By Richard Skinner.
‘Around Hejira and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, to a degree, I think I went to another level as a writer’ — Joni Mitchell
After the intense set of nine confessional poems that Joni Mitchell wrote for her masterpiece, Hejira, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter was her way out. Whereas all the songs on Hejira were cut from the same cloth, each song on Don Juan is purposefully, adamantly different and, pulled together, they make a multi-coloured, kaleidoscopic dress. She shed the skin of her desert visions and opted to explore the avenues of polyrhythmic and classical music as well as the more familiar singer-songwriter territory of “Jericho” and “The Silky Veils of Ardor”. Each piece is an adventure, provocation, meditation, lesson. There is something for everyone on Don Juan.
Bassist Jaco Pastorius and drummer John Guerin were used sparingly on Hejira but, on Don Juan, they play together across the entire album as the rhythm section. She also enlisted a number of Jaco’s bandmates from jazz-fusion group Weather Report on several tracks, as well as Chaka Khan on backing vocals and Larry Carlton.
The “Overture” that opens the album is a couple of minutes of six acoustic guitars, overlapping each other with multiple vocals overdubbed. It’s a wispy, gauzy way to open an album, and a brave one. The album proper starts with “Cotton Avenue”, the name of the Afro-American district of Macon, Georgia. This jumpy, joyful, jazz-fusion track has Joni scat-singing, celebrating youthfulness and joie de vivre and the whole thing is a kind of sister song to “Free Man in Paris”. The scene is set – this album is going to be a very different beast to Hejira.
The next song, “Talk to Me”, was one of the slightly older songs used on the album. The man whom the narrator addresses as ‘Mr. Mystery’ is allegedly Bob Dylan who, much to Joni Mitchell‘s frustration, hardly spoke to her on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour. Joni’s quick strumming provides the track’s rhythm and the interplay between her guitar and Jaco’s bass is immaculately free and easy.
There follows “Jericho”, one of my all-time favourite Joni songs. It’s another older song, a version of which appeared on the Miles of Aisles live album of 1974. Written once again in the confessional mode as a ‘penitence of spirit’ (Joni’s term), it’s an open-hearted plea for communion – ‘Let these walls come tumbling down’ – a song that wouldn’t seem out of place on Hejira, or even Blue. It’s a mystery as to why it didn’t appear on either of those albums. Jaco Pastorius’ bass is a thing of wonder on this track. Never did he sound better. Maybe that’s what Joni felt was the missing link before recording a studio version. The song is also notable as it is the first time Wayne Shorter (from Weather Report) and his sublime soprano saxophone made an appearance on a Joni Mitchell record.
After composing all the songs for Hejira on guitar while travelling throughout the US, Joni had missed playing the piano, which she now returned to with gusto for Don Juan. In the studio, she recorded some improvised piano performances based around a theme, which were then edited to form a seven-minute instrumental piece that became known as ‘The Medallion’. She then recorded herself at the piano singing six verses of lyrics she had come up with that looked back at her childhood on the prairies and her early encounters there with the First Nations peoples of Canada.
Mitchell had the idea of inserting ‘The Medallion’ between the second-to-last and last verses to create a single 16-minute magnum opus, which she called “Paprika Plains”. To embody its epic panorama, she then decided to orchestrate the whole song. Arranger Michael Gibbs was brought in to do the orchestration and what an incredible job he did. He turned ‘The Medallion’ section into a lush orchestral odyssey, full of dramatic sweeps, sudden drops and sustains. During the last few minutes, Jaco, John Guerin and Wayne Shorter join Joni’s piano and the orchestra to play out the piece.
The orchestral nostalgia of “Paprika Plains” recalls the early pioneering work of American classical composer Charles Ives. His symphony entitled Holidays was assembled from four existing compositions – “Washington’s Birthday” (1909), “Decoration Day” (1912), “The Fourth of July” (1911-1913), and “Thanksgiving” (1904). This symphony is really a suite, as there is little sense of an overriding formal structure. It contains many of Ives’s customary compositional devices – the incorporation of hymn tunes and patriotic melodies into a complicated work. “Paprika Plains” bears a remarkable similarity to Ives’ compositional style.
When Don Juan came out, the lyrics were printed on the album sleeve. Included in the lyrics for “Paprika Plains” was a 72-line passage of stream-of-consciousness imagery which was meant to be read while listening to ‘The Medallion’ section of “Paprika Plains”. Drawn from a dream Mitchell had, this lyrical tableau further explored Mitchell’s childhood but, this time, these memories of indigenous Canadian prairie folk were presented as a post-apocalyptic vision.
In interview, Mitchell has stated that “Paprika Plains” was the hardest piece of music she ever worked on. None of Joni’s contemporaries could have produced such a unique and distinctive tone poem as she did with “Paprika Plains”. Not one. The way she held on to her vision and trusted her artistic process is a measure of the heights of her creativity in this period of her life.
