Still Traveling | Joni Mitchell (Ellen Willis), Feb 24, 1973
Joni Mitchell’s fourth album, “Blue,” converted me from a well-wisher to a fan. I had always liked her, but we had never really connected. Her image tended to stand between me and her music. I saw the gentle, soft-spoken, fair-haired folk singer, the classic old lady, the Muse to numerous folk-rock machers who had to encourage her to overcome her shyness and record—the compleat hippie chick, in short—and I was looking for other models. Besides, I thought of her voice as a curiosity, a freak of nature that ought to be of some use but was really more of a distraction than anything else. Several of her songs—“Both Sides Now” and “Big Yellow Taxi,” in particular—were among my favorites, but I preferred other people’s versions.
Then came “Blue.” What hit me first was that the freaky voice had found its purpose. Before, it had just been there; now Joni was controlling it, using it to express an exploratory urgency that her lyrics confirmed. “Blue” was less a collection of songs than a piece of music divided into sections. Its central theme was travel, literal and spiritual—a familiar folk metaphor, except that instead of a man on the road, the traveller was a woman pursuing her female identity through the byways of the pop world. The sensibility that emerged (it had been lurking inconspicuously in Mitchell’s previous albums, particularly “Ladies of the Canyon”) was a blend of romanticism and stoicism which illuminated the pop milieu in a new way—a feat I wouldn’t have thought possible. Although Joni never forced the analogy, the men she loved-hated with such forgiving irony obviously embodied that milieu; from one angle, “Blue” was a neat reversal of the world-as-bitch-goddess fantasy. But neat did not mean simple. There were more resonances in lines like “You’re my holy wine, You taste so bitter and so sweet, Oh, I could drink a case of you, darling, And I would still be on my feet” than most performers put on an entire album.
“Blue” established Joni Mitchell as a better singer-songwriter than Crosby, Stills, Nash & Taylor combined. Her fifth album, “For the Roses” (Asylum SD 5057), is an elaboration of “Blue”—both technically and thematically—and is in some ways even finer. Unfortunately, it is also less accessible. Joni’s melodies and lyrics and rhythms are so rich and complicated and un-pop-songlike, her voice such a subtle instrument, her artistic pretensions so overt that if the record were any less brilliant it would be a disaster. As it is, I’m not sure how I would have reacted if I hadn’t heard “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio” first—on the radio. “You Turn Me On” is an irresistible tour de force, a metaphysical poem (I mean the kind dispensed by Donne, not Rod McKuen) based on the crucial technological metaphor for rock and roll. Witty, playful, gently self-mocking, it explores the lighthearted surface that half covers, half exposes Mitchell’s passionate fatalism (or fatalistic passion). But the album also has its dark side. In “Banquet” and “Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire,” the surface is stripped away. Other songs just display the cracks: “I heard it in the wind last night, It sounded like applause. Chilly now, End of summer.” Like “Blue,” “For the Roses” is full of acerbic comments about men and the difficulties and ambiguities of love. But where “Blue” emphasized the adventures of new emotional terrain, “For the Roses” is more preoccupied with dead ends, limitations, final failures. At the same time, recurrent images of electricity and fire speak of a new kind of gathering energy, abstract and awesome—can it be anger? “You’ve got to roar like forest fire…. They’re going to aim the hoses on you. Show them you won’t expire,” Joni cries in “Judgment of the Moon and Stars.” But that’s material for another album.
