Joni's starry nights

I'm pleased to see that Joni Mitchell has been given a major biography, written by New Zealander Karen O'Brien.  I haven't read the book but I hope the singer was cooperative, though it wouldn't be any surprise if she wasn't.  She would have every right to say that she had already written her autobiography over the last thirty years or so, in the lyrics to her songs.  In my opinion its a far better piece of literature than Dylan's equally long-winded chronicle of himself..

Received wisdom among people who haven’t really followed her career is that her masterpiece was the album BLUE, a contemporary snapshot of the Woodstock generation, but Mitchell moved on smartly from there.  In  COURT AND SPARK, songs about David Crosby gave way to ones about David Geffen.  It seems to me that these have stood the test of time better.   Crosby's world has gone whereas the world of Geffen is still with us.  The squeaky hippie yodelling of  Mitchells first and only number one single Big Yellow Taxi,  mellowed into a  heavy smoker's silvery purring.

 The album after COURT AND SPARK  was even better, the one after that better still and so on, until jazz, like a drug that helps at first, suffocated her creative life.   But then she got over it.  I remember reading a review of one of her nineties records which said: this is probably the best seventeenth album ever.  That is the truly great thing about Mitchell.  She got to number seventeen and kept on going. And, overall, she has continued to get better.

Her emotional life was never easy.  Fascination turned quickly to litigation.  On the album HEJIRA she sings about a strange boy

weaving a course of grace and havoc

on a yellow skateboard

through midday sidewalk traffic

A few albums later the strange boy, or someone very like him, is sueing her for everything she's got.  She hisses at him

You'd eat your young alive

For a Jaguar in the drive

When she writes like that I, for one, can forgive her the occasion when she rhymed years  with mirrors.

Her nearest and dearest counselled her to give up these debilitating entaglements, become an environmental campaigner, get into  charity.  And for a while, she did.  But Mitchell is too much the artist for all that. Misery is her  meat and drink.

There's a wide world of noble causes, and lonely landscapes to discover -  the thirty-year- old millionaire sang.   But all I wanna do right now is find another lover.  

 Mitchell is an inveterate traveller,  the original lonely planet.  But she doesn't go on the road,  like other Americans of her generation.   She goes on hejira,  takes flight, like Mohammed from the enemies of true religion.  HEJIRA ends with a meditation on the smallness of human life.

In a highway service station, over the month of June

was a photograph of the earth taken coming back from the moon

and you couldn't see a city, on that marble bowling ball

or a forest or a highway

or me here, least of all.

The humility  seems  absolutely false.  It somehow leaves me with the feeling that if I was up in a spaceship, looking  at the earth, I would see the singer's face moving across the oceans and continents.  

But who would have thought that, so late in the day, anyone would have found new life in the rhyme of moon and June.  The album is an essential item in anyone's collection.

 Her egoism is part and parcel of  Mitchell's over-weening self-proclaimed but under-recognised genius, like the curiously awful paintings that she inflicts on us through her album covers.   She has said that she regards painting as her true vocation - such perversity could well be a hallmark of genius.  Music to her is a base trade that she engages in with reluctance. Surveying her brushwork, one can only thank God for the demise of the fold-out LP sleeve. 

 Yet who would be without the self-portrait of Joni as Van Gogh, complete with bandaged ear, on the cover of her '94 album TURBULENT INDIGO - after HEJIRA, her best work to date?

As she sails into grumpy old age  the fascination and love of life are still there, but in Joni's California, the forces of revenge are on the rise.

lawyers haven't been this popular since Robespierre slaughtered half of France

In some of the most beautiful lines she has written, she laments her own beauty.

 Once I was blessed,  I was awaited like the rain

like eyes for the blind,  like feet for the lame

Kings heard my words, and they sought out my company

but now the janitors of Shadowland flick their brooms at me.

These lines are from Job's Sad Song, in which Joni, without a blush, compares herself to God's most long-suffering victim.   Squarely confronting her creator/tormentor, she demands to know

What have I done to you

that you make everything I dread

and everything I fear

come true?

Let's hope that, before it all comes true, she can find the acceptance that earned Job his immortality.