The Home Key #20
Defector From the Petty Wars
1. The day on which we embarked to see Joni Mitchell play the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles (“we” defined as myself, my wife Laurel Nakadate, and our son Theo), having flown west from Boston, was the date of my own parents’ wedding anniversary, namely, October 19.
2. My parents had been divorced since, I think, 1971, or 53 years, on the occasion of the concert. I still think of them on October 19.
3. Is not divorce, any divorce, on the list of “petty wars” that the Joni Mitchell narrator of “Traveller (Hejira)” describes in that bit of song ravishment? (I’m using the demo/early version here.)
4. There are things I find keenly uncomfortable about Los Angeles. I like to walk, but L.A., because of its scale, requires a lot of driving. A constancy of highway transit, yes. A city of travelers.
5. “Hejira,” the title, means (arguably) exodus, means traveling, means perhaps exodus with a spiritual intent (Mohammed’s transit from Mecca to Medina, e.g.), and that purpose is sketched out in various songs on the album of the same name. For example, in the title track and in the closer, “Refuge of the Roads.”
6. We flew on my birthday. My son was preoccupied with the trip, in the weeks before, and kept asking, “When is LA? When is LA?”
7. Before the pandemic, before my son was born, there was quite a bit of travel in my life. Not as much since.
8. This weekend in LA, in which we were to attend the Joni Mitchell show, had a few other activities scheduled in too.
9. Laurel had some work in a gallery in LA. The opening was that afternoon.
10. We were to see some friends.
11. And perhaps most notably we intended to stamp the Ireicho, the book of names of all the Japanese Americans interned in domestic concentration camps during WWII by the American government. This list of names contains several of Laurel’s close relatives, including, for example, her father.
12. (See, e.g., his powerful work on the subject, Looking After Minidoka: An American Memoir, Indiana University Press, 2013. By Neil Nakadate.)
13. The Ireicho is stamped, according to this project, which is currently housed by the Japanese American National Museum in the “Little Tokyo” section of Los Angeles, by the family members, in a brief ceremony that is programmed by the museum.
14. Laurel had long wanted to undertake this pilgrimage.
15. There is much to say about what it means to be a witness to the generational wound commemorated in the Ireicho, to travel in order to accompany, to make note. But some of what wishes to be said about this is cheapened by words, made homely, and in truth can only be approached through transformation, allegory. For the observer silence is most elegant.
16. (Still I am both accompanist to those affected and father to one person affected, and I can say from a position of adjacency that executive order 9066 continues to ring out with its barbarism, its venality, its weakness, its shredding of the law and legal standards, its glorification of racialist thinking, its natively grown fascism; the ripples on the surface of the pond, rippling outward, following upon the jingoism of a single American congressman from Santa Monica, California, from whom the idea gained its dark momentum until it reached the desk of the allegedly progressivist man of the people.)
17. The Japanese American National Museum in L.A. features a reconstructed barracks from one of the concentration camps, and relics from each.
18. The relic from Minidoka in this display is an empty wooden box, not terribly large, suitable for portage, for some last collection of family heirlooms, maybe.
19. Lots of scholarly material there too. If you haven’t lately read the original poster produced by the government whose purpose was to cause the rounding up of the Japanese Americans you should.
20. It bears mentioning perhaps, that a certain politician of the present moment, while campaigning, on the day we flew west, compared the jailed January 6th (2021) insurrectionists to interned Japanese American citizens, Why are they still being held? Nobody’s ever been treated like this. Maybe the Japanese during Second World War, frankly. They were held, too.“
21. The ironies!
22. The same candidate elsewhere refused to speak against the internment of Japanese Americans with this moment of homespun American oratory: "War is tough.”
23. (He also said the Nazis did some “good things.”)
24. The stamping of the Ireicho, at the Japanese American National Museum, was principally accomplished, in this case, by Laurel, my son Theo Moody, and Theo’s cousin Jackson Nakadate, also attending Jackson’s mother Stephanie Manfre and myself. It involved taking a small stamp, under the name of relatives, and then, further, stamping once for a non-related person who has not been able to be commemorated, by reason of not having any living relatives, or relatives able to travel to the site of the Ireicho. That is, you do an additional stamp—for the community.
25. Everything about the process, and the reverence associated with the process, the silence of the process, the space in which the process took place, the book itself, the lighting, and so on, was devastating, except for the part that was about survival, the part about bearing witness, the part about community, the part about not forgetting, and I hesitate to say “devastating,” because my experience of the Japanese American community is they would think the word “devastating” was perhaps a bit histrionic.
26. And yet.
27. It is hard to watch your son learn about these things.
28. I have forgotten to say that we went to the Santa Monica pier the day before, on the day we landed in LA. We went straight to the Santa Monica pier, because we figured it was an iconic LA location, and Theo, at least, needed to see some of the iconic places of Los Angeles, so we went to the pier, in the district once represented by Leland Ford, first architect of internment.
29. Theo had picked out a restaurant he wanted to try on the pier. It was called Japadog.
30. And: we climbed down from the pier to be close the Pacific, which ocean Theo had seen episodically because of our family in Oregon, but which is always worth a look when you’re in LA, because it calls forth, for example, “Surf’s Up,” by The Beach Boys.
31. (The thing about “Surf’s Up” at least according to Van Dyke Parks, the lyricist, was that the title was meant to convey that the surfing was over, completed, as in, e.g. “time’s up,” but perhaps while retaining surfer usage in which “surf’s up,” means the waves are large or such as to permit good surfing, and thus the title is auto-contradictory.)
32. (The armchair that Joni Mitchell sang from at the show we later saw, center stage, sort of reminded me of Brian Wilson’s central location in his last concerts, from behind a keyboard he mostly did not play. Maybe this is a semiotics of stage design that indicates: performer of advanced years around whom is the orbiting of the players.)
33. I took a photograph of my son with trousers uprolled, dancing for his mom, with thunder of the surf, at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.
34. Oh, by the way, we stayed in an iconic LA hotel, the Roosevelt, in Hollywood, in a neighborhood of a singularly urban cast, the neighborhood with the “Walk of Fame” stars contained in it. The Roosevelt has a sort of sixties vibe. Marilyn Monroe was photographed there on a diving board that no longer exists; David Hockney painted the floor of the pool; Montgomery Clift’s ghost haunts the ninth floor, so they say, Clark Gable made gin in his bathtub there, etc.
35. Our room was rather small.
36. Another professional reason we had for going to L.A., was that I had been attempting a story for each state in the United States, and I had drafted a sort of a California story in which a kid from the Central Valley comes to LA to see the Walk of Fame star of Mark Hamill, because he’s obsessed with that space western, but he can’t really get to the star, because there’s a protest happening by a star associated with a certain politician. This protest blocks my protagonist’s access.
37. I had written this story without ever seeing the Hollywood Walk of Fame, despite my dozen or so visits to Los Angeles.
38. Thus, I wished to see the precise location of the star of the politician, in order to better write of its location in detail. This star happens to be in front of a Capital One bank, not far from the El Capitan, in front of which is also Hamill’s star, the one unreachable by my protagonist.
39. Naturally, there is something abhorrent about the Walk of Fame, especially when you get in the business of cataloguing the really awful people, besides the presidential candidate, who are memorialized there. Lots of convicted abusers of various kinds and people with other sorts of public-relations difficulties. There is someone to love the star of every miscreant, however, like the young woman we saw in some kneeling, prayerful, or otherwise reverential posture before the star of the guy who sang “Billie Jean.”
40. The presidential candidate’s star had nearby it a stand hawking MAGAwear and other effluvia.
41. All of this we passed on the way to Runyon Canyon first thing on Saturday morning. As we were still on East Coast time, we passed unmolested through the Walk of Fame, and we could see there some greatness, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, or Louis Armstrong, for example. For some reason, everywhere we went that weekend, everywhere that was not a Joni Mitchell concert, Creedence Clearwater Revival was playing, like at Mel’s Drive-In, later, where five songs by Creedence played. So, of course, we saw John Fogerty’s star, on the way.
42. I would not say that all of Hollywood Boulevard was a fentanyl zone, and that the entirety of Hollywood was populated by an unhoused addict population, nor that I saw any superabundance of this unhoused population while in Los Angeles, but there was a raw, slightly unsettling, anti-civilizing occupying force on Hollywood Boulevard. In the Target, e.g., virtually everything in the store, all the electronics, much of the health and beauty aids section, was locked up, and when I, a man in his sixties, white-haired and soft, attempted to locate an iPhone charger, it had to be walked up to the register by an employee to ensure that I was not going to try to spirit it past the front door.
43. Runyon Canyon is perhaps one of the few places in LA wherein you can scarcely hear the traffic and the desperation, and from there, at its rim, you can see the famous “Hollywood” sign, which my son had never seen, and various other landmarks, like the observatory, the ocean, certain spots associated with Scientology, the “downtown” portion of Los Angeles, and so on.
44. To hike the canyon, however popular, is to defect from the petty wars, and to rise up above the desert, where it can be known. The former desert. The once and future Los Angeles.
45. The desert seems to be in resistance to the vast urban onslaught.
46. After the hike, we went to brunch with a friend in Echo Park, who is in the middle of a divorce. On the day of my parents’ anniversary, which to me is a day to think about divorce, we thought about my friend’s divorce, and worried for her, about the money, about the separation of property, and so on. But we also laughed some and ate crepes and I talked to my friend’s child about YouTube and video game design.
47. Much of Hejira by Joni Mitchell, it is said, is about Mitchell’s breakup with/from drummer John Guerin. And about the time after the time of the breakup, the journeys after the journey that is a relationship as it dissolves.
48. My hypothesis is: divorce causes narrative branching. And the embarkation along the axes of narrative branching is experienced like a journey, a novel journey, a new beginning. And this is how the song “Hejira” begins: “I am traveling in some vehicle/I am sitting in some cafe.”
49. I like the ambiguity of “some vehicle,” because it indicates the polymorphic ambiguity of rock star vehicles but also implies more abstract vehicles too. Vehicles psychic, spiritual, and philosophical. I am in some vehicle that is the conveyor of change.
50. My experience of cities, recently, is that cities are, yes, large-containers of addiction and addict populations. What one presidential candidate frames as an invasion force is not an invasion force so much as a class of humans (my class, I should say, as a person with an addictive history), an us not a them, many of them exposed to opioid addiction, arguably, by American capitalism (Big Pharma), not by their own moral lassitude.
51. We expected, further, on the walk to the Hollywood Bowl, that this would be our time to encounter large-scale fentanyl-related disability, and it is true that outside the coffee shop by the hotel I had the experience of seeing “someone I would know,” a relatively ordinary young woman standing and smoking and then getting down under a tarp, right on the sidewalk, a someone who would perhaps be in the addicts-in-recovery circles that I have frequented my whole adult life; but in general my experience was contrarily that Hollywood was not overpopulated by these persons; New York is worse these days; in general I have seen no city that really compares to Portland, OR, in this regard, and in Portland, OR, the problem stems from decriminalizing without having a big, accessible, user-friendly, city-sized treatment model in place; addiction is physical disease, as all the mental illnesses are; and while I know there are some pretty grungy skid row parts of LA (as there are in Boston, where I live now), my conclusion is that we have become subject to an apocalyptic rhetoric about cities during this election cycle, and the apocalyptic rhetoric is, as all apocalyptic thinking is, to fail to look deeply and understand nuance, variation, polyphony, difference, scale. The apocalypse is to fall short on human relations.
52. The passage, on foot, through L.A. is benedictory. This is not true of car travel.
53. I’m sure that there is often a large crowd of people walking to the Hollywood Bowl for musical acts that are to me inexplicable, like Imagine Dragons, or Haim, or The Black Crowes, or Maneskin, or The Jonas Brothers, or Avril Lavigne, or (perhaps especially) Morgan Wallen. There is a crowd for each, and maybe to them, the constituents of our crowd, the Joni Mitchell fans, are contemptible, or old, but because there is a sense with every one of the current Joni Mitchell shows that she might never play again, there is a profound sense of sharing in something really important. It’s congregational.
54. That’s why we flew all the way across the country.
55. So coming up the hill to the Hollywood Bowl, on foot, was to be in a kind of a pilgrimage. Toward the congregation. There was, this night, a whiff of miracle cures.
56. There are lots of echelons of capitalism that have to be passed through before you get to the actual amphitheater, the Hollywood Bowl itself, and the merch lines, e.g., were really long (the money these days is all in dry goods), but then eventually you climb up enough, circumnavigate enough, and you are there.
57. You’re sort of on some potentate’s lawn.
58. Benches, sure, but they’re on someone’s lawn.
59. The thing that came to mind, for me, was the ruin of a Roman amphitheater I saw once, upon traveling in Lyon, France. Everywhere I went they kept telling me Lyon was the “centre gastronomique de France.”
60. I was there, on this occasion, to deliver a paper on Antonin Artaud, in which I considered from many vantage points the opening section of The Theater and Its Double, especially the line: “And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.”
61. And so while I was in Lyon, I went to see the Theatre antique de Lyon, which is on a hill, also sort of somebody’s lawn, the Roman Empire’s lawn, on the Fourviere hill, which was built in the first century of the common era.
62. They held gladiatorial combat there.
63. And plays.
64. It’s hard not to think of The Theater and Its Double when you see the ruin in Lyon, which says empire and death in all their brute simplicity, and signals the kind of spectacle that Guy Debord lamented in the sixties.
65. The Hollywood Bowl is like the theater in Lyon in many aspects. It is a ready container for spectacle, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Stevie Wonder, Fleetwood Mac, Adele, and on and on. And it is a display of the crowd-control dynamics that are made possible by empire. It is, as an architectural feature, about the empire of capital, carved into a space degraded and endangered by the presence of twenty million people, in a climate of extremes, built on a tectonic fault line.
66. Every show there is about the possible end of the Hollywood Bowl, in fire or flood.
67. Every show involves fiddling while Rome burns.
68. In the meantime: what an incredible place to hear music.
69. Now, my unpopular opinion is that while it is important that Brandy Carlisle has helped to bring Joni Mitchell back to the stage, her role has become, in a way, too fundamental to the event. It’s as if the evening is vetted by Brandy Carlisle, and her approval is somehow necessary for the process.
70. Manifestly, Joni Mitchell herself exceeds the world’s conception of Joni Mitchell (mine included), and thus hearing Brandy Carlisle say: “Joni you just sang the shit out of that song!” After one number is a counterproductive grace note in the proceedings because it diminishes the Joni Mitchell who exceeds all containers.
71. We all know that Joni Mitchell could play these songs with her crabbed, arthritic hands, on a guitar with just one string, with just what vocal range is available to her now, her alto-ish voice, and still they would be some of the very greatest songs ever written by anyone.
72. So the spectacle—the enormous band, the pyrotechnical keyboard solos, the guest stars, the ever present Carlisle, hey that’s Los Angeles, man, it’s Hollywood. But once upon a time Joni Mitchell sang “Woodstock” with just electric piano and voice. She sang “River” accompanying herself, with no one else besides.
73. She could do it now—and this gesture would say: here is the human.
74. However: if you were worried that the Brandi Carlisle effect would be outsized you were in part disabused of this by an instantaneous sensation in the first couple of songs: these are some deep cuts. Not the predictable crowdpleasers.
75. Like, uh, would the Hollywood version not start with “Help Me?” Or “You Turn Me On I’m a Radio?”
76. Nope.
77. I didn’t know a song until the third one: “Hejira.” Which I have been interleaving into these lines.
78. Maybe this is the moment to note that my sister had, I think, four Joni Mitchell albums among her store of things at the time of her death—Ladies of the Canyon, Blue, Court and Spark, and Hejira, actually maybe For the Roses, too. More Joni Mitchell than albums by anyone else, including the Grateful Dead, whom she sorta followed around. It’s possible that I wouldn’t have any thoughts about music at all if it weren’t for the time of my sister, if it weren’t for the abbreviated Being of my sister, my sister as an idea of music appreciation. Not what she said about it, but how it was in her and with her, the behold-the-feminine of my sister and her music.
79. (Though, here’s some other stuff she liked: Birds of Fire (Mahavishnu Orchestra); Roxy and Elsewhere (Zappa/Mothers); Collaboration (Shawn Phillips); The Wild, the Innocent, the E Street Shuffle (Springsteen); John Barleycorn Must Die (Traffic); Mister Magic (Grover Washington, Jr.); Sailing Shoes (Little Feat); The Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus (Spirit), etc.)
80. “Hejira” was the third song. And this one I knew because my sister liked that album.
81. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that there would never be a life in music for me if not for the musical women in my early life, and the relationship to music on the part of these women, which was a relationship of self-iteration in the process of collecting/listening where the albums were somehow cairns on the alpine hike of self, and what an arresting disappointment it was for me later in high school and college to find that there were people who owned music just as something to fill a silence or to which they might dance.
82. But my sister (and my mother, too, at least for a time), was always looking for something, for an edge to push against. And it wasn’t that she didn’t like the joyful and accessible; it was that she never would stop there. Not when there was an alpine journey to be had.
83. Thus: Hejira.
84. It might be said I have always resisted the fretless bass playing of Jaco Pastorious (self-proclaimed greatest bass player in the world), even though I attempted to master a fretless instrument at one point and I know how difficult they are. Jaco’s bass always wanted to demonstrate its proficiency and its front-of-the-mix centrality. And while I admire certain bassists who can’t be bothered with root-note obligations, in the jazz tradition, harmonic resistance or harmonic liberation, even in Weather Report he was too much. There’s a mugging, an antic quality with Jaco Pastorious, perhaps verging on a pathology.
85. It would be easy to feel about Hejira that it occasionally suffers from too much Jaco Pastorious.
86. But wherever there’s a negation there’s an affirmation lying in wait, and not only do we see in Pastorious’s sad fate a poignancy in the music waiting to be perceived, a non-chronological poignancy, but also the fretless bass work on Hejira is impossible to reproduce—it’s too singular—and so at the Hollywood Bowl they didn’t try. Well, maybe there were some solar flares, but nothing quite so performative, and this is another reason why there was room at the show, and specifically on the song “Hejira,” for:
87. The lyrics.
88. The theme of the album called Hejira is travel, arguably, but more, perhaps, travel as a kind of spiritual exercise (maybe kind of in the way Basho talks about travel).
89. Apparently the word Hejira is a slightly impulsive translation of الهجرة which is more commonly rendered “hijrah.” Mitchell has said various things about the word, that it means, something like “leaving precipitously but with honor.” This sounds like “defecting from the petty wars” of romance, which is almost immediately sketched out in the title song, which, as I have noted, was originally called “Traveling (Hejira).”
90. (All Joni Mitchell demos are incredible, hushed and astounding, and this demo is no exception. Listen to the demo!)
91. The Arabic word الهجرة also refers to the prophet Muhammad’s relocation, with followers, to Medina, from Mecca, which as I understand it was a kind of expulsion, an exodus, like the Mormons fleeing west, like the Jews going out from enslavement, like Rastafarians in Marley’s bus, on their exodus.
92. To hear it at the Hollywood Bowl, self-selected by Mitchell, one of three songs from the album, in a set list long on the least well-known period of Joni Mitchell, the post-Mingus period, was above all to hear the lyrics.
93. These are some of the best lyrics anyone ever committed to song.
94. “I’m traveling in some vehicle …”
95. If you were under the delusion that this was going to be some expectable rock and roll on-the-road-again song, you are soon mistaken.
96. No vehicle specified, because some of the conveyance systems are abstract.
97. A journey from Mecca to Medina.
98. Mitchell has also indicated that the leaving in her album of traveling songs is without regrets.
99. The Joni Mitchell narrator of “Coyote,” one of the three songs from Hejira played at the Hollywood Bowl, says this very thing: “No regrets, Coyote.”
100. To the (alleged) Sam Shepard character.
101. So even though the traveling of Hejira seems like it features an aloneness or takes place in a post-romantic or extra-romantic space, it also feels non-recriminatory.
102. As here: “In our possessive coupling/So much could not be expressed/So now I’m returning to myself/These things that you and I suppressed.”
103. Is the “non-recriminatory” part of what I’m thinking of as Mitchell’s prophetic language?
104. Maybe it is a feature of the prophetic that it is both lacerating/challenging and forgiving/passionate.
105. Mitchell, of course, is not unknown for her bounty of lovers in the music community.
106. At a certain point you might have said it was her subject. As in “A Case of You,” which she played on this night, and there is, if one speaks merely biographically, the specific precipitating event (a “break-up” to use the common parlance), that seems to get trod over in Hejira, the album, but there is also a kind of intense transitional energy, a passing beyond, with respect to the common parlance.
107. Maybe part of it has to do with: jazz.
108. Maybe jazz is: vehicular.
109. “I’m traveling in some vehicle.”
110. Where the vehicle is: instantaneity.
111. The words are composed but the arrangements leave this space—a space that is even more so than on Court and Spark where the jazz inflection first appeared.
112. In a way the lyrics of “Hejira” (the song) seem to go backward in time, starting post-breakup and then going backward into the events preceding.
113. This is in the nature of analysis, especially in the analysis of human behavior.
114. That it wishes to understand the causative.
115. For example, while this essay is about a Joni Mitchell concert, it also writes from the time after the presidential election of 11/6/2024 about the time just before this election, and part of its mission is perforce therefore an inquiry into causative forces with respect to that election, or a seeing backward into that former time.
116. One verse of “Hejira” does this exactly, conceives of prehistory.
117. A portion of verse two, thus:
118. “Now here’s a man and a woman sitting on a rock/They’re either going to thaw out or freeze/Listen/Strains of Benny Goodman/Coming through the snow and the pinewood trees.”
119. This sculptural evocation of the dyad, a retrospective sculptural evocation, as if made by Rodin, rises out of nowhere in verse two of the song. It’s anything but “now.” It’s almost classical, except in the mind of the narrator and beholding subject.
120. By the way, the lineation I propose above comes from Mitchell’s web site, and so it is consistent with her ideas—an injunction to “listen” hanging out there by itself.
121. Why Benny Goodman is wafting across the tundra here would be an interesting question, and I’m sure Mitchell has spoken to it, though at the moment her having-spoken-thus is shrouded in a mystery that permits me a certain license to connect Benny Goodman to the 1970 recording of “For Free” from Ladies of the Canyon.
122. Goodman plays the clarinet; the street musician the Mitchell protagonist hears in the narrative of “For Free” is a clarinetist.
123. Such that “For Free” seems premonitory with respect to the complexity that is Hejira.
124. However: my point in invoking the section of verse two of the song, and the couple there bound to thaw or freeze, is to see the album and the song not only about travel, and particularly about spiritual journey, but also as taking romantic struggle and disaffiliation as a point of departure for spiritual journey.
125. You set out for spiritual growth via an aloneness.
126. When Mitchell was writing Ladies of the Canyon she lived in the house in Laurel Canyon (so close to Hollywood Bowl) memorialized in Graham Nash’s “Our House.” A site of domestic unanimity.
127. In just six years she went from there to the Basho-like peregrinations of Hejira.
128. I could hear all of this in “Hejira” in ways I had not before. As in the demo of the song a suppression (Mitchell’s word) of Jaco Pastorious, which likewise at the Hollywood Bowl made possible a presencing of the lyrics.
129. It was during “Hejira” that I knew something epochal was transpiring—an instance of the prophetic.
130. The key for me (and perhaps I didn’t get it till the repetition at the end) was “a defector from the petty wars.”
131. To hear this song was to be in the presence of that absence.
132. That defection.
133. That retirement.
134. That registration of defection.
135. That noticing.
136. The crowd noticed. The players onstage noticed. Brandi Carlisle made a crack like: “You just heard Joni Mitchell sing fucking ‘Hejira!’” Or similar. (I’m remembering here rather than checking YouTube.)
137. All of this was to know something was taking place, and that its code was not “Let’s play the hits.”
138. And if “Hejira” didn’t make defection plain enough the next song did. “Cherokee Louise.”
139. It’s from Night Ride Home, not every Mitchell fan’s first stop (the nineties), the Larry Klein period, but with a lyric both bittersweet and about childhood and deeply harrowing about disenfranchisement, prejudice, and outright physical and sexual abuse suffered by indigenous persons in the Canada of Mitchell’s youth.
140. No easy song, no thing of pillowy concert-going comfort.
141. Where the fuck is “Big Yellow Taxi?”
142. And now we get to the interesting part. When “Cherokee Louise” was over Mitchell embarked on her first extended remarks of the evening, these mainly an explication of the song and its narrative, in the way, e.g., that folksingers, in the old days, would pause to give a generous accounting. This story was harrowing and sad she talked around it some, it took a while, and then: Mitchell further extemporized using a term for a Louise’s Cherokee heritage, a bit of a colonialist word that most younger people would perhaps avoid. I’m not sure my son would even know that this word applied to the First Nations peoples.
143. What I mean is: Mitchell is 80 years old and was perhaps using the word commonly employed when she and Louise were young, when they were just kids.
144. And what I mean is: Mitchell defiantly wrote a song in defense of her friend, and then, in defending this defense, she used the old word, the word of empire, to name the First Nations peoples.
145. Is it my imagination, or did Brandi Carlisle then attempt to abbreviate Mitchell’s story about Louise a little bit, such that we would get back to the proceedings? I’m sure she would say just the opposite in retrospect.
146. There are, in abundance, accounts online of how thoughtfully and gently Carlisle and the others involved in the Joni Jams keep Joni “on track,” and these inevitably feature some discussion of her aneurysm and brain surgery in 2015 and the recovery therefrom.
147. I’m sure that all of this discussion is perfectly accurate.
148. And yet I did feel like saying: let the lady talk.
149. She’s Joni Mitchell, she wrote the song—about patriarchy and prejudice in Canada.
150. And what is “on track” anyway? Who gets to decide?
151. The key in which this song was written, as with “Hejira” and others we were soon to hear was: prophetic language.
152. Let the prophet talk!
153. The next two songs were “Coyote” and “Carey,” and though the first of these is from Hejira, and features the “no regrets” line that marks the album as a whole, these two songs were to keep the asses in the seats, or, perhaps, to cause people to stand up in their seats.
154. There was a node of classic Joni fans a row or two behind us, in fact, for whom the appearance of “Carey” was a very important world-historical moment.
155. I think of them as belonging to the “Help Me” me portion of the fandom, for whom the success of that song served as the point of ingress, though its vocal demands would make it difficult to recreate by the present Joni Mitchell.
156. In any event, once “Carey,” had been performed, and I will warrant that it was very satisfying, very moving, even if significantly different from the initial arrangement, the set list veered back toward the outspoken and opinionated material of Mitchell’s 1980-1990s discography.
157. Two songs from Turbulent Indigo were on the set list, including, after “Carey,” a song called “The Sire of Sorrow (Job’s Sad Song),” the long, mournful last song from that album, in which Mitchell takes on the point of view of Job, the mythic sufferer, and in the process, seems to speak an allegory about the time in her professional life when her relationship to work had grown apparently less comfortable.
158. (The relevant line is: “Why have you soured and curdled me?”)
159. (On Spotify, one morning I listened to “The Sire of Sorrow,” and it was then followed by the joyful, somewhat jubilant “All I Want,” from Blue, with its warm, affirmational, celebratory lyric: “I want to knit you a sweater, I want to write you a love letter, I want to make you feel better,” where the song itself is the love letter. What a contrast between these songs!)
160. Of course, Job is an original reservoir of language for the afflicted, and Mitchell’s song, recorded during the time of the HIV crisis, finds a potential modern analogue in that time, but it’s relevant to contextualize the song with reference not only to Mitchell’s childhood struggle with polio, but also with reference to her post-polio syndrome, her struggle with the Morgellons family of symptoms, and her aneurysm and recovery. The song predates some of the life events, but prepares a way to talk about them, to name them.
161. The celebrated jacket of Turbulent Indigo—which casts Mitchell as Vincent Van Gogh, complete with missing ear—makes plain the high cost of art-making.
162. It’s really easy to think you know what this cover image means.
163. It’s easy to think we know what there is to know about mental illness and artists.
164. It’s easy to think we know all there is to know about Mitchell.
165. It’s easy to think we know how hard it is to be a woman who is an artist. It’s easy to think that we know about a particular kind of unwanted attention and exploitation that women receive in the music business. Harder to think about the cost of that to the self over, say, decades.
166. Consider what it’s like to be a person with polio (who has had to relearn how to walk twice in her life), at this moment in history, when the public debate is about whether to vaccinate for polio at all, while you continue to suffer from the after-effects of the disease seventy years later.
167. The value of the Book of Job is that it models a prophetic voice against injustice. It creates its own literary modus: the first-person cry of pain. For the Book of Job to resonate fully, Job has to suffer with an array of excrescences, and (perhaps) when that obligation is met, whether in the actual or metaphorical state, the language is an organic development, the music of suffering.
168. (For example, when Jesus of Nazareth, on the cross, in the Place of Skulls, says “Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani,” during his suffering, he recalls/alludes to the plaint of Job.)
169. However, this prophetic language of suffering can also precede the event of excrescence, because in the purest examples of suffering causation and language are confused in time—
170. The sufferings reverberate forward and backward in the event sequence.
171. Nietzsche’s suffering, in language, precedes his late-life psychosis, pre-figures it, and the same with Artaud, who then writes from his psychotic time back into his youth so as to make his suffering inevitable.
172. In this way, perhaps, it is less that prophetic language is predictive (as it appears to be in some common ideas of the prophet) and more that this language breaks down causality and finds a cycle of suffering and language to be somehow self-reinforcing.
173. The description of pain, transmittal thereof, is a very basic language function (as I believe Wittgenstein argued too).
174. Despite, e.g., a childhood with polio, Joni Mitchell cloaked a struggle with physical pain in the philosophy of adroit melodies early on, with extremely compelling results, all beloved of the “Help Me” portion of the fandom, until at some point some of this melodic simplicity and comeliness began to fall away and we saw more completely a prophetic language, acutely noticeable in lyrical constructs after Mingus, let’s say, and from there on out, unto the present, unto the Hollywood Bowl.
175. Nobody likes a prophet in her own time, of course.
176. Actually, “Sire of Sorrow,” in the concert, was followed by “God Must Be a Boogie Man,” from Mingus, a sort of abandon-hope-all-ye portal into the later Joni Mitchell, a song which, on 10/19/2024, had not been played live in 41 years. It sure sounded good, and a quick look at the recent Vol IV of the Mitchell Archives reminds me of a set of proto-Joni-Jams that were arranged for Mingus—the singer playing early versions of the Mingus compositions with seasoned Charles Mingus ensemble veterans.
177. These performances are some of Mitchell’s very best.
178. Initially (I read somewhere) the lyrics of Mingus were meant to update Eliot’s “Four Quartets” Yikes! Time present and time past! In my beginning is my end (as Anaximander seems to say), because beginnings constitute endings.
179. And: the last three songs of set one were of continued interest: “Refuge of the Roads,” “Night Ride Home,” and, to send the audience happily into the break between sets, “Both Sides Now.”
180. I guess “Both Sides Now” was expectable, as she has sung it almost continuously and consistently since her range declined, on, for example, her “standards” album of 2000, also called Both Sides Now, and the version she performed at Newport somewhat followed that one, containing, e.g., the “Hey Joni, you’ve changed” line in verse three, this torch ballad reading, which finds the older singer’s opportunity in a very young singer’s song, time past in time present.
181. “Night Ride Home,” with its cricket high hat, or cricket continuo (on the original), is amiable, is another road song (from 1991), but it’s set on the 4th of July, and basically inhabits the idea that the national holiday is unimportant. It doesn’t figure in the action. The song develops a frivolous neglect of political superstructure. But its simple reckoning with nighttime, ecosystem thereof, constitutes a pure instance of songcraft in the 90s output of Joni Mitchell.
182. To get to these songs, though, we passed through “Refuge of the Roads,” the companion piece to “Hejira,” the song that closes the album of the same name.
183. A truly mesmerizing song with a beautiful rhythmical guitar part in some masterful Mitchell tuning (CACFAC) where every chord is easily suspended, and featuring many key migrations, especially in the bridge.
184. And this was the second time that Mitchell made extensive remarks, on this night in Hollywood, about Chogyam Trungpa. He, the founder of Naropa, and a popularizer of Tibetan Buddhism in the West.
185. Mitchell, as she has done on many occasions, presented her encounter with Trungpa as a straightforward spiritual experience—apparently one in which Mitchell was cured of cocaine addiction. So the story goes.
186. The song “Refuge of the Roads” paints a straightforward rendering of Trungpa’s legendary alcoholism, his sexual adventuring, and so on. But in the prophetic tradition the spiritual renewal with which one is occasionally blessed is what is. You don’t judge. You don’t go back and evaluate the teachers, any more than you evaluate the prophet. The value of the prophet is in the prophecy. In the language.
187. The prophet is an effect of the prophecy.
188. So, in a way, the value of the Joni Mitchell “unretired” appearances are prophetic in their facticity—as of Trungpa of whom it was said that he was the dharma, in his presence—Mitchell gives by her presence-in-song, in exactly the condition she’s in, in her contemporary aspect.
189. The remarks she gave, as with the remarks about “Cherokee Louise,” were time past in time present, and completely phenomenological, and you only have to go read about W. S. Merwin and Trungpa if you want a countervailing opinion.
190. But the prophecy offers the possibility of revelation, not a journalistic account. And it does not need to comfort.
191. Now: there’s a revelation coming in the second set of this show, which is imminent, but I have to skip over some music to get there. (You can watch the other songs on YouTube if you like.)
192. I’m going to skip over the cover of “I’m Still Standing” by Elton John, where the joke was that most people onstage were sitting, most especially the resplendent Joni Mitchell, in her throne-like spot at center stage.
193. I acutely dislike this song.
194. It’s not that I dislike Elton John, I must add. I think Madman Across the Water and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road are both rather terrific, in very different ways, but each with respect to melody writing. The dude could really write a melody. I like many things about the whole first decade of Elton John. His frequent gospel adventures, string arrangements by Paul Buckminster, the incredible bass stylings of Dee Murray, Elton’s elastic attempts to cram in all the words, his falsetto, etc.
195. And yet: I feel only despondence about the eighties and the nineties of Elton. The music of that time is dashed off.
196. And so: “I’m Still Standing,” insipid, boastful, oversimplified, unserious. The lyrics are not to be borne. It’s up there with Eddie Money or Laura Branigan or Night Ranger from the same period. I don’t feel I ever need to hear “I’m Still Standing” again, not even an ironic version, and when I am trapped with it in a gruesome CVS prescription-collection line, I always think I have come at last to the infernal punishments.
197. I get that Mitchell’s band were rehearsing this infant formula for the next night when the ostensibly retired but still very plugged in man himself, Reg Dwight, was going to show up and throw down.
198. But, still, no thank you.
199. I’m also skipping over Annie Lennox singing “Ladies of the Canyon,” which was great. Annie Lennox is a treasure with a really husky interesting voice. It has appreciated even further with age.
200. Marcus Mumford also appeared to sing “California” with Mitchell. I sort of know who this singer is.
201. Mumford did a good job with “California,” and some portion of the audience seemed beguiled by him and his reputation.
202. There were also, at the beginning of the second set, certain flashy piano solos. And Mark Isham, the bittersweet/plangent trumpeter and longtime Mitchell side person, also performed memorably.
203. Then, somewhere in the midst of this spree of accessibility Mitchell snuck in “The Magdalene Laundries,” which like “Cherokee Louise” is about exploitation of women, and also about religious extremism.
204. It’s maybe the single best song Mitchell wrote in her mid-career period. My God, what a song. My God.
205. Mitchell sings it in the first person, though it is not autobiographical, and vanishes into the Irish story finding as one would perhaps (as Sinead O'Connor did) the Irish Catholic infrastructure precisely non-religious, exploitative, while finding the people who suffered under its yoke, conversely, exactly the repositories of the holy.
206. Mitchell gets to the heart of the paradox in the first verse: “Branded as a Jezebel I knew I was not bound for heaven.”
207. And yet as the song goes on the narrator is precisely “bound for heaven,” whatever we think of that address, and the beautiful elliptical music of the song is the route through which it might plausibly happen.
208. This song, unplayed live since 1998, was between Marcus Mumford and Annie Lennox, a bit of a marker thrown down.
209. Maybe no song by Joni Mitchell is more so, more exactly doing the overturning of the tables of the moneylenders, more like Jeremiah in his uncontrollable rage, more like Job in his plaint, and thus rich in the spiritual.
210. Prophetic.
211. Also tucked into the accessibility spree was that chestnut of allegory, “Summertime,” by George Gershwin and Dubose Heyward. (With help on the lyrics from Ira Gershwin.)
212. Mitchell has sung this song throughout the “unretired” period, and it reflects the partial diet of covers that characterized the first iteration of the “Joni Jams,” which likewise included, e.g., “Love Potion #9,” “Young at Heart,” and “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” The presumption must be that these were songs that they played with Mitchell in her house.
213. “Summertime,” of course, summons the especially important jazz renditions thereof, over the years, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, Chet Baker, etc. It is a song that favors, and shows off well, when sung, a restricted vocal range. Of course the reduced range, in this case, is part of the expressive power of the song—not a limitation. A strength.
214. Mitchell uses all of the expressive power available to her.
215. “Summertime” was, therefore, particularly moving.
216. Brandi Carlisle noted as much in its immediate aftermath: “You just sang the shit out of that song, Joni.”
217. In the vast majority of cases, the spree of accessibility portion of set two of the Hollywood Bowl concert reproduced the Newport show of 2023, by now well-known, won a Grammy, and so on.
218. I am not interested in writing about these songs, from set two, which do not command the writing. Though let it be said that in some cases the really incredible songs do command silence, of which they are mostly given none in maw of runaway capitalism.
219. “A Case of You,” e.g., at the Hollywood Bowl, on 10/19/2024, commands a non-commentary:
220.
221. At one point in my own meager career as a musician I sang some songs, duets, with Jolie Holland, my friend, the singer-songwriter, a truly great musician, and among the songs we were going to sing for this one show, which I believe was on a Valentine’s Day, and which I believe was circa 2014, was “A Good Year For the Roses,” by George Jones. Singing harmony on George Jones, I should note, is especially delightful, owing to the way the harmonies work in his era of country, which borrows from Old Time; it is so much joy singing this song, “A Good Year for the Roses.” However: I noted in singing with Jolie Holland that she did not want to listen to any George Jones recording before attempting to learn the song, not because she didn’t like the song, but rather because she adores the song, and did not wish to deplete it by listening to it.
222. The recording, in this view, the LP or cassette or CD or streaming track, constitutes a diminishment of the power of the song, in the fulcrum of commodity-related repetition. Yes, there are a finite number of performances of a song in which it can be experienced as though new, with the kind of expressive intensity that happens when you first hear a song.
223. As I have noted elsewhere, I have this same feeling about Holland’s song entitled “Mexican Blue,” that it inspires a deep, gentle, and abiding love. The not-wishing-to-deplete-it feeling. Verse four of “Mexican Blue,” when first heard, struck me as hard as any song I have ever heard: “And when you dreamed my guardian spirits appeared/And the moon stretched out across your little bed/They said they’d started to get worried about me/They were happy we had finally met, we had finally met.” There is the danger in listening often to “Mexican Blue” that you will deplete it of its miraculous ability to describe transformative love, past love, reparative love.
224. Jollie Holland, who wrote this song (and then almost left it off the album, according to what she told me), did not want to deplete “A Good Year For the Roses,” one of the saddest, most bereft songs anyone ever recorded, and I do not want to deplete “A Case of You,” nor “Ladies of the Canyon,” nor “Raised on Robbery.” Alas, “Big Yellow Taxi” has been (re)done recently, and silence can only help commence the process of rehabilitation.
225. Here are some other songs that have been annihilated through overuse, which I could go thirty years without hearing again, and it would be fine with me, though in all cases they once had significant force as popular songs: “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” “Wild Horses,” “Let It Be,” “(Sitting’ on) The Dock of the Bay,” “Imagine,” “The Tears of a Clown,” “Hotel California,” “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Friend of the Devil,” “Candle in the Wind,” “Me and Bobby McGee,” “Heroes.” “Don’t Stop Believing,” “Summertime.” And so on.
226. I choose silence.
227. And now: when this portion of the show was completed, the part of the show in which the lady behind us, a mid-level functionary at a manufacturer of party favors, let’s say, took especial delight, Joni Mitchell restored herself to her religious density, and chose, for us, the song entitled “Dog Eat Dog,” and this is where things got particularly interesting.
228. It is true, “Dog Eat Dog” is, to me, a song from a challenging moment in Mitchell’s career, the portion wherein she allowed her songs to be rendered in the production style of the day, with gated reverb, the Yamaha DX7, and so on. The Thomas Dolby period. (I very much like some Thomas Dolby! But still.) The Dog Eat Dog era, for this listener in the eighties, was when I said: it seems she no longer has a story to tell me.
229. Perhaps this feeling had more to do with what Geffen Records wanted (a contemporary sound), and less with what Mitchell was trying to say. If so the Geffen Records approach was hollow and inert.
230. Because: live, with real percussionists and acoustic instruments, “Dog Eat Dog” was a much more interesting song. And it was of a piece with the thinking in set one, which gave us “Refuge of the Roads,” et al.
231. Of course she would play this song.
232. (Though it had not been played since 1985.)
233. And: I think it was during the line about “big wig financiers” that Mitchell then ad-libbed the aside: “like Donald Trump.”
234. She also said this at the show the next night, which means either that she was satisfied with the swell of approval from some significant majority of the audience, or that she was planning to make it part of the show—in fact, it might have even been the reason that “Dog Eat Dog” merited inclusion (for the first time since Ronald Reagan was president). Whichever the case, it was hard not to note the desperate (and futile) optimism that was contained in the roar of approval.
