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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

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That is Joni Mitchell singing Blue, the title track to her 1971 album, which if you're doing the math, is now 50 years old. You may have seen the essays and think pieces about how Iconic the album continues to be, and we're going to get into some of that in just a second, but as we dug in on that album, the context in which it was made and its impact on both music and culture, we realized that 1971 was a really, really good year, even in many respects, a turning point year for popular music overall.

This summer, we're going to be looking at a variety of albums or tracks turning 50 this year. Next week we'll talk about Marvin Gaye's What's going on. Did you know that Nelson Mandela quoted a lyric from that song in a speech after his release from prison? Now we'll start with Joni Mitchell and Blue, and joining me to talk about how the album was shaped by its time and its enduring legacy today is Jessica Hopper, music critic, producer, and author of several books, including a forthcoming expanded second edition of The First Collection of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic. Hey, Jessica, welcome to WNYC, thanks for doing.

Jessica Hopper: I'm grateful to be here, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take some of your own thoughts on Blue at 50, 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, or tweet at Brian Lehrer. In a recent article for the LA Times who wrote Blue is where her talent and ambition start to come into sync, the point where Joni Mitchell becomes, Joni Mitchell. Let's take a step back, and there may be many listeners who don't know Joni Mitchell's music. Who was Joni Mitchell before Blue came out

Jessica Hopper: Joni Mitchell got her start on the Canadian coffee house circuit. She had been touring around and was "discovered" by David Crosby, then of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. He brought her back to Los Angeles where she wowed the Laurel Canyon Beaumont, and he helped her get a record deal by agreeing to produce her. She starts making records, but also at that time in 1968, Buffy Saint-Marie, the Canadian treasure, had taught Joni song Both Sides Now to Judy Collins, and Judy Collins scored a huge hit with it.

While Joni was making her way up from the folk underground, she suddenly had songs that were in the top 20 and winning Grammys, but not because she was singing them because both sides now quickly became essentially a pop standard at that time. She continues to make records and they're fairly well-received, but it's very uncommon still at that time for women to be writing the songs that she's singing, and by that point, producing her own albums, and so she really quickly becomes an iconoclast, and really an idealized independent woman both in and out of the music scene.

Brian Lehrer: You're right, it's not just that Blue is a beautiful album, it captured the zeitgeists with its poignant portrayal of disillusionment. Let's take a listen to a little bit of one such song from the album, part of the song California.

[California playing]

One takeaway here is that Joni Mitchell doesn't love Paris, another might be that this is the end of the story because that album was a travel log in a certain sense, but yet another is that in those lyrics, "Reading the news and it sure looks bad, they won't give peace a chance, that was just the dream some of us had," you want to talk a little bit about what you think she's capturing there?

Jessica Hopper: Yes, this record while it's very much idealized as the consummate breakup record, the best breakup record of all time, it's really she's capturing the moment, not just in her personal cynicism but really speaking for her generation. It's their big hippie dream is really confronting some grim realities. At the time that she's writing this, is running at the same time as the reinstatement of the draft, we have the Kent State shootings, and the revelations of both the Mỹ Lai massacre and COINTELPRO, and it's also the dawn of the weatherman.

It's really, obviously, a very dark time, but also it's her wondering, is this dream even possible? On this record, part of what makes it so beautiful is that it's both this, is my romantic dream of my own life possible? Can I even be in love? Then also a bigger picture is, can this bigger dream even exist? It's just a time when free love is basically confronting violent tradition in America. How can you reconcile all of these things? She really tries to do that within Blue.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, what's your dog's name?

Jessica Hopper: Bowie and he's valiantly defending me from the delivery of the mail right now. I'm so sorry. This is Zoom.

Brian Lehrer: I thought it was hilarious to hear Bowie over California, but that's really, really cute, reflected. You're right, Blue raised the bar heaven high on first-person confessional songwriting. Let's listen to a little sampling of that. Here's a bit of a longer stretch from A Case Of You, here's 43 seconds.

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Can you get into that a little more? Who was writing first-person confessional songs, and how did Joni Mitchell come in and changed it?

Jessica Hopper: At that time, there was still a folk movement happening where sometimes people were writing first-person songs, but in terms of the pop world that she was entering, it was very rare for women to even be writing songs, let alone songs that they sang. Of course, Bob Dylan radically altered the shape of pop music by coming in and making songs that were literate, in many ways, strange in comparison to what was on the radio at that time, what was popular music in America.

Really Joni takes Dylan's evolution, and moves it further, and made music able to be very personal and not just poetic, that listening to these songs, it's immediately evident. She's singing from her own experience and it's very much imbued with that kind of tenderness and feeling that you know she's singing about something that really matters to her. At the time, she was really one of the only women who was making records like this.

Brian Lehrer: Talk about taking confessional to a whole other level. One song that stands out on Blue as a song that among other things could only have been written by a woman is Little Green, and I'm not sure it was known at the time, but this song is about Joni Mitchell's daughter who she gave up for adoption just a few years before the album Blue was released.

