Happy 45th Anniversary to Joni Mitchell’s seventh studio album The Hissing of Summer Lawns, originally released in November 1975 (specific release date N/A).
Joni Mitchell made an October 2014 appearance at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, California to screen the film Love Has Many Faces, a ballet based on her music. Scores of fans showed up to the event hoping to meet the septuagenarian. Instead, Mitchell had a private dinner with select guests afterwards, in a great room, lined with large bay windows. Fans pressed themselves against the glass to drink in the irony of a demigoddess doing plebeian things. Mitchell continued conversing comfortably with friends, giving no more regard to the hungry eyes upon her than she did the smoke seeping from the lit cigarette tweezed between her fingers.
Amazingly, Mitchell needs neither squint nor sunglasses to withstand the glare of a public gaze. But there was a stretch of time when she did desire to clothe herself emotionally. She called it The Hissing of Summer Lawns. In 1985, Prince told Rolling Stone that it was “the last album I loved all the way through.” Unabashed as Mr. Nelson’s love was, the buying public was not as kind when the record was released in November 1975.
Mitchell’s fans had acquired a taste for gossip. Taylor Swift isn’t the first songwriter to use her personal life as grist for the mill. Mitchell’s laundry list of lovers includes Leonard Cohen, David Crosby, Graham Nash, James Taylor, and others. Fans had become accustomed to her songs being informed by the highs and lows of those relationships. Much of the ballyhoo (or lack thereof) was around the shift away from more popular works like Blue (1971) and her previous studio album Court and Spark (1974) that mined these experiences. That is to say, Mitchell had no intention of spilling the contents of her heart like a purse turned upside down this time.
“People started calling me confessional,” Mitchell lamented about the response to Blue, “And then it was like a blood sport. I felt like people were coming to watch me fall off a tightrope or something.” And so began the moratorium on allowing the public to live a vicarious love life through her.
Furthermore, Mitchell as an artist is adventurous and musically itinerate. Sentencing her to continue making different permutations of Blue time and again might have put her in an early grave. She needed to follow her muse, and it was very much a moving target. Hissing dabbles in world music, defiantly undiluted jazz, and incorporates synthesizers for the first time. On one hand, this is truly exciting for an artist. On the other, it drove Asylum Records to drink.
Asylum co-founder David Geffen was actually Mitchell’s roommate for a time. Though Geffen repeatedly encouraged her to write hits so she could “sell a lot of records,” he says she laughed the idea away. Roberta Joan Anderson could not be any less concerned with hits. It didn’t matter to her that Hissing’s esoteric lean made choosing a single nearly impossible. This was the album she wanted to make.
The label issued “In France They Kiss On Main Street” as a 7-inch in the winter of 1976. The rollicking release is full of youthful abandon, not unlike some of the L.A. Express-backed workouts on Court and Spark. Here, the verses scrawl romantic, devil-may-care imagery on the wall almost faster than the listener can take them in. Friendly ex-flames Nash, Crosby, and Taylor join her all-star background chorus for a fun time. In total, “France” flirted with Adult Contemporary radio for a couple months until it reached #32. But then it lost interest in the pursuit and went off to sweet talk someone else.
The title track of the LP begins its flip side with a lustrous, afternoon groove. Electric piano and Moog bass guarantee a mellow mood. The song is rife with understated musicianship, like the lazily purring horn line that follows the bridge, curling on the ground like an overfed housecat seeking attention. And every time Mitchell sings “summer lawns,” she drags its sibilance behind her like the tail of a serpent. Her perception is keen, and delivery slit-eyed. The exhibitionist has become a voyeur.
It was revealed in 2012 that Mitchell wrote “The Hissing of Summer Lawns” about renowned musician José Feliciano after visiting him and his new wife at their home in the San Fernando Valley. Attaching the lyric to Feliciano, famously blind since birth, gives a context that changes the lighting on its opulence and elitism (“He gave her his darkness to regret / And good reason to quit him / He gave her a roomful of Chippendale / That nobody sits in / Still she stays with a love of some kind / It's the lady's choice”).
Mitchell again casts a questioning eye on a relationship in “Edith and the Kingpin.” The three-act short story has no chorus, but is carried by a curious melody rolled through a winding path of jazz chords. In it, an underhanded figure in a small town sets his sights on a soon-to-be-corrupted young ingénue (“Women he has taken / Grow old too soon / He tilts their tired faces / Gently to the spoon”).
Answering the imagined questions of salivating gossip hounds, Mitchell told Mojo Magazine, “Part of it is from a Vancouver pimp I met and part of it is Edith Piaf. It's a hybrid, but all together it makes a whole truth. Basically, I am trying to present the human truth, but did [those things] happen specifically to me? What does that matter?” That’s how an intellectual tells one to mind one’s own damn business.
If that stung any, focus on the “little black dress” that Mitchell’s voice then slips into for the Hendricks-Edison composition “Centerpiece.” In this dream sequence, Mitchell indulges her Cotton Club fantasy shimmying as if to drive a hooting audience as mad as possible. It’s in the way she saunters up to all the flat thirds in the melody, shamelessly milking all the soul that can be gathered from them. The ‘50s jazz tune gets spliced into the center of “Harry’s House,” itself a compelling split-screen depiction of a marriage with its intimacy waning.
The Hissing of Summer Lawns didn’t have quite enough jazz to vie for Recording Academy honors in that category. It had just enough to scare off the timid contingent of her pop, rock, and folk listeners. It scored a GRAMMY nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, but was predictably passed over in favor of Linda Ronstadt that year.
Genuinely unconcerned with her records’ commercial performance, Mitchell would swim out into deeper jazz explorations over the next several years. Her pairing with kindred musical spirit Jaco Pastorius would define Hejira (1976). Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter (1977) would push even further past the edge of wonder. By 1979, jazz legend Charlie Mingus chose Mitchell to complete the last compositions of his lifetime on an album named after him.
The Hissing of Summer Lawns is a sizzling hand slap to listeners following Mitchell’s artistry just to get emotional jollies from a pop song. She didn’t include a “Help Me” to lament to, or another “A Case of You” that one can run out a box of Kleenex on. This is to be expected as one wearies of always having to put on a show. If Mitchell confessed to anything intimate or tawdry on Hissing, it was probably that sometimes she likes to watch too.
LISTEN: