“They were right”: the one album that killed Joni Mitchell’s career
Joni Mitchell wasn’t trying to become one of the biggest pinup stars of the day when she first started.
Every single artist she respected was from the singer-songwriter world, and even if she could rub elbows with everyone from David Crosby to James Taylor, most of her contemporaries were standing in awe of the kind of music that she could make whenever she busted out the acoustic guitar. These were some of the most finely-crafted songs that any pop star had ever made, but Mitchell had her eye on something much bigger than being a big presence on the charts.
Because, really, a lot of Mitchell’s greatest influences were from the days before rock and roll was even a major force on the charts. One of the first pieces of music that she fell in love with was the work of Rachmaninoff, and while she wasn’t going to dive headfirst into being a classical composer right out of the gate, you could tell that she had a lot more nuance in the way she structured her vocal melodies.
Every single syllable that she sang had to mean something, and as much as her poetry helped establish a scene for every song, the melody was what drew the picture in the audience’s mind whenever she made a record. But after going through some of the finest songs of her career on tracks like Blue and Court and Spark, Mitchell wanted to see what she could do if she moved into more sophisticated territory.
She had long been a fan of the greatest figures in jazz, and when she started working on some of her later albums like Hejira and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, there were pieces that delved deeper into complex harmony. No one had heard anything like ‘Amelia’ on the charts with its various chord changes and smooth guitar lines, but when she started to work on pure jazz music, she knew that she would be taking a massive gamble.
Not everyone is able to make that transition to hanging with giants like Miles Davis, but when she began her album with Charles Mingus, Mitchell never took a single second of her time on the album for granted. She was getting the chance to work with one of the greatest musicians she had ever known, but while the end result was absolutely beautiful, Mitchell was a little bit jaded when she found out that there was no market for it.
This was supposed to be the album that opened her up to a new audience, but when she brought it to the record company, she remembered that the album basically ruined her career as a hitmaker again, saying, “Then along came the Mingus album, which, as I was warned by my manager, would lose me FM airplay. I would be ‘excommunicated’. I thought, ‘That’s impossible.’ Turned out, they were right. It never got on the airwaves again. But I would do it again in a minute for the education of stepping deeply into jazz. That’s when my friendship with Herbie (Hancock) began. And I made my best friends in that camp.”
But when you think about it, the fact that she delved into more complex music shouldn’t have been a commercial death sentence. If you think about the modern age, Lady Gaga has numerous albums where she delved into the Great American Songbook, and yet she’s still looked at as one of the best pop stars that we have right now, so why couldn’t Mitchell have done the same thing?
Well, as it turns out, sometimes being right too early is the same thing as being wrong, and while Mingus was wildly ahead of its time by most pop star standards, it wasn’t something that the world was ready for. Mitchell didn’t deserve that fate, but now we can at least look back on it as one of the true watershed moments of her career.
