Joni interviewed by Camille Paglia, 2005
rmjon23
age ago in "Woodstock," paving the way for a generation of artists to
open their imaginations to the gleaming potential of pop and to making
music that matters. Here, Mitchell and Camille Paglia discuss how
striving for those ideals, in these new, uncertain times, has never
seemed more crucial.(Interview). Camille Paglia.
Interview 35.7 (August 2005): p112(7).
In her new best-selling book, Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads
Forty-three of the World's Best Poems (Pantheon), Interview's
contributing editor Camille Paglia offers a meditation on Joni
Mitchell's classic song "Woodstock." Here she talks with the music
legend about her new album, Songs of a Prairie Girl (Rhino Records),
and the many sources of her inspiration.
CAMILLE PAGLIA: Is this Joni?
JONI MITCHELL: This is Joni.
CP: Oh, wow, I'm floored to be speaking to one of the great artists of
our time!
JM: So, what should we talk about?
CP: I'm interested in your creative process. You've lived a whole life
as an artist in ways that are very inspiring to young people who lack
role models today. As a lifelong fan of pop culture, I'm worried about
the way it's supplanting artistic experience for young people now.
JM: Well, America has always loved its criminals, but in the last two
decades the sediment has truly risen to the top. To me, underbelly
cultures are always interesting, but when those subcultures grab the
reins and rise to a dominating position, especially in youth-oriented
mediums, there are sociological consequences.
CP: Your music often explores the metaphysics of love--the ecstasy and
melancholy, the ups and downs. Just a few days ago, I was standing in
the plumbing section of Home Depot when your song "Help Me" came over
the loudspeaker. It's absolutely gorgeous and has enduring popular
appeal. It captures the subtleties and emotional modalities of being
in love or out of love. But that kind of complex insight seems gone.
Young musicians were once the cutting edge of culture, but no more.
JM: When we started out, it was uncharted waters. I mean, it's not
like I grew up playing air guitar in front of my bedroom mirror.
Artists were still disreputable. I was a painter and wanted to go to
art school, but my parents didn't want me to--to be an artist wasn't
respectable. Then the Beatles hit, and suddenly people thought,
"There's gold in 'dem hills." I never thought I'd have a record deal.
I come from a wheat-farming community where it's the tall poppy
formula: Stick your head above the crowd, and they'll be happy to lop
it off for you! [Paglia laughs] You weren't encouraged to be
exceptional unless it was about getting A's in school--but there's no
creativity to that.
CP: This is why your body of work has such quality. You were
developing your imagination and your voice before outside commercial
pressures began. Now young people instantly covet the recording
contract. Unfortunately, the fabulous music-video revolution of the
'80s degenerated and turned music into image and posing.
JM: I heard a record executive say on the radio that they were no
longer looking for talent but rather for a look and a willingness to
cooperate, because with Pro Tools they can fix anything. There's
always been a disposable quality to this business.
CP: I've been teaching at art schools for most of my career, and I can
clearly see the way the business is short-circuiting young artists'
development. They don't have time to percolate.
JM: The reason I did is because the record company didn't value me at
all. This was to my advantage. They got me dirt cheap--they didn't
know how to market me. I looked like a folk musician because I'd been
playing in clubs for several years, which I really enjoyed. You could
jump down off that stage, and you were still one of the people--they
didn't gasp at the mention of your name. It was comfortable, and you
could experiment. Warner Reprise had no money invested in me and
therefore left me alone--not out of kindness but out of disinterest.
CP: But wasn't there a tremendous buzz in the music community about
your songs?
JM: Actually, other artists would cross the street when I walked by!
Initially, I thought that was due to elitism, but I later found out
they were intimidated by me. Led Zeppelin was very courageous and
outspoken about liking my music, but others wouldn't admit it. My
market was women, and for many years the bulk of my audience was
black, but straight white males had a problem with my music. They
would come up to me and say, "My girlfriend really likes your music,"
as if they were the wrong demographic.
CP: The musical landscape has changed profoundly. In my commentary on
your song "Woodstock," I stress the enormous difference between
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's upbeat hard-rock version and the way
you perform it as a moody art song. Their style had the cultural
momentum for decades, but I think the hard-rock moment in popular
music is over. I'm sad because it was such a huge part of my youth.
