REVIEWS:
Joni was born out in Saskatchewan out near Saskatoon, a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, and escaped her stodgy parents to become a folksinger, when she was discovered by David Crosby sometime in the sixties. Her first album, Song To A Seagull, produced by Crosby, well, since then she's done tons of stuff that other people have covered (go to Wilson and Alroy's Record Reviews at http://www.warr.org/ to see a full list), her style fades from folk to rock to jazz to old standards (i.e. her most recent album Both Sides Now), she uses guitar-tunings and invented chords that are LEAGUES above everyone else's, she's ruined her voice with cigarettes these days (oh but there's plenty in the catalogue before that), her lyrics blow away everyone else's, oh yeah, and go visit http://www.jonimitchell.com/, it's an incredible website.
Why not Joni Mitchell? Practically none of the Big Web Reviewers (with the exception of Wilson & Alroy) review her stuff, even though (read below)... Is it a gender thing? What's NOT "prog" about her album Don Juan's Reckless Daughter? Too complex maybe? Not in the right genre? Or maybe it's just that she's too old and missed her chance to be a cult thing like the Doors, or it's this thing against "soft rock," done to death by folks like Joni's onetime lover James Taylor (a man with much less talent than she has). Whatever. These days, everyone knows the women Joni says she opened the door for, Sarah MacLachlan, Jewel, etc.. Joni says they're not as good, and, frankly, I agree.
Joni's stuff (at least before 1991) gets across-the-board high ratings because of 1) lyrics that are more than just "gee I'm so hung up on you" or "let's make love" or the variations thereof that TV shows such as "Friends" have made into cliches, 2) narratives that really tell stories, 3) tunes that entertain rather than confusing, 4) moods that nobody else in the music business has captured, 5) innovation nobody else was or is doing, like that weird instrument she plays these days. OK, there's some stuff in there I don't review. Go figure. After 1991, IMHO, her voice becomes constricted and her lyrics lose my interest. And I'm not really a big fan of that instrument she plays on the Taming The Tiger album, anyway. At any rate, I am not a pure Joni Mitchell fan. Keep that in mind before sending any comments you may have about these reviews.
--Samuel Fassbinder
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(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
OK, this is her first album, but it's got all kinds of complex stuff in it that I really like. I just bought it this week, and it holds up under hard comparison with the rest of Joni's opus, in fact I may spend awhile listening to it. It's raining outside; that sets a mood for this album, to be sure. This is rainy-day stuff, tho' it doesn't have to be. I'm not going to analyze the lyrics to death, some of it is fluffy and some of it is literary but all of it is very very good. All of the hard data is on the site Wally Breese created for Joni at http://www.jonimitchell.com/, so I will avoid redundancy. Suffice it to say that all of the doubts that W & A have about this album are unimportant.
She plays guitar all the time on this album, & nothing else? Yeah, OK, but isn't Joni with a guitar an orchestra in herself? The tunes are complex and they meander? OK, but since that's WHY one listens to Joni Mitchell, how does that count as an objection? Instead, one should wonder why there isn't more of this kind of stuff and less of the easy stuff you hear on the next two albums. Oh yeah, fame, fortune, and all that. Anyway, everytime I try to pin one of these songs down to criticize them, they slip away, like the avocado seed in Gary Snyder's poem "Avocado" (in the collection Turtle Island).
There's a miniature play in this album, there are people of all sorts with lives and passions and fantasies and there's a great ocean for dreaming throughout the second side and Joni lets you in and gives you the chance to sit with them as the guitar melodies wander off with the stories... OK, this is hippie music, but I'm stressed out, that's what I need. Joni said in an interview that her earliest stuff was "naive" -- after a few listenings I concluded that's a compliment, though it's not intended as such. I bought this in the used bins at a Wherehouse outlet. And so can you, if you're lucky.
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(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
Here the sound is more "pop," the tunes are simpler. "Chelsea Morning" is, of course, the song that former US President Bill Clinton considered when naming his daughter Chelsea, though Joni apologists will promptly mention that it was Judy Collins' cover version which inspired Bill. But enough about our sordid history. "I Don't Know Where I Stand" has also been covered, the version I remember was the one sung by Judy Dyble on Fairport Convention's first album. And don't forget that this album has "Both Sides Now," a song which I learned from my teachers in elementary school, oh sure, it's profound and all, and Joni's original version is doubtless the best that can be made of the melody. It ends the album.
So, needless to say, there are some syrupy-sweet moments on this album. If you can deal with them, you'll be fine, because there's some other stuff here that's good, too. "Tin Angel" is a cool song, "That Song About The Midway" has some poetry to it," "Songs to Aging Children Come" might as well be an anthem for the baby boomers, of whom I am only marginally a member (born late in 1961). There are some good reality principle lyrics on this album -- "The Gallery" is the best of this, about this guy with a sleazy pickup line: " 'Lady, please love me now, I was dead, I am a saint, turn down your bed, have you no heart,' that's what you said/ You said, 'I can be cruel/ But let me be gentle with you". "Roses Blue," about a Tarot reader, is pretty good too.
Toward the end there's an a capella "The Fiddle And The Drum," with a bunch of antiwar symbolism, by a Canadian woman indeed, not of the right nationality nor of the right gender to be drafted into war. One has to remember, though, that America's war against Vietnam so permeated the consciousness of the world of popular music back then that even Donovan, himself only on the margins of Brit culture (and now living in Ireland), composed an anti- Vietnam war song. My feeling for Clouds is that it was a transitional album, containing some of the melodies of Song To A Seagull in simplified form, and inching up to the social considerations that would show up on Ladies Of The Canyon.
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(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
Here we are, we're still in Joni's acoustic "folk" period, but this time there's more piano to it, giving this album a more sonorous sound. The songs to this one were written in the period when Joni was hanging out with Crosby, Stills and Nash, great liberals all of them (please see David Crosby's recent book "Stand And Be Counted" for a history of rock music compassion in this vein, with its attendant benefit concerts). In Ladies Of The Canyon, we can hear Joni's take on this ideological milieu, significantly its attitude of privileged compassion for the social and biological worlds, and of course she criticizes it as she moves into it. The results are a heavy listen.
I'd like to show how this all settles out in Ladies Of The Canyon, but first I'd like to unpack my use of this word "liberal" before the bandwidth clogs with the ideological pit-bull attack made famous by former President G. H. W. Bush. I'd like to start on "liberalism" by contrasting it with the "conservatism" now in vogue. "Liberalism" is an expansive ideology of compassion for everything; see for instance Kevin Baker's review of the Crosby, Stills, And Nash album (here on this site). One can see there that it even drew him in with its idealisms, even as Baker attacks Senator Jeffords for quitting the Republicans, something he said offhand in reviewing Led Zeppelin's second album. Anyway, "liberalism" (like "conservatism" it's in scare quotes because it's not a pure thing) encompasses a wide variety of compassions, both genuine and bogus, harmless and dangerous.
"Conservatism," on the other hand, is merely a privileged invocation of "the rules" so as to _facilitate_ the domination of others. As such, "conservatism" is a particularist ideology, it's the ideology of a "privatized" society defending itself, from the "ancien regime" of prerevolutionary France to the era of the antebellum South to the present. It's the ideology of _no apology_ by the winners in the struggle for power, whomever they happen to be, where- and whenever they are. "Conservatism" is the presumption of "equality" across the class divide, for the sake of defending the "equal rights" of the rich and powerful people of any society, at that very moment in which they're exploiting the hard work of the poor and powerless, or just tossing them into prisons for minor drug offenses while confiscating their property under forfeiture laws. "Conservatism," for example, forbids affirmative action programs in the name of this pompously-invoked formal "equality," while sending children to a school systems that serve as big affirmative action programs for the rich and powerful, thirteen years out of everyone's lives in such programs and not one "conservative" voice in complaint. Or if they do complain, it's to argue for the privatization of the public schools, which would write this form of affirmative action in cement.
