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Joni Mitchell – The Asylum Albums (1976-1980)

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What does it sound like?:

Here is the latest instalment in Joni Mitchell’s reissue programme; a beautifully packaged box set incorporating the studio albums Hejira, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter and Mingus, and the double live album, Shadows And Light. It’s a 5CD or 6LP set, featuring more of Joni’s artwork in a gorgeous book, a full size print of the painting on the outer box, and an updated cover for Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, to replace the original featuring Joni in blackface. The new cover is only an improvement in that it’s less offensive. This time, Meryl Streep writes the essay in the booklet. Bernie Grundman, who engineered the records at the time, is responsible for a tasteful remaster. In the UK, the CD price isn’t too bad at £54 but the vinyl box costs £172.

It all starts in November 1975, with Joni joining Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Review and indulging in the vices of the road, in Joni’s case a prodigious cocaine habit and an affair with a cowboy lothario, Sam Shepard. Naturally, she wrote a song about it, the sinewy and sexy Coyote, a disarmingly frank, participant’s view of the “passion play” that occurs on tour. It’s a song that imploded her engagement to John Guerin who, nevertheless, continued to drum for her. An attempt to tour The Hissing Of Summer Lawns with Guerin ended prematurely in acrimony and Joni found herself alone. As usual, the girl from Saskatoon, a small town with a big sky, looked to the horizon with “travel fever”. On a whim, she agreed to drive two acquaintances, one an ex, from Los Angeles to Maine. She took the scenic route home in a white Mercedes, a woman alone with her guitar, down to Florida, across to the Gulf of Mexico before turning north back to LA. It was on that journey, running from a bad relationship, bad drugs and an existential crisis, that she found her true artistic voice and composed the songs for her masterpiece, Hejira. The arrangements are simple, Joni’s open tunings suggesting endless possibilities, her self-styled “chords of enquiry” posing profound questions, constantly wrestling to make sense of her life and art. Percussion provides some decoration to deceptively complex rhythms, a solo instrument, wind or string, adds aesthetics, but, most importantly, she found the bass player of her dreams. Her intimate tussle with Jaco Pastorius’s fluid, “figurative” bass lines is the musical signature of the album and set the tone for the rest of the decade. The result is feminine, sensual, and nakedly honest, perfectly reflecting Joni’s personality. These are songs that only Joni Mitchell could have written on an album that only Joni Mitchell could have made. It’s an illustration of what a woman alone is capable of, rather than having to be defined by the presence or absence of a man. As such, it is a touchstone for many artists that followed her. Hejira had a profound impact on Björk as a child, and is the declared favourite album by young female artists, such as Danielle Haim, Weyes Blood and St. Vincent.

Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, a double LP, is undoubtedly Joni’s most experimental. However, it is still rooted in folk song. It’s just that she hadn’t written many. Two of its ten songs had previously appeared on other albums and one has no words at all. Don Juan opens with an Overture, consisting of six guitars tuned differently. The epic, hallucinatory Paprika Plains fills a whole side, beginning as a sweet piano melody, with a dramatic full orchestra middle section, and ending in a Weather Report improvisation. There is a near seven minute instrumental piece of wild Latin percussion and vocal whoops, a sound palate that bleeds into Dreamland in a performance meant to reflect a Brazilian carnival but whose real joy is the dynamic vocal interaction between Joni and Chaka Khan. After three sides of challenge, the listener is rewarded with a more familiar Joni on side four. The pulsing title track seems to have stepped out from The Hissing Of Summer Lawns. Off Night Backstreet’s folkiness is disguised by an orchestra. The closing song, The Silky Veil Of Ardour, feels like a postscript to her travelogue album, Blue, in which the “wayfaring stranger” reminisces and reflects with some regret. For many faithful fans it wasn’t enough. Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter was her last album to attain gold sales. However, nearly fifty years on, its strangeness and its byways less travelled reward close scrutiny.

