Blue is not just the best album Joni Mitchell ever recorded, is it perhaps the most perfect folk-rock album of all time. It sounds better today than when I first heard it in my mid teen years, at a point when I had not lived enough life to truly understand the essence of Blue and its expression of the disappointed, freedom-loving bloodied Valentine’s heart of the matter explored within. Blue celebrates love and explores the fact that love hurts, love is imperfect, and if you never love, not only would you have ‘never cried’ like Paul Simon once sang, but you also would have missed out on the most beautiful of human experiences. It is not possible to get through life without loving, or losing, and it should not be possible to get through life without listening to Blue, at least once. In this transitory world, where life and love are but games and marketing ploys, the human soul which tends towards love, drags us into devotion, is at war with a world where love is put up for sale, hung out to dry and left to wither on the vine.
Joni is the mistress of her own songs, using various strange and complicated tunings to put her own watermark on her work, keeping them her own, instead of having to share them with The Byrds, Peter, Paul and Mary or the Mamas and Papas. Dylan’s legend and wealth was partly formed by these bands making Dylan part of the public consciousness, by raising him from ‘niche’ to ‘mainstream’. Joni never sold out like this, her songs are are almost uncoverable, due to her strange tunings which either have your guitar strings pinging and breaking slashing your hand, or else flopping and falling off the pegs. Joni is ‘frightened by the devil’ but I am scared of her tunings! Either you make nice with a dulcimer and piano and lick the tunings into shape, or else the songs just do not sound right. This helped protect her music and her uniqueness. It was a genius move, and one that has kept her music almost solely in her voice, and what a voice it is! Dylan might have farmed out his material to better voices and a more accessible sound, but Joni kept control of her heart, through keeping control of the performance of her material. It both ensured she remained somewhat of a cult figure, and also kept the expression of her soul through her own voice.
Joni at her zenith, her absolute peak can be heard in Blue. She is vocally pure, at her lyrical best, and musically inspired. The notes she manages to hit in the 1971 recording of the album are so pure, so perfect, so haunting and fragile, it is the sound of her soul, the sound of love, the sound of suffering and longing. Her voice’s descent into the husky smoke-ruined tones of Miles of Aisles, or even the sweet but artistically depleted Court and Spark was evident by 1974, but in 1971 with Blue, she was still singing like cut-crystal ringing and flying high. Never again would Joni have such absolute control over her weapon of choice, her voice. Blue is a snapshot of Joni, the artist at her young, vibrant, perfect best. That point of maturity, full bloom, the peak point of physical, artistic and emotional output is a wretched state to observe. It is something that deserves to be preserved in amber, kept for eternity, yet mourned as something absolutely transient. I am just grateful that Blue preserves the voice and genius of Joni at her artistic peak for ever more.
Blue rarely makes it high enough in the ten greatest albums of all time lists. In 2020 it made number 3 in the Rolling Stone yearly rankings, but I suspect that was only because it was coming up for it’s 50th birthday. The boys (and girls…do they even have females writing at Rolling Stone?) at ‘Stone aren’t that sensitive, and appear more concerned with TV shows and BTS than musical genius. Who needs Rolling Stone when there are ears who can hear the reality of Blue – it is perfectly produced, gloriously performed and the material is utter perfection.
Joni is the female Lorca of Love songs: unflinchingly raw, and unashamedly beautiful. There is no simpering or baby- baby-babying, just the honest chase down of love in it’s myriad forms: real love, not pretend, even if that love only lasts for a night and has disappeared in a Joni-infused morning on the Midway.
