Brandi Carlile performing with Joni Mitchell at the 2024 Grammy Awards: NAJ screen shot

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — We lived in the time of Joni Mitchell.

It’s true, in more ways than one.

For a few moments in the present on Sunday night, it was once again possible to both live in the promise of the past — and to hold out some hope for the future.

Is it beyond the pale of our collective imagination to see this as a transitional moment in human history? Or is it just a fleeting flash in the pan we could watch on television with a free broadcast signal or on a computer screen or iPhone with an internet connection? Is it one of the last gasps of creative freedom in America before we shuffle off as an empire to give in to a fascist dictator who takes over and ruins everything in November?

I don’t know. It’s too early to say how history will reflect on this night.

The media and social media world exploded with what was going on before our very eyes on the screen, and at one point, it seemed to nearly break the internet. The volume of traffic must have even been a shock to the system of the bots we depend on these days, because for a few minutes, both the Apple Safari web browser and Google Chrome froze up, at least on my T-Mobile connection. I switched to AT&T, and it still took a few minutes for everything to return to normal.

Just in time to head for bed listening to “Court and Spark,” one of my favorite albums of all time. Many a night I’ve drifted off to sleep while listening to this iconic work, one of the most creative collections of song writing in the history of music. Sheer poetry in motion.

While the television media and the web media chased the massive traffic by posting pictures and videos of Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus, the moving exchange and duet between Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs doing the hit song “Fast Car” and the New York Times was live blogging the best and worst moments from the 2024 Grammys, I was sharing links on Facebook.

But what blew me away the most was not any one performance, even the comeback of Billy Joel. It was the introduction of Joni Mitchell by Brandi Carlile.

“Whether we know it or not, any one of us out here who ever dreamed of becoming a truly self revealing singer-songwriter did it standing on the shoulders of one, Joni Mitchell,” she began.

“Joni is one of the most influential and emotionally generous creators in human history,” she said.

And this is where it gets really good, if you are an intellectual creative type and appreciate smarts and good writing like I do.

“She redefined the very purpose of a song to reflect the contents of a person’s soul,” she said. “Before she took this leap, the popular song was observational. It was brilliant and influential, of course. But the exhilarating risk that we all now take by turning ourselves inside out for all the world to see started as far as I can tell with Joni Mitchell.

“She was first,” she said, adding a humorous line for the live audience, “like the first person to strip down at a skinny dipping party to take that awkward terrifying leap — before everyone else joyfully follows.”

As someone who has done exactly that myself a hundred times over so many years, literally and metaphorically, I can relate. Maybe you can too. What Joni Mitchell did in popular music, the “new journalists” were doing too, putting their hearts and souls in the story, like Hunter S. Thompson. Not just writing about what they “observed” and were assigned to report, but how they felt about what they saw. Putting things into a political and historical time context.

For all time, Carlile said:

“We will remember that we lived in the time of Joni Mitchell.”

It was “a reminder of our mortality,” my Facebook friend Randy Cochran said on Monday morning. “She definitely left a mark and changed the way stories were told in that golden 3.5 minutes.”

So I’m already sobbing even before Mitchell, at 80 and in her first performance at the Grammys, turns in her golden throne like the queen she is, and starts singing “Both Sides Now.” As far as I’m concerned, she stole the show. The rest is dance music.

“I was crying as I listened to Joni Mitchell’s riveting performance of ‘Both Sides Now’ on last night’s Grammys,” said Nashville song writer and journalist Debi Smith Cochran when I asked for her reaction.

“As a songwriter, she is a master of the deft slide from watercolor metaphor to the God’s honest truth,” she said. “As a singer and musician, she glides across rivers of notes and we follow, mesmerized. In an evening of memorable highlights of those we love and those we have lost, this golden lady led us into the canyon one more time to remind us that we are stardust.”

