Reasons to love Joni Mitchell's Hejira album

wow - never read that story about Furry liking her even less after Hejira!

Here's the RS article:

Furry Lewis is Furious at Joni
by Mark Seal - February 24, 1977

MEMPHIS - There's an electrical wire hanging down in front of bluesman Furry Lewis' small, olive green duplex. It drapes across his front porch, and Furry is so worried about it he can hardly get drunk and have fun with the people who have come to visit, "Somebody call up the 'lectric department to fix that thing!" he yells, sitting in the bed that has become his stage and pouring a dose of Ten High bourbon into a well-worn shot glass. "l know I've always been a rascal, but I ain't never done nothin' bad enough to be in the 'lectric chair."

Age and cataracts have dulled Furry's eyesight - though not his feisty spirit - and his public appearances have been whittled down to a cherished few, but Furry's still got the world at his bedside. Guests, from young neighborhood kids seeking guitar lessons to celebrities, stream into his three-room flat.

Lewis played his slide-driven, talking guitar blues with the father of the blues, W.C Handy, on Beale Street in the early 1900s. Today, the street is crumbling, and a small statue of Handy toting a horn overlooks the ruins. To Furry Lewis, Beale Street was "where somebody was killed every Saturday night and born every Sunday."

At arm's reach from his bed, Furry's got all his daily necessities: battered Martin electric guitar and small amp, two half gallons of Ten High, a .38 revolver stashed inside a drawer, his walking stick, a teddy bear and a cigar box labeled "Business". "I'm 83 years old half blind and gots a wooden leg," he says. "But I sure gots a lot of friends. "

But Furry's got his problems, too. Just a few weeks ago, he explains, he played at a local club and still hasn't been paid. And then there's "that woman" who recorded a song about him.

The song, "Furry Sings the Blues," is on Joni Mitchell's latest album, Hejira. In it, Mitchell paints Furry "down and out in Memphis, Tennessee," and his music "mostly muttering now and sideshow spiel." She had visited the aging bluesman and the pitiful situation on Beale Street had led her to write:

Furry sings the blues
Fallin' to hard luck
And time and other thieves
While our limo is shining on his shanty street.
Old Furry sings the blues.

"The way I feel " says Furry "is that your name is proper only to you, and when you use it you should get results from it. She shouldn't have used my name in no way, shape, form or faction without consultin' me 'bout it first. The woman came over here and I treated her right, just like I does everybody that comes over. She wanted to hear 'bout the old days, said it was for her own personal self, and I told it to her like it was, gave her straight oil from the can." He stares at the surrealistic photo on the Hejira cover. "But then she goes and puts it all down on a record, using my name and not giving me nothing! I can't stop nobody from talkie' 'bout Beale Street, 'cause the street belongs to everybody. But when she says 'Furry,' well that belongs to me!" (Though Joni Mitchell had no response to Furry's comments, her manager, Elliot Roberts, responded: "All she said about him was, 'Furry sings the blues' the rest is about the neighborhood. She doesn't even mention his last name. She really enjoyed meeting him, and wrote about her impressions of the meeting, He did tell her that he didn't like her, but we can't pay him royalties for that. I don't pay royalties to everybody who says they don't like me. I'd go broke.")

Still, Furry can't deny the truths of "Furry Sings the Blues," with its references to Beale Street's doom, that "history falls/ To parking lots and shopping malls."

"They only make a statue of you when you dead and gone," Furry says. "I've known a whole lots of musicianers in my life and lots of 'em are dead now. But I guess that Handy's the only one that's ant a statue of him. But then I ain't gone yet.

"Now I know I ain't a star," he says, reaching for his glass and winking with a wise old grin "But I sure might be a moon."

Don't judge Joni on "Free Man In Paris", it's one of her most awkward songs lyrically.
However am I the only one who thinks the cold war metaphor in "Blue Motel Room" is brilliant?

