Wednesday, 7 October 2026

Joni Mitchell in the 1970s - Blue

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. Her 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. 

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 we 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..."

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.

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. 

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 there 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.

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 - the dulcimer is on the piano. 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.
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 (link). 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 withdraw 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.”



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Wednesday, 30 September 2026

July 1970 - Festival dramas, Clapton solo album and Derek & The Dominoes

 

Click on each photo to expand
In July 1970, local residents were objecting to planned music festivals in the UK, one at Plumpton Racecourse and another on the Isle of Wight.

The Plumpton Festival was set to feature Deep Purple, Family, Yes, Colloseum, The Groundhogs, Elton John and Peter Green.

It didn't draw a massive crowd like the festivals at Bath and the Isle of Wight. The following year the festival moved to Reading and so began the annual Reading Festival in the town that is still running today.

On the Isle of Wight, the festival promoters, having failed to secure the site of the previous festival in 1969 - which had witnessed Bob Dylan's return to the stage after a three year absence - found a new site at Freshwater Bay for the 1970 festival.

"If anything disastrous does happen (with the approvals process) we can switch to one of the reserve sites," said Peter Harrigan of festival promoters Fiery Creations.

Derek & The Dominoes unveiled
"The County Council has been hounding us and the rear admirals and brigadiers have been whipping up hysteria against us. We've almost been hounded off the island."

"This could be the last year of the big festivals, so we want them to go out with a big bang."

It did go you with bang too, literally fired from a cannon on the stage during ELP's performance. 

There are many stories and legends that grew out of the aftermath of the 1970 Isle of Wight music festival.

There was the invasion by French anarchists; the stage meltdown by promoter Rikki Farr ("you go to hell!"); the way Joni Mitchell won over a restless crowd; the remarkable performance of Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix's last UK show, The Who playing on until dawn, ELP's breakthrough and many others.

It was five days of high drama. In the Melody Maker the week after the festival, an editorial said, "There can be little doubt that the events of last weekend will have a chastening effect on any other promoter considering putting on a similar event.

"What kind of lunatic will want to risk having to deal with the French, Algerian and American revolutionaries who raised such hell?"

And yet even with all of that to contend with, the festival was a musical triumph - bigger than Woodstock and featuring many of the same performers from Europe and America. Click on this link for the full report from IOW 1970, including clips of some of the performers.

The news section of the Melody Maker on 25 July featured the first picture of Derek & The Dominoes - Jim Gordon, Carl Radle, Bobby Whitlock and Eric Clapton - along with tour dates, including a festival in Nice, France.

"We did not want to do any festivals at all, let alone so early" said Clapton. "But this one seems unusual and more pleasant than many others."

On the same page is an item about how the single 'Ohio' by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young was to be released in the UK, having been banned by radio stations in America.

The song refers to US president Richard Nixon and the killing of four Kent State University students by National Guard troops brought in to break up an anti-Vietnam War demonstration.

Meanwhile, Eric Clapton talks to MM about his first solo album, due out in the UK in two weeks. "The biggest reason for it coming out is that it's just good music. I loved the sound of the whole thing and I never thought that was possible. I've had hang-ups about my singing my whole life. I've always been worried about whether or not I could sing."

Clapton said he felt he had to follow through with the album because "I couldn't let anybody down and I had to do it. The love that went around between everybody involved on the record was just so powerful that I'm really proud of it."

Hotlegs - the band that would later become 10cc - emerged with their hit song 'Neanderthal Man'. The band’s leader, Eric Stewart, said they were ready with an album and how amazed he was by Kevin Godley’s singing. At this point, it was just the three of them - Stewart, Godley and Lol Creme, before Graham Gouldman joined and they became 10cc.

Birmingham's Black Sabbath announce their forthcoming second album, Paranoid. The single of the title track is being released this week.

In neat gothic type, the MM describes how Led Zeppelin invaded Germany (groan...)

In the folk gigs section of the Melody Maker this week, the one hit wonder, Mr 'Dave' Bowie is playing at the White Hart pub in Acton, supported by Orpheus Boot.
Who's this Dave Bowie geezer?

Bowie was at this point involved in his Arts Lab project and had formed a new electric band, The Hype, a vehicle for the new songs he had written for his 1970 album, The Man Who Sold The World.

The Hype was Bowie with Tony Visconti on bass, Mick Ronson on guitar and Ronson's mate Woody Woodmansey on drums.