Joni writes about love: not Van Morrison’s twisted creepy lusting over 14 year old girls in Astral Weeks kind of lust that masquerades as love; nor the colonialist wet dreams of the Stones as they leer over the black music culture they pillaged for sounds and words. The kind of love Joni sings about is not Dylan’s inferior obsession and infatuations of his earlier songs, which was accompanied by his sly whining about parasite sisters and cutesy throwaway Ballad in plain D where the ‘birds (are) free of the skyways’ but love is not free of twisted emotions. It’s not the kind of love Joey Ramone had for his beloved carbona glue; nor the peculiar species of love with jelly on it’s shoulder that Lou Reed rolled and rocked around in whilst hunting down the ‘smelly essence of New York’ in the backrooms and factory floors of New York. It’s not the love of that songbirds Stevie Nicks and Christine Perfect have for their rock and roll men, no!
Joni, the Blonde in the Bleachers knows you ‘can’t hold the hand of a rock and roll man very long’ , and her secret is that she never really wanted to. She would ‘teach her feet to fly’, like she sang in River. Joni ‘made her baby say goodbye’ because that was the price of her freedom. To love is not necessarily never to let go. Blue is all about love, but does not avoid the terrible truth that love can be lost, or else has to be pushed away because the world is imperfect and love is not enough. From Little Green, the love song to the baby she had to give up for adoption, singing ‘you are sad and you are sorry but you are not ashamed’, to the rock-steady dignified song to love-lost song, Case of You, where Joni realizes that she is ‘a lonely painter’. Love is touching souls, sings Joni and she means it. You can’t keep a rock and roll woman drunk on love. Joni can drink ‘ a case of you and still be on (her) feet’, because her true love is her art. The self knowledge of Joni by the time of Blue, the unfiltered self-examination, and the generosity of spirit makes not for a toxic love, but for a glorious, giddy, free-wheelin’ love for life above all things.
Everyone was looking to Dylan for answers, while he uselessly protested that he was just a ‘simple song and dance man’. Dylan tapped into something primal for a while, before he got his hands burnt and had to step away and write Country Pie. Leonard Cohen had his obsessions with his women and their bodies and the kindnesses wrought upon him. Joni knew they were just all Coyotes, wild-dogs of men, who exist ‘between the white lines of the freeway’ who have ‘a woman at home, another down the corridor’ and want her anyway. In Blue, Joni claims her rightful place amongst these coyote-men, the poets and musicians who have got more of the fame and fortune in return for their genius, than Joni was afforded. Blue shines, invioble, a shining example of how ‘love is the finest thing around’, like James Taylor, her ex-lover once sang. Love is found in the airy ‘clouds’ of her earlier work, where painted ponies, but the fullness of love, the wholeness of love, the chase, the loss, the longing, the realization that love is not the panacea to everything, but merely a fortunate and painful by-product of being human. We are both blessed with love and doomed to love at the same time. We can skate away from love, as Joni does in River, and we can fly towards it, as she does in This Flight Tonight, but we cannot escape it. Love is the drug, it is that case of strong alcohol, that ‘holy wine’ that Joni drinks and rejects. It is not just the drug, but it is also the goal and the pitfall of life.
I remember seeing Joni staring starkly out of the screen in the Last Waltz, Bob and the male rock and roll royalty are there on the stage, singing about their light coming shining brightly, remembering the faces of every man that put them ‘there’, while Joni stands alone and stony faced, mic down, seemingly overwhelmed in the cresting tide of self congratulatory testosterone. Drowned out with Neil Young looking far too close and frisky for comfort. She makes her stand, she and her works stands up amongst Dylan and Neil Young-of-the-shitty-lyrics, let alone the rest of the hoi-polloi on that stage, and yet she gets accused of imperiousness. . Sam Shepherd described David Blue relishing the imminent prospect of conflict between Joni and Dylan’s wife, Sara: “Just wait”, said Blue, “till her and Joni get around each other. You’ll get some shit on camera then… Sara’s a very regal, powerful chick, and Joni’s gettin’ into her empress bag now. I mean Joni’s a real queen now. She’s really gettin’ up there.” Why should Joni, one of Dylan’s ‘gifted Kings and Queens’ not be seen as the pure musical and artistic genius that she was and is?
