Spellbinding: Melbourne performer Queenie van de Zandt. Photographer: Scott Belzner
When I was 15 going on 16, still at school and knocking about with a troupe of skinny long hairs playing air guitar in our bedrooms to Hendrix and Zeppelin, someone handed me a record called Blue by Joni Mitchell.
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The memory of exactly who was trying to educate me through the acoustic songs of a trilling folksy pop female is now dim because it was 51 years ago.
I suspect it was a younger school friend called Harks who wore a Parisian-style beret, wrote his own songs and was a much better guitar player than all of us, which was extremely annoying.
Harks was annoying on a lot of levels because he could talk seriously about music and art using words like “honest” or “confessional” when it came to describing his favourite songwriters whereas the rest of us generally stuck with “bloody great” or “far out” to capture the essence of things.
Of course back then we thought of Harks as an insufferably talented tosser, but somehow he had a portal to what was genuinely new and exciting when it came to the powerful chemistry of music and words.
Ground-breaking: Joni Mitchell’s album Blue gave the female voice a new, intimate power.
And so Mitchell’s ethereal voice broke through the teenage boy bombast of smashing guitar and drums to enter our pantheon of musical greats and sit like a bird of paradise on a glass mountain, where it still remains.
I’d forgotten just how great this album is until I was taken back to that glass mountain by Melbourne performer Queenie van de Zandt’s spellbinding performance at Eastbank Riverlinks.
The singer has been touring her show Blue: The Songs of Joni Mitchell since last year in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the release of the album Blue.
Van de Zandt inhabits the songs with uncanny power to bring out the stories behind the album’s creation during the chaotic years of Mitchell’s life in the early 1970s.
The album grew from the all-too-familiar story of relationship breakdown and desertion when Mitchell found herself penniless, pregnant and unmarried in her early 20s in 1964 — a time when nice people scorned unwed mothers.
Mitchell reluctantly gave up her baby for adoption and later went on to mine feelings of loss and melancholy throughout her artistic life. It took 30 years for Mitchell and her daughter to be reunited.
In the early 1970s Mitchell was already a folk music star with hits such as The Circle Game, Both Sides Now and Big Yellow Taxi. When Blue came out in 1972 it was hailed and condemned equally for it’s profoundly “confessional” tone, as Harks would have said.
Songs like Little Green about the child she gave away, and others such as River and A Case of You about her failed relationships and subsequent travels carried a punch of honesty that was just too much for some people.
Fifty years later, the songs are still raw enough to bring emotions to the surface in anyone who has lived a life of love and loss, which would account for most of us.
Van de Zandt delivered lines like “I've looked at love from both sides now/ From give and take and still somehow/ It's love's illusions that I recall/ I really don't know love/ Really don't know love at all” with such conviction it seemed to come from her own lived experience and earned her and her three-piece band a standing ovation.
On Tuesday evening at Riverlinks we sat on a table with three people we’d never met before, but we ended up sharing stories of our own lives spurred by the confessional power of Mitchell’s music and words.
Nobody talked about the election result; it all seemed so dull and trivial compared to the strange and tangled web we had woven with our time on earth.
Thanks to Riverlinks for the experience and the perfectly delicious food — and overdue apologies to the teenage Harks, who was cruelly derided for opening a door on the strength and endurance of the female gaze.
