Advent Music

 

Canadian Advent.

What if Joni is singing about her relationship with God?

Urge for Going

 

I just had the immense pleasure of going through Joni Mitchell's lyrics for "Urge for Going" with a student.

Mitchell is an excruciatingly good poet. I think it is possible "Urge for Going" is actually the best poem ever written in Canada. And the most Canadian.

I awoke today and found the frost perched on the town

It hovered in a frozen sky, then it gobbled summer down

When the sun turns traitor cold

And all the trees are shivering in a naked row

I get the urge for going but I never seem to go

I get the urge for going

When the meadow grass is turning brown

Summertime is falling down and winter is closing in

I had me a man in summertime

He had summer-colored skin

And not another girl in town

My darling's heart could win

But when the leaves fell on the ground

And bully winds came around pushed them face down in the snow

He got the urge for going and I had to let him go

He got the urge for going

When the meadow grass was turning brown

And summertime was falling down and winter was closing in

Now the warriors of winter they gave a cold triumphant shout

And all that stays is dying and all that lives is getting out

See the geese in chevron flight flapping and racing on before the snow

They've got the urge for going and they've got the wings so they can go

They get the urge for going

When the meadow grass is turning brown

Summertime is falling down and winter is closing in

I'll ply the fire with kindling and pull the blankets to my chin

I'll lock the vagrant winter out and I'll bolt my wandering in

I'd like to call back summertime and have her stay for just another month or so

But she's got the urge for going so I guess she'll have to go

She gets the urge for going when the meadow grass is turning brown

And all her empires are falling down

And winter's closing in

And I get the urge for going when the meadow grass is turning brown

And summertime is falling down

And winter closing in.

Joni Mitchell and Neil Young Fight against Freedom of Speech

 

Sadly, Joni Mitchell has now joined Neil Young in pulling her music off Spotify in protest against their hosting of Joe Rogan’s podcast.  Specifically, this is because Rogan has expressed doubts about the safety of vaccines, and has had on his show a prominent doctor, Robert Malone, who questioned government vaccine policy.

Both Mitchell and Young accuse Spotify of spreading “misinformation” about COVID, and thereby causing deaths.

A left-leaning friend has also since announced on Facebook that he is terminating his subscription to Spotify, and is urging everyone else he knows to do the same.

They all seem bizarrely certain that Malone and Rogan are spreading falsehoods.

An obvious question: how do they know? Obviously, they are not medical doctors. Malone is an expert. How do they know that one expert is right, and the other one wrong?

Especially, how do they know without hearing both sides? For the logic of their demand to censor is that they and everyone else should not even listen to Rogan or Malone. How does only know without listening that someone will say or has said something false? How do you know before you listen that what someone is going to say will be the truth?

They might argue that most doctors disagree with Malone. But science does not work by popular vote. When Einstein published his Theory of Relativity, most physicists would have said he was wrong—and did at the time. By Young’s or Mitchell’s metric, Einstein’s paper—any groundbreaking scientific paper—would not have been published in the first place. Or the publication boycotted. Their position is profoundly anti-science.

And even if science did work by popular vote, neither Young nor Mitchell nor we know what that vote would be. There is no mechanism in place to take a poll of relevant scientists, or even to determine who counts as a relevant scientist. A petition was floated signed by 270 people claiming the relevant expertise; but such a petition has no evidentiary value, as any scientist could explain, since the survey sample was self-selected.

Science, and human progress, works by a free and open exchange of ideas, allowing for free and open debate, after which, everyone has the right to decide for themselves, barring some pressing social need to infringe that freedom. Mitchell, Young, and my friend are short-circuiting that necessary process. They are claiming the right to decide what is right and wrong not only for themselves, but for others. That is a profoundly egotistic and totalitarian impulse.

I am inclined to give creative artists wide leeway on politics. For some reason, the sort of mind that is good at the arts is rarely competent in political matters. Artists are naifs, and easily swayed emotionally by the last person they have talked to. This is what Keats called "negative capability." Similarly, Plato or Lao-Tzu are greatly insightful on individual spiritual matters, but their political thinking is horrifying. I am sad that Mitchell and Young are so badly tarnishing their legacy and reputation, and quite likely wrecking their income in retirement.