"Conservatism" is doubtless popular today because of the fragmentation of the audience that modern advertising has aimed to reach since the '80s, or since the TV program "Hee Haw" went off the air because the wide audience it drew didn't have the money to buy the products it advertised. The reasoning here is that since conservative particularism has become the basis for the advertising pitch, it rules in politics as well. As Leiss, Kline, and Jhally pointed out in their book "Social Communication In Advertising," "American culture" (itself a product of the domination of "hyphenated Americans," the myth of the Melting Pot, etc.) is thoroughly permeated by advertising messages. Advertising informs our culture. And "American culture" isn't strictly "American," if indeed it ever was, it's really a culture of global appropriation.
Today, for instance, it drives a Toyota while listening to the Beatles on its Sony stereo and while eating Mexican food from Taco Bell, or Italian food like pizza. Now, everyone under capitalism would like to buy some of this culture of global appropriation, each of us wants a different section of the great smorgasbord of cultural product on sale in the global "free market." And we all particularly want the product of the global exploitation of labor that flows so smoothly through the local Wal-Marts etc., so as to own it for our own personal private uses, (including your humble author -- me too), so therefore we all have our own conservative "American culture" as a politicized explanation of our desires.
The private encroachment upon the public sector is part of this popular demand for domination (for dominating rather than being dominated), is the connection to politics. Thus "conservatism" runs deep, it is also the voice of every young child from a destitute neighborhood as she/he dreams of growing up to be a police officer while she/he spends her/his time tattling upon her/his fellow students amidst the suffocating rituals of lower-class education. Consequently, the music of our era is about the endless grasping of the will to power, either over society or power over the pop charts. The enormous disparities in wealth and power under today's globalist capitalism just make this will to power even more urgent. What else would Eminem or Britney Spears be about?
"Liberalism," by contrast, was popular back in 1970, in the sunny era of my childhood, in the period of the final crisis of Keynesian capitalism, the transitional world after the first Woodstock concert and just before the economic crises of the '70s. When "liberalism" was popular, it offered us Americans the opportunity to appear to be compassionate (in a world when it was easier to do so, for economic reasons); and what sort of popular music artist did not want to appear to be compassionate as he or she opened her mouth and sung to the world from the isolation of his or her recording studio? Doubtless the singers in the "hilltop commercial" for Coca-Cola (recently re-aired on "That '70s Show") felt that way, as they would certainly "like to buy the world a Coke/ And keep it company." So, too, the Joni Mitchell of 1970 bought this appeal. And expressed it extremely well, I might add, since "Ladies of the Canyon" is one of the biggest and most profound thoughts on "liberal" politics ever combined with musical talent.
Now, both liberalism and conservatism were and are justifications of appropriation and exploitation, and we can see this in the lyrics of Joni's album. "Morning Morgantown," the first song, is the hippie-esque celebration of an ordinary industrial "Rust Belt" town, presumably Morgantown, West Virginia. While the inhabitants of urban America are playing out the drama of production and consumption, Joni pledges to watch it all like a member of the leisure class: "We'll find a table in the shade/ And sip our tea and lemonade/ And watch the morning on parade/ In morning Morgantown." The next song, "For Free," shows Joni's compassion for those on the other side of the class divide, She portrays herself as this rich popstar who admits to playing for loads of money, shopping for jewels, riding in limousines. But she is the only one she sees who appreciates this great street musician playing his clarinet: "Nobody stopped to hear him/ Though he played so sweet and high/ They knew he had never/ Been on their TV/ So they passed his music by/ I meant to go over and ask for a song/ Maybe put on a harmony..."
"Ladies Of The Canyon," the title track, is about the women of Topanga Canyon of the hip 1960s. There is the style of the 1960s about all of this album, it's what makes it so special (besides the ideology). I can't leave this alone, though, without making you feel uneasy about what that style represents -- the "ladies of the canyon," as Joni describes their splendor, are all homemakers, the difference is not that they're "liberated" or anything but that they've made something beautiful, something compassionate, of their homemaker status. And that's what graces the _relationship_ songs of this album, of "Conversation" and "Willy" and "The Priest" and "Blue Boy," that awkward moments are made into something compassionate and pretty.
"The Arrangement" is a song about rejecting consumer ideology, about being "More than a consumer/ Living in some room trying to die". It is the Joni counterpart to CSN's "You Don't Have To Cry." But in this song (which Joni won't play anymore, I think, for its ostensibly "naive" quality), Joni begs the question -- what "more than a consumer" can the average American possibly be? If we weren't "a name on the door/ On the thirty-third floor/ In the air," as the lyric is sung, what would we be and what would we do? Me, I think I have an answer, but I don't think Joni expressed anything of the sort, and so "The Arrangement" is a song she rightly considers naive. "Rainy Night House" is a song in the same dropout vein of self-discovery: "You are a refugee/ From a wealthy family/ You gave up all the golden factories/ To see/ Who in the world you might be." The "wealthy family" thing says a lot here. Can anyone "live out in the Arizona sand" without money in the bank?
This album is totally famous for "Big Yellow Taxi," and the original version of "Woodstock," and "The Circle Game," songs which I learned in elementary school, either from teachers or from the radio. "Big Yellow Taxi" is a song about environmental destruction, with the famous lyric "they paved Paradise/ And put up a parking lot". It's self-interested, too: "Leave me the birds and the bees/ Please." "Woodstock" is a song Joni wrote because she missed Woodstock on the advice of her handlers, with the famous chorus "We are stardust/ We are golden/ And we've got to get ourselves/ Back to the garden." Somewhere in the choral repetitions, however, she remarks that we're "caught in the Devil's bargain," and this prompts us to go back and ask ourselves what this "Devil's bargain" really is, how bad or good a bargain is it, after all, if we insist upon "caught" in it, why _don't_ we go back to the garden, and why does Joni sing this song with the same sadness decade after decade? Hint: the answer is different for different groups of people. For Joni's group, the liberal popstars, it's because the garden is another labor of love; music is what earns her money.
Finally, "The Circle Game" is a song expressing compassion for people of all ages. "We're captured on a carousel of time/ We can't return, we can only look/ Behind from where we came," as she sings about the aging process of an "average American" at the prime of her youth. All of which are performed in a downbeat mood, even "Woodstock," though CSN put out an upbeat version that sounds quite different. Once again, this is an essential album because it constructs a mood of compassion for the world from a position of privilege while in fact admitting freely of both compassion and privilege. But that means that it's not all fun and games. There's a whole set of corny sentimental moments throughout this album that make parts of it a grating and difficult listen. "You're bound to lose/ If you let the blues get you scared to feel," Joni sings, but she's laying it on too thick. Still, you can't knock Joni too much because, as I said, she's leagues beyond everyone else.
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COMMENTS
[email protected] (Kevin Baker)
Well, it seems as if people DO read my reviews. They also apparently get them confused as well; it was my review of Another Side Of Bob Dylan that contained my Jim Jeffords crack. I'd never disgrace such a fine band as Led Zeppelin by mentioning his name in their presence.
