Joni Mitchell 78th Birthday notes

 

“Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words,” Malka Marom, September 2014.

"I liked playing the coffeehouses, where I could step off the stage and go sit in the audience and be comfortable, or where there wasn’t a barrier between me and my audience in the clubs. The big stage had no appeal for me; it was too great a distance between me and the audience, and I never really liked it. I didn’t have a lot of fame in the beginning, and that’s probably good because it made it more enjoyable. 

A lot of these songs, I just lost them. They fell away. They only exist in these recordings. For so long I rebelled against the term: “I was never a folk singer.” I would get pissed off if they put that label on me. I didn’t think it was a good description of what I was. And then I listened, and – it was beautiful. It made me forgive my beginnings. And I had this realisation…

I was a folk singer!" Joni Mitchell

The Guardian Interview

By the mid and late late seventies of course Mitchell never really a folk singer per se had played pretty much all the significant auditoriums and stadiums which makes the above quote something of a nostalgic vision for her past. By 1970  she had played the Royal Festival Hall and large scale festivals like the Mariposa so her yearnings seems somewhat disingenuous here. The Dylans and Van Ronks, the Peter Paul and Mary's and the Joan Baez's et al played all the folk clubs but only those achieving high pop/rock status began playing the huge venues so early and by 1983 I had seen her play the Wembley Stadium ( I say "see" but frankly there was little to see of stadium rock at that time. Dylan at Blackbushe airdrome was but a speck in the distance and the sound just about approaching listenable for an airfield.) From the mid seventies to early eighties Mitchell had played every significant rock stadium in existence In fact her first live album even celebrated this with it's 'Miles of Aisles' compiled as it was from LA's Universal Amphitheater in 1972

Fed to the Beast (so why agree to play it then if happier in the coffee house?) she agreed to play the Isle of Wight festival to over 600,000 Brits and made a pretty much disastrous afternoon slot somehow better but it was clearly a struggle . . . . . . .