"A Tribute to Mr. Kratzman, wherever you are!
This album is dedicated to Mr. Kratzman who taught me to love words."

So runs the brief and generous note on the inside of Joni Mitchell's first album. It comes after the usual album credits for musicians, cover photos, "art direction,' engineers, and coffee carriers, and automatically you ask:

Who in hell is Mr. Kratzman? Just like that, without even a first name?

Mr. Kratzman, Joni explains, is the Mr. Kratzman who taught her the love of words between the ages of 11 and 12. He was an Australian teacher of English at high school in Saskatoon, and the love of words he taught her can be heard three times a night at the Riverboat in Toronto's Yorkville.

They are simple and remarkable words - more remarkable than the music which even when matched to Joni's clear and flexible voice, tends to too much keening on the same plane. A curious mixture of plangent plainchant and the characteristic Mitchell swoop reminiscent of a yodel that doesn't quite make it. But if Mr. Kratzman never did anything else, he gave the impetus to a singer with a telling gift for imagery and atmosphere.

Where is he now? Possibly in Edmonton, but Joni isn't sure. What is his first name? Joni never knew. What did it matter, when she was an impressionable 11-year-old and this guy Kratzman "looked like Gable and Peck rolled into one, with gray sideburns"?

The cover of Joni Mitchell's first album - selling like crazy in California, starting to move on the east coast, just released here - was designed and painted by her. Somewhere in the drawing there is a woman with long flowing hair, and somewhere in the hair there are the words, modestly picked out: Joni Mitchell. Too modestly for Warner Bros-7Arts, who otherwise gave her carte blanche on the album; and the singer's name is blasted out in plum colors top right. Warners plainly have high hopes for her; It's a fold-out album, rare for a first, and there's not a word of bio blurb anywhere in it (even rarer for a first. Just the words of the songs).

"It seemed to me that all I had to say was in the songs," Joni says deprecatingly. Mr. Kratzman would probably appreciate that, since he was (probably still is) very strong on essentials and death on superfluities.

Still, painting was Joni's first love. She met Kratzman for the first time at the end of a school year, and he told her: "If you can paint with a brush, Joni, you can paint with words. See you next year."

Next year she was in his class and she wrote an epic poem about a stallion, full of superheated stuff about "equine statues bathed in silver light." Joni thought it was great; and had it returned brusquely with red Kratzman circles all over it, plus the crushing word "Clich�" to go with each circle.

Kratzman took her aside. "What do you really know about stallions?" he asked.

From then on she stuck to things she knew, like crocuses and tadpoles caught in a mayonnaise jar�and the boys, stuck to things like squashed toads which the other teachers would have hemorrhaged over.

"He was just a great man," says Joni, "What he did was keep alive the fresh images that come out of the mouths of children."

These images remain with her in her songs today. It's a feel for one's roots that is rare among English Canadian singer-composers; as rare as singer-composers are in English Canada. Ian and Sylvia used to have it. Buffy Ste. Marie has it intermittently.

All but two of the songs in Joni Mitchell's album were written in the past 12 months. From her heritage the images of flowers and animals and things remembered from the Saskatchewan and Alberta prairies recur:

Marcie in a coat of flowers
Stops inside a candy store
Reds are sweet and greens are sour
Still no letter at her door
So she'll wash her flower curtains
Hang them in the wind to dry
Dust her tables with his shirt and
Wave another day goodbye�
Someone thought they saw her Sunday
Window-shopping in the rain
Someone heard she bought a one-way ticket
And went west again

Joni had taught herself the guitar from a Pete Seeger manual (never finished, which helps account for some singular fingering with her left hand), and she left the prairies when she was 19. Since then she has played in Toronto at the now-defunct Gate of Cleve and the Seven of Clubs; and at the Penny Farthing, as well as the Riverboat.

Later she married folksinger Chuck Mitchell; now divorced; wrote The Circle Game, probably her best known song, and about a year ago discovered the work of Leonard Cohen.

For a time after Toronto she lived in New York, where in short order her apartment was broken into three times and where she was mugged last winter by a man with a beer bottle.

"Hey Twiggy!" the man shouted, enigmatically, and then slugged her. "A racial grievance," Joni explains it. And now she lives in Los Angeles, among the curious and splendid canyons of North Hollywood, above the smog line, where the rents are still reasonable and the rest of Los Angeles seems a million miles away.

"It's a different world," she says. "The people up there have dropped out, and I think it's a time for me to put down some roots."

It certainly won't be as hectic a year as last when she worked 40 weeks out of 52 - "and that's club work, which means real weeks."

She worked wherever she could - for money firstly ("I didn't want to go back to working in a Saskatoon dress shop"), but also in case all these people were right who kept telling her that she wasn't what was happening, baby, and that what was happening was wildly psychedelic and loud.

Above all, Joni Mitchell, is not loud. She is direct and straightforward, but not loud. And after a bit, things started coming around her way: Rooms became more flexible in their booking policies, Warner-7 Arts signed her to a two-year, four-album contract, and this year she stands to make a lot of money out of her blend of sorrow, nostalgia, and affection.

A Hit for Joni Mitchell, A Miss for Lightfoot

Sometimes it�s the voice of a little girl, all pink and clean and full of wonder. The voice of innocence. And sometimes it�s the strong and slightly melancholy voice of a woman, a voice that�s hurting a little. It�s fascinating � the voice of the woman who has grown up and knocked around without losing the little girl inside her.

It belongs to folksinger Joni Mitchell, and it has never sounded more appealing that it does on her first album, Joni Mitchell (Reprise RS 6293) which was released this week in Toronto. It�s an exciting album; it displays a wonderful talent. And if there�s any justice in these things (which, of course, there isn�t) it will make Joni Mitchell a star.

Folk music has fallen victim recently to the very force that has so successfully revitalized rock �n� roll � musical eclecticism. The Beatles have borrowed from folk music, from the classics and jazz, from the music of the Oriental world; they�re using symphony orchestras, hokey jazz sounds, the most sophisticated recording technology and God-only-knows what next . . . and it�s fresh and exhilarating. Great. But Judy Collins fighting to hold her own against the busy orchestral arrangements of Joshua Rifkin, and Joan Baez singing semi-classics with the Toronto Symphony, and Leonard Cohen singing over the hum of some rooty-tooty studio chorus and Gordon Lightfoot with a studio orchestra � this is borrowing for its own sake. It�s tasteless.

Well, all this misplaced eclecticism seems not to have touched Joni Mitchell, with the result that her new album is a model of the kind of perfect harmony between material and arrangement that is the basis of all good music � and invariably the mark of a strong musical personality. The album was produced by David Crosby (late of the Byrds) which may account in part for the simplicity and taste of its arrangement. But the songs themselves � the melodies and lyrics � are Joni Mitchell�s, and exceedingly beautiful.

She has divided the album into two set of five songs. The first she calls, �I came to the city,� the second �Out of the city and down to the seaside.� The distinction isn�t that important, really, because no matter what the physical setting � be it the �chromeplate� and �plastic clothes� of the city or the �woodlands and the grasslands and the badlands� of the Prairies � her thoughts are the thoughts of a woman torn between the romantic notions of love and freedom.

Seabird I have seen you fly above the pilings
I am smiling at your circles in the air
I will come and sit by you while he lies sleeping
Fold your fleet wings I have
brought some dreams to share

It�s plain Miss Mitchell has a great love of words (she has dedicated the album to a Mr. Kratzman �who taught me to love words�) and a respect for clarity of expression that carries over to her music. The melodies she has written for the songs on this album are (with only one exception) carefully shaped and distinct, one from the other. All of them bear a diving-soaring quality that makes them unmistakably hers.

Add it all up (I forgot to mention that she�s a pretty fair guitarist) and you have a great album, an exciting musical experience and the hottest � make that the sweetest � new sound in folk music.

Separating Pop From Pap

Popular music and the music that enjoys popularity are not necessarily the same thing. Although there has been great improvement in the content of pop music since the mid-1950s, there is still a lot of trivia produced for consumption by 1968's adolescent Babbits.

This admixture of quality and pap hurls a real challenge to the record-buyer, the disk-jockey, and the ticket-buyer. If one lets his critical guard down for minute, the promoters can storm across the threshold. How else can one explain the triumphs of Paul Mauriat and his Tchaikovskyesque Muzak? How else could "Hair" cause boredom among the knowledgeably sophisticated of all ages and still excite dithyrambs from the ambience-chasers who would have walked out on a performance of The Fugs a few months earlier? The list is regrettably long. One could even add to them those slick artisans Simon and Garfunkle who are becoming increasingly like that thin and bashful photographer on the beach - underdeveloped and overexposed.

We are predictably entering a new era in which the challenging cynicism that American youth has exercised toward all Establishment products and lifestyles will be turned toward the popular culture scene. When that day arrives, "Hair" will get trimmed and The Fugs will be philosopher-kings. The musical show has simply borrowed the external trappings of The Fugs' super hippie outrages at convention and dull normality and turned it into a commercially acceptable clich� of musical and social inconsequence.