OK, shame on me. I'm sure Jim Jeffords is a nice guy, and the same goes for you, Mr. Fassbinder. However, if that's how you define conservative and liberal (note the lack of quotation marks), then you're guilty of the same generic ideological bashing as Julia Roberts with her "Republicans, Reptiles, and Repugnant" comment. This is not to say I'm a Republican; I'm nothing. Why align yourself with a party? That's pointless and results in bickering.
I said in my bio that I'll stick to my guns with stuff; that's why I'm replying. Just out of curiousity, how is my CSN review an example of liberal thinking? I must have missed that as I was writing it. Since I'm such a blackheart who wants poor children to stay uneducated so I can use them as societal cogs, I must have done a horrible review job seeing as how liberal those guys were. BTW, I'd like to add that my Jeffords "attack" was more of a joke than anything before I forget. I actually think he did the right thing, and I think it will encourage some guts in the Senate Republicans, and also maybe a little more listening skills.
But at any rate, this notion of conservatism as being designed to maintain societal "status quo" is quite founded, but you misconstrue it. You say it is designed to keep the wealthy on top of things by supressing the poor. Malarky. Explain the 80s to me, buddy. If we consider Reagan's presidency to be the hallmark of conservatism in government, then how come everybody save a select few made more money, had more job opportunities, and generally did better for themselves? How does allowing more freedom to the indivdual by limiting government and supporting freedom hurt people?
If we define liberal as wanting to help people, liberalism is as foreign to most liberals in power as Timbuktu. How does Tom Daschle or Dick Gebhart want to help Americans? By taking more American money from everyone, not just the privileged, and doing with it as they please while simultaneously expanding the government. Of course, plenty of government programs are great. There is nothing wrong with wanting to help people, but you do not help people by hurting others. You think you won't be hurt by tax hikes? Ask people who saw 78% of the income taken away by the government. You think that hate crimes law and affirmative action won't hurt? The former is stupid---is there such a thing as a love crime now? Is it any less hateful for me to kill a white man than a black man? As for the latter, it's discrimination! It has done some good, but look at education nowadays. It sucks (pardon my French). By creating quotas, that means that a certain number of applicants could get a job simply because of their race with hardly a look at qualifications.
I do not want to see people starving or trapped in poverty, nor do I want to see an American aristocracy run the nation. However, to say that conservatism is the private encroachment on the public sector and an evil thing...gimme a break. By default, that makes liberalism the public encroachment on the private sector. There is no way I want the government appropriating from me when I haven't knowingly exploited. I do not want to see hunger or suffering; that's why i give to charity, work on mission projects, and try to help my fellow man out. But it's my job to do that, not the governments. You can't make someone be compassionate. You can only take their money and be compassionate for them, which is wrong. Shame them, make them feel guilty, pray for them, whatever---but you have no right to confiscate what they've earned. There is no more wrong in being wealthy than there is in being poor. There is wrong in being miserly, but that's between a man and God, not a man and God and the government.
Oh, for the record, I am a middle-class American. I'll be lucky if I can get into a private college, and it'll take scholarships and probably a student loan. My dad, a vet and a former cop, works for Dow, and my mom is a kitchen manager for a public school in a very poor neighborhood. I'm conservative because I've seen, I've logicked, and I've prayed. I am not liberal because I have done all of the above.
Don't take this personally; politics can get a rise out of me. This was too big to not let slide, however. God go with you.
[email protected] (Samuel Fassbinder)
SDF: Let's dispense with the stuff about Jeffords (yes, Kevin, you're right, you write a ton of reviews and I picked the wrong one because my slow, faulty modem at home won't let me look at them without a lot of rebooting) and go straight to the political stuff, so we can dispense with that, too:
Kevin: "how is my CSN review an example of liberal thinking?"
SDF: Basically, Kevin, I was arguing that CSN are a bunch of liberals, and that their ideology is appealing, since even you found something to like in it. Now, that doesn't make you a liberal. But it _does_ mean that I think that CSN are liberals, that's for sure. I apologize if you think it applies to you.
Kevin: "But at any rate, this notion of conservatism as being designed to maintain societal "status quo" is quite founded, but you misconstrue it. You say it is designed to keep the wealthy on top of things by supressing the poor."
SDF: What I thought I said was that conservatism facilitates domination, that it is a defense of the "equal rights" of the rich and powerful at that point in time at which such people are exploiting the poor and powerless. Now I don't see any reason at all why the poor have to be "suppressed" in order to be exploited -- it seems to me that all the rich and powerful really need to do to dominate the rest of us is offer us a choice: work for us, or starve. It has nothing to do with suppression. The poor can express all of the frustration they want, as long as they keep working to produce that glorious surplus that makes Wal-Mart such a cheap place to shop. In fact, the poor can be counted upon to suppress themselves -- who do you think wants to be a cop these days? That's what "hegemony" is, Kevin. Did your teachers mention it?
I also said, and I quote:
"Now, both liberalism and conservatism were and are justifications of appropriation and exploitation"
So it really doesn't bother me that you choose conservatism instead of liberalism. What I _did_ argue, however, is that liberalism makes better music. This _is_ a music review site...
Kevin: "Explain the 80s to me, buddy. If we consider Reagan's presidency to be the hallmark of conservatism in government, then how come everybody save a select few made more money, had more job opportunities, and generally did better for themselves?"
SDF: How come people keep saying stuff like that? Visit http://www.prospect.org/print/V6/22/wolff-e.html , see how the pie is really sliced. The average guy is STILL experiencing wages below their 1973 levels.
Kevin: "How does allowing more freedom to the indivdual by limiting government and supporting freedom hurt people?"
SDF: Is that what the Reagan Administration did when it proposed budgets to expand the military budget to encompass half of your IRS tax dollar (http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm) and by making the US into the world's biggest debtor nation? If that's your idea of "small government," then what's a few trillion dollars between friends?
Kevin: "If we define liberal as wanting to help people,"
SDF: I explained liberalism as a combination of compassion and privilege. I didn't say that this compassion was connected to any real desire to help people, just a desire to _appear_ to want to help people. In fact, when compassionate liberals supported Bill Clinton and his line of snake oil products, they weren't helping people.
(confusion omitted -- come on, nobody really pays 78% of their income in taxes without moving to Monte Carlo or finding tax shelters, and the 78% bracket is hardly deserving of UNICEF support...)
Kevin: "I do not want to see people starving or trapped in poverty, nor do I want to see an American aristocracy run the nation."
SDF: Which is why you defend Reagan? C'mon, Reagan's entire cabinet claimed membership in the Trilateral Commission or the Council on Foreign Relations, along with all the other big elites. http://www.trilateral.org/ , http://www.foreignrelations.org/ , Bill Domhoff's book "Who Rules America"...
Kevin: "However, to say that conservatism is the private encroachment on the public sector and an evil thing...gimme a break."
SDF: Are you saying "no, it's not"? No, you're saying nothing of the sort. And I didn't say conservatism is an "evil thing" -- please read my review again, it describes how "we all have our own conservative 'American culture' as a politicized explanation of our desires." Actually, Kevin, by receiving student loans, you will be a big _beneficiary_ of the public sector, even if you did renounce public schooling, public libraries, fire, police, weather, health and safety services...
Kevin: "By default, that makes liberalism the public encroachment on the private sector."
SDF: No, that's taxes, not liberalism, and taxes are by no means the preserve of the liberal. Ever heard of George "no new taxes" Herbert Walker Bush? He raised taxes. It's also the Federal Reserve System, and monetarism, the ideology of the Fed, the World Bank, the IMF etc. IS the status quo. Conservatism only _facilitates_ monetarism, it's only monetarism's handmaiden.
