Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire: Joni Mitchell at 80
Celebrating the career of a most articulate music legend
A talented, attractive blonde, singing personal songs that strike a chord with a wide audience, all the while her dating life is fodder for cheap and easy jokes.
But I’m not talking about Taylor Swift. No, I’m talking about somebody who went through all of that years before — Joni Mitchell, who turns 80 today.
Mitchell is, at the least, on the short list of most influential women in popular music of the 20th Century. It’s not an outcome one would have guessed, based on her beginnings.
Small town Saskatchewan, even a larger community like Saskatoon, is not the kind of place someone with that lofty position usually comes from. But it’s where Mitchell grew up. It’s where she (eventually) got her first guitar despite resistance from her mother. It’s where she drew inspiration from one of her teachers and from the jazz records she was drawn to. It’s where she had childhood polio, which later forced her to get creative with her guitar playing and tuning because of its aftereffects. It’s where she played her first gigs.
That led to a steady, if not swift climb. She moved to Toronto, starting with busking and non-union gigs because she couldn’t afford dues. She began to write her own songs because the scene could be territorial with more established singers getting preferential treatment for covers.
Her shows and songs both got more notice, resulting in her being the one covered. Tom Rush was an early champion. The likes of Leonard Cohen and Fairport Convention were fans. By 1968, Judy Collins’ version of “Both Sides Now” would become a Top 10 hit.
Mitchell wasn’t in Toronto for too long in the scheme of things, moving to the U.S. and touring.
One of those road gigs that changed the trajectory of her career. David Crosby saw her performing at a small club in Miami, telling Uncut in 2020, “She was stunningly good, right off the bat. I was amazed. Amazed by her, of course, but also that there wasn’t a gigantic crowd of people saying, ‘Holy shit, did you hear that?!?!'”
The high profile of a former Byrd being a cheerleader didn’t hurt, but big names in the folk scene played a big part. Buffy Sainte-Marie and Rush both had the ear of an agent’s assistant named Elliot Roberts, getting him to see her at Cafe Au Go-Go in the Village.
Mitchell accepted Roberts’ offer to become her manager. She’d have a deal with Reprise Records in short order, with her first album having Crosby as producer.
AUDIO: Joni Mitchell “That Song About the Midway”
Their romantic relationship wouldn’t last, because of who they both were as people. Crosby being Crosby, his infidelity ended it. Mitchell sang the breakup song she’d written about him — “That Song About the Midway” – right to his face at one of those Laurel Canyon gatherings. Then she immediately sang it again.
Whatever bad decisions Crosby was making in relationships or in life, he did one thing right. When it came to her first album, his instinct was that with Mitchell’s talent and confidence, the best thing he could do was stay out of the way and let her do what she wanted.
Song to a Seagull remained on the spare side, also showing a bit of a contrarian streak by not including any of her songs that had been covered by others. The album remains intimate, as if you’re seeing her up close at some random coffeehouse. “Michael of the Mountains” showed that love songs weren’t all “moon in June.” She could portray endearing comfort (“Sisotowbell Lane”), but also explore more disquieting territory (“I Had a King” and “Cactus Tree,” the latter of which smartly contrasted its lyrics with deceptively sunny musical backing).
The debut set a baseline template that Mitchell would expand upon and, as her career went on, deviate from. It’s an effective tablesetter, but Mitchell would quickly get even better.
There’s long been a dichotomy in Mitchell, a woman who is often intensely private in her life, but unafraid of exploring that life in her art. Relationships were subject matter from the get-go (“Both Sides Now” had been inspired by the end of her first marriage). It was clear that Mitchell was as capable of finding joy in the moments where everything clicked as she was of being clear-eyed when they fell apart. She came across as someone too realistic to be a full-fledged romantic. And less than 15 years into the rock era, it wasn’t as if audiences were getting flooded with songs about the challenges that even good relationships can face.
