Joni Mitchell Did Whatever the Hell She Wanted. A New Box of Unheard Music Proves it
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Like its two recent multi-disc predecessors, Joni Mitchell Archives — Volume 3: The Asylum Years (1972-1975) collects live and studio vault tapes from a particular era in Mitchell’s career. This one gets off to a seemingly unbeatable start. Much of its first quarter is devoted to an entire live show from Carnegie Hall in 1971, months after Mitchell’s landmark album Blue had been released. Sounding at the top of her game, vocally and instrumentally, Mitchell opens with a swooping, vivacious “This Flight Tonight.” Accompanying herself on guitar, piano and dulcimer, she then rolls out one eventual entry after another in what would become the New American Songbook — “Woodstock,” “Both Sides Now,” “All I Want,” “Big Yellow Taxi,” ”A Case of You,” and “Carey,” the latter complete with what must be one of her earliest public explanations about the man who inspired it.
Listening to the concert now, it’s easy to think: How in the world could she top that? With its versions of “You Turn Me On (I’m a Radio”) and a few other songs that would end up on her next record, For the Roses, the Carnegie tape offers one answer to that question. But on 1972’s For the Roses, 1974’s Court and Spark, and 1975’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Mitchell became more rueful and reflective, sometimes ditching her normal first-person voice for character studies and hiring jazz and fusion players to broaden her palette. Essentially, she started the process of dismantling everything expected of her or any singer-songwriter of the time. And in tracing the way Mitchell’s songs mutated from bare-boned recordings to fully realized tracks with more musicians than she’d ever used before, Archives Volume 3 finally allows us to hear those steps along the way.
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That evolution is most apparent in the making of Court and Spark, an album that was both a beautifully crafted piece of adult pop on par with Steely Dan’s work and a warm, intimate, emotionally conflicted meditation on love and relationships. Naturally, the songs started with Mitchell; in one astounding tape, she’s heard at a piano, playing “Down to You,” “Court and Spark,” and “Car on a Hill” one after another, a mini-suite about the giddy highs and disorienting lows of a relationship. Then, in early takes with woodwinds player Tom Scott, drummer John Guerin, bassist Max Bennett and others on the eventual album, the songs slowly take shape. An alternate “Trouble Child” has a heavier undercurrent, and a different take on “People’s Parties” has a more pronounced rhythm section.
“Raised on Robbery,” the giddiest and most lighthearted romp on that album, went through a process all its own. Mitchell’s solo take is followed by other, discarded attempts to shape the song, including a clanky one with Neil Young and his Tonight’s the Night crew. (Earlier in the box, Young and his previous band, the Stray Gators, join her on a version of “You Turn Me On [I’m a Radio]” that slows down and speed up like a car stuck in traffic, never quite finding the right gear.) As we also hear, she took an early, more tentative crack at Annie Ross and Wardell Gray’s “Twisted” during For the Roses. An unheard Court and Spark demo, “Bonderia,” is a wordless series of chord changes that recalls the freeform, alternate-tuning work David Crosby was doing around the same time.
Touring behind Court and Spark, Mitchell brought along a full band for the first time. Most of Miles of Aisles, the live album she would release from the tour, was recorded toward the end of those shows. But here, a 16-song tape from L.A., just as Court and Spark was rolled out, captures the collaboration between Mitchell and Scott’s L.A. Express band at its freshest. As on that previous album, a few of the arrangements, like for “Rainy Day House,” are a bit gauzy compared to the originals. But songs left off Miles, like “Free Man in Paris” and “Just Like This Train,” are here, replicated close to the studio versions.
This third Archives is also sprinkled with ephemera. In a studio with her then beau James Taylor, Mitchell indulges in a fun cover of the Fifties rocker “Bony Moronie,” and Taylor counters with Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell.” The set is also a testament to the increasing sophistication of Mitchell’s instrumental skills: On a demo of “Just Like This Train,” the licks we’d eventually hear played on reed instruments are already in place with just her guitar.
Then and now, The Hissing of Summer Lawns remains a challenging record. Littered with gangsters, Hollywood types and references to the high-end Bloomingdale’s department store, the narratives still feel as if they’d been lifted from a Joan Didion novel, and the melodies Mitchell set them to largely defied the accessibility of her previous work. Whether we’re hearing Mitchell’s solo tapes or early versions with many of the same studio players from Court and Spark, those impressions remain the same while listening to Archives. But Mitchell’s home tapes are fascinating in the way they lay out the blueprints for the finished takes — much in the same way that Carole King’s realized demos illustrate how much she’d thought out her arrangements before anyone else around her picked up an instrument.
Archives — Volume 3 wraps up with a telling moment. A preliminary, unused take of “Dreamland,” her swirling, surrealistic narrative about American imperialism and the slave trade, recalls the more propulsive version that Roger McGuinn would eventually release. But when Mitchell tried it again, on 1977’s Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, she not only revised the lyrics but set her voice to clattering percussion. The way she completely remade the song, into something far more exotic and cinematic, demonstrates the way Mitchell used her post-Court and Spark commercial capital to essentially do whatever the hell she wanted. She didn’t just go pop. She made pop contour to her, and scores of musicians, in all genres, owe her a debt for it.
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