Court and Spark heralded a new phase in Joni Mitchell’s development as an artist, as noted by Jon Dale in a retrospective review of Court and Spark originally published in Uncut Magazine and reproduced on Joni’s website:

For anyone who has listened through Joni’s first wave of albums in their entirety, the leap from the folk stylings of 1972’s For The Roses, with its tentative nods to the pop charts, to the panoramic Court And Spark, is nothing short of startling: it’s the career equivalent of a deep, long exhale, as though Mitchell has finally, after five albums, found musicians who fully grasp what she is capable of doing . . . What you take away most from listening to Court And Spark, though, is a massive jolt of confidence to Mitchell’s writing—she was doing things, now, that simply no one else was doing.

Perhaps the most important break for Mitchell, with the development of Court And Spark, was her embrace of jazz musicians . . .

While I generally agree with the tenor and some of the conclusions in this snippet from Mr. Dale’s assessment, I think he missed the boat with his offhanded treatment of For the Roses and came close to hyperbole in his comment regarding jazz musicians.

The confidence he heard in the music on Court and Spark was a direct result of the cathartic experience of For the Roses. Joni began her retreat in the British Columbia woods unsure of herself, damaged by relationship failures, freaked out by fame and disillusioned with the music industry. Rejecting the nostrums of classic psychology, she battled her demons through the art of songwriting, describing her catharsis and epiphany in the album’s closing song, “Judgement of the Moon and Stars (Ludwig’s Tune)”:

They’re going to aim the hoses on you
Show ’em you won’t expire
Not till you burn up every passion
Not even when you die
Come on now
You’ve got to try

Ironically, the outcome of her spiritual journey is best described in the language of modern psychology: “Catharsis involves both a powerful emotional component in which strong feelings are felt and expressed, as well as a cognitive component in which the individual gains new insights.” For the Roses is where strong feelings were felt and expressed; Court and Spark is the manifestation of new insights.

As for her “embrace of jazz musicians,” I will note that many rock critics tend to play fast-and-loose with the term “jazz,” a generic label of little meaning given the diversification of jazz over the years. The music of L.A. Express is classified in a sub-genre called “jazz fusion,” but their sound isn’t anything like what you hear on Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew, the first two albums tagged with that label. The L.A. Express version of fusion is essentially a mix of jazz instrumentation and rhythms with rock sensibilities and a touch of funk—closer to Steely Dan than Thelonious Monk—and the jazz you hear on Court and Spark is more Swing Era than modern jazz. The truth is that Court and Spark isn’t that much jazzier than For the Roses and hardly represents an “embrace.” Dave Blackburn described Joni’s integration of jazz on “Blonde and the Bleachers” as “not quite jazz (though more so),” and on Court and Spark and each subsequent album, she moved a few steps further towards an embrace, gradually building a path to the more experimental jazz of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter and Mingus.

Determined to “burn up every passion,” Joni began working on Court and Spark shortly after the release of For the Roses. According to Dale, “The year 1973 was relatively quiet for Joni Mitchell, at least as far as the public eye was concerned. She only performed a few times, once at a benefit concert, then a few shows with Neil Young.” Though I found no sources to back up my supposition, I think it’s likely that playing a few shows with a guy who was “doing whatever the fuck he wants” helped reassure Joni that following her instincts was the way to go.

Joni spent most of 1973 in the studio developing and recording the album, taking time outs to explore the L.A. jazz scene, looking for new ideas and musicians capable of playing the kind of music she had in mind. She didn’t have to look too far. Having worked with Tom Scott on For the Roses, she went to hear Tom’s L.A. Express at one of the clubs and immediately extended an invitation for the band to join her in the studio. Dale reported that “The encounter wasn’t seamless, at first—there were real struggles for the new outfit, Mitchell noting that the group “didn’t really know how heavy to play, and I was used to being the whole orchestra.” Eventually Joni learned that “less is more” and that she had partners to help her share the load. What she truly embraced on Court and Spark is the value of a strong backup band who happened to share her curiosity regarding jazz.