235. Then the song came to an end. And there was a pause as Mitchell and Carlisle prepared for the next song. Someone shouted some rejoinder from the audience to Mitchell and Mitchell laughed, and then Mitchell got right up on the mic and said:
236. “Fuck Donald Trump.”
237. Normally, I try to avoid typing out the name of that person, because why provide column inches. Moreover there is a gangrenous internal sensation. I type it here for the sake of documenting my experiences on 10/19/2024 in L.A. At the Hollywood Bowl.
238. The roar of the assembled now was twice during and after the song. Many, many people stood—as if a thing they most longed for had somehow been enacted, which, I suppose, means that many people feared the outcome of the election. The onrushing black cloud of autocracy already in motion. The roar was of unfettered joy at being wrongly convinced of rightness, at least as adjudged by the subsequent popular vote.
239. It was really funny, too, of course, because nothing is funnier, in a way, than when people in their eighties say “fuck.” It just sounds really good coming out.
240. It was also funny because of course Joni Mitchell would say this, if you think about the Joni Mitchell of the eighties and nineties, who was not noted for avoiding any controversial remark. Of course she would say what she said in this her ninth decade.
241. But it was also the case that that the remark was consistent with what I have been describing in this essay, which is what the prophetic tendency is like. It is to challenge some existing preconceptions—down to the roots thereof. Without hesitation, without worry about the cost to self.
242. Also: considering that Mitchell had to relearn some basic physiognomic capabilities after her neurological affliction on 2015, of which, I believe, the ability to speak was one aspect, it is significantly powerful to see her just dash off this political perspective from the stage. She relearned to talk so that she would have no apologies, no undue preoccupation with propriety, but only a concern about the truth.
243. Here I write from after the presidential election: it is now somewhat routine to blame the “ideological left” in equal measure for the state of affairs in which we find ourselves. I might say that our present circumstance constitutes a fact-as-it-is, and that change to come has to be not from an aspiration, an irrealism, but from the facts-as-they-are. The electorate seems to have preferred what has come to be the current state of affairs. Begin with this premise.
244. When there was, in some large measure, a standing ovation, whatever that means, as to the matter of “Fuck Donald Trump,” Mitchell enlarged her point of view, and here there was, at least for me, a rending aside of the veil. Mitchell noted that she couldn’t exactly participate in the upcoming election, calling herself “one of those lousy immigrants,” and suggested that the actual voting part was our responsibility.
245. And this was the breathtaking and most comprehensive moment of political (or spiritual, let’s say) philosophy of the evening, which is to say also a dreadfully obvious moment. There is no difference between a so-called “citizen” of the United States of America (by which we mean, in truth, a descendent of colonial occupiers) and an “immigrant,” no difference in accomplishment, no difference in ingenuity, no difference in religious conviction, no difference in familial responsibility, no difference in numbers of criminal convictions (though perhaps fewer in the case of the so-called “immigrant”), no difference in commitment to the nation state. They are us, one and the same. There is only power and disenfranchisement and the ways that power uses its levers to maintain its status at the expense of those without. “Immigrant” is a plutocratic usage, a designation for a workforce to be plundered in the pursuit of surplus value.
246. So: Joni Mitchell is just another a “lousy immigrant.” She who wrote “Help Me,” and “Both Sides Now.” Which the daughters (and some sons) of plutocrats have sung for fifty years.
247. Then, after “Dog Eat Dog,” it was “Amelia,” another song from Hejira, played at her Newport show in 2023, continuing with the Basho-esque narrative of travel. As with the other three songs from Hejira, it’s preposterously good. A thing of magnificence.
248. With a refrain about Amelia Earhart.
249. Guitar tuning CGCEGC.
250. The fourth volume of Mitchell’s archives allows us to hear a demo recording of “Amelia,” shorter than the album version, and leaving the “hexagram” of fighter jets the Mitchell narrator sees above the desert in verse one till the end.
251. About those fighter jets.
252. Don’t they plainly recall the “bomber planes” turning into butterflies in the dream of the last verse of “Woodstock?”
253. I have had trouble locating the quotation from Mitchell—in a long-ago context—where she indicates that “Woodstock” was inflected by some millenarian apocalyptic religious thinker under whose influence was she temporarily.
254. (Mitchell didn’t play the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival, according to the famous story, because her agent told her to play on The Dick Cavett Show instead. And it is, possibly, this fork in the garden of forking paths that, possibly, sends her off into the efflorescing of her keen antiestablismentarianism.)
255. The Edenic imagery suggests an early model of prophetic language, sure, and the verse in which the bombers appear in “Woodstock,” consists of a dream, ever the rhetorical barge of prophets down through the ages:
256. “And I dreamed I saw the bombers/Riding shotgun in the sky/And they were turning into butterflies/Above our nation.”
257. In the aftermath of that heady time of ideals, if that’s what it was, in the grip of a more jaundiced view of history, the nightmare from which we are trying to awake, it’s possible to see “Woodstock,” the song as impossibly naive.
258. After all: butterflies.
259. But it’s also, when considered musically, among the spookiest, most experimental and most uncompromising songs in the early Mitchell canon. And here, today, it seems to prefigure the improvised and freestanding intensity of “Amelia.”
260. Two dreams, separated by some years, recalled in the Hollywood Bowl, summoned in the Hollywood Bowl, each dream free, proceeding outward into a chain of associations, but each commencing, finding generative propulsion in anxiety about military hardware.
261. The mystery of “Amelia,” the song, is in its refrain: “Amelia, it was just a false alarm.”
262. For example, what does “it” mean here?
263. The “it” in “it was just a false alarm” is a craggy mountainous summit, for me, and I can hardly dig into the verses as a result and that’s before I even try to deal with “false alarm.”
264. Yes, everybody knows that dreams are the hop-on-hop-off tourist bus of meaning, dreams are where the essence of meaning goes to be non-essential, dreams are the grocery list after it gets ketchup spilled on it and is left out in the rain, dreams are the journal after journaller has discarded it, dreams are the disused quarry seen from above, dreams are the indiscriminate used bookstore, dreams are the data storage bunker where nothing is ever discarded and rarely is it displayed, dreams are the endless photo feed of the ADHD Gen Zer, who will never look again, dreams are the personal possession hoard of the dispossessed exile, dreams are the wasteland of collectivity, the floating trash island off the Gulf of Mexico, dreams are the collection of all possible tweets, the museum of discarded tastes, and of course dreams are the language of the prophets.
265. In the past there was a glorious ascending arc to dreams.
266. They were predictive.
267. They were symbolic—from a realm of collective narratives.
268. They spoke from a deep place unto the future.
269. The Book of Revelations would be an example.
270. Prophecy of this kind is well known to us, at least when we link up the prophetic voice with some premodern languages of the ancients.
271. And the Edenic/agrarian dream of “Woodstock” is consistent with this premodern prophetic voice.
272. Perhaps the military anxiety is too.
273. Maybe the anxiety of the being-conquered, the anxiety of confronting asymmetrical power, the anxiety of shock and awe is as old as prophetic language.
274. And it runs like a motif through Joni Mitchell.
275. It is true that for some couple of decades, the eighties and nineties, more or less, I frequently dreamed of nuclear attack.
276. Once a month or so.
277. More sometimes.
278. These dreams varied.
279. In Providence, where I was an undergraduate, I dreamed of standing in that little terrace on Prospect St. and watching the mushroom cloud down below.
280. In other dreams it was a digging through the rubble of incineration.
281. In still others the menace was the radiation and I was okay for the moment but knew what was to come.
282. In those days my life was unsettled—professionally, personally, with respect to my art, emotionally, physically, etc. This instability would have been cause enough.
283. But I was also fixated on the horror of that Reagan-era line (actually uttered by T. K. Jones, a Cold War treaty negotiator) about life after the American-Soviet nuclear exchange: “With enough shovels we can get through this.”
284. (Actually, the line, which is ungrammatical, apparently goes: “Turns out with the Russian approach, if there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it.”
285. You sort of know what he means.
286. The dream of being-faced-with-asymmetrical-force.)
287. The last song Mitchell played was “The Circle Game,” which is about the myth of eternal return, at least somewhat. There’s sort of nothing to say about that, excepting that it’s a fine way to end. But there was a penultimate song, the next-to-last, that was most lasting.
288. That song was “Shine.”
289. Although Mitchell has been playing this song these last two years it’s a pretty wacky choice. If Dog Eat Dog is often considered a least good Mitchell album, Shine runs near to it in many list-making venues. It is, it’s said, too cranky and too adult contemporary. Even people who love Joni Mitchell frequently don’t love it.
290. But here it was. (She also played “If” from the same record.)
291. (By the way my own top ten Joni Mitchell albums: Blue, Court and Spark, Hejira, Ladies of the Canyon, Shadows and Light, For the Roses, Mingus, Travelogue, River: The Joni Letters, Clouds, and then, special mention, Anthology Vol 4.)
292. “Shine,” the song, does a thing Joni Mitchell doesn’t do very often: it repeats a lot.
293. Really almost every major Joni Mitchell song, especially after Court and Spark, resists a home key either modulating or by playing with passing tones and modes that are sort of at the edge of tonality. “Shine,” though, especially in this new Gospel-inflected version, is melodically static.
294. Melodically static can be rhetorically immense.
295. In this case “Shine” alludes directly to “This Little Light of Mine,” the African-American spiritual of unknown origin, which seems, like many uncanny things, to emerge from out of nowhere in the 1920s.
296. Maybe it was a children’s song first?
297. Maybe it was a primer on physics?
298. Maybe it was about astrophysics?
299. Maybe it was about desire?
300. Maybe it was about self-expression?
301. Maybe it was about the divine and conceptions of the divine?
302. Maybe it was about the Big Bang?
303. Maybe it was about songwriting?
304. Maybe it was about anaphora?
305. Mitchell’s version preserves the simplicity and country-gospel-hymnodic feel of “This Little Light,” or some portion thereof, and especially the ecstatic luminosity of the theme, but—
306. And here’s the big difference—
307. She fuses the sunny optimism of the original with the frank articulations of her later work.
308. Indeed, there is no song by Mitchell that is quite as noteworthy for its provocations and challenging sentiments.
309. But it is the cross-contamination of “Shine,” especially, e.g., in the Newport concert recording, that is most noteworthy. Challenging lines, easy musical form.
310. So much dark, so much light.
311. On the basis of this intensely luminous soup of the cross-contaminated you might suppose that the prophetic must be:
312. Complex.
313. I want to make sure that that does not suggest “obscure” to you like in the revelations of St. John. Because I mean “complex” but not “obscure.”
314. “Shine” is right out front where you can wrestle with it.
315. And yet: there is the internally contradictory material.
316. The light in this ecstatically luminous space lights up every gradient of earthly activity, both sacred and profane, good and ill.
317. So: if Mitchell has landed on a spiritual echelon in this the post-Woodstock extremity of a ninth decade it seems to incline toward: an infinite outflowing of grace, whether an individual recipient “deserves” the infinite outflowing or not.
318. A non-conditional outflowing of grace, no matter who you are. An amazingness of grace.
319. I think the lighted-up-phones during “Shine” probably started in Newport, or, maybe, the idea of it preceded Newport. Doesn’t matter really. By the time we got to the Hollywood Bowl, the idea of 17,000 phones lit up in the greater outdoors must have looked very seductive for the concert organizers.
320. And so it was during “Shine” that at first a few phones, but then nearly all the phones, throughout the basin of the Hollywood Bowl, lit up during “Shine,” and this you can see on YouTube, from the 10/20 show at 2:59. I am sure that the audience’s participation in this was matched by some illumination native to the Bowl itself.
321. It was, to me, one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen at a concert. The conjunction of all those nodes of light, more like some concatenation of shooting stars, or like some total failure of the light pollution in that city, such that the Milky Way swarmed around us.
322.
2. My parents had been divorced since, I think, 1971, or 53 years, on the occasion of the concert. I still think of them on October 19.
3. Is not divorce, any divorce, on the list of “petty wars” that the Joni Mitchell narrator of “Traveller (Hejira)” describes in that bit of song ravishment? (I’m using the demo/early version here.)
4. There are things I find keenly uncomfortable about Los Angeles. I like to walk, but L.A., because of its scale, requires a lot of driving. A constancy of highway transit, yes. A city of travelers.
5. “Hejira,” the title, means (arguably) exodus, means traveling, means perhaps exodus with a spiritual intent (Mohammed’s transit from Mecca to Medina, e.g.), and that purpose is sketched out in various songs on the album of the same name. For example, in the title track and in the closer, “Refuge of the Roads.”
6. We flew on my birthday. My son was preoccupied with the trip, in the weeks before, and kept asking, “When is LA? When is LA?”
7. Before the pandemic, before my son was born, there was quite a bit of travel in my life. Not as much since.
8. This weekend in LA, in which we were to attend the Joni Mitchell show, had a few other activities scheduled in too.
9. Laurel had some work in a gallery in LA. The opening was that afternoon.
10. We were to see some friends.
11. And perhaps most notably we intended to stamp the Ireicho, the book of names of all the Japanese Americans interned in domestic concentration camps during WWII by the American government. This list of names contains several of Laurel’s close relatives, including, for example, her father.
12. (See, e.g., his powerful work on the subject, Looking After Minidoka: An American Memoir, Indiana University Press, 2013. By Neil Nakadate.)
13. The Ireicho is stamped, according to this project, which is currently housed by the Japanese American National Museum in the “Little Tokyo” section of Los Angeles, by the family members, in a brief ceremony that is programmed by the museum.
14. Laurel had long wanted to undertake this pilgrimage.
15. There is much to say about what it means to be a witness to the generational wound commemorated in the Ireicho, to travel in order to accompany, to make note. But some of what wishes to be said about this is cheapened by words, made homely, and in truth can only be approached through transformation, allegory. For the observer silence is most elegant.
