The band Joni Mitchell thought were more punk than anything from the punk movement
There’s often fierce debate over whether punk, in a musical context, is more about a way of thinking or if it’s about a sound that unites certain bands. Going by the latter description, you can definitively say that Joni Mitchell is not punk.
Rarely ever raising hell with her music and preferring to keep things on the mellower and more tranquil side, Mitchell’s work was more about subtlety as opposed to in-your-face abrasion and raucous riffs. That isn’t to say that it was never challenging, but it wasn’t ever to the point where it was deliberately tough to listen to because of a fear of developing tinnitus.
On the other hand, Mitchell has always been a vocal supporter of many of the issues that punk has aligned itself with, and was always considered to have been a fringe participant of the counterculture movement that was, in an ideological sense, a precursor to what punk came to represent. If we think about punk as being this state of mind, Mitchell was just as, if not more punk than spiky-haired rebels like the Sex Pistols.
It would appear that Mitchell herself has a similar perception of what constitutes being punk, and during a 1996 interview with Guitar World, the folk singer commented on the one band that she believed was perhaps the most ‘punk’ thing to have ever existed, despite their background being firmly rooted in jazz music.
Jazz is, of course, also a form of rebellion, with its ideology coming from a desire to challenge convention and normality through an entirely expressive form of art, rather than making something that was regimented and full of a desire to appeal to a particular audience through mass-marketability. While a number of jazz artists do end up falling into similar styles, it remains something that has always stayed true to the ethos of being anti-mainstream, and you arguably don’t get more punk than that.
And so, in Mitchell’s opinion, there hasn’t been a more punkish outfit to have ever existed than Weather Report, the multi-national jazz fusion act who were best known for boasting a cast of members that included the likes of bassist Jaco Pastorius and Zawinul.
With Pastorius having also performed on a number of Mitchell’s records, helping her to drift towards a jazz fusion style during the 1970s on albums like Hejira, her knowledge and understanding of what the band aimed to do was detailed, and she can reasonably call herself something of an authority on their work.
“Weather Report was the most aggressive ‘synthetic’ band prior to the punk movement,” she explained to the magazine. “Zawinul had a keyboard sound that was much more interesting than anything at the time. Jaco was doing things with the low end I’d been dreaming about, and Wayne Shorter was musically a metaphorical thinker, like me. Probably because we’re both painters.”
While songs like ‘Birdland’ and ‘Black Market’ might not immediately scream punk to a listener, with an often quirky and playful tone being one of the standout characteristics of the band, it’s clear that what Mitchell was referring to is the way that Weather Report managed to stand out from the crowd and produce something that was both authentic, but completely unwavering in sticking to its ethos. That’s punk, if you ask me.
