FEATURE:
Beneath the Sleeve
Joni Mitchell - Hejira
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IN a new feature…
IN THIS PHOTO: Joni Mitchell in 1976/PHOTO CREDIT: Joel Bernstein
I am going deep inside a classic album. In the coming months, I am going to cover a wide range of iconic albums from throughout the decades. Even if Hejira is not the most celebrated and talked-about Joni Mitchell albums, I think it is one of the best. Following the sublime The Hissing of Summer Lawns in 1975, Hejira was a bit of a departure. Hejira is the wonderful eighth studio from Mitchell. Released through Asylum Records, its songs were a result of Mitchell writing during a period of frequent travel in late-1975 and early-1976. I am going to start out with an article from Joni Mitchell’s official website. There is a great archive interview where Dave Blackburn spoke with A&M staff engineer Steve Katz about the making of Hejira, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter and Mingus – a run of three wonderful albums that was a move away from the more Folk-based sound of her previous work:
“DB: "I read that the recording for Hejira was mostly complete when Joni was told about this bass player from Florida that she might really like. Joni apparently flew him out to L.A and he ended up putting down his parts on four songs. Is that how you remember that?"
SK: "Yeah, and I don't know if he replaced any of the other tracks but she pretty much gave him free rein because she had already listened to the Weather Report stuff, I guess. I remember, he came in, and we met him. He was so different, with the fretless bass and an Acoustic 360 amp. We mainly ran him direct but we still miked his amp and combined those sounds together. He was pretty adamant about using some of the amp sounds - he liked that."
DB: "And he liked to double and triple track himself, right?"
SK: "Sometimes we'd speed the tape up - go double speed." [Probably that low C "bomb" where he enters during Overture on Don Juan was achieved by playing his lowest normal C with the tape running at double speed. When returned to normal speed his note would be an octave lower, and below the range of a four string bass guitar.]
SK: "If we were going to double a riff, he knew exactly what he had played; he would play it perfectly. He was amazing, the guy was just brilliant! Karen Carpenter was like that - she could double and triple her voice, singing an inch off the mic. She was the most amazing singer I'd ever worked with."
DB: "So working with Jaco was a pleasurable experience, then?"
SK: "Ha, oh yeah. He was new, he was different, he was completely out of the box. Other bass players were like vanilla compared to him. He was a rainbow - any color you want, he could do it. I'd never seen anybody like him, and he was just a kid!"
DB: "Well she was always looking for players who could paint with sound. That's why she liked Wayne Shorter too..."
SK: "It wasn't always what Wayne played; it was what he didn't play. That's how you have to listen to Wayne Shorter. He would play, but it was always the holes that he would leave. These guys were just phenomenal. She was starting to create with all these new sounds that she had now in her toolbox."
DB: "We haven't mentioned Larry Carlton yet, but he was another guy who could paint with sound and really interact with a track"
SK: "She used him, [and later Steve Lukather, on Wild Things Run Fast] Those guys were very creative when they played. The way her melodies were, Larry could paint a really nice picture with his guitar."
On Blue Motel Room
[There is a very good chance, though Steve doesn't remember for sure, that Joni's guitar on Blue Motel Room was recorded at her home and then transferred to the multi-track at A&M for the rhythm section and vocal overdubs. It has a 'home recording' room sound, and prominent tape hiss that would not have been there if it had been recorded there.]
DB: "Were you a fan of Joni's outside of being in the studio? Did you listen to her records?"
SK: "It's funny. I graduated high school in 1970, and then in '71 or '72 I went to Valley College, in the San Fernando valley, and I was taking a lot of general classes; I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. And in the library they had turntables. I remember, for the longest time, if I had an hour or two between classes, I used to bring in Joni's first three albums, 'cause I loved those three records. I'd put them on and people would come in and say 'do you mind if we listen to that with you?' She was widely popular."
DB: "So when you did get to work with her, that was pretty exciting then?"
SK: "Yeah, I loved these records growing up, and here I am all of a sudden working with her!"
DB: "Well, so what was she like to work with?"