Clearly, he was some way off gaining any kind of recognition for his efforts. Quite a contrast from Ziggymania in two years' time.
In other news, Kenny Everett was sacked by the BBC for making an innocuous remark about a politician's wife passing her driving test. He had been feuding with the BBC management for some time and had recently told the MM the BBC was awful, really revolting". In the interview, Everett said he wouldn't continue as a DJ forever. He already had a London Weekend Television Show, 'Nice Time' and home studio.
The sorry tale of the Yorkshire Folk, Blues & Jazz Festival at Krumlin unfolded in August 50 years ago. What could have been one of the biggest festivals of the era with better management, turned into a logistical disaster that had to be closed down because of unseasonably wet and cold weather.

For the full picture of how a pleasant country festival turned into "an unmitigated disaster", check out the memories of those who attended on this site.  

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Tuesday, 29 September 2026

Revealed. The site of the 'Who's next' cover photo

What was it exactly? 

A concrete pillar set in the midst of a large excavation, it featured on one of the most revered rock albums of the 1970s. And yet no one knew what it was, or for that matter where it was. Until now, 55 years later. 

The cover shot of the monolith on which the four members of The Who have just relieved themselves, was apparently taken in a Sheffield slag heap they passed in the tour bus. Or at least that was the story they recalled later, although none of them could quite remember.  

It was a spontaneous decision to stop the bus on the way to the next gig and take some photos. Photographer Ethan Russell said he thought, after they had done it, there was no chance it would be used.

Quite how it was selected, then, will remain a mystery. But in a recent twist to the tale, someone in Derbyshire identified where the monolith actually was - contradicting what Russell and the band had remembered. 

The concrete pillar was actually a drain built into a spoil heap from a Derbyshire colliery to help prevent landslips.

John Hirst, who worked for Chesterfield Borough Council in the 1970s, photographed it a number of times before it all but disappeared.

The stone pillar as it is today

He told the Derbyshire Times that someone in his office was a fan of The Who and said he knew where the photo had been taken.

"He used to drive past it every day. So we went up there and I took photo of him standing with it.

"I got married soon after and moved nearby, and over the next couple of years I took more photos as the land was filled in around it.”

Today only the very top of it is visible at ground level, in what is now a farmer’s field.

Somewhere around here, I believe

Pete Townsend hated the image, saying, "Of course I don’t like it. It’s got no artistic consequence whatsoever. No link to the music. It’s meaningless. It’s four guys stopping in a car and pissing up against a chunk of concrete. Anyway, can we move on?" 

As I wrote in my story about the making of Who's next, Pete may have failed to get the broader 'Lifehouse' project off the ground, but Who's next nonetheless carries a strong sense of what the NME observed as “We’re all part of something bigger and somehow one day we’ll all join together as one.”

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Tuesday, 21 July 2026

Pat Metheny - Still playing the most sublime music

Pat Metheny
Pat Metheny is one of the most accomplished and versatile guitarists I’ve ever seen. His music is jazz, for sure, full of the most amazing solos. But it’s so much more, reflecting his huge range, musically and culturally. 

It is a rare thing to find an individual musician who can move effortlessly from gentle acoustic playing to frenetic and 'challenging' jazz freak-outs. 

Over his long career, Pat Metheny has explored many different musical landscapes and he manages to find a purity of expression in each of them.

His records and live performances are uniquely multi-cultural, absorbing influence from across the Americas. The sounds are reflective, sinuous, exuberant and sometimes jarring. Above all, in a live setting, it is just amazing to see musicianship at this level up-close.

Back in the mid-1980s, I saw Pat and members of the Pat Metheny Group (which then included keyboardist Lyle Mays, bassist Steve Rodby and drummer Paul Wertico) up-close at the Half Moon pub in Putney (London), playing jazz standards as a warm up for a UK tour. To this day, I don't think I've ever seen a virtuoso musician in that close proximity. His virtuosity is undeniable and if you’re close enough, just to watch his hands moving is mesmerising.

On stage at the Barbican. Photo by UK Jazz News
On Sunday I was lucky to be just a few rows from the front (thanks Julia) at a matinee - “the breakfast show” as Pat called it - and we had the luxury of being able to watch him work his incredible magic on a wide range of guitars.

