Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell Read Online Free PDF Page B

hippie, yippie, yuppie transition from the sixties to the seventies to the greedy eighties and Ronald Reagan—my generation dropped the baton and spawned this totally lacklustre [next] generation... Machiavelli said, ‘People don’t know what to do with peace. It always degenerates into fashion and fornication’... and that’s what we have. We are not building the kind of strong people in this third generation that we are going to need for the catastrophes that lie ahead. They aren’t getting any ethical instruction. I’m reluctant to say ‘moral’ because... things that are done in the name of morality are completely diabolical.” 15
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Song from this chapter
    â€œWoodstock”

9. Sing Shine Dance
    â€œAnd to me also, who appreciate life, the butterflies, and soap-bubbles, and whatever is like them amongst us, seem most to enjoy happiness.
    To see these light, foolish, pretty, lively little sprites flit about—that moveth Zarathustra to tears and songs.
    I should only believe in a God that would know how to dance.”
    â€”Friedrich Nietzsche, “Of Reading and Writing,” Thus Spoke Zarathustra
    There was a hint of déjà vu about Grammy night 2008. All the awards, save one, had been handed out—mostly to Amy Winehouse, who was being toasted as the femme feral for Back to Black . Winehouse had been granted a day pass from rehab in order to play a song via satellite from London, and she ended up patching into the broadcast to make acceptance speeches for best new artist, song of the year, record of the year, female pop vocal performance, and pop vocal album. Everyone expected Winehouse—or at the very least then-tragedy-stricken Kanye West, who had just lost his mother to surgical complications—to win the final and most prestigious prize for album of the year.
    When a breathless Quincy Jones opened the envelope, “there was an audible gasp—at least where I was sitting,” said musicreporter Joe Levy when interviewed on The Today Show . 1 The winning album on the Grammys’ fiftieth anniversary was River: The Joni Letters , Herbie Hancock’s tribute album to Joni Mitchell, explored entirely through jazz progressions. The win was a surprise on a few levels. First, few people had even heard of the record before it picked up the biggest prize of the night. Second, Joni Mitchell’s name hadn’t been Grammy night currency in more than a decade. Third, it was a jazz record.
    â€œYou know it’s been forty-three years since the first and only time that a jazz artist got the album of the year award,” said Hancock, referring to the 1965 win for Stan Getz and João Gilberto. Hancock, the boundary-breaking musician who rose to fame in the wake of his pioneering 1983 dance hall instrumental “Rockit,” thanked his mentors, from his former employer and friend Miles Davis to fellow jazz artist John Coltrane, for their inspiration along the way. “But this is a new day,” he continued, “[It] proves the impossible can be made possible. Yes, we can, to coin a phrase.”
    As Hancock’s tip of the hat to Barack Obama ricocheted through the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles, he thanked the blond ghost who occupied the studio: “My thanks of course to Joni Mitchell, her music and her words, and without the vision of Larry Klein as producer, this could never have happened.”
    Hancock held it together in the moment, but he later said he was as “shocked” as everyone else by the win. “It’s totally out of the blue,” he said. Once Hancock had digested the awards-night press, he called Mitchell, who was supportive of Hancock’s win but largely indifferent to the Grammy glitz. “She is not enamored with the Grammys, I’ll tell you that,” said Hancock. “She’s all for the things that have the greatest real value, such as the quality of music,