Posts Tagged: Joni Mitchell
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.
Listening to Joni Mitchell, part two
Not in Order
I’m starting with the first record I heard by Joni, which was Ladies of the Canyon. When I was thirteen, Brother Steve brought it home from Minneapolis, where he attended art school. Home for me was a log cabin at a ranger station near the mouth of Gallatin Canyon, in Montana. Steve was my musical mentor, bringing me song after song because he hoped I’d love them. And I did, though Joni sang a little high for me.
These songs are so personal, a sung diary from a young woman in a magical world I longed for: music, artists, sunshine, longhaired men who were really still boys. A world to walk around in as opposed to getting into a car and driving somewhere, which is what we had to do to reach Bozeman. I was fascinated with boys but fearful of them. No “Morning Morgantown” for me, no rising from a man’s bed and venturing out in the city with my love. She might as well have been singing about the surface of the moon.
Besides, I was notoriously awful in the morning (still am).
The Sad Songs
I loved most the songs I could sing. “For Free” was keyed perfectly for me and it also told that haunting story. I’m sure my family got tired of listening to me crooooon alooooong to this song, as well as “Willie,” which I loved because I could break out the vibrato. Just imagine a thirteen year old girl warbling, “Willie is my chiiiiild, he is my faaaaather,” and then trying to hit the notes for “our love cannot be real.” Really. My parents could be very patient.
As a girl, I didn’t really understand “Conversation,” but an adult, I will tell you that “Conversation” has me shaking my head. It’s like “Poetry Man.” They capture a specific kind of heartbreak, the naive belief that you’d be better for a man than the woman he prefers. He banks the fires of his ego with your adoration, then returns to the woman he loves. Oh, my young heart bought right in, but my adult heart quietly ushers those men right on back to their homes.
I didn’t understand “The Arrangement” either, a song indicting capitalism, which is fine, and she does some interesting things with her voice, some truly haunting pyrotechnic runs that gave her nodes. But it meant nothing to me as a kid and I probably lifted the needle right over this one (remember how skilled we were at that?).
I loved “Rainy Night House” because it told me another non-relatable story, again with lovely vocal agility. It was also keyed low, so I could sing it without straining or offending the ears of my family. “Blue Boy” was another mystery I enjoyed, despite how troubling “roll her in his arms and give his seed to her” was to my virginal ears. As a girl, I thought it was about a statue that came to life, an idea I liked. As an adult I know it was one more song about Joni throwing her love away on a manchild.
The Happy Songs
Everyone knows and loves “Big Yellow Taxi,” and they should because it’s fun and playful and a pleasing antidote the heaviness that precedes it. But that goes right into “Woodstock.” And I’ll tell you, at age thirteen, as I sat there with headphones on and album cover in hand, listening to the lyrics of this song, I understood poetry for the first time. This song’s complex, layered lyrics sent my young mind spinning, enlarging, opening to the linguistic possibilities of metaphor.
“The Circle Game” is a singalong, and so sweet, and ends the record on a hopeful note after all the wooooo, and choral doom, and sad love stories on this record. But I saved the most important song for last.
The Ladies, the Canyon
“Ladies of the Canyon” enchanted and perplexed me at age thirteen. I listened to it over and over, because exactly which archetypal lady of the canyon would I be? Trina, Anna, Estrella, so deftly sketched and yet, so mysterious (as was this canyon of which she sang, I lived in a canyon myself but had never heard of Laurel Canyon or I’d probably have steeled my heart and taken off hitchhiking to reach it).
But back to the ladies. I thought these were the three choices available to me and I wasn’t sure where I fit. Trina was clearly a clothing artist (she wears her wampum beads? Seriously?). But hey, I had a really cool secondhand coat from my Grandma Lucille, so maybe, even though I was thirteen and too tall and curvy and pale and awkward. I started thrifting that year and wore outrageously strange clothing for an eighth grader, but it wasn’t exactly lace and filigree. I understood the look, I just couldn’t quite imagine myself pulling it off.
And then, in the next verse, bless her, Anna sat you down to eat while a horde of extremely fat cats and children twisted around her ankles. I could see this kitchen in my mind, and I liked it, but I didn’t enjoy making or eating most baked goods. I loved cats, but babies? Nope. Not a fan. Also, Anna was clearly the earth mother of the outfit. I was still planning to evade motherhood and I absolutely did not want to be Anna, nourishing, giving, fecund Anna, with her open door and all those goddamned baked goods. Anyone but Anna.
Estrella (Circus Girl) was definitely the most mysterious and arresting, so artistically described with “songs like tiny hammers hurled / at beveled mirrors in empty halls.” But then she was out there sailing seas and climbing banyans. Obviously I didn’t write songs or go on overseas adventures. Somehow I knew, at age thirteen, that I didn’t have the soul of an adventurer and feared I never would. Case in point, I never once ran away from home. But oh, how I wanted to be that woman, fearless and traveled, with her shattering songs and gypsy shawls.