Mitchell’s dating life (which included a time where she was involved with Graham Nash) was cheap fodder for the burgeoning white dude circle of rock critics. Earlier this year, Jann Wenner stuck both of his feet in his mouth in a New York Times Q&A. He attempted to defend his new book of compiled interviews with rock “masters,” all of them white men. His defense strategy was to insist that neither people of color or women were “articulate” enough to meet his standards for the book. When David Marchese pushed back on this, specifically mentioning Mitchell, Wenner responded by jamming his feet further down his gullet without the aid of condiments, saying, “You know, Joni was not a philosopher of rock ’n’ roll. She didn’t, in my mind, meet that test. Not by her work, not by other interviews she did. The people I interviewed were the kind of philosophers of rock.”
Over 50 years earlier, under Wenner’s leadership, Rolling Stone showed its “commitment” to “rock philosophy” and “being articulate” by acting like snickering 13-year-olds, referring to Mitchell as “The Queen of El-Lay” and “The Old Lady of Rock” and making a crude chart outlining her dating history.
Mitchell was justifiably pissed, refusing to speak to the mag until a 1979 Cameron Crowe interview.
On the album front, Joni assumed even more control. Whereas her cover art for the debut had been pen-and-ink drawing,she painted a self portrait for Clouds (her first creative love was painting, something she still does today).
As the painting was in full color, unlike the half-and-half feel of Clouds’ cover, the album itself feels fuller, even as it sticks to an acoustic blueprint. “Chelsea Morning” made the intimate feel expansive, as Mitchell’s deft use of imagery makes a song about her NYC apartment feel universal. There’s an empathy in “I Think I Understand” that’s palpable. “That Song About the Midway” is honest, but “Both Sides Now” is contemplative beyonds its origins, as she gets metaphorical and philosophical. Its sheer strength as a song unsurprisingly made it one the most covered in her catalog.
With Clouds being a better version of the debut, she was on an upward trajectory.
Ladies of the Canyon would reflect the most well-known creative surroundings of her career — the house on Lookout Mountain Road in Laurel Canyon. Musicians who made enough money early on flocked to the area, which had the advantage of being close to L.A’s hustle and bustle while being quiet and isolated, full of trees.
Members of Canned Heat were Mitchell’s neighbors (until a 1969 fire destroyed the house). Mitchell used some of the money she made off her first album to buy her home. Not long after buying it, she met Nash, who was in L.A. with the Hollies. Within a few months, Nash moved in, a relationship that led to songs by both (most notably his composition “Our House”) and the formation of CSN, when Stephen Stills and Crosby came by the house one night.
One could see the view from one of her windows, drawn into the folds of her self-portrait skirt on the cover. The contents inside revealed Mitchell was incorporating more elements into folk, with an uptick in writing that resulted in some of her most memorable songs.
VIDEO: Joni Mitchell “Big Yellow Taxi”
Mitchell’s social concerns came to the fore on “Big Yellow Taxi,” its commentary played against the bright, almost playful music. If its inspiration came from seeing encroaching development during her first trip to Hawaii, its themes were universal and sadly prescient thanks to capitalism going unchecked too often. The memorable line, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot” has been repeated far too often in real life in the over half-a-century since.
She didn’t actually play Woodstock, thanks to management that shortsightedly thought The Dick Cavett Show would be a better booking. She watched news reports on the festival in the hotel room where she wrote it, later hearing about it firsthand from Nash, a memorable early gig for CSN. As Stills was captured staying in the Woodstock film, “This is the second time we’ve ever played in front of people, man, we’re scared shitless.”
In her hands, she leaned into the hippy dream more than the reality, mixing in spirituality and political commentary. It memorably captured the positive aspects of the festival that allowed it to happen without falling apart as happened to others, becoming a hit for Crosby, Stills and Nash.
“Circle Game” dated back a few years to her club days. It was a reply to Neil Young’s “Sugar Mountain,” which he’d written on his 19th birthday in 1964, a lament of the pending end of his teen years.
