The musicians Joni Mitchell wanted to be remembered with: “The right group”
There was always something about Joni Mitchell that never seemed to fit in with the rest of the rock and roll world.
She may have been friends with a lot of musicians who ended up becoming legends in their own right, but if you look at the long history of rock and roll from Chuck Berry up to the 1970s, no one would have necessarily seen someone like Mitchell coming back then. Granted, there’s a good chance that Mitchell wasn’t even trying to play the same musical game that all of her contemporaries were, either.
She had a great deal of respect for people like Berry when she started out, but there was no sense in her trying to make the same bluesy songs that everyone else was doing. She had come from a much different world, and even if she tried to play the blues on her guitar, how the hell was she supposed to do when she was tuning her songs in different tunings than everyone else in California?
It wasn’t about trying to go back to those same rock and roll chords anymore, and some of the biggest names that she wanted to work with came from the jazz world. She was fascinated by people who could interpret her songs in different ways, and even if they had ways of developing a handful of ideas every single time she walked into the studio, it was all in service in trying to make the best music that each of them possibly could by the time that the engineer pressed RECORD.
But what was even more interesting was seeing how well she adapted to her new formats. Everyone else would have been lost in the woods trying to figure out what the hell to do with the different chords that jazz players use, but Mitchell took to it like a fish in water when she worked with someone like Charles Mingus. It was a daunting task, yes, but after making these kinds of songs, Mitchell was somewhat confused that people still saw her as a rock and roll artist at the time.
Her life as a folk musician was already miles in the rearview at that point, and there was no point in her trying to make the same kind of music that everyone expected out of her. And while the rest of the world would have thought that her time as a jazz artist was just a detour for her, she felt that there was no need to go back to the drawing board. This genre was where she belonged, and she was willing to go even further as well.
Compared to all of the folk singers that end up in her general circle amongst music fans, Mitchell felt that she deserved a place next to the more sophisticated songwriters of her time, saying, “I wouldn’t put myself in that group. It would be a ‘what’s wrong with this picture?’ I’m much more related to Miles Davis and Edith Piaf. If you want to put me in a group — I tell you — nobody ever puts me in the right group.”
But that’s because a lot of what Mitchell does is virtually impossible to categorise for more than a few seconds. She wasn’t a David Bowie-type figure who kept changing her sound for the hell of it, but she was interested in seeing where her music could go when she decided to make something that was a bit more off the wall than the traditional rock and roll songs that everyone else was thinking of.
That was music for the youth, and Mitchell wasn’t afraid to make music later down the line that sounded a bit more grown-up. Her biggest heroes were people like Davis, and the reason why his music is evergreen is the same reason why Mitchell has yet to wear out her welcome with fans. Neither of them made music thinking about the listener first, and doing what came naturally felt a lot better than playing traditional music.
