Joni Mitchell 1970 / Leonard Cohen 2013
Concert footage from the greats at different points in their lives.
Joni Mitchell Both Sides Now - Live at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970 (2018). Grade: B. Leonard Cohen Live in Dublin (2014). Grade: B
Both these artists mean a great deal to me, for different reasons. Both came to popular attention at around the same time, from slightly different angles; Mitchell was part of the early 60s folk revival scene, while Cohen had published some poetry before turning to music in the late 60s. Both have been extensively covered, imitated, and admired — Prince was a MAJOR Mitchell fan as a teenager. He wrote her several fan letters, which Mitchell remembered later: ‘“Prince used to write me fan mail with all of the U’s and hearts that way that he writes,” she recalled. “And the office took it as mail from the lunatic fringe and just tossed it!”’
The first of these DVDs comes from a never-finished film project. Murray Lerner, an experienced documentary/music filmmaker, was hired to shoot the entirety of the massive five-day 1970 Isle of Wight festival. Featuring, among others, Joan Baez, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Kris Kristofferson, Sly and the Family Stone, the Who. Leonard assembled seven film crews to capture what was happening onstage, backstage, and in the crowd.
The festival was largely considered successful, from a gathering + musical standpoint. Around 600,000 people attended. But making a profit on it was impossible; the concert promoters filed for bankruptcy. And they never paid Murray Lerner. He sued, and eventually gained the rights to all his footage. Lerner assembled it into a two-hour 1996 film shown on the BBC and released on video; He put out DVDs of individual performances for years afterwards.
This comes with a 76-minute presentation mixing interview footage with Mitchell’s full 56-minute concert; we stuck with the concert. It starts off rather bumpily, and Mitchell breaks off after half of “Chelsea Morning,” saying “I don’t feel like singing that song.” And there’s an odd hiccup soon after that. But by the end, Mitchell has the crowd absolutely enthralled.
That hiccup comes, bizarrely enough, during Mitchell’s performance of “Woodstock.” If you only know the song from the CSNY version, the Mitchell one is considerably different. It’s a good deal moodier and spookier. Give it a go if you don’t know it:
Yeah, that’s a little less celebratory than the CSNY one. It somewhat suggests that the idealistic flower children, lovely as they may be, were somewhat hopelessly lost. (Mitchell had missed Woodstock herself.)
At the beginning of the live performance here, somebody up near the stage has a freak out moment (and receives medical attention). At the end of the song, somebody ON the stage has a freakout moment. (Actually someone Mitchell slightly knew who was behaving badly.) She follows up by telling the audience to calm things down and that “you’re acting like tourists… give us some respect.”
(There was a little tension at the festival between the ticked attendees and the ones who believed everything should be free. And occasionally some sound issues. During Kris Kristofferson’s first appearance, the sound was so wonky, he got booed off the stage. His second show on the festival’s final day went just fine.)
Despite the “Woodstock” moments (and having her time slot switched), you can see Mitchell really getting into the performance here. Playing piano and an Appalachian dulcimer (and showing her acoustic guitar chops as well). She’s having a great time. She hadn’t always — she had polio as a kid — and she wouldn’t always (life will get to ya, every time). But here, she’s supremely happy. When she decides, at the last moment, to play an encore, she runs back to the stage.
It makes you think of the times you’ve had in your own life, infrequent as they may have been, when you were really happy. When you really thought everything was going great, and didn’t worry about what might eventually go wrong. You always hope to have more moments like that again, but as you get older, you fear they might all be behind you.
In 2013, when Leonard Cohen performed his set in Dublin, one imagines most of the golden moments were behind him. He was about to turn 79; he’d die in 2016. (On Joni Mitchell’s 73rd birthday.) And there’s a lot of regret about his performance, here. He’s both celebrating his life’s work and apologizing that it wasn’t better, pleading for the audience to believe it was the best he could do. (In an excellent Pitchfork review, Marc Hogan highlights how Cohen stresses the “Hallelujah” line “I didn’t come to fool ya.”)
The DVD (it’s included with two CDs of the set) has three sections; a first act, a second act, and an encore. They are long; all together, this is three hours of material. But, aside from maybe some of the encores, and a few too many Hammond organ solos, this doesn’t drag.1 It helps if you watch the sections separately. (I guarantee the paying audience didn't mind the encore being long.)
The first act has more of Cohen’s later, apocalyptic material, like “The Future” and “Everybody Knows” (a song Guns’N’Roses sometimes used as a crowd-warmer!). In that first act, I wished Cohen’s voice was a little stronger. In those dark songs, part of the punch comes from Leonard’s deep, growling-yet-powerful voice. I missed hearing it. He doesn’t sound bad here, just less forceful.
