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POP MUSIC : Out of the Canyon : Joni Mitchell’s profile during the ‘80s was, well, low. If her new album is any indication, the ‘90s will be different.

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<i> Robert Hilburn is The Times' pop music critic. </i>

Joni Mitchell has looked at pop from both sides now. She was the toast of it in the ‘70s, but a virtual outcast from it in the ‘80s.

After gaining attention in the late ‘60s for writing such folk-flavored songs as “Both Sides Now” and “Woodstock” that were hits for other singers, she recorded a series of landmark albums in the ‘70s, including “Blue” and “Court and Spark,” that chronicled romantic anguish and desire with candor and grace that was almost unparallelled in pop music.

Her artistic stamp and influence were so strong that almost every sensitive female singer-songwriter with either blond hair or a guitar who followed her has been described as “the new Joni Mitchell”: Rickie Lee Jones, Suzanne Vega, Tracy Chapman, Michelle Shocked. Her songs remain such an evocative chronicle of relationships that they were recently collected in a well-received revue titled “The Joni Mitchell Project” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

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Like Bob Dylan a decade before, Mitchell became the focus in the ‘70s of a cult--mostly female fans, in her case, looking to her music for signs of understanding and guidance as they navigated their own trials of relationships.

Mitchell wrote in such a personal, confessional style that it was virtually impossible for a generation of fans to separate the emotions in the song from the woman who wrote them. In her new album, “Night Ride Home,” there are more songs about romance that speak so personally it’s easy to see the guessing games starting all over again.

The album, due March 5 from Geffen Records, is her warmest and most accessible collection since “Court and Spark” in 1974--an album that joins recent works by Paul Simon and Sting as an example of pop’s growing ambition and maturity. (See article on next page.)

“All this preoccupation with the writer in pop isn’t healthy,” Mitchell declares during a late afternoon interview on the patio of the Hotel Bel Air. “We are treated as if we are running for president or as if we have committed a crime. There is a tremendous amount of interrogation.”

Mitchell, 47, pauses to light the next in a steady stream of cigarettes.

“You know I’m really a short-story writer. I never set out to write my life. . . . I just wanted to write about life, period. If I was a short-story writer, people would accept it as a story rather than try to always link the person and the art.”

But isn’t it reasonable to think of, say, “I Had a King,” an early Mitchell song, as a personal declaration of independence? The song was written after a 22-year-old Mitchell broke away from family and a brief marriage to move from Canada to New York to begin a career in folk music.

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I can’t go back there anymore

You know my keys won’t fit the door

You know my thoughts don’t fit the man

They never can they never can.

Aren’t those lines autobiographical?

“Oh, sure,” she says, without hesitation. “After I took half the furniture when I left, (my ex-husband) changed the lock on me. . . .”

Mitchell pauses, at the contradiction.

“Well,” she continues, flashing a warm smile. “I never said there’s wasn’t some of me in the songs.”

Mitchell’s best songs, indeed, were personal, insightful blends of complex emotions and graceful, accessible images--music that has been cited as an influence by artists as varied as Prince and the Replacements’ Paul Westerberg.

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So, it was a surprise when her pop fortunes changed dramatically in the late ‘70s and ‘80s.

Sensing the need for new musical textures in pop-rock, she searched through jazz and Third World rhythms for new motivation and color. She also wrote more overtly about social matters. There were complaints that the musical textures she wove were inaccessible and that her themes were too somber.

Her albums no longer made the Top 20 and once-adoring critics grew hostile.

Mitchell was bruised by the reaction but--as an artist--she never looked back. In a pop world of imitation and compromise, Mitchell continued to demonstrate the same artistic independence that made her so acclaimed in the ‘70s.

“It’s funny,” she says. “For years, I kept reading or hearing about people wanting another ‘Blue’ or another ‘Court and Spark,’ but they already have those albums. It’s not as if someone went into their record collections and stole the albums.

“Besides, if I gave them more of that, they’d be so bored. Each of those albums had a particular spirit because I am always changing and I am only working with the fodder of what I am going through. Hopefully in a lifetime, I will go through pretty much the range of human experience.”

Mitchell was virtually the Garbo of pop during the ‘70s, but these days she is refreshingly good-natured and talkative, able to look back on the triumph and trauma of the ‘70s with frequent insight and wit, and to speak about her personal development--as a person and an artist--during the ‘80s.

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Despite her immense ambition and influence, she remains remarkably unpretentious. One reason for her forthright, even playful nature nowadays is that she is more comfortable with her own celebrity.

Mitchell and her husband Larry Klein, a record producer and bassist, live near the hotel, and it is one of her favorite meeting spots because of its peaceful, beautifully landscaped grounds.