16. (Still I am both accompanist to those affected and father to one person affected, and I can say from a position of adjacency that executive order 9066 continues to ring out with its barbarism, its venality, its weakness, its shredding of the law and legal standards, its glorification of racialist thinking, its natively grown fascism; the ripples on the surface of the pond, rippling outward, following upon the jingoism of a single American congressman from Santa Monica, California, from whom the idea gained its dark momentum until it reached the desk of the allegedly progressivist man of the people.)
17. The Japanese American National Museum in L.A. features a reconstructed barracks from one of the concentration camps, and relics from each.
18. The relic from Minidoka in this display is an empty wooden box, not terribly large, suitable for portage, for some last collection of family heirlooms, maybe.
19. Lots of scholarly material there too. If you haven’t lately read the original poster produced by the government whose purpose was to cause the rounding up of the Japanese Americans you should.
20. It bears mentioning perhaps, that a certain politician of the present moment, while campaigning, on the day we flew west, compared the jailed January 6th (2021) insurrectionists to interned Japanese American citizens, Why are they still being held? Nobody’s ever been treated like this. Maybe the Japanese during Second World War, frankly. They were held, too.“
21. The ironies!
22. The same candidate elsewhere refused to speak against the internment of Japanese Americans with this moment of homespun American oratory: "War is tough.”
23. (He also said the Nazis did some “good things.”)
24. The stamping of the Ireicho, at the Japanese American National Museum, was principally accomplished, in this case, by Laurel, my son Theo Moody, and Theo’s cousin Jackson Nakadate, also attending Jackson’s mother Stephanie Manfre and myself. It involved taking a small stamp, under the name of relatives, and then, further, stamping once for a non-related person who has not been able to be commemorated, by reason of not having any living relatives, or relatives able to travel to the site of the Ireicho. That is, you do an additional stamp—for the community.
25. Everything about the process, and the reverence associated with the process, the silence of the process, the space in which the process took place, the book itself, the lighting, and so on, was devastating, except for the part that was about survival, the part about bearing witness, the part about community, the part about not forgetting, and I hesitate to say “devastating,” because my experience of the Japanese American community is they would think the word “devastating” was perhaps a bit histrionic.
26. And yet.
27. It is hard to watch your son learn about these things.
28. I have forgotten to say that we went to the Santa Monica pier the day before, on the day we landed in LA. We went straight to the Santa Monica pier, because we figured it was an iconic LA location, and Theo, at least, needed to see some of the iconic places of Los Angeles, so we went to the pier, in the district once represented by Leland Ford, first architect of internment.
29. Theo had picked out a restaurant he wanted to try on the pier. It was called Japadog.
30. And: we climbed down from the pier to be close the Pacific, which ocean Theo had seen episodically because of our family in Oregon, but which is always worth a look when you’re in LA, because it calls forth, for example, “Surf’s Up,” by The Beach Boys.
31. (The thing about “Surf’s Up” at least according to Van Dyke Parks, the lyricist, was that the title was meant to convey that the surfing was over, completed, as in, e.g. “time’s up,” but perhaps while retaining surfer usage in which “surf’s up,” means the waves are large or such as to permit good surfing, and thus the title is auto-contradictory.)
32. (The armchair that Joni Mitchell sang from at the show we later saw, center stage, sort of reminded me of Brian Wilson’s central location in his last concerts, from behind a keyboard he mostly did not play. Maybe this is a semiotics of stage design that indicates: performer of advanced years around whom is the orbiting of the players.)
33. I took a photograph of my son with trousers uprolled, dancing for his mom, with thunder of the surf, at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.
34. Oh, by the way, we stayed in an iconic LA hotel, the Roosevelt, in Hollywood, in a neighborhood of a singularly urban cast, the neighborhood with the “Walk of Fame” stars contained in it. The Roosevelt has a sort of sixties vibe. Marilyn Monroe was photographed there on a diving board that no longer exists; David Hockney painted the floor of the pool; Montgomery Clift’s ghost haunts the ninth floor, so they say, Clark Gable made gin in his bathtub there, etc.
35. Our room was rather small.
36. Another professional reason we had for going to L.A., was that I had been attempting a story for each state in the United States, and I had drafted a sort of a California story in which a kid from the Central Valley comes to LA to see the Walk of Fame star of Mark Hamill, because he’s obsessed with that space western, but he can’t really get to the star, because there’s a protest happening by a star associated with a certain politician. This protest blocks my protagonist’s access.
37. I had written this story without ever seeing the Hollywood Walk of Fame, despite my dozen or so visits to Los Angeles.
38. Thus, I wished to see the precise location of the star of the politician, in order to better write of its location in detail. This star happens to be in front of a Capital One bank, not far from the El Capitan, in front of which is also Hamill’s star, the one unreachable by my protagonist.
39. Naturally, there is something abhorrent about the Walk of Fame, especially when you get in the business of cataloguing the really awful people, besides the presidential candidate, who are memorialized there. Lots of convicted abusers of various kinds and people with other sorts of public-relations difficulties. There is someone to love the star of every miscreant, however, like the young woman we saw in some kneeling, prayerful, or otherwise reverential posture before the star of the guy who sang “Billie Jean.”
40. The presidential candidate’s star had nearby it a stand hawking MAGAwear and other effluvia.
41. All of this we passed on the way to Runyon Canyon first thing on Saturday morning. As we were still on East Coast time, we passed unmolested through the Walk of Fame, and we could see there some greatness, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, or Louis Armstrong, for example. For some reason, everywhere we went that weekend, everywhere that was not a Joni Mitchell concert, Creedence Clearwater Revival was playing, like at Mel’s Drive-In, later, where five songs by Creedence played. So, of course, we saw John Fogerty’s star, on the way.
42. I would not say that all of Hollywood Boulevard was a fentanyl zone, and that the entirety of Hollywood was populated by an unhoused addict population, nor that I saw any superabundance of this unhoused population while in Los Angeles, but there was a raw, slightly unsettling, anti-civilizing occupying force on Hollywood Boulevard. In the Target, e.g., virtually everything in the store, all the electronics, much of the health and beauty aids section, was locked up, and when I, a man in his sixties, white-haired and soft, attempted to locate an iPhone charger, it had to be walked up to the register by an employee to ensure that I was not going to try to spirit it past the front door.
43. Runyon Canyon is perhaps one of the few places in LA wherein you can scarcely hear the traffic and the desperation, and from there, at its rim, you can see the famous “Hollywood” sign, which my son had never seen, and various other landmarks, like the observatory, the ocean, certain spots associated with Scientology, the “downtown” portion of Los Angeles, and so on.
44. To hike the canyon, however popular, is to defect from the petty wars, and to rise up above the desert, where it can be known. The former desert. The once and future Los Angeles.
45. The desert seems to be in resistance to the vast urban onslaught.
46. After the hike, we went to brunch with a friend in Echo Park, who is in the middle of a divorce. On the day of my parents’ anniversary, which to me is a day to think about divorce, we thought about my friend’s divorce, and worried for her, about the money, about the separation of property, and so on. But we also laughed some and ate crepes and I talked to my friend’s child about YouTube and video game design.
47. Much of Hejira by Joni Mitchell, it is said, is about Mitchell’s breakup with/from drummer John Guerin. And about the time after the time of the breakup, the journeys after the journey that is a relationship as it dissolves.
48. My hypothesis is: divorce causes narrative branching. And the embarkation along the axes of narrative branching is experienced like a journey, a novel journey, a new beginning. And this is how the song “Hejira” begins: “I am traveling in some vehicle/I am sitting in some cafe.”
49. I like the ambiguity of “some vehicle,” because it indicates the polymorphic ambiguity of rock star vehicles but also implies more abstract vehicles too. Vehicles psychic, spiritual, and philosophical. I am in some vehicle that is the conveyor of change.
50. My experience of cities, recently, is that cities are, yes, large-containers of addiction and addict populations. What one presidential candidate frames as an invasion force is not an invasion force so much as a class of humans (my class, I should say, as a person with an addictive history), an us not a them, many of them exposed to opioid addiction, arguably, by American capitalism (Big Pharma), not by their own moral lassitude.
51. We expected, further, on the walk to the Hollywood Bowl, that this would be our time to encounter large-scale fentanyl-related disability, and it is true that outside the coffee shop by the hotel I had the experience of seeing “someone I would know,” a relatively ordinary young woman standing and smoking and then getting down under a tarp, right on the sidewalk, a someone who would perhaps be in the addicts-in-recovery circles that I have frequented my whole adult life; but in general my experience was contrarily that Hollywood was not overpopulated by these persons; New York is worse these days; in general I have seen no city that really compares to Portland, OR, in this regard, and in Portland, OR, the problem stems from decriminalizing without having a big, accessible, user-friendly, city-sized treatment model in place; addiction is physical disease, as all the mental illnesses are; and while I know there are some pretty grungy skid row parts of LA (as there are in Boston, where I live now), my conclusion is that we have become subject to an apocalyptic rhetoric about cities during this election cycle, and the apocalyptic rhetoric is, as all apocalyptic thinking is, to fail to look deeply and understand nuance, variation, polyphony, difference, scale. The apocalypse is to fall short on human relations.
52. The passage, on foot, through L.A. is benedictory. This is not true of car travel.
53. I’m sure that there is often a large crowd of people walking to the Hollywood Bowl for musical acts that are to me inexplicable, like Imagine Dragons, or Haim, or The Black Crowes, or Maneskin, or The Jonas Brothers, or Avril Lavigne, or (perhaps especially) Morgan Wallen. There is a crowd for each, and maybe to them, the constituents of our crowd, the Joni Mitchell fans, are contemptible, or old, but because there is a sense with every one of the current Joni Mitchell shows that she might never play again, there is a profound sense of sharing in something really important. It’s congregational.
54. That’s why we flew all the way across the country.
55. So coming up the hill to the Hollywood Bowl, on foot, was to be in a kind of a pilgrimage. Toward the congregation. There was, this night, a whiff of miracle cures.
56. There are lots of echelons of capitalism that have to be passed through before you get to the actual amphitheater, the Hollywood Bowl itself, and the merch lines, e.g., were really long (the money these days is all in dry goods), but then eventually you climb up enough, circumnavigate enough, and you are there.
57. You’re sort of on some potentate’s lawn.
58. Benches, sure, but they’re on someone’s lawn.
59. The thing that came to mind, for me, was the ruin of a Roman amphitheater I saw once, upon traveling in Lyon, France. Everywhere I went they kept telling me Lyon was the “centre gastronomique de France.”
60. I was there, on this occasion, to deliver a paper on Antonin Artaud, in which I considered from many vantage points the opening section of The Theater and Its Double, especially the line: “And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.”
61. And so while I was in Lyon, I went to see the Theatre antique de Lyon, which is on a hill, also sort of somebody’s lawn, the Roman Empire’s lawn, on the Fourviere hill, which was built in the first century of the common era.
62. They held gladiatorial combat there.
63. And plays.
64. It’s hard not to think of The Theater and Its Double when you see the ruin in Lyon, which says empire and death in all their brute simplicity, and signals the kind of spectacle that Guy Debord lamented in the sixties.
65. The Hollywood Bowl is like the theater in Lyon in many aspects. It is a ready container for spectacle, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Stevie Wonder, Fleetwood Mac, Adele, and on and on. And it is a display of the crowd-control dynamics that are made possible by empire. It is, as an architectural feature, about the empire of capital, carved into a space degraded and endangered by the presence of twenty million people, in a climate of extremes, built on a tectonic fault line.
66. Every show there is about the possible end of the Hollywood Bowl, in fire or flood.
67. Every show involves fiddling while Rome burns.
68. In the meantime: what an incredible place to hear music.
69. Now, my unpopular opinion is that while it is important that Brandy Carlisle has helped to bring Joni Mitchell back to the stage, her role has become, in a way, too fundamental to the event. It’s as if the evening is vetted by Brandy Carlisle, and her approval is somehow necessary for the process.
70. Manifestly, Joni Mitchell herself exceeds the world’s conception of Joni Mitchell (mine included), and thus hearing Brandy Carlisle say: “Joni you just sang the shit out of that song!” After one number is a counterproductive grace note in the proceedings because it diminishes the Joni Mitchell who exceeds all containers.
71. We all know that Joni Mitchell could play these songs with her crabbed, arthritic hands, on a guitar with just one string, with just what vocal range is available to her now, her alto-ish voice, and still they would be some of the very greatest songs ever written by anyone.
72. So the spectacle—the enormous band, the pyrotechnical keyboard solos, the guest stars, the ever present Carlisle, hey that’s Los Angeles, man, it’s Hollywood. But once upon a time Joni Mitchell sang “Woodstock” with just electric piano and voice. She sang “River” accompanying herself, with no one else besides.
73. She could do it now—and this gesture would say: here is the human.
74. However: if you were worried that the Brandi Carlisle effect would be outsized you were in part disabused of this by an instantaneous sensation in the first couple of songs: these are some deep cuts. Not the predictable crowdpleasers.
75. Like, uh, would the Hollywood version not start with “Help Me?” Or “You Turn Me On I’m a Radio?”
76. Nope.
77. I didn’t know a song until the third one: “Hejira.” Which I have been interleaving into these lines.
78. Maybe this is the moment to note that my sister had, I think, four Joni Mitchell albums among her store of things at the time of her death—Ladies of the Canyon, Blue, Court and Spark, and Hejira, actually maybe For the Roses, too. More Joni Mitchell than albums by anyone else, including the Grateful Dead, whom she sorta followed around. It’s possible that I wouldn’t have any thoughts about music at all if it weren’t for the time of my sister, if it weren’t for the abbreviated Being of my sister, my sister as an idea of music appreciation. Not what she said about it, but how it was in her and with her, the behold-the-feminine of my sister and her music.
79. (Though, here’s some other stuff she liked: Birds of Fire (Mahavishnu Orchestra); Roxy and Elsewhere (Zappa/Mothers); Collaboration (Shawn Phillips); The Wild, the Innocent, the E Street Shuffle (Springsteen); John Barleycorn Must Die (Traffic); Mister Magic (Grover Washington, Jr.); Sailing Shoes (Little Feat); The Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus (Spirit), etc.)
80. “Hejira” was the third song. And this one I knew because my sister liked that album.
81. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that there would never be a life in music for me if not for the musical women in my early life, and the relationship to music on the part of these women, which was a relationship of self-iteration in the process of collecting/listening where the albums were somehow cairns on the alpine hike of self, and what an arresting disappointment it was for me later in high school and college to find that there were people who owned music just as something to fill a silence or to which they might dance.
82. But my sister (and my mother, too, at least for a time), was always looking for something, for an edge to push against. And it wasn’t that she didn’t like the joyful and accessible; it was that she never would stop there. Not when there was an alpine journey to be had.
83. Thus: Hejira.
84. It might be said I have always resisted the fretless bass playing of Jaco Pastorious (self-proclaimed greatest bass player in the world), even though I attempted to master a fretless instrument at one point and I know how difficult they are. Jaco’s bass always wanted to demonstrate its proficiency and its front-of-the-mix centrality. And while I admire certain bassists who can’t be bothered with root-note obligations, in the jazz tradition, harmonic resistance or harmonic liberation, even in Weather Report he was too much. There’s a mugging, an antic quality with Jaco Pastorious, perhaps verging on a pathology.
85. It would be easy to feel about Hejira that it occasionally suffers from too much Jaco Pastorious.
86. But wherever there’s a negation there’s an affirmation lying in wait, and not only do we see in Pastorious’s sad fate a poignancy in the music waiting to be perceived, a non-chronological poignancy, but also the fretless bass work on Hejira is impossible to reproduce—it’s too singular—and so at the Hollywood Bowl they didn’t try. Well, maybe there were some solar flares, but nothing quite so performative, and this is another reason why there was room at the show, and specifically on the song “Hejira,” for:
87. The lyrics.
88. The theme of the album called Hejira is travel, arguably, but more, perhaps, travel as a kind of spiritual exercise (maybe kind of in the way Basho talks about travel).
89. Apparently the word Hejira is a slightly impulsive translation of الهجرة which is more commonly rendered “hijrah.” Mitchell has said various things about the word, that it means, something like “leaving precipitously but with honor.” This sounds like “defecting from the petty wars” of romance, which is almost immediately sketched out in the title song, which, as I have noted, was originally called “Traveling (Hejira).”
90. (All Joni Mitchell demos are incredible, hushed and astounding, and this demo is no exception. Listen to the demo!)
91. The Arabic word الهجرة also refers to the prophet Muhammad’s relocation, with followers, to Medina, from Mecca, which as I understand it was a kind of expulsion, an exodus, like the Mormons fleeing west, like the Jews going out from enslavement, like Rastafarians in Marley’s bus, on their exodus.
92. To hear it at the Hollywood Bowl, self-selected by Mitchell, one of three songs from the album, in a set list long on the least well-known period of Joni Mitchell, the post-Mingus period, was above all to hear the lyrics.
93. These are some of the best lyrics anyone ever committed to song.
94. “I’m traveling in some vehicle …”
95. If you were under the delusion that this was going to be some expectable rock and roll on-the-road-again song, you are soon mistaken.
96. No vehicle specified, because some of the conveyance systems are abstract.
97. A journey from Mecca to Medina.
98. Mitchell has also indicated that the leaving in her album of traveling songs is without regrets.
99. The Joni Mitchell narrator of “Coyote,” one of the three songs from Hejira played at the Hollywood Bowl, says this very thing: “No regrets, Coyote.”
100. To the (alleged) Sam Shepard character.
101. So even though the traveling of Hejira seems like it features an aloneness or takes place in a post-romantic or extra-romantic space, it also feels non-recriminatory.
102. As here: “In our possessive coupling/So much could not be expressed/So now I’m returning to myself/These things that you and I suppressed.”
103. Is the “non-recriminatory” part of what I’m thinking of as Mitchell’s prophetic language?
104. Maybe it is a feature of the prophetic that it is both lacerating/challenging and forgiving/passionate.
105. Mitchell, of course, is not unknown for her bounty of lovers in the music community.
106. At a certain point you might have said it was her subject. As in “A Case of You,” which she played on this night, and there is, if one speaks merely biographically, the specific precipitating event (a “break-up” to use the common parlance), that seems to get trod over in Hejira, the album, but there is also a kind of intense transitional energy, a passing beyond, with respect to the common parlance.
107. Maybe part of it has to do with: jazz.
108. Maybe jazz is: vehicular.
109. “I’m traveling in some vehicle.”
110. Where the vehicle is: instantaneity.
111. The words are composed but the arrangements leave this space—a space that is even more so than on Court and Spark where the jazz inflection first appeared.
112. In a way the lyrics of “Hejira” (the song) seem to go backward in time, starting post-breakup and then going backward into the events preceding.
113. This is in the nature of analysis, especially in the analysis of human behavior.
114. That it wishes to understand the causative.
115. For example, while this essay is about a Joni Mitchell concert, it also writes from the time after the presidential election of 11/6/2024 about the time just before this election, and part of its mission is perforce therefore an inquiry into causative forces with respect to that election, or a seeing backward into that former time.
116. One verse of “Hejira” does this exactly, conceives of prehistory.
117. A portion of verse two, thus:
118. “Now here’s a man and a woman sitting on a rock/They’re either going to thaw out or freeze/Listen/Strains of Benny Goodman/Coming through the snow and the pinewood trees.”
119. This sculptural evocation of the dyad, a retrospective sculptural evocation, as if made by Rodin, rises out of nowhere in verse two of the song. It’s anything but “now.” It’s almost classical, except in the mind of the narrator and beholding subject.
120. By the way, the lineation I propose above comes from Mitchell’s web site, and so it is consistent with her ideas—an injunction to “listen” hanging out there by itself.
121. Why Benny Goodman is wafting across the tundra here would be an interesting question, and I’m sure Mitchell has spoken to it, though at the moment her having-spoken-thus is shrouded in a mystery that permits me a certain license to connect Benny Goodman to the 1970 recording of “For Free” from Ladies of the Canyon.
122. Goodman plays the clarinet; the street musician the Mitchell protagonist hears in the narrative of “For Free” is a clarinetist.
123. Such that “For Free” seems premonitory with respect to the complexity that is Hejira.
124. However: my point in invoking the section of verse two of the song, and the couple there bound to thaw or freeze, is to see the album and the song not only about travel, and particularly about spiritual journey, but also as taking romantic struggle and disaffiliation as a point of departure for spiritual journey.
125. You set out for spiritual growth via an aloneness.
126. When Mitchell was writing Ladies of the Canyon she lived in the house in Laurel Canyon (so close to Hollywood Bowl) memorialized in Graham Nash’s “Our House.” A site of domestic unanimity.
127. In just six years she went from there to the Basho-like peregrinations of Hejira.
128. I could hear all of this in “Hejira” in ways I had not before. As in the demo of the song a suppression (Mitchell’s word) of Jaco Pastorious, which likewise at the Hollywood Bowl made possible a presencing of the lyrics.
129. It was during “Hejira” that I knew something epochal was transpiring—an instance of the prophetic.
130. The key for me (and perhaps I didn’t get it till the repetition at the end) was “a defector from the petty wars.”
131. To hear this song was to be in the presence of that absence.
132. That defection.
133. That retirement.
134. That registration of defection.
135. That noticing.
136. The crowd noticed. The players onstage noticed. Brandi Carlisle made a crack like: “You just heard Joni Mitchell sing fucking ‘Hejira!’” Or similar. (I’m remembering here rather than checking YouTube.)
137. All of this was to know something was taking place, and that its code was not “Let’s play the hits.”
138. And if “Hejira” didn’t make defection plain enough the next song did. “Cherokee Louise.”
139. It’s from Night Ride Home, not every Mitchell fan’s first stop (the nineties), the Larry Klein period, but with a lyric both bittersweet and about childhood and deeply harrowing about disenfranchisement, prejudice, and outright physical and sexual abuse suffered by indigenous persons in the Canada of Mitchell’s youth.
140. No easy song, no thing of pillowy concert-going comfort.
141. Where the fuck is “Big Yellow Taxi?”
142. And now we get to the interesting part. When “Cherokee Louise” was over Mitchell embarked on her first extended remarks of the evening, these mainly an explication of the song and its narrative, in the way, e.g., that folksingers, in the old days, would pause to give a generous accounting. This story was harrowing and sad she talked around it some, it took a while, and then: Mitchell further extemporized using a term for a Louise’s Cherokee heritage, a bit of a colonialist word that most younger people would perhaps avoid. I’m not sure my son would even know that this word applied to the First Nations peoples.
143. What I mean is: Mitchell is 80 years old and was perhaps using the word commonly employed when she and Louise were young, when they were just kids.
144. And what I mean is: Mitchell defiantly wrote a song in defense of her friend, and then, in defending this defense, she used the old word, the word of empire, to name the First Nations peoples.
145. Is it my imagination, or did Brandi Carlisle then attempt to abbreviate Mitchell’s story about Louise a little bit, such that we would get back to the proceedings? I’m sure she would say just the opposite in retrospect.
146. There are, in abundance, accounts online of how thoughtfully and gently Carlisle and the others involved in the Joni Jams keep Joni “on track,” and these inevitably feature some discussion of her aneurysm and brain surgery in 2015 and the recovery therefrom.
147. I’m sure that all of this discussion is perfectly accurate.
148. And yet I did feel like saying: let the lady talk.
149. She’s Joni Mitchell, she wrote the song—about patriarchy and prejudice in Canada.
150. And what is “on track” anyway? Who gets to decide?
151. The key in which this song was written, as with “Hejira” and others we were soon to hear was: prophetic language.
152. Let the prophet talk!
153. The next two songs were “Coyote” and “Carey,” and though the first of these is from Hejira, and features the “no regrets” line that marks the album as a whole, these two songs were to keep the asses in the seats, or, perhaps, to cause people to stand up in their seats.
154. There was a node of classic Joni fans a row or two behind us, in fact, for whom the appearance of “Carey” was a very important world-historical moment.
155. I think of them as belonging to the “Help Me” me portion of the fandom, for whom the success of that song served as the point of ingress, though its vocal demands would make it difficult to recreate by the present Joni Mitchell.
156. In any event, once “Carey,” had been performed, and I will warrant that it was very satisfying, very moving, even if significantly different from the initial arrangement, the set list veered back toward the outspoken and opinionated material of Mitchell’s 1980-1990s discography.
157. Two songs from Turbulent Indigo were on the set list, including, after “Carey,” a song called “The Sire of Sorrow (Job’s Sad Song),” the long, mournful last song from that album, in which Mitchell takes on the point of view of Job, the mythic sufferer, and in the process, seems to speak an allegory about the time in her professional life when her relationship to work had grown apparently less comfortable.
158. (The relevant line is: “Why have you soured and curdled me?”)
159. (On Spotify, one morning I listened to “The Sire of Sorrow,” and it was then followed by the joyful, somewhat jubilant “All I Want,” from Blue, with its warm, affirmational, celebratory lyric: “I want to knit you a sweater, I want to write you a love letter, I want to make you feel better,” where the song itself is the love letter. What a contrast between these songs!)
160. Of course, Job is an original reservoir of language for the afflicted, and Mitchell’s song, recorded during the time of the HIV crisis, finds a potential modern analogue in that time, but it’s relevant to contextualize the song with reference not only to Mitchell’s childhood struggle with polio, but also with reference to her post-polio syndrome, her struggle with the Morgellons family of symptoms, and her aneurysm and recovery. The song predates some of the life events, but prepares a way to talk about them, to name them.
161. The celebrated jacket of Turbulent Indigo—which casts Mitchell as Vincent Van Gogh, complete with missing ear—makes plain the high cost of art-making.
162. It’s really easy to think you know what this cover image means.
163. It’s easy to think we know what there is to know about mental illness and artists.
164. It’s easy to think we know all there is to know about Mitchell.
165. It’s easy to think we know how hard it is to be a woman who is an artist. It’s easy to think that we know about a particular kind of unwanted attention and exploitation that women receive in the music business. Harder to think about the cost of that to the self over, say, decades.
166. Consider what it’s like to be a person with polio (who has had to relearn how to walk twice in her life), at this moment in history, when the public debate is about whether to vaccinate for polio at all, while you continue to suffer from the after-effects of the disease seventy years later.
167. The value of the Book of Job is that it models a prophetic voice against injustice. It creates its own literary modus: the first-person cry of pain. For the Book of Job to resonate fully, Job has to suffer with an array of excrescences, and (perhaps) when that obligation is met, whether in the actual or metaphorical state, the language is an organic development, the music of suffering.
168. (For example, when Jesus of Nazareth, on the cross, in the Place of Skulls, says “Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani,” during his suffering, he recalls/alludes to the plaint of Job.)
169. However, this prophetic language of suffering can also precede the event of excrescence, because in the purest examples of suffering causation and language are confused in time—
170. The sufferings reverberate forward and backward in the event sequence.
171. Nietzsche’s suffering, in language, precedes his late-life psychosis, pre-figures it, and the same with Artaud, who then writes from his psychotic time back into his youth so as to make his suffering inevitable.
172. In this way, perhaps, it is less that prophetic language is predictive (as it appears to be in some common ideas of the prophet) and more that this language breaks down causality and finds a cycle of suffering and language to be somehow self-reinforcing.
173. The description of pain, transmittal thereof, is a very basic language function (as I believe Wittgenstein argued too).
174. Despite, e.g., a childhood with polio, Joni Mitchell cloaked a struggle with physical pain in the philosophy of adroit melodies early on, with extremely compelling results, all beloved of the “Help Me” portion of the fandom, until at some point some of this melodic simplicity and comeliness began to fall away and we saw more completely a prophetic language, acutely noticeable in lyrical constructs after Mingus, let’s say, and from there on out, unto the present, unto the Hollywood Bowl.
175. Nobody likes a prophet in her own time, of course.
176. Actually, “Sire of Sorrow,” in the concert, was followed by “God Must Be a Boogie Man,” from Mingus, a sort of abandon-hope-all-ye portal into the later Joni Mitchell, a song which, on 10/19/2024, had not been played live in 41 years. It sure sounded good, and a quick look at the recent Vol IV of the Mitchell Archives reminds me of a set of proto-Joni-Jams that were arranged for Mingus—the singer playing early versions of the Mingus compositions with seasoned Charles Mingus ensemble veterans.
