Joni Mitchell – Jeff Meshel's World: Recent Episodes
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So why did Joni's Gershwin award turn me off?
The post 163: Joni Mitchell, ‘For Free’ appeared first on Jeff Meshel's World.
Joni, skating on thin ice, on a river so long that our own feet can fly us away from this troubled world.
Peace on earth, goodwill towards men and women, everyone.
The post 222: Joni Mitchell, ‘River’ appeared first on Jeff Meshel's World.
Why Joni Mitchell isn’t relevant in a world of Millenial zombies.
The post 277: Joni Mitchell, ‘Electricity’ appeared first on Jeff Meshel's World.
Most of the little I understand of the female psyche I've learned from Joni Mitchell.
The post 106: Joni Mitchell, ‘Cactus Tree’ appeared first on Jeff Meshel's World.
David Crosby.
Sometimes he gives you a high.
Sometimes he makes you want to jump off something high.
In 1993, he and Joni Mitchell wrote a beautiful, enigmatic song together.
The post 260: David Crosby/Joni Mitchell, ‘Yvette in English’ appeared first on Jeff Meshel's World.
You don’t need Thile and Mehldau to justify the standing of Dylan or Mitchell. But their fresh new readings may still amplify and even enhance the originals.
The post 259: Chris Thile & Brad Mehldau: ‘Marcie’ (Joni Mitchell), ‘Don’t Think Twice’ (Dylan) appeared first on Jeff Meshel's World.
A close reading of the harrowingly intimate Joni Mitchell masterpiece, 'Blue'.
The post 215: Joni Mitchell, ‘Blue’ appeared first on Jeff Meshel's World.
50 years ago I was at the Woodstock festival, in the mud and the mire and the morass. Joni wasn't, but she got it right in the song. True Woodstock is in the mind.
The post 177: Joni Mitchell, ‘Woodstock’ appeared first on Jeff Meshel's World.
50 years ago the Woodstock festival took place in upstate New York. I was there. I got wet and muddy and cranky and went back home after one night to listen to some of the same artists on my headphones.
The post SoTW 14: The Woodstock Festival/הימים הטובים לפני ואחרי וודסטוק appeared first on Jeff Meshel's World.
The albatross of fame and fortune. Young Joni crafting her disillusion into a gem, 1970.
The post 163: Joni Mitchell, ‘For Free’ appeared first on Jeff Meshel's World.
Joni Mitchell’s songs can be deceptive, because they’re so darn attractive. But she is also a mistressful artisan who happens to possess a magnanimous soul. Her works aren’t merely moving – they’re also marvels of craft.
The post 141: Joni Mitchell, ‘I Don’t Know Where I Stand’ appeared first on Jeff Meshel's World.
Joni, skating on thin ice, on a river so long that our own feet can fly us away from this troubled world.
Peace on earth, goodwill towards men and women, everyone.
The post 222: Joni Mitchell, ‘River’ appeared first on Jeff Meshel's World.
My granddaughter Nogah has me wrapped around her finger, and she knows it. So when she asked me to write a Song of The Week for her high school graduation, it was a no-brainer.
The post 286: Joni Mitchell, ‘The Circle Game’ appeared first on Jeff Meshel's World.
Joni Mitchell, ‘Electricity’
106: Joni Mitchell, ‘Cactus Tree’
141: Joni Mitchell, ‘I Don’t Know Where I Stand’
163: Joni Mitchell, ‘For Free’
177: Joni Mitchell, ‘Woodstock’
222: Joni Mitchell, ‘River’
215: Joni Mitchell, ‘Blue’
259: Chris Thile & Brad Mehldau: ‘Marcie’ (Joni Mitchell), ‘Don’t Think Twice’ (Dylan)
260: David Crosby/Joni Mitchell, ‘Yvette in English’
Photo by Norman Seeff
Joni Mitchell isn’t relevant for the 21st century. It’s tragic, I cry over it, but it’s true.
She used to evoke such admiration for her precision craftsmanship and such affection for her emotional stripteases, among the people of the era whose epithet she helped coin—The Woodstock Generation. And of course she’s spawned already several generations of introspective singer-songwriters, strong younger women building on the ground Joni broke, all of whom credit Joni as their soul-mother.