Rather than hide in a secluded corner of the hotel restaurant while waiting for the interview, as even some outgoing pop performers might, Mitchell waited for a reporter and a photographer on a sofa in the middle of the hotel lobby.

Though a hotel representative had set up a table in a quiet area of the hotel for her to use during the interview, Mitchell opted for a table on the public patio, where she ordered the first of two pots of cappuccino and removed the wrapper from a fresh pack of cigarettes.

And when she later suggested going inside to get out of the evening chill, she again sidestepped the secluded restaurant and chose a table in the middle of the crowded bar.

“I enjoy being around people, but that wasn’t always the case,” she said. “Part of it may have been cultural. As Canadians, we are taught, ‘Stick your head above the crowd and someone will lop it off,’ and I found it was true.

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“I worked for seven years in clubs and I was enough of a ham that I liked it . . . that much attention. But when it came to the big stage and suddenly there was what I would call neurotic adoration, I used to run--I just couldn’t handle it. I hated how everyone, including the media, thought of you as public property.

“Now, though, it’s nice when you walk down the street and someone says, ‘Hi’ya, Joni, when are you gonna do another show?’ or something--just like we are friends from the same small town or something. The feedback for years in the press was never that nourishing, but the feedback on the street was always there. The street has always been my tail wind.”

Mitchell was born Roberta Joan Anderson in Ft. MacLeod, Alberta, the daughter of a former Royal Canadian Air Force officer and his schoolteacher wife. Most of her close friends--and Klein, her husband--still call her Joan.

The family moved around a lot, finally settling in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where young Mitchell had a case of polio during grade school that was so severe doctors feared she would not ever be able to stand again. Yet Mitchell struggled back.

“I had a strong will,” she says now. “But also, being so confined, I think I developed an inner life. I’d imagine all kinds of stories and pictures and scenes in my head--just looking at the ceiling and thinking it was a screen.”

As a teen-ager, she enjoyed the beauty and structure of classical music and she loved dancing to rock ‘n’ roll. But she cites Edith Piaf, the dramatic French chanteuse, as her first real musical love. “I remember the first time I heard her. It was a recording of ‘Les Trois Cloches’--’The Jimmy Brown Song’--and my hair stood on end,” she recalls. “Her voice just thrilled my soul.”

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By the time she went to art college to study commercial art, she was writing poetry and playing folk music in small clubs--mainly for fun and pocket change. She didn’t think about putting the words and music together until she heard Dylan.

“At first, I thought Dylan was just another Woody Guthrie copycat, and I’m pretty hard on copycats. But suddenly, Dylan’s gift came in and I went, ‘Oh my God.’ I realized that you can write and sing about any emotion, that you could combine music and literature. It was so liberating.”

After a brief marriage to folk singer Chuck Mitchell, the would-be singer-songwriter headed in 1966 for New York’s Greenwich Village, the hub of the folk music world. She played the East Coast club circuit, driving from town to town and serving as her own manager.

“It was a lonely job,” she said, reflecting on the era. “You’d go into a town and have nothing to do except the shows and then you’d be on the road again, but it was good in a way because it gave me the time to write. I learned the purpose of melancholy too . . . that grieving and sorrow are highly underrated in this culture.

“In a 9 to 5 job, you are not allowed to really savor your emotions, but on your own, you have time to live with them, and I was on my own. I wrote a lot of the songs that appeared on the first three albums during that time. “

The first trace of national recognition for Mitchell was when Judy Collins recorded “Both Sides Now” in 1968 and the song went to No. 8 on the national charts. The tale of innocence and uncertainty remains perhaps her most famous song:

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I’ve looked at love from both sides now

From give and take, and still somehow

It’s love’s illusion I recall

I really don’t know love at all.

When Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young included “Woodstock” on the group’s “Deja Vu” album in 1970, Mitchell’s popularity and acclaim took another jump.

“Ladies of the Canyon,” her own album that year, made her a pop star. It was certified gold (500,000 copies sold) and included both “Woodstock” and “Big Yellow Taxi,” which became her first hit single.

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By the time of that album, Mitchell had moved to California, along with manager Elliot Roberts and agent David Geffen, both of whom would become industry powers in their own rights.

“I was their first racehorse, so to speak,” Mitchell reminisces. “We moved out together from the concrete jungle into the sun and the trees . . . and I’ll never forget the smell of Laurel Canyon when we first moved in. Geffen didn’t move there, but Elliot and the rest of us moved all the way up Lookout Mountain. It was an amazing time.”

Amazing indeed.

Much like the pop equivalent of literary Paris before World War II, Lookout Mountain was the center of a social world that included the royalty of pop--and Mitchell was its queen.

