Joni Mitchell true to form

by Liam Lacey
Toronto Globe and Mail
July 13, 1983

On Monday night, as Joni Mitchell sat in her hotel room at the Four Seasons Hotel for a press conference, she talked briefly about the various "esthetic shifts" in her music, from baroque to abstract, and now, she said, she s moving toward a music that is more simple and danceable.

Her choice of words indicated a fundamental change in attitude. A few years ago, Miss Mitchell would have been more likely to talk about her artistic changes in terms of her personal growth: now it seems to be more a question of pursuing definition and clarity in her work. Last night's concert at the Canadian National Exhibition Grandstand, showed a new Joni, an artist entering her classical period.

A few minutes after 8:30, Miss Mitchell walked to centre stage, dressed in basic black - a skirt with a bolero jacket and stiletto heels. Except for the baseball cap perched atop her new feathery blond coif, she could have been going to a business lunch. The band behind her was a stripped-down rock and roll band - a keyboard player, a drummer, a bassist and a guitarist. In guitarist Michael Landau (whose chunky style occasionally suggests Martin Belmont of The Rumour), Miss Mitchell has found someone who can fill in where two or three musicians are usually needed. Her husband and bassist, Larry Klein, proved himself up to a solid Charlie Mingus impression when she sang There Must Be a Boogie Man.

In the first half, the old hits went by like clockwork - Coyote, Free Man In Paris, Edith and The Kingpin, You Turn Me On (I'm A Radio) - all delivered with punchy expertise, but with no surprises. Unlike, for example, Bob Dylan, who turns his songs inside out and upside down year after year, Miss Mitchell changes almost nothing in the vocal arrangements and, save for a few jazzy moans at the end of Big Yellow Taxi, everything was by the book.

She saved the best until last with two solos; the first was Feel Good For Free, a song about a street corner clarinet player in New York, which allowed her to do some lovely acoustic piano playing. The final song was the rambling jazzy I Could Drink a Case of You and Still Stand Up ("my version of Hit Me With Your Best Shot") played slide-style, with her guitar across her lap.

Set two concentrated on some of her more rambling, jazzy travelogues - including the title song of her album, Wild Things Run Fast and Refuge of the Roads.

Only when she came back with the bouncing Leiber and Stoller hit, You're So Square (I Don't Care), and her standard, Raised On Robbery, did the audience reaction start to build again through to the encore, The first encore was Marvin Gaye's I heard It Through The Grapevine, which kicked harder than anything had all night, but if anyone can make Motown sound like art music, it's Joni Mitchell.

---

This appeared in the Globe and Mail a week later:

Hitting right notes

Re Liam Lacey’s article, Joni Mitchell True to Form (in the late editions of July 13):

Three song titles were inaccurate. There Must be a Boogie Man should be God Must be a Boogie Man; her classic Real Good For Free was quoted as Feel Good For Free, and the line from A Case of You is “I could drink a case of you and still be on my feet”, not “…and still stand up”. While Mr. Lacey’s tone implies a familiarity with the artist, his charade is pathetically transparent.

For those fans who were not able to see Miss Mitchell live, don’t worry. Her shoes were black pumps, not stilettos, and her “basic black” dress was full and casual, highlighted with a bright red blouse and lipstick and a silver-plated belt and bangle bracelets. Her “feathery blond coiffe [sic]” was a dishevelled [sic] nest of platinum blonde, dyed strands, the dark roots blatantly apparent when she removed her peaked red and black cap in the second set. Heads would certainly have turned at any business luncheon I’ve ever attended.

But the best and most comical feature of Mr. Lacey’s write-up was his description of the way the artist accompanied herself during A Case of You - “played slide-style with her guitar across her lap”. This would have been a neat trick, but Miss Mitchell was playing a dulcimer, an ancient stringed instrument which can only be played across the lap, sliding sound emanating from the fingers moving along the strings.

The article also failed to give any sort of a critical analysis of Miss Mitchell as a singer-songwriter-performer. On the first score, her voice still has force and clarity, although she has certainly lost some of her range. As a songwriter, Miss Mitchell’s new lyrics are as prolific as ever and she has begun to recapture some of the lovely melodies and rhythms of her earlier work. As a performer, what she has lost in personal stage presence, she has gained in the technical aspects of her delivery.

Mr. Lacey’s article amounts to little more than a listing of Miss Mitchell’s repertoire, mis-titled at that.

Pauline Malley
Toronto