by David Yaffe
Song to a Seagull is an astonishing debut, but it did not give everything away. Joni already had enough excellent material for three albums, and she would sit on some of the greatest among her songs with the confidence that her career would unfold, and that whatever growth she would make along the way would accommodate some songs that, in the hands of others, had already proven to be successful. Her debut was, like Simon and Garfunkel’s Bookends or The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, a concept album in the wake of Sgt. Pepper. Side A and Side B were titled Part 1 and Part 2, to call attention to its literary ambition. Part 1 was “I Came to the City,” with some songs written when she lived in Toronto’s Yorkville neighborhood (where you had to persuade someone to get out of the house already in “Night in the City”). Others were written when she was living on the edge of New York City’s Chelsea district, at 41 West Sixteenth Street.
Part 2 was “Out of the City and Down to the Seaside,” when David Crosby first spirited her away on a boat ride and then eventually on a plane to the other coast, to Laurel Canyon, all of which occurred just months before the album was recorded. Thematically, there was nowhere to put “Both Sides, Now” or “The Circle Game” or “Urge for Going.” Everything had to fit the overriding narrative, and Joni also wanted the album to sound fresh, not like cover versions of her own songs. “Chelsea Morning,” crackling with urban exuberance, could have fit on the city side, but would have been in danger of overwhelming it, sounding like too much of a good mood for an album that, apart from “Night in the City,” was a story told by a fairy princess in an echo chamber resounding with her own melancholy. It is, of course, a gorgeous, compelling weariness, even an addictive one. It was the mood Joni would become best known for, even though, as her career unfolded, she would contain multitudes.
Perhaps she felt the need to make a Serious Statement, since she knew that it was hard to be taken seriously in the boys’ club of American pop. The album was advertised on Sunset Strip billboards with slogans blaring, first, “Joni Mitchell Is 90% Virgin,” then “Joni Mitchell Takes Forever,” and concluding with “Joni Mitchell Finally Comes Across.” Who knows what the good people at the label thought they were doing, but Joni needed to meet these attitudes with seriousness, what she felt she needed in order to be respected by a group of powerful men taking advantage of the sexual revolution without noticing the revolution part. She had to be even more serious than the competition. Even Bookends had the whimsical “Punky’s Dilemma” and “At the Zoo”; even Bringing It All Back Home had a couple of joke tunes (“Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” “Outlaw Blues”). And, of course, there were jokes all over the Beatles’ output, and the more revered they were, the cheekier they got. She seemed to match the melancholia of Leonard Cohen, but even his debut contained the exuberance of “So Long, Marianne,” and he would eventually sing a song (with a chorus including Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan) called “Don’t Go Home with Your Hard-On.”
“I’m starting to get my own vocal styling now,” said Joni in 1968. “It’s sort of a law of averages. You don’t bomb anymore.”
It’s telling of the era that when the Rolling Stone editors wrote their first big profile of Joni, the article was accompanied by a portrait of her shot for Vogue magazine the year before. The black-and-white photograph shows Joni mid-song, holding her guitar and wearing a white embroidered peasant-style top. The portrait is standard Woodstock-like fare, but the words accompanying the picture are anything but. You can see the editors struggle to explain why Joni is more than she seems on the surface, how she may present like her girl-singer peers, but how it is she stands apart. The writer is the legendary RS editor Ben Fong-Torres, the date is May 17, 1969, and the questions raised are ones that will stay with Joni for a very long time: “Just who—and what—is Joni Mitchell, this girl who’s so obviously perched on the verge?”
The old names are back, but in more commercial regalia. Judy Collins, softened, orchestrated, countrified (and even, on national TV, miniskirted), is a regular chart item now, after years of limited success. The music (someone called it “Art Rock,” but that can be ignored) features a lighter, more lyrical style of writing, as exemplified by Leonard Cohen. As if an aural backlash to psy-ky-delick acid rock and to the all-hell-has-broken-loose styles of Aretha Franklin and Janis Joplin, the music is gentle, sensitive, and graceful. Nowadays it’s the personal and the poetic, rather than a message, that dominates.
Into this newly re-ploughed field has stepped Joni Mitchell, composer, singer, guitarist, painter, and poetess from Alberta, Canada.