And, of course, some people may be influenced by them.

More generally, we are desperately ill-served that all high school students are not taught John Stuart Mill’s explanation of the need for freedom of speech.

“To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility. Its condemnation may be allowed to rest on this common argument, not the worse for being common.”

“To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.”

A free society cannot exist with censorship.

Coyote

I find this clip entrancing.

It is not just for the song, a brilliant piece of lyric poetry.

It is not just for the historical interest: Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and Roger McGuinn at Gordon Lightfoot's home.

It is also because Joni Mitchell's singing voice eerily reminds me of my grandmother's.

And even her face in movement reminds me of my grandmother's.

It's the Irish in her.

Lots of coyotes in my part of Canada.

Night in the City

As a onetime bassist, I have always loved this Joni Mitchel track for its bass run. Just so fine.

And guess who the bassist is?

Steve Stills.

Had he taken up the instrument, he might have been the greatest ever.

Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen

Three truly great songwriters emerged from the Baby Boom generation: Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Joni Mitchell. Among these three. it is hard to choose who is the best. Dylan is the most prolific, but also wrote a lot of junk. Cohen is the best lyricist and most consistently good, but weaker on melody. Mitchell is not quite as good as the other two on lyrics at lyrics, but most innovative musically. In any case, compared to these three, everyone else is in a lesser league. A few great songs, but not the consistency of output.

Both Cohen and Mitchell are Canadian, which gives me a special bond with them. But more than that; something uncanny. Cohen went to the same high school I did, Westmount High School, and took largely the same route home from school. He is full of local Montreal references that resonate very strongly with me. And Mitchell reminds me terribly much of my own grandmother, also a longterm Westmounter: her voice, her mouth, her eyes, even to some extent her apparent personality.

I was surprised reading the recent (2012) Cohen biography by Sylvie Simmons, I'm Your Man, to discover that Cohen and Mitchell had a love affair in 1967, when they were both starting out in the pop music business in New York.

I should not have been. Listen to the lyrics of Mitchell's song "Rainy Night House" (Ladies of the Canyon album, 1970). Anyone who has read Cohen's first, autobiographical novel, The Favourite Game (1963), will have no trouble identifying the house in question as his chiildhood home at 599 Belmont Avenue, Westmount.

It was a rainy night
We took a taxi to your mother's home
She went to Florida and left you
With your father's gun alone

(The gun, which Cohen's father Nathan kept from his service in World War I, figures prominently in Cohen's imagination. He admired his father for being a soldier, When his father dies slowly of a diseased heart when Cohen is age nine, he wishes the senior Cohen, pitifully weak, would take command of his own destiny and use the gun to commit suicide.)

Upon her small white bed
I fell into a dream
You sat up all the night and watched me
To see who in the world I might be,

(Staying up all night to watch a lover sleep was, on the evidence of The Favourite Game, a tendency of Cohen's.)

I am from the Sunday school
I sing soprano in the upstairs choir

(Mitchell, a soprano, started her singing in the local church choir in Saskatoon. Here she contrasts her Irish-Scandinavian roots with Cohen's very different Russian Jewish background. Mitchell is as Aryan-looking as they come.)

You are a holy man
On the F.M. radio
I sat up all the night and watched thee
To see who in the world you might be. 

You called me beautiful
You called your mother, she was very tanned
So you packed your tent and you went
To live out in the Arizona sand. 

You are a refugee
From a wealthy family
You gave up all the golden factories
To see who in the world you might be

(The "golden factories" are/were factories for making brass faucets, owned by the Cohen family. Cohen gave up the life his family had planned for him, in the family businesses, to become a poet.)

Even more indicative of the Cohen influence is Mitchell's never-recorded "The Wizard of Is," which is quite simply a straight imitation of Cohen's "Suzanne," complete with the same tune. When they met, Mitchell was an unknown, 23, Cohen nine years older, 32, and already an established poet and novelist. He was obviously the mentor, she the acolyte.

Mitchell. "The Wizard of Is":

He's a little like the sunlight

(Cohen: "and the sun pours down like honey... Compare also Mitchell's "Chelsea morning, Änd the sun pours down like butterscotch..")

As he walks into your kitchen
Kinda golden like the morning
As he asks you what you're fixin'
So you set the table pretty
With the flower that he brings you

("And she shows you where to look/ Among the garbage and the flowers...")

And you flutter like a robin
When it's found a friend to sing to
And you think you maybe love him

("And you think maybe you'll trust her;...")

For he speaks to you in riddles
About little men and kings
As he holds you like a wizard
And you watch the sunlight scatter from his ring. 

And the Wizard is your moon now
Your enchanted silver jester
And he fills the dark with moonbirds
While you smile to think that yesterday
You watched him from the shadows
Like a thief who'd come to steal him
With a ladder on a mountain
And you thought you'd never reach him
For he seems too high above you
And he speaks to you in riddles
Saying I am but a mirror

("While Suzanne holds the mirror ...")

For reflection of your fables
And the happy ending stories that you hear.

Several other Mitchell songs are supposed to refer to Cohen: "The Gallery" (Clouds, 1969), "That Song About the Midway," (Clouds) and "Case of You" (Blue, 1971). The depth of Cohen's influence shows in the fact that part of him is admittedly pouring out of her as late as 1971. Mitchell had many other romantic liaisons, but none seems to appear as often in her lyrics as Cohen.

"That Song about the Midway":

I met you on a midway at a fair last year.

(The fair was apparently the Newport folk festival, at which Cohen and Mitchell first met)

And you stood out like a ruby in a black man's ear.
You were playing on the horses, you were playing on the guitar strings
You were playing like a devil wearing wings, wearing wings
You looked so grand wearing wings
Do you tape them to your shoulders just to sing

(This appears to be a reference to the 1966 NFB short, "Ängel," in whih Cohen appears wearing wings.)

Can you fly
I heard you can! Can you fly
Like an eagle doin' your hunting from the sky

I followed with the sideshows to another town
And I found you in a trailer on the camping grounds
You were betting on some lover, you were shaking up the dice
And I thought I saw you cheating once or twice, once or twice
I heard your bid once or twice
Were you wondering was the gamble worth the price
Pack it in
I heard you did! Pack it in
Was it hard to fold a hand you knew could win?

("Ït's true that all the men you knew were dealers... /Ah, you hate to see another tired man lay down his hand/ Like he was giving up the holy game of poker..." "The Stranger Song," Songs of Leonard Cohen, 1967.)

So lately you've been hiding, it was somewhere in the news
And I'm still at these races with my ticket stubs and my blues.
And a voice calls out the numbers, and it sometimes mentions mine
And I feel like I've been working overtime, overtime

I've lost my fire overtime
Always playin' one more hand for one more dime
Slowin' down
I'm gettin' tired! Slowin' down
And I envy you the valley that you've found
'Cause I'm midway down the midway
Slowin' down, down, down, down.

As one might expect of the more mature artist, the mentor -- Cohen gave Mitchell, at her request, a reading list of great books to allow her, a high school dropout, to self-educate) there are fewer apparent references to Mitchell in Cohen's songs. It looks at though "The Stranger Song" may be adressed to her; or she may just have been rifffing on a pre-existent Cohan song as she did with "Suzanne." There is also "Winter Lady," from the same album. Mitchell had already written a different song to the same title, making Cohen's version seem like a response.

Mitchell's lyrics:

Winter Lady, where you going
With your hair all soft and loose like snowing
Winter girl, December child
Don't run away
Winter Lady, walking sadly,
Does your lover treat you badly
Do you dream or wish on stars
To hear him say:

I won't cheat you, I won't desert you
Winter Lady you need loving
I need loving too
I need loving you" 

Staring out your winter window
At a silver sky you know you've been to
In a kiss, upon a day
Before a spring 

Winter Lady, cry those crystal tears
He won't know what he's missing
Love's too late, you've changed your mind
And it's my turn to sing, 

Oh Winter Lady I won't hurt you
I won't cheat you, I won't desert you
Winter Lady you need loving
I need loving too
I need loving you.