The concert was part of a summer jazz series at The Barbican – 3 shows over the weekend.

 His latest band, the Side-Eye III trio of Chris Fishman (keyboards) and Joe Dyson (drums), augmented by Jermaine Paul (bass) and Leonard Patton (vocals and percussion), are of quite a different generation to Metheny. The mutual respect is clear, though, with Metheny demonstrably acknowledging each of his bandmates’ exceptional playing.  

Fishman is a versatile and gifted keyboardist, surrounded by a grand piano, various electric pianos and synths and a Hammond B3 organ. He covers a lot of ground. 

Drummer Joe Dyson’s playing style harks back to that of long-time PMG drummer Paul Wertico, with lots of fine cymbal work, but with a muscular energy when it comes to soloing. Jermaine Paul is one of the most adept and musical upright bassists I have heard in a long time. And Patton’s vocalising is in keeping with a long line of latin-tinged singers from PMGs of the past.

Metheny's recorded work is often melodic and played with a distinctive style that once heard is seldom forgotten. But he has also wandered off into more challenging areas, taking influences from free jazzers like Ornette Coleman. On many of his albums, he doesn't always play safe and has never been afraid to push the boundaries.

In this latter part of his career, working with a new generation of players, he has reached a point where he feels able to revisit some of his most popular tunes in a live setting, while continuing to push at the boundaries of jazz and world music exploration.

For his current audience, the mix of the new and familiar is just about perfect. As well as material for the most recent Side-Eye III+ record, early on in his set we heard a new arrangement of Bright Size Life, and a duet between guitar and keyboards on Phase Dance.

Fishman's impressive keyboard array
The classic vocal crescendos of First Circle are complemented with more gorgeous vocalising from Patton on the gentle, slow Brazil-inspired Más allá. Metheny and band sound as good as they ever have. It’s really something to see how he and the band so effortlessly shift between moods and rhythms.

The stage emcee had told us that the previous night there were “many encores” and this afternoon, we were again treated to four – two with Metheny playing solo acoustic. On these, Pat played beautifully, creating a medley of his most beloved tunes, including Last Train Home, Minuano, James, September Fifteenth and his Bowie collaboration This Is Not America.


No filming allowed in the auditorium, so you won't find much on youtube. The link above to First Circle is worth a look and listen. And here's a clip of them playing the PMG classic Are you going with me? earlier this year in Rome. 

Listening to Pat Metheny live always sends me back to the records. I have several of his 1970s and 80s ECM albums on vinyl. My most favourite of the ECM era is the Pat Metheny/Lyle Mays album As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls. It features September 15th, their tribute to Bill Evans. It's an almost meditative album, full of atmosphere and reflection, while also managing to be uplifting. Like so much of Metheny’s music.

For a really in-depth understanding of Pat Metheny's musical genius, this interview that Rick Beato did with Pat in 2021 is essential viewing. 

ALSO ON THIS BLOG





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Wednesday, 10 June 2026

RUSH-mania as Anika Assumes Control

Anika Nilles - a powerhouse performance
It's quite a week for fans of Canadian prog-rockers RUSH. Social media is alive with comment and footage from the first shows of their 'Fifty Something' world tour. 

As a long-time fan - I first saw Rush at Hammersmith Odeon in 1978 - it's been emotional seeing them rejuvenated like this.

The excitement is all around their new drummer, Anika Nilles. Replacing the seemingly irreplaceable Neil Peart, Anika has proved the many doubters wrong with a phenomenal display. 

And the most heart-warming aspect of it is the great cheers that have gone up in the audience every time she nails one of Peart's iconic drum fills. 

If you have seen the clips on youtube, you will already know how amazing it is to see someone other than Neil Peart pulling off those amazing drum patterns and fills. 

For those that haven't - feast your eyes on this.
Locked in and having fun

Opening song - Xanadu 






Any way you look at it, Anika is just phenomenal in the way she not only plays those iconic drum fills, but how she captures the feel and spirit of the songs. And then to lock in with two guys who have been playing this stuff for 50 years! That's special and it's why there has been such an emotional response from fans around the world.

Peart, who tragically died six years ago, was an inspiration to drummers and wannabe drummers, who were drawn to the music of Rush for its anthemic qualities. This was especially true in Rush's early career in the late 1970s, when their music was epic in its scope.

