from the gloom. "I was too close to my own work. I got very depressed, to the point where I thought it was no longer a problem to burden my friends with," she said in 1974.
She
took to the psychiatrist's couch - "I was practically catatonic," but
that provided no solution. So, she withdrew once again from the LA music scene, to a remote area of Vancouver and revisited the simple life.
Joni emerged, said one reviewer, "as a talented
entertainer, rather than the emotional registrar of experiences." In the following years, she rejected the role her audience wanted her to play ad
infinitum. Joni herself put it bluntly: "I'm not going to be your sin-eater any longer."
By the mid-70s, she was a very different artist; more confident and driven to evolve as a musician. Her work from Court and Spark onwards is proof that she was all about the art.
“I feel like I’ve come through...” she said of the period of
re-evaluation she went through after Blue. “...having had a small taste of success,
and having seen the consequences of what it gives you and what it takes away.”
"I feel I want to go in all directions now, like a mad thing.”
