JONI MITCHELL COMPLAINS TOO MUCH

Brilliant as she can be—let’s not deny Joni Mitchell her due, she’s a prodigy and a provocateur—she’s also responsible for a catalog that, in equal measure, feels half-baked, overwrought, and, yes, pretentious with a capital “P.” You see, she wears that “genius” label like an overzealous badge, brandishing it with a self-consciousness that would make even Dylan wince—Dylan, who’s made a career out of mythologizing himself, yet has the decency to flinch at such a moniker. Mitchell’s notorious complaint about Dylan’s supposed lack of authenticity is a riddle wrapped in irony, since the very concept of “art” is rooted in artifice—let’s not forget, the word “artist” itself stems from “artificer,” the craftsman, the constructor, the one who lends a touch of the unnatural to the natural. But here is Mitchell, bemoaning authenticity as if she’s forgotten that she, Simon, Dylan, and Cohen—the poet-songwriters of the Sixties—were, at their core, fabulists, fabricators, spinning tales from the threads of their own feelings, politics, and personal histories in pursuit of a memorable phrase, a piercing insight, a story worth telling. Authenticity, I submit, has less to do with the artist’s raw emotion than with the effect conjured in the listener. Mitchell’s perennial grousing—her famous crankiness—has become a tiresome refrain, a dirge that plods along with the regularity of a metronome.

She demands—almost pleads—to be taken seriously as a musical artist, issuing albums that seem engineered to pummel the listener into acquiescence. Her excursions into art song, serial music, jazz, and a surrealist strain of feminism yield results as varied and unpredictable as a bowl of leftovers. The fatal defect in these ambitious undertakings is that their most egregious moments are so self-important, so precious, they overshadow any spark of innovation. Mitchell’s persistent arrogance and lingering bitterness leave a metallic tang in the mouth. Still, her fans have admired her restless drive to reinvent herself, so my initial response to The Hissing of Summer Lawns was one of cautious optimism, applauding its bold leap toward personal and artistic evolution. Yet, while Hissing and the less successful Hejira saw Mitchell testing broader song structures, more impressionistic lyrics, and jazz textures, her quest for a distinctive voice gradually erected walls between her and her audience. With Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, a sprawling double album, Mitchell gathers the ground won by her previous records only to scatter it in a jumble of half-realized notions.

The lyrics are impressionistic, yes, but hardly impressive—a collage of images, cryptic allusions, and wan revelations that cry out for editorial mercy. Mitchell comes off like a whispering Imagist draped in the vestments of a Confessional Poet. Perhaps she’s spilled all her secrets in the most evocative language she could muster—or, worse, forgotten what she meant to reveal. Writing that’s elliptical by habit breeds lyrics that even the author may struggle to decipher. The spotlight is fixed on jazz modernism, with some tracks stretching past ten minutes, meandering through Mitchell’s shadowy piano chords. She finds a strident chord and lets it linger, musing aloud as her side men—Jaco Pastorius and Wayne Shorter from Weather Report, plus John Guerin—strive to impose some shape on the proceedings. Her defenders protest: “A poet may speak as she pleases!” But parsing Reckless Daughter for meaning is a fool’s errand. Mitchell touches on themes—spiritual exhaustion, the weight of freedom, sexuality in middle age—that might resonate, but she offers precious few hooks, catchphrases, or familiar footholds. Instead, she serves up “Art,” capital A, indifferent to whether her audience savors it. The paradox: in her pursuit of “Art,” she’s jettisoned craft, evolving from an artful songwriter to someone simply arty—a fate that befalls public figures too enamored of their own legend. In this, Mitchell has joined the company of John Lennon, Yes, and other luminaries who’ve developed a taste for their own mythology.