What strikes me about Court and Spark is that it sounds like Joni is having lots of fun stretching her boundaries and playing with “musicians who fully grasp what she is capable of doing.” Good times aside, Court and Spark is a transitional album, filled with both promise and flaws. The vibes are good and the arrangements are well designed and executed, but sometimes the lyrics lack the emotional punch of her best songs and some of Joni’s choices regarding subject matter are questionable. It may be her best-selling album of all time, but it’s hardly her best work. The importance of Court and Spark is that it placed Joni on an evolutionary path that expanded her compositional range, allowing her to discover new ways of expressing herself through music.

*****

Courtin’ and Sparkin’

Sometimes I wish I weren’t so anal and felt compelled to track down every lead I run across in my research. In this case, I wanted to understand the meaning of the phrase “court and spark,” an idiom with which I had zero familiarity. In the end, I found out that my ignorance had to do with being born and raised in San Francisco.

My first lead came from a woman by the name of Debbie Conover, who offered this hint at the bottom of the song page for “Court and Spark”: “court and spark was used by jed clampett, beverly hillbillys, season 1, ep. 22.” I had a very hard time reconciling Jed Clampett with Joni Mitchell, so I simply had to check it out.

Debbie was right! I’ve set the video to start at the beginning of the scene (0:45); you can stop it after you hear Jed utter that immortal line at about 2:15 (or watch the whole episode if you’re into that kind of thing):

Then I became curious about the etymology. I learned that the phrase is fairly common in both the Missouri Ozarks (where Jed found the “Texas Tea”) and the Appalachians (thanks to the website “Blind Pig and the Acorn”). Further research only added to the muddle; in some locales “courting” and “sparking” mean the same thing: it’s what a man does when trying to woo a woman. I thought “courting” was the “wooing” and the “sparking” was the get-down-and-dirty part, consistent with my desire to get down and dirty as soon as possible.

By my count, seven of the eleven songs on the album deal with courtin’ and sparkin’ in one form or another, and unsurprisingly, Joni’s take on the ritual is much more complex and nuanced than Jed Clampett’s or mine.

*****

Side One

“Court and Spark”: The dominant piano provides a nice transition from For the Roses, a reassuring moment of continuity that gives the album a certain grounding before presenting new sounds and styles to the listening audience.

In a perfect world every album would open with a track like “Court and Spark,” a song that clearly establishes the two major themes that will be explored throughout the album. The first involves the challenge of developing a relationship that strikes the right balance between commitment to one’s partner and the need to have a life of your own, or what Dale somewhat inaccurately identifies as “love vs. freedom.” The second theme involves the endless tension between personal values and the compromises we have to make to earn a living or realize our dreams.

Joni accomplishes those two thematic goals by painting an encounter with a man who is the archetype of a free spirit, an embodiment of the anti-materialist, anti-establishment counterculture of the era—values that she embraced in her early recordings. He shows up at her door “With a sleeping roll/And a madman’s soul” after spending some time in Berkeley “playing on the sidewalk for passing change.” Somewhere along the way, he has an epiphany:

Glory train passed through him
So he buried the coins he made
In People’s Park
And went looking for a woman
To court and spark

People’s Park was one of the epicenters in the battle between the counterculture and The Establishment. “For more than half a century, People’s Park in Berkeley has been a beacon of community activism. It’s also a place where authorities and the counterculture have done battle again and again. The space, east of Telegraph, has been a contentious plot of land ever since an April 1969 ad in the Berkeley Barb encouraged people to congregate there.” (KQED) “To them, the park represents a utopian vision of all the free speech and people-power virtues about Berkeley that are idealized — rightfully so, in many cases — as well as a stand-in for all their grievances about the city, the university and the world.” (San Francisco Chronicle). My parents were fortunately hanging out on the fringes of the crowd on Bloody Thursday when the cops moved in, killing one protestor, blinding another and sending 128 to hospitals. A couple of days later, Dutch Reagan sent in the National Guard and defended his hard-line response: “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.” Polls indicated that the majority of Californians approved of his psychotic approach.