JM: I've seen things written about "Woodstock" in university courses
on the '60s--they really like to nail me for the naive idealism of it,
whereas you were able to get the ironic tone. At that time, I felt so
desperately that we were placed here to be the custodians of the
planet Eden. So for the first 10 or 20 performances of that song, I
used to get a lump in my throat. I felt that the primitives who
remained on the planet were still living in harmony with nature,
versus us--the supreme white guy, with our scientific monstrosities,
playing with half a deck! We need to get a grip on our original
destiny and learn to love the wild and save what's left of it and not
go paving over farmlands that we may need someday. This is the farmer
in me speaking. I'm the first generation of my genealogy off the farm,
so it's in my blood to think in terms of good soil and weather.
[laughs]
CP: This brings us to your new album, Songs of a Prairie Girl. You
come from Central and Western Canada, a great open landscape that has
clearly given you vision and perspective.
JM: In looking at the album I found that it's all about winter and
wanting to get out of there! [both laugh] The song "Big Yellow Taxi"
was inspired by my first trip to Hawaii. I woke up after my first
night there, looked out the window, and saw these green mountains and
white flying birds and then, down on the ground, a parking lot as far
as I could see. When that song was released as a single, it was a hit
only in Hawaii at first--it took people in other places a while to
realize that their region was paradise and that they were losing it
too.
CP: You have such a strong eye for detail, be it for nature or the
city or people or colors. It's one of the hallmarks of your writing.
Is it because you grew up on the prairie?
JM: Well, I'm a painter, so I tend to think in pictures and store
pictorial information, like an autistic person.
CP: You're a superb model for young, aspiring artists because of your
vast range: music, literature, and art all melded together.
JM: I'm a Renaissance person in that I express myself in three arts. I
work to get them all up to a certain standard through discipline and
observation. You have to be self-adjudicating and self-critical.
CP: You also have a gift for improvisation.
JM: Improvisation takes nerve. It requires taking a chance and also
failing. You have to overcome fear. My mother was always saying,
"You're too sensitive," and "You think too much for a female." That
comes under the banner of that generation's "Don't worry your pretty
little head about it!" In Plato's utopia, you could not be a poet and
a painter and a musician. You had to pick one. CP: Plato felt that
poets and artists couldn't be trusted because they questioned
authority and religion and therefore were dissidents who would
threaten the stability of the ideal state.
JM: Absolutely. I did an album called Dog Eat Dog [1985], which was
not well received. It contained headline stories, such as the fall of
Jimmy Swaggart.
CP: I know you take the issue of evangelical Christianity very
seriously.
JM: I take the marriage of church and state very seriously. On Sunset
Boulevard during the Reagan era, there were pink billboards with black
letters saying, "Rock 'n' Roll is the Devil," signed by Jerry Falwell
and the Moral Majority. Reagan was very cozy with him. When I put that
album out, the church was watching rock 'n' roll, playing it
backwards, looking for diabolical messages. When the album was
released, I was challenged to a debate on The 700 Club by Pat
Robertson, though I got congratulatory letters from an Episcopalian
Church and from the Crystal Cathedral, which really surprised me. They
said, "We need more artists like you."
CP: During the George W. Bush administration, the evangelical movement
has intensified its cultural pressure in the U.S. There are more and
more cable TV channels devoted to religious broadcasting.
JM: Oh, it's very lucrative. It's a nice little business to get into
if you're a good rapper.
CP: The big scandals involving Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Baker made
evangelists seem to disappear for a while, but they were still
powerful under the national media radar. You took a strong public
stand against them.
JM: Swaggart was declaring war from the pulpit [paraphrasing her song
"Tax Free" from Dog Eat Dog]: "Our nation has lost its guts, our
nation has whimpered and cried and pandered to the Khomeinis and the
Qaddafis for so long that we don't know how to act like men." He even
declared war on Cuba! I watched all the televised church services in
search of an honest man, and all I saw were criminal con men fleecing
the flocks. Christianity is an ancient Egyptian myth, laminated,
presented like the history of a person who actually lived. Most of the
story is ancient mythology--walking on water, virgin birth. Don't get
me started on the scare of Christianity!
CP: Early Christianity was about renouncing materialism and worldly
status. That's what's troubling about so many TV evangelists
soliciting cash.
JM: Christianity was basically the Roman Empire in disguise.
CP: What part did religion play in your youth?
JM: My father was Lutheran, and my mother was Presbyterian. So they
went to the United church, which was for mixed Christian marriages. I
broke with the Church at age 7, because Genesis raised a lot of
questions for me--it seemed like pages had been ripped out of the
Book. I'd ask in Sunday school, like, "Why did God punish Eve when he
was really after Adam?" That story has been compelling to me all my
life.