Mingus is a failed attempt at collaboration. Ailing in health, Mingus reached out to Joni to write lyrics for a musical version of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. He saw her as a musical poet rather than a composer. Joni wasn’t keen on the idea of reducing T.S. Eliot to song lyrics and declined. Still, Mingus continued to write music for her, and a project grew. Mingus recommended a number of musicians for her to experiment with. None of their music was used on the album but all participants in the early sessions got a credit. In the end, Joni reverted to what she knew and turned, once again, to Weather Report with the addition of Herbie Hancock. The LP was released five months after Mingus died. It’s a Joni Mitchell album, a tribute to Charles Mingus, its beautiful melancholy pieces hanging together as an elegy. Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, originally a tribute to Lester Young, now with Joni’s words, grieves for Mingus too. Only The Dry Cleaner Of Des Moines has energy, with its boisterous horn section, arranged by Mingus himself. Short snippets of his homespun wisdom add some weight to proceedings but it’s Joni’s artwork that describes the story best. As she tried to capture his image, his essence, we witness her getting the measure of the man and imposing her own style and technique. Mingus has a lot more going for it than people will have you believe. Most of all, it’s an album packed with warmth and love.

Her 1979 tour, captured on the double live album Shadows And Light, was her first appearance on stage since The Last Waltz in 1976. If there are any nerves, you can’t hear them. Her vocals are wonderful, better than many of the studio versions. The band consists of Pat Metheny on guitar, his keyboard player, Lyle Mays, the Weather Report rhythm section of Jaco Pastorius and Don Alias, Michael Brecker on saxophone, plus Joni herself. The Persuasions appear on two songs, including a spectral a capella Shadows And Light. There are a clutch of songs from Hissing Of Summer Lawns, most of Hejira and three from Mingus. There is a fire in this band that lights up these songs. Only a drum solo and Dreamland feature from Don Juan. Chaka Khan is sorely missed. Perhaps, the entirety of The Persuasions should have stood in for her. The concert concludes with a poignant rendition of Woodstock, played in the style of Hejira, its lyrics instantly recognisable but its melody stretched beyond any semblance of singalong. It illustrates just how far Joni had come as an artist and a performer. Metheny, perhaps forgetting he’d been booked to play a Joni Mitchell gig, complained the band was under-utilised, but Shadows And Light is one of the truly great live albums and a satisfying summary of her music of this period.

The Asylum Albums (1976-1980) is Joni Mitchell’s “jazz period”. She surrounded herself with jazz musicians, learnt a lot about chords and harmonics, wrote looser, freer songs, changed her vocal style, gliding effortlessly over a remarkable range of notes, and developed her guitar playing. Drawn to atmospherics, her favourite album is In A Silent Way and her go-to musicians fusion. She gave a lot to them, too. Herbie Hancock, for example, was smitten by her gifts and became a lifelong friend, recording the excellent River: The Joni Letters in 2007. Her lyrics hardened. The insightful balladeering of the sixties and early seventies grew more pragmatic. These albums sound very like jazz, but they are not jazz. Joni Mitchell struggled to improvise or introduce spontaneity into her music. Most egregiously, none of it swings. Without any big choruses or whistleable tunes, the demands on the listener are intense. Nevertheless, they remain superb albums because they are indelibly stamped by Joni herself. In her thirties, she embraced adventure and change, but whatever her influences, her records are all unmistakably Joni. The contents of The Asylum Albums (1976-1980) are wonderfully played, beautifully recorded and capture an artist at the peak of her creativity. It’s a stimulating listen from beginning to end.

What does it all *mean*?

The Asylum Albums (1976-1980) marks the end of Joni Mitchell’s remarkable imperial phase, an over a decade long body of work worthy of comparison to Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and David Bowie. The Archives for this period should be very interesting, especially the build up to Mingus.

These albums were her last for Asylum. Are we going to see a Geffen Albums box?

Goes well with…

The Reprise Albums (1968-1971), The Asylum Albums ( (1972-1975) and Archives Volumes 1-3.

Release Date:

21st June 2024

Might suit people who like…

The very best of modern popular music.