The work of The Fugs is by no means of an even consistency. Heaven help the protest poets if they ever do get to be polished. But their latest album, Tenderness Junction (Reprise 6280), is their most musical work yet. After some false starts on Broadside and ESP, the Fugs are ready to do battle in the commercial marketplace with their anti-commercial rants, their satirical slashes that draw blood, their Lenny Bruce-isms that hit the conventional middle-class right between its myopic, suburban eyes. The contrast and comparison between "Hair" and The Fugs could make a long article but this is a record column merely calling attention to the sextet's hymnology to an American cultural revolution on its best album yet.

The new lease on life obtained by The Fugs in recording for a West Coast label that has been causing a stir in music circles, call attention to some other second-time-around artists who Reprise is giving excellent productions when others thought they were no longer commercially viable. Jack Elliott, that bedrock city folknik who filled the gap between the generations of Woody Guthrie and Patrick Skye has a lustrous and illustrious album on Ramblin' Jack Elliott's Brigham (Reprise 6284). He has made at least 20 albums, including many a gem, but this is one of his best. Bruce Langhorne produced this LP under executive producer Andy Wickham in an album that rings as much with tradition as it does with modernity, dualism that used to undo certain folk fans. The Elliott album ranges from an experimental quasi-raga "If I Were a Carpenter," to a folkish "Goodnight Little Arlo," a song to a colleague also recording for Reprise. With this kind of singing and this kind of recording, Jack Elliott will never go out of style.

A few words of praise are in order for Reprise and its new orientation. It is no blanket plug for a record company to call for public attention to the meritorious releases of the label, past, present and for the immediate future. Coming, for example, is an album by a discovery of Bob Dylan's, named Sir Douglas, who has been described as a male Janis Joplin. Already recorded are two new song-writers, Randy Newman and Joni Mitchell, who are complex, artful and imaginative trend-setters.

A considerable stripe above most contemporary folk-pop song-writing can be heard on Joni Mitchell (Reprise 6293) and Randy Newman (Reprise 6286). Thanks to previous recordings of Miss Mitchell's work by Judy Collins and Dave Van Ronk, Miss Mitchell has already become an underground rage. She has a delicate pen, dipped in evanescent imagery never far from comprehension, but tickling to the senses and the intellect.

He singing has a haunting song-off-the-moors quality that should further help to establish her reputation.

Mr. Newman is a droll and cunning song-writer with a style vaguely reminiscent of Hoagy Carmichael's, in which he smears phrases as if finger painting. But Mr. Newman, to continue the art images, is a sort of Jacob Epstein of Silly Putty, building most intriguing statuary. He's had a big influence on the English singer Alan Price and the word from London is that the Beatle's' "When I'm Sixty-Four" was heavily influenced by Randy Newman's style.

There are several other Reprise or sister Warners label albums worth hearing. Two New York singers and song-writers who found the West Coast climate freer and more rejuvenative are heard on Hamilton Camp - Here's To You (Warners-Seven Arts 1737) and David Blue: These 23 Days in September (Reprise 6296). Messrs. Camp and Blue posit two unresolved answers to manners of personal style, the former compensating with extroversion while the latter is slowly coming out of a defensive introversion. Both are given beautiful production assistance on these albums, and both stand for earnest talent that may not set the world afire, but does kindle small flames to brighten the landscape.

The Top Ten of the trade paper hit charts may never see the work of The Fugs, Jack Elliott, Sir Douglas, Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman, Hamilton Camp or Dave Blue. "Chart action" as they call it, is still no index to artistry or quality. But I wish them and Reprise well because there are high standards at work here that merit popular and commercial success. The historic album for Reprise by Van Dyke Parks previously discussed in these columns by Richard Goldstein is an artistic triumph that cost $50,000 to produce and has yet to sell 10,000 copies. It is like the old days of classical recordings. The imperative message to the pop-record buyer is: support quality or it will disappear, or sell out to the promoters.

Joni Mitchell

Here is Joni Mitchell. A penny yellow blonde with a vanilla voice. Influenced, or appearing influenced, by Judy Collins, gingham, leather, lace, producer David Crosby (the ex-Byrd), Robert Herrick, North Battleford (Saskatchewan), New York (New York), Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Chuck, seagulls, dolphins, taxicabs, Dairy Queen floats, someone named Mr. Kratzman, "who taught me to love words," the Lovin' Spoonful, rain, sunlight, garbage, metermaids and herself.

To folk music followers, Joni Mitchell is no stranger. Her songs have been recorded recently by Judy Collins, Tom Rush, Ian and Sylvia, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Dave Van Ronk and others. Now she sings her songs herself. Some of her better known numbers ("Circle Came," "Both Sides Now," "Urge for Going") have been omitted in favor of new material, but after hearing it you know she's been saving some of her best for herself.

The Joni Mitchell album, despite a few momentary weaknesses, is an good debut. Her lyrics are striking. Her tunes are unusual, Her voice is clear and natural.

Miss Mitchell is a lyrical kitchen poet. "Michael brings you to park/ He sings and it's dark, /When the clouds come by, /Yellow slickers up on swings /Like puppets on strings /Hanging in the sky . . ."

Joni Mitchell is Leonard Cohen's Suzanne: she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers.

Joni Mitchell leaps from image to image but seldom leaves you hanging. Occasionally her lyrics seem to lose relevance and become frosting without any cake, but then she's like a sand dune: you like the idea of her.

Joni's tunes are surprising. You don't go whistling then down the street right away because you don't learn them so easily. Her notes do not flow into each other naturally; they are put there one by one as the song is constructed. This method may not produce consistency, but it does produce flashes of brilliance and sometimes these occur so regularly that a higher consistency is achieved. Listen a while to the lilting chorus of "Night in the City" or the gentle verses to "Marcie" and you may find yourself whistling them after all.

One of the major new departures of this album may at first appear atavistic. Joni Mitchell uses no orchestration. She plays acoustic guitar. Her only side-man is Stephen Stills (of the Buffalo Springfield) on one number ("Night in the City") because, she says, "he came up with a beautiful bass line that I just couldn't deny." Her main studio trick is to dub in her voice a second time as a choral answer on certain songs.

"If I'd recorded a year ago," as Joni tells it "I would have used lots of orchestration. No one would have let me put out an acoustic album. They would have said it's like having a whole paintbox and using only brown. But today is a better time to be recording. It's like in fashion. There's no real style right now. You find who you are and you dress accordingly. In music today I feel that I can put down my songs with an acoustic guitar and forget the violins and not feel that I need them."

In contrast to the narrative verses and repetitive choruses that mark traditional music, there is in Joni Mitchell's work a full sense of composed music and written words. Had she added "lots of orchestration " the whole structure might have buckled under its own weight. As it is, the album serves as a reminder that and music and voices and imagination are more vital than arrangements with orchestration. If nothing else, the album is good for the soul.

Jerry Jeff, Joni, and Tim

Jerry Jeff Walker, one of the solo singers surviving the explosion of rock groups, can now be heard on his first album, Mr. Bojangles (Atco SD 33-239). The song that gives the album its title is a masterpiece of a pop song, one of the finest contemporary folk poems ever set to melody.

Its first public airing came about a year and a half ago during an underground radio show over WBAI on a midnight-to-whenever-they-feel-like-going-off-the-air affair called Radio Unnameable, hosted by Bob Fass. On that night, Walker and his longtime accompanist, David Bromberg, came up to the studio with their guitars and stayed to play and sing for hours. At 4 A.M. they did "Mr. Bojangles" and a girl called the station and said it was like not being alone any more.

Bojangles is a weathered, tattered, itinerant street dancer with a liking for the bottle. Walker transfigures him and dances him through dreams and tales of streets immemorial, the way a puppeteer dances a marionette through its paces. Meanwhile, Bromberg plays a nimble guitar countermelody which patters and highsteps like the wizened old man's shoes.

Though they must suffer a bit by comparison, Walker's other songs measure well against "Mr. Bojangles." "Gypsy Songman," a portrait of the artist as a Greenwich Village minnesinger, is as cunning a songsketch and as colorful a folk myth as "Mr. Bojangles." "Little Bird" is a soft evanescent love song with an elegance born of simplicity and immediacy. "I Makes Money, Money Don't Make Me" is a down-home, nitty-gritty statement of integrity. "The Ballad of the Hulk" is a long, scathing, free-form monologue done in talking-blues style, pleasantly reminiscent of Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues." "My Old Man," a song about the artist's father, closes the album tenderly.

Walker's voice is supple and luxurious and his songs are handcrafted, skillfully constructed and buffed to a rich luster. His subject matter is homespun, rustic and as curiously inglorious as the old gentleman described in "Mr. Bojangles."

The programming on the album is significantly well effected. There is a comfortable balance of material, which results in a genuine unity. The arrangements - which are particularly tasteful and sensitive to the artist's nuances - explore different textures of the single tonal quality Walker and his guitar supply. As an album of a solo artist's work, this one is outstanding.

