Many books come out each year deconstructing rock music: The musicians, their albums, their songs, their showering habits, and their other habits. It’s here where we’ll take an excerpt of a book for you to check out before you make the purchase. As of now these will exclusively feature the venerable 33 1/3 series, which picks apart an album by a band or musician. In the future, we hope to include more rock books of all varieties.

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A Broader Sensibility

I suppose people have always been lonely, but this, I think, is an especially lonely time to live in. So many people are valueless or confused. . . . Things change so rapidly. Rela­tionships don’t seem to have any longevity. There isn’t a lot of commitment to anything; it’s a disposable society.

—Joni Mitchell, 1974

Of course, at this point, it feels as though I’m circling the airport of Court and Spark, trying desperately to clear the air of my deep admiration for the albums that preceded it before going in for a landing. Fair enough. Still, a fundamental question per­sists: How can you pick one album? How can you say, even tacitly, that Court and Spark is better than Blue, For the Roses, or Hissing of Summer Lawns? Or even Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, Dog Eat Dog, or any of the other Mitchell records C&S is empirically way better than. What does “better” even mean? And so forth.

But again, the premise isn’t that Court and Spark is the best Joni Mitchell album. As we all know, the best Joni Mitchell album is the one that’s playing right now. You don’t hear “All I Want” and long for “Down to You”, or vice versa. No, the prem­ise is that if you regard the period between 1971 and 1975, from Blue to Summer Lawns as a single narrative—a musical Freitag’s Triangle of sorts—then C&S is the unquestionable cli­max. It’s the point at which Mitchell stepped outside herself just enough to communicate the breadth of the lonely time she felt herself living in, and by doing so, revealed more of herself than she ever had before. Blue is sharply first person (and presum­ably autobiographical) throughout. For the Roses, meanwhile, steps back somewhat to engage in overreaching social meta­phors (“Banquet”, “Barangrill”, “Electricity”), but also features a second-person voice that often sounds like a direct address to specific people (“Why do you have to be so jive?”; “You imitate the best and the rest you memorize”; “Where are you now? Are you in some hotel room? Does it have a view?” etc) and which therefore functions as first person in drag. Court and Spark is energized by a wider, more adventurous perspective than either of its predecessors: Third person narratives delivered by first person narrators, which is to say character studies, which is to say songs that manage to be personal—often devastat­ingly so—without needing to be autobiographical. After inspiring such intense one-to-one identification in her listeners, Mitchell was now taking expeditions outside herself, trying to identify with the people she met there, to better illuminate the dark corners of their inner lives as she had her own. The women of Court and Spark—the ones who find themselves at people’s parties “fumbling, deaf, dumb, and blind,” the ones who stay up for hours waiting for their “sugar to show,” the ones who know there’s going to be trouble because they’re falling in love again—are everywomen, at least in the context of a certain corner of California and a certain corner of the ’70s. By those same standards, the men are universal, too. The “Free Man in Paris”, though famously modeled on David Geffen, doesn’t leap off the grooves because Geffen is such a fascinating person, or because of the lurid secrets he was still keeping when the song was written; the song conveys, with forceful grace, the pathos of a prosperous man feeling trapped inside his own life. The simultaneously poetic and novelistic lyrics to this song come out of nowhere for Mitchell—the Free Man owes as much to Sinclair Lewis as to Dylan or Cohen or any of her other folk-rock contemporaries—and are the best representation of the quantum leap her perspective took on the album. Blue is about the self. For the Roses is about the self as reflected in others. C&S is about the city, and all the selves that collide—and fail to collide—within it.

“Court and Spark”

“Love came to my door,” the album opens, “with a sleeping roll and a madman’s soul.” A few years prior, this kind of hippie calling card would have gained anyone happy entrance to a Joni Mitchell song. Back when she was a lady of the canyon, she might have cooked him a meal and sang him a song, then waxed wistful as he rambled onward. But this “Love” is an alto­gether more complex beast than the ones who had populated Mitchell’s universe in the past. The “madman’s soul” factor that had once seemed so compelling and agonizing in the lovers she sang about, now begins to seem burdensome, exhausting, not worth the effort. This would-be lover’s rap about guilty peo­ple and “clearing” himself and the whole litany of ascetic sacri­fices he’s made—having “buried the coins he made in People’s Park”—and presumably expects her to make, can’t beat out the comfort of her own life. Though she may be tempted (“the more he talked to me, you know, the more he reached me”), the narrator of “Court and Spark” can’t let go of whatever she’d have to let go of in order to be worthy of this Love. In the song, it’s called “LA, city of the fallen angels.” And what LA means is the subject of nearly every song on the record. This open­ing song establishes much of the tone that follows: Ambivalent, unconvinced, torn, circumspect, wary of love’s price even while in its thrall, “mistrusting and still acting kind.” These aren’t entirely new ideas, even in Mitchell songs. What’s new is the worldliness of the voice that communicates them; there’s no prostration or angst in her rejection of this suitor, just a choice. She admits a pang of sadness, perhaps, that she “couldn’t let go of LA,” but that’s more about herself than it is about him. The operative contrast here isn’t between two star-crossed lovers, it’s between People’s Park—the student/hippie enclave in Berkeley that represented the best of the ’60s counterculture energy and some of the harshest retribution against it—and the city of fallen angels, the seat of decadent decay. This isn’t “My Old Man” (though, notice that he, too, was a singer in the park) or the absentee “nonconformer” of “Little Green.” Or if it is, the woman singing about him has really changed her tune. No more wistful sighs about his charming unavailability; this “Love” sounds like some kind of raving zealot: With all his talk about glory trains, clearing one’s self, and sacrificing one’s blues. And at the risk of over-literalizing the whole scenario, can you blame her for choosing LA? I always picture the song starting at 3am: Intense guy carrying a sleeping bag and nothing else pounding on the wooden door of a house in the Hollywood Hills, making loud pronouncements about “all the guilty people” and offering his host the privilege of completing him, while pledging to return the favor. There’s something vaguely sinister about the whole scenario (a song about a raving hippie with a madman’s soul sh
owing up at your door in LA wasn’t exactly a lullaby in the post Helter Skelter early ’70s). The choice she’s really making isn’t about a guy, however, or even a lifestyle. She’s choosing between a life of realism—however painful that reality might be to accept—and a romantic ideal she simply doesn’t subscribe to anymore. The angels in question are fallen not from heaven but from the naïve grace of being willing to sacrifice their blues to go “dancing up a river in the dark.” The great tragedy in “Court and Spark” lies in having outgrown the romance of youth without having lost the thirst for romance.