Here's to Mitchell, Beatty for avoiding compromising positions

by David Coddon
San Diego Union Tribune
June 4, 1998

Gulp ... could it be? Does everybody compromise, sooner or later?

I'd been starting to wonder, what with Robert Duvall stooping to "Deep Impact," Courtney Love fully immersed in her Jean Harlow impersonation and "Seinfeld" opting to ultimately punish its characters for being the very thing that made them funny.

"Selling out" should be about tickets, not about integrity.

But, just in time to counteract a summer season of neatly packaged entertainment and excess product tie-ins, my faith in the bravery of artists (and in the bold statements they're capable of making in ways subtle or not, but ever wondrous) has been renewed -- thanks to one concert and one film.

Compromise? Not Joni Mitchell.

All but overlooked in the shovels-full of Lilith Fair promotion is the fact that one woman songwriter has been making a significant contribution to pop, rock and folk music for four decades.

In 1967, Roberta Joan Anderson, a Canadian art student-turned folk musician, recorded her debut album, "Song to a Seagull." Her name by that time was Joni Mitchell. From the first, hers were songs of eminent honesty and intelligence, sensitive but not sentimental. Though she sang, in a matchless, rangy soprano, about love and identity and life's crossroads, she also sang for a generation. She could be counted on to render, without pedagogy, messages of conscience and commitment, a belief in the visionaries and a distrust of the dream merchants.

When her album "Court and Spark," with its bigger sound and pop accessibility, took off in '74, Mitchell could have played "the game." She could have made two or three albums just like it, taken up heavy touring and taken herself as seriously as so many rock journalists did. (Writing about music, Mitchell reportedly once scoffed, is "like dancing to architecture.")

Instead, Mitchell mined her soul for more treasures to share, self-discoveries that became the adventurous but uncommercial "The Hissing of Summer Lawns," the confessional but antipop "Hejira" or the esoteric "Don Juan's Reckless Daughter."

When Mitchell -- incredibly, now 54 -- performed a couple of weeks ago at UCLA's Pauley Pavilion on a bill with Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, it was clear that she remains uncompromising. In the vast stillness of an audience -- some transfixed by her elegance, others fidgeting between the flashier sets of Dylan rock and Morrison roll -- Mitchell reached out as she always has: with dignity, with respect for her songs older ("Woodstock") and newer ("Sex Kills") and respect for those who applaud her.

For someone such as myself, faith shaken by this popular wave of conformity and commercialism, the concert was as timely as it was restorative. So was the film I saw the next day.

....[commentary on Beatty and Bulworth deleted]