Joni Mitchell's songs are the product of her fascination with changes of heart, changes of mind, changes of season and changes of self. She's written, in "Both Sides Now" and "Circle Game" two stunningly simple parables of life that have been recorded by dozens of other artists: Judy Collins, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Dave Van Ronk, Tom Rush, to name but few, and that is why this very independent artist did not include them in her initial album, Song to a Seagull (Reprise 6293).

Joni Mitchell writes and sings of the people and places she's been, from the windy Saskatchewan prairies where she was raised to the seaside which entrances her and to the big cities. Her lyrics are poetic portraits, artistically detailed and honest. Her melodies are exotic, taking unusual turns in time and tone. She takes the listener on a wistful journey in her quest for honesty, in her search for human values.

The songs about herself are songs for today's independent young woman and the peculiar problems she faces. "I Had a King" is a sad backward glance at the artist's broken marriage, without bitterness or self-reproach. "Cactus Tree: speaks of today's young divorcee on the rebound, "so busy being free." "Nathan La Franeer" is her definitive comment on New York City cab drivers.

It would be good to be able to say that "Song to a Seagull" is as successful an album as Joni Mitchell is a performer and composer. But the engineering is uneven, her voice sometimes sounds shaky. The songs, accompanied only by Miss Mitchell's guitar, beg for adornment and their sequence work to decided disadvantage of the material. The effect is monotony, albeit a gentle monotony. Any one of these frailties would ruin an album of a lesser talent, but "Song to a Seagull" offers rewards in spite of itself.

After several disappointing tries, someone has finally recorded Tim Hardin the way those of us who have seen him live know him. Tim Hardin 3 (Verve Forecast FTS-3049) is an immensely satisfying album, containing rare performances of the artist's best-known material, "The Lady Came From Baltimore," "If I Were a Carpenter," "Misty Roses," "Red Balloon," and "You Upset the Grace of Living When You Lie." The jazzy backup ensemble complements and embellishes Hardin's trembly aching voice, which floats in the unlikely middleground between folk and jazz, far removed from the gusto of pop. Hardin is a truly individual phenomenon, a man and a voice and songs that reveal his pain and hopes and fears. He strikes a crippling blow at human indifference.

He stands vulnerable in the midst of his music, articulating despair and loneliness, questioning the things that are lacking between people and, finally, questioning himself. There is a deep comfort in Hardin's songs, as well as a document of feelings, which run almost too deep to be controlled. In the communication of these feelings, the sharing of human pain and hope lies the very highest sort of art.

A superb second album from one of America's best singer-songwriters. Joni sings beautifully and with great feeling throughout and her songs are underlined by simplicity and lucidity. All she has written is of a highly personal nature dealing with tangible situations and reflecting her reaction to them. She successfully communicates various emotional responses with songs like the exuberant "Chelsea Morning' or the sad "I Don't Know Where I Stand." Also included are "The Gallery," "Both Sides Now," "Roses," "Blue," "The Song About The Midway," and the dramatic anti-war "The Fiddle And The Drum." Joni Mitchell is a great talent and this album more than confirms it.

Along with other established ladies of folkdom, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Judy Collins, both Mrs. Harris and Miss Mitchell have been around a while. Some brilliant chick folksingers have vanished - Judy Henske, Alice Stuart and Rosalie Sorrels whither art thou? - but these two have endured. This is Joan's eleventh album and Joni's third and in their own gentle ways they come to grips with the teeth of the times in their curiously lyrical, frankly autobiographical fashion.

Joni Mitchell writes some of the finest tunes around and matches their flowing hesitancy with her enduring epiphanies and modern parables. Her clever inner rhymes and stylized satire have been around for years - recall Tom Rush's "Circle Game" and Judy Collins' "Both Sides Now"? Ably matched here by "For Free," "Conversation," and the already CSNYed "Woodstock," not to mention the elusive "The Priest" or the incisive "Ladies of the Canyon" and seven other enigmatic, poetic word-journeys that move from taxis to windows to whiskey bars to boots of leather and racing cars. Plus the fact that Joni has now mastered the piano to the point where she employs it rather than guitar on nearly half the cuts - she plays it shrilly with a lot of echo and lingering notes, giving certain songs even more dimension and wideness. Other innovations this time out are a mild use of horns and even vocal choruses on some cuts. The choruses don't work for me - I think they ruin her long-awaited version of "Circle Game" - but the point is debatable. The use of horns is excellent - in particular the minor riff at the close of the stunning "For Free."

And "Woodstock" must be mentioned. Forget the hyper-active CSNY version and listen to this one. Joni uses a heavily-amped electric guitar [sic] and sings the hell out of each phrase, each syllable of this soon-to-be anthem of the Seventies. She takes her time and the song has its mellowing, quicksilver effect: "We are stardust/Million year old carbon/We are golden/Caught in the devil's bargain/And we got to get ourselves/Back to the garden." An album of departures, overheard conversations and unquiet triumphs for this hymnal lady who mingles the random with the particular so effectively. Now that she has stopped touring to concentrate on writing, successive albums ought to get better and better.

Joan's album is curiously refreshing. It ought to have been entitled DAVID'S Album Volume Two, for all the songs were chosen again to cast musical shadows on the fact that her man is in prison. Thus we get vibrant versions of Bonnie & Delaney's "Ghetto," the Stones' "No Expectations" and Gil Turners's "Carry It On," among others. But useless cuts creep in: her re-done version of "Long Black Veil" is just repetitive, while the spasmodic "Jolie Blonde" is plain unnecessary. If there is a problem, it is that she is still stuck in Nashville singing through a montage of musicians led by Brady Tate (the formula for her last two albums also), though other idiosyncrasies occur this time. She is joined by Jeff Shurtleff for vocal duets on three cuts - the most effective of these being the title tune, Willy Nelson's introspective "One Day At A Time."

Oddly enough, the highpoint of each side occurs when Joan sings the songs she authored. "Sweet Sir Galahad," which is about her sister Mimi, the ghost of Richard Farina and Milan Melvin, along with the revealing "Song For David," succeed musically and lyrically, probably because the emotions and recollections are so close to home. Also interesting is Joan's version of the old union song "Joe Hill," from which Dylan borrowed ingeniously for his "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine."

Two albums of lyricism and folk echoes from two impresarios of the current music scene. I just wish Joan would leave Nashville behind for the next one.

In a year in which three of the leading candidates for the list of 10 best albums have been by women�Janis Joplin's "Pearl," Carole King's "Tapestry" and Carly Simon's debut album - Joni Mitchell's "Blue" (Reprise MS 2038) adds a strong fourth. The album is a marvelously sensitive portrait of love and romance, from the times of semi-desperation and regret to those of comfort and celebration.

Miss Mitchell, whose best known songs include "Both Sides Now" and "The Circle Game " has established herself in her past albums as a writer who has the sensitivity to pick out those important moments of a situation and/or relationship and as one who has the skills and intelligence to express those moments in fresh, lasting ways.

In "Blue," quite possibly, she uses that sensitivity and those skills more impressively than in any of her previous albums. The album's 10 songs were produced with just the right amount of restraint, limiting the instrumentation to just a touch of guitar here, a bit of piano there.

As in many of her previous songs (particularly a song like "Both Sides Now"), Miss Mitchell often combines more than one emotion or theme in a single work. "All I Want," for instance, is a multi-faceted song that speaks about her own desire for fulfillment/adventure ("Alive, alive, I want to get up and jive/I want to wreck my stockings in some juke box dive!'), but ends up revealing most of that fulfillment is based on a certain kind of relationship: "All I really want our love to do/Is bring out the best in me and you... I want to make you feel better/I want to make you feel free."

There's happiness in "My Old Man," tenderness in the poignant "Little Green," mischievousness in "Carey," regret in "This Flight Tonight," longing in "River" and a kind of shattered idealism in "The Last Time I Saw Richard." Several of the songs have one or two guest musicians (including Stephen Stills on one number, James Taylor on three and drummer Russ Kunkel on three), but it remains, more so than most albums, the highly impressive, personal work of a single artist.

Beautifully Blue Joni Mitchell

Not since "Song To A Seagull" - her first album - has Joni Mitchell used her voice quite so well. She seems to have reverted back to a far simpler approach, both vocally and in her writing and presentation, and has begun to use her very versatile voice to express the things which before, as in "Gallery" and "Ladies Of The Canyon", she used more complicated use of words and more intricate accompaniment to get across to the listener.

But, as with all of her albums so far, the more you listen to each song, each line and each expression, the less you can find to say about them - and not because they lose their appeal but simply because each new hearing reveals a further facet of her skills and consummate artistry.

"Blue", in relation to her three previous releases, apart from being a return to simplicity shows no falling off in her all-round ability. If anything, her piano and guitar playing are better than before and her incredible talents as a songwriter shine through as ever-beautiful poetry set to music. There are a few numbers that will be familiar to her followers including "My Old Man", which she did so well at the Isle of Wight Festival last year, and while the songs swing from slow sad songs to happier more buoyant numbers the overall feel is in fact reflected in the title.

This is shown nicely in "Little Green" (a slower track with memories of the first album's sadness, then into "Carey", a bouncy song with a faster tempo and much rosier outlook. "Blue" closes side one and is punctuated crisply by her piano, clear high-pitched vocals and the piano rolling like the inshore waves, closing the number. Side two perhaps contains the better numbers, opening with "California", which tells of Joni's love for her present home; and it's all there - you can almost feel the heat, amidst Joni's acoustic guitar and the weaving of a controlled steel guitar to add to that inescapable feel of West Coast music of late.

"This Flight Tonight" is full of the fatness and rhythmic quality she manages to get from her guitar, but for sheer beauty of composition and voice "River" is a hard track to beat although "A Case Of You" runs it very, very close. This song in particular has Joni's special allure, the quality which makes people so readily relate to her and the situations she sets in her songs. You feel that each composition is a piece of the artist herself and that each new segment is exactly true to life, nothing however painful or personal has been left out - complete honesty in fact.

"The Last Time I Saw Richard" is a case in point and delves deeply into another part of Joni's past, gone but certainly not forgotten. Joni Mitchell wears her heart on her sleeve and doesn't care who knows it and this fact alone ahas alienated her to many who feel that such emotions, because of their apparent openness, must be false. But whatever you likes or dislikes her artistry is unquestionable and whatever she does, like a champion prize-fighter, a great race horse or a Dutch master, it will be done perfectly. If that's not enough "Blue", on early listening, could be the best thing she's done yet.

Blue

The last time I saw Joni Mitchell perform was a year and a half ago at Boston's Symphony Hall, in one of her final appearances before she forswore the concert circuit for good. Fragile, giggly and shy, she had the most obvious case of nerves I have ever seen in a professional singer. Her ringing soprano cracked with stage fright and her frightened eyes refused to make contact with the audience. It wasn't until well into the second half of the concert that she settled down and began to enjoy herself; even then it seemed clear that she would have preferred a much smaller audience -perhaps a cat by a fireside.

Joni Mitchell's singing, her songwriting, her whole presence give off a feeling of vulnerability that one seldom encounters even in the most arty reaches of the music business. In "For Free," her one song about songwriting, she declared that she sang "for fortune and those velvet curtain calls." But she long ago renounced the curtain calls; and her songs, like James Taylor's, are only incidentally commercial: Her primary purpose is to create something meaningful out of the random moments of pain and pleasure in her life.

In the course of Joni's career, her singing style has remained the same but her basically autobiographical approach to lyrics has grown increasingly explicit. The curious mixture of realism and romance that characterized Joni Mitchell and Clouds (with their sort of "instant traditional" style, so reminiscent of Childe ballads) gradually gave way to the more contemporary pop music modern language of Ladies of the Canyon. Gone now was the occasionally excessive feyness of "rows and rows of angel hair/And ice cream castles in the air"; in their place was an album that contained six very unromanticized accounts of troubled encounters with men.

Like Ladies, Blue is loaded with specific references to the recent past, it is less picturesque and old fashioned sounding than Joni's first two albums. It is also the most focused album: Blue is not only a mood and a kind of music it is also Joni's name for her paramour. The fact that half the songs on the album are about him give it a unity which Ladies lacked. In fact, they are the chief source of strength of this very powerful album.

Several of the lesser cuts on Blue give every indication of having sat in Joni's trunk for some time. The folkie melody of "Little Green" recalls "I Don't Know Where I Stand" from her second album. The pretty, "poetic" lyric is dressed up in such cryptic references that it passeth all understanding. "The Last Time I Saw Richard' is a memoir of Joni's "dark cafe days," cluttered with insignificant detail and reminiscent of the least memorable autobiographical songs on Ladies. "River" is an extended mea culpa that reeks of self-pity ("I'm so hard to handle/I'm so selfish and so sad/ Now I've lost the best baby /that I ever had"). Joni's ponderous piano accompaniment verges on a parody of Laura Nyro, especially the melodramatic intro which is "Jingle Bells" in a minor key. The best of this lot is "My Old Man," a lovely, conventional ballad.

The songs have little or nothing to do with the main theme of the album; developed in the remaining songs, which is the chronicle of Joni, a free lance romantic, searching for a permanent love. She announces this theme in the first line of the first cut, "All I Want": "I am on a lonely road and I am traveling/Looking for something to set me free."

The lonely road has taken her through a series of places in the past - from Chelsea to Sisotowbell Lane, from Laurel Canyon to Woodstock - and she had followed it in pursuit of the settled, long term happiness that has always eluded her. "All I Want" is a manifesto for that happiness; Joni has found a new lover and she bombards him with a list of her desires, piling them up in a quick succession of rhymes:

I want to talk to you, I want to shampoo you
I want to renew you again and again
Applause applause - life is our cause
When I think of your kisses, my mind see-saws

The accompaniment - James Taylor and Joni drumming a nervous, Latin-flavored guitar pan over a bass heartbeat that throbs throughout the song - perfectly expresses Joni's excitement and anticipation. So does the melody, a dipping, soaring affair which she sings in her sweetest soprano.

"All I Want," though it begins the album, marks the end of the long holiday journey described in "Carey" and "California.' Both songs have the syncopated, Latin touch that characterizes the best cuts on the album. "Carey," a calypso about dalliance on Crete, had a definite festival flavor, but with a twist at the end: "The wind is in from Africa/Last night I couldn't sleep/Oh, you know it sure is hard to leave here but it's really not my home."

"California" jumps along in short bursts, the lyrics giving snapshots of Joni's European itinerary. Then comes the flowing chorus with its hint of tango, its plaintive pedal steel guitar and its homesick refrain: "Oh, it gets so lonely/ When you're walking and the streets are full of strangers." The song is a model of subtle production; James Taylor's twitchy guitar and Russ Kunkel's superb, barely detectable high-hat and bass-pedal work give it just the right amount of propulsion.

In "This Flight Tonight," "A Case of You," and "Blue," Joni comes to terms with the reality that loneliness is not simply the result of prolonged traveling; the basic problem is that her lover will not give her all she wants. In "This Flight Tonight," Joni has walked out on her man, is flying west on a jet, and now regrets the decision. The lyrics, a clumsy attempt at stream of consciousness, are virtually unsingable and Joni's lyric soprano is hopelessly at odds with the rock and roll tune. But the chorus has just the wispiest trace of Bo Diddley and it sticks with you:

Oh Starbright, starbright
You've got the lovin' that I like all right
Turn this crazy bird around
I shouldn't have got on this flight tonight.

It is only a short step from that to Joni's vow that she will walk through hell-fire to follow her man: "Well everybody's saying/ That hell's the hippest way to go/ Well I don't think so/ But I'm gonna look around it though/Blue I love you." This is "Blue," the last cut on the first side but clearly the album's final statement, the bottom of the slope downward from the euphoria of "All I Want." For all its personal revelation, "All I Want" still sounds like a beautiful pop tune; "Blue," on the other hand, has the secret, ineffably sad feeling of a Billie Holliday song. Joy, after all, can be shared with everybody, but intense pain leads to withdrawal and isolation.

"Blue" is a distillation of pain and is therefore the most private of Joni's private songs. She wrote it for nobody but herself and her lover:

Blue here is a shell for
Inside hear a sigh
A foggy lullaby
There is your song from me.

And yet, despite the title song, Blue is overall the freest, brightest, most cheerfully rhythmic album Joni has yet released. But the change in mood does not mean that Joni's commitment to her own very personal naturalistic style has diminished. More than ever, Joni risks using details that might be construed as trivial in order to paint a vivid self portrait. She refuses to mask her real face behind imagery, as her fellow autobiographers James Taylor and Cat Stevens sometimes do.

In portraying herself so starkly, she has risked the ridiculous to achieve the sublime. The results though are seldom ridiculous; on Blue she has matched her popular music skills with the purity and honesty of what was once called folk music and through the blend she has given us some of the most beautiful moments in recent popular music.

Joni Mitchell at a Crossroads

Writing 10 or 12 original songs for a record album is a more difficult accomplishment than most people realize. Writing the material for four albums in a period of two and a half years or so, as Joni Mitchell has done, is enough to boggle the mind-she has managed to sustain, in that time, a relatively persistent artistic momentum.

This latest release represents a more enigmatic step forward than any of the others. The title is well chosen, since it reveals a womanly melancholy that is new to Miss Mitchell. Her voice, no doubt reflecting the influence of James Taylor, slips and slides, moves in and out of the rhythm, plays with words and announces her maturity as a performer. The songs reach out I all directions. Predictably, they provide a mind's eye view of Miss Mitchell's lives and loves, and she clearly is no longer the innocent of her earlier days. We now hear about trips to Paris and Greece and Amsterdam, about winds from Africa, and her distaste for the thought that "hell is the hippest way to go." Touches of the old whimsy remain in songs like "A Case of You" and "The Last Time I Saw Richard," but for the most part the mood is introspective and somber-sometimes passionately so.

I suspect this will be the most disliked of Miss Mitchell's recordings, despite the fact that it attempts more and makes greater demands on her talent than any of the others. The audience for art songs is far smaller than that for folk ballads, and Joni Mitchell is on the verge of having to make a decision between the two.

Joni Mitchell Sings Her Blues

Provocative images and thoughtful messages add up to an album that is quite probably her best yet Joni Mitchell continues to demonstrate that she is not only an actress-singer but a composer of considerable power: her newest (and aptly titled) album "Blue" for Reprise is an unqualified success on both counts. It is a collection of what once were called "torch" songs, but Miss Mitchell adds an extra dimension to her "my man's gone now" theme by introducing a spare, satirical element that is sometimes directed at herself, sometimes at her partners. It is this balanced dispassion which makes her work truly womanly rather than merely girlish.

And, if her songs are based on personal experience, she certainly does seem to have had a rough time of it in the Game of Love. In the song *California* she meets a red-neck on a Grecian isle who "...gave me back my smile/But he kept my camera to sell." The subject of *My Old Man* is apparently given to irregular disappearances, thus causing Joni to collide with the blues and to discover that "The bed's too big/The frying pan's too wide." That last phrase (think about it) is a *genuine* image, provocative and palpable. There are others like it running all through her compositions, and they regularly bring the listener to sharp attention with the unmistakable clang of sardonic truth.

Though the subject of all these songs is the blues, Miss Mitchell's extraordinary performances of them quickly remove any possibility that they might all add up to a bad case of the sulks. For instance, her nervous, slightly weird soprano makes *My Old Man* a touching and poignant story rather than a tiresome, weepy complaint. Also, the near-perfection of her arrangements and accompaniment (both Stephen Stills and James Taylor sat in on guitar during the sessions), the beautifully finished (in the sense of complete) sound of each track, all contribute to what may be her best album yet.

I think the finest thing about "Blue," however, is its message of survival. "Well, there's so many sinking now/You've got to keep thinking/You can make it through these waves/Acid, booze, and ass/Needles, guns and grass/Lots of laughs, lots of laughs./Well everybody's saying that hell's the hippest way to go/Well, I don't think so." These words sound to me very like a pointed and pertinent warning to that part of a generation that talks a lot about getting it all together but begins to seem less and less capable of really doing so.

Los Angeles, Spring, 1971

Carpenters. James Taylor. Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Paul Simon. Carole King. Later I discovered the ones he'd left out � Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. My dad now explains, "Neil Young was always too whiny, and I gave up on Joni Mitchell when she went jazz." But his loss has been my gain. I've enjoyed discovering Neil and Joni myself, sensing all the while that I was actually re-discovering them in some vague primordial sense.

Is the music I grew up with great, or do I just think it's great because I grew up with it? Had my dad listened to Tom Jones and Nancy Sinatra, would I be nostalgically pining over their work now? I think not because Tom and Nancy suck, whereas the music I grew up with rocks! OK, now that I've objectively settled that issue, let's head on back home...

The City Of Angels

Oh but California
California I'm coming home
I'm going to see the folks I dig
I'll even kiss a Sunset pig
California I'm coming home.
("California" by Joni Mitchell)

While I was soiling my diapers in Lafayette, Louisiana, a singer/songwriter scene was raging in Los Angeles, the likes of which has not been seen since. Here's a list of just a few albums recorded in L.A. between 1970 and 1972:

Sweet Baby James � James Taylor
One Man Dog � James Taylor
Ladies of the Canyon � Joni Mitchell
After the Gold Rush � Neil Young
Harvest � Neil Young
Deja Vu � Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young
Linda Ronstadt � Linda Ronstadt
Eagles � The Eagles
Saturate Before Using � Jackson Browne

Los Angeles (more accurately Laurel Canyon) was the happening scene, but Joni Mitchell came there from Canada, Carole King came from Brooklyn, and James Taylor came from Boston. All three artists are excellent tune writers and intimate performers. Carole's lyrics are the weakest of the three, and they're still pretty good. All three artists sing about love, but that's no surprise. Carole King's love is mature and hopeful; Joni Mitchell's love is young and sad; and James Taylor's love is timeless and romantic. The rare thing is, you can hear their souls in their music. Few singer/songwriters write and perform this transparently anymore. Maybe David Wilcox. Who else? That Beck, he's a real hoot. Who else?

For Tapestry, James loans Carole his drummer and his electric guitarist. Joni is her own band, with a little help from James and his drummer. Follow me closely as I make some more connections � James plays guitar on Carole's "You've Got a Friend." Joni sings on James' version of Carole's "You've Got a Friend." Carole wrote "You've Got a Friend" for Tapestry, but it was James' version that became popular. Joni's song "Carey" is supposedly about James. Carole plays piano on James' "Love Has Brought Me Around," and Joni sings on it. Although Joni and Carole don't sing on each other's albums, they do record in the same studio. And that's all I have to say about all that.

Carole King � Tapestry

Snow is cold, rain is wet
Chills my soul right to the marrow
I won't be happy till I see you alone again
Till I'm home again and feeling right
("Home Again" by Carole King)

Carole King was a renowned songwriter well before she ever made it as a performer. I guarantee you know at least five of her songs. Aretha Franklin's "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman," the Shirelle's "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow," the Monkee's "Pleasant Valley Sunday," James Taylor's "You've Got a Friend," the Shiffon's "One Fine Day (You're Gonna Want me for Your Girl)," and Little Eva's classic roller rink hit, "The Locomotion." Insane, no? The same woman who wrote "You just call out my name/ And you know wherever I am" also wrote "I know you're gonna like it if you give it a chance now/ Come on baby, do the locomotion." That's not to mention the songs Carole popularized herself on Tapestry � "I Feel the Earth Move," "So Far Away," and "It's Too Late (baby, now it's too late)."

Most of Carole's early songs were collaborative efforts where she wrote the tunes and someone else wrote the lyrics. But on Tapestry, six of the lyrics are Carole's own, and they're the most confessional of the lot. No longer having to craft made-to-order tunes and free to write her own words, the songs on Tapestry are more complex musically and less bubblegum lyrically. Even so, Mrs. King still seems incapable of writing an un-catchy tune. Years of pop music are hard to shake (witness Sting's awkward forays into jazz as proof).

The production on Tapestry is cool because it is so thin and sloppy. Carole drives all the songs with her own piano playing, and there are no real instrumental arrangements. All the musicians (bassist, drummer, the occasional soloist) are so good, they just jam along. Carole does not have a dynamite voice, but it is pleasant � full of empathy and joy. She sings like a woman who has finally been released to vocally interpret her own songs. Carole's performance of "A Natural Woman" is less like a performance and more like a personal celebration. It's just her voice, her piano, and her husband's bass guitar. As Carole pours out her heart, we finally get to glimpse the woman behind the curtain of the song. And since I'm not much for Aretha's soul vocal wizardry, I much prefer Carole's simple version. OK, I more than prefer it. It freaking rocks. I wish I were a woman, so I could belt it out with all the stanky oomph it demands.

Other standouts include "I Feel the Earth Move," which is as funky as a Brooklyn honky is likely to get this side of the Beastie Boys. "So Far Away" has a melancholy jazz feel to it, artfully folked-out by J.T.'s acoustic picking. "It's Too Late" is actually a tasty funk/jazz/lounge amalgam. If it reappeared anew on the scene today, it would be lauded as the best single the ultra-lounge French retro movement has yet produced. As it is, you occasionally hear it as Muzak in the frozen foods section. We've come a long way, baby.

Lyrically, I love Carole's "Beautiful." It articulates the realistic optimism that makes Tapestry such an underdog favorite. And finally, the doo-woppy ballad, "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow," recently inspired an impromptu slow dance with my wife in the kitchen, complete with Wedding Singer-style hand placement, so you've got to love that! There is no better tune writer than Carole King, period. Her only real peer is Paul McCartney, and that's saying something.

Joni Mitchell � Blue

I want to be strong, I want to laugh along
I want to belong to the living
Alive, alive, I want to get up and jive
I want to wreck my stockings in some juke box dive
("All I Want" by Joni Mitchell)

Joni Mitchell is the best lyricist of this trio. She's also the best vocalist and a proficient guitarist and pianist. Blue's songs are alternately guitar-based and piano-based. Consequently, the album is a jerky ride tempo-wise. The guitar songs are upbeat and jazzy; the piano songs are plaintive and less rhythmic. But in terms of theme and mood, Blue is singularly consistent. Song by song, it's not Joni's best album, but as a whole it may be.

Most of these songs are about hippy love. "We don't need no piece of paper from the city hall/ Keeping us tied and true./ My old man/ Keeping away my lonesome blues." There's hippy love in the infatuation stage: "I want to knit you a sweater/ I want to write you a love letter/ I want to make you feel better/ I want to make you feel free." There's hippy love in the addiction stage: "Oh you're in my blood like holy wine/ You taste so bitter and so sweet/ Oh I could drink a case of you, darling/ And I would still be on my feet." And there's hippy love gone bad: "Richard got married to a figure skater,/ and he bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator/ and he drinks at home now most nights with the T.V. on." But hippy love is still human love, and I've felt all this stuff before. This album is a lot like high school love � it starts off promisingly intoxicating, and it ends real sad. So sorry. I'm crying right now listening to it.

Blue is not sad in a hokey, bittersweet melancholy I-kind-of-want-to-cry-some way. Its sadness is the product of hope quenched, of emptiness. A blue Meg Ryan even quotes from this album in You've Got Mail, "It's coming on Christmas/ They're cutting down trees/ They're putting up reindeer/ And singing songs of joy and peace/ Oh I wish I had a river/ I could skate away on." Blue has its optimistic moments, but they don't prevail. So what's the value of an album like this? Well, the high points are truly wonderful, and they feel true while they last. And the low points are honest in a way that lets you know you're not alone.

Everything about Blue aims to connect. The arrangements are sparse and muted, enhancing the album's mood with minimum distraction. Joni's voice is strong and flighty as always, foreshadowing her later jazz stylings. The tunes are beautiful and unusual, structured like folk songs but with surprising jazz twists in their melodies. Ultimately, however, this album is not a collection of pop hits. It's not even about music, really. Blue is a message from Joni Mitchell's soul to mine, across states, across time.

"I remember that time you told me, you said,/ 'Love is touching souls.'/ Surely you touched mine/ 'Cause part of you pours out of me/ In these lines from time to time." B.B. King and Blind Lemon Jefferson elude me. None of that so-called blues music has ever made me blue. These songs...these are my blues.

James Taylor � Mud Slide Slim And The Blue Horizon

Hey mister that's me up on the jukebox
I'm the one that's singing this sad song
Well I'll cry every time that you slip in one more dime
And let the boy sing the sad one one more time.
("Hey Mister That's Me Up On the Jukebox" by James Taylor)

James Taylor has so many great albums that this one often gets overlooked. Mud Slide Slim is not J.T.'s best, but it would be almost anyone else's best. Of our three 1971 albums, Mud Slide Slim is the least transparent, the least focussed thematically, and the most produced. Unlike James's later radio-friendly ballad projects (Gorilla, In The Pocket, JT), Mud Slide Slim is still very bluesy ("Machine Gun Kelley," "Hey Mister, That's Me Up On the Jukebox") and folksy ("Long Ago and Far Away," "You Can Close Your Eyes"). On "Riding on a Railroad," James even ventures a bit of country bluegrass, complete with banjo. And the title track is a middle-of-the-road funk number with Carole King driving the backbeat piano. Russ Kunkel's rock-steady drumming thankfully provides a consistent backbone to these otherwise eclectic styles.

Mud Slide Slim is so much a part of my blood, I can't objectively evaluate it. These songs surely must be required listening for everyone west of the Congo. James Taylor's early songs are to me what I imagine "Tam O'Shanter" and "Comin' Through the Rye" must be to Irish folks.

Unlike Carole and Joni, James fronts a crafted persona. He's the balladeer, the storyteller. But I've so come to know and love his persona, I don't really care how much of it is actually him.

There are some quirky gems on Mud Slide Slim that I miss from JT's current live sets � the stream of consciousness interlude, "Soldiers;" and the rambler anthem, "Highway Song." James's "You've Got A Friend," with its mellow calypso rhythm, is much better than Carole's own version. "Long Ago and Far Away" is James at his timeless lullaby best. The album's best song, however, is the enchanting ballad, "You Can Close Your Eyes." I remember singing it to my eight-month-old Caroline deep in the mountains of western North Carolina, along the upper banks of Slickrock Creek, with the moon on the rise behind us and the fireflies dancing on the water:

Well the sun is surely sinking down
But the moon is slowly rising
So this old world must still be spinning round
And I still love you
So close your eyes
You can close your eyes, It's alright
I don't know no love songs
And I can't sing the blues anymore
But I can sing this song
And you can sing this song when I'm gone
It won't be long before another day
We gonna have a good time
And no one's gonna take that time away
You can stay as long as you like.
So close your eyes...

And now I'm crying again. I'm full of love for my daughter and my wife, and I'm thankful for this life God has given me. And I'm telling you more than you probably want to hear. But I don't care. I love music because it puts us in touch with important and profound things, things we sometimes don't want to face, but things that we're forced to face when they invade our souls through music.

I'm thankful that my dad started me off right, there at our home in Lafayette, with the tubes of the Marantz amplifier dutifully glowing blue into the night; and so I pass the music on. Sometimes life is sad, but I'm going home for good soon enough, and it's gonna be alright. Until then, L.A. in the spring of 1971 ain't bad.

All Time Classics

Joni Mitchell fans know that she recorded 1971's "Blue", her fourth album, in an "emotionally transparent" state, after her relationship with Graham Nash fell apart. The couple, who were introduced by David Crosby, enjoyed a joyous love affair, Joni moving out to California from her native Canada to live with Nash in Laurel Canyon. But by the time Crasby, Stills, Nash and Young started work on "Deja Vu" in 1969, the relationship was on the rocks. When the inevitable break up came, 27 year old Joni poured her heartache into "Blue", writing bleak sketches for acoustic guitar and piano (for the Nash take, listen to "I Used To Be King" and "Simple Man" from his 1971 album "For Beginners"). What scant accompaniment there is comes from Stephen Stills, James Taylor, (by this time Joni's new lover), Pete Kleinow, and Russ Kunkel. But the music is always secondary to her voice, which whoops and leaps, and flies, and soars, and warbles, and takes all kinds of improbable jazzy detours. As with many singer songwriters, the music is an exercise in mood, a scene-setting device, a framework for poetry and voice.

Although Blue has similarities with the product of other female singer songwriters like Laura Nyro, Carole King and Judy Collins, it exists in its own bleak universe, a snapshot of one woman's life as her soul makes a journey from chronic unhappiness to personal rebirth. Like Big Star's "Sister Lovers, The Replacement's "All shook Down", John Cale's "Music For A New Society", or Lou Reed's "Berlin", "Blue" is a once in a lifetime record, the kind of album that no artists ever makes twice, nor could be expected to. With every line of "Blue", Joni gives her all, the songs exuding a weird, vital energy, the album an exorcism, a bilious venting, the sound of someone writing themselves better.

The album opens with "All I Want", gentle brushes of acoustic guitar that were almost recreated note-perfect by Mark Eitzel (a huge Joni Fan) for the intro to the American Music Club track "Ive Been A Mess". The lyrics are phrased, paced and rhymed with a poets ear and often most beautiful when she makes them sound throwaway ("Oh I love you when I forget about me" and "Do you see how you hurt me baby/so i hurt you too").

Next up is "My Old Man" on which Joni sings about Nash: "My old man, he's a walker in the rain/he's a dancer in the dark". She sings of love between two musicians: "He's the warmest chord I ever heard/Play that warm chord and stay". But then he's gone and she's lonely: "the bed's too big/the frying pan's too wide". Time and time again on this album she tosses off the beautiful, offbeat Raymond Carver-style snapshots of love on the rocks. "Little Green" surfs a brittle, picked, guitar motif as vulnerable as the woman singing over it, and is said to be about the child Joni gave up for adoption when she was young (not that anyone knew this at the time of the album's release). The acoustic shuffle of "Carey" returns us to the pop terrain of "Big Yellow Taxi" the song which helped Joni's third album "Ladies of the Canyon" sell half a million copies.

Track five, the very Laura Nyro-Carole King sounding jazzy piano ballad "Blue" is rumoured to have been written as a thank you letter to James Taylor for pulling her from her despair. It also seems to be a warning to "Blue" not to fall prey to the way their peers are living: "You can make it through these waves/Acid, Booze and Ass/Needles guns and Grass/lots of laughs" Overall its got the bruised feel of a Billie Holiday classic. After that things go jaunty-ditty with travelogue ditty "California" (she went travelling in 1970 to escape her newfound fame), the dancing guitar, washes of pedal steel and pretty lyric reminiscent of modern day Joni fans Counting Crows who recently covered "Big Yellow Taxi". The rumoured move from Nash to Taylor is coyly hinted at when she sings: "California coming home/ Oh will ypu take me as I am / Strung out on another man".

In the dark James Taylor strums of "This Flight Tonight", we can hear Mark Kozelek's work with Red House Painters, as well as countless songs penned and sung by Natalie Merchant. It's a great flying metaphor of a song, Joni comparing circling to land at night with a spiralling love affair. "Blackness, blackness dragging me down / Come on light the candle in this poor heart of mine". The saddest and best song on the album, "River" opens with the tinkle of "Jingle Bells" (something Lisa Germano lifted for her "Excerpts From a Love Circus" album) and chronicles a lonely festive epriod: "Its coming on Christmas....I Wish I Had a River, I Could Skate Away On".

"River" blends into "A Case of You", the same broken love affair under the microscope, with an opening guitar figure that was later likely appropriated by Annie Lennox on "Why?" The album closes with a piano ballad "The Last Time I Saw Richard", a goodby to her old life singing in folk clubs, and a failed marriage in Canada. And then its over, this painfull 36 minute confession, this open house with Joni's diaries from 1969 - 1970. Such honesty makes this an album to treasure. It's difficult listening. Like all her work is. But it's that rare thing, and album that speaks to you the way only a lover can.