SK: "Oh, she was amazing. Henry and I would never really know what we were going to do when she'd come in. We were ready, we always had a vocal mic up, but we just had to wait and see. She would go home at night and work out parts and then she'd show up and say 'I want to work on this.' One time she showed up with Glenn Frey and J.D. Souther to do backgrounds [for Off Night Backstreet]. Jaco would come in to the studio, and he'd be waiting with us, and she'd show up an hour or two hours late, and then we'd start, but nobody really knew what we were going to be doing."
DB: "So once Jaco was involved, he stuck around for the remainder of the project?
SK: "Yeah, he pretty much showed up almost every night." [especially for the DJRD and Mingus albums.]
On Hejira guitars and effects
SK: "She had a few guitars on Hejira, none of them solid body." [they were most likely Gibson hollowbody arch tops with flatwound strings - the Ibanez GB10s she later toured with in 1979 and 1983 were not available until 1978. The exact guitars she used will probably never be known as neither Steve nor Joni remembers what she played, and Henry is no longer with us to ask.]
SK: "She would go to Guitar Center and try out stuff" [she was also a regular customer at Westwood Music, owned by luthier Fred Walecki, who was her guitar tech/advisor.] "She'd come in and lay down things she'd been rehearsing at home; she never really did her rehearsing in the studio.
DB: "And the pedal effects she was using on the record?"
SK: "Yeah, all that was done either at Guitar Center or at home. A lot of time these guys would show up with stuff that hadn't even been released yet. They had deals with these companies who would give them stuff to try out."
[The Boss CE-1 chorus/vibrato pedal was released in 1976 and was the first chorus effect in a pedal format to be available; it is very likely a part of the guitar sound on Hejira, along with a phaser pedal giving a "liquid" swirling effect - likely the MXR Phase 90 which had been released in 1974 and was the first product sold by MXR. Then one or two more layers of guitars, including an acoustic, would be added and then be panned left, center and right, giving the album its lush panoramic texture full of modulated movement.]”.
Before getting to a review and some modern acclaim for Hejira, I want to keep inside its making of. Some insight form those involved. Back in 2006, Doug Fisher spoke with Joni Mitchell about Hejira. Many people do not know about the album or assume it is inaccessible or too out-there. Even though it is very different to 1971’s Blue or 1970’s Ladies of the Canyon, it is a remarkable album that everyone needs to listen to:
“Whenever Joni Mitchell had trouble sorting out her life, she took to the road. But in early 1976, with a turbulent love affair on the rocks and too many drugs in her body, she hit the highway almost with a vengeance.
"I was getting away from a romance, I was getting away from the craziness and I was searching for something to make sense of everything," she says. "The road became a metaphor for my life."
And it inspired the album many of her fans and music critics consider her masterpiece.
Released 30 years ago this week, the nine songs on Hejira form the remarkable personal journal of a nomadic, romantic dreamer whose aural notebook is filled with the stories of doomed love, late night roadhouse dance floors, wedding gown fantasies, lost chances and a deep yearning to escape and start over.
Mitchell is not convinced Hejira is the best of the 22 albums that made her among the most influential singer-songwriters, male or female, of the past 40 years. She won't attach that label to any of her albums.
'Hejira could only have come from me'
But she concedes Hejira is probably her one album that could not have been made by anyone else.
"I suppose a lot of people could have written a lot of my other songs, but I feel the songs on Hejira could only have come from me," she said an interview with the Citizen.
The stories they tell are so vivid, their observations so naked and the landscapes so haunting that Kris Kristofferson famously urged her in a letter to be "more self-protective ... to save something of yourself from public view."
But Mitchell says self-confession, no matter how risky and revealing, was essential to her writing during that era.
"My songs have always been more autobiographical than most people's," she says. "It pushes you toward honesty. I was just returning to normal from the extremities of a very abnormal mindset when I wrote most of the songs (on Hejira).
"When life gets interesting I get very alert, and life was very interesting. I think that took the writing to another level."
Mitchell talked about the album by phone from her home in Los Angeles, where she revealed she's recording her first collection of new songs in nearly a decade. More wary of public scrutiny these days, the Canadian singer agreed to a Citizen request to discuss Hejira because, she said, the album recalls an "interesting transitional" time in her life and her career.