CP: So your parents were religious?
JM: No, but they went to church. That's a distinction. My grandmother
was a Bible beater--she quoted the Bible, and my mother quoted
Shakespeare, mostly Ophelia's father, Polonius, all that platitudinous
stuff.
CP: So how did you manage to break with the church mentally at 7,
given that the community was so conformist?
JM: The church was loaded with holy hypocrites. Basically, it was a
place to wear your new hat. But there came a new preacher, one of the
great heroes of my life, a Scottish minister with a Burmese wife who
never converted from Buddhism. He gave the only inspired sermon I ever
heard. My father and I still talk about it.
CP: How did your interest in the visual arts begin?
JM: With Bambi [1942]. I always drew, but, being a sensitive child,
the fire in that film haunted me. The downside of sensitivity is that
when you get stuck on a topic, you can't get off it--it's another
quality that artistic and autistic people share. I was down on my
knees for about three days after that movie, drawing forest fires and
deer running.
CP: You have a fire image on the front of Dreamland [2004].
JM: Oh, that's just George W. Bush burning down the world. All my
paintings lately have been Bush bonfires. It's the same as the forest
fire in Bambi, with the hideous white hunter.
CP: So that film started you drawing and painting?
JM: That, and something that happened in the second grade. There were
so many of us that year that they annexed a parish hall and dragged an
old lady out of retirement to teach us. She put all the A averages in
one row she called the Bluebirds, all the B's in a row called the
Robins, the C's in a row called the Wrens, and then the D's. I was in
the C row. I remember how the A's looked so smug and pleased with
themselves, but I didn't like any of the kids in the A row. I liked
them better in the C and the D rows--the ones who were bored and not
trying or even the ones who were a little simple. I have this
prejudice against the illusory sense of attainment associated with the
educational system on this continent.
CP: I totally agree!
JM: Yes. I see that in you. I'm glad you exist and have a good loud
voice, because you can do some good in terms of reeducating about
poetry and everything. Thank you for including me in your book, which
took some nerve.
CP: I love that my book starts with Shakespeare and ends with Joni
Mitchell! I write that in the 40 years since Sylvia Plath's "Daddy,"
no poem written in English has been more important, influential, and
popular than "Woodstock."
JM: The irony is that the line "I dreamed I saw the bombers riding
shotgun in the sky/and they were turning into butterflies above our
nation" has been taken as girly and silly and too idealistic. But the
point of it is, we've got to do that--if we don't, we're done. There's
a genuine urgency. Huge numbers of species have become extinct, and
when that many species go, everything is out of whack. Now everybody's
got these damn bombs, and they're testing them underground and under
the ocean.
CP: At what point did you become an environmentalist?
JM: I grew up in a really tough town--the kids were as mean as New
York kids, so when they got too much for me, I would ride my bike out
into the country. I'd sit in the bushes, smoke, and watch the birds
fly. I wrote a poem when I was 11 about a boy living on a farm who
overhears his father saying he's going take this bluff down, and the
bluff is everything to the boy. I take it through all of the seasons:
"Slapping a puck into an orange crate goal, applauded only by the wind
that banged and clanged and shuttered in the greenery door."
CP: So you could have been a poet, yet you began to work with the
piano.
JM: Why am I not a poet?
CP: No, you are a poet! What I mean is that you moved from the page to
music, and somehow music allowed you to express yourself more. What
was the first instrument you worked with?
JM: My experience in that second-grade classroom, where I was made a
third-class citizen, kind of answers that question. That teacher's
approach to learning was to say something, for us to memorize it, and
then to have us spit it back, which didn't interest me. I remember
thinking, If she gives us something to solve that she doesn't know the
answer to, then I'm in--but if not, then I don't care. What gave me
the courage to become an artist, though, was that one day she had us
draw a three-dimensional doghouse, and everybody's was either too tall
and skinny or the perspective was off. I drew the best one, and I drew
security from that. At that moment I forged my identity as a visual
artist. I also pissed off the educational system by spacing out,
squeaking by, and finally flunking chemistry and math in grade 12 and
having to repeat it.
CP: When did music enter the mix?
