Joni Mitchell: Classic or Dud

Lex did a great Ten Of The Best on Joni last week on the Guardian website, well worth checking out.

Tim OTM about Ladies.
For some reason, the record has always felt like work to me, even though i do really like most of the individual songs. Not sure how to explain this, but to my ears that album as a whole comes across as this folky "quality piece of work", whereas Blue (not my fave anyway) seems much more evident and necessary.

think i prefer Ladies to Clouds. not sure though, it goes back and forth for me. i love blue and it may be my favorite joni record, but i really really really prefer the dulcimer tracks to the piano tracks.

Blue is amazing, but it was kind of ruined for me when I was in college and lived off campus near the womens' college student center (and thus spent a decent amount of time in the student center), where the coffee shop was ALWAYS playing it. It's also one of those albums that's just so tender and interior and sad that it's rare that I'm in the right frame of mind to listen to it in my busy adult life.

also some of these "classic or dud" threads started 12-14 years ago in which the subject is an older artist who is typically undeniably classic (e.g. joni) always show a kind of interesting split between early and new ILM -- how many people on ILM nowadays who don't like joni mitchell would care enough to visit the thread and say shit like this:

Pure garbage. Not fit to pick the toenails of Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Tim Buckley. Bloody ugly, as well.

― Johnathan, Friday, April 13, 2001 8:00 PM (13 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

newer artists obviously still get lots of discussion but i'm kind of grateful we don't see posts like the above anymore.

I feel like ILM used to get a lot more random googlers. IDK if that has changed for some techno-magical reason.

ILX didn't use to require registration - can't remember when that was changed

2007 iirc

Anybody who likes her at all shouldn't miss the debut, alternately listed as s/t or Song To A Seagull. Whatever romantic illusions she still had, she'd already been through some early shit (teen motherhood, baby put up for adoption, marriage soon over), not spelled out yet, but shadowy allusions clear enough in the first song, "I Had A King," and though feminism was hardly a recognizable term just then for most, "I in my leather and lace/I could never be that kind" in that voice, meant she had the strength to take her distinctive self pretty far, in whatever direction. That's not hindsight, because I first heard it soon after it came out. The tunings, the tunes,the chords--individually and in progression--the rhythmic turns, the way she made the warble work, between the level, confiding, unapologetic, though never complacent phrases: she could be a one-woman Pentangle, she could do folkie-pop, whatever. She was observational, she was introspective without getting lost in there---well, could've done without "The Pirate of Penance," but she kept me listening. She was already a Lady of the Canyon sonically, the way producer Cros kept her voice centered in there, with just the right deployment of echo, the occasional boom of lower strings. Eh, maybe it wouldn't sound that great next to some later ones now, but I thought it was awesome.

And it was almost all her voice and guitar, a little bit of her piano, plus a perfect li'l Stills bass riff on "Night In The City."

I'd be surprised if Stevie Nicks didn't know this record pretty well.

On a related tangent one of the things that surprised me about Linda Perhacs' album of the same era is how the mystical hippie stuff is intermingled with decidedly Joni-esque material like "Paper Mountain Man". It's sort of like a direction Joni could have taken if she'd drifted further towards, rather than away from folk after her first few albums.

Great post, dow. It's actually kind if amazing how in the first ten seconds of her recorded career you can hear the melodic/aesthetic/lyrical/arrangement template that she would explore for the next decade. Stark contrast to her contemporaries whose debuts all sound indebted to various Tom Rushes and the like.

i really like "Pirate of Penance" tho

also some of these "classic or dud" threads started 12-14 years ago in which the subject is an older artist who is typically undeniably classic (e.g. joni) always show a kind of interesting split between early and new ILM -- how many people on ILM nowadays who don't like joni mitchell would care enough to visit the thread and say shit like this:

Pure garbage. Not fit to pick the toenails of Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Tim Buckley. Bloody ugly, as well.
― Johnathan, Friday, April 13, 2001 8:00 PM (13 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

newer artists obviously still get lots of discussion but i'm kind of grateful we don't see posts like the above anymore.

― marcos, Monday, May 5, 2014 9:52 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think the reason for this is that there were so few regulars on ILM in the early days that the folks who /were/ here felt a need to contribute their opinion to nearly every topic/thread. now that sort of thing is impossible--I probably have time to follow four or five threads on the "new answers" page, if that.

i was on ILX in 2002 (!) and can pretty much remember how it worked.

