Joni Mitchell and Janis Joplin Met Once. Neither of Them Forgot What Was Said. D

In the spring of 1969, Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell were living in the same city, moving through overlapping worlds, and had not yet met. This is not as remarkable as it sounds. Los Angeles in 1969, and specifically the particular Los Angeles of Laurel Canyon and the music scene that it assembled there, was both small enough that certain people kept encountering each other and large enough that other certain people could miss each other entirely or nearly entirely for months.

They were not similar artists. They did not share a genre, did not share a label, did not share a manager or a producer or any of the practical infrastructure that tends to bring musicians into the same rooms. Joni Mitchell was writing and recording songs that were intricate and confessional and architecturally precise.

Songs that seemed to be constructed around a specific emotional geography rather than composed in the conventional sense. Janis Joplin was singing blues and rock with a physical completeness that had more in common with the church music she had absorbed in Port Arthur than with anything that was happening in Laurel Canyon’s acoustic world.

They were both real. They were both serious. They were both doing something that had not quite been done before. And they had not yet been in the same room until one evening in 1969 when the specific geometry of a particular party or gathering in the Los Angeles music world put them in the same room at the same time.

By 1969, Joni Mitchell had already demonstrated the specific quality of her intelligence and her craft that would define her career. She was not simply a gifted singer who wrote her own songs. She was someone who had developed a way of making music that treated the song as a complete thought, the way a writer treats a paragraph or poem, where every element exists in deliberate relationship to every other element.

Her guitar tunings, her melodic choices, her lyrical structures, none of it was conventional and all of it was precise. She was also, by 1969, familiar with loss and with the particular experience of being a woman in the music world of the late 1960s, a world that had room for women as singers, but was less clear about what to do with women as artists who insisted on controlling what they made and how they made it.

She had navigated this world with a combination of talent and stubbornness that was not always visible from the outside, but that the people who worked with her or knew her well recognized as the infrastructure of everything she produced. She had not yet heard Janis Joplin sing in person. She had heard the records.

The records were not adequate preparation for what Janis produced live, as many people had discovered before Joni Mitchell discovered it. But they were enough to give Mitchell a frame of reference for the kind of voice and the kind of performance she was going to encounter if she and Janis ended up in the same room.

She had her own framework for what a voice was for. It was different from Janis’s framework. That evening, she was going to find out how different. Laurel Canyon in 1969 was one of those places and specific moments where the history of popular music concentrates itself for a few years before dispersing.

The Canyon, the set of hills above Los Angeles that had become home to a particular community of musicians and artists and writers, was not a movement in the organized sense. It was an accumulation. People arrived because other people were there and people stayed because the combination of cheap rent and creative proximity and the specific light of the California hills made it easier to work than almost anywhere else.

The musicians who lived there 1969 were making mostly acoustic music, singer-songwriter music, confessional music, the kind of music that emerged from the specific combination of folk tradition and California light and the aftermath of 1967. Joni Mitchell was one of the central figures of this world.

She had released Clouds in 1969, had been writing and recording with an intensity that was already beginning to produce work that critics and fellow musicians were describing as unlike anything that had been done before. Janis Joplin was not a Laurel Canyon figure in the same sense. She was in Los Angeles. She moved through some of the same social world, but she was not making the same kind of music and did not inhabit the same aesthetic territory.

Her music was louder, more physical, more obviously rooted in the blues and gospel traditions of the American South. Her stage presence was different. Her relationship to the audience was different. They were neighboring planets, same solar system, different orbits entirely. Until that one evening, what happened between them in that room has not been fully documented.

And this is appropriate because what happened was not a public event. It was two people in a room in a conversation that had the quality of most important conversations, which is that it is not until afterward, sometimes long afterward, that the people who were in it understand what it was. What is documented is the afterward.

What Joni Mitchell said, not in the days following the encounter, but in the years and decades following Janis Joplin’s death, about what she understood of Janis and what she felt about her. And what she felt about the specific situation of being a woman making serious music in the 1960s, when the people around you who were also women were making serious music in completely different ways.

She said Janis frightened her. Not in the way of a threat, not in the way of competition. Mitchell was not describing a competitive response. She was describing a recognition. The specific discomfort that comes from encountering someone who is doing the same fundamental thing you are doing from a direction so different that looking at it directly forces you to reckon with all the choices you have made in your own direction.

Janis was giving everything, all of it, in the room and on stage and in her life. Mitchell was protecting her interior life in order to be able to write from it. Neither approach was wrong, but seeing them side by side, even briefly, even in one party in 1969, was not entirely comfortable. The gathering where they met was the kind of informal event that the Los Angeles music world of 1969 produced constantly.