Rolling Stone magazine would eventually publish a chart that supposedly charted all of Mitchell’s romances--a chart that included Graham Nash, James Taylor and Jackson Browne.

Mitchell winces at the mention of the chart.

“I didn’t see it, but I heard about it and it broke my heart,” she says. “They made me out to be some kind of monster. They had people on the list that I never even dated and they sullied and cheapened a lot of real relationships.”

Beneath the glamour, Mitchell was shy and somewhat fragile. She retreated from the accumulating pressures after “Blue” in 1971, spending almost a year in what she describes as the “bushes” near Vancouver, British Columbia.

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“I was really disillusioned--by my own generation and where I could see it was headed. I had to go back and spend time among slithery and furry things. I just had to be away from people, had to reinvent myself, discover myself, sort out things.

“Inside, you have all the tendencies of the world . . . tendencies towards good, tendencies towards evil. So you have to sort it out, get over the shock that these things are in you and figure out which ones you want to try to use. It took a year of isolation before a person entering my life did not create disturbances for hours after they left.”

She wrote most of “For the Roses” during that year--and re-entered the pop scene to even greater attention and acclaim. It continued through “Court and Spark” in 1975, her biggest-selling album, which contained “Help Me,” her only Top 10 single.

Then Mitchell entered what proved to be a self-imposed exile. A series of albums--”The Hissing of Summer Lawns,” “Hejira,” “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter” and “Mingus”--led her further and further from her old audience . . . and the Top 10.

The “exile,” which continued with such albums as “Wild Things Run Fast” and “Dog Eat Dog” in the ‘80s, wasn’t solely a case of going against audience expectations. It was also a case of falling short of the extraordinarily high standards of her earlier work.

The experimentation with textures--including using African drums long before Talking Heads and Paul Simon made similar moves--was sometimes jarring, and her increasingly overt political lyrics frequently lacked the gracefulness of her most prized period.

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Yet, it is also clear that some of Mitchell’s work after “Court and Spark” does appear to have been rejected because it was too radical for the old guard--and it is also true that she was given little support, from critics or early fans, for the ambition she showed in trying to grow as an artist.

One album that was hit especially hard was “Mingus,” a 1979 collaboration with Charles Mingus, the respected jazz musician-composer. While uneven, “Mingus” was an uncompromising artistic statement, with the creative spirit of John Lennon’s first solo album or Neil Young’s dark “Tonight’s the Night.”

Larry Klein was a studio musician with a background in rock and jazz when he met Mitchell during the recording of “Wild Things Run Fast,” the 1982 album that followed “Mingus.”

In a separate interview, Klein, 35, said Mitchell seemed frustrated at that time that people hadn’t responded to her recent work, but that it didn’t color her direction.

“She’s never--as long as I’ve known her--used the issue of what people like to guide her direction,” he said. “She’s pretty pure in the sense that when she sits down to write, she allows whatever is inside her to come out.”

On the same question, Mitchell replies, “Actually the isolation may have helped me in retrospect. The way it affected me was to push me further into my own music. I don’t know what would have happened if I had gone on and enjoyed popularity all this time.”

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It also gave Mitchell a chance to grow emotionally outside the suffocating glare of the media and her old cult of fans.

Still, she has obviously relived that period time and again in her mind, trying to understand the rupture of fan and critical support in this country.

“I think some of the themes were as troubling to the old fans as the changes in the music,” she says. “I pointed a lot of fingers in ‘Hissing of Summer Lawns.’ It was written in the thick of the apathetic ‘70s, critical of yuppie standards that were to come and people felt uncomfortable about being called on their actions.

“An artist should be an antenna for the culture and I felt I needed to talk about that in the music. I don’t want to go into my Doomsday Joan routine now, but we have really screwed up our planet. Everybody likes to say nature has tremendous resilience and it can heal itself, but there is a point where time begins running out. . . .”

She says she can’t help but identify with Dylan, who, too, was being frequently written off by critics.

“Well, I love Bob,” she says. “And I’m always pulling for him, defending him. I must admit I was mad at Bruce (Springsteen) initially because everyone was calling him the ‘New Dylan’ even though it wasn’t even his fault. But there is no new Dylan. There never will be. Bob is still capable of being inspired at any moment and it was a shame to see some of his records not being appreciated enough.”

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At the same time, Mitchell was often annoyed to see the “new Joni Mitchell” tag applied to so many new singer-songwriters.

“The thing I find insulting about it is it just goes to show how very little people know about music . . . that they would say any girl with a guitar that comes along sounds like me,” she says.

“Take Suzanne Vega for instance. Harmonically, there is no resemblance. Chordal movement, there’s no resemblance. Architecturally, no resemblance. Content of theme, no resemblance. Tone, aura, emotional range, no resemblance. No resemblance!

