The Canadian folk queen Joni Mitchell marks another decade on Friday. Tony Clayton-Lea salutes the icon of the Woodstock generation
She's the grande dame of singer-songwriting, and as she nears her 60th birthday, on Friday, it behoves Joni Mitchell's fans and most ardent critics to say, simply and honestly: well done, you've survived despite your heavy smoking habit, you've achieved despite your reticence, you've inspired despite your reluctance and you've excelled despite everything.
Roberta Joan Anderson was born in Fort McLeod, in the Canadian province of Alberta, the daughter of a schoolteacher mother and a former Royal Canadian Air Force father. Her early interests lay not in songwriting but in art, and without the benefit of tuition she blossomed into a capable artist while studying at Alberta College of Art, in Calgary, assuming her career would be in commercial art and design. Along with her paintbrushes, however, she also packed a ukulele, and when she wasn't inspired to express her ideas and thoughts visually she simply picked up her instrument, went to a local coffee house called the Depression and picked out a few tunes.
As her interest in commercial art diminished - although her love of painting continues to this day, as can be seen on many of her album covers - so her passion for writing songs advanced.
At 19, living in Toronto with a wandering student boyfriend and a daughter whom she subsequently and reluctantly put up for adoption, Roberta Joan met the well-educated folk singer Chuck Mitchell. The marriage didn't last long, however, and within a few years, having played yang to Bob Dylan's yin with nascent songs that equalled his output in richness and imagery yet surpassed him in direction and conciseness, the woman renamed Joni Mitchell moved to New York.
It was here she met the likes of David Geffen, the record-company head who would eventually sign her to his label, Elliott Roberts, who would manage her, and the songwriter David Crosby, who, with Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty and James Taylor, would become one of her famous lovers ("Loving Joni was turbulent," Crosby later recalled, "a bit like falling into a cement mixer.")
By the end of the 1960s Mitchell had moved to Los Angeles and become identified with the blend of soft rock and contemporary folk that ended up critically shredded a decade later. Yet the songs she wrote in the 1960s included standards such as The Circle Game, Clouds (retitled as Both Sides Now, it was a major hit for Judy Collins) and Woodstock, perhaps the defining song for the hippy movement. Come the beginning of the 1970s, Mitchell released Blue, an album that for many encapsulated the folk aesthetic of the era and a record accused of inspiring countless imitators. "Everybody is a singer-songwriter now, but not everybody should be," she said several years ago. "Music has gone downhill; ironically, at the same time that standards have dropped, the machines have increased. These people have 20 times the distribution, so the bad stuff is really everywhere."
Over the past 30 years, Mitchell - like her contemporaries Dylan, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen and very few others - has turned into a long-distance runner, the owner of a pioneering restlessness that refuses to become a human jukebox. In many ways, the 1970s set her free creatively, with albums such as For The Roses, Court And Spark, The Hissing Of Summer Lawns, Hejira, Don Juan's Reckless Daughter and Mingus mingling piano-led folk ballads and pop with innovative explorations of world music and jazz.
If the likes of Mingus and early 1980s albums such as Shadows And Light distilled her love of intelligent, conversational jazz and her peculiar take on pop into a more specialised area, then her most recent albums (1998's Taming The Tiger, 2000's Both Sides Now and last year's Travelogue) have seen her become ever more commercially insular, with the latter album, possibly her most fully realised for some time, sidelined to the niche label Nonesuch.
Mitchell correctly claims that commercial success has been denied to her, with little radio or record-company support for works that are far superior to many that sell millions. It's a problem she has lived with for some time and for which she has no solution other than to occasionally make noises about retiring.
To all intents and purposes Mitchell has done just that, as she has deliberately removed herself not only from an industry ever more inclined towards disposability but also from a generation of artists she regards as whiners and degenerates. You might hear one of her songs on daytime radio, but more than likely it'll be a cover version of Big Yellow Taxi rather than one of her original recordings. (You'd think the beguiling simplicity of even her earlier material would make sense to radio programmers, but apparently such a concept isn't in the marketing plan.)
The clash between commercial acceptance and artistic integrity is one that continues to take up her time; that and the recent reunion with Kelly, the daughter she gave up for adoption.
Future directions are, as usual with Mitchell, open to question. Despite her commercial downsizing, she has witnessed something of a critical renaissance over the past five years, with awards and nominations cluttering up her schedule. She still smokes, taking the advice of doctors and promptly binning it; she still paints and exhibits, with increasing success; she is still regarded as one of the finest singer-songwriters of the past 40 years.
And, to her credit, she is still that rare someone marketing people don't have to think about any more.
Joni Mitchell: The Complete Geffen Recordings, which consists of Wild Things Run Fast, Dog Eat Dog, Chalk Mark In A Rainstorm and Night Ride Home, is released on Friday
