Joni Mitchell's Black Keys

Real life and The Hissing of Summer Lawns

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“Nobody has ever made an album like this.” —David Bennun

LIKE A COMET THAT RETURNS unannounced for another pass at the Sun, I return to Joni Mitchell’s musical catalog again and again. To ride the black keys.

This is a funny custom. I can’t predict its arrival. Sometimes years will pass. And then—suddenly—I’m steeping again.

The albums that comprise my Mitchell emersions are For the Roses, Court and Spark, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Hejira, and parts of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. Prior to and post this set of albums I don’t tarry.

The painful thing about listening to prime Joni Mitchell is how her compositions remind me of modern pop’s tragic shortcomings.

Unless deliberately retrogressing into the past, current generations miss the opportunity to develop their aesthetic standards. To go up against the primordial Mother or Father. Topographical creations by demiurges like Mitchell, Stevie Wonder, Laura Nyro, and Van Morrison. To name a few.

These artists call to mind the mysteries attendant art-making—something worth striving towards—if you are an artist. Not as many of those today. Skilled Garage Band mavens? Check! And keen auto-tuned vocalists? Check! But no Pierre Teilhard de Chardins of pop. No Mitchells.

As a teenager and then into my twenties, both Mitchell and Wonder provided spiritual templates that became touchstones—homing devices that I used—first as a maturing human and then as a struggling and growing artist—to maneuver my way onward.

Especially Mitchell, who created an emotional lexicon that expanded way beyond her albums’ librettos. I’m thinking of her guitar’s open tunings. And also the uncanny multitracked harmony vocals that distinguished many of her most memorable songs. Always as interludes (more like fantasias) disrupting the song’s traditional verse-chorus sequence.

Some would say her peculiar musical idioms are taken for granted today. Or, like a blind spot, they are missed entirely. However, I think it’s more about how those sounds made people feel. Unresolved. And that could be a problem.

Some of those sounds are feral and not part of the Western musical canon. They explore weird terrains (weird: from Shakespeare’s witches in Macbeth). Sounds that were once called ‘the devil’s chords’. Forbidden notes because they do not settle along the heptatonic scale. Mitchell calls them ‘chords of inquiry’. But I’ve always heard in them something occult. Not dark necessarily, but not for the masses.

I remember watching a documentary on Mitchell with my mom years ago. And during some old footage where Mitchell started to play the song ‘Woodstock’ on her piano, my mom, a musician herself, leaned towards the television and said, “Listen! Listen how she’s focused on the black keys.”

The black keys. The modifiers that comprise the eerie pentatonic scale (a musical scale with five notes per octave). A scale developed long ago by ancient civilizations. Not for the masses.

All of Mitchell’s strange notes and inquiries outlined my interior life when I was busting out of my teens. Out of the closet. Out and about—a budding ponce—out and about—prowling for sex and discovering Tim.

Timothy was a serious and soft-spoken introvert. A blond Swede top to bottom, with a forest of golden hair all atop his forearms—even on his knuckles. He worked as a glassblower in Laguna Beach. “A real artist,” I commended myself.

Our arrangement was what my posse of queer friends called an ‘older for younger’ thing. This was before titles like Daddy and Twink dominated the homo argot.

I was nineteen, and we’d met at a queer seaside club that featured a jukebox programmed with old 60s and 70s Motown hits. Songs that, regardless of the selection, swept everyone into a bubble of pure pleasure on the dance floor.

Tim, a high-octane romantic, would make me eccentric mixtapes. Odd choices and quirky segues of songs I’d never heard but intermixed with just enough of the familiar to keep me listening. Where are those tapes now?

He lived in a cottage that was situated into the landscaping behind a rich and even older queer guy’s house. Houseplants and hundreds of biographical books about movie stars and artists claimed Tim’s space. And unsold vases and glasses from his downtown studio. And thousands of LPs meticulously alphabetized into shelving that he’d built himself.

Tim’s cottage was the first place I’d ever encountered hardwood floors. One morning, while he slept beside me, I studied our clothing strewn across the shiny pine boards. I promised myself that someday I would also have hardwood floors. But what I coveted most was the music crammed within the cottage’s confines.

I’d never bothered to understand Tim’s relationship with Quinn (the even older guy who lived above him)—not because I didn’t care—but because it didn’t matter. Back then, I was about admiration, older and smarter male company, and sex—nothing about ‘happily ever after.’

