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It's incredible how humans are capable of forgetting and discarding even the most beautiful things.
Joni Mitchell has been and still is a great artist, although not many are willing to acknowledge it, whether due to musical ignorance or simply for the sake of stubbornness. In the late sixties and seventies, Mitchell gifted the world with some of that generation's fundamental works while simultaneously distancing herself from the image of the eternal hippie. It was right after 1972, following a streak of five folk albums including the confessional masterpiece Blue, that Joni Mitchell veered towards something different, perhaps dangerous. The pivotal album is Court and Spark, a perfect blend of folk, pop, and jazz. But the true revolution comes shortly after, in 1975.
With The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Joni Mitchell embarks on a journey, often a solitary one, that would lead her to encounter some of the sacred monsters of jazz. A journey that would make her lose much of her devoted fan base and gain the antipathy of critics.
The album cannot be understood nor appreciated without considering Mitchell's own words noted in the booklet: "This is a total work, conceived graphically, musically, lyrically and accidentally as a whole." It is therefore a total work involving graphics, music, words, and fate, which must be taken as an indivisible whole. This is why, rather than starting with the songs, it's best to begin with the cover, the artwork (which with modern CDs, unfortunately, has been significantly reduced).
Literally, The Hissing of Summer Lawns means The Hissing of Summer Lawns. A colorful and evocative expression, which gains even more strength with the cover: a group of stylized black figures (presumably nude) drag a giant snake across a field of tall grass, with the city looming behind them, its suburban houses in the foreground and skyscrapers in the back. Modernity and progress versus the wild and primitive. The album starts with cheer and lightness with In France They Kiss on Main Street, recalling youthful loves, ballrooms, jukeboxes, and love made on the backseat of a car.
The album then moves on to The Jungle Line, which delivers the first heavy blow to the listener. The sound is primitive (this is the first song to use sampling techniques) thanks to the drums of Burundi natives, yet the atmosphere is futuristic, almost sci-fi. It speaks of the famous demarcation line separating the jungle, the savage, from progress. The song "slithers" like a snake, unfolds, and Mitchell's voice, almost in a trance, definitely hallucinatory, enchants both the ear and the mind.
The blend of folk and jazz is now evident. The tracks are elusive, the melodic line becomes at times evanescent, Mitchell's voice turns husky or whispers. Masterful tracks such as Edith and the Kingpin, Don't Interrupt the Sorrow, and Shades of Scarlett Conquering (where Mitchell, with a few simple words, champions womanhood more than any feminist movement) pass by. But the most striking example of this splendid musical encounter is not The Jungle Line, but the title track. The Hissing of Summer Lawns has a lazy sound like a Californian summer afternoon. The bass line becomes constant and repetitive, while flurries of flugelhorn and flute sway between Mitchell's abstract and surreal words. The sensation is like swimming freely in a pool under the blazing sun. You can actually hear the lawn hissing in the heat, that snake slithering towards us from beyond the line separating us from the dark jungle. These are purely jazzy sensations conveyed through a musical structure that is almost free and not contained within a precise framework. It's obvious that this is not pure jazz, not even remotely, just a quick incursion that nonetheless bestows enormous elegance and sentiment upon the entire work.
Analyzing song by song would take us down a path too fraught with difficulties. Fully understanding Joni Mitchell's tracks is a pleasant endeavor because they are pure poetry, and like the latter, they are loaded with symbols, metaphors, and expressions known only to the author.
If musically The Hissing of Summer Lawns represents the tearing down of a wall separating two distant genres like folk-pop and jazz, it delivers a fierce social critique in its verses. Hypocrisy, ambition, exploitation, male chauvinism, money, and religion are recurring themes in this album.
In 1975, it was difficult for critics and fans to accept such a complex and intricate work, being accustomed as they were to the melancholic Joni Mitchell depicting tormented love and the broken dreams of the pacifist generation with skillful phrases. With The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Mitchell turns her investigative and analytical gaze outward, towards society, uncovering its evils and ugliness. She herself transitions from being the blonde girl with a guitar and ukulele to a sophisticated woman who would soon devote herself entirely to jazz. It was only towards the end of the 1980s that the fickle music industry brushed off this hidden gem of North American music, giving it back the life that had been denied it in the 1970s.
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
01 In France They Kiss on Main Street (03:19)
Downtown
My darling dimestore thief
In the War of Independence
Rock 'n Roll rang sweet as victory
Under neon signs
A girl was in bloom
And a woman was fading
In a suburban room
I said, "Take me to the dance,
Do you want to dance?
