Joni Mitchell: Wild Things Run Fast
Joni Mitchell had had enough. One more record, she thought, and that’d be it. Goodbye, rock & roll. So long, jazz. Hello, brushes and paints and canvases and a life of art.
Then she remembered that she’d been making similar threats for 10 years, and she had to laugh. Joni Mitchell has been fighting an uneasy battle with fame for a decade and a half now, and when her latest bout of retirement fever eased, she went out and signed a brand-new five-year contract. So much for retirement.
But Joni Mitchell turns 40 next year, and that gives her latest threats new resonance. We’re dealing with a charter member of– – hell, a spokeswoman for– – the Woodstock generation, the kids who venerated youth with a vengeance. Pop music at 40? It’s a question mark.
Sitting in a hard-backed wooden chair in her manager’s office, Mitchell hardly looks like a woman who’s 39. Long, straight hair, just like the old days. Khaki sweatshirt and slacks. “I really did want to change careers,” she says. “The idea of making pop music when I was 45 seemed odd to me. I guess that was a minor reason for my attraction to jazz; it’s an idiom where you can continue into middle age. And in painting, you know your best work is ahead of you as long as your eyes hold out and you don’t get the tremors. But pop music…” She trails off. “It remains to be seen if it’s possible.”
So what changed her mind?
“I don’t know. See, when we started in this business, we were the ones who said you can’t trust people over 30. It was inevitable that we would eat a lot of what we said, because you have to turn 30 unless you wanna James Dean out. Now I’m finally hearing some good things about middle age. We need that. If all the war babies turn 40 and get depressed at the same time, the world will not be pleasant.”
A pause and a shrug. Besides, she says, her age is not so bad: “My boyfriend likes me.”
So she’s back in the harness. Five more years. That’ll make 19, total. “I don’t like to think about that,” she says uneasily. “It’s a very fickle industry. You wake up and think, am I a has-been yet? Oh, I’m not? Okay, let’s keep going.”
Looking back, growing up, coming to terms with age, and accepting love –– the themes of Joni Mitchell’s new album, Wild Things Run Fast, are the concerns of a woman who has finally decided that it’s possible to be both 40 years old and a pop artist. A departure from her past few jazz-oriented albums, the record contains the most commercial music she’s made since 1974’s Court and Spark, and in many ways, it’s the most well-rounded and telling as well. “You don’t have to go to art school to listen to it,” she says.
And you didn’t need art school to understand Roberta Joan Anderson when she moved to New York in the mid-Sixties, on the heels of a short-lived marriage to folk musician Chuck Mitchell. After a few of her songs were covered by the likes of Judy Collins and Tom Rush, introspective listeners began to buzz about the rare talent they had found in this sensitive, lovelorn songwriter.
On her first records, Mitchell herself seemed as fragile as her quavery, unpredictable voice –– “most suited to damsel-in-distress songs,” she says, and abetted by a childhood diet of Child Ballads (“the guy rides off and leaves her, and she throws herself into the lake”).
“She was real frail and wispy looking,” longtime friend Neil Young has said. “I remember thinking, if you blew hard enough, you could probably knock her over.” Driven by a compulsion to be truthful with her audience, she wrote about herself, about a woman uneasily navigating the newfound sexual freedom of the times. The songs, she said later, were about “what women think in the confines of their rooms late at night.”
Some of the early sing-along-style tunes reeked of an overly precious college-girl mentality, but they were also charged with an unflinching honesty. And she matured with startling quickness. Her tunes became richer and more elusive, her lyrics more intense. “We went into the studio, locked all the doors and didn’t let anybody in,” says her engineer of many years, Henry Lewy, of her breakthrough fourth album, Blue. “When that album came out, we knew we had something.”
The vulnerable romantic struggled to grow up in public, and in doing so, she sealed her bond with an audience that had come to hang on her every word. For many members of a generation recoiling from a disorienting string of social changes and retreating into uneasy introspection and doubt, turning to an articulate, probing, admittedly confused ex-flowerchild was a natural. Joni– – her music demanded that she be put on a first-name basis –– was the ideal combination of role model and confidant. Her audience soon included a staggering list of fellow musicians, from James Taylor (“I’ve never seen anyone create the way that she does”) to Jimmy Page (“She brings tears to my eyes, what more can I say? It’s bloody eerie”) to Bernie Taupin (“On her level, there is nobody who can touch her”).
Joni Mitchell: Wild Things Run Fast, Page 1 of 5