Cohen's lyrics:

Traveling lady, stay awhile
Until the night is over
I'm just a station on your way
I know I'm not your lover. 

Well I lived with a child of snow
When I was a soldier
And I fought every man for her
Until the nights grew colder

She used to wear her hair like you
Except when she was sleeping
And then she'd weave it on a loom
Of smoke and gold and breathing

And why are you so quiet now
Standing there in the doorway?
You chose your journey long before
You came upon this highway.

Reading between the lines, we can see why the affair did not last. Marriage and monogamy does not work well for artists. They are married to their muse, and a muse is a jealous lover. Both must move on in time to preserve their independence. This may be harder for the female artist, but it seems to be true of both. At least, so Cohen claims,

Mitchell, though, seems a little bitter, and as if she blames Cohen for the breakup. "A Case of You":

Just before our love got lost you said
"I am as constant as a northern star"
And I said "Constantly in the darkness
Where's that at?
If you want me I'll be in the bar"

On the back of a cartoon coaster
In the blue TV screen light
I drew a map of Canada
Oh Canada
With your face sketched on it twice. 

Oh you're in my blood like holy wine
You taste so bitter and so sweet.
Oh I could drink a case of you darling;
Still I'd be on my feet
Oh I would still be on my feet

Oh I am a lonely painter.
I live in a box of paints.
I'm frightened by the devil
And I'm drawn to those ones that ain't afraid. 

I remember that time you told me you said
"Love is touching souls"
Surely you touched mine.
'Cause part of you pours out of me
In these lines from time to time. 

Oh, you're in my blood like holy wine
You taste so bitter and so sweet.
Oh I could drink a case of you darling
And I would still be on my feet
I would still be on my feet.

I met a woman,
She had a mouth like yours;
She knew your life,
She knew your devils and your deeds;
And she said
"Go to him, stay with him if you can,
But be prepared to bleed"

Oh but you are in my blood
You're my holy wine
You're so bitter, bitter and so sweet.

Oh, I could drink a case of you darling
Still I'd be on my feet
I would still be on my feet.

In 1971, I warrant, Mitchell was still in love with Cohen, Cohen had moved on.

"The Gallery" also seems to blame Cohen:

When I first saw your gallery
I liked the ones of ladies
Then you began to hang up me
You studied to portray me
In ice and greens
And old blue jeans
And naked in the roses
Then you got into funny scenes
That all your work discloses

"Lady, don't love me now I am dead
I am a saint, turn down your bed
I have no heart," that's what you said
You said, "I can be cruel
But let me be gentle with you"

Somewhere in a magazine
I found a page about you
I see that now it's Josephine
Who cannot be without you
I keep your house in fit repair
I dust the portraits daily
Your mail comes here from everywhere
The writing looks like ladies'

"Lady, please love me now, I am dead
I am a saint, turn down your bed
I have no heart," that's what you said
You said, "I can be cruel
But let me be gentle with you"

I gave you all my pretty years
Then we began to weather
And I was left to winter here
While you went west for pleasure
And now you're flying back this way
Like some lost homing pigeon
They've monitored your brain, you say
And changed you with religion

"Lady, please love me now I was dead
I am no saint, turn down your bed
Lady, have you no heart," that's what you said
Well, I can be cruel
But let me be gentle with you

When I first saw your gallery
I liked the ones of ladies
But now their faces follow me
And all their eyes look shady

In introducing the song, Mitchell says it is an inevitable problem with falling in love with an artist. Artists are wholly committed to beauty, and so they will move on when a new beauty appears.

But Mitchell is unfair if she blames only Cohen here. Mitchell is also an artist, and, more than Cohan, a visual artist, She is at least as vulnerable to new beauty as he, and her life and many brief love affairs show it.