One night at a popular Laguna Beach seafood spot, Tim told me the meaning of the name Quinn. The name had something to do with offering wise counsel. I guessed at the time that this definition was meant to assure me that they weren’t fucking. But again, no matter. The meal was fantastic. And Tim’s golden arms were as beguiling as ever and I couldn’t wait until we got back into his bed.

Around my third week with Tim, I discovered my philosopher’s stone. Alone in the cottage after he’d walked up to Quinn’s for counseling, I ate corn chips and drew my finger along the wall of his records. I stopped at a peculiar title and wiggled it free. The Hissing of Summer Lawns. What the hell?

I climbed back into bed to study the album’s cover. It was black, sage green, and moonlight silver—pretty but ominous. What did the illustration depict?

In silhouette, a row of tribesmen wrangling an enormous anaconda, shuffling the mottled snake through the grass—like a missile—towards—(as you flipped the cover over)—a church perched on a hill near a row of houses. The homes resembled tombstones. Behind the houses loomed a jungle-like cityscape.

The cover capsulized what I sensed but couldn’t articulate about the world I was entering as a young adult. Not long out of high school—still green and not yet rooted. Carl Jung would have had a field day with that cover. Never mind what was sandwiched beneath the gatefold.

I bought my own copy and played Hissing throughout the rest of the year. Round and round. Spinning in the morning. A whirring cassette sending me to sleep at night. A dreamy parade of people and perspectives blooming.

Brando-like boys in Paris. Jungle ghettos. Manicured lawns—Rainbird sprinklers hissing. Joni floating in a nearby pool. Boho dances and Rhine wine at Harry’s house. Scarlett’s gibbering and a priest with a pornographic watch. Edith’s plane in the rain—the wires in the wall were humming. You could drift away and go missing in the album’s shadow-light estuary.

“Nobody has ever made a record like this!”

Because so much of my interior life was loaded with and defined by pop music, Hissing was like a hornet’s nest lobbed into my sanctuary of relatable sounds. The allure was the record’s psychoanalytic poetry. A quality you couldn’t deny despite the chilly connotation. A codex that slipped and slid through Hissing’s sometimes meandering melodies.

Each spin was slightly dangerous. And set off Mitchell’s shrewd probings of the human condition. I traced and retraced the tendrils until their disclosures became second nature. I knew all of the words in other words. And yet, I was decades away from comprehending Mitchell’s insights and lucidity as real-life experiences.

Hissing was the album that dislodged Mitchell from her pop-folk origins. Critics at the time defined it as sour, too heady. This was a god’s view record. Like its cover, Mitchell’s perspective was retracted from herself to observe how culture and primitive impulses co-existed.

Her overview exposed the nooks and crannies of life’s sadder, more neurotic sides. The foibles and follies. The ennui and banality. The tarbaby of grown-up relationships. Still, I’d take it. Hit me with that.

At nineteen, I was like a toddler struggling to engage in meaningful conversation. But all he offers are neologisms, mumbles, and squeals. Of course, it’s not about the words but the engagement. That’s everything.

I wanted both: a command of Mitchell’s vocabulary and to be prepared—already (somehow) primed for life. (How? At 19?) I was being rushed by hormones. Romantic love was the Trojan Horse—a drive, now, beyond being admired and desired. And Hissing offered an opportunity to check that out, too.

But not like a garden-variety pop tune. Mitchell’s colors were Scorpionic. You’d watch them bloom out from the songs like the lava in a lava lamp. Some of the melodies were lovely, others dissonant or circular—unpredictable and unresolved. The black keys.

A favorite author of mine, Alexander Chee, wrote of writing a novel:

“A novel, like all written things, is a piece of music, the language demanding you make a sound as you read it. Writing one, then, is like, remembering a song you’ve never heard before.”

This is a fact.

And when I go over the drafts of the novel I’m writing—which requires another kind of eye to skim the flotsam and jetsam, I’ll pause when I recognize a nugget from decades past. A fragment or intimation of a Mitchell lyric, something from her codex tucked into my love story—subterranean by its own design.

And why not? So much of my bedrock as a writer was forged by endless spins of Mitchell’s soundscapes, especially Hissing.

I’ll also recall (daddy) Tim, too. A lovely pink vase he gave me towards the end of our hooking up broke up during my move to Hawai’i. Symbolic of what I was leaving behind me in Los Angeles. I’d just turned 21.

So this is why you might play a record like Hissing over and over. Your comet returns to recall the Sun’s light. And to listen again to something you seem to have never heard before. For the notes that never resolve.

Like real life.

Love,

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