Joni Mitchell: Classic or Dud

"Sex Kills" is fine but the main issue with Turbulent Indigo is realising that Joni clearly thought the best song on Night Ride Home was "The Windfall (Everything for Nothing)".

I have to see this new film about her performance at the Isle of Wight festival 1970 where she calmed down a crowd of 600,000 people:
https://www.npr.org/sections/allsongs/2018/09/12/646751133/they-fed-me-to-the-beast-joni-mitchell-at-the-isle-of-wight-festival

Ooh nice. P sure I saw some of the footage of that in the Isle of Wight doc. Her pleas to the crowd are very moving and touching and the whole thing puts the woodstock generation in a very different light than woodstock (granted it's in a different country).

Isn't that the same festival where Leonard Cohen went on at 2am on the last night, and also calmed the crowd?
http://www.openculture.com/2012/10/leonard_cohen_brings_a_mob_back_from_the_brink_with_a_spellbinding_set_at_the_1970_isle_of_wight_festival.html

Cogent thoughts about JM's take on life x music interacting w author's take on the two-night musical birthday party & benefit for The Music Center---not usually into Powers' writing these days, but damn (maybe I better check out her new book)https://www.npr.org/2018/11/09/666148055/joni-mitchell-at-75-trouble-is-still-her-muse

Oof, the people at the very top of the thread arguing whether Joni Mitchell was "hot" or not. I guess 2001 was a long time ago...

Just came on here to express my love for Hejira. "Amelia" has been playing here on a loop for the past few days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeaO5UZ5OcI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxMwGTQ1bzU

Don't know if it's been posted already but this is a great recap of the genesis of 'Mingus'

That reminds me, while watching Pen15, I thought, "Hm, Maya's dad is supposed to be a drummer who makes his living...in a touring Steely Dan cover band? Something about that sounds off." Then I looked it up and hey! Her dad is Peter Erskine!

So I work in a WeWork facility. There’s music playing constantly in the common areas. A few days ago it must have been singer-songwriter day. Carey came on at one point. I don’t think it’s possible to concentrate on work while Joni is singing. Too good to fade into the background.

nice tribute video where musicians, producers and actors choose their fave joni lines:
https://www.npr.org/2019/10/25/773069289/we-live-in-the-time-of-joni-mitchell-brandi-carlile-turns-blue-into-repertoire?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=music

Er....

https://www.rockers.de/cover/1024/156762a.jpg

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-37781800

The singer Joni Mitchell startled her friends by appearing at a Halloween party 40 years ago disguised as a black man in pimp-like garb. It would be unacceptable today but times were different then, her friends argue. Others disagree. Whichever view you take, her black alter ego was a reflection of her intense identification with black music, writes Kris Griffiths.

It's Halloween 1976, and eminent session bassist Leland Sklar is throwing a fancy dress party at his Los Angeles home for fellow musicians and record industry types, including producer Peter Asher and drummer Russ Kunkel, who would later appear in This Is Spinal Tap.

However there's one lone guest loitering in the background, whom no-one seems to know, everyone thinking he's someone else's friend - a svelte black man in a zoot suit with matching chapeau, meticulous afro, wide moustache and big, dark shades.

While everyone has brought wives and partners, this pimp-like character has slunk in unaccompanied without introducing himself, and appears content to observe proceedings quietly from the corner after helping himself to the buffet.

Rock photographer Henry Diltz, more used to shooting the likes of Hendrix and Zappa, inadvertently captures the besuited wallflower on film, while snapping his own gypsy-costumed wife. The gatecrasher looks startled in the light of his flash.

Not long afterwards the host, Sklar - still oblivious to this guest's identity despite asking around - finally approaches and asks if he's at the right party.

Only then, does the interloper remove his sunglasses and wig, revealing his true identity: It's Joni Mitchell, world-famous folk music star, a week away from her 33rd birthday.

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/660/cpsprodpb/135F7/production/_92115397_jonipartyhigher-res-2.jpg

Maybe it's a Canadian thing.

i heard about this a couple of months ago and thought "what? she's not in blackface on that cover" then i read a bit further and looked again and oh jeez Joni really?

Well, I'll be damned

The album jacket is a photomontage and includes three photographs of Mitchell. In the foreground she is in blackface as her "reputed alter ego, a black hipster named Art Nouveau."

So the little kid is her too?

Won't even ask about the naked person.

"a reflection of her intense identification with black music" yeah I'm sure many white minstrel performers felt the same way

I missed this at the time but it's somehow both disappointing and unsurprising, has she said anything about it?

The Making of the Don Juan's Reckless Daughter Cover
by Angela LaGreca
Rock Photo
June 1985

"In the song, Don Juan is really the art of the tongue, it's rapping - coffee house poet talk," says Joni who dressed up as a black guy for the LP's cover and sleeve. That's her too, underneath the Indian garb. The shooting sessions were upbeat, with Joni trying on different dresses and dancing around while Norman Seeff clicked away. When he asked for another change of clothes, he hardly recognized the black character that strutted from the dressing room five minutes later. "At that point, I realized I really enjoy character acting," she says.

