The producer Joni Mitchell never wanted to work with again: “My love of music was going to die”
There’s no way that anyone needed to question what Joni Mitchell was doing throughout her career.
She had tunnel vision for what she wanted her albums to be, and even though she was becoming one of the greatest folk-rockers of her time, she didn’t want to settle for playing an acoustic guitar for the rest of her life and making a handful of decent pop tunes. She had more ambitious plans than that, but she had to deal with a fair degree of bullshit standing in her way whenever she made some of her records.
Granted, it’s not like everything that she made was going to strike the same nerve as something like Blue or Court and Spark. Those albums sounded pristine every single time they came over the radio at the time, but Dog Eat Dog was the kind of record that was bound to divide some people. Mitchell lived to experiment with new techniques, but she wasn’t going to sit back and let everyone else tell her what to do.
Her music needed to be her vision at the end of the day, and when looking at her jazz-influenced albums, she clearly knew what it took to make that kind of jump. Every single session, players that she played seemed to immediately get what she was going for on records like Hejira, but every musician usually has to deal with the one person who is behind the board every time they get into the recording studio.
But most producers aren’t looking to dictate every single thing that goes onto the final tape. Any good producer like Rick Rubin lives to listen to their artists and suggest what could make the song better every single time they hear one of their tunes, but when Mitchell got into the studio with Doors producer Paul Rothchild for her sophomore record, she admitted that it was far from the best environment for her to work in.
Compared to her debut, where she could make everything sound as subtle as she wanted to, Mitchell remembered Rothchild not caring in the slightest about what she was doing, saying, “I got this really cocksure guy who was producing for the Doors. We cut one song together, and it was hell. I’d be singing with my eyes closed, and he’d burst into the middle of the performance like a heckler. So I asked the engineer whether he thought we could get the record done before he got back, because if I had to work with him, my love of music was going to die.”
Then again, that might also be a case of Rothchild not knowing the artist he was working with just yet. The Doors needed to be whipped into shape from time to time, but Mitchell wasn’t the same kind of tortured poet as Jim Morrison. She knew what she wanted out of her sound, and she wasn’t going to let someone throw her off her groove every single time she worked on her next records.
This probably explains why she ended up having her husband, Larry Klein, work with her during many of her records later down the line. Klein knew what she wanted out of her songs every single time she played, and he wasn’t going to get in the way and interrupt her when she was in the middle because he thought that she could sing it better.
Because when it comes to all of Mitchell’s music, it’s not always about making songs that sound absolutely perfect. She was a consummate professional, but if you’re going for music that’s going to resonate with people over decades, the important thing is to get the kind of take that captures an atmosphere.
