Joni Mitchell: why is she so bitter?

Aha, the reverse Mitchell gambit.

Another musician with bitterness toward the industry (although in his case, he has talent) is Van Morrison.

It is possible to respect the artist’s talents and works and still hate the artist. A lot of very creative people are total assholes. The more talent, the bigger asshole you can be.

Since most of the people who rag on Dylan are women he has had relationships with, I’d image that’s the main source of his being an asshole, I know he and his ex-wife Sara had one helluva divorce.

I’d suggest reading Baez’s “And a Voice to Sing With” and Collins’s “Trust Your Heart” for further information.

I’m a casual Joni Mitchell fan at best, but she has come in for an awful lot of slagging in this thread, and I think she deserves at least a little defending.

Those who have said she is a superior musician to Bob Dylan are quite correct, assuming a strict definition of the term. Mitchell came up with a raft of unusual guitar tunings (over 50 different ones, by one account – an extremely small number of her many original compositions are played in standard tuning on a guitar). This is not insignificant, because a non-standard tuning makes a musical texture possible that cannot be achieved in any other way. Knowledgeable music fans give her full credit for her innovative approach to guitar (as well as ukelele and other stringed instruments).

As for songwriting, her approach may not be to everyone’s taste (particularly as her career progressed), but she also deserves credit for the lyrical and musical depth of her compositions. Really, was there any other female artist that came before her who attained this depth? Grace Slick, perhaps, but as she shared time with three other songwriters in Jefferson Airplane, her output was considerably less.
As for Joni getting her back up at inattentive audiences, she maybe carries things a bit too far, but as a performer myself I sympathize with her. If you’ve paid your money to attend a concert, you should be there to listen, not yack. If you want to yack, go out into the lobby. To do otherwise is rude not only to the performer, but to other audience members who DO want to listen.

It’s the height of boorishness, and I can understand Mitchell’s frustration with it. The audience need not hang on her every note, but they could at least be respectful toward someone who is doing something they could never do.
I don’t disagree that Mitchell perhaps thinks a bit too highly of herself and is bitter, but it’s not as if there’s no foundation whatsoever for this.

I saw Joan Baez in the 70’s right after Woodstock, when she had some name recognition and was doing concerts. This one was in a small theater in the brand new Civic Center building, in the evening, tickets were expensive at the time. She gave a good show but said something along the lines of she was a bit intimidated because (we, the paying customers) “were all so proper”. I remember thinking, sorry, maybe someone naked and all covered with mud should get up on stage and take a dump there to make you feel less intimidated.

That’s all I got.

Hadn’t heard about the flight, and had forgotten the part about the wall in the green room. Thanks for the memories. :slight_smile:

I’ve never been much of a Joni Mitchell fan, but I’ve seen OTHER interviews in which she praised Dylan profusely and cited him as a major influence on her work. I’ve heard her speak of “Positively Fourth Street” as an eye-opener for her (“Wow, you can really write songs about how angry you are at friends? How liberating!”).

So, her opinion of Bob is NOT 100% negative. On the other hand, she DOES know him personally, and may have her own reasons for disliking him now. Or the interviewer may just have caught her on a bad day; maybe a week later, she’d have had nicer things to say about him.

In any case, who really cares if Dylan was “authentic”? The Rolling Stones weren’t really Mississippi sharecroppers, were they? Joe Strummer wasn’t really a working class punk, was he? The Beatles weren’t really cute, innocent boys next door, were they? There’s FREQUENTLY an element of phoniness in any musical act’s image. If Dylan isn’t really the person many of his fans think he is, well, does that make his music any better or worse?