Listening to Joni Mitchell in the car, part Three: For the Roses

Again, Joni comes to you out of order.

I know, I know, my sparse readership is absolutely desperate to read my latest reaction to the earlier works of Joni Mitchell, all of which I first heard fifty or more years ago. In my defense, I’d like to say, I’ve been wildly busy. Also in my defense, this deep dive into Joni has elevated her from musical genius to timeless musical genius on a par with any composer who has ever lived, and I mean anyone you can offer up. Say, Mozart. She’s that amazing.

The only problem is, I have that condition called “Stuck Song Syndrome” and if you think that’s a problem for me, well, in general, it is not. I’m resigned to having a song stuck in my head at all times and it only really bothers me when I wake up in the night and there’s a song blaring, note for note, keeping me awake. I have a range of tools to help me go back to sleep but sometimes, I just have to let the song play through, again and again and again.

So the song that’s been stuck in my head is “Electricity.” And it’s driving me crazy, but it’s better than “Banquet,” which preceded it for a week and that’s the first song on For the Roses, so here we go.

I’m 13 years old on a ranger station in Montana…

I was young when I first heard “Banquet”, and I knew nothing of Canada, or even the fact that Joni is from Canada. So in 1973 as I listened to this song worshipfully, trying to coax my voice up into the impossible register in which it is sung, I’d snag on “Javex bottles on the tide.” What, pray tell, was Javex? We didn’t have the internet in 1973 so I had to let it go, but now I know it’s bleach. Because I just finally looked that up at age 66.

Javex aside, this song like so many songs on this record is an extended metaphor of incredible power. And that, I actually understood at age 13. I was young enough to still suffer the unique affliction of childhood, which is acceptance of my personal life circumstance without question. I hadn’t begun to ask hard questions about my own life—that didn’t come for years—but I was stirred by this questioning of why at the banquet table of society, where there’s more than enough for everyone, “in the cookie I read: some get the gravy, some get the gristle, and some get the marrow bone.” The whole song is an indictment. Also note, at age 13, I had never encountered a fortune cookie, so that was another mystery.

“Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire” flew right over my head. And since it’s a gorgeous and haunting look at heroin addiction, that’s unsurprising. But when I listen to it now, the way Joni’s voice swoops in and caresses desperation is unspeakably seductive. I also hear in this song’s clarinet her eventual conversion to jazz.

She offers up a sweet antidote in “Barangrill”. I mean, she’s sitting in a bar getting drunk, admiring the black diamond earrings of waitresses “talking about Zombies and Singapore Slings.” I had no idea what those were at age thirteen, I’d sipped maybe a tenth of a skunky beer at a party once at that age, but I sang along anyway. What I of course didn’t understand was that Joni is asking if simpler lives are happier. That’s a great question from a woman who went to great lengths in order to live a complicated life. Again, there’s a lovely little jazzy flute riff at the end.

“Lesson in Survival.” I loved this song because I loved to sing it, but what could such naked heartbreak say to me at age thirteen? I’d had a boyfriend or two, but never even been kissed. Listening to a grown woman try to navigate her need for love and closeness while being socially awkward around a man’s friends breaks my heart. Oh, I loved that line, “I came in as bright as a neon light and I burned out right there before him.” The way she calls him “my sweet tumbleweed” and then says “if you ever get the notion to be needed by me.” It’s just so open, so painful. “I will always love you…magnet and iron, the soul.”

It’s interesting how this song segues into “Let the Wind Carry Me” with some clarinet, and an examination of her family. How apt. But listen, at age 13, I associated kick pleat skirts, high heels and green eye makeup with my mother’s generation. The Joni I knew and loved wore miniskirts and boots, or long dresses and sandals, and not a speck of makeup, just her long bangs and high cheekbones. I had to really work to reconcile this visual with the woman I was listening to. And of course this song holds a secretive acknowledgment that she had given up a child for adoption. “But it passes like the summer, I’m a wild seed again, let the wind carry me.”

Our Title Song

Okay, I love love love “For the Roses.” It is a poem, so rich in metaphor it could collapse under the weight of all this rich language over that lovely folkie guitar picking. Every single line is a poem. I will not bore you with a bunch of repetition, but seriously? “I get these notes on butterflies and lilac sprays from girls who just have to tell me they saw you somewhere” and “Pass around your golden egg, speculation, well who’s to know if the next one in the nest will glitter for them so” and “just when you’re getting a taste for worship they start bringing out the hammer and the boards and the nails.” I don’t know who she wrote it to but I’ll tell you, he never wrote anything as beautiful as this song.

