19 y.o. Joni Mitchell and baritone uke tapes

cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/joni-mitchell-found-recordings-1.5723722

jonimitchell.com


As a teenager Jodi Anderson played baritone uke and guitar.

Barry Bowman, a teenage budding DJ, recorded a demo tape at the radio station studio of Joni singing folk songs and playing the baritone.

His copy of the tape was misplaced until recently and he returned it to her.

Joni Mitchell will release on Sept a multi DVD set of archive recordings Songs from her first recording are included.

Will be cool to hear the DVDs.

Agreed, this should be very cool. I just about this on article on my phone. Can’t wait to hear it. She became such a big success.

I first saw Joni in 1964 at the Mariposa Folk Festival in Maple Leaf Stadium. At that time she was Joni Anderson and her accompanist was the late David Rea, who was living in Toronto at the time. I'm pretty sure that David also backed Gord Lightfoot and Ian & Sylvia at this festival. Joni would have been 21 and David was 19 at the time and the baritone uke didn't make an appearance.


Joni later wrote the song Play Little David for David Rea.

To quote from another source -

John Uren agreed with Nick about the instrument Joni played. In an interview with JoniMitchell.com, John stated that in September of 1963 "she auditioned for us right there and then, playing a ukulele - not a guitar."

One night in the Fall of 1963 Joni came up to Nick at the Depression after he had performed. Nick remembers that "she asked me what the difference was between my guitar and her uke. I told her there were two more strings - a low E and A. The uke was tuned just the same as a guitar (D-G-B-E, low to high) but without the two bottom strings." That night Nick was playing his "Red Label" Nippon Gakki Yamaha "Dynamic Guitar No. 80", made in Japan. Yamaha began making this model sometime in the 1950s.

Nick continued his story, "She asked me if she could use my guitar for her set that night and that she had never played a guitar in front of anyone ever before. I told her that of course she could and that she would have no problem learning it! She used my Yamaha and she did very well. I was not surprised at all as she was an excellent musician as well as singer."

So, Joni made her public guitar debut that night at the Depression - never having performed on one before. This is not inconceivable especially for a notorious risk-taker and boundary pusher such as she. Perhaps there were a few clunky notes on those bottom two strings, but more likely she spent some time back stage prior to her set getting familiar with what she could do with them.

She played a Harmony bari.
I always thought that she didn't play guitar in a conventional way because she didn't start as "A Guitarist"

Strumdaddy said:

She played a Harmony bari.
I always thought that she didn't play guitar in a conventional way because she didn't start as "A Guitarist"

Click to expand...

Many of us started on uke and moved to guitar. I think this is quite common. I know I started playing on a uke and got my first guitar in 1960. I gave up the uke, but regained interest about 2 decades ago when I had a chance to play a uke that was a better quality instrument and not just a toy like the one I started on.


Here's 19 year old Joni with her Harmony Baritone.

Jimi Hendrix, Tommy James, Chet Atkins, George Benson, Dick Dale and Pete Rowan also started their stringed instrument playing on a ukulele. (This info came from a Ukulele magazine article.)

I started on guitar because it was the sixties and the Beatles, Rock and Roll, etc. It was cool . Only Uke I ever saw was a toy wall hanger. It wasn’t until six or seven years ago, when I was in Hawaii that I discovered that the Ukulele is a real serious instrument. About that time, I heard Jake, loved Iz and found my first Pono tenor......yes Uke is serious.

Given the time Joni started, the progression from Bari to guitar would have been very natural. From what I understand Joni pushed the alternate tunings in her playing on guitar which is very cool. I’d like to know if she ever picked up the Uke again or currently has any.

Fender just made a artist model concert ukulele for a singer song writer who’s nMe escapes me right now. She said, Uke was her first writing instrument Nd it made her write differently in a very good way.

The ukulele was also, very portable. Thatr was important to me. Gone are the 2 x 12 stack, 100 watt amps and a crap load of guitars. I’m getting older. I do still have a few guitars but find much joy out of finding my little corner, playing ukulele for myself.

I hope to see the Joni documentary DVD when it comes out!

I was surprised to see that Joni also played a tiple when she was with Chuck. Apparently this tiple still hangs on the wall of her house.

Thank you for the stories. I think that baritone ukes were still a fairly new development at that time so it's good to hear that one made its way to Saskatchestan into the hands of young Joni.

I can't quote the sources. I read about her years ago in a magazine article I think.

Joni Mitchell contracted polio when she was 9 and started playing and singing to other patients while she was recovering in the hospital. (Wikipedia confirmed this.)

One of the reasons she started to use alternative tunings on her guitars and other instruments was because the polio weakened her muscles she couldn't reach some of the frets nor had the strength to play some of the standard chords. So she invented her own way to tune her guitar to compensate.

I always thought it was funny that she had been advised not to attend in person, so she wrote the iconic song "Woodstock" from watching news reports on TV about the festival.

Archives: Volume 1 1964-67

Interesting evolution from baritone ukulele to acoustic guitar. And from young soprano to mellow folkie.





I’m dazzled by the variety of picking patterns in these performances.

Cheers.

casualmusic said:

https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_ndW7LPViwcls-_C9f0blTt6im59_kwp24

I’m dazzled by the variety of picking patterns in these performances.

Cheers.

Click to expand...

Thank you for posting this link. Great music

Kenn2018 said:

I always thought it was funny that she had been advised not to attend in person, so she wrote the iconic song "Woodstock" from watching news reports on TV about the festival.