The free spirit’s act of burying his earnings in a sacred countercultural space expresses his inner tug-of-war between living up to the values that inspired the protests and an urgent need to find refuge from a fractured society in the form of a meaningful relationship. Joni admits that his entreaty to complete each other is appealing, but her life is on a different track, one that involves compromise with the powers that be:

His eyes were the color of the sand
And the sea
And the more he talked to me
The more he reached me
But I couldn’t let go of L.A.
City of the fallen angels

It’s a deal with the devil, to be sure, but Joni manifests herself through her music and is willing to slog through the muck of the music business in exchange for the opportunity to share her music with the public. There are times in all our lives when the thing we have to do is more important than building an intimate relationship, even when that quest means placing cherished values on the back burner. We don’t live in a Star Trek universe where “We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity,” we work to earn the money we need to survive and, if we have enough left over, to enjoy ourselves and pursue our interests. Indie labels were still a few years away when Joni recorded Court and Spark, so if she wanted to be heard, she had no choice but to work for a record company, and L.A. was the place to be in the early 70s. 

If Joni had gone total pop on Court and Spark, I suppose the sellout label would apply, but though it became her best-selling album, I don’t sense any hints of a sellout—I sense a woman who had to make a choice between incompatible values and admitted that she was going to get her hands dirty in the process.

“Help Me”: Joni referred to her biggest hit as a “throwaway song,” but a “good radio record.” I think the “throwaway” label can be attached to a good chunk of the lyrics, especially the Simonesque “When I get this crazy feeling” and the painfully trite couplet “‘Cause you’re a rambler and a gambler/And a sweet-talking ladies man.” I’ll give her partial credit for the pronoun change in the closing verse lines, from “And you love your lovin’/Like you love your freedom” to “And we love our lovin’/But not like we love our freedom,” a gentle reminder that the new rules wrought by the Sexual Revolution allowed women to have ambitions beyond serving MAN-kind.

It’s a “good radio record” due to the combination of accessible lyrics, an upbeat tempo and an intriguing melody. Matching music and lyrics is generally one of Joni’s strengths, and the subtle melodic descent on the line “help me I think I’m falling” reflects the swoon while the subtle ascending notes on the following “in love again” capture the hope. The band arrangement is another plus, particularly Larry Carlton’s gorgeous and varied guitar fills and Tom Scott’s bright-and-tight flute passages. The only sound that bothers me is the bit of growling sax that accompanies the instrumental transitions, but it’s a minor quibble. I’ll also note that the bridge feels more like soul than jazz, which may have also contributed to the song’s commercial success by echoing a style more familiar to listeners.

“Free Man in Paris”: Joni explained her motivation for the song in an interview with Mojo Magazine, recaptured on the jonimitchell.com song page: “I wrote that in Paris for David Geffen [president of Asylum Records], taking a lot of it from the things he said . . . Another song about show business and the pressures. He didn’t like it at the time. He begged me to take it off the record. I think he felt uncomfortable being shown in that light.”

If Geffen was concerned that fans or potential clients would figure out that he was the guy bitching about the pressures faced by a music mogul, he needn’t have worried. As Joni explained to Johnny Black of Blender, “People assume everything I write is autobiographical,” Mitchell complains. “If I sing in the first person, they assume it’s all about me. With a song like ‘Free Man in Paris,’ they attribute almost every word of the song to my personal life, somehow missing the setups of ‘He said’ and ‘She said.'” In this case, it should have been expected that fans would have attributed the frustrations expressed in the song to Joni herself, given that she had previously expressed her unease regarding the music business on the title track of For the Roses.