No, the boys cannot allow Joni to be confident, to have an assertive self respect, to defend her position within the Rolling Thunder Revue circus train mélange of egos, cocaine and pills, revolving doors and the ‘temporary lovers’ that she describes in Coyote. She might be surrounded by a pack of dawgs, but she is no foolish goose. I would happily bow at her feet and crown her Queen: This is the woman that wrote the most perfect album of all time. This is the genius who brought Blue into the world.
If Joni had been a man she would have been lauded and paraded in front of Nobel Prize panels. If Joni had been a man she would have been as big as Dylan, and not just for the beauty and perfection of Blue, and it’s dangerous exploration into the newfound realms of love in the 1960s.
Released in 1971, with the earliest demos and performances of unfinished tracks dating back to 1970 and even ’69 in the case of Little Green, this is love from the other side of the tracks, the woman’s side. This is not Dylan’s sour longing jive of his great love song album, Blood on the Tracks. Joni wrote love all the way from the A side of domestic bliss, round the free spirit traveler scene where she will only stay as long as it takes for her skin to turn brown, and she can forgive a ‘red red rogue’ for stealing her camera and her time, before getting around to the darker, sadder, longing side of love on side B. She explores love all the way from love of a place while she remains independent and free in the tumbling breathless California, to her love song for the child she had to give up for adoption, and finally the loves for the various men that fill her time and heart, perhaps most famously Gram Nash and James Taylor, and the eponymous ‘Blue’. I could never imagine her with Gram Nash, he always seemed far too wet and soft for Joni’s diamond hard brilliance, a thought that was not disabused by the line in her song for her Case of You, where in a snipe to rival Dylan, she recounts a conversation they had:
Just before our love got lost you said
Case of You, Joni Mitchell, Blue
“I am as constant as a northern star”
And I said, “Constantly in the darkness
Where’s that at?
If you want me I’ll be in the bar”
Joni isn’t doing the whining or the pedestal-putting the boys are so prone to. Ballad in Plain D, in my opinion, is Dylan’s most unpleasant song, he veers between raising up Suze Rotolo to heights of idealized feminine perfection, dehumanizing her (innocence of a lamb, she was gentle like a fawn), whilst making her sister play the ‘bad woman’ in an almost psychotic, self obsessed spewing of vitriol. The only person Bob saw as a real rounded human being in the whole bad scene, was himself.
Instead, Joni expresses her displeasure, and knocks her lost love down a peg or two, and takes herself down to the bar. How much better is that than the bitching and vitriol?
Side 1 (OK, ok…records haven’t had sides since Post Malone’s mother was a child, but when Blue was released ‘sides were a real thing. A necessary break, a turning over of the vinyl. An enforced separation) is a more joyous rendering of love. All I Want, My Old Man, Little Green, Carey, and the bleak and spare, almost shanty-like Blue, lead the forward pass over the ups and downs of love in a young woman’s life. Love affairs, pregnancies with non conforming men letting you down, rabble rousing in bars with men you party with but don’t care to stay alongside, and ending with the dark side poking it’s head around the corner, “acid, blues and ass, needles, guns and grass…..lots of laughs”. The sixties free love was not nearly so much of a laugh for those ending up picking up the pieces. The laughs are as hollow as men’s promises and their expectations of free love, being free for them, and damn the consequences for women. Lots of laughs, indeed Joni…lots of laughs.
Side 2 is a darker affair of loves lost and prices paid. It opens with the independent brilliance of California, a declaration of love for the state of whom she is it’s ‘biggest fan’, flies across oceans in This Flight Tonight, River, gets drunk on a Case of You, and winds up in the grouchy longing acceptance that love is not what it should be, in The Last Time I saw Richard.