(skipping)
Kevin: "You can't make someone be compassionate. You can only take their money and be compassionate for them, which is wrong. Shame them, make them feel guilty, pray for them, whatever---but you have no right to confiscate what they've earned."
SDF: No, confiscation is the employer's "right" under the current regime, it confiscates what I've earned by paying me a pittance for my labor and by demeaning me by treating me like a little kid.
(skipping)
Kevin: "Oh, for the record, I am a middle-class American. I'll be lucky if I can get into a private college, and it'll take scholarships and probably a student loan."
SDF: If Reagan was so good for the country, then why aren't you getting a better deal? The best deal for students, in fact, the highest level of per capita government spending upon students, in fact, was in 1980, the year before Reagan's entry into office. Today, student aid is about half of what it was in 1980, and the main losers in that deal were undergraduates under the age of 24, which is why the students I saw as a teaching associate at The Ohio State University were more interested in working at sub-living wages selling beer for the local UDF outlet than in doing work for my classes.
But hey, if you think Bill Gates deserves that money more than you, well then I guess that's how your interest in the fruits of domination pans out. Or maybe you haven't read http://www.pir.org/boycott.html yet. I certainly wouldn't want Gates to starve. I wish you the best, Kevin, but as any "conservative" would tell you, you have to stick up for yourself, unless you're born on third base like Dubya...
But now for the real business. Kevin, what do you think of Joni Mitchell's Ladies Of The Canyon? Have you heard any of her songs? What do you think of Joni?
(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
We move from privileged and compassionate to privileged and blue. This is the early Joni that all the contemporary critics loved to death, incl. Wilson & Alroy. As I recall, when this came out, its critics (significantly in "Rolling Stone" magazine) praised it to the skies and compared it to John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band. Now, both Blue and Plastic Ono Band are informed by bad moods, but to compare them thusly is to put it simplistically. When we ask what _caused_ these bad moods, we get different answers, and therein lies the difference. Lennon was afflicted with compulsions that went back to his childhood in a broken home; Joni, on the other hand, was blue because she didn't seem to be able to stay in a relationship for very long, a different thing entirely.
"I hate you some/ I hate you some/ I love you some/ Oh I love you when I forget about me," a line that sticks in my brain like chewing gum, mostly because it's sung to a catchy pop hook. Now, the mere fact of Joni's being "blue" doesn't strike me as a particularly profound thing in itself; when Joni starts to investigate the _reasons_ for being blue, that's when I start to listen carefully. For that, I'd argue, you'd have to listen to the next album, For The Roses, an album I _would_ compare to Plastic Ono Band.
This album has a lot of the sound of Ladies Of The Canyon, without a lot of the thundering piano, and with some attempts at rock-and-roll mandolin here and there, and with the rhythm on one of the songs ("Carey") more dancable than Ladies because Joni added bongos in the background. The music on this one is only slightly sharper than on Ladies. More discussion of the "Devil's bargain" in the title track: "Everybody's saying/ that hell's the hippest way to go/ Well I don't think so/ But I'm going to take a look around it though/ Blue, I love you." I suspect Joni no longer associates with the '60s counterculture today because of this thing about Hell that pops up in her records of that era, at some point she spooked herself with some good old-fashioned scary Christian stories I suppose. The war is still there in this one: "They won't give peace a chance/ That was just a dream some of us had".
The song "River" exemplifies the tone: "I wish I had a river/ I could skate away on," Joni is telling herself that she wants an escape, or somewhere else to go ("California") that will make things better. One recalls the history of the counterculture as told in all those books I once read, I remember my favorites such as Sara Davidson's "Loose Change," James Michener's "Kent State," etc. -- as a result of the antiwar scene getting too scary, with Kent State and all, the counterculture was in full retreat by 1971, people moving into the backwoods, the Weatherpeople committing acts of violence against the State and then disappearing for decades, cynical Nixon in charge. Paul Kantner's gloomiest album, Sunfighter (see Jefferson Airplane), a classic even though he won't play its songs anymore, is a product of 1971. At the end of this album we have "The Last Time I Saw Richard," who states it baldly: "The last time I saw Richard was Detroit in '68/ and he told me all romantics meet the same fate someday/ cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark cafe"
Generally, Blue is just blue all the way through. The extra point I gave to Ladies for its profundity doesn't apply to this one. Somewhere on the website (http://www.jonimitchell.com//) Joni talks about writing this album to regale the folks who worshipped her as this hippie icon; then the critics laud it for its "introspection," whereas I find it too much of an indulgence. If you want smart introspection, try the next album. I give it my best critical rave.
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COMMENTS
I'm reading and enjoying your reviews at http://a.rn11.com/yh/pu/yhgeointpu.htm . I'm assuming that you're Samuel.
In the review of the Blue album, you write about hearing a mandolin. I think what you're hearing is an Appalachian dulcimer (not to be confused with a hammered dulcimer). The Appalachian dulcimer is a three-stringed (I think) instrument that is often played while held on the lap. There's a lot of dulcimer music on Blue.
If there is mandolin on the Blue album, please tell me where it is - I'm a mandolin player and would like to listen for it.
Thanks,
a d pratt
(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
This is the album the critics should have been listening to, when they were all hyped on praising Joni Mitchell the introspective artist. This album divides itself into four or five discrete parts -- part one is "The Banquet," a pointed critique of the system of property and privileges in America, very metaphoric. Part 2, "Cold Blue Steel And Sweet Fire" is about the experience of the drug culture, very weird and New York City, the tune is awesome in its innovative sweep and profound in its poetry. Part 3, "Barangrill" is about a bar and grill and its customers and employees, no artist has made a commercial so compelling. Well, that's the beginning.
Part 4 is the rest of the album, a bunch of rather different songs but they all blend together in one great set of out-of-this-world chords, with more accompaniment than on the previous albums although on this one the mandolin is gone, it's like an acoustic folk-jazz symphony or something. "Lesson In Survival" is like the songs in Blue, more intellectualized perhaps, "Let The Wind Carry Me" introduces you to her family, you find out her inner dynamic. "For The Roses" is her reaction to stardom, and "See You Sometime" is I think an interaction with James Taylor when he was having an affair with her, more dialogic than those Blue relationship songs. "Electricity" forms a metaphor for the dysfunction of the world around her, the gender relationships thing too, etc. The next song, "You Turn Me On I'm A Radio," made the Top 40 just barely.
Aw, man, there's details in this album that pour like you were there with Joni experiencing her life for her. The rest of the songs are about negotiating romantic relationships, like with "Blue," but the details are more poetically interesting. Joni sure could talk straight with her boyfriends, you can tell, and I think that if I were one of them I'd be jealous of her X-ray vision... I love this album all the way to the exhortations to glory at the end, & I'm not sure I want to review it further or taint its rating, seek & ye shall find...
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(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
The later Joni albums, after For The Roses, have a distinctly rockin' feel to them, even when they go off into jazz. (The extreme example is of course Mingus, Joni's tribute to Charles Mingus.) By 1975, Joni had a full band, the piano had been replaced by an electric piano, and her acoustic guitar was sometimes a backup for a lead electric guitar. I won't say anything about the albums Court And Spark, since I don't own it. I just found Miles Of Aisles, used, for six dollars -- I had been ignoring it because I didn't think much of it when I heard it fifteen years ago. Maybe Kevin Baker would be willing to pick up Court And Spark on mp3 and review it, that is, if he likes Joni, and I don't know, now at the time of this writing, if he does or doesn't. (Note: I have no mp3 technology, nor could my puny hard drive accommodate it.)
