Susan Lacy, the writer, producer and director, has amassed a flock of famous commentators: Tom Rush, James Taylor, Eric Anderson, David Crosby, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Graham Nash, one of her legendary loves David Geffen, her agent ex-husband Larry Klein. "Blue just went to a level of psychic pain and honesty that no one else has ever written before and no one else has ever written since." "It was naked, pulsating, great poetry," New York Times music writer Stephen Holden says. "Since I was a public voice and I was subject to this kind of weird worship, I thought they should know who they were worshipping." She explains her motivation: "They were putting me on a pedestal, and I was wobbling," she says, describing how she came to make the landmark album Blue in 1971. She talks about her process: "Depression can be the sand that makes the pearl. She reveals her poetic gift: "Some nights, if you listen to the battles of your own head, it's more linguistically colorful or eccentric than other nights." Tonight's program also intertwines an interview with the star herself.
AMERICAN MASTERS JONI MITCHELL PLUS
Like tonight's episode, that one turns up miles of old footage plus interviews with the star's contemporaries that put the viewer intimately at the center of a legendary scene.
AMERICAN MASTERS JONI MITCHELL SERIES
Putting bookends of a sort on pop music in the second half of the 20th century, the series will profile Muddy Waters, father of the Chicago blues, on April 23. It's a musical month at American Masters, one of the shows that still distinguishes PBS from the crowd of cable channels chipping pieces away. They really felt, 'This woman, by the light of this record player, is looking into my soul.' " In "Heart and Mind," VH1 executive Bill Flanagan, who created the series Legends, tries to explain it: "People didn't just love her the way people love the Rolling Stones or Motown. " 'Where are they going?' "), through her Grammy awards for striking but unpopular music in the '90s, to her reunion with a long-lost daughter, and life as a now-59-year-old grandmother.Īiring from 9 to 10:30 on WHTT (Channel 12) and jammed with historical performances that underscore her other-worldly music and the ethereal-princess appearance that she came to loathe, it properly emphasizes her early career, and is sure to bring throat lumps and sniffles to viewers of a certain age. "Joni Mitchell: Woman of Heart and Mind" follows her entire trip, from the 1940s front-room picture window overlooking the highway in Maidstone, Saskatchewan (" 'Here they come,' " she says she thought. The archetypal female singer-songwriter, Mitchell connected with the spirit of a generation in the late '60s and the '70s, but then she left most of her fans behind, as they clutched tender records and memories, while she journeyed off to sing with foreigners and Charles Mingus. Basically, the reason I'm so unruly in this business is 'cause I never wanted to be a human jukebox." Toward the end of tonight's American Masters on PBS, Joni Mitchell laments, "There is no 'acefully' in the pop world.