Blue is a Perfect Album. There isn't one note that could be changed, one word that could be improved, one inflection of her voice that might be different, or one note of the accompaniment that might be pepped-up. Every. Single. Song.
I was a sixteen year old OND Engineering student at the time. I was going to the local college of further education, when most of the boys I'd known at school had stayed on to the Sixth Form. Around the same time I had discovered Weather Report's first album in the a stall in the nearby market, and was grooving to Miles At The Fillmore and the subsequent albums.
Describing the mood of the 1970's is more or less impossible now. The media talked about a generation gap in attitudes between my generation and our parents: it felt real, but I have no idea what it consisted of. They could remember the war, and rationing, and really thought that nuclear war might break out as a result of the Seven Day's War. A lot of them had been in the Services. Rationing was over when we were born, and conscription was dropped before we were of age. Jobs were easy to get for school-leavers, and the best employers went round universities on what they called the Milk Round to interview and recruit graduates.
Life was simpler, but rougher, even in the cosseted streets of the south-west London suburbs. Mixed schools were pretty much for the low(er)-achievers: good grades needed single-sex schools. The girls in the posh schools were, I found out years later, actually quite wild. We had nothing like them in our boy's school. Boys pushed and shoved and formed cliques. I was one of those boys whose friends at school were all the other boys who didn't have any friends. I wasn't in the rowing team (my school had an ace rowing team, and the best rowers wound up in the Boat Race teams. Until the Americans came along and ruined it all), and I wasn't in the football team, and I couldn't make the chess club either... There were fewer divorces, but consequently more un-happy marriages and more drinking. GPs handed out Valium or speed like candy to anyone complaining that they were miserable or moody or whatever else. The well brought-up boys and girls of the suburban bourgeois started smoking and drinking when they were sixteen.
There were fewer cars, you could park almost anywhere in London any time you wanted, the trees were smaller and scraggly, shops closed at 1PM on a Wednesday and on Sunday the country was closed. It was pretty much closed by about six in the evening, except around the West End, and theatres and cinemas. Heck, the radio and TV stopped broadcasting about nine in the evening.
Joni Mitchell sung us songs from a different world. Her lyrics talked about Greek Islands and seedy bars in American towns, and made heartbreaking romance out of the mundane: but when he's gone / Me and them lonesome blues collide / the bed's too big, the frying pan's too wide. It could be bathos, but he voice soars when she sings about the frying-pan and you can hear how much it hurts her to see the half-empty pan. Also, your unconscious notices that she has a fried breakfast, so you know she's one of us.
The darker days songs of For The Roses, and the grown-up disappointments of Court and Spark were yet to come. By the time she got to the mystery that is Hissing of Summer Lawns she was portraying the mood of the 1970's.
But on Blue she is still happy, still in love, travelling the world even if she wants to be back in California, which in 1970 was a paradise on earth - except for the bits in Dogtown and Z-Boys which weren't.
