Here’s the very short version: Roberta Joan Anderson was born in Ft. Macleod, Alberta, Canada on November 7, 1943, and went on to become perhaps the most influential and important female recording artist of the latter half of the 20th century.
Here’s the slightly less short version. Her mother was a teacher, her father was an officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force who, after the war, became a grocer in Saskatchewan. Roberta studied poetry, painting, and music. She played piano first. At the age of nine, she contracted polio (see the previous installment), and, upon recovering, starting smoking. Said Mitchell, “I kind of made a pact with my Christmas tree, or maybe it was God, that if I could get my legs back,” she would resume going to church. She kept her part of the bargain: “So I joined the church choir and one night after choir practice, in the middle of winter, a girl had snitched a pack of Black Cat cork [cigarettes] from her mother and we all sat in the wintery fish pond in the snow, and passed them around. And you know, some girls choked and some threw up, and I took one puff and felt really smart! My head cleared up. I seemed to see better and think better. So I was a smoker from that day on.” Her iconoclasm was plainly an early-budding trait.
In her teens, she bought a baritone ukulele for $36 because she couldn’t afford a guitar just then, and taught herself to play. She got a guitar eventually. She briefly attended the Alberta College of Art and Design, then quit to move to Toronto and become a folk singer. There, she married and performed with an American folk singer named Chuck Mitchell, and moved to the United States. The marriage lasted less than two years, but she kept his last name, and Joan became Joni. She moved on to New York City and embarked on her brilliant career.
That iconoclasm: it’s easy to overlook in this day and age, but apart from Bob Dylan, it’s difficult to think of another recording artist who was as artistically and commercially successful as Mitchell despite her glaring indifference to the formulas for that success, her fierce independence, and her sharp criticism of the music industry. Sure, she never sold as many records as Carole King or Carly Simon, but neither they, nor most of her male contemporaries, were as deeply creative and relentlessly innovative as Mitchell, who experimented and synthesized various forms and genres, yet always within the context of her personal and distinctive artistic vision.
Paul Simon made quite a splash fusing pop and world music in 1986’s Graceland, but Mitchell had already explored that territory ten years before on The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. Sting walked away from The Police to pursue a solo career that began with a more jazz-oriented pop sound, working with Branford Marsalis and Kenny Kirkland, but Mitchell was there first, having released a trio of albums in the previous decade that fused jazz, pop, folk, and world music, collaborating with just luminaries as Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter, Larry Carlton, Chaka Khan, and Charles Mingus. We talked about Mitchell’s pioneering role for so many of the female recording artists that followed her. But Mitchell was also a pioneer for all recording artists, male and female, when it came to innovating and exploring forms, genres, and styles.
Here’s a curious parallel associated with that. In 1974, Mitchell released Court and Spark, undoubtedly her most successful album, a jazz-tinged pop recording that rose to 1 and 2 on the charts in Canada and the US respectively and earned her three Grammy nominations. Her next studio recording, The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975) was the first of a trio of albums in which Mitchell more fully explored the jazz idiom. THOSL rose as high as #4 in the US, based on the strength of her earlier success, but the album plainly marked a sea change, and reviews of the time were not especially kind. Most notably, Rolling Stone called The Hissing of Summer Lawns the “worst album title” of the year. Fast forward a decade: The Police disband after their most successful studio recording to date, Synchronicity (1983), to pursue solo careers. Sting’s first solo recording, his aforementioned foray into the jazz idiom (outfitted, coincidentally, with some Weather Report alumni), was titled The Dream of the Blue Turtles. Sting’s title, of course, did not garner the same peevish little tweak. Apparently there was another recording by a major artist that year with an even dumber name. (And Sting’s record, with its songs about coal miners and vampires, came out a lot better in the wash as well. Mitchell’s jazz work is actually invoked in the RS review of Turtles – predictably, he succeeds jazzwise where she failed.)
But Mitchell always had a somewhat contentious relationship with the music industry and the rock press. It was a different time; every part of the musical establishment was male-dominated (except for groupies), and it was unlikely that they would ever let her forget it. Rolling Stone, with its typical snarky self-importance, once published a graphic resembling a family tree that identified all of Mitchell’s alleged “romantic partners,” most of them musicians. Mitchell was deeply hurt. But being successful, dauntingly talented, restlessly creative, and a woman was bound to result in a comeuppance in the enlightened 1970s from the powers that were.
Next time: we conclude our profile with more on Joni Mitchell’s music.
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Thom Palmer is a writer, designer, and very amateur musician. His most recent novel, Desire, was published last year.
