Joni Mitchell - Court and Spark
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Written By: Moti Kupfer
Release date - 17.01.1974
The year is 1973, and after five consecutive years in which Joni Mitchell made a point of releasing one album per year, she suddenly found herself with breathing space and time to experience life from a shared, intimate perspective, following her meeting that same year with one of the founding members of the "Eagles", Glenn Frey.
Mitchell, whose sixth album "Court and Spark" was released on January 17, 1974, was blessed with a wide range of talents. From a young age, she learned to play the ukulele and piano, to compose and perform her own songs, and she also proved herself as a gifted visual artist. However, as her relationship with Glenn Frey grew closer, it became clear that Mitchell had yet another hidden talent in her arsenal.
"In 1974, I moved to a place at the corner of Ridpath and Kirkwood in Laurel Canyon, and we had poker games every Monday night during football season,” Frey recalled. “Joni Mitchell got wind of those card games, and she always was a good hang, so she started coming every Monday night and playing cards with us. We’d watch football from six to nine and then play cards until the wee hours” Frey recalled. He said that she amazed everyone in how good she was and then it turned out she was also a poker champion.
Beyond the captivating Monday Night Football poker games, Mitchell wrote two songs inspired by her romance with Glenn Frey. One of them, "Help Me", became one of the biggest hits in her catalog, and together with "Car on a Hill", it found its place on her sixth album "Court and Spark".
Mitchell was born Roberta Joan Anderson in November 1943 in Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada. At the age of seven, she began playing piano and drawing, and two years later she contracted polio. During her hospitalization, she was told she would not be released before Christmas. As a result, she began singing Christmas carols to herself, and it was there that her first real interest in singing took shape.
During her teenage years, Joni taught herself to play the ukulele and guitar and began performing at parties and coffeehouses around her hometown. After finishing high school, she enrolled at the Alberta College of Art and Design, but left after one year and moved to Toronto.
In Toronto, she discovered she was pregnant by a former partner, and in February 1965, at the age of twenty-two, she gave birth to a daughter. Several weeks later, she married folk artist Chuck Mitchell. Despite his promise to help raise the child, Joni decided to give her daughter, Kelly Dale Anderson, up for adoption. This decision was kept secret for many years, but it deeply affected Mitchell and later surfaced in several of her songs, most notably "Little Green", which tells the story of the pregnancy and the adoption. The marriage ended after a year and a half, but she kept the surname Mitchell from that union.
It was on a cold night in November 1966 that Joni Mitchell’s career truly began to take shape. Israeli singer Malka Marom Cohen, born in Hungary and Poland and later immigrating to Canada, was driving home from the CBC studios in Toronto, where she had been filming her musical television program with her creative partner Joso Spralja. Exhausted after more than twelve hours of singing, Marom did not drive home as usual. Instead, she drove in circles and eventually stopped at a small club called "Riverboat", There, she watched a young woman of about seventeen standing on stage, repeatedly tuning her guitar strings for long minutes. When the young woman finally began to sing,“I can’t go back there anymore / you know my keys won’t fit the door / you know my thoughts don’t fit the man / they never can,” Marom saw the past, the present, and the impossible future that awaited her. That moment changed her life, eventually leading Marom to divorce her partner.
After the show, Marom approached the young woman and said, “what an enormous talent you are! Immense! And what a range, your voice, four octaves, even five - huge range! And the poetry! What a poet you are, as wonderful as Dylan and Leonard Cohen!.. Really, really. You're going to be acclaimed the world over". She asked her name. “Joni Mitchell,” the girl replied. “I’m Malkah,” Marom answered. True to her nature as a woman of action, Marom did not settle for compliments. She brought a record company representative to hear Mitchell at the same damp club, though he lost patience while Mitchell tuned her guitar. Years later, Marom stated she was the first to tell her she would be great. That she had enormous talent.
Twenty years later, when Mitchell had already become a legend, a young violinist named Mika Karni happened upon Mitchell’s album "Blue". Mitchell’s associative writing style and distinctive voice were among the influences that later helped shape Karni’s own musical career.
Returning to Marom, legend has it that folk singer Judy Collins was the first to record Mitchell’s songs and turn them into hits. In reality, Marom, then one of the most prominent singers in Canada and a key figure in promoting ethnic and world music alongside Yosso, was the first to perform Mitchell’s songs publicly and repeatedly, determined to sing them until they were known. When Collins eventually took on that role, Marom stepped aside. Soon after, many leading artists began recording Mitchell’s material, including Buffy Sainte-Marie, Dave Van Ronk, and Judy Collins.
Mitchell’s luck continued when David Crosby attended a club performance in Florida and was deeply impressed by her work. He took her to Los Angeles, introduced her to the folk community, and persuaded a record label to work with her on a debut album consisting entirely of acoustic music, without studio arrangements. The result was "Song to a Seagull", released on "Reprise Records", marking Mitchell’s first album as a folk artist.
In August 1969, the Woodstock festival took place. Mitchell did not attend due to prior commitments, but she was captivated by the stories told to her by her partner at the time, Graham Nash. Inspired by those accounts, she wrote "Woodstock", a song that received numerous cover versions and reached the top of the UK charts in 1970 in a rendition by "Matthews Southern Comfort".
Mitchell’s stature rose even further with the release of her fourth album "Blue" in 1971. After releasing her fifth album "For the Roses" in 1972, she decided to change direction and explore new sounds. She devoted an entire year to writing and recording her next album, "Court and Spark", which blended folk, pop, and jazz elements.
The album explores the roles of honesty and trust within relationships, with one notable exception. The third track, "Free Man in Paris", focuses on Mitchell’s agent and manager David Geffen. Mitchell and Geffen rose together in the late 1960s. He was establishing himself as a talent agent, while she was building her reputation through her music. They became close friends, and when Geffen founded "Asylum Records", Mitchell recorded her album "For the Roses" for the label.
Geffen often spoke with Mitchell about the extraordinary pressures of the music industry, and she wrote the song based on his reflections. The place where Geffen felt most alive and unrestrained was Paris, where no one could reach him with favors or demands. David Crosby and Graham Nash, close friends of Mitchell and also Geffen’s clients, provided backing vocals on the track. Puerto Rican guitarist and singer José Feliciano, who was recording in a nearby studio, also joined in on guitar.
Mitchell, who was part of a wide bohemian social circle in Los Angeles, often found herself witnessing questionable social scenes. One such moment inspired "People’s Parties", written after she observed a nervous breakdown suffered by Dutch model Apollonia van Ravenstein in the middle of a dinner party, seemingly without reason. It later emerged that Jack Nicholson had been involved with her behind the back of his partner at the time, Anjelica Huston.
Extending that idea, Mitchell wrote "The Same Situation", a song about a reckless Hollywood bachelor who ensnares women hungry for love, unaware that they are falling into the trap of a modern-day Don Juan.
The album closes with "Twisted", the first non-original song to appear on a Joni Mitchell studio album. "Twisted" is a sung psychoanalysis first recorded by Annie Ross in 1952. Mitchell underwent major surgery in 1973, an experience that stirred intense emotions and created a personal connection between her and the song.
In the year of its release, the album was named Album of the Year by The Village Voice in its annual Pazz & Jop critics’ poll. In 2000, it was ranked at number 116 on Colin Larkin’s "All Time Top 1000 Albums" list. In 2020, it placed at number 110 on "Rolling Stone" magazine’s list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". As further recognition of its lasting impact, the album was inducted into the "Grammy Hall of Fame" in 2004.
For Listening: Spotify, Apple Music
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