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(Credits: Far Out / Tidal)
Joni Mitchell has never been someone known to rest on her laurels when it comes to her music. She knew that what she was doing had the power to shift the world on its axis, and when she started to progress herself beyond the folk rock scene, there was no limit to what she could do if she had a handful of chords and a really great idea at her disposal. She knew that she had the power to make something powerful, but when you have that much talent, there are always going to be a few people weighing you down.
When looking at the rest of the California rock scene, it was no secret that Mitchell was miles above the rest of her peers. She had already been working on making musical poetry whenever she made new music, but listening to how she interpreted some of her songs, like ‘The Circle Game’, guitarists were shellshocked to see her get as much as she did out of tunings they had never heard of before.
Then again, the folk scene never catered that much to complex musical arrangements. When Bob Dylan first came out, all he needed was a harmonica, a guitar and a decent microphone to play half of his shows, and even when he did go electric, he was only co-opting the kind of rock and roll formats that people like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones had worked with for years.
So when Mitchell left the confines of folk-rock, it was only natural for her to have the best of the best behind her. People like David Crosby may have sung her praises to the high heavens whenever he talked about her, but whenever she made a record, she knew that Jaco Pastorius and Larry Carlton were the ones who could bring her songs to life with their background in jazz and fusion.
Before she had even got off the ground, though, she had already started up a partnership with her husband, Chuck Mitchell. While he was far from a horrible musician by any means, there was an obvious disconnect whenever he and Joni started performing together. She was meant to fly well above anyone else on the West Coast, but the more she played with her husband, the more she realised he was becoming a musical albatross around her neck.
And when looking at the kind of songs he had to offer, Mitchell felt that she couldn’t be around that kind of music anymore, saying, “Chuck was my first major exploiter, a complete asshole. We were a duo then. He was pandering all the time. His taste in music was so foreign. It was show tunes: Flanders and Swann–very quaint and clever–and The Fantasticks. To me, it was cornball stuff.”
Given that she was sitting on tracks like ‘Both Sides Now’, it’s no wonder that the show tune angle wasn’t going to work with her. The music she had was bound to cross the musical threshold into something bigger than pop music, so the thought of her having to spend the rest of her life singing the musical equivalent to nursery rhymes would have been one of the greatest injustices, with Joan Baez even telling her to drop him at a moment’s notice.
And after breaking free, there was no limit to where Mitchell could go. There had been a few bumps in the road trying to get her career officially started, but there was no reason for her to think that her calling would be found in playing second fiddle to someone who clearly didn’t have the chops to match her.
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