And then for something completely different – “Otis and Marlena”, a portrait of an elderly couple vacationing in Miami, observing other holidaymakers from their 10th floor hotel balcony. The song paints such incredible colours of the Floridian city and skies (once again evoked by Larry Carlton’s fine guitar harmonics). It’s also a close look at the ageing process and the bodily textures old age produces, almost like looking at a painting by Lucian Freud or Jenny Saville. The line in the chorus – ‘While Muslims stick up Washington’ – refers to an incident that occurred nine months prior to the release of Don Juan, when a band of militant Muslims briefly took over the B’Nai Brith International Center in Washington DC, taking hostages and demanding the release of some of the members of their group who were in prison at the time.
“Otis and Marlena” is one of Joni’s sharpest social satires and would have sat very easily in the gallery of great character studies on The Hissing of Summer Lawns. It’s one of the jewels in Joni’s crown and, in my view, is probably the finest single set of lyrics she’s ever written. This is just the first verse:
Marlena under Foster Grants
She’s undercover from the dawn’s advance
That girl is travel drained
And the neon mercury vapor stained
Miami sky
It’s red as meat
It’s a cheap pink rose
Otis in the driver’s seat
Watches the street lights fade away
On louvered blocks in green sea air
In fluorescent fossil yards
Slippers are shuffling into folding chairs
Freckled hands are shuffling cards
A cross-fade leads us from the story of Otis and Marlena into the dream of “The Tenth World”, an extended South American percussion and vocal chant piece recorded by Joni and most of Weather Report. One of Mitchell’s inspirations, reportedly, was a visit to the Carnival in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, when the streets run riot with the various escola de samba, or ‘samba schools’. The joy in the song is infectious. How generous of Joni to allow space on her record for these guys. How often had any of her contemporaries done the same?
We then move further into the dreamworld on “Dreamland”. The same set of players provide a percussive backdrop over which Joni sings very free-form lyrics exploring themes of tourism, colonialism, racial inequality and the disillusionment with idealized escapes. It’s a kind of development of “The Jungle Line” on The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Chaka Khan is the accompanying vocal guide.
It’s commonly thought that “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter” is one of the four or five finest songs in Joni Mitchell’s catalogue. The song was actually completed in February 1976 and was originally a kind of companion piece to “Coyote”. They have a very similar style and feel. The two songs were performed as a medley on Joni’s US tour in January and February of that year but the medley was later dropped and the songs were separated.
Whereas “Coyote” is relatively playful, “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter” is a more soul-searching song. Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter is, of course, Joni herself. By employing an alter ego as narrator, she is then free to explore the dual nature of her identity. The ‘You’ addressed in the song may be another portrait of the playwright Sam Shepard, and the song may ultimately be about their (mis)union, or it could be one side of Joni’s split personality. But, if so, what role in her life does this spirit guide play? Doppelgänger, decoy or body double? Like all good art, the song asks the questions but doesn’t provide answers.
“Off Night Backstreet” is a sultry love-protest song with slick backing vocals courtesy of her old (ex-boy)friend, James Taylor, and members of the Eagles. The song has a suitably soft rock feel to it. Jaco’s bass is another revelation. Yet another colour in Don Juan’s palette.
To close, Joni returns to her folk roots and gives us the sublime “Silky Veils of Ardor”. Full of the romantic imagery of her early songs, Joni sings as a woman who has lost her heart at great cost. In the final verse, with the mention of ‘Noah’s pretty little white dove’, we end with an image from the Bible, just as we had started with another – the tumbling walls of Jericho. Entrance and exit. Perfect.
Much misunderstood at the time, the album received mixed reviews when it was released in 1977 at the height of punk. It lost Mitchell her commercial viability. “The Tenth World”, “Jericho” and “Off Night Backstreet” were all released as singles in the UK but did nothing. As the years have gone by, though, the album has grown in stature and reputation. What before seemed artistically muddled now appears as a clear act of supreme self expression. In its ‘carnivalesque’ aspect, Don Juan resembles The White Album by the Beatles or Sign O’ the Times by Prince (a huge Joni fan), and because of the huge variety on it, it’s the only Joni album for me that can still surprise.
Since Hejira’s release, some artists have undoubtedly reached a similar emotional intensity in their work, but very few have explored such a wide range of structures and subject matters as Joni Mitchell did on Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. It’s a truly audacious suite of songs. If Hejira is a cartography of Mitchell’s wandering heart, then Don Juan is the psychogeography of her native soul.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Skinner is a novelist, poet and essayist. He has written a novel about Erik Satie, entitled The Velvet Gentleman (Faber & Faber), which was shortlisted for a prize in France. In his three essay collections, Richard has written about The Beach Boys, Luc Ferrari, R.E.M., David Sylvian, & Iannis Xenakis, among many others. He is a regular contributor to Electronic Sound magazine’s ‘Buried Treasure’ column including pieces about Holger Czukay, Robert Palmer & Vangelis, among others. And for 3:AM magazine, he has written longer pieces about Talking Heads & Mercury Rev.