With Mingus, her next album, we’re left to admire Mitchell’s readiness to stray from the chatty confessionalism that made her famous and reach for something resembling high artistry. “Arty” remains the operative word, as her ambition outstrips her skill. There’s a whiff of the amateur, the dilettante hammering away at the piano, hoping boldness will suffice. But Joni Mitchell is no Mingus—neither as composer, nor musician, nor artist—and one hopes she doesn’t fancy herself his equal, for no one is. I have no quarrel with established artists seeking new terrain to “advance their art,” but I do object to dabbling in genres—like the moody expressionism of jazz—where one is clearly out of depth. To be fair, the music and lyrics cohere somewhat better here than on Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter (that abyss of amorphous atonality and free-associative lyrics that communicate little), but the core issue persists: Mitchell is not a jazz singer. Her voice—thin, reedy, pale—never ignites when it ought to blaze with color. You find yourself yearning for Annie Ross or Patti Waters. As a tribute to the late Charles Mingus, the album falls short. The inter-song snippets—Mingus reflecting on mortality—add scant depth to an already patchwork offering, alternating between brilliance and the half-baked. The whole affair, alas, carries more than a hint of tackiness.

 

THE VAULT: two reviews from the Seventies

GOLD--Jefferson Starship

The Jefferson Starship are ·one of the more remarkable Jobs of a late Sixties acid rock band re-tool their image so that they might fit in the Seventies marketplace. The original Airplane, if you· remember, were a group of LSD crazies who espoused the glory of chemically expanded consciousness years before Carlos Castaneda got Into the act. In their original conception, the Starship became paranoid revolutionaries (on paper anyway) who'd lost any grasp they had on reality, and whose political broadsides resembled a Psychedelic piece of hate literature. (The peace and love gleam had faded from the Jefferson Airplane’s collective gaze and the first Starship album, Blows Against the Empire, was a quizzical and quixotic way of trying to rouse their fans to act of resistance. I’m still hesitant to say that writing a semi-rock opera centering around hijacking a starship and heading out some a cosmic place where longhairs, dopers and select people of color wouldn’t be hassled by the man was the best way to change one’s lived-in circumstances. Ah, the Sixties…)  In this age of lower expectations, though, it's understandable that the Starship's rebel stance has wizened, and that their music has become more commercially approachable. They've placed themselves safely on the record charts with a series of hit singles and albums, the sounds of which border on the easy-listening lilt of Fleetwood Mac, Peter Frampton, or The Eagles. Lucidly for old Airplane fans, the new Starship has produced several well-crafted hits, most of which are on Gold. The standout track is Marty Balin's "Caroline," a superbly produced and arranged song that screams for radio programmers to include it on their playlist, "Miracles, " a stunningly layered ballad with an elusive, captivating melody that is , besides,  perhaps the greatest  song ever written with oral love references, and "With Your Love." There will be those die-hard rock and roll counterculture adherents who’ll feel that the Starship has betrayed the cause, whatever that might be. One must remember, however, that the Airplane/ Starship has a formidable body of work complete with stratospheric highs and the lowest lows, and their momentary upswing on the record charts is more than anyone could expect from a band who, by rights, should have burned itself out years · ago. 

______________________

The more I thought about it, the less I wanted to attend the Nov. 16 Ry Cooder concert in the UC gym. Cooder, I knew, made a name for himself for the slicing slide guitar work he did on the Rolling Stones Let It Bleed album, a record I enjoyed. But word had it that Cooder was a dyed-in-the-wool folkie, someone who does songs they've learned from hillbillies, blues pioneers, sailors, and other sources. In other words, Cooder wasn't any Hollywood pretty boy stroking his Ovation guitar while singing self-penned tomes to his own sensitivity, like Jackson Browne (though Browne's stylistics  their own reward),  Rather, Cooder was strictly bucolic, with rough edges In both voice and guitar work, not a virtuoso but engagingly honest in presentation to an audience that I suspected picked up on folk music as part of a collective rejection of high art in general.  But while my admittedly dour presuppositions could have turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy ("The old and still adolescent school of making up your mind before being in possession of facts), I realized I needed to switch off the contempt. It was a bit like culture shock in your own culture. Cooder, without the band he's been using for most of this tour, ambled sleepily on stage!! and sat in his chair and goaded the sound crew to "goose” the volume up in the monitors, finally imploring them to " crank it. Don't be afraid." The height of his performance was his guitar work. Basing his styles in rural blues inflections and country picking techniques, Cooder's approach is an enticing hodgepodge of effects that don't fall into any category, but rather rest between the boundaries. His picking is quick and firm, with the vigorous pulling of the strings, and his chord mix ragtime jazz progressions, classical chording, and blues phrasings with egalitarian ease that's positively organic. His slide work, his strongest forte, avoids the dying dog moans that neophyte players, mostly British, manage, and _ maintains a solid flow of incisively slashing riffs. The fact that he seemed affable and good-natured worked in his favor as well. He seemed to enjoy the songs he did, avoiding the sort of inverse snobbery I thought pervaded this genre and its audience. Cooder debunked that prejudicial nonsense. Opening the show was Mike Seeger, Pete's brother, who played banjo, fiddle, autoharp, harmonica, Jew’s harp, as well as guitar, set the night's mood with an amicable way of going about his job. The highlight of his set was his Jew’s harp playing, which with the utilization of the University's super fine sound system, approximated the unearthly buzz of interstellar insects, a ploy Pink Floyd might consider next time they take their million-dollar quad system on tour. It's astounding that sometimes the strangest emanations come not from smoky, sparking, colicky electronic amplifier banks, but from the recesses of man's musical past. His concert was refreshing to remember that not everything we’ve done as species is ugly and created with it in mind to stomp on the next guy.

