“Theirs was the record I wore thin”: the band Joni Mitchell said were as important as The Beatles
Not everyone has the same musical upbringing when they decide to play rock and roll. There’s bound to be some overlap now and again, but the lion’s share of the greatest rock musicians are usually an amalgam of everything they’ve listened to rather than a carbon copy of one singular band whenever they play. Although Joni Mitchell always revelled in soaking in every influence she could, she knew enough to pick out the core influences that changed the way she thought about music.
Then again, Mitchell was always slightly more sophisticated than the average singer-songwriters in the rock and roll scene. Although Bob Dylan helped kick down the door for that style with his inventive wordplay, every single played needed a certain quirk, whether that was Bruce Springsteen’s working-class exterior or James Taylor’s gentle fingerpicking style. For Mitchell, though, it all came back to the world of jazz.
Although the genre may have been considered the antithesis of rock by some people’s definition, jazz was always omnipresent everywhere on the charts. Both rock and jazz had some connections back to the blues, but by moving into more sophisticated territory, artists like Miles Davis and John Coltrane were as important for music in the 1960s as people like Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin were.
For any rock artist who liked to dream bigger, though, The Beatles were always what they thought of as true success. The idea of four musicians coming together to have fun playing music was always the dream, but listening to the way they incorporated advanced theory into their music on tracks like ‘In My Life’ and ‘Michelle’, it was easy for people to look at them as the be-all-end-all for what a professional musician was supposed to be.
But Mitchell had seen what music had been like years before The Beatles set foot in America. She had been listening to everything under the sun, and while the folk scene was certainly a trip, listening to Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross was what really set the bar for her. The idea of vocal jazz may have been alien to most people, but what they could accomplish with their voices struck a chord the minute Mitchell heard them.
For her, the trio had done what the Fab Four had done for millions of others, saying, “[They were] my Beatles and theirs was the record I wore thin, the one I knew all the words to.” But listening to the way that their vocals bounce off each other, it’s not that far off the mark from what The Beatles were doing a few years later.
The harmonies between the Fab Three out front were certainly adventurous for the time, but nowhere near as sophisticated as what Lambert, Hendricks and Ross were doing. Many minds had been blown listening to tracks like ‘Because’, but the trio’s ability to keep an audience engaged with nothing but their voices, a piano, and a saxophone is the kind of taste that is normally in short supply in rock and roll.
Although Mitchell eventually turned to making jazzy records later in her career, she never bothered trying to match what her idols did. The mantra behind many of her finest moments was to stay original, and with the knowledge passed onto her by her favourite artists, she had a broader set of musical colours to paint with.
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