In later interviews, Mitchell is not kind to her great influence, claiming he "had copped his writerly stand from Camus and Lorca."

This is rich coming from the author/"composer" of "The Wizard of Is. " Presumably Mitchell feels vulnerable because of her deep debt to Cohen, and wants to accuse him of the same thing to exonerate herself.

Lay Off Joni Mitchell

People are getting on Joni Mitchell’s case now. I wish they would stop. One of the great things about Canadians used to be that they did not devour their heroes. They just ignored them. Better that than the ugly dance of envy, pulling people down because they can do things you can’t.

No doubt Mitchell should stop giving interviews. But she is not responsible for the harshness of her comments. She is fighting a life and death struggle against the forces of darkness that the rest of us can only imagine.

For decades, she says, she has been suffering from Morgellones Disease. The evidence suggests that this is a mental illness rather than a physical condition. No matter; it involves constant pain, as if there were little bugs always moving under your skin. On top of this, she admits to bouts of extreme paranoia.

Who in the world would not be irritable?

This is the kind of price commonly paid for the kind of talent Joni has. Remember Robin Williams a few months ago? You don’t do that stuff without intimate contact with the spirit world. And there are things in the spirit world more terrible as well as more wonderful than anything out of doors.

Chelsea Hotel

Okay, so two Canadians walk into the Chelsea Hotel in New York City. They're both great songwriters, and in particular great lyricists. In fact, they both seriously vie for the title of best lyricist ever. Remarkably, they are both staying in the Chelsea Hotel at the same time, are lovers, and they both, at about the same time, write a song expressing their experience of the place.

So who's the greatest? Leonard Cohen?

Or Joni Mitchell?

You decide...

Personally, although Joni Mitchell's lyrics are wonderful, I have to go with Leonard Cohen. While brilliantly evocative, her words are mostly ornamental. Nice picture. Cohen's strike through, as they always seem to do, to touch the central mystery of life.

As a bonus, here's the never-officially-recorded original version of Cohen's song: Chelsea Hotel #1:

Popular Music and Politics

Memorial to John Lennon, Central Park, New York.

I think everyone assumes that the world of popular music, like Hollywood, is a leftist redoubt. One thinks, once again, of Joni Mitchell, of Neil Young's “anti-war” album, of Bob Dylan and the tradition of “protest songs,” of John Lennon's “Imagine,” and on and on. More generally, there is a hostility on the right towards the arts.

I think this is a big mistake.

To begin with, the arts by their nature are not political. Artists in general, including popular musicians and songwriters, are politically naive, perhaps more naive than the average person. But political organizations, by their nature, are eager to co-opt when they can. It seems to me that it is the left that has co-opted art, and it is a mistake for the right to allow them this ground. Because, while artists are mostly apolitical by nature—free spirits cannot function within a political organization—what they create can be immensely influential politically.

Dylan is the classic case in point. The truth is, nobody can really pin down Dylan's religion or politics. And this seems to be very deliberate on his part. Back in his “protest” days, he was given an award by a leftist organization, the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. He took the occasion of the award presentation to announce publicly that he was not interested in politics.

Protesting the World Bank. CDs available.

“You people should be at the beach....There's no black and white, left and right to me anymore. There's only up and down, and down is very close to the ground, and I'm trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial such as politics.”

Dylan was wise enough to realize that politics is a trap for artists. On the one hand, political groups are desperate to claim a fairly prominent artist on their own; they are soon knocking at any successful artist's door persistent as Mormon missionaries. At the same time, becoming connected with a movement gives an artist a ready-made distribution channel, enabling his art. WB Yeats says he got the advice, early in his political career, that to make it in Ireland as an artist, you had to have either the Catholic Church or the Independence movement behind you. As a Protestant, he could not hope for the Catholic Church. So he chose to join the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Hence Yeats's politics; which everyone else since has taken so seriously.