ROCK THE SHAM

March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, is upon us, and being of Irish descent those who know my last name and aware as well that some consider me a poet, a lover of words used fully, have asked me what my plans were. What party are you going to, what Irish Pub will you be drinking at, what Irish poet will you recite at the Open Reading of Irish Poetry? Attending the idea you would want to celebrate a culture rich in the greatest ringing glories of the English language comes the question about how drunk you intend to get, and will you remember the way back to your bedroom at your mother's house if you become unable to utter a comprehensible sentence?

There are times I hate being Irish; the jokes at the expense of this culture make it obvious that White European Americans are the only ethnic group one can offend with impunity. The Holiday is a match to a conspicuously open can of gasoline.On The Day itself, many will inquire, “Where’s your green?” All these questions on the single topic become nagging of a kind, the persistent inquiry into what someone else takes as an imperfection. My imperfection seemed to be that I didn't feel Irish enough. I don’t wear green on any day, it’s not my favorite color, and there’s a deep resentment at others who expect me and any other Irish American to play the shaleighlei -stroking trick monkey with green paper hats, green beads and affecting brogues as bogus as paper forks.

There’s a scene in Woody Allen’s movie “Annie Hall” when his character Alvy Singer berates a woman’s Jewishness with several wisecracks at the expense of the ethnic heritage he imagines her identifying with. The woman says nothing and Singer, feeling he’d crossed the line, gives a half-hearted apology for his jokes, to which she replies (and I paraphrase here) “No, it’s all right, I don’t mind being reduced to a cultural stereotype” This was a “eureka” moment, since it articulated a foul mood I’d been in for years each time St.Patrick’s Day rolled around and Americans, of Irish Lineage and otherwise, rolled out their boxes of stereotypes: green beer, whiskey, green beads, glittered cardboard shamrocks, the whole disgusting offensive lot.St.Patrick's is a day on which those of us with family connections to the Emerald Isle is to relish the contributions of Ireland to the world through it;s poets and dramatists and novelists, whether Joyce, Yeats, John Millington Synge or Roddy Doyle and Seamus Heaney, an activity of worth if the proceedings were low key and attentive to what Irish writing sounded like and what cluster of emotions and experience it collectively expressed; it's a literature at war with itself and conflicts and tensions such as that results in a major poetry. Bombast, bottles, and bullshit about all things Irish follow the lip service to the Literature and St.Patrick's Day become only respectful of its cultural namesake than does Cinco de Mayo or Halloween.
It's an excuse to drink to excess and behave badly and be a lout. Someone assumed it that because of my last name and that I made a living both writing and selling books I would be all over the Holiday and partake in the lugubrious, drunken wallow. I remember yelling at some partying moron with an Italian last name who was doing a miserable Barry Fitzgerald impersonation, I had it in mind to come to his house late at night and do some patently offensive immigrant through a bullhorn if he kept up with what I thought was a cultural slander. He didn’t get what I was getting at, and I never showed up in his driveway to deliver on my promise, but the upshot is that he's never forced his face into mine after that with that wavering brogue.I resisted the temptation to ask if he Minstrel -Showed impersonations for black people on Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, as the point was both overkill and would be lost on him. Say what you might about me, but I pride myself on the quality of issues I waste my breath on, a perverse pleasure that might reaffirm the cliché of the Irish being masters of futile eloquence. Doubtful; I just love the sound of my voice and don't feel compelled to credit cultural determinism for what is a gift or a curse( depending on circumstance, inspiration, and the quality of the coffee I might have been drinking when inspired to place a few words on the page, in rhythmic order, declaring war on the latest peeve or pestering pustule of aggravation). It that despite that small country’s amazing contributions to World Literature, I’ve never felt much kinship with Ireland, nor with the native Irish I’ve met. What I've felt like through my life is a middle-class white guy, Irish American, emphasis on the American. Irish-American.It's a different tribe.