Mitchell’s engaging response to her friend from the club days, with backing vocals from Crosby, Stills and Nash, was both bittersweetly contemplative about the inevitable passage of time as it was deliberately hopeful (“So the years spin by and now the boy is 20/Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true/There’ll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty/Before the last revolving year is through”).
And those Mitchell standards were the last three songs on the album, which had plenty of other things to recommend it. “Morning Morgantown” was a spiritual sequel to “Chelsea Morning.” “For Free” melds piano-driven beauty with her love of jazz in an exploration of her ambivalence towards fame.
The follow-up would be the most important and beloved of Mitchell’s career. Blue would be a touchstone, not just for singer-songwriters who came along in its immediate wake, but for artists all the way to the present day (Mitski, boygenius, Swift, etc.). Artists whose work rarely, or never sounded like Mitchell, like Maynard James Keenan of Tool, even picked up something from it.
AUDIO: Joni Mitchell Blue (full album)
In short, I could have written this piece entirely about Blue.
The end of her relationship with Nash made its way to the album. It had not been a pleasant breakup, as things hadn’t been smooth since Mitchell sensed his reluctance to marry. The final straw was a trip Nash took on Crosby’s boat, The Mayan. It was an extended getaway to comfort Crosby, who was deeply grieving the death of his girlfriend, Christine Hinton, who’d been killed in a car accident taking his cat to the vet. It was a multi-week trip from Fort Lauderdale to San Francisco with ample supplies of weed and coke.
Those supplies had kicked in by the time they reached Panama, where Mitchell met up with them. She was less than pleased with Nash, leading to an argument. By the time he got back to L.A., he received a telegram which read, “If you hold sand too tightly in your hand, it will run through your fingers. Love, Joan.”
“My Old Man,” with just Mitchell’s voice and piano, is a portrait of the two before things turned, with storm clouds on horizon. “River” uses its Christmas setting (complete with portions of “Jingle Bells” in the piano part) to bring the melancholy heartbreak of the breakup (or anyone lonely at the holidays) to life. “A Case of You,” which noted Joni fan Prince later covered, detailed the love for an ex that can remain even when you know it’s over as effectively as any song before or since.
But Blue was far from being 10 Songs About Graham Nash. The affecting “Little Green” was about the baby daughter she’d given up for adoption when she couldn’t afford to raise her during her club days. “Carey” is about a fling she had with an American in Greece when she’d left to decompress, one that both knew wouldn’t last. If she got back on her feet then, she also felt homesick, which came through in the buoyant “California.”
The album was deeply confessional, yet Mitchell kept it relatable. In that 1979 Rolling Stone interview, she said, “The Blue album, there’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals. At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world and I couldn’t pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy. But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defenses there either.”
If the ’70s were the Me Decade, Mitchell made her “me” songs feel like they were written about you.
For the Roses reflected a desire not to repeat herself as she threw more jazz into the folk pop mix, with different players like sax and woodwind player Tom Scott. There is still a bit of Blue here, as with “Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire,” about a heroin-addicted lover (which could certainly be read as James Taylor) and “Woman of Heart and Mind.”
There’s also a bit of dissatisfaction with the music business. She wanted her painting of a horse with roses sticking out of its butt to be the cover. Her new label, Asylum, said no. Then she suggested a photo of her standing naked on ocean rocks, effectively mooning anyone who viewed it. Asylum head David Geffen dissuaded her by pointing out that it would be in stores with a $4.99 sticker slapped on her ass.The photo went in the inner gatefold.
Her displeasure informed both the title track and “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio.” The latter, with Nash on harmonica, became her biggest hit to that point. Even though she wrote it sarcastically as a response to Geffen’s call for a hit single, it came across as more playful in practice and still unmistakably Joni.
Mitchell moved past dabbling on Court and Spark, with backing from Scott and his whole L.A. Express band, among others. She hadn’t abandoned the songcraft that got her there and the result was the other high water mark next to Blue.
