Friday, Sep 5, 2008
As pure an artist as can be found in the entertainment industry, her confessional lyrics and lilting, soaring soprano have inspired countless musicians.
Apr 4, 2000 | A somber mood prevailed over Britain's Isle of Wight festival in 1970. The four-day concert, subject of the 1997 documentary "Message to Love," showcased the Who, Jimi Hendrix (in his last performance) and the Doors, but the dominant themes seemed to be exploitation and narcissism. Kris Kristofferson took note of the surly, 600,000-strong crowd -- "I think they're gonna shoot us" -- and hightailed it offstage shortly before reaching the end of "Me and Bobby McGee." The festival became a dark antithesis to the hippie Utopia projected by Woodstock.
Stepping into this miasma of greed and paranoia, Joni Mitchell performed her song "Woodstock" in a lilting, melancholy soprano that seemed to float somewhere above her piano, as beautifully incongruous as a seagull hovering over a landfill. But after the song, a whacked-out man named Yogi Joe grabbed the microphone and began shouting. After he "was thrown off the stage by her security, much to her dismay," documentary director Murray Lerner recalls on the recently released DVD, "the crowd began to boo and become unruly." Yogi Joe spouted off backstage about being the "head of the official committee to paint the fence invisible," but Mitchell had the unenviable task of quieting the belligerent throng. As she later told British music magazine Q:
It was a hostile audience to begin with. A handful of French rabble-rousers had stirred the people up to feel that we, the performers, had sold out because we arrived in fancy cars ... backstage there was all this international capital -- bowls of money, open coffers ... So, with my chin quivering, fighting back tears and the impulse to run, I said, "I was at a Hopi snake dance a couple of weeks ago and there were tourists who acted like Indians and Indians who acted like tourists -- you're just a bunch of tourists. Some of us have our lives involved in this music. Show some respect." And the beast lay down. The beast lay down.
The crowd noise turned into applause. Mitchell ended her set smiling, triumphantly belting out the last chorus of "Big Yellow Taxi," which contains notes separated by nearly three octaves: "Don't it always seem to go/That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?/They paved paradise/And put up a parking lot." Lerner remembers Mitchell as "masterful ... receiving a standing ovation and thunderous applause from the same crowd" that had been heckling her a few minutes earlier. The prescience of Mitchell's songs and her nervy performance created a stirring, fleeting moment of true artistic transcendence. Only a year earlier, she had fled the indifference of a crowd less than half the size, in Atlantic City, N.J. Mitchell's music seemed to save the day, but the same tension -- between her personal art and its public performance -- would always remain.
Throughout her career, Mitchell has bemoaned celebrity even as she enjoyed its fruits, never overlooking the irony of the situation. As pure an artist as one is likely to find in commercial music, she has continually withdrawn into her poetry, painting and relationships -- her life -- only to return again with new sounds, new songs, new virtuoso performances. "You felt her life was inspired," singer Natalie Merchant has said of Mitchell. "She made you want to live an inspired and exotic life."
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Mitchell was born Roberta Joan Anderson in Alberta, Canada, on Nov. 7, 1943. Her father was a grocer; her mother was a schoolteacher who "raised me on Shakespeare as other parents quoted from the Bible," Mitchell once recalled. A few years after her birth, the family moved to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where she attended public schools. As a 9-year-old suffering from polio, she sang to fellow hospital patients. Mitchell had three bouts with death, but the ravages of the disease would one day play a crucial role in her musical artistry.
In 1976 she recalled her luck in having "one radical teacher" who "drew out my poetry." After writing an epic poem, Mitchell got it back covered in red circles, with "clichi" written next to phrases such as "White as newly fallen snow" and "High upon a silver shadowed hill." Legions of Mitchell fans can thank the teacher for this bit of dead-on advice: "Write about what you know, it's more interesting."
She took piano lessons for a few years, taught herself ukulele and then settled on guitar with the help of a Pete Seeger instruction book. A painter from an early age, she enrolled in art school, but left at the end of her first year, in 1964, heading to Toronto to try her luck as a folk singer. Mitchell wrote her first song, "Day After Day," on her three-day train trip east to see a performance by Buffy Sainte-Marie.
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