A party or an after-show or one of those evenings that begins as one thing and becomes another as the hours pass and the room fills with people who know each other from various overlapping contexts. These were the connective tissue of the scene. Not the official events, not the concerts or the sessions or the press appearances, but the rooms between those official events where the musicians who made the music actually encountered each other as people.

Joni Mitchell was at this gathering. So was Janis Joplin. At some point in the evening, the specific geometry of a room put them close enough to each other that conversation became the natural thing. They were not strangers to each other’s names. They were strangers to each other’s presence, the particular physical reality of another person that recordings and reputation cannot fully convey.

By multiple accounts, Janis talked. This is not surprising. Janis Joplin in social situations was not a quiet presence. She was funny and loud and generous and sometimes overwhelming. And her social self had the same quality of physical fullness as her stage self. The sense of someone who was not managing the volume of who they were, but simply being it at whatever volume it naturally reached.

She talked. She laughed. She held court in the specific way that people with her combination of charisma and need for connection hold court. Joni Mitchell listened. Joni Mitchell watched. And later, when people asked her about Janis Joplin, she chose not to say much. The comparison between Joni Mitchell and Janis Joplin is one that critics and music historians have been making for 50 years.

Usually in service of some argument about the two available modes of female seriousness in popular music. The controlled interior approach that Mitchell represented and the unbounded exterior approach that Joplin represented. The comparison has never quite been fair to either of them because it reduces two very different and very complete artistic practices to positions on a spectrum.

What is true is that they were aware of each other. That in the specific world of 1969 Los Angeles, two of the most genuinely serious women making music encountered each other and were in that encounter in the presence of a mirror that reflected something different from what either of them saw in any other mirror.

Joni saw someone who gave without reservation. Janis saw, presumably, someone who protected what she gave in order to be able to go on giving it. These are not opposing choices in any simple moral sense. They are choices made by specific people in specific situations with specific temperaments and specific histories and specific things they needed in order to do what they were doing.

Joni Mitchell needed to protect her interior in order to access it for her songs. Janis Joplin could not protect her interior even when she tried and she often tried. One of them survived the decade. One of them made Pearl and died at 27. The choices they made were not about safety. They were about what each of them was capable of being.

Janis Joplin died in October of 1970. Joni Mitchell was alive. She went on to make Blue in 1971, one of the most celebrated records in American music history, an album of extraordinary interior honesty and formal precision that became the standard against which confessional songwriting was subsequently measured. She continued to make records that challenged and surprised and occasionally baffled for decades.

In a career that was extraordinary for its length and for the consistency of its seriousness. She did not speak much about Janis in the years immediately following her death. This was not unusual. Many people who had been close to or adjacent to Janis Joplin went quiet about her in the years after October 1970 out of grief or out of the difficulty of finding language adequate to the loss or out of the particular silence that the music world produces around its dead, which is a different kind of silence from the silence it produces around the living. But Joni Mitchell did eventually speak about her. Years later in interviews and in conversations that became public, she talked about Janis in terms that were more careful and more complicated than the standard tributes that tend to follow a famous death. She did not describe Janis primarily as

a great singer, or as a great loss, or as a symbol of the 1960s, or of the specific tragedy of a talent extinguished too early. She described her as someone who had frightened her and impressed her, and shown her something about what it cost to do what Janis was doing. The cost was visible in every performance.

Joni saw it, and she never forgot what it looked like up close. Joni Mitchell, in one of the later interviews in which she discussed Janis Joplin, said something that has not been widely quoted, but that is one of the more precise things said about Janis by anyone who knew her, even briefly. She said that Janis sang the way she did because she had no choice.

That the thing that made the voice extraordinary was also the thing that made ordinary life difficult. That the complete absence of a filter between the interior and the exterior, the quality that made the performances what they were, was not a technique that could be turned off after the show. It was simply how Janis Joplin was made all the way through, which meant that the performances were what they were.

And also meant that the life that surrounded the performances was what it was, difficult, and sometimes very lonely, and requiring remedies that ultimately cost more than the thing they were remedying. Joni Mitchell saw this in one evening in a room in Los Angeles in 1969. She did not say it at the time.

There was no occasion to say it. And perhaps she did not yet have the language for it. She said it later, in retrospect, in the way that retrospect allows you to understand what you were seeing at the time without quite being able to articulate it. Two voices one evening a room in Los Angeles in 1969. One of them still here to tell about it.

Still making music. Still choosing her words carefully. The other one still audible every time anyone plays the record. Still completely, entirely there.