Special from Newsday

by David Herndon
Newsday
November 7, 1994

As far as most people are concerned, her peak creative period ended 20 years ago. Joni Mitchell realizes this -- and has plenty of theories about why that perception took hold -- but she can't understand why people talk about her in the past tense. It's not as if she ever dropped out or stopped making music and painting.

"I never felt better in my life," says the 50-year-old singer-songwriter, settling into her Manhattan hotel room to talk about her new album, "Turbulent Indigo" (Reprise). "I'm happy with my life and have love in my life. Things are good."

But for someone who feels so upbeat about the way things are going, Mitchell sure does haul a lot of baggage around. Critics occupy a special place on her enemies list, which includes record company honchos, former friends and colleagues (and lovers) on the Southern California music scene, doctors and lawyers (of course), service people who overcharge her because she's famous and lives in an oversized house. The house is in Los Angeles, a town she hates even though she has lots of friends there because, "Driving in traffic is difficult, extreme. Your fellow civilians are hostile. The shopping center is full of Russians who, like, try to beat you if you don't watch your bill; they're all like black-market immigrants or something. The restaurants that I eat in are close enough to Brentwood, but there's an influx of, like, you know, sickly tourists wanting to know where the woman shops and how to copy her. You're glad to get through the day without a fire or a mudslide or a drive-by shooting. You jump in traffic when a car backfires. Lovely place to live. Full of inspiration."

When she pauses for a breath, it's to pull on a cigarette; she's chain-smoking. Mitchell may have projected the image of the ice queen diva -- she's so Scandinavian-looking, her lyrics drip with sophistication, her music is burnished with such cool surfaces, she's so arty -- but it turns out that's not her style. Throw her a topic, and she's off and running, with anecdotes that grow into short stories peopled with the likes of Leonard Bernstein and Marlene Dietrich, art-history references, giggly self-deprecating asides, revisionary parenthetical remarks that spin out and come to rest -- temporarily -- about a half-mile down the road.

So it turns out the "artiste" is a yakker. That comes as a refreshing departure from the pro forma celebrity interview, but also makes you wish you'd brought along some chill pills; Mitchell's reflections have a breathless, anxious quality, and her speech is seasoned with bitterness. She hears it herself and worries about how it will sound. But her instinct is to let it all hang out, and her mind is so active. Maybe even hyperactive. As the composer of "Woodstock," Mitchell's name surfaced prominently in the context of the 25th-anniversary festival. But it would fall to the Spin Doctors and Crosby, Stills, and Nash to play her anthem, because she wasn't interested; she declined an invitation to appear. To her, the first festival -- which she didn't attend, either -- was a "turning point, it was basically the pinnacle of hippie culture." Afterward, with the hippies' acceptance came "commercialization and exploitation. The drugs got harder, and everything fell apart." The anniversary festival "just seemed silly," and besides, Mitchell resents being pigeonholed as a Sixties artist. "I don't see myself as belonging to an era. I belong to three new decades of music now, as far as I'm concerned." But starting with "The Hissing of Summer Lawns" in 1975, Mitchell became increasingly experimental and gradually lost touch with the audience that takes its cues from commercial radio stations. Her 1979 collaboration with the dying Charles Mingus represented a divorce from the pop mainstream, a rift that has never been reconciled. She has released a new album every couple, three years since then, writing songs with recognizable verses and choruses, and some of them have received good notices. But her bottom-line critical reputation is that she went out for a walk in the mid-Seventies and never came back.

Mitchell has confidence that if her music gains exposure, it will connect. "Young audiences are not as apartheid as the market seems to think," she says. Mitchell has spoken in the past of making music until she's 80, but now she's not so sure that's possible. "I'd like to keep going. But this contract that I've signed [with Warner Bros.] gives the record company hundreds of ways to get rid of me. It's a bean-counting business now; the people at the top are covering the losses of their other conglomerates. "They're just going to look at me like a statistic; they're not music lovers. If people support me by not taping and by giving the bean counters some numbers to work with, then I will stay in the business. If not, they'll drop me, no matter how talented I am. No matter how unfinished."