Miss Mitchell, a wispy twenty-five-year-old blonde, is best known for her compositions, “Michael from Mountains” and “Both Sides, Now,” as recorded by Judy Collins, and “The Circle Game,” cut by Tom Rush. She has a first LP out (on Reprise). A second album—recorded during successful concerts at UC Berkeley and at Carnegie Hall—is ready for release, and another studio album has already been recorded. She is editing a book of poetry and artwork; a volume of her compositions will follow shortly. And she has received a movie offer (to conceive, script, and score a film).
Not bad for a girl who had no voice training, hated to read in school, and learned guitar from a Pete Seeger instruction record.
Just who—and what—is Joni Mitchell, this girl who’s so obviously perched on the verge?
To those who don’t spend hours in audio labs studying the shades, tones, and nuances of the human voice, Miss Mitchell is just a singer who sounds like Joan Baez or Judy Collins. She has that fluttery but controlled kind of soprano, the kind that can slide effortlessly from the middle register to piercing highs in mid-word.
Like Baez, Miss Mitchell plays a fluid acoustic guitar; like Collins, she can switch to the piano once in a while. And her compositions reflect the influences of Cohen.
On stage, however, she is her own woman. Where Joan Baez is the embattled but still charming Joan of Arc of the non-violence crusade, and where Judy Collins is the regal, long-time lady-in-waiting of the folk-pop world, Joni Mitchell is a fresh, incredibly beautiful innocent/experienced girl/woman.
She can charm the applause out of audience by breaking a guitar string, then apologizing by singing her next number a capella, wounded guitar at a limp parade rest. And when she talks, words stumble out of her mouth to form candid little quasi-anecdotes that are completely antithetical to her carefully constructed, contrived songs. But they knock the audience out almost every time. In Berkeley, she destroyed Dino Valente’s beautiful “Get Together” by trying to turn it into a rousing sing-along. It was a lost cause, but the audience made a valiant try at following. For one night, for Joni Mitchell, they were glad to be sheep.
Joni would become an iconic singer-songwriter but she would never become a “star” in the biggest sense of the word. This was not for lack of talent. She had what it took: she had all the charm, the charisma, the poetry, the voice, the looks, and the chops. But the Rolling Stone analysis above hints at something that has never been fully explored: records were too limited a medium to capture all that Joni brought to her live performances. As an intensely visual artist, Joni would have thrived in this age when an artist like Beyoncé releases a concept album like Lemonade, with short films, more than music videos, to accompany every track.
Joni was sitting on a formidable songbook by the time she signed on to Reprise, and some of the songs, especially those that were never released, were at least as playful as “Big Yellow Taxi,” a track that ends with laughter on her third album. She would save her stand-up for the clubs, where she would sing a song, “Mr. Blue,” in response to hearing that Dylan had written “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” based on unused bits of other songs. (This would probably characterize much of Dylan’s associative writing in his ’65–’66 burst of brilliance.) Mr. Blue was blue because he was treating his old lady badly, Mitchell tells the coffeehouse crowd, so he deserved everything he got. “Oh, Mr. Blue, you blew your chances long ago,” Joni seemed to relish singing
. She was particularly proud of causing scandal with these lines: “Hang on one more day or two / Then I promise I’ll be laying you.” It sounds like Mr. Blue hadn’t blown all his chances yet.
There was more whimsy—and some accidental self-revelation—in “Ballerina Valerie,” inspired by a documentary about the dancer Vali Myers, so scandalous with her “redheaded fits” that she was even exiled from Paris. Just when she began receiving commercial offers after dancing alongside a Donovan performance of “Season of the Witch”—a deadly serious song for the Wiccan Vali—she was so bewildered, she hid in a cave. The ink on Joni’s Reprise contract was barely dry when she was trying this song out in coffeehouses, and it wouldn’t take long for her to have second thoughts and eventually plot her own escape. She announced her composition as a psychedelic song that would make a natural Coca-Cola advertisement—laughing as she spoke, pronouncing the word with her Canadian diction on the second syllable. Joni reveled in turning this wild gypsy into a Coke commercial, right down to the jingle melody:
Everything’s bright as he draws on the pipe
And the bowl glows redder
And things go better with Coca-Cola
That finale always got a big laugh in clubs where she would be on the same bill as stand-up comics like Mort Sahl. Her own dialogue was often peppered with screwball comedy timing. Before a woman could have political or economic power, she could be Lucille Ball or Elaine May. Joni had a big, generous laugh that welcomed everyone, even herself, from the introspection for which she is better known. The humor songs of that period have remained unrecorded, and the laugh lines stayed out of the music, at least for her debut. She had something serious to share.