I love to dance"
And I told him, "They don't take chances
They seem so removed from romance"
"They've been broken in churches and schools
And molded to middle class circumstance"
And we were rolling, rolling, rock n' rolling
Downtown
The dance halls and cafes
Feel so wild you could break somebody's heart
Just doing the latest dance craze
Gail and Louise
In those push-up brassieres
Tight dresses and rhinestone rings
Drinking up the band's beers
Young love was kissing under bridges
Kissing in cars, kissing in cafes
And we were walking down Main Street
Kisses like bright flags hung on holidays
"In France they kiss on Main Street"
"Amour, mama, not cheap display"
And we were rolling, rolling, rock n' rolling
Downtown
In the pinball arcade
With his head full of pool hall pitches
And songs from the hit parade
He'd be singing "Bye, Bye, Love"
While he's racking up his free play
Let those rock 'n roll choir boys
Come and carry us away
Sometimes Chickie had the car
Or Ron had a car
Or Lead Foot Melvin with his hot-wire head
We'd all go looking for a party
Looking to raise Jesus up from the dead
And I'd be kissing in the back seat
Thrilling to the Brando-like things that he said
And we'd be rolling, rolling, rock n' rolling
02 The Jungle Line (04:26)
Rousseau walks on trumpet paths
Safaris to the heart of all that jazz
Through I bars and girders-through wires and pipes
The mathematic circuits of the modern nights
Through huts, through Harlem, through jails and gospel pews
Through the class on Park and the trash on Vine
Through Europe and the deep deep heart of Dixie blue
Through savage progress cuts the jungle line
In a low-cut blouse she brings the beer
Rousseau paints a jungle flower behind her ear
Those cannibals-of shuck and jive
They'll eat a working girl like her alive
With his hard-edged eye and his steady hand
He paints the cellar full of ferns and orchid vines
And he hangs a moon above a five-piece band
He hangs it up above the jungle line
The jungle line, the jungle line
Screaming in a ritual of sound and time
Floating, drifting on the air-conditioned wind
And drooling for a taste of something smuggled in
Pretty women funneled through valves and smoke
Coy and bitchy, wild and fine
And charging elephants and chanting slaving boats
Charging, chanting down the jungle line
There's a poppy wreath on a soldier's tomb
There's a poppy snake in a dressing room
Poppy poison-poppy tourniquet
It slithers away on brass like mouthpiece spit
And metal skin and ivory birds
Go steaming up to Rousseau's vines
They go steaming up to Brooklyn Bridge
Steaming, steaming, steaming up the jungle line
03 Edith and the Kingpin (03:37)
The big man arrives
Disco dancers greet him
Plainclothes cops greet him
Small town, big man, fresh lipstick glistening
Sophomore jive
From victims of typewriters
The band sounds like typewriters
The big man he's not listening
His eyes hold Edith
His left hand holds his right
What does that hand desire
That he grips it so tight
Edith in the ring
The passed-over girls are conferring
The man with the diamond ring is purring
All claws for now withdrawn
One by one they bring
His renegade stories to her
His crimes and his glories to her
In challenge they look on
Women he has taken grow old too soon
He tilts their tired faces
Gently to the spoon
Edith in his bed
A plane in the rain is humming
The wires in the walls are humming
Some song-some mysterious song
Bars in her head
Beating frantic and snowblind
Romantic and snowblind
She says-his crime belongs
Edith and the Kingpin
Each with charm to sway
Are staring eye to eye
They dare not look away
You know they dare not look away
04 Don't Interrupt the Sorrow (04:05)
Don't interrupt the sorrow
Darn right
In flames our prophet witches
Be polite
A room full of glasses
He says "Your notches liberation doll"
And he chains me with that serpent
To that Ethiopian wall
Anima rising
Queen of Queens
Wash my guilt of Eden
Wash and balance me
Anima rising
Uprising in me tonight
She's a vengeful little goddess
With an ancient crown to fight
Truth goes up in vapors
The steeples lean
Winds of change patriarchs
Snug in your bible belt dreams
God goes up the chimney
Like childhood Santa Claus
The good slaves love the good book
A rebel loves a cause
I'm leaving on the 1:15
You're darn right
Since I was seventeen
I've had no one over me
He says "Anima rising-
So what-
Petrified wood process
Tall timber down to rock!"
Don't interrupt the sorrow
Darn right
He says "We walked on the moon
You be polite.";
Don't let up the sorrow
Death and birth and death and birth and death and birth
He says "Bring that bottle kindly
And I'll pad your purse-
I've got a head full of quandary
And a mighty, mighty, thirst."
Seventeen glasses
Rhine wine
Milk of the Madonna
Clandestine
He don't let up the sorrow
He lies and he cheats
It takes a heart like Mary's these days
When your man gets weak
06 The Hissing of Summer Lawns (03:01)
He bought her a diamond for her throat
He put her in a ranch house on a hill
She could see the valley barbecues
From her window sill
See the blue pools in the squinting sun
Hear the hissing of summer lawns
He put up a barbed wire fence
To keep out the unknown
And on every metal thorn
Just a little blood of his own
She patrols that fence of his
To a latin drum
And the hissing of summer lawns
Darkness
Wonder makes it easy
Darkness
With a joyful mask
Darkness
Tube's gone, darkness, darkness, darkness
No color no contrast
A diamond dog
Carrying a cup and a cane
Looking through a double glass
Looking at too much pride and too much shame
There's a black fly buzzing
There's a heat wave burning in her master's voice
Hissing summer lawns
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
The hissing of summer lawns
10 Shadows and Light (04:17)
Every picture has its shadows
And it has some source of light
Blindness, blindness and sight
The perils of benefactors
The blessings of parasites
Blindness, blindness and sight
Threatened by all things
Devil of cruelty
Drawn to all things
Devil of delight
Mythical devil of the ever-present laws
Governing blindness, blindness and sight
Suntans in reservation dining rooms
Pale miners in their lantern rays
Night, night and day
Hostage smile on presidents
Freedom scribbled in the subway
It's like night, night and day
Threatened by all things
God of cruelty
Drawn to all things
God of delight
Mythical god of the everlasting laws
Governing day, day and night
Critics of all expression
Judges in black and white
Saying it's wrong, saying it's right
Compelled by prescribed standards
Or some ideals we fight
For wrong, wrong and right
Threatened by all things
Man of cruelty-mark of Cain
Drawn to all things
Man of delight-born again, born again
Man of the laws, the ever-broken laws
Governing wrong, wrong and right
Governing wrong, wrong and right
Wrong and right
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