Joni Mitchell's Blue

There are a handful of moments in my life when I experienced something like a complete conversion to a cause. One of them was an edition of the John Peel Sunday show in the winter of 1970/71, when Joni Mitchell played an hour-long solo set. (Warning: I can't find this via Google, but since I heard the repeat when I was a summer intern with the CEGB at the Pembroke Power Station, and that was summer 1971, I think I'm right.) My first reaction was "oh, she wrote Clouds" and so I was expecting some twee folkie stuff. I'm sure she previewed some songs from Blue and her then hit Ladies of the Canyon. I was totally converted and genuflecting in front of the radio half-way through. I had no idea anyone could write songs and sing like that.

Joni Mitchell is one of a handful of artists in any genre who never stopped developing. Miles Davis. John Coltrane. Francisco Goya. Henry James. David Bowie. She never hit a groove and stuck with it, but kept on changing. Grow up following the career of artists like that and the regular guys, who hit a groove and stay with it, seem like, well, tradesmen. Entertainers. It gives you crazy expectations.

She released Blue in the summer of 1971. I heard it again after a long while recently and it sounded better. It is, in fact, perfect. Perfect in the way that Kind of Blue or A Love Supreme or In A Silent Way are perfect. You know the songs by heart, but there's always another little detail in the accompaniment, another piece of phrasing in her singing, that you didn't notice before - just as happens with Kind of Blue. Maybe Ashley Kahn should write a book about it.



Blue swings between ectsatic love-song (Carey, My Old Man) with the immortal lines "But when he's gone / Me and them Lonesome Blues collide / The bed's too big, the frying pan's too wide", to the darkness of Laura Nyro in the song Blue: "Acid, booze, and ass / Needles, guns, and grass / Lots of laughs lots of laughs / Everybody's saying that hell's the hippest way to go / Well I don't think so / But I'm gonna take a look around it though". The rockingest song she ever wrote, covered by Nazareth (!), is there in This Flight Tonight and A Case of You has been covered by more than a dozen people.

It's not for everyone. Joni Mitchell has been described as making music for sensitive girls of both sexes, but they aren't paying attention to the lyrics. Joni Mitchell doesn't expect love to last, and she doesn't regret that it doesn't. She expects it to be wonderful when it's there but for it to pass away pretty soon. That's not a girl-y sensibility. A woman's, maybe, an artist's defintely.