all about me

Blue and Late for the Sky. I have complicated relationships with Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne. Much of what I’ve read and heard about the two of them would suggest that they’re both assholes. Jackson strikes me as being pompous, self-righteous and smarmy, and Joni seems like a bitter egomaniac. But I’ve never met either one of them, so the ‘complicated relationships’ really refer to my connection with their music. Besides, I’m sure a lot of the music I cherish comes from people I wouldn’t like if I met them. In the cases of Joni and Jackson, the best parts of their careers make me forgive everything else that may or may not be true about their personalities. They are (or were) both supremely talented songwriters, so much so that their songs create alternative personae – people you want to talk to, question, and get to know... For me, the gap between the people they ‘really’ might be and the people they become in song widens even more because they both represent a part of L.A.’s history I’ve been obsessed with ever since I moved here…




When I grab my body board and drive to County Line in my Mustang, I like to play Joni’s Court and Spark on the car stereo as I drive down to PCH from Kanan Road. Something about the way she sings ‘breaking like the waves at Malibu’ makes me picture myself as Elliot Gould in The Long Goodbye, walking through a sunken living room and out a back door that opens onto the golden sands of Paradise Cove... If I sit at home and try to conjure up other images of early 70s L.A. for my book, I often turn to Jackson Browne’s first album. I know it’s bland, but it’s a blandness of a very distinct, melancholy sort. The record is like a blurry snapshot of this city, shrouded in yellow smog and haunted by ambiguities of the 60s...

I am a dizzy dinosaur in this age of gadgetry and instant gratification, hopelessly nostalgic for a place and time continually fading into the distant past. Neither Joni Mitchell nor Jackson Browne can take me back to that time entirely, but they both give me a window into its state of mind…

The ‘fitful dreams’ of the Love generation lay in ruins at the end of the 60s, and one very common response was to withdraw into downbeat self-examination. Joni Mitchell’s Blue is not the first singer-songwriter album in this vein and isn’t even Joni’s first crack at it. By the time she recorded the album in 1970-71, she had already made several records and enjoyed some moderate success with Ladies of the Canyon. But in my opinion, Blue is worth singling out as the ultimate representation of the hippie mind turned inward at the dawn of the 1970s. Listening to it, I feel as if I'm privy to Joni’s most intimate ruminations on the highs of giddy romance, the lows of love lost, and the inextricable connection between the two. ‘I’m so hard to handle/I’m selfish and I’m sad/Now I’ve gone and lost the best baby that I ever had’… Joni allows herself to be more nakedly vulnerable on Blue than on any other record she made over the course of her career. When she sings ‘I wish I had a river I could skate away on’, or tells the child of “Little Green” that 'there’ll be icicles, and birthday clothes, and sometimes there’ll be sorrow', I can't help but go down to those despairing depths with her. The stark emotional authenticity is what distinguishes Blue from a lot of other singer-songwriter fare. I just don’t respond in the same way to James Taylor, or Carole Klein, or Linda Ronstadt…

On “California”, one of the upbeat songs on Blue, Joni sings, ‘They won’t give peace a chance/That was just a dream some of us had.’ This is one of the only instances on the album where Joni moves outside herself. The irony is that, in a way this is Joni trying to tell us why she has retreated into such profound introspection.

Next Time: Jackson Browne...