Joni,
Greetings — I’m Jeffrey Wells. I’ve been a film columnist, reporter and critic for 30-plus years, and I’ve been tapping out a dailly column since ’04 — www.hollywood-elsewhere.com.
I’ve never gotten to know or work the music realm like the movie business. Not professionally or politically, I mean, so I’ve never tried to interview you or anything. I’ve nonetheless been a rapt admirer of your music for 43 or 44 years (since “Blue”). And I want you to know I felt serious pangs of fear two or three weeks ago when you were suddenly rushed to the hospital.This made me want to finally say something.
The kind & gentle Phillip Rothschild, who’s been doing my hair for maybe a decade, graciously declined to pass this along.
The thing I want to say is that your reputation as a world-class poet, phraser, searcher and sufferer will certainly last for the next several centuries.
Nobody has recorded a more touching and transcendent version of “Unchained Melody.”
I know most of your work, but your early ’70s to early ’80s stuff was rock perfect. Especially “The Hissing of Summer Lawns” and “Hejira”. Those “six white vapor trails across the bleak terrain,” “the hexagram of the heavens, ” “poppy poison-poppy tourniquet [that] slithers away on brass like mouthpiece spit”…I’ll take these lyrics with me into the next life.
One other thing: I know all about the sensual satisfactions of a good smoke, but you have to switch to vapor cigarettes…you just have to. That’s all I’m going to say.
I quit smoking decades ago but not entirely & not 110% because for years I would dabble with Davidoff cigarettes when I visited Europe. It’s different over there somehow. But I stopped even that about five years ago. For the joy and the light and the radiance of it all, please do what you can do extend your physical time here.
That’s mainly what I have to say, but I’ve added some things I’ve written about you in recent years plus two personal anecdotes…
I just checked the lyrics to “Refuge of the Road,” and all this time I thought the line went “hard of humor and humility,” as in “hard of hearing.” I loved that line! But apparently the lyric actually goes “heart and humor and humility”…right?
Personal recollection #2: I attended a short, smallish concert that you gave at Studio 54 in October ’82 to promote “Wild Things Run Fast.” The crowd wasn’t huge, maybe 150 or so, and I was standing fairly close and pretty much dead center. I was quite excited about being this close. I was beaming, starry-eyed and staring at you like the most self-abasing suck-up fan you could imagine, and during the first song your eyes locked onto mine and I swear to God we began to kind of half-stare at each other. Your eyes danced around from time to time but you kept coming back to me, and I remember thinking, “Okay, she senses that I love her and she probably likes my looks so I guess I’m her special fanboy or something for the next few minutes.”
You were dressed in a white pants suit and some kind of colorful scarf, and you sang and played really well, and I remember you had a little bit of a sexy tummy thing going on. Sorry but that had a portion of my attention along with the songs and “being there” and a feeling that I’d remember this moment for decades to come.
Like that Everett Sloane moment on the Staten Island ferry in Citizen Kane when he saw that girl in a white dress.
Personal recollection #1: The very first time I saw you in person (this really dates me) was in the summer of ’73 (possibly ’74?) around 11:30 pm at Wherehouse Records in Westwood. You were standing just outside the front door and talking with a couple of excited female fans. I sensed from your expression that you were feigning more interest than you really had in what they were saying — you were being nice, polite, gracious. (I was also struck by your brownish hair color, which argued with the blondeness on the cover of “For The Roses.”)
In any event I walked past you and the fans and into the store, and lo and behold there was Warren Beatty, sifting through records and wearing a jean jacket and a somewhat sullen expression. I realized right away he was with you that night (way too much of a coincidence that he just happened to be there at the exact same moment) but didn’t want to chat with fans, etc. I was on my way to a midnight screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Item: “Sometimes I don’t quite understand what ‘important’ means, but Joni Mitchell is the most important and influential female recording artist of the late 20th century, and a poet of the highest order. So I don’t mind that “Be Cool”, a track from 2002’s “Travelogue,” is today’s ear bug.”
Article: “Good music yesterday is good music today. You just have to let it in. Passively, I mean. Stillness is key. (Speed-walking on a treadmill at 24 Hour Fitness…not so much.) I was reminded of this last night while driving 75 mph on the relatively uncrowded 405 freeway. It might be the best music-listening activity of all. Especially if the music has the right kind of nocturnal freeway-flow vibe in the first place. Which Hejira definitely has.
“The Wikipage page quotes Mitchell as saying that “the whole Hejira album was really inspired…I wrote the album while traveling cross-country by myself and there is this restless feeling throughout it…the sweet loneliness of solitary travel.”
All my life I’ve loved Mitchell’s stuff for all the right reasons, but I was especially impressed last night by the quality and the exquisite recording of the session performances on this 1976 album. The gently layered guitar and bass arrangements are so precisely laid down, and yet with a professional aplomb that’s so swoony and soft and lulling…stirring to the depths.
“All hail Larry Carlton (acoustic & electric guitars), Max Bennett (bass on “Song for Sharon”, “Furry Sings the Blues”), John Guerin and Bobbye Hall (drums, percussion).”
Article: “On 4.20.12 Variety‘s Jeff Sneider reported about that ludicrous notion of casting Taylor Swift as Mitchell in a film version of Sheila Weller‘s 2008 book, “Ladies Like Us.” Swift was said to be “circling” the Mitchell role. The Katie Jacobs-directed film was going to be shot under the aegis of Sony and Di Bonaventura Pictures. But last fall it was reported that Mitchell had killed the Swift casting. (She told a Sunday Times interviewer that “I squelched that…I said to the producer, ‘All you’ve got is a girl with high cheekbones.’” She added that the screenplay “is just a lot of gossip… you don’t have the great scenes.”)
The Swift casting was “an appalling idea,” I wrote, “because Mitchell’s manner and speaking style always conveyed the churning soul of a poet and artist, and Swift looks and talks like a none-too-introspective, looking-to-please pop personality. Mitchell is a world-class lady with oceans, rivers and tributaries within; Swift is a pond.”
Love ya forever,
Jeff