Spirit Of Radio...The Trees...Xanadu...YYZ...Tom Sawyer...Closer To The Heart...2112 - all classics

Neil's drumming provided every teenage fan's dream of what a drummer could be. He showed you didn't have to sit back there and just keep the beat. His musicality on the kit meant that Rush songs became known as much for the drum fills as the guitar licks. Moreso, in fact. 

Which makes this new incarnation of Rush so intriguing. Anika Nilles had already gained a reputation as a jazz fusion drummer - here she is with Jeff Beck. But most mainstream rock fans would not have heard of her until Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson announced they were reconvening Rush for a world tour. 
Rush in their 1970s pomp

As a trio, Rush were the perfect blend and showed how, in the rock idiom, a three-piece band is often the most dynamic and cohesive musical unit.

Back in the day, as a Rush fan you were definitely outside of the mainstream. None of my friends were remotely interested, but I was a fan of their first live album All The World's A Stage, which featured excerpts from their recent breakthrough album 2112, as well as earlier songs like Fly By Night and Lakeside Park.

So I took the opportunity to see them live at Hammersmith in 1978, in their full prog rock pomp, playing their early classics. The show was later released as part of the Different Stages CD package.

It was the glam-prog era of silk kimonos and their extended pieces like Xanadu - "To seek the sacred river Alph, to walk the caves of ice" - and 2112: "Attention all planets of the solar federation!
We have assumed control". 
My ticket for Rush live in 1978

This interview sheds some light on the recording of A Farewell To Kings, Rush's studio follow up to the breakthrough album 2112.  

The second live album, Exit...Stage Left, reflected their evolution from the 1970s to the early 80s (shorter hair, no more silk kimonos) and is probably the best of the early live recordings.

Later on in their career, the Rush In Rio DVD showed how much their music meant to people all over the world. And South Park's send-up was so good that Rush incorporated it into their live shows as the intro to Tom Sawyer. They are using it for this tour too. 

A perfect example of how much Rush meant to their fans, is the Foo Fighters doing 2112 at the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame.

If you haven't seen it and you're a fan, check out the documentary Beyond The Lighted Stage for the full story of how Rush defied expectations and became one of the biggest bands in the world.

The Professor hits the road
Neil had an uncomfortable relationship with fame, and the pressures of being on the road and away from loved ones. He once said, “I don’t like to puncture illusions. I know I represent some kind of fantasy to a lot of people. But there is no fantasy.”

His way of dealing with the isolation and distractions of life on the road was to ride the back roads on his motorcycle. 

“Every day when I’m on tour and travelling between cities on my motorcycle, I have half-a-dozen pleasant encounters with people. I’ve spent a lot of time in truck stops and diners and cafes, very casual, low-grade places, and those are the encounters I have: stranger to stranger, I guess you could say. I love the anonymity of my travels.”

Here's a rare televised interview with the Professor himself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=311&v=q_mKr28G7og&feature=emb_logo

If Neil was looking down now, he would surely see millions of people of all ages still air drumming to his songs - and mesmerised by Anika's skill at helping to recreate the Rush magic.


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Tuesday, 28 April 2026

Inspired Use of Music in Movies

Where is everybody?

I can vouch for the fact that at 7am on a Sunday morning, Times Square is deserted.

Radiohead fans will be aware that director Cameron Crowe used the song Everything In Its Right Place at the beginning of the movie Vanilla Sky.

It instantly brings the film to life and is a perfect example of a scene you can't imagine could have been presented better with any other piece of music. 

Maybe not as spine-tingling as the start of Apocalypse Now, when the The End by The Doors rises from the jungle, but it's inspired nonetheless. 

Soon after seeing Vanilla Sky, I was in New York City and staying just off Times Square. I wanted to see if I could replicate the scene where Tom Cruise drives his Ferrari 250 GTO through the deserted streets of midtown Manhattan and stops in the middle of Times Square. 

OK, well I didn't have the Ferrari, but I did have the location. It's an eerie feeling, wandering out onto a stretch of road that is normally packed with people. The silence is quite surreal.

Shooting that sequence for Vanilla Sky is reputed to have cost the studio $1 million to shut off the surrounding streets for three hours on a Sunday morning.

Transcendent sounds

It's no surprise Cameron Crowe has impeccable taste when it comes to movie music. He was a reporter for Rolling Stone in its classic 1970s heyday, as depicted in his love letter to the era, Almost Famous. His attention to period detail on that movie was painstaking. The incidental music was faultless and contains some unusual choices.

