Fever (16 page)

King's Tapestry songs were sturdy, if sentimental, and her new bohemian persona almost seemed like feminists had dreamed it up whole: a young, liberated woman devoted to craft and relationships, framing smart arrangements around a soft-edged, unthreatening alto. She hung around with James Taylor, who sang backup and played some guitar on
Tapestry
and who took her “You've Got a Friend” and made it
the
singer-songwriter anthem. King's
Tapestry
version had a certain modesty; Taylor's treacly 1971 smash hit was unbearable even before radio played it into the ground.

That same year, though, 1971, Taylor played backup guitar on Joni Mitchell's fourth album,
Blue.
It was some of the best work of his career, but the effect was different than when he supported King. King was a better songwriter than Taylor, and if his “You've Got a Friend” only helped sell
Tapestry,
his support of Mitchell seemed positively subservient. The fact that Taylor and King sang each other's songs almost interchangeably was telling—Taylor never sang a Joni Mitchell song. King and Mitchell may have “shared” a musical boyfriend, but they played off Taylor in different ways; if he was a newfangled “sensitive” male, the women he hung out with each represented a completely different idea about womanhood.

On her first three records, Joni Mitchell dreamt up the liberated-woman persona that King embraced: the spare, brooding
Joni Mitchell (Song to a Seagull)
from 1968 (produced by former Byrd David Crosby); the more tempered
Clouds
in 1969 (which closed with a ruminative “Both Sides Now,” adapted into a brighter pop hit by Judy Collins); and the sturdiest of these,
Ladies of the Canyon,
from 1970 (which sported the song “Woodstock,” electrified into a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young hit the following year). Mitchell's music asked for some patience; King was that much more pop friendly. So there were ways in which Carole King's
Tapestry
had a tinge of feminist retreat to it, even though it was one of rock's first blockbuster albums (once it appeared in April of 1971, it stayed on the charts for six years, and remains a huge back-catalog item).
Blue,
Mitchell's fourth album and early peak, was a trump card, and has held up a lot better.

Tapestry
was simply too comfortable with itself, too soft-core, to be a challenge to women's consciousness—its idea of rocking out was “Smackwater Jack,” which was vaguely soft-shoe. In songs like “The Arrangement” and “I Don't Know Where I Stand,” Mitchell made the turmoil of free love sound like the emotional roller coaster it must have been. By comparison, King seemed almost too at ease. Even King's smash, “It's Too Late,” a reluctant breakup scenario, had an unneurotic flavor, as though the singer hadn't struggled with the relationship as much as she claimed, or as if the struggle hadn't yielded much. (King's commercial return found its own gender echo in that of another Brill Building cohort, Neil Sedaka. His middle-aged remake of his 1962 hit “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” entered the charts in 1975, a few months after the Captain and Tennille recorded his “Love Will Keep Us Together.”)

With Mitchell, a love affair was always a risk, with dangers inherent in what the lovers were bound to find out about one another. King was nothing if not domestic, and her affairs had the safe aura of serial monogamy. Not that this was a setback—but it certainly didn't challenge expectations, or shake up your ideas about love, or put your own relationships in perspective. Where Mitchell didn't “need no piece of paper from the city hall/Keeping us tied and true” (in “My Old Man”), King was more the type to don a veil of flowers and stage herself a barefoot wedding.

*   *   *

Where Carole King exuded pop craft, Mitchell was a conceptualist with kaleidoscopic emotions, and her self-contained, solo-guitar posture made her a female Dylan-in-waiting with the added bonus of having a discreet—instead of prolix—lyrical sense. Mitchell songs took their time growing on you, and you could enjoy them before you began to understand all the levels of meaning at play between characters. Like Dylan's, her lyrics trailed her quixotic delivery; her arrangements felt intuitive, eccentric, and as deeply felt as any words. Unlike Carole King and James Taylor, who as prototypical singer-songwriters tended toward confessionals, Mitchell was comfortable both inside and outside the first-person mode, which lifted her above the genre's norm.

