A powerful portrait of Joni Mitchell, blackface and all
In 1989, when I was 14, REM released Green, their sixth album and their first on a major label. It turned my world on its axis. So smitten was I that I spent what little pocket money I had on every album that Michael Stipe and friends had released up to that point. From then until they played Slane in 1995, on their tour in support of the grunge-inspired Monster, no other band could shift REM from the centre of my obsessions. Now, though, almost 30 years later, a seemingly infinite number of artists have supplanted them in my listening habits.
I mention this because Ann Powers’ remarkable book on Joni Mitchell poses questions about why certain acts connect with us at various stages of our lives and why our relationship with them can go from infatuation to indifference and vice versa. I may not listen to REM very much any more, but I certainly listen a lot to Mitchell, someone who barely registered in my teen years.
Now, aged 80, Mitchell’s already lofty reputation has grown steadily in recent years. There’s huge excitement about her imminent American concerts as her brain aneurysm in 2015 left many assuming that she would never grace a stage again.
Powers is among the more serious-minded American music journalists, one who appeals to those of us who abhor the dumbing-down of so much modern criticism. There’s no fear of that happening on this book. It may be weighty in places, a little too meandering in others, but it is rarely less than riveting.
The author makes it clear early on that she is no biographer and anyone looking for a straight, chronological account of Mitchell’s life is well served by other books. Instead, she approaches Mitchell across several themes, like her status in contemporary culture as a “genius” and how her childhood continues to inform her songs.
Powers takes a close look at the childhood of Roberta Joan Anderson growing up in the Canadian prairies and how she found her voice by playing a ukulele. As one might imagine, much of the book centres on her move to Los Angeles, when she became a leading light of its Laurel Canyon creative scene.
There’s plenty of analysis of her songs, not least in that imperial phase when she released milestone albums such as Blue and Hejira. No book about Mitchell would be complete without a look at her complicated romantic life and her relationships with several other giants of song. Powers interviews several of them.
Yet Travelling is as much a memoir about Powers herself, as it is a work on a legendary singer-songwriter. There are some similarities between writer and subject, not least a desire to escape stultifying upbringings and find a more bohemian life filled with music and culture.
It’s also a book about listening, about how music can be so intrinsic in our lives and how artists of Mitchell’s stature can help us make greater sense of the world. Music, of course, can be enjoyed on a superficial level, but like many, I savour a deep dive. Mitchell is one of those artists whose songs yield even more the more they’re listened to.
Powers speaks to several people close to Joni, including Judy Collins, James Taylor and the late David Crosby, but not the artist herself. When she was commissioned to write the book, Mitchell was recovering from ill health, but it was more the fears that the project could turn into a hagiography that ensured Powers kept her distance. “Her supercharged appeal,” she writes, “is a problem if clarity is your goal.”
The book ventures into territory where most male writers would fear to tread, such as the undeniable impact of Mitchell’s beauty on her fortunes, and how she played the game somewhat in the early years when one of her peers, the gifted Laura Nyro, did not. Powers also questions the apparent sexism the singer experienced in her first flush of fame, not just from critics, but from male troubadours. Later, some of those same musicians — including Crosby — acknowledge that they didn’t quite give Mitchell her due back in the day.
Powers is very good at contextualising Mitchell’s life and music with what was happening at the time, especially in the 1970s, when Joni was at the peak of her creativity. It was a decade when seismic changes were taking place in society, such as the strides made by the women’s liberation movement.
Mitchell’s gender, at a time when the vast majority of big-name singer-songwriters were male, fascinates Powers although it’s hard not to think the writer is going over the top when she asks: “Can you tell that I’m a little bit angry at Joni for trying to genius her way beyond gender?” I’m sorry, what?
Too often, A-list artists like Mitchell are deified, but Powers is keen to explore the singer’s faults too. There’s an intriguing look at one of her albums that’s seldom talked about now, 1977’s Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. The original cover features Mitchell in blackface — this was a time when she took on the guise of a black male alter ego, dubbed Claude or Art Nouveau. Mitchell had bragged about turning up at a party in blackface and wearing an Afro wig and nobody recognising her. It’s the sort of thing that would have any white musician cancelled today.
To modern eyes, the Mitchell of that era seems grossly insensitive, especially when it comes to race issues, and to her credit, Powers doesn’t let her off the hook. But she asks a question that all artists must grapple with: “Can you go to ugly places with your subject? How do you commune with the ugliness in them?”
Ultimately, though, for this reader, the book is at its most rewarding when focusing on the songs. Powers acknowledges that when it came to the innovative way Mitchell used open tunings on guitar, or her finger-picking style, or the sheer weight of her lyrical gifts and the conversational way that she delivered them, few could match her then or now.
Music: Travelling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell by Ann Powers
HarperCollins, 480 pages, paperback €19.42; e-book £14.99
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