The Kindle & I; or, Joni Mitchell is a pompous, strutting ass

I finally broke down and used Don's Kindle to read a book..., or to read a Kindle book..., or to read an eBook; I'm not sure of the terminology. The Kindle feature of which Don is most enamored is the ability to be lying in bed at 10:15 p.m. (yes, we're usually in bed by then), decide you want to read a book, and without having to get up, put on clothes, and go to the computer, just lie there, access the Kindle store from the Kindle, buy the book, and seconds later, be reading it. That's pretty much what I did: while lying in bed reading a New Yorker (a physical print copy), I saw an ad for a new book on Joni Mitchell, grabbed the Kindle out of Don's hands, and a minute later, I was reading the book on the Kindle. (Well, I took a bit of artistic license there, but that's how it could have and should have happened.)

The book is Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell's Blue Period, by Michelle Mercer. I have a long and complex relationship with the music of Joni Mitchell, but suffice to say that I think her 1971 album Blue, a stark and lovely set of love songs, both happy and sad, is a work of genius and one that spoke to me intensely in my youth. It's also an album that still holds up after all these years ("A Case of You" was covered not too long ago by k.d. lang, and "River" has become a Christmas standard). The book covers her life and career from just before the recording of Blue in 1970 to Hejira, what Mercer seems to consider her last great work, in 1976. I would have included her next album, 1978's Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, which I like more than Hejira. But there is no doubt that by the time of 1979's Mingus, she had turned completely away from folk music and personal storytelling to jazz and more impressionistic lyrics, and lost much of her audience. I gave her two more albums, then stopped following her career. I didn't resent her for her changes, but I just wasn't interested in following her in that direction, and I was incredibly grateful for the body of work she left behind.

But this book... First of all, it's not terribly well written. I was expecting a mix of music criticism and biography, and that's basically what I got, but it's an idiosyncratic book, which bounces around in time and space, and does not do what I feel it promised, which was to include a track-by-track analysis of the albums. What analysis she does is interesting, especially when covering Court and Spark, Mitchell's biggest commercial hit. At times, Mercer, who had limited personal access to Mitchell, writes in an clear objective style, but at other times, she awkwardly inserts short personal anecdotes which seem barely related to Mitchell and her music (and there's a long section about beat poetry that comes to nothing). I totally understand this push toward "subjective criticism": if I ever write in detail on one of my blogs about Mitchell's music, I will have to relate the circumstances of my discovery of her albums and how each one affected my life. But here, the connections seem murky.

But the most disappointing thing is not the writer, but the subject. Mitchell comes off as a pompous, strutting, egocentric ass. She disparages the world for not "getting" the music she's produced over the past 25 years, and seems pretty pissed that her obituary will first and foremost reference her earlier work. There seems to be no one else in the pop music pantheon whom she respects, not even ex-lovers such as James Taylor or Leonard Cohen--and though I'm not a big Cohen fan, I will say that his output has remained interesting, accessible, and alive long after hers has become boring and irrelevant. The only other "geniuses" she can imagine being compared to are Beethoven, Debussy, and jazz musician Wayne Shorter.

Mitchell does make at least two interesting and valid points. The first is her concern with the gossips who attempt to figure out who her songs are about. These early songs are personal, about things and people in Mitchell's life, and therefore autobiographical, but the events of her life have become art and, as Mercer and I can attest, the songs take on a universal appeal. Though I've never been to Paris or Greece or even California, and never taken Graham Nash as a lover, I can identify with most of her songs. However, I am only human and I did enjoy finding out here that "Coyote," from Hejira, was about a fling Mitchell had with Sam Shepard. Still, I understand why gossip-mongering fans upset her, and Mercer does a nice job balancing Mitchell's privacy with the reader's need to find out at least a few juicy tidbits.

The other interesting point she raises concerns the label "confessional" which is often applied to her music. "Confessional" implies Mitchell has done something wrong or sinful and needs to be redeemed by confessing her errors--a lengthy discussion of St. Augustine ensues at one point. I agree with her that "confessional" is probably the wrong term to apply blanketly to the works of the singer-songwriters of the 60s and 70s. It's all the stranger, however, when Mercer says that Mitchell's music changed when she "absolved herself of the need to write autobiographical songs." Isn't "absolved" completely the wrong word here?

As to the Kindle, for me it will never replace flesh-and-blood books (I know, I know, but it's evocative) but once I gave in, I enjoyed the experience. Pages don't exist, and you only know how far you are in a book by a percentage number displayed along the bottom. (I was telling people, "Hey, I'm 34% of the way through the Joni Mitchell book!") You can take notes, though I missed the tactile experience of writing in margins and underlining things in red or purple. As for Joni, I still love her music, and am listening to "Amelia" on the computer as I write these words. Maybe it's just best not to know too much about the people we put on pedestals.