Working again with the Camera Lucida (Lucy) machine, Joni arranged the photos agreed upon from the sessions: she blew up the shot of her as the black guy and put it in the foreground; she liked the spirit of the shot with the top hat because it symbolized what she felt was the 'magic' on the album; and she included the shot of a kid who'd been in a session for a previous album. "He was shy and had never danced before, that's why he's looking at his feet," she says. But to her, the elements were not "homogenized" enough to be the final cover shot.

When she noticed a postcard of a nude with a Mickey Mouse hat and balloons on a bulletin board she felt it was "the element that was like the cherry on the pudding that makes the whole thing come together." She worked it onto the dress, partly obscuring the pubic area and figure of Mickey Mouse (for legal reasons), I added the birds, and then had an airbrusher smooth over the edges of all the photos. She then selected the background colors from the options presented by Glen Christensen, who, she says, has a "wonderful knowledge of inks."

According to Joni, most reviews of the album missed its point: "Basically it has to do with turning your back on America and heading into the Third World...at the time Muslims were messing around in Washington, there were radical tensions. I was disillusioned. The songs on the album have a lot of ethnic references and there's a certain sentimentality for the North American Indian."

I thought everyone knew about this, certainly Joni Mitchell fans should have known, I just assumed they were too embarrassed to talk about it.

#cancelled

Can we just cancel side 3 of Don Juan's Reckless Daughter? Takes it down to a good single album without either the filler tracks or Jaco Pastorius on bongos.

But but but..."Dreamland"!

ew

I'd keep:

Talk to Me
the title track
Jericho
maaaaybe Paprika Plains

I keep hoping "The Silky Veins of Ardor" will transform into an arrangement as mysterious and sinuous as its title, but I'll keep it.

I have to say Hejira -> Don Juan is a drop in quality as sudden as Sabotage -> Technical Ecstasy, but at least you have cocaine to blame for that one. Maybe this too, I dunno.

I love "Dreamland"

XP I was looking at different Joni stuff on wiki, and it's mentioned that she started doing coke on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour (so pre-Hejira), but there's conflicting stories about when she quit: one being sometime in '76 after being 'cured' by a psychic (!), and the other just saying she struggled with addiction into the '80s.

I’d guess she probably went off and on it and other stuff for awhile like every other LA music person ever

I prefer DJRD to Hejira, but Paprika Plains is the one track I always skip.

Wow - I went from the intoxication of Hissing to the cool abstraction of Hejira and then DJRD was like missing a gear change. It’s definitely got merits but it’s like a sudden failure of taste. Maybe the cover art 🖼 influenced me.

In the summer of 1977, Joni began work on what would be her first studio double album. She was close to completing her contract with Asylum Records, and she felt that this album could be looser in feel than any album she'd done in the past. Joni said, "This record followed on the tail of persecution, it's experimental, and it didn't really matter what I did, I just had to fulfill my contract"
[...]
She had a bunch of songs left over from previous projects, and she collected them together with a couple of new songs, and recorded them with most of the same personnal from the previous albums.
[...]
The double LP and cassette, DON JUAN'S RECKLESS DAUGHTER, was released in December 1977.

Her throwing together a bunch of leftover tunes to fulfill her contract is probably the main reason behind the dip in quality.

I like it OK but this totally makes sense. It feels like a pretty good comp of outtakes and bsides: some good tunes that could have fit on Hejira, some hit or
miss attempts at experimenting and some filler.

Help me > In France > Free Man = 10 minutes of bliss

Someone upthread posted the Shadows and Light clip of Amelia. From there I ended up watching the whole show on youtube. I realize I need much more Joni + the Persuasions in my life. Crazy good rendition of Why Do Fools Fall In Love with Joni as Frankie Lymon. And then a beautiful gospel rendition of Shadows and Light.

...And the Gods Socially Distanced" (C. Grisso/McCain) at 6:27 13 Jun 20

XP I was looking at different Joni stuff on wiki, and it's mentioned that she started doing coke on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour (so pre-Hejira), but there's conflicting stories about when she quit: one being sometime in '76 after being 'cured' by a psychic (!), and the other just saying she struggled with addiction into the '80s.

I think it's just safer to assume every classic rock artist was coked out in the mid/late 70s unless you know otherwise

Maybe it's a Canadian thing.

There's also the Kids in the Hall Mississippi Gary sketch, although this is a bit rich coming from a Brit tbh.

I think I've had more weird discussions about "joni mitchell blackface" over the past five years than any other touchy topic.

These days Joni Mitchell is unwell, and she declined to comment for this article except to reassert her often-repeated desire to begin her autobiography, should it ever appear: "I was the only black man at the party."

Jesus!!!

There's also the Kids in the Hall Mississippi Gary sketch, although this is a bit rich coming from a Brit tbh.

I was thinking more of your current Prime Minister tbh but it was a joke anyway.

Yeah, I was taking Trudeau as a given.

(And I knew it was a joke and stand by my response.)