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Comments

    • Beautifully written and cogently articulated piece. Rarely, under the broad mantle of what might be called Pop have any works been so sophisticated, in its true sense, or as adult in form and content as that of Joni’s Asylum albums.

      For what it’s worth, I believe her three greatest albums fall outside the remit of these reissues. Namely, Blue, Court & Spark, and greatest of all, The Hissing Of Summer Lawns. But that’s a matter for another time.

      T.S Eliot had a phrase to describe perfect poetry. When word, metre & imagery combine to evoke emotion. Precisely, almost surgically, but resonantly & profoundly too. Eliot describes it as “The Objective Correlative”.

      Time after time, in song after song, Joni achieves something very similar. A perfect construct of language, tone, music to distil loneliness, loss, desire. Amelia. Song For Sharon. Coyote. To name only three and all from one album, Hejira.

      Prince believed Joni to be the greatest of all talents. Hendrix seemed to think something similar at a very early stage of her artistic development. Herbie Hancock at a much later one.

      Think too of some of the men variously in thrall to her – Jackson Browne, Jaco Pastorius, Leonard Cohen, Sam Shepherd. Mighty talents all. Some touched by genius themselves. Yet all, like Icarus finally, falling to hard earth, wings unglued in the orbit of Joni’s sun.

      Or as inimitable, irascible David Crosby put it when asked what it was like being with her:
      “Living with Joni? It was like living with Beethoven”.

      • If we’re making an argument based on sophistication, I’m tempted to suggest starting the run after Blue (which I think of as the apotheosis of the early acoustic albums). For The Roses is a hinge/developmental album, then we start the run.

        I agree that Hissing… is the peak – but it’s not a popular view, Hejira generally getting the white carnation these days. I blame Jaco! 🙂

        • Agree Jaco’s bass can be be mesmeric but kind of intrusive.

          On Coyote’s it’s brilliant. Or Song For Sharon. Or Hejira’s title track. Yet it meanders into being virtuosic for its own sake. A tendency more evident on the experiential musings of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter.

          Hissing however, is a Dos Passos novel, an Altman movie. Souls in crisis, hearts in need. America in excelsis, and on its knees

  3. An excellent review as ever @Tiggerlion. Joni fans may be interested to know that a new biography of her was published this week. Travelling: on the Path of Joni Mitchell by Ann Powers has received some decent reviews, not least in Mojo and the Graun (below). My copy is on order from the Dodgers who generously gave me a 2p refund on their pre-order price guarantee.

    https://www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/jun/18/joni-mitchell-and-the-me-decade-ann-powers-travelling?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

  4. Thanks for a splendid review Tiggs. My pre-ordered copy will arrive here tomorrow morning (hopefully), and I’ll be enveloped in jazz Joni for several days to come. This series of albums represent, to me, the finest work produced by any contemporary music artist in the latter half of the twentieth century, simple as that. No one has come close to rivalling her. Like you, I eagery anticipate the matching Archives release when it appears.

  6. Last week I went to our fab local theatre in Beverley to see a performance by the fantastic Hejira, who describe their show as A Celebration Of Joni Mitchell. Their two sets were unsurprisingly focused primarily on Hejira itself and a lovingly performed approximation of several highlights from S & L.
    Highly recommended, as others have said previously.

  7. Don Juan could have been the natural follow-up to The Hissing Of Summer Lawns. In fact, the exotic instrumentation of tracks like ‘The Tenth World’ and ‘Dreamland’ have their origins on Hissing. Dreamland was actually demo’d for that album.

    Similarities of Don Juan’s title track with Coyote are not accidental, as Joni had written DJRD at around the same time as Hejira’s lead-off track. She even played the two songs together as one on her 1976 tour.

    At the time, Joni said this about her collaboration with Jaco Pastorius on the track Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter:

    “I was trying to find a certain sound on the bottom end, going against the vogue at the time. He had this wide, fat swathe of a sound. I don’t know if he detuned his bass, but he started striking the end of the strings, up by the bridge, and he’d slide with his palm all the way down to the head. He set up this pattern: du du du doom, du du du doom.

