The exact moment Joni Mitchell believes rock and roll died: “The roll went out of it”
Most people think rock and roll is a spirit that will outlive us all in music, even after every one of us is long gone. Not Joni Mitchell, however, who believes that it has barely lasted the course of a decade.
You’re not alone if you find that a slightly perplexing opinion. Of course, she’s not wrong in asserting that the genre unleashed itself into the world in the 1950s, but it’s not as if rock and roll lived and died by the sword of Elvis Presley alone, and then faded into a relic to simply admire from a distance for the rest of time. What about Led Zeppelin? David Bowie? The Beatles, for God’s sake, are none of them rock stars in her eyes?
Well, perhaps only in certain senses of the word. You see, it’s not necessarily the case that Mitchell thinks rock music is dead, or will ever cease to exist in some form. But it’s the ‘and roll’ bit that’s the operative term here. Many people will use ‘rock’ and ‘rock and roll’ interchangeably; the short and long-hand essences of words that essentially mean the same thing. But for the ‘California’ singer, this is not so, and there’s one vital difference.
“People keep writing songs about how rock and roll will never die,” Mitchell famously once uttered, “Well, rock and roll died a long time ago. It never even made it into the ’60s. The roll went out of it”.
In this sense, she may actually have a valid point. Consider the sonics of the likes of Presley, Little Richard, or Buddy Holly, and compare that to The Rolling Stones or The Kinks merely a decade later. Sure, they may have started out being rooted in blues beats, but that soon got left behind in favour of something far more brash.
To this end, Mitchell herself added: “What died was the push beat, the remnant from swing and boogle-woogle. And when it died, what was left was just rock, a more vertical beat. A certain joy went out of rock and roll, and what was left was militancy, which I guess makes sense because of the times.” Between wars and the near-miss threat of nuclear annihilation, it’s quite true that maybe out-and-out looseness was no longer called for. It didn’t mean that they lost the art of a good time, though.
It’s quite ironic that an era dubbed the swinging ‘60s lost the very heart of the thing it was named after as its tenure rolled on, but such is the evolution of music and the business they call show. In fairness, Mitchell wasn’t citing the loss of roll out of rock and roll as a completely bad thing, but it simply highlights how the things we once thought of as revelatory perhaps weren’t quite as so.
She’s the right woman to make the call, considering how many of her contemporaries she witnessed making the transition over the years, not least herself. When Bob Dylan abandoned folk for rock, or The Beatles took flight from their skiffle roots, the world acted like it was shocked. But under Mitchell’s watchful eye, she could hardly have been surprised. It was simply the change that was coming all along.