You see how it all came out.
I really hate to break it to my thirteen year-old self, but of the three, I am most definitely the woman with the open door and the plump babies and the flowers on her table. It’s been small dogs over here, not cats. And I am no baker. But I’ll sit you down and feed you whenever you need it.
Listening to Joni Mitchell in the car – Part One
I’m aware that there are women in this world who don’t care for Joni Mitchell. They’re wrong, to be clear, but today–or perhaps eventually–I’ll address those of us who love Joni. The key word here is “eventually.” First, let’s go on a few road trips.
Port Townsend, Washington
I just wrapped up six weeks of various travels. First, I went to Port Townsend with two friends, Shannon and Katrina, for a writing retreat. In case you’re wondering, they are both writers, and in need of retreat. I drove up the Kitsap Peninsula with Katrina in my old car that still has a CD player. I’d grabbed a stack of options for listening, and asked Katrina to choose what we’d listen to. In there was one of my favorite car-trip CDs, Joni Mitchell’s Hejira. I assumed that at some point, my friend would choose Hejira, but she passed it by in favor of Bluegrass, and then of course the best car trip CD of them all, which is Paul Simon’s Graceland.
I allowed a small doubt to percolate in my psyche. Was it possible that Katrina didn’t like Joni Mitchell? I knew such women existed, but had never thought I’d harbor such an individual in my cadre of friends. To be on the safe side, I cautiously sidestepped the entire topic of Joni. I didn’t want to stir the smooth waters of the writing retreat, which was a peaceful, restorative experience that produced progress on the short story to which I have devoted my entire retired life so far.
And there were deer.
Florence, Oregon
My next trip was to Florence, Oregon, where April and I revisited a VRBO in historic Florence on the Siuslaw River, where we’d stayed at a few years ago. I took a really stressful route to Florence because my phone told me to get off I5 at Halsey. As I hair-pinned and white-knuckled my way through the hinterlands of Oregon, music was not an option. I focused all my attention on the road and my white-hot anger at my iPhone for leading me into this mountainous, rural, stunningly beautiful hellscape. I was going to the COAST, I didn’t need all this NATURAL BEAUTY, I just needed to get to the COAST to enjoy the natural beauty THERE.
At some point, my bladder near to bursting, I stopped at a Chevron and said, “I’ll gladly buy something but can I have your restroom key first?” The young clerk handed me a literal Hula Hoop with a key attached. I bought a Poppi. It was far too sweet but I drank it anyway. Poodle Creek Road finally delivered me to the highway I should have been taking in the first place, which I followed just long enough to be stopped for hours by a terrible (fatality) accident. I was four miles from the VRBO and hopelessly stalled. I turned off the car and listened to The Fine Young Cannibals, an old CD I bought right before the trip. It was still the banger I remembered from the years I’d put it on and my then-husband would groan because “Not again, Karen.” I don’t think The Raw and the Cooked, is responsible for him leaving, but “She Drives Me Crazy” might have been a factor.
The time in Florence was fantastic once I finally got there. April and I had fun of the type we’ve honed over fifty years of friendship. Great meals, some shopping and gallery-going, a ridiculously short hike to the Cape Perpetua Lookout, the Yachats rock shop (if you’ve been you know what a wild place that is). April prods me into moving, which is a good thing, and also a little humbling. At the Port Townsend writing retreat, my more fit companions took daily walks and came home flushed and happy. I just sat there, admiring the deer and writing. In Florence, April made me walk. It’s like she wants to keep me around for a few more years or something. I ate my weight in delicious seafood to circumvent her ambitions for my longevity.
Federal Way, Washington
My next trip was up to Federal Way to see Sue at her charming lakeside cottage for some relaxing days of conversation, aggressive thrifting, and crafts. Sue is an accomplished art quilter who crackles with creative energy and bursts with talent. When I visit her, her artistry feels contagious. So even though I have zero crafting talent, I brought a tiny case with some small craft-type materials in it that I’ve been carrying around for twelve years. I swear one of these days I will finish something.
The weather granted us only one sunny day down by the lake, where I read Sue the one short story to which I have apparently devoted my entire retirement so far, and I found all the places where it needed work.
The other days were cold, almost blustery. We kept ourselves busy with days of thrifting, good food, cocktails, and a Ricky Gervais series to binge watch in the evenings while we crafted (if you’re wondering, I embroidered a small part of a praying mantis on a piece of muslin. Go me!).
One day, Sue laid out material groups for a dozen quilts with my input, which (from me) sounded mostly like, “Do you have a stripe you could put with it?” or “Do you have a check you could put with it?” because I love adding stripes and checks to florals. My suggestions were sometimes greeted with “All wrong!” or “Yuck” or “Hmmmm” or “That might work!” or even “Perfect!” I’d send her into her quilting room to look for a specific color, and at one point she said, “I don’t have a fabric store in here.” Then she came out with a bunch of choices and said, “Okay, I do have a fabric store in here.”
