From both sides now
Singer Joni Mitchell’s reproduced 1970s book does not pretend to be a work of literature.
Few of the Dylan fans who applauded when His Bobness was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (I was not among them) have a book of the poet’s lyrics on their shelf. I do, but I can detect no signs of life on the printed page, which is where literature resides. “You gotta lotta nerve,” works when snarled over Al Kooper’s organ, but not so much when read as if it were Ode to Autumn.
Morning Glory on the Vine, by Joni Mitchell, another songwriter fabled for her lyrics, does not pretend to be a work of literature. Originally a handmade book of only 100 copies, it was produced as a Christmas gift for friends in 1971, when Blue, Mitchell’s fourth studio album, had cemented her critical and commercial reputation.
Billing a $55 reprint as “a present to us all” is a bit of a stretch and, truth be told, a volume for the completist, and perhaps those who think that a songwriter can be a literary figure.
Most, though not all, of its five dozen entries are handwritten lyrics from Blue and its predecessors ( Ladies of the Canyon, Clouds and For the Roses) and the minutiae are diverting: Blue’s Carey was originally Cary and the second line, “Last night I couldn’t sleep”, was “The sea is full of sheep”, which may have been a playful wink to her readers; Mitchell is also revealed as a poor speller (serpant; cupie doll; rythms).
There are useful reminders of the extraordinary compression she achieved so effortlessly (is there a more perfect sustained metaphor than Blue’s “Songs are like tattoos/You know I’ve been to sea before/Crown and anchor me/Or, let me sail away”?) and a striking opening poem, written in 1959 when she was just 17, is a prescient and precocious meditation on fame (a fishbowl is “a world reversed” in which hooks that “dangle/from the bottom-up/Reel down their catch/On gilded bait”).
Completing the package are full-page drawings, including portraits of collaborators and lovers Graham Nash, David Crosby and James Taylor, and the cover art from Court and Spark, which make what is a publishing curio into an eminently browsable coffee-table tome.
Now, about those albums …
MORNING GLORY ON THE VINE, by Joni Mitchell (Allen & Unwin, $55)