The albums that made Roger Waters change his mind on Joni Mitchell
The best musicians that Roger Waters ever met tended to be the singer-songwriters.
Even though Pink Floyd could have carried on making some of the finest music that anyone had ever heard, it’s sometimes easier to relate to someone when all you have is an acoustic guitar, a couple of chords, and some of the greatest lyrics that you could manage to pull out of your heart at any given time. But even though Joni Mitchell fit that description to a tee, Waters remembered that there were more than a few times when he was less than impressed by what she was doing behind the scenes.
Because while Waters did love the idea of making the greatest music that he could, he didn’t like leading anyone on for too long. Jamming was part of the reason why he felt that he could no longer carry on with the rest of Floyd, and when he started to follow his own muse and start writing narratively every single time he played, seeing Mitchell go in the opposite direction was a big turn-off for him whenever he picked up records like Hejira and saw her working the biggest names in jazz.
It was a bold step forward for her, but for Waters, there was no point in her trying to make that kind of music if it was all about being precise, saying, “I sort of loved Joni Mitchell until she decided to become a jazzer and then I thought, ‘Nah’. I sought her out at one point because everybody fancied her from my generation. [But] she did have a beautiful voice, and she did have a thing for bass players, but it never developed into anything.”
Then again, are we just going to ignore the fact that there are pieces of jazz sprinkled throughout all of Floyd’s catalogue as well? Waters could have felt that Mitchell’s version of jazz was a bit more meandering than what he was used to, but this is the same person who also made the kind of lyrics that fit over a song like ‘Breathe’, complete with a chord sequence that was lifted directly from a Miles Davis album.
And it’s not like Waters was a snob about anyone else becoming more adept at their instrument by any stretch. There’s the age-old story that the beauty behind every rock song comes from the imperfections, but if that was the case, how do you explain Waters eventually working with someone like Jeff Beck later down the line? Say what you will about serving the song, but any tune that has Beck on it automatically becomes a vehicle for that gorgeous guitar playing, whether the singer wants it to or not.
It is true that Mitchell had a thing for bass players, but when you look at the musicians she surrounded herself with, it was mainly about the kind of lines that they played most of the time. Jaco Pastorius was one of her favourite musicians of all time, but her infatuation with his playing was because he managed to sound so fluid from the minute that he started working on some of his lines, whether that was with her or turning Weather Report songs inside out from the minute that he started playing.
Whatever bias Waters had against Mitchell, though, it didn’t seem to hold that much water when he asked her to participate in The Wall concert in Berlin. This was years after working on Charles Mingus’ final works, but Mitchell still fit in perfectly when working with the biggest names in pop, even managing to give everyone a run for their money when singing along to ‘Goodbye Blue Sky’.
Considering that Mitchell didn’t have the fondest memories of people being unprofessional behind the scenes, though, it’s not like there was much love lost between Waters and Mitchell. There was a lot more ground for her to cover on her own, and she didn’t make music thinking about what some random prog musician was going to think of her growth as a songwriter.