Musically, Hejira certainly marked a departure from the two jazz-tinged but radio-friendly albums that preceded it. Gone were the hummable melodies, conventional formats and jaunty horn sections she used as Top 40 flirtations on 1974's Court and Spark and '75's The Hissing of Summer Lawns.
In their place, Mitchell offered seductively sparse rhythms, lush swirling guitars and the brilliant spark of Jaco Pastorius's fretless bass to create an unceasing musical motion that is as mesmerizing as the highways she travels in her songs.
The album is also a departure lyrically. Using the music's structural looseness to her advantage, Mitchell gives her words a simple directness and poetic polish seldom seen in her music before and rarely found again.
"To me, the whole Hejira album is really inspired," Mitchell says. "There is a rootlessness to it, for sure, but also discovery along the road."
Despite good reviews, Hejira did not sell as briskly as the more accessible albums Mitchell released during the first half of the 1970s. Although exact numbers are hard to get, there are indications sales of Hejira are stronger today than ever.
Voting on jonimitchell.com, an excellent fan-driven website, ranks Hejira as Mitchell's most popular album. A critics' poll done in the late 1990s placed the album in a first-place tie with the Blue, a moody collection of love songs she recorded in 1971.
Mitchell says Hejira's songs were written during or after three journeys she took in late 1975 and the first half of 1976.
The first was a concert tour cancelled amid turmoil after six weeks in February 1976 when Mitchell and her drummer boyfriend John Guerin ended their on-again, off-again relationship, this time seemingly for good.
Soon after, Mitchell signed on with Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Review, a ragged, drug-soaked circus that also variously included Joan Baez, Mick Ronson, Roger McGuinn, Ronee Blakely, Allan Ginsburg and members of the Band. She soon became a frequent cocaine user.
"I realized you couldn't stay on that thing straight -- you'd be the only one," she explains. "It was just insane." Looking back, she says, the drugs had both "great and disastrous" effects: "I had terrible insomnia but I wrote a lot of epic poems," including Song for Sharon, for many the masterpiece around which Hejira orbits.
In danger of losing her equilibrium, Mitchell fled for home in Los Angeles. She was only back a few days when two friends, one of them a former lover from Australia, showed up at her door proposing they drive across the country to New England.
Mitchell eventually dropped them in Maine before heading alone down the coast to Florida, around the Gulf of Mexico and across the southwest back to California.
"I was driving without a driver's licence," she remembers. "I had to stay behind truckers because they signal you when cops are ahead. I had to drive in daylight hours only to stay out of harm's way."
In the South, where hard rock and country music dominated the airwaves, Mitchell was a virtual unknown. "It was a relief. I was able, like The Prince and the Pauper, to escape my fame under a false name and fall in with people and enjoy ordinary civilian status."
The cross-country sojourn resulted in six of the songs on Hejira, which Mitchell says was originally called Travelling -- "that wouldn't have been very memorable," she jokes.
While looking through a dictionary, Mitchell came across the word "hejira," an Islamic term for exodus or breaking with the past. It became a song title -- and against the will of her record company, which wanted something less cryptic -- the name of the album.
"I'd been struggling with a title for the song," she says. "The idea of departure with honour captured the feeling I was after very well”.
I will get to a great Pitchfork review soon. When Rolling Stone were ranking the best 500 albums of all time last year, they placed Hejira in 133. It is one of those albums that is undeniably a classic and work of brilliance but is often compared to other work less favourably. When we talk of Joni Mitchell, we discuss Blue but Hejira does not get the same sort of affection. I was keen to explore it more and spotlight one of her finest albums:
“No regrets Coyote/We just come from such different sets of circumstance,” what a perfect way to start an album. ‘Coyote’ was written about Sam Shepard, a member of Bob Dylan’s entourage from the Rolling Thunder Review with whom Mitchell had a brief relationship. Mitchell joined the tour for a few shows in 1975. She picked up a relationship and a cocaine habit. The song is all about sex, drugs and Folk Rock ‘n Roll. The album in itself is a road trip album. It was written mostly in the car while Mitchell was road tripping solo following ‘The Hissing Of Summer Lawns’ tour (#258). ‘Hejira’ is an Arabic word meaning “journey,” and that’s just what this record is. Mitchell later said “I suppose a lot of people could have written a lot of my other songs, but I feel the songs on ‘Hejira’ could only have come from me.”