Quilters, get set to drool.
It was glorious fun.
This trip was I5 all the way north and south, so I brought a stack of CDs, and many were Joni. For the Roses, Blue, Hejira, Ladies of the Canyon, Clouds, and Court and Spark. I decided to listen in chronological order, which brings me to the actual point of all this meandering introduction. I’m going to talk about Joni. A lot. Prepare yourselves, because I get personal. But because this got so long, and I intend to talk about these CDs in depth, I’m going to stop here and return to Joni another day.
That’s all.
The Album
Hey!
After I posted this, I realized I have a new essay up at Herstry: Fully Grown. I wrote this for a memoir-writing class with the wonderful Martha Gies, and it’s about motherhood, dwarfism, and wrestling with my moral conscience. I hope you enjoy it!
AND NOW BACK TO MY REGULAR NOODLING…
My first record
I know the first record I ever bought was a 45–Joni Mitchell’s “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio”–but my sense of myself as a person with musical tastes was inextricably tied up with the 33, the LP, or the album.
From a young age, I loved the actual physical object of an album. I would scrutinize the cover art and the artist photos, read the liner notes, memorize the lyrics. Everything was a clue. I wanted to understand the inspiration and the personality, to know as much as I could of the people behind the songs. The album cover itself was talismanic, a physical map to the music it held, worthy of intense study. But I didn’t own any until I was 13.
My first Album
For my 13th birthday, my parents gave me a choice. I could have a new record player, or I could accept my sister’s avocado green one with the cube-shaped speakers as a hand-me-down, and receive 25.00 to spend on albums. I went for the records. They drove me to Bozeman. As a college town, Bozeman had a great little store off Main where all the albums were 5.00. Imagine, five LPs, all of my own. I only remember two of them; “For the Roses,” by Joni Mitchell, and George Carlin’s “Class Clown.” They were both revelations in their way.
When you opened up “For the Roses,” Joni stood naked on a rocky seashore. I was too young to understand the symbolism, how this was a visual representation of how confessional her music was becoming, the artist stripped bare. I did understand what self-possession it would have taken to pose nude, on purpose, of your own volition. As the possessor of a female frame, I wanted to ward off the unwelcome attentions and expectations it carried. I hadn’t felt like that when puberty first hit in Arkansas, but in Montana it was different, and I layered up and hid away. And there she was, relaxed and proud of her nakedness. Joni would hide nothing from us.
“Class Clown” was a different animal entirely. My sister and I had memorized Dad’s copy of “Live at the Roostertail,” and probably expected more of the same. Well, this was raunchy Carlin, unfettered Carlin. Gone was the 1962 haircut and the skinny tie, the skits and bits. Carlin was a rebel, given over to political and social analysis in the guise of humor. I learned the entire record by heart in order to shock my classmates with the Seven Words.
And then, tape. Yuck.
Times change, and so does media. But I held on. Albums gave way to 8tracks, which gave way to cassettes. The absolutely awful sound quality of tape didn’t work for me, but my van had a tape player, so tapes it was. I kept my three-foot row of albums around for decades. But then, society went through a time where it was nearly impossible to find new needles. And CDs were there, and they had wonderful sound quality. I began to buy those.
I kept the records long after I no longer had a turntable. And then one day, I asked my husband to take that row of records out of the bookshelf and set it on the coffee table. I told him I needed to go through it. I knew there were treasures in there, and I had to figure out what to save. How would I decide? By artistic merit, possible value, sentimental attachment? How do you rank twenty years worth of musical acquisition? I had no idea where to start. The stack of albums sat for a week. It sat for another week. I never touched it. Then I quietly asked him to take it to the Goodwill.
All of it, every last one.
For months afterwards, when we visited our local Goodwill, I was tormented by the display of my old records. “Live at the Roostertail,” for which they wanted 5.99. Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls,” for which they wanted 9.99. What bugged me the most was seeing Donovan’s “Gift from a Flower to a Garden.” I knew that, despite the battered edges of the box, it was in wonderful shape. All those lyric sheets were intact. I didn’t even check the price on that one.
As the months went on, I tried very hard to ignore the record section, but my old records haunted the edges of my vision. And then, they were gone.
CDs do not hold the same object importance of albums. They are simply the music. I might look at the art for a minute, occasionally squint through a ridiculously small set of lyrics out of curiosity. Now, most people don’t even own CDs. I’m holding on to mine. I have no idea what I’ll do when our cars no longer have players, but I have a few players in the house, and I’m keeping them. For now.
Eventually, I suppose these CDs will all end up at the Goodwill. I don’t think I’ll be the one to take them there. I don’t want them haunting the edges of my vision when I stop in, demanding to know why I let them go.
