Another Side of Joni Mitchell
This weekend's special: An interview with the revered singer/songwriter, and her urge for growing, that may surprise you.
Taking a break from my own memoirish weekend ramblings, we present the third in our ongoing guest postings (previous ones covered a recent Patti Smith show and a vintage concert, and pot bust, involving Louis Armstrong). Nicole Sandler, former radio deejay and now political host with her own show via YouTube, Facebook, and Progressive Voices Network, recalls a lively 1998 lunch/interview with a very out-of-fashion Joni Mitchell. I’ve culled from it some wide-ranging quotes but also linked to the full transcript and the audio. Yes, despite the many tribute concerts and albums with top stars, old and young, Joni’s been marginalized for over 40 years, ever since her music took a more adventurous and sometimes “jazzy” direction (including collaborations with Charles Mingus and Jaco Pastorius). Nicole found her calling music execs her “natural enemy,” but she also talked about everything from Van Morrison and Bob Dylan to finding her daughter. First, our usual political cartoon offering. And as always: please share, comment, subscribe (it’s free).
Joni Mitchell, Taming the Tigers, 1998
Intro by Nicole Sandler, then link to full interview and choice excerpts (italic context courtesy of yours truly).
I have spent the better part of my career in music radio but for more than fifteen years have been doing political talk radio. Although I worked in multiple music formats, my favorite time was spent in the Adult Album Alternative format, where I spent most of the 1990s in Los Angeles. Greg Mitchell’s recent “Profile in Music” about Joni Mitchell spanned 1966-1994. My Joni Mitchell experience begins where his ended.
In July of 1994, I was part of a group that launched a radio station in Los Angeles: KSCA 101.9. We played at lot of new music, breaking artists that went on to great success. We also embraced heritage artists that no longer enjoyed much commercial radio airplay, including—this may surprise some—Joni Mitchell. The year we launched KSCA, Joni released her Turbulent Indigo album. We were the only station in town to play it–-and kept Joni as a core artist in our library. She lived in L.A and was a listener.
This was just before the effects of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 kicked in. The biggest casualty of that Clinton-era bill was local radio. The age of consolidation had arrived. KSCA was sold for a ridiculous 68 million dollars to Heftel broadcasting, who flipped our niche Triple A station to Mexican Ranchero music and quickly became the number one station in LA.
I segued over to the trade magazine Album Network before moving down to San Diego to co-host a morning show on 91X. In 1998, Joni released her next album, Taming the Tiger. Although 91X was an Alternative station and didn’t play Joni Mitchell, I jumped at the offer to interview her for the Triple A publication, Totally Adult.
I met Joni at the Hotel Bel Air where we chatted while she ate lunch for over an hour. She was candid, disillusioned with the business of radio, and not happy about the loss of our eclectic radio station that had given her a home on the Southern California airwaves if only for a few years.
I held on to the audio of that interview, which was never intended for air. Here is the full transcript, the audio, and some quotes below—again, some may surprise you—from that wonderful afternoon I spent with the amazing Joni Mitchell.
On the state of her career (almost 30 years after she broke through) and the devilish music biz.
I could give a damn about hip. You know, like when I'm on a project—I want to discover something, I want to thrill myself, I know that there's gonna be somebody that'll get it, you know? It's not that selfish, really….
I'm not selling enough records to recoup the cost of making my albums, so I keep carrying a debt, which means that I'll never see a record royalty. So, I still make money off of writing the songs, 'cause the company hasn't devised a way—although they're trying to—to get at that yet. And you know, anything to squeeze you, squeeze you, squeeze you so they can get their goddamned graft to go up the way it is now. You know, you've got these people at the top of the business and they could care less about, you know, music. All they care about is money. So they're killing music with their goddamn grafts… They are my natural enemy. They're the enemy of music, and they own the music business… And, they're the devil himself!
You know, in order to make music and keep it pure in this arena, and also to make a living at it—I feel I'm good enough, I'm an established artist—I deserve to see a record royalty. I haven't seen a record royalty on all my Geffen catalog, because the records, cumulatively, cost so much to make and they were not allowed the airplay, and I can't get my product to market. The prejudice could be [my] chronological age, whatever it is. You know....The last one won two Grammys, and didn't recoup the cost of making it….
And at the same time, you know, mediocrity is being pushed to the forefront in all fields. Is it that they can't tell the difference, or, or --? I don't know. Money used to mean that you could have the finer things in life. But even if they get money they don't even seem to know what the finer things are.
And, you know, as the [new] album reflects, a lot of what's going on inside of me is a negative attitude towards my business. "Taming the Tiger," you know, the tiger being an analogy for the business...you can't tame it! The only way is independence. [“Amelia,” below.]
On touring recently with Van Morrison and Bob Dylan.
