Mercenaries, copy cats, and peacocks: All the artists Joni Mitchell hated once she got to New York
If you were to take only Patti Smith’s word for it, you would think the Chelsea Hotel in New York was a total lovefest of artistic influence back in the day. However, Joni Mitchell tells a very different story.
As we have all become well accustomed to by now, Mitchell has absolutely no qualms when it comes to addressing her issues with any kind of people, places, or things in the world. Of course, there have been occasions where this has landed her in her share of hot water, but this has largely glided off the duck’s back – she doesn’t care what people think or whether her opinions will land her on any unpopularity lists, because she simply cannot hide what she thinks.
In some ways, it’s a solid mantra to live by, but there’s also something about Mitchell’s searing honesty that at times feels a little unsolicited, especially when it comes to her unprovoked attack on the Bard himself. Sure, you can be a lyric-writing genius all you want, but no one can outdo the father of the history of literature. It’s heavy talk to suggest you’re somehow greater than that. However, it would be down to Mitchell to try.
Naturally, she had no issues in admitting as much during an interview where she recalled her earliest days stomping the streets of the Big Apple, which were obviously flooded with inspirations, but not always in the form she would like to take them. It’s not an unreasonable assumption to suggest that, given how literate Mitchell’s lyrics can often be, that she might have been guided by Shakespeare himself. But she was clearly offended by this idea. “I didn’t like poetry,” she sneered. “When I read the Shakespearean sonnets, I feel like some of them are mercenary. How many poems can you write where you say, ‘You’re so beautiful that you should reproduce yourself and I’m the guy to do it’? They can’t all be inspired.”
But she wasn’t done by insulting the legacy of the literary god, because she also decided to take aim at the supposed Shakespeares of the musical world, as well. Leonard Cohen was a let-down because “once I read Camus and Lorca I started to realise that he had taken a lot of lines from those books, which was disappointing to me.” Bob Dylan famously wasn’t much better, but he was an “influence even though initially I was a detractor. I thought he was a Woody Guthrie copycat.”
In short, Mitchell only had respect for people who she thought were truly original, or at least offered something substantial to say. But there was a line that had to be drawn – you couldn’t be too avant-garde, bear in mind. In terms of the art world, she also hated “Abstract Expressionists like [Jackson] Pollock and Barnett Newman,” who “were big at the time, but I was not a fan. I wanted to paint in a folk-artist-y way.” This, from the woman who later rebuked the title of being a folk artist, was certainly a rich thing to say.
But nevertheless, that is and was simply the Mitchell way, and you just have to learn to accept it, whether you happen to agree or not. For most, New York is a hive of artistic muses; people, places, and sights that combine to infuse a touch of magic in the air. For Mitchell, it seemed to be nothing more than a ruse of a scene, and she clearly felt she had to call out some of its sham pretences for what they were.
