(“The most important thing is to write in your blood,” Mitchell had once said.) And during this acoustic performance at Lightfoot’s, with the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn on a third guitar, the look in Dylan’s eyes confirms what all knew, that at this moment Mitchell is the towering genius. Dylan was revived in the wake of his Joni-inspired comeback, Blood on the Tracks. It may be true that a younger Mitchell’s lyrics were liberated by Dylan’s 1965 single “ Positively 4th Street.” It may be true that Dylan fell asleep in 1974 when she played him Court and Spark. She had just released her misunderstood jazz-pop masterpiece The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Mitchell’s longstanding admiration of Dylan led her to Rolling Thunder, and because she admired Dylan, she did not look back.
To her right, backing her up and following her lead, was Dylan. It’s November, 1975, and she sits in Gordon Lightfoot’s house with her acoustic guitar and her black beret and a new song that would open Hejira a year later: “Coyote.” She wrote it on and about the tour-exposing sex-drugs-rock myths in lyrics about her peers’ “temporary lovers and their pills and powders to get them through this passion play”-but more accurately, she was composing “Coyote” in real time, improvising with her surroundings. It started, more or less, on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue.Ī clip from Martin Scorsese’s 2019 film chronicling that drug-and-nostalgia-soaked tour shows Mitchell outpacing her generation.
To begin with, however, in the spring of 1976, Mitchell was running from a doomed engagement, the chaos of touring, an increasingly inhospitable music business, cocaine, and home.
0 kommentar(er)