From Yaffe’s biography:

Two years after Joni was booed by a room of black female prisoners in New Jersey, in December 1977, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter was released. Many people who first saw the album cover may not have realized that the image of a black man in full pimp regalia, captured by Norman Seeff’s camera, was Joni herself. Joni’s provocation—a white woman dressed as a black male boss pimp—comes with historical baggage, much of which was unknown to her. Blackface minstrelsy—white performers blacking up with burnt cork and singing “coon songs,” the most famous example of which was Ernest Hogan’s “All Coons Look Alike to Me” — was the dominant form of popular entertainment after the Civil War, all the way through the 1920s vaudeville era. White performers would perform in terrifying makeup and do imitations — sometimes grotesque, sometimes in homage — of the black performers doing a far superior version of songs in early jazz and blues, although there were also famous black minstrel performers, most notably Bert Williams and Johnny Hudgins. The Jazz Singer (1927), the first talkie, was a sentimental biopic for Al Jolson, torn between his Jewish family’s expectation for him to be a cantor, and his passionate need to sing “Mammy” in blackface.

Joni, defending her own costume, also defended Jolson. “Al Jolson’s not a Stepin Fetchit,” Joni told me. “He’s a Jew in blackface, so he’s always getting the better end of the deal, kind of like Bugs Bunny. And I didn’t see anything derogatory. But the prejudice was enormous. What I did that, people thought it was a bro, and it wasn’t stereotypical, it was individual. Why I got away with it . . . I got the greatest reviews for that record in black magazines. They saw the brother, they reviewed it, and they got it.”

It’s not clear how many black journalists even recognized Joni on the cover of the album or how many black magazines actually reviewed it. The black music journalist Greg Tate, who interviewed Joni for Vibe magazine in 1998 and wrote a poem, “How Black Is Joni Mitchell?,” for Joni’s honorary doctorate ceremony a few years later, would come out in passionate support for what he called her “stunt.” Janet Maslin was the only journalist for a major publication, Rolling Stone, to criticize Joni’s album cover. “The album offers what is, one can only hope, the ultimate in cute cover art,” Maslin wrote. She is blunt in her attack: “Here and elsewhere, there seems to be the notion that blacks and Third World people have more rhythm, more fun and a secret, mischievous viewpoint that the author, dressed as a black man in one of the photos on the front jacket, presumes to share.”

Maslin didn’t approve, but she was one of the few journalists who actually noticed. Joni’s costume was so convincing, most people did not realize it was her.

After Joni failed to reach a room full of black female prisoners because she, as Joan Baez said, “couldn’t do black,” she decided she’d one-up them all by being black. “So there came Halloween, and I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard,” Joni recalled. “There were a lot of people out on the street wearing wigs and paint and masks, and I was thinking, ‘What can I do for a costume?’ Then a black guy walked by me with a New York diddybop kind of step, and he said in the most wonderful way, Lookin’ good, sister, lookin’ gooood. His spirit was infectious and I thought, ‘I’ll go as him.’ I bought the makeup, the wig, the sideburns, I went into a sleazy menswear [store] and bought a sleazy hat and a sleazy suit, and that night I went to a Halloween party and nobody knew it was me, nobody.”

When Joni was planning a memoir, she said that the opening would be “I was the only black man at the party,” and her intent was to be a combination of pimp and artistic creation. She would dress up as this character from time to time and never got spotted, even by men who should have known. Sometimes she would call this character Art Nouveau; other times he would be Claude the Pimp. In a 1979 concert taped for Showtime, in the middle of “Furry Sings the Blues,” on the line “everybody’s fly,” she turned into her pimp character. What was troubling was that her desire to be the black man on the street superseded the unsettling history. Art Nouveau/Claude the Pimp, as he appears on the cover of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, is a dead ringer for Zip Coon, the minstrel character ridiculed for trying to dress the part of a gentleman. Zip Coon, like Jim Crow and Tambo, was a standard figure in minstrel shows. Zip Coon was the dandy, Tambo was the singing, dancing fool, and Jim Crow was ignorant and poor—a pretty accurate indicator for the intention behind the Jim Crow laws. And yet Chaka Khan, who, as a teenager, had been a member of the militant Black Panther party, had no problem with the cover of the album for which she provided vocals. “I loved the cover of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter,” she said unequivocally. “She’s into color. She’s a world of person, and she lived that, she sang that, she is that. I am, too. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s a way to go.”

historical baggage, much of which was unknown to her.

What, was she utterly stupid?

^ TBH the whole biography, while well-researched and very informative, is sometimes frustratingly lauditive and praiseful, so it's not surprise he's trying to come up with such dumb excuses.

jesus christ joni

someone could write a thesis on the racial/gender politics behind this episode

^ TBH the whole biography, while well-researched and very informative, is sometimes frustratingly lauditive and praiseful, so it's not surprise he's trying to come up with such dumb excuses.

― ˈʌglɪɪst preɪ, Sunday, June 14, 2020

Agreed. For once a musical bio that doesn't stint on how the artist creates music.

Janet Maslin knows what's up.