― Tim Finney (Tim Finney), Thursday, April 13, 2006

I think there were country songs almost ten years prior that also had puns on Cold War with relationship subjects

http://www.atomicplatters.com/platters.php?id=C0_9_1

shit....Floyd Tillman's 1949 country classic "This Cold War With You". Don't know if there are others

It's not so much the fact of the Cold War pun as the way she runs with the metaphor:

"We're gonna have to hold ourselves a peace talk
In some neutral cafe
You lay down your... sneeeeeaking round the town, honey
and I'll lay down the highways"

oh yeah, no doubt, those are great lyrics. not that anyone here would care, but i was interested to learn that the male love interest on this record is the playwright Sam Shepard ("Coyote")

xpost to me this has always been one (possible) hallmark of a good "literary" lyricist, not just simply drawing analogies between things but getting across the detailed structure of the analogy with a few carefully curated side-shots of the same idea.

Another joni example that always comes to mind is in "The Boho Dance": "like a priest with a pornographic watch, looking in longing on the sly", which evokes a much broader metaphor of musical-authenticity/class-authenticity as hypocritical religious conviction and self-denial.

"Between the forceps and the stone"

i love this album, and I love everything between Court and Spark through to Don Juan. but i tried to listen to Blue yesterday and I'm still having real difficulty with it. I guess I'm just not into folk Joni

I would wager that some day you probably will be, Blue is a grower

“California” is insane, the vocal melody alone is maybe her best thing ever. I say this as a devotee of Hissing and Hejira, and I’m about 50-50 on the rest of Blue. Well ... 70-30.

This thread brings such a smile to my face. Hejira is the album I've probably listened to the most in my life.

I love Blue, too (as well as pretty much every record she made in the 70s). dog latin, have you tried For the Roses? It's like a midway point between the folky starkness of Blue and the more heavily arranged later output.

god for the roses is so good, finally clicked with me last year. incrementally jazzier joni against very frail arrangements

Yeah, there isn't really a dividing line in her career for me - right from the start she used a lot of out chords and key changes. I love every album without reservation.

FTR took the longest to click: the tension between the acoustic arrangements with the occasional orchestral flourish was at first bracing. Now I enjoy it more than Blue tbh. And if there's a Joni album that Prince listened to it's FTR more than Hissing.

Hejira is the only of her 70s albums that I don't wholly adore, and I can't puzzle out why. Even Mingus for all its slightness contains far more moment-to-moment drama... on Hejira there is something fussy about her vocal performance and something too-straight about the band, or something

ahaaa, a challop!

Nooooo I keep trying at it! I love the versions of "Hejira" and "Amelia" on Travelogue!

^ Funny, I like some of the reworkings on Travelogue but the Hejira originals remain untouchable for me!

Also, this might sound embarrassingly nerdy but since English is not my first language I tried translating all the Hejira lyrics when I first became obsessed with the record at the age of 13 or 14. Of course most of the metaphors/similes/wordplay/etc. were totally lost on me back then (what with all these white lines or picking somebody's scents on your fingers!) but poring over OED trying to decipher what Joni was on about definitely expanded my vocabulary and the general cultural competence (?), or at least my sense of AmE style. Joanna Newsom's Ys probably took it to another, more abstract level when it came out about three years later. Anyway--yes, I did try to squeeze being "porous with travel fever" and seeing "a city's flickering wasteland" into my ESL homework essays, no matter the topic, which probably explains both the bewilderment of my teachers and my virginity remaining intact for most of my high school years. Thank you, Joni.

haha, that's great

what's your first language?

which probably explains both the bewilderment of my teachers and my virginity remaining intact for most of my high school years

Ah, so the curse of the high school art rock nerd is universal

My first language is Polish.

And yeah, the curse is real and it stretches across borders. I still remember those blank stares on my crushes' faces when I tried to play them Joni, or Kate Bush, or Aphex Twin, or PJ Harvey, or Radiohead, or Björk, or Sonic Youth etc. all those years ago. Streaming has definitely changed the game, I wonder if it gives today's teenagers more opportunty to get stuck in genre rabbit holes, or if it's all more uniform.

But speaking of Hejra and not understanding its lyrics at first, the line that used to stand out to me when I was a kid was:

Pawn shops glitter like gold tooth caps
in the gray decay,
they chew the last few dollars off
old Beale Street's carcass.
Carrion and mercy.
Blue and silver sparkling drums,
cheap guitars, eye shades and guns
aimed at the hot blood of being no one
down and out in Memphis, Tennessee.