“Yet this girl went all around the world billed as the new Joni Mitchell and she got sick of it. At some point in Europe, she got pumped up with her success and she began to trivialize me. That was annoying, but I understand how irritating it must be for them to be likened to someone else all the time. It robs them of their identity and me of mine. I’m not that easily cloned.”

Mitchell waits a moment before answering the final series of questions in the interview, including one about how the private Mitchell differs from the image that became so widely studied in the ‘70s. It’s as if she’s thumbing through a Rolodex of memories.

“Most people probably have a very limited view of who I am, certainly people who only listened through ‘Court and Spark,’ ” she says finally. “One thing that people miss is the humor in my work. They think of ‘Blue’ and they aren’t sure they can laugh with me.

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“When I went to see ‘The Joni Mitchell Project,’ I told this one singer that she was missing the humor in one of the songs. I told her not to take it all so seriously.”

She found the LATC revue “a really pleasant experience,” she says, but “in going home and reflecting on it, I saw the potential for what it really could be. It made me want to revamp it--I’d like to get involved, make it a little more of a musical than a revue. They hadn’t really found much of a theme to hang it on. And then I’d like to write a musical from scratch.”

Unlike her early days in Laurel Canyon, Mitchell doesn’t spend a lot of time around other musicians.

“I’m a Scorpio,” she says. “I’ve got a lot of old friends. Every once in a while, Klein and I’ll round up a few people in a restaurant. We have a couple of places we go with regularity. It’s our way of trying to make a small town out of this big burg we live in.

“I didn’t make my best friends through the star system. I like a lot of giggling with my partying. You know what I mean? I like to party in a way that a room full of stars can not give me.”

Finally, the Poetess of the Heart focuses on the subject of romance.

Mitchell expressed doubt in the ‘70s that she would ever remarry, declaring at one point that she already felt “married to this guy named Art. . . . I’m responsible to my art above all else.”

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“I must admit I just didn’t think I would find the person,” she says in the hotel bar, running a hand through her blond hair. “I’m a hard match.”

But she also acknowledges that she was as wed as much to the “buzz” of romance as to her art.

“Romance is like, ‘Oh, God, I’m so nervous, so excited, I hope he loves me.’ I had a pattern of going through very brief relationships, where the romance never had a chance to develop into anything else. If you have set up a certain kind of promiscuousness, the buzz is eventually gone and you move on. That’s the world of Don Juans and Don Juanettes and I was part of it.”

Looking across the room as she lights another cigarette, Mitchell continues.

“Love is different. It’s not built on insecurity, it’s built on caring. . . . The best description I’ve ever found is Corinthians. . . . ‘Love is kind. . . . Love has no evil in mind, love gives without asking in return.’

“It’s like ‘Lucky Girl’ (a song from the “Dog Eat Dog” album). . . . ‘I never loved a man I trusted . . . until I loved you.’ But Klein’s trustworthy. That’s a beautiful quality and it’s hard to find: a man committed to marriage.

“He’s a lot younger than me and in a lot of cases that probably wouldn’t work, but he’s not afraid of wrinkles. I’m always going to be 13 years older than him and he’s just coming into his manhood now and I’m like going into my 50s, but he’s cool with it.”

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It was partially the security of a relationship, she says, that encouraged her to become more political in albums such as “Dog Eat Dog.”

“It got to a point where I just wasn’t willing to bleed for people in romantic love anymore,” she says. “One does that while you are looking for your mate. But I found a mate and that part of my life was taken care of. So, you extend yourself to social matters. You can’t do that until you are properly anchored.”

The new album balances social and personal tales--from the peaceful, romantic aura of the title song to a tale of obsessive longing to a story of racial bigotry. (See review Page 60).

Ed Rosenblatt, president of Geffen Records, believes the album will be well-received.

“When you are talking about Joni Mitchell, you are talking about ‘artist’ in the way the dictionary would want you to use the word.

“I think the songs on this album are very strong and I think the fact that she has gone to a more basic sound that has enabled people to get into her lyrics more easily is going to make it very well-received.”

Rather than a return to form, Mitchell sees the album as simply the natural evolution of her music--a growth that would have been impossible without the sometimes controversial excursions of the past decade.

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“I feel this (aura) of ‘Welcome home, Joan’ building, but this album isn’t an attempt to ‘regain’ my old audience,” she notes, matter of factly. “For years, I heard people say, ‘They won’t play your stuff on the radio. It’s too radical,’ or whatever.

“But a lot of the things I was doing--experimenting with textures and rhythms and music from other cultures--is the same thing that Paul Simon and Sting are doing now. I haven’t ‘gone back.’ I just think I’m in sync with the times again.”

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