From: les@jmdl.com (onlyJMDL Digest) To: onlyjoni-digest@smoe.org Subject: onlyJMDL Digest V2005 #76 Reply-To: joni@smoe.org Sender: les@jmdl.com Errors-To: les@jmdl.com Precedence: bulk Archives: http://www.smoe.org/lists/onlyjoni Websites: http://www.jmdl.com http://www.jonimitchell.com Unsubscribe: mailto:onlyjoni-digest-request@smoe.org?body=unsubscribe onlyJMDL Digest Tuesday, March 15 2005 Volume 2005 : Number 076 ========== TOPICS and authors in this Digest: -------- Re: Rosie on Joni [Jerry Notaro ] joni discussed in new book of poetry [Douglas Cooke Subject: Re: Rosie on Joni > Somehow, I wound up on Rosie O'Donnell's blog at onceadored.blogpot.com. She > rants and raves in an odd free-form style about many topics, and if you scroll > down past her observations about Kirstie Alley,Condi Rice, etc., there is a > nice little section where she talks about and quotes Joni's Sire of Sorrow. > In fact, the blog name, "onceadored" comes from said song. It's kind of cute > how she credits Joni and in parenthesis says "(all bow)". I appreciate her > reverence for Joni, though the rest of her stuff, part poetry, part running > monolgue, makes me wonder about her mental state. > Ken > np Elliot Smith/Lets Get Lost > I've been following her blog, which is pretty hard to find, so we can't accuse her of self promotion. But I also am worried about her state. She is getting into a lot of name calling and conflict in her blog, especially with Boy George over the failure of Taboo. Jerry ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2005 07:22:41 -0800 (PST) From: Douglas Cooke Subject: joni discussed in new book of poetry Joni Mitchell will be included in a new book of poetry called BREAK BLOW BURN by the controversial scholar/gadfly Camille Paglia. I don't know which poem(s) is discussed. The book is scheduled for release March 29. Douglas Cooke www.richardandmimi.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site! http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/ ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2005 02:21:55 +0000 From: revrvl@comcast.net (vince) Subject: Jimmy Webb (Joni content) from last Friday's Chicago Tribune, article by Greg Kot (who loves Joni) Revisiting the magic of Jimmy Webb Greg Kot, Tribune music critic Published March 11, 2005 Jimmy Webb, who's coming to town this weekend for a rare pair of concerts, is a modern master who never quite fit in despite writing some of the greatest songs of the last half-century. Webb, 58, was an odd-ball even in the oddball 1960s, a long-haired Baptist minister's son who wrote elegantly complicated songs that became hits for artists (Fifth Dimension, Glen Campbell, Richard Harris) considered too middle-of-the-road for the rock generation. In the '70s, he reclaimed many of those songs, putting his own eccentric spin on the likes of "Galveston," "P.F. Sloan," "The Moon's a Harsh Mistress," "The Highway-man," "Wichita Lineman" and "MacArthur Park." He sang in a scratchy Southwestern drawl, played piano like the child prodigy he once was, and developed arrangements that stamped him as a worthy successor to Jack Nitzsche, Quincy Jones and Billy Strayhorn. Those albums, recently collected on the limited-edition box set "The Moon's a Harsh Mistress: Jimmy Webb in the Seventies" (Rhino Handmade), became critically acclaimed, the idiosyncratic output of a songwriter who won Grammys yet never quite escaped the cult-artist ghetto. Webb can now laugh about those days, as hurtful as it once was to realize that he would never become the pop star he once fantasized about becoming. "I escaped without having to pay back too many millions of dollars for the albums I made that didn't sell," he says during an interview from his home in New York. "Which is something that young artists don't get away with too much in this day. The record companies have turned into thugs." Webb's career is far from over. After lying low for nearly a decade while weathering a divorce and trying to get a play produced on Broadway, he is preparing to release his first studio album of new material in more than a decade this spring on Sanctuary Records. "I call it `Twilight of the Renegades' because I see so many of the musical renegades, in the best sense of that term, getting older and dropping by the wayside," Webb says. "People close to me like Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, Richard Harris and Warren Zevon have died in recent years, and I don't see anybody ready to fill those shoes. We've lost our farm club of great songwriters and that really disturbs me. I hope someday there is another John Lennon, and I hope that music gets involved in politics and culture again, and becomes a significant force in the world, because it can be so awesomely powerful in its ability to reach people. Does pop music do that anymore? I don't think so." Webb sees production overtaking songwriting craftsmanship, to the point where two-chord phrases have usurped developed melodies as choruses. In the service of the song, Webb developed a style that favored layered instrumentation and dramatic contrasts, sometimes crossing the line into melodrama. His Richard Harris-sung version of "MacArthur Park" earned an entry in critic Jimmy Guterman's "The Worst Rock 'n' Roll Records of All Time" (1991), which derided the song's "bathetic lyrics" and "over-orchestrated" arrangement. Yet his equally ambitious "Wichita Lineman" and "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," the latter recorded in an epic, slow-burn version by Isaac Hayes, are stone classics. Webb was nothing if not ambitious, willing to take huge risks sonically and lyrically while exposing his inner turmoil. In his invaluable book "Tunesmith: Inside the Art of Songwriting" (1998), Webb offers this advice: "In the pursuit of art, there are no mistakes." At the same time, he recognizes that the pursuit can sometimes go too far. "The only way you can draw the line is to go over it," he says. "Because you keep pushing in that direction, and then all of a sudden you look back and realize you did. When songwriting becomes inextricable from your life, there are always gonna be times when people say, `Isn't that a little overboard?' "It's the art of self-revelation, and someone like Joni Mitchell--someone I was privileged and pleased to be around a lot in the '70s--perfected it. She developed this conversational tone, even as she was saying all this stuff to you: `I'm having a nervous breakdown, I'm in the hospital today, and I'm thinking of all the mistakes in my life, and that's what this song is about.' Such a thought would never have occurred to George Gershwin or Cole Porter." Webb says he and his '60s contemporaries, from the Beatles to Brian Wilson, were "just a faint, ghostly image" of what Porter, Gershwin and the other songwriters of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway were doing decades earlier. He's a little sheepish about sounding like the old pro lamenting the passage of the good old days, but he thinks it's more a shift in cultural priorities rather than a lack of talent that accounts for today's paucity of sophisticated songs. "It's scary how much luck has to do with this," he says. "There are certain artists who have achieved notoriety and there's not a reason in the world they should be famous, and there are anonymous geniuses walking through airports carrying battered guitar cases." "The farm clubs of songwriting have been decimated, if not wiped out," he continues. "The places that are available for them to play, the labels willing to take on songwriters who may not be that immediately charismatic or ready for radio, but have real acumen in their music, and a way of putting something over, are drying up. Bob Dylan wouldn't even get close to a microphone on a record company's dime today." Jimmy Webb - -- http://www.southsiders.net ------------------------------ End of onlyJMDL Digest V2005 #76 ******************************** ------- Post messages to the list by clicking here: mailto:joni@smoe.org Unsubscribe by clicking here: mailto:onlyjoni-digest-request@smoe.org?body=unsubscribe ------- Siquomb, isn't she? (http://www.siquomb.com/siquomb.cfm)