DB's Song of the Day (day 311): "COYOTE" (1976) Joni Mitchell

Today’s song is one of my favorites by birthday girl Joni Mitchell. She performed it memorably at The Band’s farewell concert, as shown in the film The Last Waltz (1978), but it was already a known entity as the most radio-played song from Hejira (1976), one of Mitchell’s landmark albums. The original track features, famously, the fretless bass playing of Jaco Pastorius, and it does indeed add wonderful tonalities to the track and to the album. The version with The Band though is exquisite too, mostly for how Mitchell, singing live, milks certain lines and looks so great as she performs it—I’ve always loved the little girl shudder she gives to “this flame—he put here in this Eskimo.” And when she puts her heart into “a prisonor of the fine white lines, of the white lines, on the free, freeway” and then keeps strumming with those faraway eyes, it just kills me.

The song has been said to be about a brief fling with actor-playwright Sam Shepard, whom Mitchell met while they were both on Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975-76, which was being filmed for Dylan’s oddball shambles of a rock’n’roll film/arthouse film, Renaldo and Clara (1978). In other words, this music comes from the days when the mavericks of Sixties music were aging into eminences and flirting with the Big Screen, and it’s also the last hurrah for a certain kind of road saga that suited the less pretentious times before the Eighties—and MTV—hit. It was a different kind of rock’n’roll circus in those days, and though middle-of-the-road and down-and-out bands might continue to live it, they don’t live it the way those who came up in the Sixties did. And that, in essence, is what The Last Waltz is about.

So it’s great to see Joni singing this song, born of the Rolling Thunder Revue, and capturing the incompatibility of the rock’n’roll lifestyle with just about any other: “I’m up all night in the studio / You’re up early on your ranch.” Shepard, with his sophisticated shit-kicker demeanor, is perfect for Coyote, the kind of guy who has “a woman at home, he's got another woman down the hall,” and Mitchell confides, “seems to want me anyway,” then she giggles “why’d ya hafta get so drunk and lead me on that way.” It’s refreshing to hear how simply she spells out the seduction and, without being either a little girl lost or a maneuvering gal on the make, she manages to let us feel how exciting the attention is and the extent of her investment: “There’s no comprehending / How close to the bone / And the skin and eyes and the lips you can get / And still feel so alone / And still feel related.”

Mitchell puts it out there: every little notch on the barrel leaves more mark than that. But she begins her monologue with a clear-eyed, “No regrets, Coyote.” The song shows her to be, as they used to say, “a tough cookie,” but it also shows her to be detached from the “that was called love for the workers in song” situations so rife in those times: “Peeking through keyholes in numbered doors / Where the players lick their wounds / And take their temporary lovers / And their pills and powders / To get them through this passion play.” There are also, because this is a road saga, great glimpses of driving past a burning farmhouse, stopping at a roadhouse to get up and dance with “locals up kicking and shaking on the floor," and of Coyote dallying with a hawk in the field “near my old home town.” It’s a song crammed with little postcards from this escape-the-rat-race romance. And it sounds so free and easy, as Leonard says, “aw, you should’ve seen us.” And the wonderful specificity of “He picks up my scent on his fingers / While he’s watching the waitresses legs.” It’s not even that this guy is particularly a hound dog, but that compression in turning him into a hunter “picking up the scent” while also beguiled by the visual treat before him is not only knowing but also fond.

The only line in it that cloys a bit is that “run away and wrestle with my eeeeego” but it gets a fun rhyme with “Eskimo,” so, two wrongs kinda make a right. And anyway, who cares. The line she keeps coming back to “you just picked up a hitcher” is full of the immediacy of hitching practices at the time and signals as well the temporary nature of the bond: “No regrets, I just get off up aways.” Ta ta.

The track features a great swirling strum sound that gives the song its insistence and is bright and lively with the feeling of a sudden spike in erotic interest. It plays out but doesn’t burn out, that flame.

