Rows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I've looked at clouds that way…

There is something unexpected and magical about Joni Mitchell's success. Her songs of intense personal emotion, subtle rhymes, and complex thought, sung to the accompaniment of her own guitar in her strange flute-like voice, have brought her renown with the very same young audience that thunderously devoured rock music at its most psychedelic frenzy from 1967 to the present. As rock cools and returns to its roots of folk, country, and blues, her success seems all the more amazing. When the generation's psychic metronomes had been set to the rhythms of the Rolling Stones' super sensual Mick Jagger who "can't get no satisfaction" and Bob Dylan's raucous "Everybody must get stoned," one has to be amazed at a poetess who captured hearts with songs that begin:

Peridots and periwinkle blue medallions
Gilded galleons spilled across
the ocean floor…

Part of the answer lies in her own roots. A native of Canada, whose frontier resilience and purity remain in her work, Joni was precocious as a painter as well as a musician. In consequence, her albums are uniquely the products of her own talents. She is sole author of words and music, vocal soloist, her own accompanist on guitar and piano - and the painter of the covers which make her albums extraordinarily graceful. The self-portrait holding a red poppy against a red and orange sky, which is the cover of her second album, "Clouds," is truly a work in itself.

The vibrations of her highly evolved talents were picked up by a vibration conscious public. Enhanced by the natural psychedelia and stoned awareness of her artistry, her songs penetrated the sonic boom of rock without the slightest compromise to its noisy masculine flamboyance.

It must of course remain conjecture - but Joni Mitchell is good evidence - that had America been flexible and evolutionary, the emergence of a crop of spiritually and intellectually turned-on youth would have brought about an incredible cultural renaissance instead of the present exasperated political crisis. As she is not native either by birthright or temperament, her trajectory through the American landscape is particularly instructive. Drawn to the states in the early '60's - a more exciting proving ground for her gifts - she faced phenomena with an artist's forthright personalism. Paying her dues by singing in the dim folkie haunts of New York City, she developed an unmistakable style, responding specifically to the people and places, both the "up" of the nighttime New York in "Night in the City" -

Night in the city looks pretty to me
Night in the city looks fine
Music comes spilling out into the street
Colors go flashing in time…

And the "downs" of a taxi ride to the airport driven by one "Nathan La Franeer":

He asked me for a dollar more
He cursed me to my face
He hated everyone who paid to ride
And share his common space…
Thru tunnel tiled and turning
Into daylight once again I am escaping…

By the time she came to record her first album of songs, she had reached musical maturity and her style to the present has remained constant through two more albums. Richly modal, it is pervaded by an exotic calmness, reminding one of things like wind chimes or the glass globes Japanese fisherman use to float their nets. Against this delicate background her reedy voice with its natural vibrato is free to discover its own paths of harmony. Inspired by folk artists, especially Joan Baez, Joni learned the technique of allowing her voice to jump an octave or more in pitch. Far surpassing her original mentor, she uses this talent to amazing dramatic effect. Suddenly, like a hawk on an updraft, she will carve a breathtaking harmonic arc and soar out over the landscape of her verse.

Totally adaptable, her style is suited to the most contrasting subject matter. Her first album is sharply divided into songs about New York, "I came to the city" on one side and "Out of the city and down to the seaside" is inhabited by a group of gentle people sharing their lives:

Eating muffin buns and berries
By the steamy kitchen window
Sometimes we do
Our tongues turn blue…

A lovely vision for the multitudes now thirsting for a life of ecological simplicity expressed long before that thirst was so deeply felt. Out of this environment comes the inspiration for the title song of the album, "Song to a Seagull."

My gentle relations
Have names they must call me
For loving the freedom
Of all flying things
My dreams with the seagulls fly…

She sings, incorporating into this one verse the two pervasive elements of that first album, dreams and freedom.

Her personal artistic viewpoint has remained as constant as her musical style. This unforced subjectivity has created a continuing psychic portrait, with the same "I" throughout the three albums. Like the larger youth culture around her, she has gone from hopeful idealism through confusion to a point of frustration. In common with all of the rock culture, she has shared the American trip, reacting often with greater insight to the fume and fire than many native sons driven to excess. To the war madness she replies with sisterly compassion in "The Fiddle and the Drum":

America my friend
You are fighting us all…
But we can remember
All the good things you are…
How did you come
To trade the fiddle for the drum.

Likewise the explosive phenomenon of Woodstock inspired a rare insight. Rather than trying to turn it to specific political or personal profit, or turning away in disgust, she understands the larger ecological meaning in her song "Woodstock":

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.

And if, like just about everyone, she has capitulated to the star/profit system on which rock is now based, she retains an honest objectivity, expressed in a song about a street musician entitled "For Free":

Now me I play for fortune
And those velvet curtain calls…
But the one man band
By the quick lunch stand
He was playing real good for free.

The one reality, however, which separates her from the vast majority of the rock culture stars - and may well be the cause of her personal sense of futility - is the fact that she is a woman. For all its revolutionary nature, real and postured, rock culture has one point in common with the most conservative establishment. Rock is the most flamboyant expression of male chauvinism. Not simply male supremacy, but white male supremacy. Practically the only Black to make it, not as a "soul brother" but on straight "white" psychedelic terms, was the late Jimi Hendrix. And practically the only female star to crash through in high volume aggressive masculine style was the late Janis Joplin. Unwittingly though it may be, and unquestionably exasperated by traditional business pressures, the fact remains that after five years the rock music of new culture is the almost exclusive province of young white males. And this fact appears to me to be inescapably at the core of the lovely and melancholy talents of Joni Mitchell.

Her first album is suffered with dreams of freedom, but her second, "Clouds," is an expression of anguish, reworked into some of her most successful artistic creations. The final song, "Both Sides, Now," probably her most famous and admired, contains the most philosophical statement of this state of mind:

I've looked at life from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all.

The sunshine of her third album, "Ladies of the Canyon," is quite deceptive. It is the sunshine of a release from struggle brought about not by overcoming but by surrender. In "Cactus Tree," on her first album, Joni proclaims her intention to remain a free spirit in spite of the onslaught of beautiful suitors:

He has kissed her with his freedom
He has heard her off to starboard
In the breaking and the breathing
Of the water weeds…
She will love them when she sees them
They will lose her if they follow…
While she's so busy being free.

The whole of "Ladies of the Canyon" is submerged submission. The canyon she refers to is Laurel Canyon, a leafy eucalyptus haven rising off Sunset Strip on one of the hillsides which divide L.A. form the San Fernando Valley. For half a decade it has been probably the hippest address in L.A. and home of some of rock's most genial talents. Yet Joni as a woman cannot be a full-fledged resident. She has to be one of the "ladies," and her gallery of associates is filled with pre-suffragette characters:

Trina wears her wampum beads
She fills her drawing book with lines
Sewing lace on window's weeds…
Annie sit you down to eat…
Cats and babies round her feet.

Two men are subjects of song in this album. About the first, "Willy," she says:

Willy is my child, he is my father
I would be his lady all my life.

Even the most superficial acquaintance with the attitudes of new feminism reveals the deep dissatisfaction with the daughter/mother image of woman, not to mention the submersion of one's own identity by being someone else's "lady." The second man is the "hero" of her magnificent song "Conversation." Joni here has become friends with a man whose relationship to his wife is that of unliberated women to their husbands:

She removes him, like a ring
To wash her hands
She only brings him out to show her friends.

And when, using one of her startling changes of register, she spreads her musical wings, wailing "I want to free him…" one cannot shake the distinct feeling that she is talking about herself.