Elvis on... Joni Mitchell (Part 1)
From ElvisCostello
Interview of Joni Mitchell
Vanity Fair, 2004-11-01
Elvis Costello
We were talking about "The Circle Game," a song that has made several appearances in Joni Mitchell's career. It was initially recorded by other artists prior to the beginning of her own recording career; Joni's version was released in 1971 on her third album, Ladies of the Canyon, as she approached her early peak of almost universal acclaim. The lyric, a meditation on the cycle of life, must have appeared precocious to some upon its original issue:
Sixteen springs and sixteen summers gone now Cartwheels turn to ear wheels thru the town And they tell him, "Take your time, it won't be long now Till you drag your feet to slow the circles down”
The song was later invested with a poignant resonance that could only come with time when she re-interpreted it on the 2002 orchestral album Travelogue. The composer had been down this road before: "I heard and saw it performed by Mabel Mercer, who was then in her 70s, and it had all that life experience behind her. I went backstage afterwards, and I didn't tell her I was the author-I was just a young girl. And I said, 'You know, that's the best performance of that song. It takes an older person to bring it to life ' And I offended her. I learned a woman is never an old woman."
Joni's laugh rolls easily out of a speaking voice that is still imprinted with her Saskatchewan origins despite many years in California. Her striking features frame one of the most clear and penetrating gazes you might hope to encounter.
At the risk of causing the same offense, I tell Joni that in 1972, when I was 17, I bunked off school with my friend Tony Tremarco and took the early-morning train from Liverpool to Manchester so we could be in line when the box office opened in order to get good tickets for her only show within 40 miles. That concert was remarkable for the indelible impression created by the revealing songs from her then latest album, Blue. The show ran so long that four of us had to pool the very last of our money to pay for the unimaginable extravagance of a taxi back to Liverpool after we stayed for the encore and missed the last train home.
I mention this because it was a time in my life when money had to be saved up to make one album purchase a month, at best. Having received her first LP as a gift from my father, each subsequent Joni Mitchell record was greatly anticipated, saved for, and bought on or close to the day of the release. Like so many people, I felt a curiously intimate connection to Joni's songs even though they spoke mostly of things outside my own experience. The rarity of those purchases meant that I spent many hours alone, listening in the dark to such increasingly emotionally and musically complex albums as Blue (1971). For the Roses (1972), and Court and Spark (1974). In this period, Joni shifted from the beautiful pure soprano voice of her first records to her more natural alto tones -the opening vocal note of the song "Blue” sounded like a horn while the subtle instrumental accompaniments of her unique open-tuned guitar gave way to the precisely arranged ensembles of Court and Spark. Though she was often described as a "folksinger" and had a place in the "wooden music" trend of rock 'n' roll that included Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, her most sympathetic accompanists began to come from the world of jazz. She followed the popular success of Court and Spark and its hit single, "Help Me," with the even more ambitious The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975). The influence of jazz upon her writing and arranging became more pronounced, and the dense, third person lyrical portraits of damaged and unsympathetic characters in songs such as "Edith and the Kingpin” and "Shades of Scarlet Conquering" did not sit well with some of her more starry-eyed listeners.
I had begun playing the guitar in 1968, the year that Joni Mitchell's first record was released. I started to write songs almost immediately, and like most novices, I imitated the things I loved. I recall telling my school careers adviser that I wanted to "write words and set them to music," as if I had invented the wheel, and he ridiculed me, saying, "So you want to be a pop star." Like many teenagers, I was probably rather serious and self-absorbed, but this calling seemed attainable and legitimate to me as I was going home and listening for hours to writers like Joni (and also Randy Newman and David Ackles). Such albums could he as rewarding as hooks. They did not yield up all of their secrets at one hearing.
This process for me ran out shortly after the release of the exquisite Hejira, in 1976, when I realized that rock 'n' roll music was the best way to get my songs heard, and I began making my own first recordings.
Within a year I was earning enough "disposable income" to buy 10 records in one day but no longer had that unique time with which to concentrate on any one piece of music.
Nevertheless, I continued to buy each LP as Joni stretched the width of the canvas with 1977's Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, an album which still yields up unnoticed pleasures; collaborated with Charles Mingus on one of his final projects, her 1979 album Mingus and gradually moved her artistic focus from within to the outside world, often finding it wanting.
In the 8Os and early 90s, I took some comfort in the knowledge that an artist I greatly admired thought it worthwhile to do battle with an era of shrill sonic choices that I would characterize as the aural equivalent of being trapped in a Chinese restaurant that boasts of added MSG. A move from Asylum to Geffen Records did not seem to help matters: the promotion of Joni's albums became lackluster and poorly focused. An individual voice that had seemed both universal and timely was now met with a dim and impatient critical response. Still, there continued to he remarkable, enduring songs, such as the beautiful but harrowing The Beat of Black Wings," a conversation with a disturbed soldier who had returned home from another military folly, which appeared on 1988's Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm.
The last few years have witnessed a house being put in order. The Grammy for Turbulent Indigo (1994) and other awards seemed less of an acknowledgment and more of an apology from a rather shamefaced business that had done much to marginalize her work in the preceding period. Joni herself began to engage in a process of re-examining her song catalogue. First there was the orchestral rerecording of Travelogue. She then cooperated with the making of the television and DVD portrait Joni Mitchell: Woman of Heart and Mind. The interview footage contained in that film reveals someone who is considerably more candid and uncompromising than any of her contemporaries.
We are meeting on the occasion of the July release of The Beginning of Survival, a very specific collection of songs taken from her 8Os and 90s Geffen releases and final two Reprise albums of original material, Turbulent Indigo and 1998's Taming the Tiger. This is not a "greatest hits" record but, rather, a passionate and prescient series of responses to a world on the edge of a spiritual, moral, cultural, and environmental abyss.
Many of these vehement and even angry songs originally sprang from a spiteful and hollow decade during which such concerns were patronized and ridiculed by the pop media nearly as much as they are today. The tone of the material is serious. But then, so are the blighting ills observed: the plunder of nature ("Ethiopia" and "Lakota'), the actions of those who make an entertainment of justice ("The Windfall [Everything for Nothing]) or who profit from the distortion of faith ('Tax Free"). These provocations to the conscience, and the re-statement of uncomfortable truths, such as the adaptation of W. B. Yeats in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," could not be more timely. If you are looking for "balance:' you can always turn on Fox News.
This release was followed in September by Dreamland, a Rhino Records career-length anthology made more valuable by Joni's insistence on the inclusion of a more balanced and personal view of the contents than could be achieved with the curious Hits and Misses collections that appeared in the 90s on Reprise. The packaging of these new releases also features a pictorial commentary that makes lavish use of Joni's painted self-portraits, family groups, and other studies of nature and memory.
I met Joni for the first time only a couple of years ago, through my wife, Diana (Krall). Since then, we have talked on the phone occasionally, and the three of us have spent a few relaxed nights over dinner or playing pool at Joni's house, games of "two against one" in which our hostess trounced us on every occasion. Today, I wield my tape recorder and list of questions with some trepidation. My contempt for a media industry that postures hut lacks insight or even a sense of joy, while reducing much musical criticism to the level of puerile name-calling, probably surpasses that of my conversational companion. We are well matched in our disdain for the cynicism of the disintegrating music business. What follows are a few moments from a conversation that took place at the Hotel Bel-Air, in Los Angeles, and lasted six and a half hours. It yielded 50,000 words, ranging across art, commerce, belief and the "Prairie Lope"………