Geffen is lucky that Joni stood her ground, for had he put his foot down and refused to include “Free Man in Paris,” he would have won the award for Dumbest Fucking Music Executive of the Year. This is a fundamentally great song with solid forward movement and a memorable melody. Joni delivers her lines with energy-charged empathy for Geffen and the endless demands from the “dreamers and telephone schemers” he had to deal with 24/7:

He said, “The way I see it he said
You just can’t win it
Everybody’s in it for their own gain
You can’t please ’em all
There’s always somebody calling you down
I do my best
And I do good business
There’s a lot of people asking for my time
They’re trying to get ahead
They’re trying to be a good friend of mine”

“I was a free man in Paris
I felt unfettered and alive
There was nobody calling me up for favors
And no one’s future to decide . . . “

The band matches Joni’s energy with a diverse arrangement marked by strong rhythmic punctuation. The impromptu guitar duo of Larry Carlton and José Feliciano makes the most noticeable contribution, but the first-time pairing of drummer John Guerin and drop-in bassist Wilton Felder of Jazz Crusaders fame supply a solid bottom filled with some interesting departures from the script.

“People’s Parties”: “Joni reached a point where, to my mind, she was writing about rich people,” Randy Newman later carped to MOJO writer Barney Hoskyns. “And I lost interest.” In Joni’s defense, she simply had to include a song about the debauched, dog-eat-dog world of the “city of fallen angels” for people to fully understand why her choice to play the game wasn’t easy. I do wish she’d chosen another party or skipped the part where she describes a woman in a painfully embarrassing moment of instability, as that depiction goes beyond cruelty. I’d rank “People’s Parties” as my least favorite Joni Mitchell song ever and the only way I could survive three times through was to focus my attention on Wilton Felder’s bass.

The internet is full of “who’s who” information about the song if that kind of gossipy crap is your bag.

“The Same Situation”: It makes sense that “People’s Parties” flows seamlessly into “The Same Situation,” for in another excerpt from the 2019 Mojo article, Joni explained, “I don’t want to name names or kiss and tell, but basically it is a portrait of a Hollywood bachelor and the parade of women through his life . . . how he toys with yet another one. So many women have been in this position . . . being vulnerable at a time when you need affection or are searching for love, and you fall into the company of a Don Juan.” Given the reference to “kiss and tell,” we can assume that Joni fell for the guy’s bullshit.

The melody has a vague resemblance to something from the English folk canon, a resemblance strengthened by the storyline of yet another woman falling prey to insincere courtin’ and sparkin’. The arrangement crosses the line into overblown when the strings crowd the mix, and the weak woman act gets a bit tiresome. The lyrics are rather disjointed, but Joni does manage to reinforce one of the themes in what I suppose counts as the chorus:

While the millions of his lost and lonely ones
Call out and clamour to be found
Caught in their struggle for higher positions
And their search for love that sticks around

She modifies the second go-round with a relevant personal reflection:

Caught in my struggle for higher achievements
And my search for love that don’t seem to cease

In modern parlance, we would refer to Joni’s dilemma as “work-life balance,” but it’s more accurate to say that she was concerned with work-love balance and the challenge of finding a partner willing to grant her enough space to explore her creative impulses.

As I take a backward glance at the songs on side one, I have two questions. Was it really necessary to include two songs about L.A. as the equivalent of Sodom and Gomorrah? Joni’s reply to Randy Newman tells me that she really didn’t find her status as one of the rich and famous all that problematic: “I can only say that you write about that which you have access to,” Mitchell responded in her defense. “So, if you go from the hippy thing to more of a Gatsby community, so what? Life is short and you have an opportunity to explore as much of it as fame and fortune will allow.”

Question two: “Hey, where’s the jazz?”

Side Two

“Car on a Hill”: Oh, here it is . . . sorta. I suppose Tom’s sax counts as jazzy, and the tempo changes in the transitions reflect jazz values, but this is really “tipping a toe into the water” jazz. The all-Joni layered background vocals are far too dominant in the mix and the string arrangement was completely unnecessary. As for the lyrics . . . I find it hard to believe that any woman would wait three fucking hours for her date to show up.