--old man amateurist

Misogyny, thy name is Patriarchal Penis Envy! Never! Have I witnessed such a stomach churning Big Bully Boys Club Day Out as the shit flung at Joni Mitchell on this board.

Ever occur to you gents that you're jealous because you've done Sweet FA w/your lives and Ms. Mitchell's taken the very essence of life itself and moulded it to her muse?

I spit on you! Puh!

i think 2014 ilx consensus is that joni is most supreme. check out this to feel affirmed:
Oh I Wish I Had a POLL, I Could Skate Away On: The Joni Mitchell Tracks/Albums Results Thread (ILM ARTIST POLL #26)

googler, I take it? xp

valuable new poster

tbf when i open this thread up i always fp the naysayers at the top just to make sure

only FP cos I want to see if we can set a new record here

tho its fuckin madness to even hint at did ITT tbh

old ilx was a bunch of twee fuckers with challops regarding stuff abt which they knew v little.

Daphnis otm

old ilx was a bunch of twee fuckers with challops regarding stuff abt which they knew v little.

― a biscuit/donut hybrid called “bisnuts” (stevie), Sunday, 27 July 2014 09:39 (6 hours ago) Permalink

See also: opening few posts on the Neil Young: Classic or Dud thread

i think about the guy who told everybody they only liked coffee because it was cool like ... most days

Sweet FA would be a great band name.

sweet, sweet failure analysis

An early show, listed as Nov. '66 at the Second Fret in Philly, though someone quoted toward the end of the post says it's from 1967, that she did play there the previous year, but in a duo with her husband, Chuck Mitchell. Could be, since the post also links to an interview from the 1966 gig, where Chuck does a lot of the talking. Anyway, this show is all her, and she does some songs that wouldn't show up on her albums for years--- decades, in some cases:
http://bigozine2.com/roio/?p=1884

In case the tracks go away, here's the original annotations (also transcribed in the Big O post, if this isn't legible enough):

http://www.bigozine2.com/MP3AA/MP314/JMsfret/JMsfretBk.jpg

http://www.bigozine2.com/MP3AA/MP314/JMsfret/JMsfret2.jpg

thank you dow!

Welcolme, stevie. Before she plays "Urge for Going," she says that George Hamilton IV's version is "Number 13 with a bullet," so might be early '67 already, since that's when he got it into the Country Top 10. What a guitarist she is! I suspect the way she rang the changes "influenced" some other songwriters as much as anything else she did.

eh, "welcome," jeez.

her tunings are in any alt-tuning bible by name; she's one of the great acoustic guitarists of the rock era

I like the story from "hotel california" w/Clapton watching her play some tunes at mama cass's house and staring at her hands trying to figure out how the hell she was doing what she was doing.

aero otm

Read this earlier this year - its really excellent
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Girls-Like-Us-Mitchell-Generation/dp/0091899249/ref=sr_1_11?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1406619092&sr=1-11&keywords=joni+mitchell

Yeah just to second that recommendation, good book

Thirded

Gosh Miles of Aisles is great -- love hearing the band from that era jam out

i've been listening to this really great album recently it's called blue

i didn't know night ride home before everybody got effusive about it, in this thread or a different thread, i don't know. & wow! i listen to it a lot lately. the windfall.

*puts on night ride home again*

"The Windfall" makes me feel a bit uncomfortable actually.

How so, Tim? I haven't heard it. This evening I came across an old tape of acoustic demos for The Hissing of Summer Lawns. She's still working out how to articulate all these dense lines, but I got some of the nuances of her social critiques, which aren't too aloof--she gets pulled into the promenades of "On France They Kiss On Main Street," "Dream Land," "The Boho Dance"---but on first listen, the simple male mind is most smitten by the most simplistic song, "Shades of Scarlett Conquering": sympathetically rendered scenes from the love life of a drama queen, fucked up by the movies--very cinematic, so maybe she just saw the wrong movies. Reminds me of that elegantly deterministic property, "Paul's Case," by Willa Cather. Sound's rough-edged, but no Tom Scott sax on these, yay.

It's only six songs from the finished album, which I haven't heard in ages.

elegantly anti-commodity-fetish property or progressive morality machine, something like that.

Like Mitchell was one of those who though a range of California-associated perspectives (did she date Jerry Brown? Think that was Ronstadt)

"The Windfall" is a blunt character assassination of a former house maid who had sued Joni. Even if the portrayal is accurate the whole exercise reveals a tremendous lack of tact.

Less important, but it's also the only tune that really jars with the compelling seer-crone-priestess vibe she sets up on the album's best songs.