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Want to talk about Little Green?

Jessica Hopper: Yes, that's just such a beautiful- it's one of my favorites on the record. Joni's career was really born of a need for independence after she gave up her daughter and it left the quick marriage that had come in the wake of giving birth to her daughter. She couldn't afford to support her daughter. She was very reluctant to give her up and she just realized she couldn't support her as a singer. Now without her daughter, all she had was her art. She was completely bereft and songs just start pouring out of her.

That's really the moment where Joni Mitchell really becomes a songwriter. There's still songs that references come out of it for years afterwards, but that need for independence and to never be dependent on a man and never be in a situation like that again, means that when she comes to finally gets a record deal in '67, that she's really one of the first artists that has complete artistic control over every aspect of their music and their marketing.

There's a real cause and effect there and she's strived for independence and that's really a hallmark of her music and a huge part of her appeal, especially with her women, I supposed, at that time.

Brian Lehrer: You write about that full artistic control that she had being an influence and a pacesetter that empowered many other artists, Neil Young, for example.

Jessica Hopper: Yes, Joni truly was one of the first and she was managed at the time by Elliot Roberts and David Geffen. After they had negotiated her contract with Artistic Control, built into it, they used that then for the record deals for Neil Young and some of the other really substantial era-defining artists that they managed. It was really Joni and her insistence on that that paved the way for so many people that came after her because, before then, artists were not at the top of the decision chain and they were managed in a way that was about managing their pop appeal or marketing their pop appeal, not staying true to their artistry and their artistic integrity.

Joni really does even help develop and articulate the idea in the '70s of just what an artist could be and that albums were the vehicles for complete artistic expression and a full expression of vision, which you can hear all throughout Blue. It's an incredibly astute record.

Brian Lehrer: We're talking about the 50th anniversary of the release of Joni Mitchell's classic album Blue with Jessica Hopper, music critic, producer, and author of several books, including a forthcoming expanded second edition of The First Collection of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic. We have a few minutes left. How did Joni Mitchell think about her music as it came out? Did she categorize it even as folk music?

You talked before about some of the inept comparisons with people like Joan Baez and Judy Collins. She went on to make jazz albums, Joni. Is that style present in Blue at all, the seeds of it?

Jessica Hopper: What you hear on Blue that just barely tips its hat of how far out she would go from pop is that on Blue, her song structures, they don't resolve easily. It's not verse, chorus, verse, bridge outro. They go in all sorts of different directions totally. They're fairly strange for the time, and then also, she was using her own guitar tunings in part because she had to, she had issues with her hand because she had polio as a child. As she talks about later, people just always called her folk.

They assumed that she was folk because all they saw and she said was a girl with a guitar in her hands. She talks about trying to make her voice sound like Miles Davis's trumpet and that's what she was. She wasn't trying to sing hooks, she was trying to get to a different level and truly use herself as a instrument to divine all of these things that she wanted. You just get a little hint of it and mostly structurally of how her songs unfold.

Brian Lehrer: I think Miles once said, the perfect solo, if he could figure out how to do it would be the one perfect note. We hear that spare attempt at perfection at every second, I think, in so much of Joni Mitchell singing. You cite some of the reviews that came out at the time, Timothy Crouse and Rolling Stone, River is an extended mea culpa that reeks of self-pity, the song River.

Don Heckman wrote in the New York Times, "I suspect this will be the most disliked of Ms. Mitchell's recordings despite the fact that it attempts more." You quote Maclean's, a Canadian magazine. She has always had a unique sense of melody, she is Canadian, but she used to play word games. Now, apparently on a romantic bummer, she wants to tell us about herself. This is one of those great works of art that was panned at the time.

Jessica Hopper: There was some people that understood it for what it was, but a lot of these reviews really were saying this record is really an evolution or I can't stop listening to it, and they would pick it apart. Also a lot of them really credited Joni's genius to her recent proximity to her then ex-boyfriend James Taylor, who was doing similar music. It's just, as Joni herself famously said in 1975 that her genius is forever credited to whatever man happened to be in the room with her.

This is a time where a lot of these rock critics and then music press just aren't even used to seeing women as fully fleshed artists, as capable of art, as capable of basically having the temerity or bravado or libido to properly rock and roll. You see that a lot in these reviews because people just thought it was still very much the realm of men that only men could really be artists. This is the dawning of people understanding that women can be genius visionaries when it comes to music as well.

People, at the time, they saw this as an evolution of Joni, but they were really confounded. I say my piece that I think perhaps it was just having to listen to a woman sing about what she thinks and feels for the better part of an hour was very unusual for reviewers at the time.

Brian Lehrer: Jessica Hopper, thanks so much for helping us celebrate the 50th anniversary this summer of Joni Mitchell's Blue.

Jessica Hopper: Thank you.

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