177. These performances are some of Mitchell’s very best.
178. Initially (I read somewhere) the lyrics of Mingus were meant to update Eliot’s “Four Quartets” Yikes! Time present and time past! In my beginning is my end (as Anaximander seems to say), because beginnings constitute endings.
179. And: the last three songs of set one were of continued interest: “Refuge of the Roads,” “Night Ride Home,” and, to send the audience happily into the break between sets, “Both Sides Now.”
180. I guess “Both Sides Now” was expectable, as she has sung it almost continuously and consistently since her range declined, on, for example, her “standards” album of 2000, also called Both Sides Now, and the version she performed at Newport somewhat followed that one, containing, e.g., the “Hey Joni, you’ve changed” line in verse three, this torch ballad reading, which finds the older singer’s opportunity in a very young singer’s song, time past in time present.
181. “Night Ride Home,” with its cricket high hat, or cricket continuo (on the original), is amiable, is another road song (from 1991), but it’s set on the 4th of July, and basically inhabits the idea that the national holiday is unimportant. It doesn’t figure in the action. The song develops a frivolous neglect of political superstructure. But its simple reckoning with nighttime, ecosystem thereof, constitutes a pure instance of songcraft in the 90s output of Joni Mitchell.
182. To get to these songs, though, we passed through “Refuge of the Roads,” the companion piece to “Hejira,” the song that closes the album of the same name.
183. A truly mesmerizing song with a beautiful rhythmical guitar part in some masterful Mitchell tuning (CACFAC) where every chord is easily suspended, and featuring many key migrations, especially in the bridge.
184. And this was the second time that Mitchell made extensive remarks, on this night in Hollywood, about Chogyam Trungpa. He, the founder of Naropa, and a popularizer of Tibetan Buddhism in the West.
185. Mitchell, as she has done on many occasions, presented her encounter with Trungpa as a straightforward spiritual experience—apparently one in which Mitchell was cured of cocaine addiction. So the story goes.
186. The song “Refuge of the Roads” paints a straightforward rendering of Trungpa’s legendary alcoholism, his sexual adventuring, and so on. But in the prophetic tradition the spiritual renewal with which one is occasionally blessed is what is. You don’t judge. You don’t go back and evaluate the teachers, any more than you evaluate the prophet. The value of the prophet is in the prophecy. In the language.
187. The prophet is an effect of the prophecy.
188. So, in a way, the value of the Joni Mitchell “unretired” appearances are prophetic in their facticity—as of Trungpa of whom it was said that he was the dharma, in his presence—Mitchell gives by her presence-in-song, in exactly the condition she’s in, in her contemporary aspect.
189. The remarks she gave, as with the remarks about “Cherokee Louise,” were time past in time present, and completely phenomenological, and you only have to go read about W. S. Merwin and Trungpa if you want a countervailing opinion.
190. But the prophecy offers the possibility of revelation, not a journalistic account. And it does not need to comfort.
191. Now: there’s a revelation coming in the second set of this show, which is imminent, but I have to skip over some music to get there. (You can watch the other songs on YouTube if you like.)
192. I’m going to skip over the cover of “I’m Still Standing” by Elton John, where the joke was that most people onstage were sitting, most especially the resplendent Joni Mitchell, in her throne-like spot at center stage.
193. I acutely dislike this song.
194. It’s not that I dislike Elton John, I must add. I think Madman Across the Water and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road are both rather terrific, in very different ways, but each with respect to melody writing. The dude could really write a melody. I like many things about the whole first decade of Elton John. His frequent gospel adventures, string arrangements by Paul Buckminster, the incredible bass stylings of Dee Murray, Elton’s elastic attempts to cram in all the words, his falsetto, etc.
195. And yet: I feel only despondence about the eighties and the nineties of Elton. The music of that time is dashed off.
196. And so: “I’m Still Standing,” insipid, boastful, oversimplified, unserious. The lyrics are not to be borne. It’s up there with Eddie Money or Laura Branigan or Night Ranger from the same period. I don’t feel I ever need to hear “I’m Still Standing” again, not even an ironic version, and when I am trapped with it in a gruesome CVS prescription-collection line, I always think I have come at last to the infernal punishments.
197. I get that Mitchell’s band were rehearsing this infant formula for the next night when the ostensibly retired but still very plugged in man himself, Reg Dwight, was going to show up and throw down.
198. But, still, no thank you.
199. I’m also skipping over Annie Lennox singing “Ladies of the Canyon,” which was great. Annie Lennox is a treasure with a really husky interesting voice. It has appreciated even further with age.
200. Marcus Mumford also appeared to sing “California” with Mitchell. I sort of know who this singer is.
201. Mumford did a good job with “California,” and some portion of the audience seemed beguiled by him and his reputation.
202. There were also, at the beginning of the second set, certain flashy piano solos. And Mark Isham, the bittersweet/plangent trumpeter and longtime Mitchell side person, also performed memorably.
203. Then, somewhere in the midst of this spree of accessibility Mitchell snuck in “The Magdalene Laundries,” which like “Cherokee Louise” is about exploitation of women, and also about religious extremism.
204. It’s maybe the single best song Mitchell wrote in her mid-career period. My God, what a song. My God.
205. Mitchell sings it in the first person, though it is not autobiographical, and vanishes into the Irish story finding as one would perhaps (as Sinead O'Connor did) the Irish Catholic infrastructure precisely non-religious, exploitative, while finding the people who suffered under its yoke, conversely, exactly the repositories of the holy.
206. Mitchell gets to the heart of the paradox in the first verse: “Branded as a Jezebel I knew I was not bound for heaven.”
207. And yet as the song goes on the narrator is precisely “bound for heaven,” whatever we think of that address, and the beautiful elliptical music of the song is the route through which it might plausibly happen.
208. This song, unplayed live since 1998, was between Marcus Mumford and Annie Lennox, a bit of a marker thrown down.
209. Maybe no song by Joni Mitchell is more so, more exactly doing the overturning of the tables of the moneylenders, more like Jeremiah in his uncontrollable rage, more like Job in his plaint, and thus rich in the spiritual.
210. Prophetic.
211. Also tucked into the accessibility spree was that chestnut of allegory, “Summertime,” by George Gershwin and Dubose Heyward. (With help on the lyrics from Ira Gershwin.)
212. Mitchell has sung this song throughout the “unretired” period, and it reflects the partial diet of covers that characterized the first iteration of the “Joni Jams,” which likewise included, e.g., “Love Potion #9,” “Young at Heart,” and “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” The presumption must be that these were songs that they played with Mitchell in her house.
213. “Summertime,” of course, summons the especially important jazz renditions thereof, over the years, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, Chet Baker, etc. It is a song that favors, and shows off well, when sung, a restricted vocal range. Of course the reduced range, in this case, is part of the expressive power of the song—not a limitation. A strength.
214. Mitchell uses all of the expressive power available to her.
215. “Summertime” was, therefore, particularly moving.
216. Brandi Carlisle noted as much in its immediate aftermath: “You just sang the shit out of that song, Joni.”
217. In the vast majority of cases, the spree of accessibility portion of set two of the Hollywood Bowl concert reproduced the Newport show of 2023, by now well-known, won a Grammy, and so on.
218. I am not interested in writing about these songs, from set two, which do not command the writing. Though let it be said that in some cases the really incredible songs do command silence, of which they are mostly given none in maw of runaway capitalism.
219. “A Case of You,” e.g., at the Hollywood Bowl, on 10/19/2024, commands a non-commentary:
220.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________221. At one point in my own meager career as a musician I sang some songs, duets, with Jolie Holland, my friend, the singer-songwriter, a truly great musician, and among the songs we were going to sing for this one show, which I believe was on a Valentine’s Day, and which I believe was circa 2014, was “A Good Year For the Roses,” by George Jones. Singing harmony on George Jones, I should note, is especially delightful, owing to the way the harmonies work in his era of country, which borrows from Old Time; it is so much joy singing this song, “A Good Year for the Roses.” However: I noted in singing with Jolie Holland that she did not want to listen to any George Jones recording before attempting to learn the song, not because she didn’t like the song, but rather because she adores the song, and did not wish to deplete it by listening to it.
222. The recording, in this view, the LP or cassette or CD or streaming track, constitutes a diminishment of the power of the song, in the fulcrum of commodity-related repetition. Yes, there are a finite number of performances of a song in which it can be experienced as though new, with the kind of expressive intensity that happens when you first hear a song.
223. As I have noted elsewhere, I have this same feeling about Holland’s song entitled “Mexican Blue,” that it inspires a deep, gentle, and abiding love. The not-wishing-to-deplete-it feeling. Verse four of “Mexican Blue,” when first heard, struck me as hard as any song I have ever heard: “And when you dreamed my guardian spirits appeared/And the moon stretched out across your little bed/They said they’d started to get worried about me/They were happy we had finally met, we had finally met.” There is the danger in listening often to “Mexican Blue” that you will deplete it of its miraculous ability to describe transformative love, past love, reparative love.
224. Jollie Holland, who wrote this song (and then almost left it off the album, according to what she told me), did not want to deplete “A Good Year For the Roses,” one of the saddest, most bereft songs anyone ever recorded, and I do not want to deplete “A Case of You,” nor “Ladies of the Canyon,” nor “Raised on Robbery.” Alas, “Big Yellow Taxi” has been (re)done recently, and silence can only help commence the process of rehabilitation.
225. Here are some other songs that have been annihilated through overuse, which I could go thirty years without hearing again, and it would be fine with me, though in all cases they once had significant force as popular songs: “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” “Wild Horses,” “Let It Be,” “(Sitting’ on) The Dock of the Bay,” “Imagine,” “The Tears of a Clown,” “Hotel California,” “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Friend of the Devil,” “Candle in the Wind,” “Me and Bobby McGee,” “Heroes.” “Don’t Stop Believing,” “Summertime.” And so on.
226. I choose silence.
227. And now: when this portion of the show was completed, the part of the show in which the lady behind us, a mid-level functionary at a manufacturer of party favors, let’s say, took especial delight, Joni Mitchell restored herself to her religious density, and chose, for us, the song entitled “Dog Eat Dog,” and this is where things got particularly interesting.
228. It is true, “Dog Eat Dog” is, to me, a song from a challenging moment in Mitchell’s career, the portion wherein she allowed her songs to be rendered in the production style of the day, with gated reverb, the Yamaha DX7, and so on. The Thomas Dolby period. (I very much like some Thomas Dolby! But still.) The Dog Eat Dog era, for this listener in the eighties, was when I said: it seems she no longer has a story to tell me.
229. Perhaps this feeling had more to do with what Geffen Records wanted (a contemporary sound), and less with what Mitchell was trying to say. If so the Geffen Records approach was hollow and inert.
230. Because: live, with real percussionists and acoustic instruments, “Dog Eat Dog” was a much more interesting song. And it was of a piece with the thinking in set one, which gave us “Refuge of the Roads,” et al.
231. Of course she would play this song.
232. (Though it had not been played since 1985.)
233. And: I think it was during the line about “big wig financiers” that Mitchell then ad-libbed the aside: “like Donald Trump.”
234. She also said this at the show the next night, which means either that she was satisfied with the swell of approval from some significant majority of the audience, or that she was planning to make it part of the show—in fact, it might have even been the reason that “Dog Eat Dog” merited inclusion (for the first time since Ronald Reagan was president). Whichever the case, it was hard not to note the desperate (and futile) optimism that was contained in the roar of approval.
235. Then the song came to an end. And there was a pause as Mitchell and Carlisle prepared for the next song. Someone shouted some rejoinder from the audience to Mitchell and Mitchell laughed, and then Mitchell got right up on the mic and said:
236. “Fuck Donald Trump.”
237. Normally, I try to avoid typing out the name of that person, because why provide column inches. Moreover there is a gangrenous internal sensation. I type it here for the sake of documenting my experiences on 10/19/2024 in L.A. At the Hollywood Bowl.
238. The roar of the assembled now was twice during and after the song. Many, many people stood—as if a thing they most longed for had somehow been enacted, which, I suppose, means that many people feared the outcome of the election. The onrushing black cloud of autocracy already in motion. The roar was of unfettered joy at being wrongly convinced of rightness, at least as adjudged by the subsequent popular vote.
239. It was really funny, too, of course, because nothing is funnier, in a way, than when people in their eighties say “fuck.” It just sounds really good coming out.
240. It was also funny because of course Joni Mitchell would say this, if you think about the Joni Mitchell of the eighties and nineties, who was not noted for avoiding any controversial remark. Of course she would say what she said in this her ninth decade.
241. But it was also the case that that the remark was consistent with what I have been describing in this essay, which is what the prophetic tendency is like. It is to challenge some existing preconceptions—down to the roots thereof. Without hesitation, without worry about the cost to self.
242. Also: considering that Mitchell had to relearn some basic physiognomic capabilities after her neurological affliction on 2015, of which, I believe, the ability to speak was one aspect, it is significantly powerful to see her just dash off this political perspective from the stage. She relearned to talk so that she would have no apologies, no undue preoccupation with propriety, but only a concern about the truth.
243. Here I write from after the presidential election: it is now somewhat routine to blame the “ideological left” in equal measure for the state of affairs in which we find ourselves. I might say that our present circumstance constitutes a fact-as-it-is, and that change to come has to be not from an aspiration, an irrealism, but from the facts-as-they-are. The electorate seems to have preferred what has come to be the current state of affairs. Begin with this premise.
244. When there was, in some large measure, a standing ovation, whatever that means, as to the matter of “Fuck Donald Trump,” Mitchell enlarged her point of view, and here there was, at least for me, a rending aside of the veil. Mitchell noted that she couldn’t exactly participate in the upcoming election, calling herself “one of those lousy immigrants,” and suggested that the actual voting part was our responsibility.