JM: I had a hard time finding kids to play with, but I did make
friends with two kids: One was a piano prodigy, and the other was
studying opera. That was the only creativity in the community. They
were considered kind of nerds, but they had imagination, and we used
to put on circuses and get all the other kids involved and charge
admission, which we'd give to the Red Cross. The father of one of
these kids was the school principal, and sometimes he'd let us out to
go to a movie. One we saw was The Story of Three Loves [1953] with
Kirk Douglas, which was made up of three stories, with the piece
"Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini" by Rachmaninov. The music made me
swoon. I asked to buy it, but it wasn't in the budget. So I'd go down
to this department store that was across from my dad's little market,
and I would take the record out of its brown sleeve and go into a
listening booth and play it. One day I said to my parents that I
wanted to take piano lessons, and they sent me to a woman who, as all
piano teachers did in those days, rapped my knuckles with a ruler.
CP: [laughs] They were horrible!
JM: Oof! Some people can survive it, but I couldn't. She killed my
love for the piano. It was like the church and school, so I quit. And
as a result my mother viewed me as a quitter and the expenditure on
the piano as a waste of money, so years later when I wanted to play
guitar, she refused to buy me one. Once I got into the music business,
the next killer of my love would have been working with a producer. In
the music business you have these unmusical people who are unjust and
red queenish and domineering and untalented--they take a lot of your
money and push you towards commerce instead of art.
CP: Is that why you didn't want a producer for much of your career?
JM: Yes. David Crosby produced my first record, but he liked my music
the way it was. The record company expected him to turn me into a folk
rocker, which was bankable, but he only pretended to. Then on the
second record I got this really cocksure guy who was producing for the
Doors. We cut one song together, and it was hell. I'd be singing with
my eyes closed, and he'd burst into the middle of the performance like
a heckler. Or you'd get all full of adrenaline, and he'd go, "No!" And
then at the end of the session, he'd look at his watch and say, "Well,
I gotta go produce the Doors, but I'll be back in two weeks." So I
asked the engineer whether he thought we could get the record done
before he got back, because if I had to work with him, my love of
music was going to die. He grinned at me and said he thought so, and
we got the record done within those two weeks. I never used a producer
again until I married Larry Klein.
CP: So you were producing yourself?
JM: My point is, if you have a vision and you know what you want, you
most definitely don't need a producer, but that was unheard of. I
ultimately had to put it in my contract that I didn't have to use one.
I mean, did Beethoven have a producer? Did Mozart? On Court and Spark
[1974], I sang all of the melodies onto the tape. Same thing with For
the Roses [1972], where some of it was written out by a scribe and
reproduced by other instruments. So that was the way I was able to
score my own music, by sketching it with my voice.
CP: Do ideas for songs or melodies come to you at odd times, or do you
consciously sit down to try to write?
JM: Well, I don't write at all anymore. I quit everything in '97 when
my daughter [whom Mitchell gave up for adoption in infancy in 1965-
Ed.] came back. Music was something I did to deal with the tremendous
disturbance of losing her. It began when she disappeared and ended
when she returned. I was probably deeply disturbed emotionally for
those 33 years that I had no child to raise, though I put on a brave
face. Instead, I mothered the world and looked at the world in which
my child was roaming from the point of view of a sociologist. And
everything I worried about then has turned out to be true.
CP: It sometimes sounds as if you were thinking through the piano
during that period.
JM: I'd just sit at the piano and lay hands on it and make shapes,
kind of like abstract expressionism. But I have a gift for melody, so
I know when it sounds noodley--which is more than most contemporary
composers know. [both laugh] Forgive my arrogance, but it's true!
CP: I read somewhere that you particularly like Cezanne. Is that
true?
JM: No. In fact, in the '80s I bit the bullet and found an original
voice as an abstractionist. Initially, I had no respect for
abstraction, and I took that with me to art school, where all the
profs were pouring paint down incline planes. [laughs] There I was an
honor student because I had chops, but the attitude was: You're a
commercial artist, not a fine artist, because the time of the camera
has come. But for a painter especially, originality is the goal. You
want to plant the flag where no one else has been, whereas in music,
if you adhere to a tradition, you'll do better. If you're after money,
don't try anything original in music, because you won't get the votes.
In order to have a hit, you have to dumb down a lot.
CP: Do you mostly paint in a home studio?
JM: I've had official studios, especially for the abstract
expressionist work, which is messy and big. But in the '90s, I
thought, No, I'm going to go back to where my heart is: I'm going to
paint as they did during the period of Van Gogh and Gauguin--
postimpressionism. So I paint like that, although those artists were
formed by their religions. You have to be trained to believe in your
imagination in order to swallow the Bible, whereas the Calvinists
concluded that the Bible was really just an archaic relic and that
Jesus would be more approving of taking long walks in the woods than
he would of studying religious dogma.