There is an imperfection to this debut Serious Statement, and it was not the fault of the material. Song to a Seagull, sonically speaking, is not quite what it wanted to be, and this was largely because of a technical glitch, and the buck stops with David Crosby in the producer’s chair. “I hadn’t recorded it well enough,” he recalled later. “I had allowed too much noise—too much signal-to-noise ratio—too much hiss.” Removing this hiss also removed considerable resonance, and this was further marred by a failed experiment. Crosby, who had only previously experienced the studio as a performer, thought it would be a groovy idea to get the overtones and the resonance from the piano strings—Joni also was keen on this idea—but he had no idea how to get the levels right.
Compare the sound quality with her follow-up, Clouds, engineered by Henry Lewy, who would be Joni’s cherished partner in the studio throughout her greatest experiments of the ’70s. It is the audio equivalent of a blurry, opaque lens versus a sharp, lucid one. Almost immediately after the release, Joni said it sounded like it was recorded in a bell jar, which, given the emotional subject matter of the songs, was unintentionally appropriate. The Joni of her debut is trapped in the reverberation of her own voice, the echo chamber of her mind. Still, Crosby was enthralled with his lovely discovery, and also enthralled with himself for plucking her from the Gaslight South.
“He would take me around and show me off like he’d invented me,” Joni said. “It was kind of embarrassing. You see the look on his face [referring to the famous photograph on Mama Cass’s lawn]. Clapton couldn’t figure out what I was doing. He was leaning on his fingers like a monkey. His mouth is gaping open. But Crosby is sitting there like a proud papa, as if I were his discovery. As much as I was young and wanted people to hear my music, I found it embarrassing. He’d trot me out and he’d call me down from upstairs and watch me blow their minds.
“But then we got into the studio, he kind of held court and he was incompetent,” Joni recalled. “I don’t know how he screwed up the sound the way he did. It’s not on the masters. There was hiss on the tapes, but not on the masters. He was trying to get the sympathetic vibrations off of the strings. All they had to do was cut off that track and everything would have been fine. The masters weren’t ruined. This was just voice and guitar with very few effects on it. So whatever it is that is making the sound suck could have been remixed in a night, the whole thing. Just balance the guitar and the voice, add a minimal amount of echo, a tiny touch, and remix it. But instead, he took it to David Adderley to remix it to try and get the hiss off, and in the process they took off the high end of the vocals. That was a really stupid call. I don’t know what that cost me. You put it on with a stack of other records and you’ll hear how bad the sound is. Judy Collins said it sounded like it was under a Jell-O bowl. The performance is strong, but it’s scratched like an old silent movie negative.”
Still, the sound quality couldn’t bury such extraordinary material. Joni’s ascension was unquestioned.
Joni’s evenings are most people’s mornings, and on “Night in the City,” Song to a Seagull’s most ebullient track, she celebrates her nocturnal muse. She introduced the song in 1967 thus:
“It’s about a night in any city where you go out and wander around listening to music. I wrote it about a place in Toronto, Ontario, called Yorkville Avenue. It’s a little village there, and there are clubs all along for several blocks and you can . . . stand in what I think of as music puddles, where music sort of hangs from here to here, and if you step too far over into the other direction, then you’re in . . . a new music puddle. And it’s dedicated to all people who came tonight with someone who took much too long to get ready.”
“Night in the City” is not harmonically adventurous by Joni’s standards—it’s straight-up blues with a lyrical melody—but it is set way past bedtime and, stepping into unknown “music puddles,” anything could happen. It is the closest thing the album has to a group performance. On bass is Stephen Stills, who happened to be down the hall at Sunset Sound with Buffalo Springfield (whose other leader was Joni’s old friend Neil Young). And Joni accompanies her guitar playing with some blues-based piano riffs.