I mean, she could've been singing just gibberish but her delivery made these words sound so musical and meaningful, even if I didn't get the meaning until a few years later.

That passage is classic Joni, the way she sets up the metaphor and then runs with it.

Wow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvUNlJ9szFM

yes

but who will fix the pitch

Yeah I was like 'what's up with this' and then she started singing and my computer exploded

I'm kinda into it, but I regularly slow down/speed up songs I love that I've burned out on. Probably why I love live recordings. Nice to hear her killer guitar playing so fast & tight here. Fixing the pitch would be easy, it's just a tape speed issue. If I weren't busy I would bounce that to tape and reupload it. Maybe in a couple weeks.

I was going to fix the pitch on that but I had a hunch and was right - the whole show's up in perfect pitch here:

http://ia801406.us.archive.org/21/items/JoniMitchell1979ForestHills/JoniMitchell1979ForestHills.mp3?cnt=0

setlist:

http://tela.sugarmegs.org/_asxtela/asxcards/JoniMitchell1979ForestHills.html

also noticed in that youtube video that her strat has a Gibson headstock decal - just a photoshop joke or was she hanging out with EVH??

Amazed how little from Blue makes it on that setlist

Doesn't sit well against her mid/late 70s records imo

any idea what phaser is used all over this album? whatever it is, it seems like they set it all the way to the slowest rate and just left it on throughout the entire recording session.

for a long time, i would have easily said blue or court and spark were my favorite joni album, but hejira has been the one i go back to most frequently the last few years. there's just something different and transcendent about this album. the older i get, the more i find that my favorite music is stuff that i just love, without any real way to exactly articulate why — besides just saying that i love how it sounds; which isn't very descriptive, but also feels like the best way for me to put it.

anyway. it's exceptionally good.

I find its the one that suits my mood the most, definitely. can't hear a phaser, sure it's not your copy?

The Boss CE-1 chorus/vibrato pedal was released in 1976 and was the first chorus effect in a pedal format to be available; it is very likely a part of the guitar sound on Hejira, along with a phaser pedal giving a "liquid" swirling effect - likely the MXR Phase 90 which had been released in 1974 and was the first product sold by MXR. Then one or two more layers of guitars, including an acoustic, would be added and then be panned left, center and right, giving the album its lush panoramic texture full of modulated movement.

https://jonimitchell.com/library/view.cfm?id=4622

then you have mad Jaco on top playing with a delay pedal that sounds like a chorus (iirc). very cool sounding album. I can't abide folk Joni but this is an all-timer for me

Seems like they're guessing, though.xp

Killer Live show from around the Hejira days


https://youtu.be/bLKb9Ms68ME

yeah, i was wondering if it was just a good old phase 90; i know the effects market was infinitely smaller back then and it could've only been one of a handful. i play a phase 90 a lot in my own music because, again, i just love how it sounds. makes sense, even if it is just an educated guess.

thanks for that link, cal. will definitely check it out later.

!!! that band

yeah shadows and light is a great live album, and I love that dvd. persuasions on the title track *shivers*

love the version of dreamland too

Oh, it was the Shadows and Light show? That's my favourite Joni some/many days.

and now is the time for me to admit that i just now learned about the existence of that album.

off to discogs!

I was always under the impression that the modulation sounds on the album were from Roland Jazz Chorus amps. I used to have a 70s one and could get the same chorus/vibrato sounds (though the chorus circuit in the amp is basically the same as the CE-1). Joni actually claimed a few times that the amp was actually designed for her, but I've never found any corroboration for that.

The Roland jazz chorus is the most trebly amp I’ve ever played through as a humble guitar player. Not for everyone.

Free man

https://open.spotify.com/track/60eqXSs8J3c4QERz7AqvBH?si=NVaPkBIRQVOHEEe4GVvALw

it definitely sounds like the precursor to those Jazz Chorus sounds that were so big in the 80s

Shame they didn’t play Help Me. Would have kicked with this group

man, a Phase 90 and a CE-1. the most basic modulation setup for guitar. Leg