The danger of this approach, though, is that then the artist has a harness on, which rarely rests easily on an artist's shoulders. When he must always look over his shoulder at the possible political repercussions of what he sings, paints, or writes, this can lead to second-rate, insincere art. And politics is fickle: become publicly identified with a cause, and once the cause goes away, often, so do you. Yet, once you have become identified with a movement or a cause, it is very difficult and dangerous to get away. Not only will you have lost your audience; they will turn on you and hate you as a traitor. Dylan has risked this several times. Few members of Sinn Fein have a good word to say about Yeats today.

John Train in his early years.

Phil Ochs is a perfect counter-example of the danger Dylan sidestepped here. He got bought and sold as an anti-war advocate. The war ended. He was passe. He seems to have realized he had been tricked and trapped; in his last days, he re-imagined himself as a new person, “John Train,” who was systematically opposed to Phil Och's politics. Then he hanged himself.

Currently, there is also obviously tremendous pressure within the arts community to at least pretend you are leftist in order to get along. You have to be pretty big before you dare challenge your peers on such a matter—pretty big, and pretty politically aware. Andy Warhol once commented that he was for lower taxes, and really should be a Republican. “But artists aren't allowed to be Republicans, are they?”

Somebody should set up a refugee program for artists, welcoming them, getting the word out, trying to help them with a new audience when they flee the left-wing cult of the arts. It would have to be done delicately, though; the way Catholics do missionary work. No point in fleeing a leftist cult only to get caught up in a rightist one.

In the meantime, those on the right can at least be understanding, and not jerk their knees at a Joni Mitchell, a Neil Young, or a Keith Richards. They are leftists in the same sense that fish ride bicycles.

Joni from Saskatoon

A lot of folks, especially on the right, are upset at Joni Mitchell for recently comparing Saskatoon to the US Deep South (i.e., in the early Sixties). For my part, I give artists special license. They live in the imagination, and are not sensitive to the jostling politics of everyday life. They are politically naive. This is, ultimately, to their credit: they are “in the world, but not of it,” just as a Christian is supposed to be. They are prepared to sacrifice everything to truth and beauty, and that is what we all should do.

There is no mistaking a general tendency to egotism among artists—at least, among highly successful artists. Such perhaps are the hazards of becoming rich and famous, and perhaps they are not entirely to blame for succumbing to temptations the rest of us have never had to face. The true and the beautiful—two out of three ain't so bad.

Besides, Joni Mitchell is one of the co-creators of Canada as a culture. She is part of a striking artistic movement that began in the early Sixties and transformed all art, world wide: the chanteur-chanteuse tradition that emerged from the “folk renaissance,” independent from but concurrent with rock and roll. Before these performers, songs and popular music were pure entertainment, a commodity, a craft. They transformed them into true art, but art of a uniquely popular nature—an art of the people, not of the elites. They changed what music was, and what singing meant.

I can identify ten major Canadian figures in this movement. Almost all are within a few years of the same age, all emerged at the same time, and all were, necessarily strikingly versatile. They had to be. The nature of the art required them to be proficient singers, composers, and poets, in addition to usually playing at least one musical instrument extremely well. Not surprisingly, most of them were also visual artists.

The ten, moving across the country from west to east, are: BC and Alberta's Ian Tyson; Saskatchewan's Joni Mitchell and Buffy Sainte-Marie; Manitoba's Neil Young; Ontario's Gordon Lightfoot and Robbie Robertson; Quebec's Leonard Cohen, Gilles Vigneault, and Robert Charlebois; and the East Coast's Stan Rogers.

Together, I think they surpass any other nation's artistic output in this particular genre, although one has to credit Bob Dylan with blazing the path that made it possible for the rest of them. Together, they even represent a great flowering of Canadian culture, comparable to the English Romantics. They are all getting to an age at which they will soon be gone—but for Rogers, who is gone already—and we will not soon see their like again.

For my money, and I suspect most people's, Leonard Cohen stands above the rest; but each one of them has touched the sublime many more times than once. And many of their songs have become part of Canada's sense of itself.

You run down Joni Mitchell, and, in the end, you are running down my country.

Besides, she has always looked and sounded eerily like my grandmother.