Innocence on a Spree

by Noel Coppage
Stereo Review
April 1976

Joni Mitchell would seem to be all there, in black and white, in her own words. She has made a hardheaded, crusading effort to describe intimate feelings in her songs, and her candor covers style as well as content. The popular-music audience has seldom encountered a songwriter so open about the specifics of personal hopes and fears, or a writer-performer so overt, as Ellen Willis said, about her artistic pretensions. No wonder Time observed in 1974: "Everyone seems to know Joni. She is the rural neophyte waiting in a subway, a free spirit drinking Greek wine in the moonlight, an organic Earth Mother dispensing fresh bread and herb tea, and the reticent feminist who by trial and error has charted the male as well as the female ego." Also, for good measure: ". . . a modern Isadora whose life is a litmus for the innocent and the imaginative." But there's too much color, too much contrast in all these images and "everyone" is too many people; we have so much information from Joni and her Muse that we're back where she was after she'd seen both sides of clouds, love, and life: we really don't know her at all. And there's one more image that begs to be added to the list: a modern Eve dispensing apples from the Tree of Knowledge; the big blow to innocence comes when you realize that the more you learn, the more there is to learn.

Innocence is a quality programmed to self-destruct, in the sense that Eve's innocence was what made her vulnerable to the serpent and that vulnerability resulted in her loss of innocence. Yet it is an ironically enduring quality that, on secondary levels, renews itself - get an inkling into how ignorant you really are and you've got some of your innocence back. Biting into the original Big Apple didn't wipe out innocence but put it on a scale; what it ended was pristine innocence, leaving us no longer innocent of the concept, no longer unconscious of the connection between knowledge - experience - and guilt. Joni Mitchell has been, like Eve, a larger-than-life figure where this irony of innocence is concerned.

Knowing too much and understanding too little is what we get for being curious. The head will take being butted against this quandary only so long at a time, though, and I want us to back-pedal right here and take a little run across the North American continent to look for more graphic signs that may have marked Joni Mitchell's progress. When an area becomes polluted, move on, we say in these parts, and that ought to apply to data pollution as well as other kinds. Besides, Mitchell thanked National Geographic for indirectly helping her create "The Hissing of Summer Lawns," and travel, of course, is the fundamental metaphor of folk music created on this continent. I got to looking at maps and globes and reflecting on places and was struck by the differences between the two major hometowns in Joni Mitchell's life- Saskatoon, the one she left, and Los Angeles, the one she adopted.

Before she was a fair-haired waif in such a place as a subway, she was a high-school girl in Saskatoon, a small city founded as the proposed capital of a temperance ("temperance" always meaning prohibition in these cases) colony and named after the Cree word for an edible berry. It sits in the middle of the prairie province of Saskatchewan, producer of more than half of Canada's wheat. There's some wildness to the north, where crops give way to jack pine and frigid blasts of air. They call the swamps muskegs up there, a fine musical word Gordon Lightfoot worked into his frontier chronicle, Canadian Railroad Trilogy, and one suspects they have better names for rain and wind and fire. The people of Saskatoon are conscious of the north, as people in Lewiston, Maine, are conscious of Aroostook County, but the ambiance favors the immediate surroundings - agriculture, prairie, sky . . . lonely distances and wheat. A flood of imagery from Ian and Sylvia Tyson suggests this, in lyrics about blue evening shadows forty feet long, night rushing fast because the land is flat, lonely girls lingering in the doorways to watch headlights and listen to the song of diesel engines out on the highway: "Diesels sing of bright spots with colors running wild - 'Follow me where the evenings overflow.'"

