It is akin to finding a beautiful wood floor beneath a pasture of bright orange carpet. That bright orange carpet probably looked amazing in its day until it didn't. I'm talking about coming upon these bare-bones, acoustic performances of Joni Mitchell's "The Three Great Stimulants" and "Dog Eat Dog," which I've been listening to all week. These come from 1985's Dog Eat Dog. I'd always thought this period marked a wrong turn in the life of her music. Wrong turns are to be expected, I suppose, when you're restless and hungry for new, when you don't want to rely on your old patterns--listen to what Joy Williams says about a writer's style being his doppelganger below. But this turn always struck me as more disappointing than the usual wrong turn, if only because it seemed to mark a point when the music seemed less self-attuned when she'd always struck me as being rigorously, strictly self-attuned. Too many hands were in the recorded performance--she, for one, has talked about the frustration of working with Thomas Dolby, who was given producer's credit for the album. The recorded performances seemed to have escaped her, and not in the good way. They held a wet finger out to the wind to feel what was out there, what was next, when the music had always been too confident for that kind of thing. They were heavy on the electronics, puzzling given the songs' anxieties about nuclear power and environmental waste. The gestures seemed too broad, without much of the nuance or texture we'd heard in Hejira or For the Roses or Don Juan's Reckless Daughter or even Wild Things Run Fast, which had just preceded it.
Or so I thought.
It is humbling to hear what might be the original versions of these songs. She is back. You can hear the commitment in her voice, you can hear vocal turns and music patterns that are entirely hers. Yes, she is probably chewing gum, and yes, she is a little pissed at the talkers in the audience ("you can't hear if you're not listening"--or something like that.) But this is music, hers and beyond hers all at once.
7 comments:
I think the typo in the first line--"between" instead of "beneath," since fixed--must have confused the hell out of anyone who looked at this.
It was confusing, but I kind of liked it: "I dreamed of 747s over wood floor and orange carpet farms..."
And yes this video is far better than what the studio turned out. Somewhere on Youtube is another video from the same "curly-perm" period (I think its actually dated, the same year, 1985) of JM painting (In her studio? in a gallery?) and it's remarkable because she seems so, well, happy. I've always been troubled by JMs whole audience relationship thing: the gum chewing, smoking on stage (another youtube video out there somewhere) contempt that seems so obviously problematic. I guess it's related to the search for the always new that any good artist is looking for and the stiff unbending iconic status that a "hit" forces on an artist.
Anyway, thanks for this post...
I think the onstage behavior you're talking about is probably in part about the frustration of feeling like a projection screen, which inevitably happens when one turns the stuff of one's inner life into something made. Maybe it's simply about fending off the inevitable expectations and pretty serious resentments that come with that transaction.
In even simpler terms, she clearly gets frustrated when people talk and make noise. That's understandable, but the downside of doing that is that the entire audience ends up feeling chastised.
Exactly....I think your notion that it's a "transaction" (the perfect word by the way)with its implications of value and currency is spot on.
And who is that guy in the video who just can't shut-up? I suspect it's a stage hand near an open mike...I can't imagine a front row audience member doing that--though you never know----
Oh, and P.S. Lovely family portrait in today's Times.
The drama of the starmaker machinery--the need to sell as many records (as they used to call them) as possible alongside the wish to be true to one's vision--two contradictory impulses. And ticket sales must be a part of that equation too. Crazy-making!
The last Joni concert I went to, 11 years ago, was full of so many crazies, from a coked-out woman who wouldn't stop yelling out, even during the quietest numbers, as if she were at a Led Zeppelin concert, to some poor mess of a fellow who kept walking to the lip of the stage, attempting to give Joni a gift. She finally did reach down to him, kindly, but ended up refusing said gift, which made the guy wet himself promptly. There he stood, looking back at the first rows with a big stain on the front of his jeans. To have an audience of such intensities! Of course it would be an uneasy relationship.
Thanks, by the way, for the nice words about the picture in the paper. :-)
I saw her twice, but really only once...the first time was at Nassau Coliseum I was still in High School.(1974 maybe?) There was an accident on the Southern State..while sitting stopped in traffic in the car we smoked all the dope we had with us, got there really late and much too high..I remember the screaming crowd and her as a tiny dot very far away...Two years or so later I saw her when she joined Dylan's Rolling Thunder tour at the Garden. The crowd screamed for her old folkie hits, she did Refuge of the Roads, Coyote, and I think one other song from Herija, which was not out yet...no one really knew what to make to make of it all and the crowd was clearly pissed that she performed stuff that nobody knew and she stopped midsong to ask for folks to stop taking so many flash pictures...The folks I was with expressed displeasure at her performance, but I said nothing. I was confused that a singer of her stature and experience could so badly miss-read a crowd, but had an inkling that her vision of her art and her desire to push out from the past towards something new was more important than not having heard "Circle Game" or 'Chelsea Morning" (two songs I did like much anyhow)....
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