JIM IS STILL DEAD AND STILL SEXY

THE DOORS:
A Lifetime of Listening
to Five Mean Years
by Greil Marcus

Greil Marcus is one of the remaining first-generation Rolling Stone rock critics who, in his old age, has evolved into something of a Methuselahian sage for the artist and band's populating the Rock and Roll Canon. He is a fine writer, beautifully evocative at times, a widely read gent who brings his far-flung references of history, aesthetics, politics, and mythology into his generalized ruminations on the movement of human history and how it was reflected and caused by the emergence of pop, rock and soul music. If he has any thesis at all, his idea is that these were not merely forms of entertainment and distraction; they were cultural forces that changed the way we live. As fine a prose stylist as he can be and as momentarily persuasive as he can seem in his richer passages, Marcus puts forth little in the way of criticism; he rarely, in his late writings, spend the time to let you how songs, lyrics work internally convincingly. 

The Doors were a mixed bag for me; the first two albums are among the essential rock albums of all time, with the remainder alternating between the proverbial poles of brilliance and balderdash. As a band, they were sublime and unique, with the odd combination of blues, flamenco, classical, jazz, Artaud, and epic theater being crafted in their hands to create a sound and feel that was singular and instantly identifiable. As a vocalist, Jim Morrison was often as evocative as the most significant fans proclaim, and it fit the half-awake twilight that seemed to be his constant state of consciousness. As a poet, though, I thought he was simply awful, fragmented, crypto-mystic, the surrealism that, save for some striking and memorable lines, collapsed from its flimsy elisions and obtuse vagaries. In his posthumous collections, the pieces read too often, like the notebook jottings of an introspective 17-year-old. I say that as a thoughtful 17 year and is now a reflective 65-year-old. Morrison might have become the poet he wanted to be had he written, edited, and finesse his work as he desired when he left for Paris. I will say, though, that being the vocalist in the Doors allowed him to go through his writings and poems and select many of the more robust passages for the band's more theatrical songs. The Doors, ironically, seemed to be an institutional editor for Morrison's words, forcing the bard to decide which of his jottings was the most powerful, concise, emphatic.  

The matter of craft isn't Marcus's most serious concern. With the Doors, though, he does an excellent job of explaining what I've always felt for some time that Jim Morrison was pompous, vacuous to a significant extent, a mediocre poet, a pretentious intellect who happened to have some things going for him: good looks and sex appeal, an appealing the baritone voice could bellow or fashion a slumbering croon, and that he was in a band of good musicians that compelled him, in the songwriting process, to peel away the most dreadful riffing in his poems and boil it all down to the genuinely strange, exotic, and provocative. The result of that combination of Morrison's affectations and the talents of the other band members made for several first-rate original songs. Save for the near-perfection of their first two albums. It also made for some mostly uneven records where Morrison's drunk insistence on being a drunk put his worst tendencies on full display. Marcus is bright and remarkably succinct on his subject. His judgments are shrewd and knowing, the key one being that while saying upfront than in any other life Morrison would have yet another counter-cultural tragedy left for dead and forgotten, rock and roll made him at least briefly pull his resources together and give the world something memorable beyond his pretentiousness.