But the second act made me happy I was watching the 79-year-old Cohen, not the 59-year-old one. Because much of it’s devoted to his earliest songs, the ones he wrote when his voice was much smoother, more golden, more conventionally “pretty.” Songs that are almost all about love. This is a 79-year-old singing about love. And it’s not the way a Mick Jagger does it.
There’s old men who ogle young women, presented comically in movies/shows like Some Like it Hot or Benny Hill. There’s old men who wistfully recall all their past affairs, like Willie Nelson and Juilo Iglesias doing “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” (when Nelson was 51) or Sinatra doing “A Very Good Year” (when he was 49).
Cohen sounds like someone who’s still in love with love. Not with sex, not necessarily; “I’m crazy for love but I’m not coming on,” he sings. He still wants the rapture of the feeling of love, of being loved. Even though he’s old enough to know what harm he’s caused to those he loved. In “Chelsea Hotel #2,” Cohen described a frank sexual moment, and said it was inspired by a real moment with a real person — then later said he wished he’d never named the lady. One could say, she’s dead now, it doesn’t matter to her ghost — but I doubt Leonard Cohen would take any comfort from that at all.
Spirituality always played a theme in his work, and his life; Cohen was Jewish, and often made Old Testament references, yet he drew inspirations from Buddhism and Christianity as well. At times, here, he seems to be singing something like a readiness to join the afterlife, to leave the aches and pains behind. Judaism doesn’t, exactly, promise an afterlife (it doesn’t necessarily frown on the notion, either). But until he made his journey to wherever, Leonard Cohen would stay in love with love.
I feel the same way, myself. I’m not in my 70s yet, but I’m older than Willie or Sinatra singing their “remember the ladies” songs. And I don’t want to think it’s over for me falling in love. It doesn’t have to be a “coming on” love, either (I’m married and love Mrs. twinsbrewer very much). We both have friends we haven’t seen in years that it feels aching inside to miss, the way you ache when your intended shoots you down. Being with them is like being in love.
It could be a love of discovering something new and great in art. Or rediscovering something old. I’d heard some Mitchell growing up (my parents were big 60s/70s folky singer/songwriter fans before that music was mostly banned from our home, as Dad became driven by fundamentalism). After embracing rebellious rock in college, I spent my 20s thinking that all that folky singer/songwriter stuff was wimpy “soft rock.”
Not so! There’s nothing wimpy about John Denver singing “so many times I’ve let you down,” or Gordon Lightfoot singing “never thought I could act this way, and I’ve got to say, that I just don’t get it.” There’s nothing wimpy about Jim Croce or Cat Stevens or Harry Nilsson or Joan Baez. And there’s nothing wimpy about Joni Mitchell, or Leonard Cohen. Vulnerable, sure. Not wimpy.
Rediscovering Mitchell’s Clouds and Ladies of the Canyon songs for the first time since I heard them as a child made me absolutely bawl. Some of those songs still do. Some of Cohen’s as well. I remember driving through a beautiful, desolate part of Oregon in the early 2000s and hearing so much hateful, vicious talk radio it made my head spin. I popped in my music player and it randomized right to Cohen’s “Democracy.”
It's coming from the sorrow in the street
The holy places where the races meet
From the homicidal bitchin'
That goes down in every kitchen
To determine who will serve and who will eat
From the wells of disappointment
Where the women kneel to pray
For the grace of God in the desert here
And the desert far away
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A
I mean… damn. I’d fall in love with a country where that came true. When Cohen sang “from the fires of the homeless, from the ashes of the gay… Democracy is coming,” I had to pull over and just weep.
Did Cohen and Mitchell know each other? Of course, Canada’s a small country. It’s not, but yes, they were prominent folk/songsters, they knew each other. Here’s a neat picture from the 1967 Newport Folk Festival, where Mitchell and Leonard met:
They dated, briefly. It wasn’t meant to be. Mitchell at least got a song out of it. From Tom Taylor at FarOut: “‘The fall of the relationship spawned the hauntingly beautiful Joni Mitchell song ‘Rainy Night House’. She explained the origin as follows: “I went one time to his home, and I fell asleep in his old room, and he sat up and watched me sleep. He sat up all night, and he watched me see who in the world I could be.”’
Who in the world she could be… yeah. I imagine Cohen was wondering that, both in the sense of “where will her talent take her” and “who in the world IS this person.” In the end, we really don’t know anybody, do we? But we try.
And Mitchell/Cohen tried their best to let us who who they could be, or the parts of themselves they chose to share. And did it as well as anybody.
Final thought: those friends we love so dearly, and can almost never visit? It's because they live in Denmark. Well, one time we were visiting Denmark, and only found out AFTER we left that Cohen had done a show in Copenhagen during our visit! And it hadn't sold out! Wow, that would have been something.
On the other hand, whenever Barcelona multi-instrumentalist Javier Mas solos on his 12-string or one of several OTHER guitar-ish things I couldn’t possibly name, he’s an absolute joy to watch!