Saskatoon was a stop for the semis, but not the mecca they sang about. Joni Mitchell the teenager - known then as Joan Anderson - had access to juke boxes, trucked-in rock-and-roll- and folk music, but she was surrounded by the ordered, sectioned, organized life of farming country deep in the continent's interior. She has talked and written little about Joan Anderson's days there - Urge for Going, which Tom Rush recorded, could be taken as pertinent - but it seems clear enough that she wanted to follow those diesels. She was rebellious, she says, and spent a lot of time staying up late and drawing pictures. Just about the time she was becoming interested in expressing herself musically, she was doing the at once romantic and mundane thing of being a waitress in a coffeehouse - one named after Louis Riel, one of Canada's favorite heroes and, better still, one of its favorite outlaws. He led the local half-breeds, the French and Scottish metis, or part-Indians, in two rebellions against the government. The second one in Saskatchewan resulted in his capture, trial, and execution for treason, and in his becoming a martyr to the fledgling cause of French Canadian nationalism. Joan Anderson's own hero in those coffeehouse days was that rebel said to be without a cause, James Dean.

"It was then and still is a constant war to liberate myself from values not applicable to the period in which I live," Mitchell told Time. A flight from someone else's values is, as a practical matter, a flight from someone else's rules. Farm country and the interior are fraught with rules, and there are literally few places on the prairie for a born rule-breaker, or rule-ignorer, to hide. The rules started for mostly valid reasons, since the business of producing food is an absolutely vital one and since the frontier, which this was not long ago, could kill you if you slipped up; but sometimes it is the lot of the innocent and the imaginative to be ahead of the crowd in spotting rules that have outlived their usefulness and now are mischief-prone taboos. Mitchell if she did feel penned in, is to be complimented for her restraint with her own kind of pen. A more typical reaction against farm country (in the U.S., anyway) is that of the not-so-innocent but fairly imaginative H.L. Mencken: "What lies under [prohibition], and under all the other crazy enactments of its category, is no more and no less than the yokel's congenital and incurable hatred of the city man - his simian rage against everyone who, as he sees it, is having a better time than he is."

What Joni Mitchell did was to choose to live in a canyon (topographically: relief, not readily available on prairies) in a sprawling hodgepodge of a city famous for throwing the old rules out the window. Most of the resentment the rest of the country feels for Los Angeles is translated as the informed suspicion that they practice unrestrained hedonism out there and probably are raising up a new breed of pagans. Behind that, I think, is a kind of shock at how they treated the old rules, and a fear of anarchy. Police chiefs, perhaps sensing this on some level, always seem to talk extra tough and look extra mean in Los Angeles. In fact, of course, Los Angeles has many different sets of rules - it's the compatibility, the overlap, of these sets that's so confusing to people in places that never had to deal with, among other things, a fantasy factory like Hollywood in their midst. I fancy I see what Joni Mitchell sees in such a place, and where do you think Eve would have headed if she'd had the chance?

Prairie girl Joan Anderson left Saskatoon after high school to attend art school briefly (her drawings regularly play strong thematic roles on her album covers) in Calgary, where the Rockies give relief to Alberta, but she was only nineteen when she followed the diesels' song to a spa of the night, Toronto, to practice art with music. By the time she had a career rolling, an album on the market, she had spent time broke and scuffling, had met and married singer Chuck Mitchell, had lived (and performed) with him for a year or so in which they were based in Detroit - and had gone through a divorce and moved to New York. These are experiences that rake off a lot of innocence, but a learner, an examiner, emerges from them on a different plane where new stuff is going on and is, relatively and functionally, innocent again.