Mitchell's voice was smoother and far less pretentious than fellow folkie Joan Baez's, and she had no patience for what has since been dubbed political correctness. It's possible to imagine Mitchell at civil rights marches had she not been younger and paying coffeehouse dues in Canada and Detroit, where she settled with her first husband. After Aretha Franklin, Mitchell was among the first women to make the connection between the personal and the political matter explicitly as an independent female, while Baez would spend years and quite a few unlistenable recordings chasing that ideal. (Baez is a favorite whipping post for critics, but she's not often backed up for putting Dylan in his place, in “Diamonds and Rust”: “You were always so good with words … and at keeping things vague.”) As Joan Didion wrote about Baez, “She was a personality before she was a whole person.” Mitchell was always a whole person in song, but she remains an enigmatic personality.

Mitchell wound her way through a personal life both tumultuous and thrilling, reflecting the hippie era in a way that did all the free-love talk some artistic justice—she made each emotional connection matter. By
Blue,
hers were vivid portraits of men out of their depth with intelligent women (“The Last Time I Saw Richard,” a bar closer for a bar closer). And yet in Mitchell songs, the romantic choices went beyond the male clichés of beautiful loser and responsible wimp. You couldn't accuse Mitchell of parroting the feminist line (she was way too sexy for that), but you also couldn't accuse her of stereotyping men as different as the ones who show up in songs like “My Old Man” (an early celebration of cohabitation), “A Case of You” (about how love makes you drunk), and “Down to You” (macho assumptions put through the stress test).

Even songs this shrewd didn't fully define Mitchell's view of men; you never got the sense she was locked into one idea of what a man was. The typical Mitchell affair was an emotional (and often intellectual) puzzle with a dangling endgame, which she threaded through mazelike harmonies to colorful effect; she's also a painter, and her music has a painterly sense of expressive tonalities. She burned holes in the male persona like laserlike precision, but you still got the feeling she adored the dance (“Same Situation”):

Like the church, like a cop, like a mother

You want me to be truthful

Sometimes you turn it on me like a weapon though

And I need your approval …

In addition to her piercing gaze and broadened scope (not all men are the same), Mitchell tread the line between baring her soul artfully and dumping her problems into a song simply because she could. Most singer-songwriters, James Taylor especially, fell into this trap. There was very little distance between Taylor's public face and the personality conveyed in his songs. It was almost as if he wanted the listener to understand all of his lyrics as grounded in the first person—especially after his celebrity marriage to Carly Simon (the singer-songwriter as supermodel). This doesn't make all his songs airy; his first outing for Apple Records, with “Knockin' Around the Zoo,” is still a wry tour of a mental ward. And a few sleepers linger: “Anywhere Like Heaven,” from
Sweet Baby James,
suggests a rich country strain he never followed up on. But who the hell cares whether his girlfriend was a suicide or an overdose (“Fire and Rain”)? Sure it's sad—so what? It's the songwriting equivalent of holding a kitten's head beneath the bathwater.

By contrast, Mitchell stayed way out in front of her first-personisms; she may have been singing about her own relationships, but her meanings didn't stop there. Mitchell's “problems” often worked as metaphors for the songwriting process, and she wasn't wallowing in pity so much as examining her personality—as though songwriting itself were a kind of catharsis. “This Flight Tonight” is about touching down in an airport for a reunion that pits giddiness against trepidation; the rippling guitar sound equates the rush of a jet landing with the butterflies in the singer's stomach.

In her half-hippie, half-intellectual way, Mitchell was more a new kind of woman than Mary Tyler Moore, Jane Fonda, Carly Simon, or Helen Reddy, her contemporaries in early-seventies pop culture. These others vaguely hinted at the kinds of feminist values Mitchell seemed drenched in. (Helen Reddy's number-one feminist hit, “I Am Woman,” topped the charts the season before Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs in the 1973 “Battle of the Sexes,” and was eventually sold off as a Tampax ad.) Mitchell had Tina Turner's knack for making her highly idiosyncratic material address the feelings and anxieties of her audience.

