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On first listening, Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark, the first truly great pop album of 1974, sounds surprisingly light; by the third or fourth listening, it reveals its underlying tensions. The lyrics lead us through concentric circles that define an almost Zen-like dilemma: The freer the writer becomes, the more unhappy she finds herself; the more she surrenders her freedom, the less willing she is to accept the resulting compromise. Joni Mitchell seems destined to remain in a state of permanent dissatisfaction -- always knowing what she would like to do, always more depressed when it's done.
Joni Mitchell has composed few songs of unambivalent feeling. Even her most minimal work suggests a need for chang and skepticism about its potential results. On Court And Spark she has elevated this tendency into a theme: No though or emotion is expressed without some equally forceful statement of its negation.
The actual opposites of Court And Spark -- the thrill of courtship modulated by the fear of emotional commitment -- suggest a series of choices that Mitchell touches on, passes through, and defines with astounding compression -- the alternatives of love and freedom, trust and paranoia, security and rootlessness, concern for herself and for others, compromise and pursuit of perfection, and even sanity and insanity.
Her boldest fears come out in her songs about madness, the last two on the album. Her own "Trouble Child" and Lambert-Hendricks-Ross' "Twisted" deal with it in strikingly different ways: The former is tragic, the latter is a piece of comedy with an hilarious punch line that plays on the very notion of schizophrenia. Together they flirt with insanity from a distance safe enough to show she can control even so threatening a concern.
On For The Roses, Joni Mitchell's best lines were: "I'm looking way out at the ocean/ Love to see that green water in motion." Here she uses water to evoke the breaking of another's spirit:
It is a song of infinite compassion, but although she has externalized her feelings by writing about another person, the song is ultimately introspective. For that reason, the quick move into "Twisted" seems almost desperate. To me she says: Now that we've taken a look, let's get out of here -- there's nothing left to do but laugh.
But if Joni Mitchell is capable of subtly edging around the notion of breakdowns, she's unable to keep the same distance when singing about the men who dominate the album. She never seems to know where she wants to draw the line in love, or if a line exists at all. But it is precisely on the songs about love that the new lightness in her music makes so much sense.
The album achieves its ethereal and lyrical quality with even more instrumentation than any of her other recordings -- including horns, strings and a full rhythm section. Blue, her best album, defined a musical style of extraordinary subtlety in which the greatest emotional effects were conveyed through the smallest shifts in nuance. On Court And Spark the music is less a reinforcement of the Iyrics and more of a counterpoint to them. An album about an individual struggling with notions of freedom, it is itself freer, looser, more obvious, occasionally more raunchy, and not afraid to vary from past work. It is also sung with extraordinary beauty, from first note to last.
Still, her boldest musical stratagem is not the most successful. On "Car on the Hill" she changes tempi and inserts choral passages between verses, using voices that literally sound like ladies of the canyon. She then brings the performance back to its initial fantasy -- the anticipation of waiting for a man. The cut attempts a contrast between very specific lyrics and dreamy musical interludes. Striking in its own way, it suffers from a possibly too literal conception.
"Down To You" is every bit as intricate but works much better. It's the album's best love song -- sophisticated, subtle and complete in itself. As good as melody, vocal and arrangement are, the lyrics overshadow them, with intimations of the album's opposites: "Everything comes and goes... You're a kind person/ You're a cold person too..."
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On "Free Man in Paris" and "People's Parties" she moves from love to her other favorite subject: fame and its demands. She sees it as a further complication in the process of sorting out values. "I'm just living on nerves and feelings..." she sings in "People's Parties." The song, musically related to the delightful "You Turn Me On (I'm a Radio)," is at once her least ambitious and most affecting work.
Some of Side Two is more playful and suggests a wish to gradually surrender everything to emotion. "Raised On Robbery" is pure release: She ducks every issue for an exhilarating fantasy imagery to define a relationship between freedom and time: "I used to count lovers like railway cars." Now she doesn't count anything and just lets things slide. Jealous loving makes her "crazy," and so she now equates goodness entirely with the heart: She can't find the one because she's lost the other. The album's most haunting song hangs on the deceptively simple line, "What are you gonna do about it/ You've got no one to give your live to."
On "People's Parties," Joni Mitchell sings, "Laughing and crying/ You know it's the same release." The special beauty of Court And Spark is that it forces us to do both, and that it does so with such infinite grace.
- Jon Landau, Rolling Stone, 2/28/74.
Bonus Reviews!
No one expected this. Joni Mitchell's albums have sold well since Ladies of the Canyon, but Court and Spark is her first real giant and continues to grow without the benefit of a big single. Mitchell launched the album in the usual way -- a massive national tour -- but the record broke out before she had really begun. Apparently, Court and Spark satisfied the accumulated past interest in her and her special approach to women in love. Her most accessible work, its lyrics are crystal clear, even when dealing in ambiguities, and its music is lighter and broader (with the aid of a complete band) than in the past. Unlike some earlier albums, Court and Spark is more inspiring than depressing and larger numbers of people may therefore be open to it. But whatever the reasons, its presence proves that there is room for genius as well as mediocrity on the Billboard Top 20.
- Jon Landau, Rolling Stone, 6/6/74.
The first album she's ever made that doesn't sound like a musical departure -- it's almost standard rock. For the Roses gone mainstream. But the relative smoothness is a respite rather than a copout, the cover version of "Twisted" suggests a brave future, and she's the best singer-songwriter there is right now. Even the decrease in verbal daring -- the lyrics are quite personal and literal -- makes for a winning directness in songs like "Help Me" and "Raised on Robbery." Now all I want to know is whether "Free Man in Paris" is about David Geffen. A
- Robert Christgau, Christgau's Record Guide, 1981.