Both Sides Now Lyrics

Rows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
Looked at clouds that way

But now they only block the sun
They rain and they snow on everyone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way

I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It’s cloud illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all

Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels
The dizzy dancing way that you feel
As every fairy tale comes real
I’ve looked at love that way

But now it’s just another show
And you leave ’em laughing when you go
And if you care, don’t let them know
Don’t give yourself away

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

Tears and fears and feeling proud
To say, “I love you” right out loud
Dreams and schemes and circus crowds
I’ve looked at life that way

Oh, but now old friends they’re acting strange
And they shake their heads and they tell me that I’ve changed
Well something’s lost, but something’s gained
In living every day

I’ve looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It’s life’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know life at all

So far the best video I’ve been able to find of the performance without talking heads interrupting is this one someone recorded on their TV and posted to YouTube. Give it a few more minutes and maybe it will appear somewhere else, maybe Twitter (X), which I rarely use anymore thanks to Elon Musk.

As it was happening, after what I had written on Friday and Sunday, the entire event pulled me out from under the cloud of dread floating darkly over my head, the clouds getting in my way, where the “dreams and schemes and circus crowds” threaten to bury us all like the mobs of Gotham City with The Joker on the loose before Batman arrives.

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How to Save American Democracy from Fascism and Authoritarian Dictatorship

Now there’s an idea for Joe Biden. For Halloween in October, six days before the November election, the White House staff should dress Biden up as Batman, and do a video of him vanquishing Trump as The Joker. First Lady Jill Biden should dress up as Wonder Woman. In this day and age, when everything is an internet video joke, why not use it to fire up the airwaves and beat Trump at his own game?

Just my humble suggestion

What do I know? I’m just some over educated writer with a website, a Facebook page and an internet connection, a “liberal journalist” from the 20th century. No match for the famous celebrities on TeeVee and TikTok. Right. I would like to see any of them do what I do, write what I write.

Before Sunday night, the Grammy Awards show had several years of trouble. Many Americans had simply stopped watching. It did not reflect the picture in our heads or the song in our ears and hearts.

Could the 2024 Grammys help turn this country around? Maybe save the world too? If the overwhelming message of the empowerment of women is any indication, it could. That’s what it’s going to take.

But it’s also going to take someone actually telling the story. I just don’t think a YouTube video or a Facebook reel is going to be enough.

Add One, From Facebook

In thinking about my own reaction to this, why I was sobbing when Carlile was trying to tip people off and explain it, it was not so much just seeing Joni Mitchell there at 80. I saw that someone, somewhere seemed to understand the historical importance of the art of it all. And how Joni changed it, and was still standing. Finally accepted on the Big Stage for the first time. She was not embraced by the mainstream music industry Titans early on. Never invited to sing and play on the Grammy stage. It just goes to show you that the best revenge for being snubbed by people in life is to live long enough to see things that go around, come around.

Clearly there is a disconnect between what people think of as “news” and what we do on the web sometimes. It’s not about putting out a fifth grade level AP style report on what happened. Who, what, when and where. The best writing in journalism is more timeless and sweeping, at least attempting on deadline to explain HOW and WHY something happened or is happening. And what “the people” can do about it.

You can’t accomplish this by sharing a meme. It can’t be done with a dancing video on TikTok. Artists do it with painting, and poetry. Writers write.

I don’t know if I will live long enough for people to understand what I’ve been trying to do for the past 20+years. Most great innovators in art are never acknowledged while they are alive. Look at Henry David Thoreau vs. Ralph Waldo Emerson.

A perfect example of what I mean.

An Update on Thoreau’s Necessities of Life

Add Two, Wayne Perkins

When I finally got in touch with Wayne Perkins in Alabama, who knew Joni back in 1974 and played guitar on “Car on a Hill” on the “Court and Spark” album, we talked for an hour. He did watch the show on CBS. I took notes on the computer. I tried to get him to focus on the art, and the changes in the world and culture at that time. I read him the quotes from Brandi Carlile.

“She nailed it down,” he said. “Joni sang her soul into the music.”

As a writer poet, he said, “She was up there with Dickens and Thoreau.”

“If anybody deserves our admiration it’s her,” he said. “Her and Dylan.”

Bob Dylan was there too, in 1974, hanging out in the Malibu beach house compound on Carbon Beach with Jackson Brown, David Geffen, David Crosby and Joni.

“They both captured me with their songs,” he said of Dylan and Mitchell. “They always put me in a better place. Taking you out of the BS of the day.”

Of Joni, he said, “she always had a good spirit about her.”

Joni Mitchell and Wayne Perkins, 1974: Google

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