Privately probing the public rooms

DB's Song of the Day (day 67): "THE JUNGLE LINE" (1975) Joni Mitchell

Today is International Women’s Day, and in its honor, I’m going to post about the female recording artist I first purchased an album by. There were not many in the running, back then. There were few enough female artists who wrote their own material in those days, which was pretty much a pre-req for me. There was Carole King and Carly Simon and Janis Ian, but they were all too girlie, if you know what I mean. Maybe you don’t, but I’m not going to go into that now. This is supposed to be in tribute to women, y’know? So let’s just say that, back then, Joni Mitchell was head and shoulders above her sisters on that score. She had a very unusual way with a vocal right from the start (see “Big Yellow Taxi,” which I remember as a radio hit that seemed like something new under the sun), and wrote the songs that the chanteuses sing (“Both Sides, Now”—who didn’t record it in the Sixties?), and then wrote songs that no one but her can sing. There are no doubt many of those much better known than my choice for today. One that I take no end of delight in is “Free Man in Paris,” once she turned to the jazziness that really got my attention, and there are songs on Blue, and, later, Hejira, for which she is rightly renowned. But the album I bought was The Hissing of Summer Lawns, and primarily for three songs, though I came to admire most of it: “Jungle Line,” “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow,” and “Shades of Scarlett Conquering.”  The LP was introduced to me by my older brother Tom, Mitchell being one of the few female artists he listened to too.

The reason we listened to her was because, like our main man Bob Dylan, the lady has a way with words. Today’s song’s lyrics have been recited by Leonard Cohen, no less, with backing track by Herbie Hancock. And, sure, they might be a poem in their own right, but still, hearing even a voice as good at reading poetry as Cohen read them doesn’t do them the justice that Mitchell’s vocal does. And then you add the Drums of Burundi—Mitchell used a field recording of the African drummers as the “loop” that dominates the sound of the track, adding some very sinuous Moog on top of it. That combo itself speaks of what this song is up to: positing a “jungle line” or call it, to use HST’s characteristic phrase, “an atavistic fondness” for the pre-modern, hell, maybe even pre-Cambrian texture of biological life, in the midst of our modernized world, so memorably phrased as “the mathematic circuits of the modern nights.”

Every line of this song works for me, and Mitchell’s phrasing is so precise, even where she takes audible breaths becomes part of the texture. And hear how she says, “It slithers away on brass like mouth.piece.spit.” Wonderful. And how about “those cannibals of shuck and jive / They’ll eat a working girl like her alive.” Then she has an artist named Rousseau—to remind us both of the artist who painted works like “The Snake Charmer” as well as the philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau who speculated about human nature pre-civilization and penned the immortal phrase, “Man is born free but everywhere in chains”—who I always identified with the character called Pablo in Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, kind of the founder of the feast, so to speak, the guy who makes the scene happen.

“In a low-cut blouse she brings the beer / Rousseau paints a jungle flower behind her ear.” The song captures not only a kind of subculture, given over to the poppy (of opium), “and drooling for a taste of something smuggled in,” but keeps making huge panoramic gestures: “Through Europe and the deep, deep heart of Dixie blue / Through savage progress cuts the jungle line”; “the jungle line, screaming in a ritual of sound and time,” so that the jungle line also becomes the connections of the drug-runners, conducting “safaris to the heart of all that jazz,” where a “heart of darkness” export becomes the bloodline for hundreds of art and music scenes.

Mitchell doesn’t judge it so much as give it the kind of expression a painter with a gift for caricature might, like the kind who were good at capturing scenes of subculture—Toulouse Lautrec, Grosz, or even a kind of Rousseau meets Picasso. The song is insinuating and seductive and Mitchell, a painter herself, sings it that way; we might expect to see her captured in a corner of the painting somewhere, an onlooker, a recorder, an habitué perhaps, one who appraises the women who come and go, “coy and bitchy, wild and fine,” all feeding a ritualized orgiastic world that hums along below the girders and I-bars, the concrete and the steel.