It was a profound discovery. She recovered and went home. The effects of that illness had other implications down the road for the songwriter and guitarist that Mitchell would eventually become. To compensate for a weakened left hand, Mitchell would often compose on the guitar experimenting with various open, or non-standard, tunings, freeing her from having to form more difficult chord shapes as well as allowing for unusual, complex harmonies – adding further distinction to an already original style. Mitchell’s catalog would eventually include compositions in some 50 different tunings. Her open tunings allowed her to use rather simple chord shapes that nevertheless yielded rich, textured, unique guitar sounds. Listen to “Silky Veils of Ardor” from Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter: her guitar climbs from deep, throat-clearing rumbles to ringing harmonics, soaring on bright, glittering splashes of notes.
Here’s my issue. I thought to begin an occasional series of profiles of women in rock. It seems to make the most sense to start at the beginning, and one can’t reliably profile women in rock without first profiling its First Lady, its grand dame – Joni Mitchell. But when one considers Mitchell’s resonance and influence, the rich reach of her decades of composition, it’s impossible as well as ludicrous to confine her to such a context.
While one can reasonably argue that Mitchell forged the trail, artistically and commercially, for so many female songwriters and performers that came after her, the fact of the matter is, if it wasn’t Mitchell, some female artist would have done it eventually. Being a pioneer is one good thing and worthy of note. But Joni Mitchell means far more than that.
Mitchell’s influence extends far beyond women. You can hear still her, everywhere: in Conor Oberst and Ryan Adams; in Prince, Madonna, Morrisey, Sting, and Bjork (a disparate clatch of single-name artists). Robert Plant and Jimmy Page wrote “Going to California” about Mitchell. Her persuasive body of work crisscrosses genres; you can hear her in Lucinda Williams and Dixie Chicks, as well as Diana Krall and Cassandra Wilson. Staying strictly within the boundaries of the female singer-songwriter, it’s impossible to listen to Madeleine Peyroux, Annie Lennox, KT Tunstall, K.D. Lang, Indigo Girls, Tracy Chapman, Suzanne Vega, Ani DiFranco, Dar Williams, Patty Griffin, Tori Amos, or Fiona Apple (to name just a few) without the lyrical specter of Mitchell looming large in the background.
I don’t remember the first time I heard Joni Mitchell. She was always there, part of that earliest consciousness soundtrack that everyone has, depending on when one was born: when the very young mind makes that turn into understanding that music is something, that artists are actually other people with particular musical identities who are actively doing something. The Beatles, Dean Martin, Harry Nilsson, Joni Mitchell (among a hodgepodge of other strange markers – Johnny Horton’s “The Battle of New Orleans,” Tennessee Ernie Ford, “I’m Henery the Eight, I Am,” Roger Miller) are just there, embedded in memory without any particular demarcation.
But I remember the first time I truly listened to Joni Mitchell. It was near the end of the halcyon days of FM radio, when many mainstream rock stations were still eschewing formats and playing anything and everything from a variety of artists, not just the “singles.” A popular but eclectic Pittsburgh station, WDVE, was still a reliable source in the mid-1970s for burgeoning musical consciousness. They had a practice of once a week or so, at midnight, playing an artist’s newest recording in its entirety, with a break only between album sides. In my darkened bedroom, under the covers with a transistor radio, I tuned in pretty frequently, but there is only one album that I can vividly remember from all that I heard from those midnight sessions: Joni Mitchell’s Hejira.
Probably because that was the first time I carefully listened to Joni Mitchell, and it’s safe to say that at that impressionistic period, I’d never heard anything like it. Perhaps what was most startling to me at that juncture is that anything could eclipse the profound fascination and infatuation I’d long held for Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run. Those albums were not only stirring but also more accessible for an adolescent boy with an evolving and roughly equal love of both the world of words and the world of music.
In hindsight, I can only characterize Hejira and my visceral response to it as a revelation-in-waiting. That is, it was far more sophisticated a recording than I could fully grasp at the time. I seemed to understand that fact on some level, but that only deepened my fascination with it and the hypnotic effect it had on me. I’d never heard the kind of rich, many-layered rhythm guitar sounds like those of Mitchell and Larry Carlton, and I’d never before heard a long, looping, elastic lines of Jaco Pastorius’s fretless bass. And I’d certainly never heard such literate and evocative song-writing, not even in the Dylan songs I was acquainted with at the time.
But I hadn’t the life experience or the listening experience to really understand or fully appreciate that recording. Apparently I wasn’t alone. Apart from that midnight FM radio debut, Hejira received little other airplay, and a rather cool critical reception. But we all caught up with Joni eventually.
Next time: more on Joni Mitchell, her life, and her work.