    “Well, it’s a five minute song, and three minutes into it his hand started to bleed. He shredded it making it slide the full length of his bass strings. So we stopped taping and he changed to his Venus mound, below the thumb. And when we finished the take, that was bleeding, too. But the music was magnificent, and he was so excited because he’d discovered a new thing.

    “Later he built up calluses and you’d always see him doing those slides. But then he was mad with me because I had copped his new shit for my record”

      • It says here: Named after the Roman goddess of love, the Mound of Venus is a fleshy area found at the base of the thumb on the palm. It represents our desires, passions, sensuality, and emotional nature. The size, shape, and texture of this mount can vary greatly from person to person, offering valuable insights into their temperament and approach to relationships.

      • There’s a Venusberg in Bonn on top of which is a maternity unit where my elder daughter was born. I suppose the English translation would be Venus Hill, or behind generous (it’s not very high) Venus Mountain.

        I had always been unsure about the anatomical location of the mound of Venus, between thumb base and subpubes. Googling it now to get clarity, I see that ‘mound’ is down below, while ‘mount’ (at least in palmistry) is on each hand.

    • Fantastic contribution – I’d never given much thought to what now – with hindsight – seems like such an obvious overlap of artistic intent.

      That YT video of the band live at Boston makes it abundantly clear.

  8. In a verrry old thread about Joni, I suggested that she wasn’t influential (in a musical sense) because only she could do what she does. One of the few times Bob (you remember Bob) agreed with me.

    (What a pleasant relief it is to read a lengthy piece on this wonderful artiste, and the many illuminating and appreciative comments, without seeing a single mention of her laugh at the end of Yellow Taxi. Kudos!)

  9. She is clearly a lady of immense talent and I own 7 or 8 albums, However I confess that I do find it difficult with some of them to listen to the whole album. Her voice can tend to grate if I play her a lot. I will join those in the Blue camp, that’s pretty much perfect to my ears. I find DJ’s Reckless Daughter patchy and Mingus to be borderline unlistenable. There’s also something a little self satisfied about some of her stuff.

    Excellent writing as usual.

  10. 1. Great piece, as always, Tigger.

    2. I’m not surprised that they swapped out that dodgy old blackface cover of “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter”. But the new cover design that they chose isn’t at all suitable, in my view. The least they could’ve done was to find a photo from the same year as the album, i.e. 1977. But no, they couldn’t even manage that. The image they came up with, showing Joni and a stuffed animal’s head (is it a wolf?) is from many years later. Boo!

    https://x.com/onabenchinCI/status/1785671901769085012

    • Joni’s cover sleeves are consistently brilliant. However, the original Don Juan cover is awful, easily her worst. The replacement is marginally better, making it her second worst.

  11. Excellent piece of writing Tigs. As always, a review like this sends me scurrying off to listen to them with new ears (I could probably do with some, come to think of it)….that sound is me scurrying.

  13. Excellent piece of writing Tig (as ever). It’s made me go back and re-evaluate DJRD which I’ve tried and failed many times to love since it came out. Always felt a bit bloated with Joni maybe trying too hard to extend the musical palette which sometimes seemed at the expense of the song.
    Anyway I’ve finally found the solution – which is to create a new version (cover your eyes Joni fans). This involves losing the percussion instrumental which is an easy decision lets be honest, but then I’ve edited out 5 minutes of the rambly piano/orchestra section in the middle of the otherwise excellent Paprika Plains. Oh and Ive changed the running order (just a smidge).
    Heresy they cry – but now I now have an album that (for me) sits happily alongside the classic trio of Court & Spark, Hissing and Hejira and more importantly will get played.

  14. Would have Tig but of course Joni does not frequent the world of Spotty anymore and even if it did it wouldn’t have my Paprika edit ! For what it’s worth my track list is Overture/cottonnAve; talk to me ; Jericho; Dreamland; Don Juan; off Night Backstreet; Paprika Plains edit; Otis and Marlena; Silky Veils which probably not a million miles off the original

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