The city Joni Mitchell believes produced the greatest musicians: “The hotbed of all musical activity”
It takes a certain kind of musician to get into the mindset to work on a Joni Mitchell record.
While Mitchell never considered herself better or greater than any other musicians working at the time, you could definitely hear the years and years of musical depth in her music before she even opened her mouth to sing on some of her records. She wanted to push the boundaries of what a vocalist could do, but if she wanted to truly transcend genres, she was going to need the right people behind her.
Then again, sometimes she worked just as well when she had an acoustic guitar or a dulcimer in her hand. Half of Blue is all about the raw performances that she gives whenever he straps on her guitar, and while there are more than a few times where the songs are downright difficult to listen to, ‘California’ is equally as captivating, with her performing the song by herself live whenever she made any TV appearances from around that time. But that was just one phase of her career, and the next decade was about her evolving into a much greater artist.
No one was writing songs with her strange harmonies, and when listening to some of the deep cuts, a lot of her work had more in common with jazz musicians than anything else. So when she eventually started to graduate to making full-on fusion records, it’s no wonder that she ended up getting the attention of Miles Davis and Charles Mingus. She clearly knew what she could pull off, and she was willing to move the Earth if it meant getting the right sounds down on tape.
Which probably explains why she ended up with people like Jaco Pastorius in her band. He was about the closest thing that the bass community had to a Jimi Hendrix-like figure, and when you look at all of the other musicians on her records, she wasn’t skimping out on anyone. Everything needed to be perfect, and getting everyone from Larry Klein to produce to Larry Carlton to lay down some of the tastiest guitar licks ever is still one of the most jaw-droppingly beautiful moments in her discography.
But the whole reason why it worked so well was that she found herself right in the middle of the greatest musical city in the world. She had already seen what life was like in her native Canada, but even when travelling around the world, she felt that there was no one who understood her music better than those who were living out in Los Angeles around that time.
Whether it was singer-songwriters like Crosby, Stills, and Nash or studio veterans like Weather Report, Mitchell felt that no one else could touch the craftsmanship that LA had at the time, saying, “Like Paris was to the Impressionists and to the PostImpressionists, LA back then was the hotbed of all musical activity. The greatest musicians in the world either live here or pass through here regularly. I think that a lot of beautiful music came from it, and a lot of beautiful times came through that mutual understanding. A lot of pain came from it, too, because inevitably, different relationships break up, and it gets complicated.”
While there were also a great deal of flashes in the pan throughout Los Angeles around that time, that didn’t dull the brightness of the greatest stars as well. Eagles were still making the most beautiful harmonies anyone had ever made, and when you listen to Mitchell’s records like Ladies of the Canyon, you can feel the spirit of her time in Los Angeles seeping through every one of the songs.
The look of the ‘City of Angels’ might have changed a fair bit since Mitchell was in her prime, but the allure of the city has never truly gone away. There are more than a few dark alleys that show the true evil side of Hollywood, but the romanticism of someone coming from the middle of nowhere to those streets to make their dreams a reality is still what every musician is chasing when they put together their first pop song.