Including:

It Wouldn't Have Made Any Difference by Todd Rundgren
Easy To Slip by Little Feat
The Wind by Cat Stevens
Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters by Elton John
Feel Flows by The Beach Boys plays as the credits roll

And, of course, Elton's Tiny Dancer is one of the key moments in the movie. 

Here are some more of my personal favourites - movie scenes where the choice of music was truly inspired. 

Low Rider by War in Cheech & Chong's Up In Smoke

Woody Allen's ode to Manhattan, to the tune of Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue

The final scenes of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are perfectly matched with Beck’s version of the Korgis classic Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime

As someone commented on this clip, "Is there any better “I just got laid” scene in film history?" It's Joseph Gordon-Levitt walking on air to the tune of Daryl Hall & John Oates in the film 500 Days of Summer.

In Paul Thomas Anderson's film Magnolia, the drama builds to an inspired movie moment as the various actors in different locations sing to Aimee Mann's Wise Up

The Three Degrees giving it their best in the nightclub scene in The French Connection

Ewan McGregor's heroin OD and trip to the ER in Trainspotting, to Lou Reed's Perfect Day.

Of course, there's a whole other story to be written about original movie soundtracks. Later.

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Monday, 30 March 2026

Rickie Lee Jones Takes Off Like A Rocket

Rickie at home in New Orleans
Rickie Lee Jones was penniless and often homeless pretty much right up to the time, in 1978, when she was signed by Warner Brothers and given a $50,000 advance.

Even then, she had to borrow some cash because she didn’t have a bank account and was behind on her rent.

Her instant success with the single Chuck E's In Love gave Rickie no time to adjust to such a massive shift in circumstances. No surprise then that she struggled to find any equilibrium in that first flush of her career.

Live in London, 1979
It is said that nothing in the world can take the place of persistence, especially if you have an innate talent. Rickie Lee Jones the performer was, in retrospect, bound to succeed, such was her irrepressible persona and innate musical and lyrical genius.

Her early music was a rich melee of cocktail jazz and showtunes, with a tinge of influence from Laura Nyro and Dory Previn. Her words were like beat poetry, full of street vernacular, influences from West Side Story and Runyon-esque characters, with names such as Kid Sinister, Bragger and Junior Lee. 

You can't break the rules
Until you know how to play the game
But if you just want to have a little fun
You can mention my name
Keep your feet in the street
Your toes in the lawn
But keep your Business in your pocket
That's where it belongs

In 1976, based in and around Venice Beach in California, she had begun writing her first songs, the likes of Easy Money and Weasel and the White Boys Cool, and arguably her greatest song, The Last Chance Texaco.   

Being a street urchin, working menial jobs and singing in local bands to pay the rent, it was the maverick souls she met along the way that fed her stories. Her persona, with the beret and the boho styling, was an act. But equally, as she says in her memoir, Last Chance Texaco, it was who she was then. 

At the heart of her book is the doomed love affair with her fellow boho bum, Tom Waits. It seemed they were cut from the same raggedy cloth. They belonged together. 

“Tom and I were beautiful beyond compare, and so nourished and inspired by each other's hearts that for a very short time, we nearly consumed each other. Love, they used to call it.”

Waits had his bachelor pad at the Tropicana Motel in Los Angeles, with his pal Chuck E. Weiss. "Tom had two tattoos on his bicep. He liked to don the vintage accoutrements of masculinity; sailor hats and Bernardo's (from West Side Story) pointed shoes."

"We always needed to touch each other"
Of Rickie, Waits said at the time, “We drank together. You can learn a lot about a woman by getting smashed with her. 

"I remember her getting her first pair of high heels and coming by one night to holler in my window to take her out celebrating. There she was, walking down Santa Monica Boulevard, drunk and falling off her shoes.”

Even then, Waits was wary: "I love her madly in my own way - but she scares me to death. She is much older than I am in terms of street wisdom; sometimes she seems as ancient as dirt, and yet other times she's so like a little girl."

They danced around each other for a long while. Waits, already semi-famous, was scared of commitment, but Rickie knew how to catch a man. One night at the Troubadour club, already cultivating the RLJ persona in her beret and elbow-length fuchsia gloves, she had him on the hook.  

