Not Fit to Hold Her Hippie Jock Strap
This Is the Never Done Post About Joni Mitchell
The above headline has been sitting in my “drafts” queue for as long as I have been on Medium. It was a headline I used on LiveJournal in a screed about how Jewel was no Joni Mitchell. In that post I compared the lyrics of Jewel’s “Foolish Games” to Joni Mitchell’s “Coyote”, Ani DiFranco’s “Dog Coffee”, and Sylvia Plath’s “Lesbos”. I would reprint it here, but it wasn’t that funny in 2002 and HAS NOT AGED WELL. Blogging was easier in 2002, but, then again, so were we.
You know, if you want to blog, you have to block out all the noise. When I say “noise”, I mean all the knowledgeable, well-written, polished pieces about the subject you want to use as the starting point for your dreck. Take for example this Mike Errico article in Cuepoint, a music magazine from the First Great Age of Medium Publications (sorry if you missed it). [Beware: This Cuepoint article has “scary” ads that Firefox says can steal your passwords if you click on them! Which is why most of my passwords are: Ih8hax0rsHOPE-u-D13]
If you didn’t click on that article it is because you would rather read dreck than a real article about Joni Mitchell. Excellent! We should be friends. According to my stats we already are, because only people I currently follow read my stories. That’s cool with me. The rest of the people on Medium are IDIOTS. (us/them stuff still delivers a jolt of dopamine, doesn’t it?).
The truth is, I have never gotten around to writing the Joni Mitchell entry because it is so intimidating. What can I say about Joni Mitchell? I love her? I have listened to her music my whole life. When I was a pre-teen with a six foot Jimi Hendrix poster on my wall and a funky quilted blanket on my bed, I had a copy of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s So Far. The cover was painted by Joni Mitchell. A strange thing happened in my mind’s eye. When I think about Joni Mitchell, I picture a strange amalgam of that cover and the woman herself.
I have a suspicion that Joni Mitchell is being relegated to the dust bin, that somehow her music isn’t aging well. There seems to be less and less of her, and while I’m sure social media will go into hyperventilating self-absorbed grief mode when she dies, I worry that she is not making the jump to new listeners.
That’s why I was delighted to find this article by Allison Rapp:
So, I’m not going to go on. I think she is the greatest of the greats. The most creative of the creatives. The fact that she has school-marm tendencies and can be a crank makes me like her more. Her personal story is compelling, as is her relationship with the biological daughter she gave up for adoption.
I don’t know, man. All I can say is: Joni Mitchell.
I have gone down the Joni Mitchell rabbit hole on youtube many times. Here are the fruits of my meditations:
Coyote from The Last Waltz
Black Crow with Pat Metheny and Jaco Pastorius from The Shadows and Light concert footage
Woodstock from Isle of Wight 1970
(It’s about the fourth or fifth song in. Hopefully the “start at this point” works. The whole documentary is great)
Furry Sings the Blues, Toronto 2013
Free Man in Paris 1983
Get Together with CSN 1969
Long Black Veil with Johnny Cash
Last, Joni Mitchell on Baby Boomers
Others in This Series:
I’ll include a link to this story because in it I talk about wanting to write a post about Joni Mitchell:
