Joni Mitchell

Seventies Feminism: Where You Can Sleep Around Like You Mean Business
I started reading a book called Girls Like Us the other night, which led me to read another book called Hotel California. Girls Like Us is about women like Carly Simon and Carole King while Hotel California is based around the exploits of the rock Supergroup, The Eagles. Both books drew a vivid depiction of a musician's life in the Laurel Canyon of California during the Sixties and Seventies. I was fascinated by the freewheeling Sixties, with the free love and the free drugs and the musicians who wrote, played and partied together at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. In turn, this commune of sharing and caring, of creating and sharing love and accolades and music, turned into the expansive stadium tours of the Seventies, with millions of dollars rolling in and conversely, millions of grams of coke shoved up our now-detached artist's noses, as they sped around the world from limousine to limousine, and airport to airport, covered in groupies and dripping with diamonds. I read with interest, being the gossip hound that I am, about Jackson Browne, and the tragic suicide of his first wife, Phyllis Major Browne. Oddly enough, both books spoke about another former girlfriend of Browne's, Joni Mitchell, and how Joni also tried to commit suicide after her short affair with Browne ended. He left her for Phyllis, by the way. Oh, the tangled web we weave. It seems that once the Pill was created, people went crazy, and hopped beds more frequently than a bedbug catching a ride, in your spanking new Samsonite suitcase, out the local Holiday Inn and into your very own Home Sweet Home.

Joni Mitchell

I decided that I wanted to write about Joni Mitchell, who inspired a generation of women, who slept with the hottest men in the music business, from Graham Nash (think "Our House", Nash's ode to Mitchell) to James Taylor to Mick Jagger. Mitchel came from a small town in Canada, got herself pregnant (before that all-saving grace, The Pill, was created), married a local boy (who was gallant enough to put a ring on it, but was not her baby's father), abandoned the baby in hospital (the adoption papers read, "Mother left Canada for US to pursue career as a folk singer"), and hit the road for LA, to carve herself out a piece of the American Dream. Ah, the seduction of fame and fortune, it's enough to literally make a mother abandon her own child. WHEW!! That's quite a ride, and quite a legacy, and maybe not a positive legacy to be honest, which all happened before Joni even made it to the Big Times, with the draw and the name recognition to bag men like Jagger and Taylor and Browne. Mitchell was eventually reunited with her daughter, and wrote the song "Little Green", trying to put into words her motivations for leaving the little girl at birth.

At first thought, I was pretty sure that I had no idea who Mitchell was, other than an out-of-date folksie type, or even if I'd heard any of her songs at all. But after a brief Internet search, I realized that I knew many, many of Joni Mitchell songs. So many Mitchell songs were the fabric of my youth, from "Big Yellow Taxi", "Help Me", "Circle Game", "Both Sides Now" to "Woodstock", which was nicely immortalized by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and still has a prominent place on my play list. That's a string of hits that would make any artist proud, especially a woman breaking into the male-dominated music scene of the Sixties. However, after listening to Joni's songs, the ones that don't get air play where I live, I  found that I enjoyed her songs like "River" or "A Case of You" more than the ones that I recognized from the radio. Her songs are poetry, they are stories ripe with imagery, from "the sun through yellow curtains, and a rainbow on the wall" in "Chelsea Morning" to "Songs like tiny hammers hurled" in "Ladies of the Canyon". In fact, when I listened to Mitchell perform in her early days, her voice seemed almost shrill and child-like to me- her voice was jarringly high, like nails running down a chalk board. As she matured, as her reputation grew, and as she moved from lover to lover, searching for love maybe or maybe just an equal, it seems to me that her voice became stronger, less little girl lost and more woman who had loved and lost. The Mitchell I like, in fact, is the grown woman who was strong enough to publicly explain why she left her own baby girl at birth, to describe how she had clawed her way to the top of LA's fickle music scene, and to delineate how she had stolen the heart of a generation, touching both men and women alike.

Country Chicks Who Rock

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqh7TM7vhf8

I've recently become addicted to the TV show The Voice. I avoided watching the show for the first three seasons, for reasons mainly involving my aversion to shows like American Idol or The X Factor that have annoying hosts mercilessly critique vocalists who have some talent, and are desperate for their chance to make it Big. One night, with nothing to do and nothing else on TV that caught my eye, I sat down to watch The Voice, expecting to hate it, but loving every minute instead. The coaches caught my fancy, and I decided to look into the music of Blake Shelton, a Country star of whom I knew next to nothing about, except that he had stepped out on his first wife with another huge Country star, Miranda Lambert. Lambert and Shelton eventually married, and Blake has no problem bringing up his marriage to Lambert on the Voice, particularly with young girls aspiring to follow in Lambert's well-received footsteps.