But she was of a different generation, and no matter how much the young ‘uns may pantheon her, I don’t believe they have an inkling of the world of which she speaks.
Let me take one song, try to explain why it was so relevant and meaningful back then, and then why I think it’s so irrelevant to the 21st century: ‘Electricity’, a fine, overshadowed song on a fine, overshadowed album, “For the Roses” (1972), wedged between the masterpiece of intimacy (“Blue”) and the large-canvas grandeur of the orchestral (“Court and Spark”).
The song employs an extended metaphor of love as electricity, the two lovers grappling with the throes of shorts and frayed wires, Joni at her most literary. Methinks the lady doth protest too much at the critics relating to her songs as mini-romans a clef, but that’s disingenuous. She must enjoy sprinkling her songs with all those intriguing, intimate details such as James Taylor’s suspenders in the preceding song, ‘See You Sometime’. It’s a signature device–deny it as we may, we all revel in Joni’s juicy (or even gooey) autobiographical details.
To explicate ‘Electricity’ in the broadest of strokes, there’s a couple dealing with an electricity problem/outage which symbolizes their relationship. It’s all a mess (“She’s got all the wrong fuses and splices”; ”The masking tape tangles, It’s sticky and black”), and neither they together nor she alone can “fix it up too easy”. It’s a real, undeniable problem–the circuit just keeps shorting.
There are two difficulties in parsing the song. First, the chronology is chopped up. To put it in order (but you know this already; we’ve all experienced the same arc in a transitory relationship):
-
We were in love. (we floodlit that time)
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He sang her soothing songs that (still) run through her circuits like a heartbeat
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He moves to a different place (with a good dog and some trees, but his heart over-icing) where she doesn’t fit (She don’t know the system, she don’t understand)
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The relationship short-circuits (The lines overloaded, sparks flew, wires lashed out.)
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She holds a flashlight for him, to fix the fusebox/relationship.
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She even holds a (non-electric) candle for him, begging him to fix things.
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She’s left with love (heartbeat) unfixed (heartbroken).
But the ending is all the Joni we know and love: No rancor, elle ne regrette rien. Just stoking the star maker machinery, grinding out indelible songs one after another. It’s that Joni Mitchell territory we know and love so well—she begs him to show her how to fix it, but he won’t. He just leaves her with his song coursing through her bloodstream. Okay, James has gone and married Carly, but I got a good album out of it.
Joni’s canonized today as a harbinger of a new perception of the female of the species, and justifiably so. I know lots of young musicians of the female persuasion who place Joni’s bust on the mantle of their heroes and heroins, right alongside Jim, Jimi, and Janis.
Worship of certain of the Gods of My Generation has become canonized. Praising J, J and J has become a knee-jerk genuflection. I admit that I sometimes take advantage of that superstition. More than once in conversation with a Millenial have I taken a cheap short-cut to garnering Street Cred.
I do it more and more frequently as I despair of creating any meaningful dialog. I simply flash my “I was at Woodstock” badge, or just shove into the conversation “I saw the Beatles perform” and watch their jaws drop. It works for a while, but I know they’re worshipping false gods. The Paul McCartney touring today isn’t the Paul of ‘Penny Lane’. Bob Dylan singing ‘That Old Feeling’ or ‘As Time Goes By’ (better them than ‘The Best is Yet to Come’) is not Bob Dylan singing ‘The Times They Are A-Changing’, or even ‘Forever Young’.
Remember the Y2K bug? (I know, it was 17 years ago, so how could anyone under 35 be expected to remember it? Well, I remember it well. I took it half seriously—that at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999, the world would collapse. Not just the computers of the world–the world itself. The sun would extinguish. The earth would stop spinning. FACEBOOK WOULD COLLAPSE IRRETRIEVABLY! (Launched in 2004, I know, but still.)
Then
But it passed, and nothing seemed to happen, so everyone thought Doomsday was a marketing ploy.
It wasn’t. The Y2K bug passed. But unbeknownst to all, the seeds of the Millennium Plague had been planted. It was the night when humanity as we know it was infected by cannibal electrons.
I always preferred young people to those my age. They were vital, creative, excited and exciting. You could well attribute it to arrested development. I preferred to think of it as fuel for my creative bent.
