Three Insights from Joni Mitchell in 1985....

Volume One in an (irregular) series: "Digging Through the Interview Cassettes."

Talking live recordings recently, we missed giving another long theater bow to one of the most luminous in pop history — Shadows And Light, Joni Mitchell’s 1980 tour document featuring Pat Metheny, Jaco Pastorious and others. Here are some thoughts.

Listening to that version of “Edith and the Kingpin” made me curious to dig out the cassette and hear a bit of the long-ago interview I did with Mitchell. It was 1985, just before the release of her bold, synth-textured Dog Eat Dog album. In New York, at Geffen Records, for the Miami Herald. I was new to the press-circuit interview game, and in my anxiety I dissected every track and prepared pages upon pages of questions. I started by asking about her well-documented dislike of the interview process; she calmly explained that she was doing more press than she ever had before, including TV interviews, because she had three more records on her contract and she wanted them to be heard. She talked about the effect of television at some length….

The songs of Dog Eat Dog  find Mitchell expressing anger and/or dismay at elements of popular culture and politics – at one point she explained how she learned about the then-surging phenomenon of televangelism, which is discussed on her acidic “Tax Free.”

That led into a discussion of fundamentalism, and the tactics of the religious right. I was floored to encounter this bit of the conversation in the aftermath of the 2020 election: All these years later, the names have changed – Reagan was president, the Koch brothers were not yet power brokers  -- but the issues are astonishingly familiar. When the historians talk about societies not learning from past instances of greed and craven ideology, this is what they mean…