“Down to You”: Joni and Tom Scott shared the Grammy for this song in the category Best Arrangement, Instruments and Vocals (the name of the award has changed frequently over the years). Of the three songs with string arrangements on the album, this is easily the best, confirming my belief that musical magic is largely the result of collaboration. I would have dispensed with the brief bursts of vocal harmony as they contradict the fundamental loneliness expressed in the lyrics, but thankfully they don’t take up much space.

Everyone who has engaged in courtin’ and sparkin’ since the Sexual Revolution can relate to the depiction of the process in the second verse:

You go down to the pick up station
Craving warmth and beauty
You settle for less than fascination
A few drinks later you’re not so choosy
When the closing lights strip off the shadows
On this strange new flesh you’ve found
Clutching the night to you like a fig leaf
You hurry
To the blackness
And the blankets
To lay down an impression
And your loneliness

That was pretty much my life in my early twenties, fucking my brains out but never making the deeply intimate connection I was longing for and that my partners were probably longing for as well. It’s very difficult for me to listen to this verse because it triggers memories of the black-hole feeling of depression—but it’s a verse that someone had to write because of its utter truthfulness and I’m grateful that Joni had the courage to face the truth about her experience in the mating game.

Dave Blackburn’s piano transcription is a fascinating read, as this verse in particular is filled with time signature and BPM changes galore, colored with a barrage of minor-seventh and minor-eleventh chords that express emotions of doubt and uncertainty. The extended instrumental passage is a thing of beauty, with strings, piano and clavinet supported by alluring contributions from the flute and clarinet. To my ears, the passage communicates a sense of hope, transforming the final rendition of the title line “It’s down to you/It all comes down to you” from blame to accepting one’s own contributions to an unsatisfactory relationship.

“Just Like This Train”: Of all the songs on Court and Spark, this is the one that best displays the folk-jazz fusion Joni was after. The jazz is most noticeable in the transitional call-and-response passages between the lyrical segments, where Joni opens with the lower-register main riff in CGDFCE tuning and the one-man woodwind section of Tom Scott responds with rising, syncopated, complementary harmonies mixing flute and clarinet. I would have loved to have been in the studio when they came up with that “aha moment” of close collaboration.

The lyrics are deliberately disjointed, flipping from observations of what’s going on in the “real world” to Joni’s internal musing on yet another failed relationship:

The station master’s shuffling cards
Boxcars are banging in the yards
Jealous lovin’ll make you crazy
If you can’t find your goodness
‘Cause you lost your heart

I love that juxtaposition because it’s so true to life . . . at least for the 30 to 50 percent of people who have an inner monologue playing in their heads most of the time. I consider myself very lucky to have married someone who doesn’t have an inner monologue and can help me navigate through the real world. Without her, I would have eventually broken the world record for missing highway exits.

Joni finds “this empty seat in the crowded waiting room,” continuing her oscillation between inner and outer reality. Given her circumstances, it sounds like Joni is putting up a brave face or trying to appear normal so that the kids with “cokes and chocolate bars” and the “thin man smoking a fat cigar” will leave her alone to deal with her pain and resentment. She finally finds refuge from prying eyes on the train, where she can fret about her loss, get drunk and take pleasure in the likelihood that the guy who dumped her will suffer an attack of premature baldness:

What are you going to do now
You’ve got no one
To give your love to

Well I’ve got this berth and this pull-down blind
I’ve got this fold-up sink
And these rocks and these cactus going by
And a bottle of German wine to drink

Settle down into the clickety-clack
With the clouds and the stars to read
Dreaming of the pleasure I’m going to have
Watching your hairline recede
My vain darling

Taking satisfaction in an ex-beau’s likely misfortune also qualifies as true to life.

I was surprised to find a total of zero comments from fans on the “Just Like This Train” song page on jonimitchell.com. The combination of superb lyrics and an excellent jazz fusion arrangement earned “Just Like a Train” the official designation of “My Favorite Song on the Album” and I was hoping to find someone who agreed with my assessment. Oh, well.