The Hissing Of Summer Lawns is an album sometimes profound, sometimes amusing, and sometimes serious in an art-school sort of way. At any rate, in many of these tunes Joni shows what a great portrait artist she is. The songs are mostly story narratives, and the tunes meander around their chords so as to give the narrative/ refrain/ narrative/ refrain structure a jazzy, loose feel, unlike, say, with Bruce Cockburn's World Of Wonders album, where Bruce tells his musical stories in a near-monotone against a Germanically rigid alternation of rock narratives and refrains. There are lots of experiments on this album, maybe you could think of it as the Joni Mitchell equivalent of Zeppelin's Houses Of The Holy, though that's a comparison of apples and oranges to be sure.
"In France They Kiss On Main Street" is a reminiscence of youth and youthful, "molded to middle class circumstance," but "kissing under bridges, kissing in cars, kissing in cafes." The line that makes it all worthwhile is where she sings: "I'd be kissing in the back seat/ Thrilling to the Brando-like things that he said/ And we'd be rolling/ Rolling/ Rock and rolling" without missing a beat. It's rock, all right, with jazz chords and a shifting time. It's jazz-fusion approached from the other side, the folk-rock side. "The Jungle Line" is one of the first music pieces to be "world beat," percussion accompaniment imported directly from Burundi. In Africa. Yeah, that's right, you, you who don't know where Burundi is. Look it up on a map. The lyrics are poetry, I can't make sense of them. "Edith And The Kingpin" is about a soap-operatic affair, about people I guess I wouldn't normally care about. Joni tells it well.
"Don't Interrupt The Sorrow" is a strange song about life or something like that, its lyrics are less narrative and more like poetry. "Shades of Scarlett Conquering" is about Scarlett O' Hara of "Gone With The Wind" of course, about prissy, overbearing women. It has a great piano intro, and an electric piano at the end with a gelatinous texture. Up through this part of the album Joni has been having fun. From here on it gets more ponderous. The next tunes would probably count as Side 2 if I were listening to vinyl or tape and not CD.
"Hissing Of Summer Lawns," the title track, is about suburban American life, although in that sense it's a warmup for a song later in the album. "The Boho Dance" is not that song, "The Boho Dance" is about Joni's attraction to bohemian lifestyles, to the escaping "other" of suburban life. "The Boho Dance" is performed in a way which IMHO muffles the sentiments it presents -- I think I have a fair idea of what bohemianism is about, and this isn't it. The real tribute to/ criticism of suburbia is in "Harry's House," which has the refrain of an old tune called "Centerpiece" grafted onto it, along with some bluesy piano. "Harry's House" has a magnificent bass line, it's got me hooked, it's a premonition of the acoustic-guitar hypnotism that would pervade the magic trick of most of her next album, Hejira. Joni's critique shines through the cracks in the pavement of suburban society, like a dandelion growing in the pesticide-laden front lawn. "Battalions of paper-minded males/ Talking commodities and sales/ While at home their paper wives/ And their paper kids/ Paper the walls to keep their gut reactions hid." "Centerpiece" is tacked on toward the end of "Harry's house."
The last two songs are even more ponderous. "Sweet Bird" is about the "Sweet bird of time and change" that makes everything transitory and relative. "Shadows And Light" is, of course, the title track of a later live album of a very pretty Joni performance in Santa Barbara, a perfect place to perform '70s Joni at any rate. "Shadows And Light," the song, goes past musical politics and musical philosophy to give us, that's right folks, musical theology. It's sung like it was performed in church or something, no organ but a heavy synthesizer though, lots of dualities laid on really thick. "Compelled by prescribed standards/ Or some ideals we fight/ For wrong/ Wrong and right/ Threatened by all things/ Man of cruelty (female chorus in the background: 'Mark of Cain')/ Drawn to all things (background female chorus: 'Born again, Born again')." God and the Devil and all that Manichean stuff, in your ears.
The narratives and the melodies of this album feed off of each other -- the narratives keep the brain moving while the melodies keep things relaxed even though they move quite swiftly, the background percussion humming like a motor. "In France They Kiss On Main Street" and "The Jungle Line" being less languid than the others, of course because of the percussion, and "Shadows And Light" like some nonsectarian Church of Joni. Definitely an interesting album, an ambiguous one, an album that pokes a finger at that part of the world that has been conquered by suburbia, without really rebelling against it except in musical style (which was enough for some of the critics and music industry execs to notice its rebellion).
It is no coincidence that the inner sleeve portrays Joni floating languidly in that most forceful of southern-California suburban icons, the swimming pool. This is an album to test Theodor Adorno's thesis on jazz (that jazz promotes the non-conformity of the musical statement while limiting it and bringing it into a conformist orbit). No, Joni doesn't break on through to the other side, although if I were to read Adorno in a music review I might expect her to do so. An album that doesn't excite me tremendously, on top of all that. Neither its lyrics nor its music nor _especially_ its '70s jazz-fusion instrumental choices producing much in the way of powerful sentiment, outside of "Harry's House" or "Shadows And Light" if you go for that kind of stuff. Maybe it's that I'm not in love or something.
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(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
From the gooey subject matter of The Hissing Of Summer Lawns we proceed to the topic of Hejira, which is to say, travel. One of the primary amusements of the Era of Cheap Oil, that great era of history which we are experiencing today, and which will draw to a close sometime in the next twenty or thirty years, is travel, and we should doubtless credit America's network of interstate highways, much of it built in the '50s and '60s, for making it all possible. Though I do recall reading in college that Aldous Huxley and his first wife Maria Nys drove across the US in the late '30s, on whatever roads they had back then. "See America," the ads used to say. See North America, guest starring the voice and guitar of Joni Mitchell, the guitar of Larry Carlton, and the bass of Jaco Pastorius. Jaco, if you didn't know already, was one of these take-charge bassists (like Jack Casady) who creates new things from the chords he's asked to play. It can be distracting; but here, it's great.
My most favorable impressions of travel are all summer -- a great time to listen to this beautiful, lazy album -- and they're of hitchhiking, of hitchhiking from the Bay Area to Chicago and from Seattle to Aspen, Colorado and then down to southern California. And in hitchhiking I'd meet people like the ones that populate Joni's Hejira album -- the old oil industry guy with one arm who told me all about the barren wastelands of northern Nevada as we traveled across them, the folks in Nebraska who would pick me up just to see who would do what I was doing, who would share beers to me until I was silly-drunk, the Germans who didn't know where they were going (and who misunderstood my directions), the Israelis who all sang in chorus while stuffed into the back of a station-wagon... well, Joni saw a different bunch, but you get the idea. This is good stuff.
Well, the big difference is that Joni was drifting in and out of affairs and reflecting upon them ("We're only particles in space I know, I know/ Orbiting around the sun/ But how can I have that point of view/ When I'm always bound and tied to someone," she sings) whereas I, I was chasing down some girl on the Aspen hitchhike, to find that she had withdrawn to a convent (well, Northern Arizona University, same thing) by the time I caught up with her.
My old folklore instructor once presented to her class the idea that hitchhiking was obsolete, that people did it all the time in the 1960s and that there was nothing of hitchhiking after the '60s because people didn't do it, it wasn't safe. I think she was disappointed to hear my early- and mid-'80s hitchhiking stories. Though I must admit to having been scared witless by Wyoming's cops, and taking a Greyhound all the way to Greeley, Colorado when I was trapped out that way... Greeley was great...