Van came to me at one point and said, "Has he spoken to you?" and I said, "Yeah, we talked at one point in Vancouver." And he said, "Well he hasn't spoken to me." I said, "Well come on, let's crash his show." So we went on this one song just as a kind of a lark at the Gorge and, looking at the faces of the people, they loved it. Looking at the reviews, some criticized it and some loved it. You know it was controversial.
On choosing music over dancing in high school, which was seen as a betrayal by some friends.
I was a Lindy dancer, a partner dancer in high school...mainly that was the dance. And it was, you know, I was good on a small town scale, and I lived for it and I loved it! I mean, I loved it with a passion, the same passion that I then applied to folk music. And all my dancing friends, suddenly…it was almost like schizophrenia to them. One guy said, if you don't out that guitar down, Anderson (that was my maiden name)—it was a ukulele—I'm gonna break it against the wall. You know, 'cause when I got it, I took all the energy that I put into dancing, and I'd huddle in the corner at parties and romance this box with strings on it, you know.
So it developed. My inner life had been kind of secretive. I wrote poetry always but didn't like poetry. Never showed it to anybody unless I had to turn it in, on an assignment. I was “rhyming Joan,” I was taught to rhyme almost in infancy by a Cockney woman! You know, so rhyming came easy to me. I put my thoughts down in rhyme because it was structured, you know. But I've never really liked poetry, I've always thought there wasn't enough meat on it.
On playing the recent Woodstock anniversary festival at Yasgur’s farm (she had missed the original but famously wrote about it).
It was wonderful! It didn't rain during my set, it threatened. It was a very warm audience. And, you know, the criticism that was leveled against me, again and again and again...was that I didn't do my earlier material, and [what she did do] was too jazzy. Right? Well, when I got to Woodstock there was a banner about 8 feet long that said "Joni's Jazz." And they applauded my players and they responded to them beautifully. They didn't seem to have any problem with the music. It was really a thrill. And my daughter and my grandson were there. And my daughter said it was the best day of her life.
You know, there was some trepidation [with her daughter]. In some ways I think she'd rather that I was fat and lived in a trailer park (laughs)—than all of this, until we adjust. 'Cause the press, you know, ate us alive initially. And, you know, to come into this carnivorous world. So it was the first time that she'd seen me perform. And she was probably worried that she might not like it. After all, it's her mother. [At Woodstock that day, below, playing “Woodstock”]
When she became a lady of the (Laurel) canyon in the late-1960s, and still holds on to that house decades later.
Well, at the time that we arrived, Tom Mix's house—which was across from Houdini's house—was occupied by Frank Zappa. And my house looked down on Frank Zappa's pond, which had ducks on it, which I drew on the back of the cover of Ladies of the Canyon….I got really sick at one point and my mother came to visit. She looked out the window one day and there were all these white ducks going around, and Zappa's groupies, like completely nude floating around on their raft…. And in the spring there were cherry blossom blooms that I looked at. It was like a viewmaster reel to look out of my dining room onto this pond with these ducks.
But eventually it kind of suffered and fell into decay. But the house that I had was charmed. It was just a tar paper roof kind of cottage built by a black piano player in the twenties but it was really, really a charming place…
I always think, the business being as treacherous as it is—if everything else fails, I'm going back in that house, you know? It's a great house for a little old lady, and my upkeep would be minimal. I would be able to afford it. Even if they robbed me again like they did in the ‘80s, you know! So that's my safety valve. [“Black Crow,” below.]
Generations: Hers, and her grandson’s.
I think I was kind of fooling myself in my teens. Aside from some shyness, you know like some social awkwardness... But I kinda' lost it in my 20s. I kinda broke down. I guess it was like, kinda like a breakdown. You come down to nothing. And you rebuild.
Well I was an opinionated teenager, really opinionated. And, a lot of my insights as a teenager...I mean I feel like I've come full circle. Like I knew that I was really myself in my teens and then I lost myself, in a certain way….
You know, it horrifies me to see him [her grandson] playing these violent games. And I mean he's sarcastic! He was sarcastic when he was three years old. Real life is not fast enough for him. And they're all like that, I think.
It's gonna be a strange generation, this one coming up. My daughter doesn't like to hear me talk about generations, but like any generation she shares some traits. You know? I don't feel that I was particularly typical of my generation, except maybe in terms of costume. I wasn't an anarchist. The only hippie value that really attracted me was the rainbow coalition. Maybe 'cause I'm a mutt. You know? [“The Magdalene Laundries,” below]
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Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels (on escapes under the Berlin Wall), the current The Beginning or the End (on MGM’s wild atomic bomb movie), and The Campaign of the Century (on Upton Sinclair’s left-wing race for governor of California), which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. His new film, Atomic Cover-up, just had its world premiere and is drawing extraordinary acclaim. For nearly all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he served as longtime editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