“Raised on Robbery”: If it weren’t for Joe Sample’s clavinet intro—and if I’d been a little bit tipsy—I might have mistaken the vocals in the prelude for the Andrews Sisters. The three Jonis manage to get pretty close to reproducing the sound and style of LaVerne, Maxene and Patty.

The intro gives the impression that something like “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” is on its way, but that possibility is blasted to smithereens by the driving rock ‘n’ roll of “Raised on Robbery.” This highly atypical Joni Mitchell composition tells the tale of a woman down on her luck because a “son of a bitch” pissed away all the money they had on a Chevy and a crateload of booze, so she’s turned to prostitution (politely described in cooking metaphors) in an attempt get back on her feet . . . by laying down and spreading her legs.

Some critics found the song “stodgy and wrinkled” while others misinterpreted it as a song about “the predatory singles scene” (read the fucking lyrics, dummy), but the majority found the song “funny” and “well worth waiting for.” I tend to side with the majority due to strong performances by Joni, Robbie Robertson on lead guitar and the L.A. Express rhythm section. It’s hardly a rock ‘n’ roll classic, but hearing Joni having a grand old time is worth it.

“Trouble Child”: Court and Spark closes with back-to-back explorations of psychotherapy, the first a reflection on Joni’s personal experience with mental health professionals and the second a cover of a satiric take on the practice from the 1950s.

In an essay featured on jonimitchell.com, author Clifford Chase begins with a comment that accurately predicts how listeners will react to “Trouble Child.” “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who find Joni Mitchell depressing, and those who, already depressed, find her comforting.” The latter classification may seem odd to you if you’ve never experienced depression, but knowing that you are not alone and that there are others out there going through similar challenges is strangely reassuring.

As Joni takes us through her experience, it becomes obvious from the get-go that she approaches therapy with skepticism and defensiveness, resentful of what she perceives as pre-judgment on the part of the healer:

Up in a sterilized room
Where they let you be lazy
Knowing your attitude’s all wrong
And you got to change
And that’s not easy . . .

They open and close you
Then they talk like they know you
They don’t know you
They’re friends and they’re foes too

Ironically, she is well aware of her status as a “challenging client,” and that she “really can’t give love in this condition,” but gives no indication that she is willing to drop her defenses:

So what are you going to do about it
You can’t live life and you can’t leave it
Advice and religion you can’t take it
You can’t seem to believe it

In the end, she reconfirms her self-awareness (“You know it’s really hard to talk sense to you”) but fails to come up with a solution and will likely continue “breaking like the waves in Malibu.” I’m not particularly fond of the funk-jazz arrangement and loathe the thin sound of the trumpet, but the lyrics make the song a keeper.

“Twisted” (Annie Ross, Wardell Gray): This piece is virtually a carbon copy of the Annie Ross vocalese hit, right down to the chatter provided by Cheech and Chong on Joni’s version. The only notable differences are in tempo (Annie’s original is quicker) and in a repetition of the opening verse in the original. Though it’s close to a coin flip, I think Annie had a better feel for the song (not surprising given her status as co-writer) but Joni acquits herself pretty well. The lyrics echo the psycho-skeptic stance found in “Trouble Child” with a healthy dose of witty wordplay.

*****

I can understand why Court and Spark became Joni’s greatest commercial success but given her exploratory nature and discomfort with popularity, it was highly unlikely she would have repeated the formula on her next album. Confidence restored, she simply had to move on to the next adventure.

I am not one of those people who were turned off by the growing complexity of Joni’s music in the years following Court and Spark. I’ll take Hejira over Blue anytime. I admire artists who search for new ways to express themselves and keep searching, even if the sales numbers tail off. In another retrospective look at Court and Spark on NME, Joni explained what motivated her to explore new possibilities in music:

“You have two options,” Mitchell told Rolling Stone back then. “You can stay the same and protect the formula that gave you your initial success. They’re going to crucify you for staying the same. If you change, they’re going to crucify you for changing. But staying the same is boring. And change is interesting. So, of the two options, I’d rather be crucified for changing.”

You go, girl!