Mitchell, Joni

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Joni Mitchell

Singer, songwriter, guitarist

Struck Down by Polio

Banging on Stardom’s Door

Recognition in the 1990s

Polio Returns

Selected discography

Sources

The pop arena is a harsh world, really, “mused Joni Mitchell in an interview with Nicholas Jennings for Maclean’s. ” It moves you up and down arbitrarily, regardless of the quality of your work. “Mitchell’s comments reflect the sometimes bittersweet nature of her long and varied musical career. Hailed by the New Rolling Stone Record Guide as” the most significant of the confessional singer/songwriters”after the release of her first few albums, Mitchell saw her critical and popular audience trickle away during the mid-1970s and 1980s. Yet by the mid-1990s she had come full circle, boosted by the strength of two new albums and a critical reevaluation of much of her ’70s output.

Mitchell was born Roberta Joan Anderson on November 7, 1943, in a remote town on the cold, windswept plains of northwestern Canada. The artist remembers where her family lived in the hardscrabble hamlets of Alberta, bereft of creature comforts. “Every house was weathered-out and derelict-looking with no paint on it,” she told Billboard contributor Timothy White. “Drinking water was delivered, and bathing water was captured off the eaves of the houses. The only recreation I had was waving from our living-room picture window in Maidstone to the steam locomotive that blew its whistle at the bend in the track as it entered town—but at least that gave me a curiosity about going places.”

Struck Down by Polio

Mitchell’s childhood, though, was a troubled one, for she was beset by a series of ailments that battered her small body. “At three my appendix burst, and they rushed me to the hospital,” she told White. “Then I had German measles and red measles, one of which nearly killed me. At eight I had chicken pox and scarlet fever, plus the arbitrary tonsillitis.” The darkest shadowthatfell over her childhood, though, was polio, and as she indicated to Vogue writer Charles Gandee in 1995, the specter of that disease continues to haunt her. “I had polio at the age of nine. My spine was twisted up like a train wreck. I couldn’t walk. I was paralyzed. Forty years later it comes back with a vengeance. It’s like multiple sclerosis. It means your electrical system burns out and your muscles begin to atrophy. It means impending paraplegia.”

After an excruciatingly painful recovery, Mitchell attended high school. Her mediocre academic performance was offset to some degree by her blossoming passion for music, painting, and art. “I was always the school artist,” she told People contributor Michael Small. “I did the backdrops for plays [and] illustrated the yearbook and the school newspaper.” After graduating from high school, she enrolled at the Alberta College of Art in

For the Record…

Born Roberta Joan Anderson, November 7, 1943, in Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada; daughter of William A. (a grocery store manager) and Myrtle M. (a teacher; maiden name, McKee) Anderson; married Chuck Mitchell (a musician), June 1965 (divorced c. 1967); married Larry Klein (a musician and producer), 1982 (divorced 1992); children: one daughter. Education: Attended Alberta College of Art, Calgary, Alberta.

Worked as a singer in folk clubs while living in Toronto, Detroit, and New York City, 1964-69; released first album, Joni Mitchell, 1968; first chart single, “Big Yellow Taxi,” released in 1970 on Ladies of the Canyon; released Blue, 1971; turned increasingly to jazz-influenced work, late 1970s; returned to public performance after six years, 1994.

Selected awards Grammy Award for best folk performance, 1970, for Clouds; two Grammy Awards (including best pop album), 1995, for Turbulent Indigo; Orville H. Gibson Award, 1995; Billboard Century Award, 1995; Polar Music Prize, 1996.

Addresses: Record company —Reprise Records, 3300 Warner Blvd., Burbank, CA 91510.

Calgary. She left Calgary a year later and headed east, eventually landing in Toronto. Shortly after Mitchell made her first tentative appearances on the city’s fledgling folk music circuit, an unplanned pregnancy proved to be a jarring interruption in her life. “I was twenty,” she told White, “and it was a crush with a fellow painter, and I got pregnant immediately. To be pregnant and unmarried in 1964 was like you killed somebody.” She subsequently met Chuck Mitchell, an older folksinger, who said he would “take us on,” she said in her interview with Gandee. “I was kind of railroaded…. We were never suitable. I went down the aisle saying, ‘I can get out of this.’”