245. And this was the breathtaking and most comprehensive moment of political (or spiritual, let’s say) philosophy of the evening, which is to say also a dreadfully obvious moment. There is no difference between a so-called “citizen” of the United States of America (by which we mean, in truth, a descendent of colonial occupiers) and an “immigrant,” no difference in accomplishment, no difference in ingenuity, no difference in religious conviction, no difference in familial responsibility, no difference in numbers of criminal convictions (though perhaps fewer in the case of the so-called “immigrant”), no difference in commitment to the nation state. They are us, one and the same. There is only power and disenfranchisement and the ways that power uses its levers to maintain its status at the expense of those without. “Immigrant” is a plutocratic usage, a designation for a workforce to be plundered in the pursuit of surplus value.
246. So: Joni Mitchell is just another a “lousy immigrant.” She who wrote “Help Me,” and “Both Sides Now.” Which the daughters (and some sons) of plutocrats have sung for fifty years.
247. Then, after “Dog Eat Dog,” it was “Amelia,” another song from Hejira, played at her Newport show in 2023, continuing with the Basho-esque narrative of travel. As with the other three songs from Hejira, it’s preposterously good. A thing of magnificence.
248. With a refrain about Amelia Earhart.
249. Guitar tuning CGCEGC.
250. The fourth volume of Mitchell’s archives allows us to hear a demo recording of “Amelia,” shorter than the album version, and leaving the “hexagram” of fighter jets the Mitchell narrator sees above the desert in verse one till the end.
251. About those fighter jets.
252. Don’t they plainly recall the “bomber planes” turning into butterflies in the dream of the last verse of “Woodstock?”
253. I have had trouble locating the quotation from Mitchell—in a long-ago context—where she indicates that “Woodstock” was inflected by some millenarian apocalyptic religious thinker under whose influence was she temporarily.
254. (Mitchell didn’t play the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival, according to the famous story, because her agent told her to play on The Dick Cavett Show instead. And it is, possibly, this fork in the garden of forking paths that, possibly, sends her off into the efflorescing of her keen antiestablismentarianism.)
255. The Edenic imagery suggests an early model of prophetic language, sure, and the verse in which the bombers appear in “Woodstock,” consists of a dream, ever the rhetorical barge of prophets down through the ages:
256. “And I dreamed I saw the bombers/Riding shotgun in the sky/And they were turning into butterflies/Above our nation.”
257. In the aftermath of that heady time of ideals, if that’s what it was, in the grip of a more jaundiced view of history, the nightmare from which we are trying to awake, it’s possible to see “Woodstock,” the song as impossibly naive.
258. After all: butterflies.
259. But it’s also, when considered musically, among the spookiest, most experimental and most uncompromising songs in the early Mitchell canon. And here, today, it seems to prefigure the improvised and freestanding intensity of “Amelia.”
260. Two dreams, separated by some years, recalled in the Hollywood Bowl, summoned in the Hollywood Bowl, each dream free, proceeding outward into a chain of associations, but each commencing, finding generative propulsion in anxiety about military hardware.
261. The mystery of “Amelia,” the song, is in its refrain: “Amelia, it was just a false alarm.”
262. For example, what does “it” mean here?
263. The “it” in “it was just a false alarm” is a craggy mountainous summit, for me, and I can hardly dig into the verses as a result and that’s before I even try to deal with “false alarm.”
264. Yes, everybody knows that dreams are the hop-on-hop-off tourist bus of meaning, dreams are where the essence of meaning goes to be non-essential, dreams are the grocery list after it gets ketchup spilled on it and is left out in the rain, dreams are the journal after journaller has discarded it, dreams are the disused quarry seen from above, dreams are the indiscriminate used bookstore, dreams are the data storage bunker where nothing is ever discarded and rarely is it displayed, dreams are the endless photo feed of the ADHD Gen Zer, who will never look again, dreams are the personal possession hoard of the dispossessed exile, dreams are the wasteland of collectivity, the floating trash island off the Gulf of Mexico, dreams are the collection of all possible tweets, the museum of discarded tastes, and of course dreams are the language of the prophets.
265. In the past there was a glorious ascending arc to dreams.
266. They were predictive.
267. They were symbolic—from a realm of collective narratives.
268. They spoke from a deep place unto the future.
269. The Book of Revelations would be an example.
270. Prophecy of this kind is well known to us, at least when we link up the prophetic voice with some premodern languages of the ancients.
271. And the Edenic/agrarian dream of “Woodstock” is consistent with this premodern prophetic voice.
272. Perhaps the military anxiety is too.
273. Maybe the anxiety of the being-conquered, the anxiety of confronting asymmetrical power, the anxiety of shock and awe is as old as prophetic language.
274. And it runs like a motif through Joni Mitchell.
275. It is true that for some couple of decades, the eighties and nineties, more or less, I frequently dreamed of nuclear attack.
276. Once a month or so.
277. More sometimes.
278. These dreams varied.
279. In Providence, where I was an undergraduate, I dreamed of standing in that little terrace on Prospect St. and watching the mushroom cloud down below.
280. In other dreams it was a digging through the rubble of incineration.
281. In still others the menace was the radiation and I was okay for the moment but knew what was to come.
282. In those days my life was unsettled—professionally, personally, with respect to my art, emotionally, physically, etc. This instability would have been cause enough.
283. But I was also fixated on the horror of that Reagan-era line (actually uttered by T. K. Jones, a Cold War treaty negotiator) about life after the American-Soviet nuclear exchange: “With enough shovels we can get through this.”
284. (Actually, the line, which is ungrammatical, apparently goes: “Turns out with the Russian approach, if there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it.”
285. You sort of know what he means.
286. The dream of being-faced-with-asymmetrical-force.)
287. The last song Mitchell played was “The Circle Game,” which is about the myth of eternal return, at least somewhat. There’s sort of nothing to say about that, excepting that it’s a fine way to end. But there was a penultimate song, the next-to-last, that was most lasting.
288. That song was “Shine.”
289. Although Mitchell has been playing this song these last two years it’s a pretty wacky choice. If Dog Eat Dog is often considered a least good Mitchell album, Shine runs near to it in many list-making venues. It is, it’s said, too cranky and too adult contemporary. Even people who love Joni Mitchell frequently don’t love it.
290. But here it was. (She also played “If” from the same record.)
291. (By the way my own top ten Joni Mitchell albums: Blue, Court and Spark, Hejira, Ladies of the Canyon, Shadows and Light, For the Roses, Mingus, Travelogue, River: The Joni Letters, Clouds, and then, special mention, Anthology Vol 4.)
292. “Shine,” the song, does a thing Joni Mitchell doesn’t do very often: it repeats a lot.
293. Really almost every major Joni Mitchell song, especially after Court and Spark, resists a home key either modulating or by playing with passing tones and modes that are sort of at the edge of tonality. “Shine,” though, especially in this new Gospel-inflected version, is melodically static.
294. Melodically static can be rhetorically immense.
295. In this case “Shine” alludes directly to “This Little Light of Mine,” the African-American spiritual of unknown origin, which seems, like many uncanny things, to emerge from out of nowhere in the 1920s.
296. Maybe it was a children’s song first?
297. Maybe it was a primer on physics?
298. Maybe it was about astrophysics?
299. Maybe it was about desire?
300. Maybe it was about self-expression?
301. Maybe it was about the divine and conceptions of the divine?
302. Maybe it was about the Big Bang?
303. Maybe it was about songwriting?
304. Maybe it was about anaphora?
305. Mitchell’s version preserves the simplicity and country-gospel-hymnodic feel of “This Little Light,” or some portion thereof, and especially the ecstatic luminosity of the theme, but—
306. And here’s the big difference—
307. She fuses the sunny optimism of the original with the frank articulations of her later work.
308. Indeed, there is no song by Mitchell that is quite as noteworthy for its provocations and challenging sentiments.
309. But it is the cross-contamination of “Shine,” especially, e.g., in the Newport concert recording, that is most noteworthy. Challenging lines, easy musical form.
310. So much dark, so much light.
311. On the basis of this intensely luminous soup of the cross-contaminated you might suppose that the prophetic must be:
312. Complex.
313. I want to make sure that that does not suggest “obscure” to you like in the revelations of St. John. Because I mean “complex” but not “obscure.”
314. “Shine” is right out front where you can wrestle with it.
315. And yet: there is the internally contradictory material.
316. The light in this ecstatically luminous space lights up every gradient of earthly activity, both sacred and profane, good and ill.
317. So: if Mitchell has landed on a spiritual echelon in this the post-Woodstock extremity of a ninth decade it seems to incline toward: an infinite outflowing of grace, whether an individual recipient “deserves” the infinite outflowing or not.
318. A non-conditional outflowing of grace, no matter who you are. An amazingness of grace.
319. I think the lighted-up-phones during “Shine” probably started in Newport, or, maybe, the idea of it preceded Newport. Doesn’t matter really. By the time we got to the Hollywood Bowl, the idea of 17,000 phones lit up in the greater outdoors must have looked very seductive for the concert organizers.
320. And so it was during “Shine” that at first a few phones, but then nearly all the phones, throughout the basin of the Hollywood Bowl, lit up during “Shine,” and this you can see on YouTube, from the 10/20 show at 2:59. I am sure that the audience’s participation in this was matched by some illumination native to the Bowl itself.
321. It was, to me, one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen at a concert. The conjunction of all those nodes of light, more like some concatenation of shooting stars, or like some total failure of the light pollution in that city, such that the Milky Way swarmed around us.
322.
323. It felt as though the song could be stretched out almost indefinitely, with its going around again of the chords, with the gospel repetitions of letting-your-little-light-shine, and then in a most magnanimous way, Joni Mitchell started laughing, looking out in the Hollywood Bowl, because, yes, she had the best view.
324. It was perhaps three times that she said, “That’s so beautiful! That’s so beautiful!”
325. In my dumb state, which is to say the being-open-to-it-all, I didn’t immediately get to the looking and staring at the little light as it shined. But eventually I did. Eventually I turned and looked.
326. Maybe what it most was like was like those images of the tracks of subatomic particles that you see reproduced here and there, black and white, mostly, because it’s what gets picked up in the collider on some reactive plate.
327. Or maybe what it was most like was the scratchings on a blackboard, back in the early days of particle physics, when they worked all of this stuff out in equations.
328. Or maybe it was like the early light in the nothingness that was about to be a somethingness in the most primordial of primordial universes.
329. Anyway, thus was a song from one of the Joni albums that almost no one defends, become a thing of transportation, and arrest, and transportation again.
330. Then she played “The Circle Game.”
331. Richard Rohr, well known, free-ranging contemporary thinker about the spiritual, in his book on prophets says: “The prophet is the one who can be a faithful lover, who is truly seeking the whole and seeking the good, and not just seeking the self. We can tell after a while the difference between someone who is operating out of their own anger and compulsions, and someone who is operating out of the heart of God.”
332. And so: Joni Mitchell took us, at the Hollywood Bowl, through the whole journey, from the relatively innocent formulations of the folk period, through the profound explorations of the “jazz albums,” through the occasionally angry and provocative songs of the eighties and nineties, to this opening outward in some kind of grace that was, well, one of the most recent songs she has written.
333. Is prophecy a product of a particular era, or a particular tradition, one changing over the course of the centuries and millennia, so that we don’t, perhaps, know that we are looking at one, because we are hanging onto a language from another era or tradition and not seeing the thing in front of us, the new, mutated version thereof? The world is crowded with prophets. Most not arrayed, really, in the mantle of the powerful.
334. They are not the happiest of folks. Maybe they are the unhappiest. They are not the most gifted in love, perhaps. They are some of the unluckiest.
335. And their message is not always immediately apparent, and not always predictive, and not always unmetaphorized, or plain, or easily understood.
336. And they are often, to choose the most transparent formulation, the elders.
337. I thought this, not only while thinking about Joni Mitchell, but while thinking about the films of the late David Lynch, and also while watching, recently, the wooly, tossed-off late-life improvisations of Garth Hudson, so lovingly compiled on YouTube. How the heavens poured out of that man.
338. The prophets are not conventionally “virtuous,” or non-complex. Their gifts are inimical to them. They are sometimes awful. (Joni Mitchell’s song “Not to Blame,” e.g., alleged to be about Jackson Browne is pretty cruel. Even if true.)
339. But the prophets themselves are not as important as the prophecies are important.
340. Since I was at the Hollywood Bowl, that night, the election turned out the way the election turned out.
341. But on this day, before the election, Joni Mitchell used her platform in this way, like a prophet. The lesson was there.
342. There’s also a last thing to say: about fire.
343. I feel like it’s craven, unfeeling, to say that the “Shine” audience phenomenon, the galactic sprawl of it, the star-carpeting of it, was conflagratory somehow, given what happened later. It was only that way in the matter of revelation. In the matter of disclosing the undisclosed.
344. And everywhere we went in LA, when we flew out to see Joni Mitchell play, was later either evacuated, or charred, or under threat, or the air was scarcely breathable. It’s impossible not to think back, now, on the city, and not to think that it is a different place, just in the months since, by virtue of the scourging and engulfment of the fires of 2025.
345. If the “Shine” audience display looks conflagratory, in retrospect, it’s because there’s an innocence to that moment, before the election, before the fires, before the protests, before the long shadow of autocracy.
346. The commonplace about prophetic language is that it has an apocalyptic trajectory. If the Book of Revelation is a sort of ur-prophetic event, the leading edge of prophecy, at least according to millenarian types, then the apocalypse is built in to our preconceptions about what prophecy is. It says “apocalypse” right there in the title. It says unveiling. But I think it means unfolding, here and now, not in the future.
347. I dreamed I saw a child of god.
Addendum:
Rohr: “Even though I love Jonah, he is what I call an unfinished prophet. He rejects his divine commission at first, refusing to preach God’s mercy to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria and Israel’s ancient enemy. After he flees and boards a ship going the wrong way, he’s cast overboard in a storm, swallowed by a great fish, and rescued in a marvelous manner. Only then does he obey God’s call and go to Nineveh. The people repent upon hearing his message and thus are saved from God’s wrath. But Jonah complains, angry because the Lord spared them. He is so detached from his own real message that he’s disappointed when it succeeds!”