The thing one noticed about Joni Mitchell was how visible this process was; trying to obscure it by being cool was not in her. She came along with these guitar tunings she had figured out by herself and said, "I compose by discovery," meaning findings in her feelings as well as accidental chords. There is a vital naivete in this that I see as consistent with her geographic migration away from "set ways" (confirmed by her finding no less a place than Paris "too old and cold and settled in its ways") and consistent with the way so much of her work simultaneously holds hands with romanticism and realism. A scholar could know all that Joni Mitchell knows. Open tunings for the guitar have been around for years and anyone could look them up in some manual. Countless books go into detail about the subtleties in the psyche. The important difference between looking it all up (that is, memorizing a new set of rules) and going to see for yourself is the important difference between ordinary people and artists - maybe it's adrenaline. There's just no way to be as excited about someone else's discovery as you are about your own. The question of whether you want, or can handle, the excitement is a valid one - but not if you are an artist; the excitement is a necessary source of energy in that case, and that's that. It is in Joni Mitchell's interests not to know all the diagrams and charts that show where the limits are, what "can't" be done, for rules, one way or another, always trace back to safety, a luxury she cannot

Mitchell somehow kept herself from hearing "you can't do that," a sound as familiar to most of us as the refrigerator motor kicking on - and this was at once a romantic and realistic deaf ear she managed to turn. Being romantic, taking chances - Playing Cowboy, I call it - is a practical matter for an artist. The one old rule Mitchell did overtly and constantly invoke was the one against being coy. She has not hidden her ambition to make art any more than she has hidden her hopes and disappointments. Or her terrors: no matter how scary it is, she'll say it. We who live by our wits worry most, probably, about our minds drying up, and there's Joni: "I'm just living on nerves and feelings . . . with a weak and a lazy mind." That really isn't her, is it? That's the way she was feeling at a particular time; she was ignoring the political rule, in and out of music, to present a single image free of inconsistencies. When she does have a consistent feeling, she presents that, too - she has regularly looked for strength in a mate, for example: "I went looking for a cause, or a strong cat without claws" and "Send me someone who is strong and somewhat sincere" and "It takes a heart like Mary's these days when your man gets weak...." And she has noted with due irony the situation men are in nowadays where strength in a mate is concerned: "You don't like weak women, you get bored so quick . . . You don't like strong women, 'cause they're hip to your tricks." She does not, in short, nail much of anything down; she just does not like to generalize.

Very romantic and very practical of her. Taking shortcuts others have discovered and marked, and arriving at aphorisms, would be the surest way for her to get lost. Someone else is always ready to sum it up, to write "Everyone's lookin' for some kind of love" and "I'm going to keep falling in love until I get it right," which cover the thrust of what she's saying, but her way is more specific. It's just as practical, though. "Joni exorcises her demons by writing these songs," Stephen Stills said. Start with someone who's really innocent, a child, and watch it grow, and you'll see every day the power of language, words, labels, in the dehorning of demons. No thought is quite as scary put into words as it was before in its formless , elusive, dark state.

A writer without her commitment to, as Hemingway put it, "writing what you truly felt rather than what you were supposed to feel," would turn out something with the taint of True Confessions if he tried what she does. Generalizing and short-cutting would plant a snigger of sensationalism between the lines if not right in them. Few songwriters, even in this so-called post-sexual-revolution period, can actually communicate something without a wink in it on the subject of sex. Mitchell looks you straight in the eye and deals with one of its crazy-making aspects: "You hurry . . . To the blackness . . . And the blankets . . . To lay down an impression . . . And your loneliness."

The naivete of her discovering nature also gives vitality to the technical side of her writing and performing. She doesn't seem to know how "basic" and semi-mandatory the three-chord melody is; she can't even make what you could readily identify as tonic-dominant-subdominant chord relationships with some of those guitar tunings. The counterpoint she sometimes uses on the piano is so farfetched you wonder how she keeps in her head the tune she's singing. And, speaking of singing, there's a taboo against cheating into falsetto too often, and she (although she has smoothed it out somewhat recently) has made doing that a basic part of her style. Most trained musicians and English majors dislike the songwriting practice of putting words in a melody that bends them into more than their natural number of syllables. It's the kind of thing that calls undue attention to itself and interferes with the listener's concentration on the sense of the statement - as certain abominations by Handel graphically demonstrate - but that's just another generality you wouldn't want to wrap around Joni Mitchell. The Arrangement, for example, starts out, "You could have been more than a name on the door on the thirty-third flo-o-o-o-or in the a-i-ir," with poor waving erratically into five syllables and air into three. But can't you just feel that old skyscraper, and the "success" it houses, swaying in the wind?

Sometimes, of course, one does sense a degree of California School of Pointless Insight in her work. Sometimes I feel I've put myself through all manner of tortuous self-analysis with her and am no closer to knowing what to do about it, and the vehicle of escape - whether it be a big yellow taxi, the pick-up pitch of a fast lady trying to compete with the hockey game in the bar of the Empire Hotel, or a street corner where someone is providing free clarinet music - is not always there when I need it. And sometimes one discovers too much artful dodging in the melody these insights are, ah, couched in, and Joni Mitchell's voice is the only one that can get anything out of it. Friends (two or three of mine consider her "shrill," but the rest are ardent and long-time admirers) are complaining about "The Hissing of Summer Lawns." Pretentious, some say, meaning (I gather) not artistically but intellectually. Others claim that the less serious parts of it are too full of jive- including too much use of jive and words like it - and they don't want her making what she does jibe with this label someone pinned on her, Queen of Rock. Others object to her trafficking with jazz affectations or taking Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross too seriously. They worry, that is, about whether this is a sign of her staying on one plane too long, hedging about being a neophyte again.

I wonder instead if "Hissing" may have been a longer jump than she could gracefully make. Her liner-note message-"The whole unfolded like a mystery, and it is not my intentions to unravel that mystery for anyone"-reads a little bit nervous, a little bit defensive, to me. This could be merely the eye of the beholder playing its tricks, of course; it does seem that in "Hissing" Mitchell was trying for the kind of ambiguity that the ear of the beholder could put to private uses. Spiritually, she may have primed her followers for all this, but stylistically she has not; without giving much warning in previous work, she slips - in ambitious songs like Don't Interrupt the Sorrow and Shadows and Light - into a sort of Joycean stream-of-consciousness way with words, and a job of making grammatical sense of them must be done before one can start to cogitate upon what they mean. Did she conclude there was no way to be more direct about these things, or did she, consciously or unconsciously, court mystery - was she, consciously or unconsciously, trying to impress those academic types who like to have things as abstract as possible so the rabble can't unscramble them? Too soon to tell, I think, but keep in mind that the simplest answer sometimes is the best, and the simplest answer is that she was again flying in the face of, trying to fly away from, a set of rules.

There will be other albums, anyway, that can't help but put this one in better perspective. Mitchell seems to be looking out at sociology more, without leaving the rough stuff of one-to-one relating unattended, and a good observer is a good observer. She seems now to be interested in the feel of Suburbia and what that does to a person, and she seems to be checking her tentative findings against what she had caught of the feel of Bohemia. But she seems to realize that an artist can't be either Suburbanite or Bohemian ("The streets were never really mine . . . Not mine, these glamour gowns"), so I won't worry too much about her fleeing from the monster that sits beside observers and examiners - loneliness - and into some kind of trumped-up Identity.

As to how it is to be that kind of observer and examiner, to be Joni Mitchell nowadays, my guess takes off from Shadows and Light and ricochets with contrast. I still see her as a somewhat shy and private person whose boyfriends nonetheless get listed in Rolling Stone (which once named her "old lady of the year"), who everyone knows wrote Willy about Graham Nash, who had the nerve to write "pack up your suspenders, I'll come meet your plane" when another celebrated ex, James Taylor, was being photographed wearing suspenders and planning to marry Carly Simon. And so forth. I still see her as a naive person who knows more than the sophisticates do, a person who may have picked up, on the prairie or in Los Angeles or in between, something from the Indians, Western and Eastern, about truly being able to have something only when you can give it up. For verily, as Eve's chronicler would say, Joni Mitchell has a great stake in innocence - and that's why she has to keep putting it on the line.


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