The couple, who married a month after they met, subsequently took up residence in Detroit, but the marriage disintegrated within about two years. Emotionally drained and financially bare, Mitchell also gave up her daughter for adoption. “I’ve never seen the child since, although I’ve always thought of her,” she later told White. “For years I didn’t talk about this because of my parents, although I did leak little things, little messages into my songs for the child, just to let her know I was thinking about her.”

Mitchell moved to Manhattan, where she threw herself into establishing a place on the local music scene. Her reputation grew, but work was still sometimes elusive. “The year Dylan went electric (1965) the folk clubs started closing all over the country,” she told Susan Gordon Lydon in the New York Times. “It was like an epidemic.…In those days, if you only played acoustical guitar, club owners treated you as though you were a dinosaur.”

She persevered, though, and with the help of Byrds vocalist David Crosby she eventually signed with Reprise Records. Her debut album, 1968’s Joni Mitchell, was produced by Crosby, although Mitchell concedes that his influence was actually fairly minimal. The album, a simple affair that featured Mitchell’s soaring singing voice and skillful acoustic guitar work, garnered immediate attention. Clouds, her second album, explored the same terrain as her first work: romanticism, emotional confusion, and other affairs of the heart.

Banging on Stardom’s Door

“A major impetus for Mitchell’s work at this time,” contended Dave Laing and Phil Hardy in the Encyclopedia of Rock, “was the struggle to make sense of a personal failure to find lasting satisfaction in any of her well-publicized relationships.” Mitchell’s 1970 release, Ladies of the Canyon, showed that she was continuing to develop musically. While her daring vocals and crisp acoustic guitar playing continued to anchor her sound, additional instrumentation effectively complemented several of the album’s songs.

With 1971’s Blue, Mitchell’s already shining critical reputation took another giant step forward. The album featured such classics as “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” “California,” “This Flight Tonight,” and the title track, and stunned reviewers marveled at the honesty, longing, and intelligence that underpinned the entire effort. Rolling Stone reviewer Timothy Crouse wrote that on Blue, Mitchell has “matched her popular music skills with the purity and honesty of what was once called folk music and through the blend she has given us some of the most beautiful moments in recent popular music.” White later commented that “the resoundingly intimate Blue stretched the tape measure for unfathomed personal inquiry until it snapped free of the spool. The deeper Mitchell delved, the higher her untethered singing flew, trembling with tortured liberty.”

The subject matter of Mitchell’s songs, though—and their inevitable coupling to her romantic relationships with such well-known artists as Jackson Browne, James Taylor, and Graham Nash—led some magazines to pay greater attention to her personal life than her musical output. Mitchell began to explore different musical directions and less introspective subjects for her songs, only to find her visibility in the entertainment world slowly ebb away. Albums such as For the Roses (197’2), which featured the hit “Turn Me On, I’m a Radio” ; Court and Spark (1974), which included “Help Me” and “Free Man in Paris” ; and Hejira (1976) received hearty words of appreciation, but others were treated less kindly. Rolling Stone even called Mitchell’s 1975 release, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, the worst record of the year.

Bold and creative experiments, such as her tribute to dying jazz great Charles Mingus on Mingus (1979), met with indifference or critical barbs from many quarters, and by the early 1980s Mitchell’s popularity had fallen significantly. “I lost some people when I went from singing / to singing you. I lost some people when I added a band,” she explained to Gandee. “Another thing was that in the eighties we moved into a particularly unromantic period in music. Videos had just begun, and they had a tendency to feature cold women with dark lipstick and stilettos grinding men’s hands into the ground. It was an antilove period, and my work—Wild Things Run Fast, in particular—was a joyous celebration of love, which basically made people sick.” Ironically, though, her fading in the public eye served to liberate Mitchell. “Once I realized that I had fallen from favor, I decided to stretch out…. I can’t pander to public opinion. Besides, the fact is no matter how talented you are, you fall out of favor.” Indeed, Mitchell never appeared to question the value of her output; as she told Gandee, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen are “my real peers. We’re the poets of that generation.”

