Simply Twisting Fate

I have said it a million times but the most spiteful musician in the world has to be Joni Mitchell. Not sure if it is simply insecurity but this woman has lashed out at so many other artists it is pathetic. She obviously thinks that she is the greatest musician who has ever walked on god's green earth.

Who has she attacked? Who hasn't would be a smaller list. But let's see, Judy Collins, Neil Young, Grace Slick, Janis Joplin, Madonna, John Lennon, Taylor Swift, who have I left out? She has had her bullseye on all these people.

Anyway I was reading this article from American Songwriter the other day and it got me to thinking, Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up In Blue” Was Inspired by This Unimpressed Musician.

Joni Mitchell is evidently taking some somewhat deserved credit for the album that I consider my desert island disk numero uno, Blood on the Tracks. My favorite album of all time, no question.

Bob Dylan might have told Ron Rosenbaum that Joni Mitchell helped inspire “Tangled Up In Blue,” but Mitchell didn’t feel like her inspiration was a welcome interpretation of the album. Never one to mince words about music or artists she doesn’t like, Mitchell recalled hearing a bootleg version of ‘Blood on the Tracks’ in the mid-1970s. “It was really good,” Mitchell said in David Yaffe’s Reckless Daughter.

“But people said, ‘Oh, it’s like a Joni Mitchell album,’ so he went and recut it with his brother in Minnesota,” Mitchell continued. “They butchered it all up. They stomped all over it. But originally, the writing was different. It was more vulnerable, and the orchestration was subtle, very like when I was using just a little of that stuff to my performances. It was beautiful.” Mitchell loved it so much that she played the bootleg version for parties she held at her Laurel Canyon bungalow—including one Bob Dylan crashed.

Mitchell said that when Dylan arrived at the party, someone told her he wanted to see her. “The bootleg was still playing, and I said, ‘Why didn’t you put that out?’ And he said, ‘Somebody stole the tape.’ Which was not true. He chickened out. People said it was like a Joni Mitchell album. He took the vulnerability out of it, and in the process, he took the depth out. The New York sessions were touching. The Minnesota sessions were not touching at all.”

First of all, I have listened to the New York tapes as well as the Minnesota tapes and I happen to disagree. While the New York material was good, it was in no way, at least to my ear, as magnificent or musically beautiful as the later finished product, created by a bunch of unknown draftee musicians in St. Paul, something I have written about previously.

Blue Heron Blast - 2010

The album is plenty raw and vulnerable, so much so that Dylan refused to play many of the cuts for years. It was post divorce and the pain is palbable. No depth? Give me a break Joni, you didn't invent depth or vulnerability or creativity for that matter. Blood on the Tracks is a masterpiece. And it is offputting the way she takes credit for the album as if Bob Dylan needed to be inspired by her in order to create this crown jewel.

Joni Mitchell needs to either s.t.f.u. or lay on a therapist's couch and find out why she is such a nasty person who has to continually denigrate her peers, some of them whose musical contributions far outshine her own and will be remembered and celebrated long after she is gone.