Joni Mitchell reached her peak of popularity in the United States with this major work. The songs on side one fit together thematically and musically like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, presenting the picture of a woman wondering aloud and in print how to cope with the problems of being famous and female. "Help Me" became the singer-songwriter's sole US top ten single. "Free Man in Paris" entered music business language as an expression for escape from the pressures and responsibilities stemming from celebrity.
"Everything a record should be," exults Canadian disc jockey Geoff Edwards, "jazz, pop, and rock with sensitive and thought-provoking lyrics."
In 1987, Court and Spark was chosen by a panel of rock critics and music broadcasters as the #37 rock album of all time.
- Paul Gambaccini, The Top 100 Rock 'n' Roll Albums of All Time, Harmony Books, 1987.
Court and Spark is middle-period Mitchell -- no longer the simple folk singer and not yet the experimental jazz writer. Having a new found confidence in her lyrics and music, Mitchell has attracted some of the finest names to contribute to this album including Jose Feliciano, David Crosby and Graham Nash, Joe Sample and Larry Carlton -- even Cheech and Chong!
One of the first CDs available in the UK back at the launch of the medium, the Japanese pressed copies of Court and Spark were very hard on the ears. The present review sample, made in Germany by Polygram, is much improved with richer, fuller sound quality. There is a residual harshness in the treble, especially in heavily multi-tracked vocals, piano and acoustic guitar, though bass no longer blubbers and has a propulsive rhythm.
Joni Mitchell is currently poorly served on CD with Blue, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, the early jazz inspired Don Juan's Reckless Daughter and the live Shadows and Light double album still eagerly anticipated on CD in mid-1987.
- David Prakel, Rock 'n' Roll on Compact Disc, 1987.
Because of the more melodic nature of the material and its less intricate lyrical convolutions, this is the highlight of Joni's major musical career. It is also as fine an example of the singer/songwriter genre as you will ever hear. Fortunately, the sound of the CD is clean, clear, and warm; of the same consistent high level as the rest of the package, making this a must disc. A+
- Bill Shapiro, Rock & Roll Review: A Guide to Good Rock on CD, 1991.
Mitchell's commercial peak came with this polished collection, which features the backup of a clutch of jazz-oriented session aces. "Help Me" was a Top Ten hit, and "Free Man in Paris" reached #22. * * * * *
- William Ruhlmann, The All-Music Guide to Rock, 1995.
Court and Spark remains Mitchell's top achievement, a melding of pop and jazz stylings that netted multiple Grammy nominations and the hit singles "Help Me" and "Free Man in Paris." * * * * *
- Hilary Weber, Musichound Rock: The Essential Album Guide, 1996.
By 1973, Joni Mitchell was searching for a new sound. On albums like Clouds and Blue, she had accompanied herself on piano and acoustic guitar, and progressed from folkie waife to sophisticated chronicler of the gender wars. She needed musical arrangements that matched the complexity of her lyrics.
Tom Scott had played woodwinds on Mitchell's previous album, For the Roses (1972), and she decided to do some sessions with his jazz-rock band, the L.A. Express. The result is Court and Spark, an album that not only represents the culmination of Mitchell's folk-rock period but also signals the many musical experiments in her future.
Released at the end of 1973, "Raised on Robbery," the album's first single, caught all the humor and energy that had always been part of Mitchell's personality but that had barely found a place in her music. The second single, "Help Me," showed the flip side of Mitchell's sensibility -- the romatic dreamer, swept up in the currents of desire and uncertain about where they are carrying her or even where she wants to go. "We love our lovin'/But not like we love our freedom," she sings in lines that summararize the dueling impulses in so many of her songs.
Playing behind her, musicians like Scott, guitarist Larry Carlton, drummer John Guerin and trumpeter Chuck Findley add colors and depth to songs that stretch melodies and vocal lines in suprising directions. And as always with Mitchell, the lyrics penetrate deftly to the painful core of feeling beneath the requisitely cool coupling of the early Seventies. When she sings, in a kind of prayer, "Send me somebody/Who's strong and somewhat sincere," her reduced expectations (this was the age of less is more, remember) seem both poignant and desperate, Court and Spark was -- and still is -- Mitchell's most commercially successful album. In another sign of the times, she was defeated the following year in two major Grammy categories by Olivia Newton-John. That's why the criterion of "standing the test of time" was invented -- a standard that Court and Spark will always meet. * * * * *
- Anthony DeCurtis, Rolling Stone, 2001.
The starting point for your Joni infatuation is this very LA masterwork, a perfect blend of jazz and pop that's her most radio-friendly release, and one of the defining albums of the 1970s. All hail the high priestess: with accessible but stylistically challenging lyrics that demonstrate love found and lost, acerbic wit and remarkable insight into human nature, she takes you to a place of wonder. * * * * *
- Zagat Survey Music Guide - 1,000 Top Albums of All Time, 2003.
Mitchell followed up Blue with the underrated For the Roses, a set of harmonically and lyrically complex songs. Court and Spark is, in comparison, smoother and more straight-ahead; it became the biggest record of her career, hitting Number Two. Working with saxophonist Tom Scott's fusion group L.A. Express, Mitchell settles into a folk-pop-jazz groove that remains a landmark of breezy sophistication, particularly the Top Ten single "Help Me." Strange but true: A cover of "Twisted" by the scat-jazz vocal group Lambert, Hendricks and Ross closes the album-- with stoner comics Cheech and Chong singing backup.
Court and Spark was chosen as the 111th greatest album of all time by the editors of Rolling Stone magazine in Dec. 2003.
- Rolling Stone, 12/11/03.
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