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The popularity of DVDs the past few years has caused an incredible explosion of the most pathetic insipid, shallow and dull documentaries of rock stars in order to cash in on people’s desire for product about their favorite acts. A mention of the worst: a feeble attempt at a George Harrison documentary, The Quiet One. This Joni Mitchell career retrospective is head and shoulders above almost everything else released so far. It is well researched. It has new insight. It has fascinating footage and interviews with the players closest to the story including interviews past and present with Mitchell herself.

And what a story. What an artist! Polio as a child, a mistaken pregnancy that led to a daughter given up for adoption, a hurried marriage to try and remedy that situation, but didn’t, and ended in divorce. Art was Mitchell’s psychiatrist as it is for so many, but the singing was a hobby to her painting until the marital problems saw her doing what Frederick Buechner once said was what an writer does, open a vein and bleed over the page. The raw honesty and vulnerability is well documented in the story of her love for Graham Nash and the Blue album that came from it. It is always a good thing to be reminded how utterly sublime an album Blue is and live snippets of “A Case of You” does just that while “Little Green,” in light of the later revelations about the daughter she gave away and the later reconciliation that the documentary deals with, is more poignant now than then.

The artist is an extraordinary one. This is a timely reminder that Mitchell is not simply the greatest living female singer songwriter of her generation but sits alongside the Dylan, Lennon and McCartney as one who reshaped the possibilities of song writing as an art form. Remember she wrote “Both Sides Now,” “Circle Game,” “Big Yellow Taxi,” “Woodstock,” and “A Case of You” among so many more. A Woman of Heart and Mind highlights her poetry and her musicianship as well as the open-veined vulnerability. A fan of the crooners, Mitchell was drawn more to the wordiness and scope of Dylan and there were never a shortage of words in a Mitchell song. She is documented on video playing acoustic and electric guitar, dulcimer, and piano covering folk, jazz, world music, and rock. Her pioneering and adventurous approach to all things musical is in your face throughout as is her ability to look not only deep within her self but also to look deeply into society and the world around her. David Crosby puts it well when he speaks of her being able to “ride above the culture, to be in the sky, to reflect, to not be in it but to look down upon it.”

There are subplots like hiding the fact that she had a daughter given up for adoption and then the finding of that daughter. The most fascinating sub plot, though, is her romantic life. Her first marriage seems a horrendous mistake and though her husband was part of a duet with her. it can be fairly easily dismissed. Not so her affair with Graham Nash who is one of the friends who adds insight throughout. If you have been, are, or will be involved with Nash in a romantic way, the interview here may cause some sense of insecurity. Nash waxes lyrical about the first night they met and his love for Mitchell is very obvious. She is in some ways repentant at how she shunned him because her grandmothers had both been frustrated musicians and she needed to follow her muse. One just wonders why Joni Mitchell, who has done so much to promote the modern woman, could not model a woman who had a marriage and a career.

The questions continue on her marriage to her bass player and producer Larry Klein. Klein talks about how they were friends before they were romantically linked and how that friendship helped them get through ten years of marriage, which he sees as a good run! Then he goes on to say that now he sees her as his best friend! Am I the only one confused?

The obligatory DVD extras also have worthy additions. A few songs are good but the wee gems are the interview outtakes. In one of these Mitchell says, “I’ve been very vocal about contemporary music. To me it’s “ic” as opposed to “music” because the muse is absent. The muse in music has a divine quality to it and a mysterious quality to it.” Her conversation here is as poetic and artistic and philosophical as her work. Woman of Heart and Mind is the life of a genius of our time. Anyone who writes songs cannot be without it and anyone interested in music should own it. Even if you are only interested in the culture you live in it would be of much use. 

Steve Stockman 10/19/2003