"Coyote" is about some strange acquaintance Joni made while on the road, apparently. "You just pick up a hitcher/ A prisoner of the white lines on the freeway..." Definitely a reminder of my own days... "Amelia" is about a dream Joni had while driving across country, "travel" being a metaphoric connection to Amelia Earhart, the famous pilot who disappeared in the '30s without a trace... "Furry Sings The Blues" is a nostalgic reminiscence of Beale Street in Memphis at a time when it was being transformed by "urban renewal." I'd imagine that Richard Wright would not sympathize with such nostalgia, read all about Beale Street in Memphis in his autobiographical book "Black Boy." Some critic way back when, I don't remember whom, took Joni to task for her condescending attitude in a lyric about the blues guy W. C. Handy: "W. C. Handy I'm rich and I'm fay/ And I'm not familiar with what you played/ But I get such strong impressions of your hey day" Readers of my reviews, especially of Joni's Ladies Of The Canyon on this page, should consider here that Joni's stances of compassion and privilege extend throughout much of her work.
"A Strange Boy" is about an affair or a one-night-stand or something of that sort, I guess she was traveling at the time she wrote it, though it's not about that. "Hejira" is the primary vehicle of the whole album, it philosophizes as Joni moves forward through the world. "Well I looked at the granite markers/ Those tributes to finality -- to eternity/ And then I looked at myself here/ Chicken scratching for my immortality" "Song For Sharon" is Joni's correspondence about marriage with a married woman, and some readers (especially on this website -- not many of the reviewers here listen to stuff made by women) may be turned off by its "girl talk" affectations. "Black Crow" is another travel song, "Blue Motel Room" is a bluesy love song, "Refuge Of The Roads" is a very pretty kaleidoscope of images.
This is still pop music, but it is pervaded by warm, jazzy, rolling guitar chords, it typifies all that is good about Joni's 1970s sound. The only thing I would say about this album that I didn't appreciate is that "Black Crow" and "Blue Motel Room" sound musically out of place (although in lyrical terms they fit perfectly). I dunno, "Black Crow" is in that stop-and-start percussive style that Led Zep used too much, esp. on Physical Graffiti. Too much like "real" jazz-fusion. Otherwise, this album has some pretty strong stuff -- "Amelia," "Hejira," "Song For Sharon," and "Refuge Of The Roads" are all hypnotic stuff, and everything else fits the pattern like the rectangular jigsaw-puzzle that one sees in the landscape of an agricultural plain. Give this one a high nine.
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(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
There's little of direct profundity on this album, unlike Hejira, (that line from the title track of that album, "chicken-scratching for my immortality," still rings in my ears like something out of my doctoral dissertation), and upon initial listenings I tended to take little interest in this album, since one has to wade through the first two songs, "Overture -- Cotton Avenue," and "Talk To Me," without hearing any memorable melody. The lyrics are static too, more like verbal paintings than stories. Indeed, Joni instrumentalizes those songs with a great repetition of notes and chords. Jaco Pastorius' bass and Joni's rhythm guitar are turned up in the mix, Larry Carlton's guitar is absent. One has to listen to the bass on this album as if it were not a rhythm accompaniment but rather as the primary musical instrument. As such, Jaco's big bass is profound like a mini-sonic boom, and hypnotic against the background of Joni's monotonous strumming.
Unlike what you read at http://www.warr.org/, this is not like the sort of music played on Hejira. It's really more like a hyper-Hejira, Joni stretching out like Miles Davis on the Miles Smiles album, setting off once again in exploration of new sonic territory. The third song is "Jericho," it has more of a melody (it's more like a Hejira song, having already been released on Miles Of Aisles). Wayne Shorter, who of course was _on_ the abovementioned Miles Davis album, plays the soprano sax. "Jericho" acts as a sort of bridge to song #4, "Paprika Plains."
Now with "Paprika Plains," which clocks in at a tremendous 16:21, we can see the lands Joni intends to explore, and also why the background of the album cover is that two-tone blue and red. "Paprika Plains" is a majestic symphony for piano and orchestra, with some great jazz-rock tacked on at the end. Lots of repetitive piano chords. This "song" illustrates a dream about Joni's childhood out in Saskatchewan, about "Paprika plains/ Vast and bleak and godforsaken/ Paprika pains/ And a turquoise river snaking". So the monotony of the melodies sets a sonic landscape for a landscape that is indeed monotonous. But it's nevertheless interesting, Joni's landscape has Indians and their symbolism. It's got some prog-rock tendencies, but it really sways toward Gershwin. On the vinyl version, "Paprika Plains" covered the entire side of a disc -- on a CD, it clears the air for "Otis And Marlena," the most memorable melody on this album. Larry Carlton is back.
From there we proceed to "The Tenth World" and "Dreamland," another attempt to get the public to focus on world beat, it never took off until the Talking Heads' Remain In Light or Paul Simon's Graceland or Peter Gabriel's discovery of Youssou N'Dour at the latest. Very polyrhythmic, bongos and all. The next song, the title track, is about a literary figure "Don Juan," and it's a puzzle, of course, the listener has to figure out which "Don Juan" she's singing about. At first I thought she was referring to British literature. (There are also the Don Juans of opera and film, but let's move on, shall we?) "Don Juan," the poem (mispronounced in British fashion "Don Juwan," as in "Juwan Howard" the basketball star) was a poem written beginning in 1818 by George Gordon, Lord Byron, and continued until his death in 1824.
It's about a guy who fools around a lot, only he doesn't really have to go out and seek the beauties -- they come to him. It's also a satire upon human shortcomings. So if Joni Mitchell is calling herself "Don Juan's reckless daughter," hmmm... well, no, the song isn't about sex, nor is it a satire, and the metaphor points elsewhere. "The eagle and the serpent are at war in me/ The serpent fighting for blind desire/ The eagle for clarity." This is the one song on this album where Joni tries to reach for profundity. "We are all hopelessly oppressed cowards/ Of some duality" points to the Don Juan of Carlos Castañeda's books, a probably-fictional Yaqui warlock ("brujo") who teaches Castañeda to see hidden realities while tripping on peyote or, even better, while not tripping on peyote. Too bad Joni doesn't have Byron's taste for hilarious rhymes. Oh well. The tune on this title track is punctuated by a tweaked-out Pastorius bass that hits the way low registers. And if you're really interested in the white woman's view of (American) Indian peyote culture, I'd recommend reading Barbara Myerhoff's anthropological classic "Peyote Hunt." This isn't about that, either.
The last two songs are extended play for those willing to engage Joni's penchant for mellowness. Lyrics are typical Joni sentiment. The last song is just Joni and her guitar, a throwback to her career beginnings. This album rolls out to nearly an hour. You'll be able to appreciate it if you have already heard Hejira and are willing to go further into the Midwest of the Land of Joni in the direction of the Great Paprika Plains of jazz-rock landscape. It's like Joni sings in "Cotton Avenue": "If you got a place like that to go/ You know you got to go there/ If you've got no place special/ Well then, you just go no place special." Either it's your thing or it's not.
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(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
The critics that I've read tended to dislike this album. I guess they didn't like its politics, or its "standard rock product" tendencies, or both. Me, I forgive Joni both of these tendencies, since she was, after all, complaining in this album about something very real. This is one of those albums that displays the 1980s reaction to the replacement of populist Keynesianism with elitist monetarism as the predominant ideology of the period after 1973. I will explain what these things are in greater detail in my rant on "Politics and Music."