At the height of her fame and success, Mitchell donned a red wig, sunglasses and told people along the way that her name was either Charlene Latimer or Joan Black. Mitchell had grown increasingly frustrated with session Rock musicians and started to look towards the Jazz world. It was on this record that she formed a musical connection with arguably the greatest bassist of all time, Jaco Pastorius and his fretless bass coupled with her guitar and vocals dominate the sound of this record. The songs are unique and different to her previous recordings in that there’s no real distinct chorus and verses. It’s mostly a flow of consciousness from Mitchell. Her lyrics are beautiful, as are the songs. Best enjoyed on the open road”.
I am going to end with a Pitchfork review from 2022. Awarding it a 10, there is a lot of great detail and background to the mesmeric Hejira. I think that it is an album that should be played and talked about more. An easy and obvious choice for this first Beneath the Sleeve:
“At the end of the ’70s, Mitchell told Rolling Stone it was never her goal to be the queen of her generation, or the best. Her goal was to remain interested in music. Her steady gravitation toward jazz was proof, from Blue’s approximations of its textures to the experimental yet accessible Hissing of Summer Lawns. She considered the electric jazz fusion of Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way to be the previous decade’s definitive record and absorbed its astral atmospheres. She was an avant-gardist among rock’n’roll people in an era when improvised music was creating rock stars of its own. Still, Mitchell inhabited that slippery space unique to those ahead of the times.
Rolling Thunder didn’t only fuel the luminous and literary “Coyote.” It also broke her down physically and left her addicted to cocaine. (She allegedly told the tour to pay her in coke and wrote ever-longer poems high late into the night: “Everybody took all of their vices to the nth degree and came out of it born again or into AA,” she said in 1988.) A month after, attempting to start her own tour for Hissing, her wrecked state and endless battles with her drummer John Guerin—the self-described “jazz snob” to whom she was engaged—resulted in its abrupt cancellation.
So the circus gave way to a spirit journey. Mitchell found herself sitting at Neil Young’s beach house wondering how to recuperate from such self-annihilation, longing to travel. Soon two acquaintances—one, an Australian former lover; the other, a lover-to-be—showed up together at her door in Los Angeles. The boys were going to drive cross country; their destination, for the Aussie ex with a 20-day visa and a grim custody battle, was Maine. “We were going to kidnap his daughter from the grandmother,” Mitchell said. “You could have made a whole movie about that trip.” (Paging Todd Haynes.)
Thirty-two years old with no license, Mitchell drove this band of outsiders east before looping back solo, down the coast of Florida and then along the Gulf of Mexico, “staying at old ’50s motels and eating at health food stores.” She adopted fake names like “Charlene Latimer.” She was often disguised in a red wig. She wrote most of Hejira on the guitar she kept in her white Mercedes. “I was getting away from romance, I was getting away from craziness,” Mitchell said, “and I was searching for something to make sense of everything.”
Hejira exalts the art of being a woman alone. It is restless music of road and sky, of interior and exterior weather suspended, epic and elemental. Her narratives unfurl with driving forward motion, telling stories of black crows and coyotes, of cafes and motel rooms; a bluesman and a pilot; psychics, hitchhikers, mothers, a guru. She contemplates eternity in a cemetery. She sees Michelangelo in the clouds. She hears jazz in the trees. Blue’s optimistic “traveling, traveling, traveling” gives way to an insatiable “travel fever,” each cartographic song extending the road further from Savannah to Staten Island to Canadian prairies, from Beale to Bleecker Streets. Her solitude distills the details into ascetic elegance.
The stark arrangements on Hejira, free of traditional structures, with only a few players on each song, are iridescent like glitter on icicles or sand. Mitchell stretches the unresolved tone of her “chords of inquiry” into a nine-song epiphany. The fretless bass, spare percussion, and unusual harmonics depict her wintry lucidity as well as the extremes of her existence, which she had accepted in service of her creativity. The protracted song lengths were allegedly a product of her drug addiction, while their clarity was inseparable from her process of getting clean.
