Bang The Drum All Day: Joni Mitchell in the 70s (3)

As an artist whose favoured means of expression is painting, Joni Mitchell empathises with the view that the true artist should make no attempt to please their audience, only to please themselves.

As she stated on the Miles of Aisles album: “nobody said to Van Gogh, paint A Starry Night again, man!”.

Having really stretched her creativity on the 1975 album The Hissing of Summer Lawns, with tremendous results, Joni was stung by the criticism it attracted (see the previous Joni post). It’s hard to believe people could have been so angry and disappointed by it. But it wasn't Court and Spark or Blue and people don’t like change, especially when their favourite artist becomes less accessible.

Mitchell’s new direction was already set, though. A year after ‘Hissing’, she released Hejira, a quite different record musically, with more of the familiar confessional style in its lyrics. The words form the bedrock of the album and are amongst the best she ever wrote.

In his review for Melody Maker in 1976, Michael Watts noted that Hejira is “the first Joni Mitchell record for which the song sheet is indispensable. Her use of language...is pretty marvellous. As a popular lyricist in the romantic tradition, she has no equal outside the Broadway musical.”

Joni ice skating on Lake Mendota, Wisconsin

A hejira is a journey of discovery - the bleak terrain of Joni’s hejira is reflected in the soul searching of the lyrics and the simple yet haunting musical accompaniment.

Joni told Rolling Stone magazine, "I knew I wanted to travel. I was sitting out at the beach at Neil’s [Young] place. Two friends of mine came to the door and said, 'We’re driving across country'. I said, 'I’ve been waiting for you; I’m gone'. So we drove across country, then we parted ways. It was my car, so I drove back alone. The Hejira album was written mostly while I was traveling in the car. That’s why there were no piano songs.

Mitchell said of Hejira: "the whole album was really inspired... there is this restless feeling throughout it... The sweet loneliness of solitary travel.

Joni and John Guerin

"Hejira was an obscure word, but it said exactly what I wanted. Running away, honorably. It dealt with the leaving of a relationship (with drummer John Guerin) but without the sense of failure that accompanied the breakup of my previous relationships. I felt that it was not necessarily anybody’s fault. It was a new attitude."

In late 1975, Joni had joined Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue. "I joined Rolling Thunder as a spectator," she told Rolling Stone. "I would have been content to follow it for three cities just as an observer, but since I was there I was asked to participate. Then, for mystical reasons of my own, I made a pact with myself that I would stay on until it was over."

Joni on Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue tour in 1975

Although Joni obviously enjoyed the experience, it took a toll on her health and her cocaine use escalated. She said, "Rolling Thunder was mad. Heavy drama, no sleep – a circus."

There were concert dates scheduled to promote The Hissing of Summer Lawns, but as well as being in poor health, the story goes, Joni had a big bust up with Guerin and she took off.

"Sharon I left a man, in a North Dakota junction"

This link is for the website tracking the Rolling Thunder Revue show by show. At the foot of the page you can download one of the first shows where Joni appeared.

It was clearly a transitional period for Joni, with at least one affair, with Sam Shepard during Rolling Thunder, thrown into the mix. That all fed into the record.

"It was a trial of sorts for me. I went out in a foot soldier position. I made up songs onstage. I sang in French, badly. I did a lot of things to prevent myself from getting in the way.

"What was in it for me hadn’t anything to do with applause or the performing aspect. It was simply to be allowed to remain an observer and a witness to an incredible spectacle."

We see her playing an early version of Coyote in an upstairs room at Gordon Lightfoot's house in Toronto.

In 1976, she also appeared at The Band's farewell concert that was filmed for the movie The Last Waltz. As the film footage shows, she more than held her own in that company.

For the recording of Hejira, Joni went back to basics, relying on her now familiar and distinctive open-tuned guitar voicing as the main accompaniment. The album also marks the beginning of a prominent role for the electric bass on her records. The inclusion of Jaco Pastorius in her musical backdrop was an inspired move. I think it represents one of the all-time great musical collaborations, especially when we include her next album, Don Juan's Reckless Daughter; a unique sound and interplay that brought out the best in both Joni and Jaco.

Hejira is the album where Joni asserts, or reasserts, in the face of such criticism, her need to evolve. In the DVD ‘A Woman of Heart and Mind’ she tells how in 1971 she had rejected Graham Nash’s marriage proposal because she felt she couldn’t subsume her desire for personal growth to become just a part of someone else; that she owed it to previous generations to go out and live life to the full.

The song 'Amelia' is as much about Joni as it is about Amelia Earhart. Joni said: "I was addressing it from one solo pilot to another... sort of reflecting on the cost of being a woman and having something you must do."

Joni the existentialist seeks out meaning in her emotional turmoil, while also reflecting an awareness of mortality. On the title track, Joni sings…”we all come and go unknown / each so deep and superficial / between the forceps and the stone.”

In 'Song For Sharon' she describes the life she might have if she wasn't still filled with wanderlust and the quest to "find another lover".

Sharon you've got a husband and a family and a farm
I've got the apple of temptation and a diamond snake around my arm
But you still have your music
And I've still got my eyes on the land and the sky
You sing for your friends and your family
I'll walk green pastures by and by

On the final track, Refuge of the Roads, the image is of “a photograph of the earth / taken from the moon / and you couldn't see a city / on that marbled bowling ball / or a forest or a highway / or me here least of all.”

The original Norman Seeff photo used on the montage for the Hejira album cover

Reviewers at the time, while appreciating the lyricism, didn’t exactly warm to the music. Creem magazine’s Ken Tucker wrote: “It took me almost two weeks of steady listening to decide that this is a good album. I knew from the first that Hejira contained her most audacious lyrics—the preciseness of her imagery is extraordinary and unobtrusive, the latter no small part of her achievement. But I sure didn't hear any catchy melodies."

Again, reviewers could not resist attacking Joni for her movement away from the popular song. Watts spoils an otherwise excellent review of Hejira by suggesting that “On Summer Lawns only Shades Of Scarlet Conquering could be said to be tuneful and accessible and even that was a difficult song.”

I mean, that’s a frankly ridiculous comment, but it is a good illustration of the limitations of music criticism at the time. Rolling Stone’s review said that while “it recoups much of the ground lost with last year's The Hissing of Summer Lawns, both musically and lyrically… in the end Hejira is a bit too cerebral for its own good.”

All this probably made Joni even more determined to strike out on her own. One of my favourite lines from the Hejira album is “and we laughed at how our perfection would always be denied.” The lyric has many meanings, I’m sure, but it could easily be applied to the album itself - and to the purity of Joni Mitchell's artistic expression in the late 70s.

A beautiful rendition of 'Amelia' performed at Wembley Arena in 1983.

I was there and I have never been to a better sounding arena show.

Monday, 18 June 2012

Joni Mitchell in the 70s (3) - Hejira

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