On the level of popular culture, the transformation of the '70s showed up as the "conservative revolution" of the Reagan era, of the 1980s, of the character of Gordon Gekko (as played by Michael Douglas) as he gave his "greed is good" speeches in Oliver Stone's film Wall Street, and, later, of the Contract With America as the ideological banner of the triumphalist 1994 Republican House of Representatives. On the level of economics, the transformation showed up as the downsizing trend of the '80s, as the "giant sucking sound" of union jobs moving out of the US (as Ross Perot described it), as the US government posting huge deficits for the sake of military spending, while creating $72,000/yr. jobs building ceramic nosecones for nuclear missiles in San Diego etc., while at the same time lending billions of dollars to impoverished nations in corporate scams, all basically for the sake of solidifying the global dominance of the US dollar. Oh and the beneficiaries of all this were sooo smug, while the middle class of Mexico lost its life's savings in currency devaluations...
When the elites stopped organizing an economy for the sake of the general public, something was lost in popular culture, too, and this was eventually reflected in the state of pop music as the '70s drifted into the '80s, which then became the insipid '90s. Today, money rules, people are fools. The music industry, correspondingly, appears poised to inspire a whole _legion_ of Robert Grazer's to continue their glorious search for the all-time worst record. Limp Bizkit and Britney Spears are in the ascendant.
The most famous musical accompaniment to this reaction is, of course, punk. If you really want to hear the idea of punk as a reaction to the end of populist Keynesianism, in a form that will surely box your ears, listen to the song "Do They Owe Us A Living?" on Crass's album The Feeding Of The 5000. At any rate, here we are, reviewing Joni's Dog Eat Dog album. On this album, Joni incorporates the worst aspects of "standard rock product," the drum machine, Thomas Dolby's synthesizers, and (*cringe*) Michael McDonald's supporting vocals, all of which the critics rightly criticize, and turns them into something quite listenable.
So what is "standard rock product"? Listen to any of the Jefferson Starship's late '70s/ early '80s records, listen to Journey or Foreigner or Bryan Adams. Listen to R.E.O. Speedwagon or Bachman-Turner Overdrive or, more to the point, listen to Joni's previous album Wild Things Run Fast, it sounded like standard rock product to me last I heard it. Maybe Robert Grazer could review it. In each case, at any rate, the music and lyrics have lost their imaginative properties and the main impulse of each band is to turn a basic literacy in electric guitar, keyboard, and drumset skills into a niche within the music industry. There's something about Dog Eat Dog that's better than all that, though its superiority is mostly in the realm of lyrics. I'll try to describe them.
On this album, sound, melody, and lyric join forces in a brusque criticism of the sterile '80s of elitism and competition. You have to be in the mood to listen to this album -- maybe listening on your Sony Walkman in some sterile corporate office building, or driving through some downtown traffic jam -- but it does serve its purpose quite well. "Good Friends" is about having good friends and then losing them amidst the capitalist society of individualists. "Fiction" is about what Cornelius Castoriadis called the "collective imaginary," the world as it is portrayed on your television set, and as it is digested by the brains of the public. Its end is attention-getting. "The Three Great Stimulants" is about hegemony, about the public's acquiescence in the status quo. Joni's trying to understand it through "the three great stimulants, artifice, brutality, and innocence," as if the PR tactics of the Reagan Administration had some great symbolic importance in themselves, apart from the social phenomenon of Reaganism.
"Tax Free" is an angry castigation of right-wing TV evangelists, I guess you can tell (like with Bruce Cockburn's song "Gospel of Bondage" off the Big Circumstance album) that Joni criticizes right-wing TV evangelism from an alternate _religious_ perspective. "How can he speak for the Prince of Peace/ When he's hawk-right-militant?" she sings. Don't know, Joni. About 25% of the American public goes for the right-wing fundies, ask them. God's domination is supposed to justify the politician's domination, I suppose, as it did in Rome and in Constantinople, as he extracts more tax money from you for his military habits. "Smokin' /Try Another" is about Joni's cigarette addiction, which hadn't ruined her voice yet. Joni "plays" a cigarette vending machine on this song!
"Dog Eat Dog," the title track, is a metaphor for the heightened competition in the capitalist environment of the 1980s. Now if Joni had access to some bright economist like Doug Henwood or Robert Brenner, we'd get something more profound, instead we get this. "In every culture in decline," Joni sings, "The watchful ones among the slaves/ Know all that's genuine will be/ Scorned and conned and cast away." "Shiny Toys" is a castigation of the elitist money culture, the parade of wealth that the '80s popularized. "Ethiopia" is bad, a dirge for the dead in the Ethiopian famine, it made me want to say "please Joni learn something about economics." Joni tries to analyze the Ethiopian famine, and mumbles something vague. "Impossible Dreamer" is about the idealism that still survived in the 1980s. It sure survived within _me_ during that decade, so I plead guilty. Demand the impossible, I say. "Lucky Girl" is about Joni's role as a playgirl -- sure, in interviews Joni complained about being ripped off by doctors during the '80s, but when one's a popstar, male or female, one has it good.
Melodies? Sounds? Joni swings as much as she can, against the synthesizers and drum machines, on track after track. Wayne Shorter shows up with his saxophones to lighten things a bit. I think the critics were applying the standard of '60s or '70s Joni albums to this one, and so it was scapegoated. Why they didn't pounce on "Wild Things Run Fast," not _half_ as hard, is beyond me. This album is more for thinking than for relaxing. I'd like to give it a 6, because it's so vindictive and '80s-icky (and because Joni's just a silly popstar at bottom), but this gets an extra point for thematic unity.
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(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
This album is basically a continuation of the thematic and electronic assault of Dog Eat Dog, but not so synthesized, also not so consistent. And the lyrics have more of a narrative feel. Thomas Dolby and Michael McDonald are on fewer tracks on Chalk Mark, which doubtless made plenty of critics cheer. Michael McDonald (you know, the obnoxious "Doobie Brothers" vocalist) and Thomas Dolby (of "She Blinded Me With Science" fame) are gone! Joni's back! they said. Me, I thought their appearance on Dog Eat Dog was Joni's way of saying "Welcome to the '80s! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA!!!" And I could appreciate that about Dog Eat Dog, though if you asked me if I _liked_it, I'd have to hesitate.
At any rate, Chalk Mark In A Rain Storm is not so frightening, though there are some Dog Eat Dog-type numbers, none of them as rocking as "Tax Free," I'm sad to say. "My Secret Place" has a resonance with me, as I had a secret place of my own to escape the '80s, in a forest no less, at least I did before moving back home in despair over my economic situation back in '88. All readers who have a secret place in a forest raise your hands... oh well. The melody is pretty. "Number One" is a cynical song, w/ synthesizers and I think a drum machine, about competition, in the vein of many of the songs on Dog Eat Dog. The repetition of the words "winner" and "trophy" evoke sports, and the tremendous growth of spectator sports culture around the time that Magic, Kareem, Worthy, and Coach Pat Riley of the Los Angeles Lakers won those back-to-back NBA championships back in '87 and '88, when this album came out. It's really gotten out of hand since then. (Can anyone here tell me why Tampa Bay needs a sports team with a dooky name like the "Devil Rays"?)