In 1982 Mitchell married record producer Larry Klein, and over the course of the decade she released three fine albums on Geffen Records— Wild Things Run Fast, Dog Eat Dog, and Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm— that were largely ignored. Undeterred by the tepid reception of each album, Mitchell continued to explore new musical avenues while also indulging her lifelong passion for painting. (A number of Mitchell’s albums feature her own artwork on covers or inner sleeves.) Night Ride Home, Mitchell’s 1991 release, received warm reviews. The album seemed to spark a slow stir in the music community as some people questioned the songwriter’s long exile in the musical wilderness. Three years later, Mitchell unveiled Turbulent Indigo, the seventeenth album in her long and varied career. Entertainment Weekly contributor Linda Sanders echoed the sentiments of many when she called the album “the distilled essence of everything she’s done before.” As critics raved about the musical and lyrical depth of the album, Mitchell assumed a visibility in the industry she had not seen since the mid-1970s.

Recognition in the 1990s

In retrospect, critics returned to Mitchell’s earlier albums, and some began to give greater thought to her place in pop music history. Sanders, for example, conceded that “all she’s really managed to deliver in the course of sixteen albums is one of the most vivid and delicious chronicles of a woman’s life that’s ever been produced in any medium anytime, anyplace.” In Guitar Player, Martin Simpson called her “perhaps the most influential female guitarist of the century,” and a huge influx of young female singer/songwriters cited the impact of Mitchell’s music on their lives. When asked about many of these artists, though, Mitchell is blunt. “There are dozens of them, but I don’t hear much there, frankly,” she remarked to Simpson. “When it comes to knowing where to put the chords, how to tell a story, and how to build to a chorus, most of them can’t touch me.”

The early 1990s were transitional years for Mitchell in many ways. While recognition of her talent ascended once again, her personal life was rocked by several blows. She divorced Klein in 1992, though she noted in her interview with Gandee that their relationship endures, albeit in a different form. “We’ve come through this thing. It’s poignant sometimes. We went out the other night. He was playing with Shawn Colvin, and they invited me to come down and sit in. You have to readjust. I imagine that it will be a lifetime friendship.”

Polio Returns

Mitchell’s childhood bout with polio also returned to haunt her. She admitted to White in 1995 that she suffers from post-polio syndrome, a malady wherein “the wiring in my central nervous system is overtaxed, and when I don’t conserve my energy, the disease manifests itself in loss of animation. Last year and the year before I was experiencing a lot of muscle aches, joint aches, and extreme sensitivity to temperature changes.”

Despite her physical difficulties, however, Mitchell has launched a cautious return to concert performing. In 1994 she performed at the Edmonton Folk Festival, playing her first full-length set in six years before an appreciative audience of fans and relatives. “It had a homecoming kind of feeling,” remarked Mitchell in Guitar Player. She has turned to a variety of medical treatments to stave off her illness, and she remained defiant about her chances in the mid-1990s. “The polio survivor is a stubborn creature. I’m in good spirits, and high spirits is how I beat it before,” she told Gandee.

In the mid-1990s Mitchell received several notable awards, further indication that she had come full circle in the eyes of the music community. She won two Grammys (including one for best pop album) for Turbulent Indigo and the 1996 Royal Swedish Academy of Music’s Polar Music Prize. Late in 1995, Mitchell was named the recipient of Billboard magazine’s Century Award. The magazine cited Mitchell as particularly deserving of the honor, a sentiment echoed by award presenter Peter Gabriel. In his introduction of Mitchell during the award ceremony, Gabriel noted: “This writer’s work has been a regular inspiration…. With her melodies, harmonies, guitar tunings, lyrics, extraordinary voice, and arrangements, she has continuously and courageously experimented, putting substance before style, passion before packaging, and all the time creating wonderful pictures with her songs…. When I think of her music, I think of imagination, invention, intelligence, and most important, a lot of soul.”