She had started playing with the jazz fusionists of L.A. Express on Court and Spark—musicians who wouldn’t “put up a dark picket fence through my music,” as she once put it—and during a pit stop on her road trip, guitarist Robben Ford played her an advance copy of the debut album by Jaco Pastorius, an electric bass player who, like Mitchell, was really more of a painter. The 24-year-old had a tendency for introducing himself as “the greatest bass player in the world.” Mitchell (and most of the best bassists in his wake) wouldn’t have disagreed. She called the eccentric Floridian the bass player of her dreams. Pastorius used a knife to pry the frets off his instrument and transform it, playing more fluidly, flexibly, or as Mitchell called it, “figuratively” than anyone. Having only recently joined the intrepid Weather Report, Pastorius overdubbed parts atop four cracked-open Hejira songs, rhythms that liberated the music.
Hejira’s tenor is one of personal reconstitution, but Mitchell populates the lyrics with characters she met along the way, some literal, some symbolic, each representing a fundamental component of her character. “Furry Sings the Blues” describes her actual visit with the bluesman Furry Lewis near Memphis’ crumbling Beale Street, one birthplace of the blues, and could be an allegory for the corruption of a music business that left its pioneers behind, another parking lot paved over paradise. (That’s Neil Young on harmonica.) “A Strange Boy” recounts her disappointing tryst with her travel companion and his confounding immaturity, standing in for the overall inadequacy of men that Mitchell had contended with so often. It’s attuned to mystery, representing this guy she couldn’t crack in amazing dialogue, like, “He asked me to be patient/Well I failed/‘Grow up!’ I cried/And as the smoke was clearing, he said/‘Give me one good reason why.’” On the discordant “Black Crow,” Mitchell likens herself to the bird overhead, brooding, searching, diving. But the most powerful of these itinerant encounters occurs solely in her imagination.
On “Amelia,” she becomes the sky. Her ode to Amelia Earhart is soaring and celestial. “Like me,” Mitchell sings of the disappeared aviator, “she had a dream to fly.” This austere six-minute ballad takes the form of a conversation “from one solo pilot to another,” Mitchell has said, “reflecting on the cost of being a woman and having something you must do.” Ambition must often go it alone, and Mitchell accordingly subtracts bass and drums entirely. What sounds like sweeping pedal steel is really Larry Carlton’s electric lead guitar and vibraphone. The song’s harmonic character is an arresting question mark, both unsettled and at ease, just like solo travel, knowing there might be something, someone missing yet savoring the space created by absence. Mitchell spoke of Hejira’s “sweet loneliness,” to which “Amelia”’s major chords and resilience attest. “Amelia, it was just a false alarm,” goes Mitchell’s refrain ending each verse, ending every romance, too. As she sings of “driving across the burning desert,” likening six vapor trails to “the hexagram of the heavens [...] the strings of my guitar,” and how Earhart was “swallowed by the sky,” the whole forlorn song seems to go that way. Stars glint in its upper edges.
Clouds and flight, metaphors for freedom and what tempers it, had long been two of Mitchell’s central obsessions. She called descendants of the Canadian prairies, like herself, “sky-oriented people,” and writing on a plane in 1967, she had looked down on clouds to contemplate life, arriving at her standard, the timeless “Both Sides, Now.” But nine years on, in “Amelia,” she equates her living in “clouds at icy altitudes” with her long-standing depression that left her admitting she’s “never really loved.” When she pulls into “the Cactus Tree Motel” to sleep on the “strange pillows of my wanderlust,” the inn’s name is an allusion to her 1968 song about a woman “so busy being free.” Her life’s motifs knock the door in Georgia, too, on the winking torch song “Blue Motel Room,” where rain turns the ground to “cellophane,” a word Mitchell famously used to describe her defenseless Blue era; “Will you still love me?” she yearns coolly, echoing a formative influence”.
An album that I was keen to dissect and go deep with, I hope those who do not know about Hejira are compelled to seek it out. Even if you are not a fan of Joni Mitchell or the blend of Folk and Jazz I would still advise you to listen. It is a wonderful album that is referred by many people but not as loved and spotlighted as much as it should be. A truly magical and spiritual album that you should…
IMMERSE yourself in.