Lorca wrote, in ‘It’s True’ : For love of you, the air, it hurts, and my heart, and my hat, they hurt me. …. Ay, the pain it costs me to love you as I love you! By the time the final chords of The Last Time I Saw Richard ring out, Mitchell realizes Lorca’s vision of love in all its fullness and pain: we have listened to what it sounds like when love reaching the final conclusion of loss and is reflected back in a pale imitation of that which is offered. All love has to be lost or at least transforms into something unsatisfactory and painful. Love can not last forever. Either love grows old and cold and disappears as fast as it comes, or else one of the lovers passes away and that supernatural divide puts love on hold, forcing it to straddle Earth and the Heavens. Even children grow up and move away, making that love something more distant and theoretical than the beautiful days of when they are young and need and love their parents more than anything. Love transforms and is transforms. Love is the engine of the universe, so why then are we surprised when it is anything but simple or happy or perfect?
The pain of love, climaxes in the see saw The Last Time I Saw Richard in which Joni in turns trys to persuade Richard that ‘love can be so sweet’, then falling herself into the blue fug of the phase that ‘all good dreamers’ fall into in their ‘dark café days’. That sweet cynicism makes for an unhappy life but a great song.
Musically, Blue soars and closes into the homely warmth of the piano and dulcimer, never subtracting from the words. Within the clash and clang of This Flight Tonight Joni pushes forward in the tin-can airplane-enclosed world the song inhabits, enclosed in the claustrophobia of being on a flight towards someone that you should never have flown towards. Her free spirit is expressed in piano and dulcimer, in strangely tuned guitars and those perfect cut-glass vocals. The best of art doesn’t just tell you what it sees and what it hears, it lets you live the experience yourself through the words, or the sounds or the images. We see the world through Vincent’s eyes, all the whirling gorgeous blue-ness of his vision. We experience the world through the reproduction of love and longing within the sounds of these beautiful and culturally vital albums. These are holy experiences. This Flight Tonight, one of the few songs that got covered, by Nazareth of all bands, lets the listener hear and feel what it is to be listening to ‘bye bye baby’ Ronettes on headphones, the whoosh of the engines and the feeling that the whole escapade was doomed to failure.
Joni preferred the hunt of real love to the mundane reality of the ‘dishwashers and coffee percolators’ of Richard’s marriage to the figure skater. She would rather find rivers to skate away on, than skate in pretty circles trapped inside an ice rink. There is always another ‘best baby’ around the corner…until there isn’t…and when there isn’t there is always California and those ‘Sunset pigs’…!
Blue is the expression of love and loss, longing rendered in perfect vocals and a driving coherent musical manifesto of folk. It might well be the best album of all time, and if I was pushed I would put it at the very top of any rankings of the best albums of all time. Not an easy job, but what else is there apart from love? Blue is love turned to sound. Blue is art not entertainment.
When I had to chose a pen name, I was immediately drawn to Joni’s Blue for inspiration. The album is so much part of my emotional life that “part of (Joni) pours of me in these lines…from time to time…’ I fell in love with Joni and her freedom loving ways, and the fact she became the artist she deserved to be, even at the cost of love. Nothing else seemed right apart from the opening lines of The Last Time I Saw Richard:
The last time I saw Richard was Detroit in 68
The Last Time I Saw Richard, Joni Mitchell. Blue.
And he told me, “All romantics meet the same fate
Some day, cynical and drunk and boring
Someone in some dark cafe”
The name “Detroit” reminded me of who I am. I am that girl who listened to her own ‘Richard’ telling her how I was doomed because of love, doomed to not love or be loved, that my romantic visions of being loved were faulty and insufficient. He was cruel, but he was right. Love might be the drug, it might be the cure, it might make the world go round but for us dreamers, the romantics and the artists and the writers, it never meets up to our expectations and we end up drunk and cynical and boring others in our beloved Cafe Vesuvio, telling them how love sucks, love isn’t enough, and how the muse demands we whore out love in exchange for art. Whenever I find myself falling for the lie of love, I tell myself that I am not alone, my experience is not unique and to remember that one day, like Joni sang, I will ‘get my gorgeous wings and fly away’ into a bright blue sky.
Bellissima !! Now I know the why to your name !! <3
Hah! It is a bit of a convoluted story! Miss you!