The biggest seller of her career, it was carried by its depth of quality with the heartfelt, orchestral “Down to You” being a highlight.
It was buoyed by its singles. “Raised on Robbery” wasn’t a huge hit, but its humorous look at the singles scene and a sex worker in the middle of it still holds up, especially with the music being as close as she got to rock-and-roll.
Her top-charting song, “Help Me,” reached No. 7 in the U.S. She juxtaposed the relationship weariness with the way her vocals glide through them in a way that suggests the rest of her may not be as wary as her brain.
“Free Man in Paris” was proof that she didn’t need to be in a relationship to write a pointed song about a man. In this case, the man in question was Geffen (“Stoking the star maker machinery/Behind the popular song/I deal in dreamers/And telephone screamers”) Married to enchanting melodic turns, it was sharp, uncompromised pop.
Mitchell chose to play the music she wanted to without regard for commercial considerations when it came to the follow-up. The Hissing of Summer Lawns kicked off this more adventurous direction. It baffled some reviewers upon its release, but it’s held up quite well, starting with its single,”In France, They Kiss on Main Street,” a story of coming-of-age during the time Mitchell did. The lyrics are uniformly strong and the experimentation, including very early sampling (on “The Jungle Line”), leave it sounding more forward-thinking than the retreat some viewed it as.
The travel-inspired Hejira might not have been as consistent, but it contained plenty of highlights, especially the flirtatiously lustful “Coyote,” which is boosted by the fretless bass of Jaco Pastorius. He’d appear on her next three albums, a welcome musical presence whose career and life were cut short in 1987 by the combination of addiction and bipolar disorder, which got him beaten to death by a nightclub bouncer.
AUDIO: Joni Mitchell “Coyote”
It might have seemed perverse to some that Mitchell walked away from her most successful style of writing. She made no apologies, telling Rolling Stone, “Here’s the thing. You have two options. You can stay the same and protect the formula that gave you your initial success. They’re going to crucify you for staying the same. If you change, they’re going to crucify you for changing. But staying the same is boring. And change is interesting. So of the two options, I’d rather be crucified for changing. ”
Mitchell indulged her jazz leanings further, combining them with less personal lyrics on Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. Stretching it out to a double album stretched patience. Compounding it was her indefensible, cringeworthy decision to appear in blackface on the cover.
It was her last album to go gold, a reality exacerbated by her decision to do a collaborative album with Charles Mingus. From there on out, she showed little interest in recapturing past glories. The results produced plenty of material worth digging for as well (she wasn’t phoning it in, by any means). Other songs were too self-impressed and inscrutable for their own good.
She closed her recording career to date with two of her strongest efforts since the ’70s. 2002’s Travelogue, which she said would be her last, is way more arresting and interesting than most artists’ revisit of their back catalogs have been. Shine, which arrived five years later, was a welcome surprise present, with Mitchell impassioned, tough and in good form.
Mitchell, whose touring became increasingly rare before ceasing all together well before she stopped making albums, has performed a couple of Joni Jam shows (with Brandi Carlile’s band and numerous guests) in the last year-plus. The first, at the 2022 Newport Jazz Festival, was released as a live album earlier this year. The second occurred at The Gorge outside Seattle in June. It’s more likely that one of those happen again than getting a new studio album, which is fine. She can relax at home, painting when the mood strikes without trying to force the songwriting muse to return if its not there.
The output of her albums over her first eight years, along with the best of what came after, ensures that Mitchell’s legacy is secure. As a lyricist, composer, guitarist and singer, she stands as a woman whose reach extends beyond the classic rock era when she sold her most records.
Indeed, she’s more than articulate enough. She’s lasted with more impact than the denizens of the Arrested Development Boys Club. That’s something to surely inspire today’s women artists, whether they’re dating a future Hall of Famer on the Kansas City Chiefs or not.
VIDEO: Joni Mitchell performs “Both Sides Now” at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival 2022
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