In a vast, empty, wild beach a blonde girl sits in the breakers and watches the sea rolling endlessly into the sand. There are seagulls in this picture, and grey grass against the dunes. There is the fresh taste of salt in her mouth, wind in her face. Here is the ultimate freedom, the perfect moment where infinity stretches out, where time takes on Its proper form and man his proper place.

But then as the eye travels across slap in the centre of this idyllic canvas is a massive pile. As obtrusive as though the painter had hated its peace and beauty and its calm and added his own morbid touch. The pile looks okay from the outside. It sparkles and smells sweet and looks like roses. But deep in its middle it's rotting. A pile of refuse of old motel signs, of lost souls, broken guitars cracked dreams, faded love letters, blunt needles and redundant talent.

This is the canvas that Joni Mitchell has used for her new album "For The Roses". And it is a picture she has drawn with a fine brush and a sensitive pen.

"For The Roses" is undoubtedly not only Joni's most important album to date, but her best. It sums up in poignant, emotive and brilliant images Joni's own position in the rock world - certainly not a unique one. The struggle within her which she spoke to me about earlier this year, is pin-pointed in this collection.

As far as Joni's concerned, "For The Roses" is a natural extension from "Blue", her last album. The reasons that in my mind it is a set so far superior to anything she's ever done, may stem from the fact that all the numbers here were written during one long year in the wilds of Canada with no outside distractions. Certainly the songs have a grit, an incredible depth about them that has never been so apparent in her work before.

She said, before she went in to cut them, that at one time she'd considered some songs too personal, too close to her life to ever present to the public. Although I can understand why (and at one point - for "Girl in The Bleachers" -the parallels run so close to the vein that she talks of herself in the second person) it would have been both a loss to her audience and to her own career if she hadn't got around to laying them down.

As it is. "For The Roses" is both an important and moving album. It is not full of doom and misery, self sympathetic flagellation or one iota of pretension. Joni looks at herself and her schizophrenic existence with a refreshing clarity, and on "You Turn Me On I'm A Radio" -the one moment of light relief, but still way above the rather fey substance of "Big Yellow Taxi" -can even see her behaviour in a rather tongue-in-cheek way with a lovely twist of lyric and clever usage of radioese: "call me at he station - the lines are open."

She is an artist who emerges here with an attitude of total realism. There is pain here but it is a commentary untempered by deprecation or self-pity. "For The Roses" is really a zenith to Joni Mitchell's career. It's her first album in two years and she approached it in a way that signalled a new path for her to tread. I think she had a feeling this one was going to be the best she's done, that the songs had lost both her previous cosiness and her plea for help, lost that rather light swansdown feeling, that icy breathlessness.

And so she has culled the best from her writing, brought to her work a new quality in her voice -giving it more pitch, more warmth and understanding, more striking power -and turned her artist's ear to the perfect blend of back-up musician. With woodwind and reeds in the hands of Tommy Scott, Wilton Felder on bass, Russ Kunkel on drums, Bobbye Hall Porter held tight on percussion, Stephen Stills supplying the entire rhythm section for "Blonde in The Bleachers", Graham Nash aiding on sleazy harmonica and the brilliant James Burton searing his way through the menacing, prowling drug number "Cold Blue Steel And Sweet Fire" - the pitch remains tight and the atmosphere captured in the hands of a lady who knew exactly what she wanted as a working base.

She uses her own piano work - more solid and demanding than ever to give her herself her private jumping off board. Using it to soar under her around that tripcord voice and colour every thing she does.

In a way "For The Roses" can be split into two themes, and both she has tasted to the full. The life of Joni the woman displayed so poignantly on "See You Sometime", "Electricity", "Blonde in The Bleachers", "Woman of Heart And Mind", "Let The Wind Carry Me", and "Lesson in Survival" ..."if you ever get the notion to he needed by me".

The life of Joni Mitchell, artist and rock and roll star, painted in red and black and acres of human frailty and loneliness on fine others. And it is these tracks - if any could be said to stand above the others - that really sear. "Cold Blue Steel", already mentioned with its sinister deceptively warm and comforting overtones. "Banquet" is about the game of life generally and in the music machine in particular...''some turn to Jesus some turn to heroin. Some get nothing, though there's plenty to spare." ''Barangrill" is a defined and brilliant track about life on the road when the artist feels like a mouse on a treadmill, memory becomes clouded and something deep within screams for release to be perhaps, just for a moment, someone ordinary and unpressured.

"Judgement of The Moon And Stars" is probably the track that is going to become the musical highpoint of the album - a beautiful, poetic, silver number dedicated to Beethoven that falls and builds with real classical complexity that lasts for over five minutes and will probably be compared in theme to McLean's "Vincent" though it really stretches itself far beyond.

But it's really the title track "For The Roses" that holds the album's power and bite. It is this song that encompasses Joni's outlook and understanding of the machine she and so many other artists are trapped in -the rotting pile on the beach. Written ostensibly for James Taylor it displays a careful, studied and yet emotional outlook on how people approach, use and fling away the artist and their work when material success falls off. "In the office sits a poet and he trembles as he sings. and he asks some guy to circulate his soul . . . okay, on your mark red ribbon runner!"

Joni's been a red ribbon runner - with 'For The Roses" she's a blue ribbon winner. She's captured the prize. Such a prize that in the end words are so much bunting for an album that superbly stands as its own witness to perfection.

Joni Mitchell's New For The Roses

At a time when so many of our most successful and respected songwriters - from Carole King to Gordon Lightfoot to James Taylor - are having difficulty coming up with something fresh in their music, Joni Mitchell, as literate a writer as we have, continues to produce works of richness and value. Her new For the Roses album (Asylum SD 5057 - distributed by Atlantic Records) is the latest case in point.

From the insights in her lyrics to the wholly distinctive vocal style, there is such quality in Miss Mitchell's albums that each one has a way of growing more impressive and personal as time passes - a fact that sometimes makes her new albums seem a disappointment until you have grown as familiar with them as you have with her earlier ones.

But a look back at her albums shows a remarkable consistency, each offering observations about love and human relationships that form a vital link in her total boy of work. Looking at the four previous Reprise albums, for instance, we find such songs as "Michael from Mountains" and "Cactus Tree" in the Joni Mitchell album, such tunes as "Chelsea Morning" and "Both Sides Now" on the Clouds album, such songs as "For Free" and "The Circle Game" on Ladies of the Canyon and such works as "All I Want" and "A Case of You" on last year's "Blue".

One of the reasons Miss Mitchell is able to produce works of merit so consistently is her willingness to explore and then honestly reveal - rather than soften, filter or glamorize - her emotions and experiences, both the joys and, more importantly, the sorrows. She is able to face her disappointments in love and deal with them in an instructive way in song.

Several of the 12 songs on the For the Roses album (among them "Lesson in Survival," "Woman of Heart and Mind" and "See You Sometime") deal with moments of defeat or insecurity in an open, honest way that few other major writers could duplicate. In "Lesson in Survival," for instance, she tells about the inadequacies a lover brought out in her: "Your friends protect you/ Scrutinize me/ I get so damn timid/ Not at all the spirit/ That's inside of me."

The album's other highlights include "Blonde in the Bleachers," a song about the difficulty one faces in holding on to a free-spirited, rock 'n' roll man; "Electricity," a well-designed song that plays the elusive nature of electricity against the elusive nature of love; "Judgement of the Moon and Stars," an ode to Beethoven or any passionate artist, and "You Turn Me On (I'm a Radio)," a light, bouncy tune about offering to comfort someone the way a radio station's music lends support.

But the album's best two songs are "Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire," a haunting, convincing account of the helplessness that heroin offers its victims, and the title song, a marvelously sensitive and moving account of the hopes, rise and fall of a pop music star.

In the song, Miss Mitchell traces the artist through the early loneliness and fright of getting started ("In some office sits a poet/ And he trembles as he sings/ And he asks some guy/ To circulate his soul around") to the time, long after stardom has arrived, that the public tires of him.

Between the rise and the fall, however, there is the time his music becomes a product and Miss Mitchell tells about the parties in which the business people who have a slice of you celebrate your latest million seller: "They toss around your latest golden egg/ Speculation - well, who's to know/ If the next one in the nest/ Will glitter for them so."

Handsomely designed, the album package contains original artwork by Miss Mitchell and a tasteful somewhat distant photo of her standing nude on a rock looking out at the ocean. But the real value, as usual, is in the music and the value of Miss Mitchell's music, also as usual, is at the highest level in contemporary pop music.

Mitchell's For the Roses: It's Good For A Hole In The Heart

Her appeal is in the subtle texture of her toughness, and her readiness to tell secrets and make obscure and difficult feelings lucid and vocal. She breaks your heart and makes you tentatively smile. She is the leading lady in a personal pageant of Heavy Duty, tension-bound romance. The poetry of her love songs sets her almost on some other planet, some separate plane where there are no inhibitions about divine arrogance, no compunctions about laying the inside of her on the line. And then there's Joel Bernstein's flamboyant inside photograph - our Valkyrie gazing at green water in motion - it complements the unique feeling that one gets about the person who made this record, who can emerge from the hazy watercolor of life and say, "I am the best person it is within my power to be. Here I am."