"Lakota" is a song of pity for Native America, from a point of view that is decidedly white privileged compassionate Euro-American. Iron Eyes Cody puts forth a vocal track to give this song some credibility with the First Nations watchdogs of "authenticity," of which there are many. Joni's authentic Canadian, tho' if we wanted authentic we'd listen to Buffy Sainte-Marie. At lease it isn't as bad as "Ethiopia." "You think we're sleeping -- but/ Quietly like rattlesnakes and stars -- / We have seen the trampled rainbows/ In the smoke of cars." I suppose there's a scary charm to lyrics like that, though I'm resisting it. "The Tea Leaf Prophecy" has this "Study war no more" and "Lay down your arms" chorus and there's this story (in the lyrics) of people taking care of their gardens and homes. Some of the lyrics seem to be about the devastation visited upon the world by World War II, though there's this reference to the "Johnny Carson show" in the lyric at the end. I looked it up on the Net, and Johnny Carson was the host of the Tonight Show (for those of you who know nothing but Leno, there was something before) starting in 1962. So Joni is using a flash-forward.
The next song is "Dancin' Clown," a song about the party scene of the '80s and a certain sort of ludicrous masculinity on show that Joni perceived in the culture. Supporting vocals by (of all people) Billy Idol! Billy growls stuff in a duet with Joni, most noticeably "C'MON!" The song mildly rocks, electric rhythm guitar, though the re-emergence of Thomas Dolby on this track is a hint. "Cool Water" is a mellow song, a remake of an old classic, Joni plays the synthesizer herself, there's a duet with Willie Nelson on this one. So if you like Willie's whiskey-drenched voice, you'll like this song.
"The Beat Of Black Wings" is a song where Joni tells the story of this Vietnam veteran named "Killer Kyle," she sings this chorus "Charlie Angel," "Charlie" referring perhaps to the Americans' name for the "Viet Cong," or more properly, the indigenous resistance to the regime of South Vietnam that allied itself with North Vietnam. I'm not going to say anything here about the story Killer Kyle is supposed to have told, you'll have to discover it yourself, it's quite interesting. The title, "The Beat Of Black Wings," refers to the sound of a helicopter I think. The title of the album is also explained in this song. Joni operates the drum machine and the synthesizer. "Snakes and Ladders" was a traditional Indian game that became a popular British board game but the song is about corporate climbing lovers. Some of the lyrics are funny in a sitcom-funny sort of way. Joni sings, "To kiss her/ To kiss her/ (6x) To kiss her he has to shave."
"The Reoccurring Dream" is about the sort of stuff they sell on those corny "paid programming" segments when they advertise stuff on TV for 30 minutes at a time, on Sunday morning or some downtime like that, when the networks know they don't have much of an audience. The background noises on this track are like samples of such programs, "Order you youth secrets of the stars/ Call now -- just $9.99" etc., it's a parody of the brainless consumerism promoted on those shows, all the way to the karate-chop Joni thrusts at the end, "Isn't there some other way?/ Who cares?" At the end, Joni, Larry Klein (her hubby, or ex, I don't remember if they're divorced at time of recording), and Wayne Shorter do a remake of the traditional blues "Corrina, Corrina," with Wayne tailing off in a twitter of saxophone noise at the end.
Chalk Mark In A Rain Storm is a transitional album, in listening it we're more than halfway through the urban jungle of Dog Eat Dog and headed toward the storytelling mode Joni adopted for the next album, Night Ride Home. There's so much going on in this album that I couldn't grant it points for thematic unity, though the cultural references and narratives will keep the listener entertained throughout. The melodies are closer to what one is used to in listening to Joni, but there's nothing exceptional to what she's doing with them here. If you want exceptional Joni melody, try Song To A Seagull, For The Roses or Don Juan's Reckless Daughter.
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(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
Some critics loved this album, claiming it was the return of Joni's style of Hejira, but a comparison with Don Juan's Reckless Daughter would have shown this claim to be overreaching. There's no Jaco Pastorius on Night Ride Home, sadly, Jaco killed himself in '86 I think. Let's give out Jaco's website, http://www.jacopastorius.com/, and a moment of silence for a talent which once was, only to snuff itself out. Larry Klein, Joni's husband for a brief period, is not the same sort of bassist that Jaco was, but he's what you'll hear on Night Ride Home. And the melodies are significantly less innovative than any of Joni's '70s stuff.
Chronologically, this is the most recent Joni Mitchell album you will see me review on these pages -- and the reason for that is simple. Listening to Night Ride Home is listening to Joni Mitchell run out of exciting ideas. There are six songs on this album that are up to Joni's standards, and four pieces of what I consider filler. The stuff I consider filler, BTW, are at the end of the album, which is telling. Of course, what is "filler" by Joni's normal standards is a good song by the standards of any other artist. At any rate, the layout:
"Night Ride Home," reflections upon a pleasant car trip out in the countryside by night. Life is good for Joni. Pretty tune. "Passion Play (When All The Slaves Are Free)" is more of Joni's theology, like maybe you heard in songs such as "Shadows And Light" and "Don Juan's Reckless Daughter." References to the corruption of society and of Jesus' crucifixion. "Enter the multitudes/ In Exxon blue/ And radiation red," Joni sings. "Cherokee Louise" is Joni telling a story of a childhood friend who was a child rape victim. Against this mellow tune and meandering Wayne Shorter soprano sax, Joni tells this frightening tale... "The Windfall (Everything for Nothing)" is this song about narcissism and greed that really belonged on Chalk Mark or Dog Eat Dog, or maybe as a b-side to singles version of an earlier Joni song. Joni was more frightening in this vein when she used those icky '80s production values.
"Slouching Toward Bethlehem" is a musical adaptation of the poem of the same name by W.B. Yeats. Best melody on the whole CD. Very amusing to hear Yeats set to music. More Joni theology, if you remember "Slouching Toward Bethlehem," Yeats' poem is about Armageddon and the Second Coming. "Come In From The Cold" is Joni's rationalization of the cultural explosion of the '60s, that it was all just an effort to escape the straitjacket of puritanical culture. "Way back in 1957/ We had to dance a foot apart/ And they hawk-eyed us/ From the sidelines/ Holding their rulers without a heart/ And so with just a touch of our fingers/ We could make our circuitry explode/ Oh all we ever wanted/ Was to come in from the cold."
None of this is terribly special, although all of it is good. Some of it is dreadfully scary, though. The rest is uninteresting: "Nothing Can Be Done" is about passion, "The Only Joy In Town" is about a pinup boy, a bit of reverse sexism, "Ray's Dad's Cadillac" is '50s nostalgia, "Two Grey Rooms" is just plain boring. Look, I don't like Cadillacs, never want to drive one, the steering radius and blind spots would drive me crazy. Don't get me wrong, I like this album. Part of that, though, is that it's good in the first half, and tolerable in the second half.
That having been said, I may review earlier Joni stuff, but I won't review later stuff, not after this one. Neither "Turbulent Indigo" nor "Taming The Tiger" nor "Both Sides, Now" piques my interest. So here is the space in which I will sum up my thoughts about Joni Mitchell. She's an incredibly diverse talent, did incredible things with an acoustic guitar, had dozens of exciting affairs, went places, saw things, and sung about them. Practically invented a new style of music with Hejira and Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, not jazz-fusion, nor prog-rock, but something new. Song To A Seagull and For The Roses are incredible albums, you ought to go out and buy them now. "Hejira" will amaze you. She's better than half the people you're listening to now.
Since Chalk Mark In A Rain Storm, though, her voice acquired this tinny squeak, like she was straining to reach notes she would easily have hit in a previous decade. The politics on Dog Eat Dog and Chalk Mark In A Rain Storm was doubtless a bit too heavy and humorless for some Joni listeners, though of course I tolerated it when it showed up wearing beads and a peasant dress on 1970's Ladies Of The Canyon. And, stylistically, the '90s were somewhat aimless for Joni. Tho in retrospect that seems to have been true for everyone.
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