Joni Mitchell’s scathing assessment of five classic musicians
When we reflect on the countercultural period, images of tie-dye shirts, out-of-it longhairs and the rather ridiculous notion of ‘peace and love’ come to mind. Although these stereotypes aren’t unfounded, with many of the era’s most prominent artists propping them up in various ways, there are some closely tied to the period who eschew this nuance-abstaining picture. Perhaps the most famous is Joni Mitchell.
There can be no doubt that the Canadian has had a widespread impact on music. Whether it be through pioneering folk and imbuing a cerebral substance into it, which paved the way for many subsequent acts – including Led Zeppelin, who referenced her on ‘Going to California’ – her poetic brilliance or dedication to constantly artistically evolving, Mitchell has mostly led by example as an artist. Now would be an apt time to bring up the problematic history she has with wearing blackface, though.
As that strange aspect of her career might suggest, outside her unbridled creativity and mellifluous vocals, Mitchell isn’t the peace-loving countercultural heroin she’s often celebrated as. She might have soundtracked the era with classics such as ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ and ‘Help Me’ and aesthetically typified the Laurel Canyon chic of the era. Still, just as several of her peers from the time are known for their outspoken nature, disavowing the general hippie vibe, she takes it to a whole new level.
Serene sonic approach aside, Mitchell’s personality has never been one to espouse peace and love like many of her famous contemporaries. It makes for a fascinating juxtaposition that someone deemed so inextricable from the egalitarian, communal essence of her era due to the beauty of her work is actually one of the most prickly characters in music. She has an acid tongue and has stung many classic artists with it during her time.
While she’s made no bones about hating hippies, another quite unbelievable point given her status, she’s also been pretty brazen in trashing other artists, either due to their work, personalities or both. I’d say that isn’t very hippie at all.
Joni Mitchell’s tough opinions of classic artists:
Leonard Cohen
It’s well known that Mitchell and fellow Canadian songwriting supremo Leonard Cohen were drawn to each other when they first met at the Newport Folk Festival in 1967, and began a short-lived relationship. That was the year that Cohen released his debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, and his contemporary folk sound was a refreshing force within the genre, typified by the infallible ‘Suzanne’.
Like the rest of the folk community, Mitchell was a big fan of Cohen’s work when he burst onto the scene. However, things soon changed when she realised that he wasn’t as original of a lyricist as he was cracked up to be. You get the feeling that perhaps the feelings were also compounded by their personal relationship.
“I briefly liked Leonard Cohen,” Mitchell once said of her ex. While this was strange, given that she’d previously claimed she was “only a groupie for Picasso and Leonard”, she did expand on why.
“Leonard was an early influence,” she said. “I remember thinking when I heard his songs for the first time that I was not worldly. My work seemed very young and naive in comparison. At the time I met him, I was around 24, around the time of my first record”. However, Mitchell quickly outgrew her old flame, adding, “But thematically, I wanted to be broader than he was. In many ways, Leonard was a boudoir poet.”
Elsewhere, speaking to New York Magazine, Mitchell revealed that as she extended her grasp on literature, she realised a few things about Cohen. “Though 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,” she said, with this seriously undoing Cohen’s artistic mystique for her.
Janis Joplin / Grace Slick
Although Mitchell is one of the definitive female artists of the counterculture, two other artists were also critical for the arc of the era and music itself: Janis Joplin and Grace Slick. While the late Big Brother and the Holding Company and Jefferson Airplane front ladies were close friends, Mitchell was never a fan of either of them. She’s been pretty harsh about them in the past.
While no one can doubt either of the pair’s artistic vitality or significance, their hellraising was more than enough to make Mitchell wince. It reflected her largely conservative values that contradict those of the generation she’s so closely associated with.