"Some turn to Jesus/Some turn to heroin/And some turn to ramblin' around." People will go to desperate lengths to fill a hole in the heart. Some do some of the above, others might try to stuff themselves or another person into the hole: a few others make words and music, opening the hole a little wider so the amazing pain of catharsis and creation has the space to squeeze itself up and out of the wound. Love 's tension is Joni Mitchell's medium - she molds and casts it like a sculptress, lubricating this tense clay with powerful emotive imagery and swaying hypnotic music that sets her listener up for another of her great strengths, a bitter facility with irony and incongruity. As the tiny muscles in your spine begin to relax as they are massaged by a gorgeous piano line or a simple guitar or choral introduction, you might get quietly but bluntly slammed with a large dose of Woman Truth.

In For the Roses, Joni is un-abashedly biased, a wronged and wronging lover, an open and forgiving loser at love's games. Her lovers are somewhat less than idealized, in turn overly sensitive, boorish, alcoholic, jive, immature, selfish or junkies. They are human. Of her relationships with her men she is candidly her own severest critic. In her songs she is sensible, chameleon, caustic, sorrowing, boisterous, judgmental, harsh and passionately understanding, occasionally passing deftly through this gauntlet of emotions in the course of one song.

Yet her great charm and wit, her intense vocal acting and phrasing abilities (the way she chooses to deal with a single word can change the feeling of an entire song) and the sheer power and gumption of her presence combine to bring it all off and make it shine. With this record she seems to have cleared the air of the beautiful murk and ambiguity of her last, Blue, and what she again makes plain is her feeling that both sexes should play by the same rules, at least when she's involved.

Eloquence is going cheap these days and there's good music to he heard all over. When the two come together, as in this woman, the appreciative mind can boggle and stall, its attention riveted. As a musician she uses a certain kind of sprung rhythm and lyrical beauty that is transcendingly, touchingly romantic without ever being common. There are no ordinary tears shed here. As a poet she has a refined, working knowledge of the functions of free verse, with its basis of boundless expression here fitted to melodies like fingers to a glove. The lyrics as printed on the sleeve stand strongly, linear, by themselves. Individual songs interlink, and For the Roses is constructed like the cleverest of novels - stories within stories within stories. The first cut is a prologue, the last an impulsive, almost disjointed epilogue. In between is a cycle dominated by a fiercely independent perspective, modern Everywoman's, but one woman's all the same.

"Banquet" introduces us to this world, a metaphorical table from which "some get the gravy/some get the gristle . . . and some get nothing/ Though there's plenty to spare." It is just her and her piano, resolute, angry chords, and the album begins on a portentous, ominous note.

"Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire" - the apparatus and taste of smack - is brilliant and chilling with its ironically brimstone lyric that is cruelly telling especially when read apart from the song:

Cold Blue Steel out of money
One eye for the beat police
Sweet Fire calling,
"You can't deny me
Now you know what you need."

Underneath the jungle gym
Hollow-grey-fire-escape thief
Looking for Sweet Fire
Shadow of Lady Release
"Come with me
I know the way," she says
"Its down, down, down the dark ladder. . ."

"Barangrill," with its more complex arrangement, is lighter and a welcome break from the damnation of "Steel." Its sprightly rap about a nice scene on the road manages to remain properly tense in keeping with the overall temper. In whatever setting, Joni can't resist a comment. She seems to always be a sucker for a remark.

"Lesson in Survival" is the first of the love songs, about the restlessness of what's new, the longing for sensation, the more pastoral the better. It hurts, this song, because she is capable of delivering such a strong subliminal suggestion and the pulse of her desire is so irresistible. It's so pretty and true it makes me want to jump out of my skin. She says it of herself - "When you dig down deep/You lose good sleep/And it makes you heavy company". "Lesson" segues by way of the piano into "Let the Wind Carry Me." With a choral and woodwind flavor it's about family chemistry, parental consent, content and displeasure. Talk about heavy company, try your parents!

"For the Roses" ends the side. Another lovely song, its ultimate cynicism is her peculiar brand of realism, an incisive portrait of what the business of fame does to humans who play music in the big leagues. "Up the charts/ Off to the airport/ You're name's in the news/Everything's first class/The lights go down/And it's just you up there/Getting them to feel like that." As perhaps a picture of this woman's much - publicized relationships, the song seems a composite photograph. That she chose to name the album for the song is an indication of her attitudes and knowledge - "I heard it in the wind last night/It sounded like applause . . . And the moon swept down black water/Like an empty spotlight." A person who understands obsessions understands people .

The second side opens with a little more love-ache. "See You Sometime" deals with fleeting feelings and romantic competition, a sweet piano song with fine dramatic singing: The tense first lines are in a faintly hysterical soprano changing to a more manageable alto as the singer's feelings wind down towards the end. This handsome song is about how perspective alter quickly when one plays fast and rough. It is a nice companion to "Electricity," a short-circuited affair of the heart with imaginary poetry, guitar and percussion, a lulling choral bit and a riff that says often people think of themselves unconsciously as machines, but flesh and bone are weak enough.

"You Turn Me On I'm a Radio" is simply stone great - she's a radio both figuratively and literally. No-nonsense lines about What's Up between two people, an example of her rollicking and rarely used humor, a rock & roll ditty that is a breath of sea air in her occasionally Dickinsonian parlor. "Blonde in the Bleachers" follows, with a wistful and resigned voice longing for a security it knows it can't have. "You can�t hold the hand of a rock and roll man - very long." It's the sum of all those teasing photos, the rumors, the gossip. She sounds wise, but miserable. Stephen Stills plays a pretty coda on guitar and the song, like the title cut, seems to be one of the major emotional messages that she's trying to get across.

As for "Woman of Heart and Mind" - this is the capper. If pop music has the power to make you cry . . . well, make your own judgment, just as she makes hers in this sublime portrait of a flawed lover. All her emotional barricades, seemingly so often breached, are broken in this song. No defenses, no pretenses. Passion and Respect versus mere Stimulation? No contest.

"Judgment of the Moon and Stars" is a symphonette, with Joni's sonata-esque piano, a wind ensemble and a rap about the inside of the deaf and blaring skull of Beethoven: "It the judgment of the moon and stars/Your solitary path," she says of the great Sagittarian. The song ends this searing record on a weird but hopeful tone, like a pep talk to a memory.

Got a hole in your heart? For the Roses will cost you about four bucks and it won't cure you, but shit, it's good salve. If it came in a can, was a little greasy and smelled OK, I'd rub a little on my forehead over the prefrontal lobe, where the third eye lives.

For The Roses

Sometimes you have to be beaten over the head to appreciate a good thing. Five albums long, I had been finding very little magic in the music of Joni Mitchell, appreciating some of her lyrical versatility but hearing disturbance in my ears every time she hit a high note. Very well, I had to learn my lesson the hard way, being totally stunned at the lady's musical gifts. Not only has For The Roses turned my head around regarding Ms. Mitchell, it has prompted me to listen to her earlier albums with an entirely new head.

Joni Mitchell has grown up a great deal since her last release. For The Roses is an album of maturity, expressing a variety of emotions with subtlety and gentleness. Unlike many of her other compositions, these songs deal with themes of the universal, carrying her out of the Hollywood Hills and into the thick of other people's problems. Selfishness, criminality, freedom, all are fit themes for her now bittersweet voice. The sometimes shrieking indulgence of past years has all but vanished, as her voice has trained itself to present its ideas with equal intensity at a much cooler level. Her voice is now captivating, weaving through her lyrics with discipline, stating exactly what she means with a deliberateness that is shocking.

For The Roses experiments instrumentally as well as thematically. A sparing, but appropriate use of horns highlight several tunes, and musicians such as Gary Burton and Steve Stills contribute electric guitar to two of Joni's sharper tunes. For the most part, though, her guitar and expressive piano are accompaniment enough to the sweeps and turns of the vocals. Joni Mitchell's songs have always been filled with raw edges, voice peaking against piano, setting the listener in an uneasy place only she can describe. As her circle of involvement has widened, covering the world, her style remains consistent and fascinating.

Perhaps the most engaging songs on For The Roses are ones that can best be titled "rock tunes." Joni's exploits with various members of the rock community were well documented, but not how each lonely encounter ultimately affected her. Her very special view of each and all affairs are set down boldly, as she claims in Blond in the Bleachers: "You can't hold the hand/Of a Rock 'n Roll man/Very long" with indisputable knowledge. For The Roses sets Joni's life on the table once more, following the hints of Conversation from Ladies of the Canyon, only this time she shares enough to let us help her pick up the pieces.

Miles of Aisles

The Hissing of Summer Lawns

Hejira

Don Juan's Reckless Daughter

Mingus

Shadows and Light

Wild Things Run Fast

Dog Eat Dog

Chalk Mark In a Rainstorm

Night Ride Home

Turbulent Indigo

Hits and Misses

Taming The Tiger

Both Sides Now

Travelogue

P�gina Principal