On the record: The Joni Mitchell Archives: The Early Years (1963-1967)
Everyone knows Joni Mitchell. She’s the singer of Love Actually tear-jerkers, the one-time lover of Leonard Cohen, and a Canadian hippie prairie waif. Put on Both Sides Now towards the end of a dinner party and chances are more than one person will start crying. But put on Big Yellow Taxi and you’re liable to have a sing-a-long on your hands.
In the fifty-two years since the release of Song to a Seagull (1968), Mitchell has become a favourite: from tentative covers of folk songs, to vulnerable, intimate evocations of relationships, to experimental-jazz-vocal-poetry. Her reach and fame have travelled far beyond her native small-town Saskatoon.
And so, when she is introduced on stage at The Half Beat, Toronto, 1964 as “Joan” or “Joni Anderson”, it is understandable to do a double take: exactly who is singing? She giggles and remarks “it’s sure refreshing to have a mic for a change” and then goes on to sing Nancy Whisky about what happens when a man “thinks his liquor is a woman”. The voice is higher and breathier than the Mitchell we know, but compelling all the same.
Nancy Whisky is one of the first songs in The Joni Mitchell Archives: The Early Years (1963-1967) which was released at the end of October. The album is nearly six hours of previously unreleased material from her first years of performing; it moves from little-known folk ballads, to early classics such as Urge for Going and The Circle Game, before ending with many of the songs that appear on her first two albums.
We hear crackly recordings of Joni and her guitar, performances in which she flusters over losing a guitar pick; a conversation between her and a radio host in which she mutters “I wrote the songs” after being called an “authoress” rather than composer, and even her impression of an English accent. In the intro to Marcie she describes soaking up “British cultcha” on a trip to London. It is not so much the variety of the album that is impressive – there are multiple live versions of most songs, and each is wonderfully, incrementally different to the others – but the atmosphere the recordings have managed to capture. At one point, Mitchell tells her audience she is taking a twenty-minute break: listening to her say this half a century on, and in my lockdown-messy bedroom rather than a club in in Philadelphia, I automatically stood up to make a cup of tea before I remembered that I was listening to a recording on Spotify, and that Mitchell was not, in fact, singing live.
It is in this familiarity and immediacy that the success of this release lies. The world is so changed from the time in which a small-town Canadian girl could sing about the wonder of being able to “look up and down at clouds”, and many of Mitchell’s early folk-songs sound undeniably childish compared to her later controlled, emotional torrents and musical narratives. But it is delightfully different to the later studio-recorded albums to hear her sing these songs live, laughing with the audience and discussing her inspiration. Nobody would ever claim that Mitchell is not an intimate, personal artist. In the words of Paul William’s somewhat condescending 1969 review of Song to a Seagull, Mitchell “really conveys how and sort of why a woman could love a man and desire a man” – but this intimacy pales in comparison to the early live recordings. Mitchell does not sing as quietly, or as vulnerably, but in her communion with the audience there is a palpable sense of something shared; a different kind of intimacy that existed just for an evening. If this all sounds very “free love” – remember we are talking about the sixties.
It would be easy to remark on Mitchell’s youth, innocence, and naivete: her stories about hearing speakers in Hyde Park, writing travel songs without having travelled anywhere, and wandering around cities with no money to spend, invite commentary on how young she was when her musical career began. Articles and reviews from the late 1960s call her a “young lady” and remark on how “pretty” she is: “Miss Mitchell” the “wispy 25-year-old-blonde”. Much is made of her ability to sing about “womanhood”, as if it was some sort of imitation. But, amidst all this chauvinist, patronising praise, any listener has to note the sheer power of Mitchell’s song-writing.
It is not her voice which held the force in her performance at that point, but her ability to make even the simplest lyrics heart-wrenching. And this is the case for much of her career: compare the 1971 Blue A Case of You with the 2000 recording and see which makes you sob first. Mitchell has never been about loud belting.
A housemate recently commented that my music taste is almost exclusively sad women singing about men. (This is unfair: I also listen to sad men singing about women). When pressed, they listed Marianne Faithful, Joan Baez, and Joni Mitchell as examples. I’d argue that this is a bit harsh on any of the artists listed – and indeed, Mitchell struggled with being compared to Baez throughout much of the high-pitched folk period we hear on this album – but it seems particularly unfair to Mitchell. If there is one feeling you are left with after nearly six hours of different versions of The Circle Game and Morning Morgantown it is a sense of joy, delight, and possibility. Mitchell does sing about men who break her heart, and Little Green is a harrowing song to the child she had to give up, but she also sings aubades (Chelsea Morning) which rival those of Donne, and even her most famous “sad” song (Both Sides Now) is at least partially a declaration of what there is left to experience, and what there is left to find out.
Live music, clubs, and travel all seem like far-flung dreams right now, but this album momentarily, tentatively, goes some way to easing the pain of their loss. In Mitchell’s recordings, the late 1960s do not sound too far away – hopefully we will be back in a club sometime soon.