"A guy I know, Ivan Ulz, was performing at the Troubadour one evening and he asked me to come over and sing a couple of songs. This fella Chuck E. was working back in the kitchen of the club, and that's how I met him."

Waits, Chuck E., RLJ and Dr. John
“Tom came out of the kitchen and stood behind the bar. He pretended he didn't come out to see me.

"'Hey', was all we said to each other. He sat down by me, ordered a scotch. We drank and talked at length and laughed until it was closing time. 

"He walked with me to my car. There, under the streetlight, Tom took me in his arms, and we danced. All the love in the world was there that night.”

The following morning he told her to go home, he had a lot to do. “I was still standing on the step when he closed the door. I was wearing high heels. I was doing the walk of shame that so many others had walked. I may have hidden behind a bush.”

After a brief fling with Lowell George - who gave her a huge leg-up by covering Easy Money, but then tried to steal the publishing rights to it - she started reeling in Tom Waits once again.

“Each time I put a dime in the phone, Tom and I got a little closer. He answered the phone with, 'What?' But when he heard my voice, he'd grow a little sweeter. 'Ah, hey you'. 

"By the time my phone was installed, we had become lovers again. We inhabited black holes where we floated upward and down again. We were jellyfish floating from day to night. Only poetry evokes the long undulating time of our lying in each other's arms.”

The buzz about Rickie gained momentum and a formal showcase at the Troubadour created a bidding war among record companies eager for Rickie's signature. She went with Warner Brothers largely because she had befriended their head of A&R, Lenny Waronker, who she trusted to guide her through the recording of a debut album. 

Warner Brothers put the best session players to work on the album. Steve Gadd, Victor Feldman, Tom Scott, Buzz Feiten, Dr. John et al, with Waronker and Russ Titelman as co-producers. They treated her not as a newcomer, but as someone who was giving her all to put across music of subtlety and character.

Russ Titelman said "Rickie Lee was fairly wild, but you knew you were in the presence of something special.

"The sessions were spontaneous, explosive. She'd never done this before. She was just a kid with a guitar, but she knew exactly what she wanted. At the end of the session, we played through the album and Rickie sat there and asked, "Is that me?".

She recalled, "I think the musicians, Lenny, Russ and the people at the record company recognised the magic I was trying so hard to create. So they cheered me on."

Saturday Night Live, 1979

But no one expected the record to take off the way it did. Once Chuck E's In Love was a hit, Rickie was swept up by the sudden demands of fame, starting with an elaborately staged set for the TV show Saturday Night Live. 

"There was no time to build a stable home. I was launched like a rocket and the rocket went much further than the expected trajectory."

The Rickie Lee Jones album became a multi-platinum seller and Rickie won the 1979 Grammy award for Best New Artist.

She told Uncut magazine, "When I look back at the films of that first tour. I'm a very sexy and wild girl onstage. It's an act, but I really am that girl. But I did not know how to put it down. It was a hard way to be."

Tom travelled to Europe to support Rickie when she became homesick on the first European tour, but he shied away from the camera. “He wanted no part of my celebrity, just as he did not want to share his own. Tom felt the business of Tom Waits must stay uncorrupted by our affection."

Nonetheless, she said his affection was constant and very physical. "We always needed to touch each other. I cannot remember anyone else holding me so completely that I felt safe to go outward. 

"I could not conceive that this would ever end, and yet I had conceived of it with Coolsville. I knew very well that it was likely one day I and Bragger and Junior Lee (that's her, Tom and Chuck) would be a past tense."

Waits' Blue Valentines album cover shoot.
"Tom said, come closer. I leaned myself against
him. I slid down his body and he raised his arms.
There is the enigma of our very private love
 and passion caught in that photo."

I and Bragger and Junior Lee
That's the way we always thought it would be
In the Winston lips of September
How we met
Decked out like aces
We'd beat anybody's bet
Cuz we were Coolsville

Chuck Weiss told Uncut magazine, "Things were never really normal again after that. She just couldn't handle it. The record company were making such a fuss over her. 

"They more or less chose to ignore some of the heavy drug use that was going on. I thought that was bullshit, that they wouldn't pay attention to that. As long as she kept producing the songs, it didn't matter to them. It was a harsh lesson."

An earlier romance with Dr. John - in between a break from Waits - had given Rickie a taste for smoking heroin – chasing the dragon. Her mistake was thinking she could function as an addict with no consequences. 