Speaking to the LA Times in 2010, Mitchell denounced both Joplin and Slick, reducing their entire careers to “sleeping with their whole bands and falling down drunk”. While Joplin, who tragically died in 1970 at the age of 27, could not defend herself, the excellent Slick, clarified on social media, “We didn’t really fall down all that much.”
This wasn’t the first time Mitchell had taken a shot at Joplin. Two years prior, when speaking to Mojo, she said of the long-passed Texan: “She was very competitive with me, very insecure. She was the ‘Queen of Rock ’n’ Roll’ [one year], and then Rolling Stone made me the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll, and she hated me after that.”
Offering a starkly contrasting statement during that same interview, Mitchell said earnestly: “I always thought the women of song don’t get along, and I don’t know why that is.” Pretty ironic that, Joni.
Don Henley
By the time the Eagles broke out, Mitchell had long been an icon. Although the ‘Hotel California’ outfit would openly describe her tremendous influence on them, and drummer/songwriter Don Henley provided backing vocals on her 1988 album, Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm, a few years later, she explained why she thinks Henley is a “jerk”.
When asked about the varying ways her contemporaries dealt with fame, she told Mojo in 1994: “I don’t like ragging on people and making ’em look bad. This makes [Don] Henley look kinda like a jerk, but shall I tell you it anyway? OK, to me, this is kind of funny.”
Mitchell recalled a strange encounter one night after seeing Sting and her friend and musical partner, Vinnie Colaiuta, playing live. However, her excitement soon cooled when she saw Colaiuta playing alone, without Sting. Then, she was the first to arrive at the afterparty and was “real cranky”. This encouraged her to approach Henley, who was sitting alone in a booth.
Despite Mitchell’s impact on his work, Henley wasn’t as welcoming as he perhaps should have been. He wore a clearly worried expression, and it didn’t take long for the sharp Mitchell to realise that he was waiting for Sting. She casually brushed it off and went to sit with Colaiuta, Bruce Springsteen, and his wife.
Later, Sting arrived, and Henley’s attitude changed. She recalled: “At that point, Henley sends an emissary, a woman, to my table who says, ‘You can come and sit with Sting and Henley now.’ So, I launch myself into the air, and I yell at Henley over at the end of the room: ‘Never!’”
Frank Zappa
On paper, you’d think Mitchell and Frank Zappa would be best friends. Both hated hippies, with the latter a particularly vociferous opponent of drug use. However, Zappa had a penchant for a different kind of intoxicant: sex. This would encroach into Mitchell’s peaceful existence in the Canyon and make her hate the ‘Cosmik Debris’ songwriter forever.
It wouldn’t just be Mitchell who would be offended by Zappa constantly shooting off his love gun, but her mother, too. “My dining room looked out over Frank Zappa’s duck pond, and once when my mother was visiting, three naked girls were floating around on a raft in the pond,” she told Vanity Fair in 2015. “My mother was horrified by my neighbourhood”.
Instances like this made their pair occasionally combative neighbours, but thankfully, due to the nature of their profession, which meant they were away most of the time, the divide was kept from deepening further.
Kurt Cobain
It seems that Joni Mitchell isn’t afraid of trashing dead people, including the members of the ’27 Club’. Despite erroneously once describing herself as a “punk”, something the late Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain was until the end, she is not a fan of his music and does not buy into his hero status.
Speaking to Time Magazine in 1998, Mitchell outlined her view on modern music and grumbled that most things she heard on the radio were “crap”. In another astounding moment of irony, she noted that she didn’t hate everything and was a big fan of Janet Jackson’s ‘Got ‘Til It’s Gone’, which samples ‘Big Yellow Taxi’. Despite her history of blackface, she said: “Most of my favourite artists are black, all modern music is black.”
In a truly maddening shift in pace only Mitchell could institute, she then took shots at Cobain, who had died by suicide four years earlier. She cruelly stated: “Everybody says Kurt Cobain was a great writer. I don’t see it. Why is he a hero? Whining and killing yourself – I fail to see the heroism in that.”
