Joni Mitchell’s issue with Grace Slick and Janis Joplin: “Very insecure”
The vibrant music scene of 1960s America would have been nothing without the songwriting talents of Joni Mitchell. Rising to prominence among the singer-songwriter boom along with iconic figures like Joan Baez or Bob Dylan, Mitchell wasted no time in asserting her profound talent for capturing the zeitgeist of the time in song. Her title as an icon of the era is undisputed, but she certainly did not endear herself towards some of the other artists who earned that title.
When looking at the American music scene and hippie counterculture of the time, there are two figures that are virtually unavoidable: Grace Slick and Janis Joplin. Both hugely influential vocalists within the psychedelic rock scene in San Francisco, the two women helped to define the hippie movement. With Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company, respectively, Slick and Joplin quickly became known as the premier vocalists of the Bay Area psych scene.
Surely, anybody who has ever heard ‘White Rabbit’ or ‘Piece of My Heart’ cannot deny the vocal brilliance of Grace Slick or Janis Joplin. However, it was their penchant for the lifestyle of sex, drugs and rock and roll that made them fairly repulsive figures for the folk music disciple of Joni Mitchell. During a 2010 interview with the LA Times, Mitchell took the opportunity to denounce Grace Slick and the late Janis Joplin, reducing their incredible careers to “sleeping with their whole bands and falling down drunk”.
For her part, Slick responded to Mitchell’s comments with her usual level of wit, writing on social media, “We didn’t really fall down all that much.” Of course, Joplin was unable to respond to Mitchell’s indictment of her career, as she tragically passed away in 1970 at the age of only 27. This was not the first time, however, that Mitchell had taken aim at the Big Brother and the Holding Company singer.
Speaking to Mojo in 2008, Mitchell spoke candidly about Joplin, saying, “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.” There is not a great deal of evidence to back up this apparent rift, resulting largely from Joplin’s inability to reply to Mitchell’s claims, but they certainly are in keeping with the folk star’s apparent hatred for the women of the hippie age.
In contrast, during that very same interview, Mitchell – without a shred of irony – said, “I always thought the women of song don’t get along, and I don’t know why that is.” Gee, it beats us, Joni. Perhaps the songwriter would have found more sisterhood in the music scene of the 1960s if she had not taken every opportunity to talk her contemporaries down.
It seems strange for Joni Mitchell to hold onto these rivalries after all these years. After all, she was hardly in competition with Slick or Joplin, they occupied vastly different sections of the American music scene of the time. On top of that, Janis Joplin is dead and Grace Slick has long since retired, so it’s unclear what Mitchell hoped to achieve by denouncing them throughout various interviews during the 2000s.