Click to expand...

Joni was on the edge of fame and was scheduled to appear on the Dick Cavett show at the same time as Woodstock so she was advised to skip the concert and appear on television for the national exposure.

Strumdaddy said:

She played a Harmony bari.
I always thought that she didn't play guitar in a conventional way because she didn't start as "A Guitarist"

Click to expand...

She could only do so much with her left hand. If you look carefully at old tapes of her concerts, you can sometimes see her discreetly retuning between songs as she talked to the audience. She did this so that she could play the notes and/or chords that the next song required.

"Childhood polio damaged her left hand, a handicap that would later inspire her to use the open guitar tunings that became her trademark."

RECKLESS DAUGHTER
A Portrait of Joni Mitchell
By David Yaffe

And not only that... If she hadn't played that mountain dulcimer on California and a couple of other songs we probably wouldn't even recognize one if we saw it: She rescued that instrument from obscurity!

I first heard her play the dulcimer when she played a couple of duo shows with James Taylor in London... a partial video available on youtube last time I checked...

But I first heard that show when I was working at radio station KCPR in 1979...the very same station where Weird Al made his first two recordings that launched him to fame... (Well, technically, they were recorded in the bathroom across the hall from the studio... I need to see his movie and find out if that part is shown accurately... we had two 100' microphone cables that ran from the production room... out the front door of KCPR... and into the men's room. We had someone stationed in the hall to make sure no one tripped on the cords or tried to use the bathroom... but that's another story!).

Back to Joni: I was looking through a box of old reel to reel tapes trying to find some tape we could bulk erase and record over for my radio production class. This was back when editing was done with a razor blade and splicing tape. After a while, the tape we used had so many splices put into them you had to find some fresh tape and start over...

Anyhow: Out of the box popped a reel from an old show called RetroRock, a syndicated show that - I think - was sponsored by Ivory Soap?... a soap opera? The RetroRock series specialized in sending out obscure concert audio for radio stations to play with the ads baked in... it's easy to tell the source when you hear one of these old tapes. We were supposed to mail them back after airing them, but I guess someone didn't have the heart to return this one and so it sat in this box for years and years.

I slapped that big real onto the old Wollensak T-1500 reel player in the preview room and was blown away... it was the first time I had heard her live!

I transferred the tape to a cassette, which I still have. It sound awful FYI but I still listen to it from time to time for the nostalgia blast...

Joni talks about her dulcimer and names it's maker, and then launches into Carey and California. I'm not sure if that part of the show makes it onto the youtube video... I'll have to watch it again and see.

What an amazing talent... A prototype for Taylor Swift? Maybe... They both rose to fame with songs about their ex-boyfriends, if nothing else!

casualmusic said:

I’m dazzled by the variety of picking patterns in these performances.

Cheers.

Click to expand...

That's the Wollensak reel to reel machine I mentioned in my (above) post that Joni is recording on in the picture in this post... KCPR had upgraded to professional quality two-track ALTEC machines by then, and Weird Al's first two songs were played straight off the master reel-to-reels made there on Dr. Demento's live show out of Los Angeles on KMET-LA. (Their jingle was: "Little bit of heaven - 94.7 - KMET! Tweedledee!") Weird Al had interned with The Good Doctor back when both of them were still developing their personas... This happened at KPPC, a tiny station out of Pasadena.

(Seriously? It takes me half a minute to recall my kid's birthdays - but the KMET jingle pops into my mind instantly... Memory is such a weird thing...)

Back in the mid 70's we listened to Dr Demento every Sunday night.

mikelz777 said:

Joni was on the edge of fame and was scheduled to appear on the Dick Cavett show at the same time as Woodstock so she was advised to skip the concert and appear on television for the national exposure.

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I don't know that the song would have happened at all if she'd been there. Nobody else that I can recall wrote a song about being there, at least not that I can remember. It certainly wouldn't have been the same song, or likely anywhere near as good.

If you think about her haunting, haunted version on Ladies of the Canyon, it's more about longing than any kind of memory, fictitious or otherwise. The most powerful lines, the fulcrum on which the while song rests, are "we are stardust, billion year old carbon, and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden." Not a literal garden. Certainly not Woodstock or music festivals in general. Metaphorically, it's Eden. In practice, it's about transcendence to a state of innocence that neither she nor anyone in her audience had actually yet experienced.

It's the "not having experienced it" aspect that's at the core of the song. The rest -- the child of God, Yazgur's farm, songs and celebrations -- is just how she's telling the story.

In the scheme of things, Woodstock as it happened for the 250,000+ people in the ground (the "half a million" figure is pure poetry; even the hype-iest of the organizers never claimed anything close to that) was never the point. It's nowhere near the biggest festival ever, and I would argue that, musically, it wasn't even the most compelling festival in the summer of '69. The vastly larger impact was from the MOVIE, especially the re-release following its Oscar win in April 1971. It legitimized youth culture as more than garbage merch and attempts to recapture The Beatles' appeal to tweens and younger (NOT teens), and it told those of us in the hinterlands that there were more of us than we'd ever imagined.

Imagination was the thing. Imagine being there! Imagine so many of us! The song Woodstock, and almost everything about it, grew because of what we saw, yes, but also because of what those sights inspired as visions, a combination of nostalgia for something that never happened but might have, and for a future that seemed impossible, but might be possible.

So it's not ironic that someone who wasn't there wrote the ultimate ode. It's inevitable. It's essential to that version of the song, because that version is about longing.