Also I had no idea what arbutus was, or how its rustling might sound, and I still don’t. I’ve decided to leave the mystery intact.

I suppose he’s the same man to whom she wrote “See you sometime”. Oh womanhood, how we circle back, something I didn’t understand would be part of my future. I did love how, in this song, she would “spring from the boulders like a mama lion.” I was doing my share of boulder springing at the ranger station, so I could have possibly finally identified with one line in one song of Joni’s—but only the boulder part. I was only nine years from becoming a mama lion myself, something I didn’t know at age thirteen. At the time, I considered motherhood impossible and had no intention of taking it on. But hey, I could leap!

And finally, we get to the stuck song, “Electricity.”

Another beautiful, playful extended metaphor. I remember listening to this repeatedly in utter confusion, having never seen a fuse box in my young life, but at some point I put it together with something I’d read and understood what I was listening to. Love as electricity, and electricity itself saying, hey, maybe I’d like a break from all these overloaded lines, sparks flying, “loose wires flying out at me.” Electricity itself was also considering going back to nature with “a good dog and some trees, out of touch with the breakdown of this century.” And I also understood “While the song that he sang her to soothe her to sleep runs all through her circuits like a heartbeat.” There she was, singing about this adult world of love and intimacy that terrified me, even as it beckoned me.

This song is short, and when it’s circling in my brain, I can let it run all the way to the end. Sometimes that brings the stuckness to a halt. And I love that vocal trill at the closing. And then comes another extended metaphor of a song, the one that brought me to Joni in the first place. The first 45 I ever bought, and one of the first albums. “You Turn me on, I’m a radio.” It’s a perfect country song, something I didn’t understand at the time because I didn’t appreciate country music back then. But I’d spent my time listening to farm reports on the AM radio out of sheer boredom, and I understood what the radio was to its listeners. Listen, this is a perfect song. I don’t have much beyond that to say about it, and the years have not dimmed my love for it.

I also love “The blonde in the bleachers” especially for that rhythmic segue with “she tapes her regrets to the microphone stand,” when you’re with him, now, standing on a stage, as he reads her note as he swings into one of his more rock and roll songs. The Pretenders do this on a song (I can’t figure out which one it is but I often heard it on KINK.fm), and the Jackson Browne version of “Stay” does this (because it’s actually live). I think it’s a fine, fine thing to give your listener. Again, we end with jazz, that clarinet noodling around.

We Know What We Know, Even Before We Know It.

I want you to know that age thirteen, I sang “Woman of Heart and Mind” with every drop of sincerity I could, understanding and almost loathing every painful word because no other song I have ever heard before or since conveys the complexity of being a woman in love. And I somehow knew this when I was still more or less a child and had never been in love, unless of course you count Cat Stevens. I knew this was what it would actually mean to be in love, and to try to make that bond of love last. It actually scared me to death. Would love be worth this suffering, this self-obliteration?

The most painful line in this song is the last. “You know, the times you impress me most are the times when you don’t try…when you don’t even try.”

It took a few years for me to understand “Judgement of the Moon and Stars.” I’m fairly sure I took this one to my mother or brother to learn that it was about Beethoven going deaf, which made sense of “No tongue in the bell and the fishwives yell but they. might as well be mute.” I know I listened to it repeatedly when I was studying Linda Bierds in college, because she wrote a poem about his deafness. Even though I didn’t initially understand what this song was about, I loved the symphonic transition when she tells him to “shake your fist like lightning, now, you’ve got to roar like forest fires. You’ve got to spread your light like blazes all across the sky.” Tell him, Joni, tell him to rage against being “condemned to wires and hammers.” This gorgeous exhortation continues into “broken trees and elephant ivories” because Joni is a poet, a poet, a poet. I can still remember my wonder as the images coalesced into a piano in my young mind. Magic.

I conclude.

I love this record, maybe best of all, but I’m sure I’ll say that about at least three of hers as I continue to delve into these songs. With For the Roses, Joni Mitchell awakened me to the existence of Canada, what with Javex bottles on the tide, and proud-headed Queen Lizzie on the copper in the fusebox. She sang seductively of the black road and double yellow line, of being a wild seed again, articulating an urge toward rootlessness that I’ve always felt and almost never followed. By opening her broken heart and letting the pain pour out in song, she warned me of the cost of love. Mostly, through her puzzling, powerful lyrical metaphors, Joni Mitchell awakened me to poetry.