CP: Calvinism has been the source of a lot of the hostility or
indifference toward the arts in the U.S. The Puritan tradition was
directed toward practicality and work, and therefore art and beauty
were considered frivolous.
JM: Practical--I have those values, and Van Gogh had them too.
CP: Do you do your landscapes in the studio, or do you actually go out
into nature?
JM: Both. But like Picasso, I never know when they're done. I live
with them. I'll go, "That part is not quite right." You know, they
once stopped an old man in the Louvre trying to deface a Picasso, and
it turned out to be Picasso himself! [laughs] He was continuously
dissatisfied and sometimes buried the best painting underneath the
final work.
Camille Paglia has a culture column that appears regularly in
Interview.
cheney_satan_08
"rmjon23" <rmj...@aol.com> wrote in message news:1172922124.1...@j27g2000cwj.googlegroups.com...
rmjon23
> I love Joni. Camille's sucking up like shes trying to get laid
I love 'em both. Camille seems to be pretty monogamous with her
girlfriend, Something Maddox?
In 2005 Camille put out a book called Break, Blow, Burn, and it's
another in a long line of poetry anthologies that PhDs put out every
now and then (esp people like her mentor Harold Bloom), in which the
intellectual picks hir favorite poems (in this case Eng and American)
and dissects them for the reader's delight. The last "poem" in the
book is Joni's "Woodstock." Paglia truly digs Joni. But Paglia errs in
analyzing (unless I hear Joni wrong) the part "We are stardust/We are
golden," and Joni sticks in "billion-year-old carbon." Camille sez,
yea, the hippies were onto the fact that the astrophysicists tell us
we are truly made of "million"-year-old-carbon. I don't know about
you, Camille, but my stuff was forged in a star at _least_ a billion
years ago. A million was, like, last week on the astronomical time
scale.
Sorry to be so pedantic, but this newsgroup has been doormant, and I
thought I oughtta go OFF on SOMETHING! (Camille's way smarter than me,
so I had to get a dig in someway?)
-misha
cheney_satan_08
will profit greatly from the observations of the greatest evangelist
ever to grace the American continent.
The Narrative is divided into three sections:
I. A General Introductory Statement,
II. The Manner of Conversions Various, Yet Bearing a Great Analogy,
III. This Work Further Illustrated in Particular Instances.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Rev. and Honored Sir,
Having seen your letter to my honored Uncle Williams of Hatfield, of
July 20, wherein you inform him of the notice that has been taken of the
late wonderful work of God, in this and some other towns in this
country, by the Rev. Dr. Watts, and Dr. Guyse, of London, and the
congregation to which the last of these preached on a monthly day of
solemn prayer; also, of your desire to be more perfectly acquainted with
it, by some of us on the spot: and having been since informed by my
Uncle Williams that you desire me to undertake it, I would now do it, in
a just and faithful a manner as in me lies.
SECTION I. A General Introductory Statement
The people of the country, in general, I suppose, are as sober, orderly,
and good sort of people, as in any part of New England; and I believe
they have been preserved the freest by far of any part of the country,
from error, and variety of sects and opinions. Our being so far within
the land, at a distance from sea-ports, and in a corner of
rmjon23
mirth, and company-keeping. But a sermon was now preached on the sabbath
before the lecture, to show the evil tendency of the practice, and to
persuade them to reform it; and it was urged on heads of families that
it should be a thing agreed upon among them, to govern their families,
and keep their children at home, at these times. It was also more
privately moved, that they should meet together the next day, in their
several neighborhoods, to know each other's minds; which was accordingly
done, and the notion complied with throughout the town. But parents
found little or no occasion for the exercise of government in the case.
The young people declared themselves convinced by what they had heard
from the pulpit, and were willing of themselves to comply with the
counsel that had been given: and it was immediately, and, I suppose,
almost universally, complied with; and there was a thorough reformation
of these disorders thenceforward, which has continued ever since.
Presently after this, there began to appear a remarkable religious
concern at a little village belonging to the congregation called
Pascommuck, where a few families were settled, at about three miles
distance from the main body of the town. At this place, a number of
persons seemed to be savingly wrought upon. In the April following, anno
1734, there happened a very sudden and awful death of a young man in the
bloom of his youth; who being violently seized with a pleurisy, and
taken immediately very delirious, died in about two days; which
(together with what was preached publicly on that occasio