“I got this piano idea for ‘Night in the City,’ and I hadn’t played piano since I was eight years old,” Joni recalled. “But I had to find the notes. It was about twenty minutes of groping, then I located the part, and now I had it. I had to bring it up to speed. It probably took about an hour, and I probably did it in an hour and a half, which isn’t that long. I’ve seen people go for four days for a fucking drum sound. And David Crosby says, ‘Shouldn’t we get a real piano player, man?’ So I thought, okay, I don’t need a voice of discouragement here. I know I’ll get it. I’m zeroing in on it, and just give me a little more time. He did a lot of things like that. Also, I’d do a performance and he’d go into raves when I knew I had a better one in me. I thought I’d be better off using my own judgment.”
“Night in the City” ranges from rhythmic alto in her chest voice in the verses, to ethereal soprano work in the chorus, as if the pitch for the city has to have more of a rock and roll insistence—the only song on the album with this feeling—while in the chorus she sounds more like a fairy princess. But it is leaping into the forbidden puddle that is the song’s most prophetic feature. “Music comes spilling out into the street / Colors go flashing in time,” she sings, as if the demarcation of someone else’s domain brought new colors to the canvas of evening. In an earlier cultural moment, Wallace Stevens wrote, “The night knows nothing of the chants of night. / It is what it is as I am what I am.” In 1967, night was still a beautiful mystery, colored in the tones and timbres of psychedelia. Joni overdubs a bluesy piano part, her first recording on the instrument. If drums and an electric guitar had been added to the mix, Joni could have produced some acid rock herself.
Song to a Seagull ends with its most ambitious song, “Cactus Tree,” a song Joni said she was inspired to write after seeing Dont Look Back, D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary that followed a few weeks of Bob Dylan’s UK tour in the spring of 1965. Throughout the film, which Joni said “made a big impression” on her, Dylan is rude, obnoxious, and particularly cavalier to Joan Baez. Joni clearly identified with Dylan and not Baez, and, inspired by “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” an
d “Gates of Eden,” both performed in the film, piled image upon image, but with more euphony. She said she even lengthened her “a’s,” to sound like his, although her voice and guitar sound nothing like Dylan’s. Even when she was influenced, she was still independent, which is what “Cactus Tree” is about. Experiences pile up, they make a huge impression, but she keeps moving. Joni’s metaphor of the cactus tree is like the rolling stone gathering no moss, except it’s even deeper. She keeps taking in experience, growing more resilient, storing up each storm to get her through each drought. It is about a strong woman who needs no gardener.
The song opens with how this album was made—and who was producing it—in the first place: David Crosby, the sailor who “takes her to a schooner / And he treats her like a queen / Bearing beads from California . . .” Joni is just getting started. The woman of “Cactus Tree” is collecting men and exfoliating in her own time. She fears that someone will “ask her for eternity.”
“‘Cactus Tree’ is about a woman who has a lot of suitors and none of them are quite right,” Joni recalled. “And it’s ironic: She’s so busy being free. It’s dripping in irony. I was trying to maintain the freedom to be myself, and men always Svengali on you. They think it’s their right. And they all have a different idea of what they want you to be.” And she doesn’t have to keep any of them. She doesn’t even have to keep the person she was. On her first album, she lays out her many selves, from the city to the seaside, with chords that end on a question mark.
Before her first album hit the streets, Joni had an encounter with another innovator, Jimi Hendrix. It was the year everything changed, 1967, when the sound of electric guitars turned thick, fat, and gloriously clangorous. Very few musicians in any genre not only master an instrument but reconceive how the rest of us hear it. Hendrix’s reinvention of the electric guitar belongs with what Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis did for trumpet, Charlie Parker for alto sax, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane for tenor, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk for piano. These are august names to invoke for a guitarist who never even learned to read music (much to Davis’s surprise when he set up charts for Hendrix), but Hendrix lived up to them. He gave his audience feedback, distortion, and a huge attack that made earlier rock guitar seem spindly by comparison. There were great rock guitarists before Hendrix, but the very best who were around for the Hendrix revolution—Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, Jimmy Page, Robbie Robertson, among others—quickly added the feedback and distortion just to compete.