I checked Lambert out too, having found her hubby's music to be mainly uninspiring, especially compared to the gems that I've heard from another Country superstar Brad Paisley, or even old-school greats like Johnny Cash. It must have been his unusual mullet that brought him fame, since anyone sporting that funky hairdo had to have a major ego to go along with the it. All styling questions aside, Lambert, on the other hand, had whimsical lyrics and a Rock element to her songs that have the same message of female empowerment that Beyonce touts in her songs. Be strong, and get back on that cheating man. You deserve better. No laying down and taking heartbreak the old-fashioned way, with a smile pasted on your face and Stand by Your Man repeatedly playing in the background as you wolf down a quart of Ben and Jerry's ice cream. Miranda sings about getting even, about letting people know when they wronged you, and I appreciated her message. I wish someone had put that message out there back in the days when I was dating, and every girl in high school should listen to her songs and learn what respect can look like. It's not the Chris Brown/Rhianna version, either, where a guy beats you up and you crawl back to him for a second round. Lambert, by the way, had an interesting Twitter feud with Brown about his relationship with Rhianna, and Lambert did the standing up to Brown that Rhianna didn't do herself, making it clear that women were not put on this earth to be used as cheap punching bags. Go, Miranda.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le-3MIBxQTw


Another band that has a Rock and Country has a Country tinge to it are the Alabama Shakes. Lead singer Brittany Howard has a Blues voice that would make Janis Joplin proud, and her message is one of love, much along the lines of Lambert's songs, but instead of singing about love gone wrong, Howard sticks to the message of love being more of a saving grace. Howard addresses the saving grace of God as well, but not in a way that would offend the non-religious. Howard is young,  and she's only at the start of her career. I think that her lyrics will evolve as she matures. In the meantime, Alabama Shakes measures up. It's good feet-stomping old Rock and Roll, with a solid Country backbone to their songs. Listen, and enjoy!

So You Want to be a Rock and Roll Star

The Byrds So You Want to be a Rock and Roll Star:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prxkTbekrMQ

Joan Jett and the Blackhearts

Nancy Wilson of Heart

 So, you want to be a Rock and Roll Star. It all sounds breathlessly and endlessly exciting in the Byrds song. Such an easy goal: one, to play Rock and Roll music and two, to be a star. It's not as if anyone would object to being star, with all that being a star entails. But... hmmm. How do you go about becoming a rock star, anyway? It's not like they offer classes in high school on how to dye your hair to just the right Indie shade of lavender, or how to dress with the just the right amount of reckless flair. I mean, you can take a Home Economics class and learn how to make Mac N' Cheese, or you can take a Wood Shop class and learn how to build a bookshelf. You can perhaps take Music classes, if you're lucky and budget cuts at your local high school haven't reduced the Music Department to next to naught. The question being- can you even learn how to play guitar like The Byrds during the course of a high school Music class?

 

Fleetwood Mac

 

How do you go about becoming a Rock and Roll Star?

Of course, The Byrds spelled it out fairly clearly. Buy an electric guitar, check. Learn how to play, check. Comb your hair just right, check, and buy a tight pair of pants, check. Sell your soul to an agent, check. Get a hit song and the girls will tear you apart. Checkmate. What teenaged boy wouldn't dream of being torn apart by a throng of drooling girls, especially those of the cheerleader variety, who normally might not look in his direction.



The Pretenders



But what if, on the other hand, you are a girl who listened to that The Byrds song? What if you were a girl who decided to rock? Who did you look up to as an example of the perfect Rock Front Woman? Well, if you were a girl growing up in the 50s or 60s, or even in the early 70s, you were quite clearly out of luck. Because women rockers were few and far between, if such an animal existed at all during the 50s and 60s. Maybe Patti Smith or Stevie Nicks could be a role model during the early 70s, but  really, they did not play an electric guitar. Grace Slick wrote classic songs during the 60s, but she also did not play the guitar. In the late 70s, though, a whole new breed of rockers appeared, women rockers. Women like Nancy Wilson, Chrissie Hynde, Joan Jett, Lita Ford, and even Bonnie Raitt appeared on the scene. They broke the mould of girls who looked pretty and sang their hearts out, like the Supremes or even Pat Benatar. These women wrote their own songs, played their own guitars, and fronted their own band. They took over the jobs usually reserved for men in music- they could curse like a man, party like a man, and get up onstage and rock like a man.

   Some of my favorite front women found success in England, where the Punk movement had made being a woman something of an asset, or maybe it is more correct to say that being a woman was not a drawback. The London rock scene was more gender-neutral than ever before. A guitarist was a guitarist was a guitarist, regarless of chromozonal arrangements. You weren't so much judged on your gender, but perhaps more on your visual presentation. Hell, Sid Vicious couldn't even play his guitar, let alone sing, so what did it matter if you were a woman who could actually figure out what chords to play without a diagram taped to the back of your instrument?
And so we have iconic rock front woman like Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders, who found success in England with a trio of three talented English musicians. Or Katrina Leskanich, of Katrina and the Waves, who also found success in London backed by three British musicians. Even Jett worked for a time in London, until she found greater success with the LA-based Blackhearts. Maybe the Byrds should have added a line to their song 'So you want to be a Rock and Roll Star'. Maybe they should have thrown something in for the girls who wanted to rock, if they could even have imagined  a female guitarist at the time. Just a small hint, for the ladies, so to speak- pack it up, girls, hop on the next plane to England, and yes, maybe you can meet your agent in London and be a star.
 

 

      

Katrina and the Waves