Although sui generis, Mitchell didn't sound encumbered by style. Her songs reeked with new possibilities about standard verse-bridge-refrain formulas and the odd detours through which lyrics might steer a melody. Some songs were short and curt, almost riddles of succinctness (“Carey”). Others were complicated, taking bizarre turns and rending the most disparate musical sections into expressive partners: “River” turned “Jingle Bells” into dry psychological compote; “Judgment of the Moon and Stars” was an ode to Beethoven that made Don McLean's “Vincent” (for van Gogh) sound like a greeting card.

Joni Mitchell's early rise was sealed by her hit “You Turn Me On (I'm a Radio),” a loving evocation of pop's ephemeral pleasures that she equated with fleeting romance. And she put this song deep on side 2 of her least pop-friendly release yet, 1972's
For the Roses.
Not satisfied with an ironic jingle, she followed this up with her 1974 smash
Court and Spark,
which had the hit “Help Me (I Think I'm Falling),” another ingenious play on radio pleasures that was easily mistaken for a free-love manifesto.

Court and Spark
had session alto saxist Tom Scott's alert arrangements framing Mitchell's odd song forms, and the result was a union of musical sophistication and innate creativity that set people humming long before they figured out what the songs meant. “Help Me” had an irresistible hook, and the song made fear of involvement almost enjoyable. Ironically, it got overplayed and quickly become an annoyance—like a cloying lover. But the fear it explored jangled the nerves. The free-love ethic was found to be hollow at its core; the figurative postcards lovers dashed off to one another (like the one from the “Free Man in Paris,” allegedly about real-life lover David Geffen) didn't mean as much as lengthy letters. And
Court and Spark
hasn't held up nearly as well as
Blue,
or even the comparatively dour
Ladies of the Canyon.

“Help Me” turned Joni Mitchell into a household name and turned her sound into a token of the times, but her persona flattened out from the overexposure. Nonfeminists could just as easily hear the song as a clichéd number about fear of closeness, where the truth was more about how fear of closeness can be a heady experience in and of itself. All of a sudden there were Joni Mitchell fans who didn't bother to pick up
Ladies of the Canyon, Blue,
or
For the Roses,
and her success muted her free-spirited image. Instead of being the cover girl for
Ms.
magazine the way her songs projected her, she became something of an icon.

With Mitchell all over the airwaves, Scott's arrangements made her idiosyncrasies sound at once fresh and completely accessible. This wasn't a singer-songwriter cashing in so much as it was a brightening up of her façade so the pop audience could catch up with her. Scott helped get Mitchell more radio play, but none of this had a whiff of a woman needing a man to get over. As if to rub our faces in her pop ambivalence,
Court and Spark
went out with a nod to jazz: a cover of Annie Ross's “Twisted,” the Lambert, Hendricks and Ross showcase, with cameos by pothead comics Cheech and Chong. (Slamming a giant rock taboo, she kept on the jazz path in 1979's
Mingus
by setting lyrics to melodies by legendary bassist Charles Mingus.)

If Carole King's audience had finally caught up with Joni Mitchell's eccentricities, Mitchell wasn't the type who would make a career of catering to them. She was artistically astute enough to realize her moment was a simple matter of synchronicity, and perhaps the affections of mogul David Geffen. After her live album of
Court and Spark
material,
Miles of Aisles,
appeared in 1975, Mitchell headed off in a new direction. She lived up to her image as a Canadian folkie with a severe face and honest-to-goodness principles. By the time she released
The Hissing of Summer Lawns
(1975) and
Hejira
(1976) and appeared in the Band's
The Last Waltz
(1975), it was clear that singles were not her game—she could take it or leave it. Sure, she enjoyed writing the “ironic” jingle, but Mitchell was above churning out hits on demand.
Hejira
's “Coyote,” a jauntily wounded road song, didn't chart the way it should have.
The Hissing of Summer Lawns
baffled most, and even though
Hejira
returned her to more familiar guitar-and-vocals terrain (albeit with a ringing electric sound, and her new boyfriend, Jaco Pastorius, a slithering jazz bassist), it didn't win back her audience.
Hejira
survives as one of the most poetic follow-up albums of the 1970s, that morning-after decade of shallow regret; it almost surpasses
For the Roses,
and gets better with age (especially the title track and “Amelia,” her free-form tribute to Earhart: “It was just a false alarm…”).