I’ve worked with young people all my life. In my 20s and 30s and 40s I surrounded myself with teenagers, as a teacher and dramatist. They invigorated me. I actually learned to speak their language (teenagerese), and wrote successful plays in it. In my 50s and 60s I worked in hi-tech. When I started, my colleagues were in their late 20s; despite all the rumors about ageism, we got along just fine.
Now
At social gatherings over all these decades, I’d look for an excuse to sit at the young peoples’ table. The girls were prettier, they guys were handsomer, and there was a lot more laughter going on.
But recently it’s fallen to my lot to be involved with Generation Y or Z or whatever, those who spent their formative years staring at screens, those who got their first iPhone before their first kiss. I tell you authoritatively: these creatures are post-Woodstockian zombies.
They engage in nothing. You could get dirty. Word of the Century: “Whatever”.
They commit to nothing. They are way too cool for that. Jobs, bands, relationships.
They feel nothing. Emotions are so passé. Give them shots and apps.
They won’t even talk. There’s a 40-year old colleague who shows sparks of caring, with whom I’m trying hard to cultivate a creative relationship. I recently texted him, all fired up, “I got this really cool idea, when can we talk?”, to which he responded in all his Millenial jaded phlegmatism “I don’t have time to talk. Text me.”
Of course I didn’t bother to respond. I’m learning. Slowly and painfully. I may not be ready to give up my belief in communication and caring, but at least I’ve begun to figure out that it’s a gene they lack. I’m even starting to stay at the adults’ table.
They no more believe in pain and love and human intercourse than they do in the need to know how to do long division by hand or to remember telephone numbers by heart.
What do they believe? They believe fervently that Bill Gates created the world in six days. They believe that Wonder Woman is a profoundly true representation of a new social reality. They believe that there is no distinction between Facebook and the real world.
These kids, they don’t know from fuse boxes any more than they know of the human heart. Electricity ain’t no thang, as long as the iPhone is charged. But they even have external energy packs for that.
We denizens of the 20th century know why we can’t hear as well over a cell phone as we can over a landline. It’s because the bits and bytes are compressed, and the frequencies cut off at the knees and at the shoulders. You get only the bare binary data necessary to process the speech. We also know that our hearing isn’t what it once was.
What the Millenials don’t realize is how much of their humanity is lost in the restrictions of that digital compression. Emojis replace emotions. Write nothing other than the obvious and the factual in your text messages, because ‘everyone knows there’s no nuance in email’. Well, you can always add a smiley.
These Generation Whatever kids, they may idolize Joni, but they will never begin to really get her. You and I know that. Joni is the one who created for us a world of passion and pain, of knowing that you’re going to get burned but throwing yourself into the throes of a doomed relationship. Feeling and caring, no matter what the cost.
Joni knows she will not fix everything ‘so easy’, but that electric passion is her heartbeat. It will keep her going for as long as she’s alive. She will never write a song entitled ‘Electronics’.
We all know that the Millenial zombies will rule the world after she (and we) are gone. In the meantime, I guess all we have left to do is to listen to Joni. Over and over. And to bewail and bemoan the emotional holocaust this generation is wreaking upon us. Perhaps if they would only really listen to her…
The Minus is loveless, he talks to the land,
And the leaves fall and the pond over-ices.
She don’t know the system, Plus, she don’t understand,
She’s got all the wrong fuses and splices.
She’s not going to fix it up too easy.
The masking tape tangles, it’s sticky and black.
And the copper proud-headed Queen Lizzie
Conducts little charges that don’t get charged back.
Well the technical manual’s busy, she’s not going to fix it up too easy.
And she holds out her flashlight and she shines it on me.
She wants me to tell her what the trouble might be.
Well I’m learning–It’s peaceful, with a good dog and some trees
Out of touch with the breakdown of this century.
They’re not going to fix it up too easy.
We once loved together and we floodlit that time–
Input, output, electricity.
But the lines overloaded and the sparks started flying,
And the loose wires were lashing out at me.
She’s not going to fix that up too easy.
But she holds out her candle and she shines it in,
And she begs him to show her how to fix it again,
While the song that he sang her to soothe her to sleep
Runs all through her circuits like a heartbeat.
She’s not going to fix it up too easy.
The post 277: Joni Mitchell, ‘Electricity’ appeared first on Jeff Meshel's World.