“I didn't feel heroin was taking from me. I thought it was giving so much that I was becoming a new and improved Rickie.”

Her biggest mistake was thinking Tom Waits would understand, when she hid it from him for a year.  

I did a foolish thing
A real, real foolish thing

"Tom wanted to make a stop at the humble little house he'd seen for rent in Echo Park. We watched the lights of the city and dreamed about a life together in that house with our kids. I would make dinner and he'd mow the lawn."

Rickie was suffering withdrawal from the drug and she thought if she confided in him, he would be sympathetic.  

But you ran out of gas
Down the road apiece
Then the battery went dead
And now the cable won't reach

"I walked around the park thinking about us. If he loves me, then I can tell him. I think I can tell him. I need to tell him, now.

"I walked back to the motel and he was standing outside the door. His body was taut.

"I thought you left."

"What a thing to think. I just went for a walk, bub."

"But some part of me was disconnected. Perhaps I had a premonition of what was about to happen to us.

"I have something to tell you.
There was no going back. I was appealing for sympathy, but there would be none.

"You take dope?"

"This was like when Tony told Maria he had killed Bernardo. I was already dead to him. I raised my eyebrows. Yes.

"Junk? Heroin? He almost buckled like he had been hit in the stomach.

"For how long?
For almost a year. The outer edges of my safe space were closing in.

"That time I came to meet you on Avenue B?

 "I should really lie. Yes.

"When we went to the Carnaman in Little Italy?

"He was deconstructing our romance and building something else, a darker, unloving relationship where dope had tricked him. 

"I was thinking, didn't I look different when I was high? And how come no one knew?

"Silence. He had stopped talking. I was alone now, watching my baby fall because of me. Because of me. He seemed so weak and unmade by disappointment. I could not find a path forward. Tom's rejection of my holler for help precipitated a complete and utter break from him.

"All night long, Tom cried like a baby. I began to recede to a faraway place, for I knew there was no going back. In the morning, he rose, picked up his wallet and keys, and drove away.

"A day later, I went to see Tom at his studio where he was rehearsing for his tour. I was thinking, okay, we had a fight and that's enough of that, right?

"Instead, a doppelganger had taken Tom's place and my boyfriend was not there anymore."

And that was that. 

Rickie lost her man through the carelessness with drugs that cost so many music biz types their lives in the 1970s, Lowell George among them.

Chrissie Hynde's recent memoir, Reckless, is another tale where the drugs are everywhere, and ultimately they ruin everything. 

Part of the way through Hynde's book, I was getting a little tired of all the drug stories. A few pages later, obviously aware that it wasn't a good look, she wrote that she wasn't proud of how all this was coming across, but she couldn't sugar-coat it; that was how it was. 

So anyway, Rickie cleaned up after a couple more years of that, and in the meantime she channeled some of the pain of the break-up with Tom through her music, notably on her second album, Pirates.

And now Johnny the King walks these streets without her in the rain
Lookin' for a leather jacket and a girl who wrote her name forever
And a promise that
We belong together
Yeah, we belong together

She told Mojo magazine she still has a store of prose to write about her love affair with Waits: “That will never go away. Some people love people forever, and I’m one of them. I really feel like writing the book is as close as I can ever come to shoving that thing into the now and letting it be."

I remember you too clearly
But I'll survive another day
Conversations to share
When there's no one there
I'll imagine what you'd say

I'll see you in another life now, baby
I'll free you in my dreams
But when I reach across the galaxy
I will miss your company.

One of the unexpected joys of the Covid lockdown was having your favourite artists play for you from their living rooms. Of course, for them it was driven by the need to keep in touch with their audience and to maintain some kind of a living. It was a tough time to be a songwriter and performer.

I willingly paid to spend time with Rickie Lee Jones. It was a total pleasure. From her home in New Orleans she would sing and tell the stories behind her most popular songs; stories that fed into her memoir, Last Chance Texaco.

I miss those days, in some ways. 

Some clips worth a look
Rickie Lee Jones live in London 1979 (BBC)

Live At The Howard Theatre, 2024

Live at Montreux Jazz Festival, 1982

Singing Steely Dan's Showbiz Kids, 2023

Rickie's Criterion Movie collection picks

Weasel and the White Boys Cool, Paris 1985

The Real End - promo video, 1984

Rickie's homepage

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