I had decided, after exchanging views with EA columnist Curmie, that I would let this one go, but alas, I cannot. I have waited a long while to try to talk myself out of posting, but I won the argument with myself. Or lost.
There are few TV productions that interest me less than the Grammys, even in the narrow category of awards shows, which I abandoned for good after the quality of Broadway fare approached rock bottom (no more Tonys for me) and the Academy Awards decided to prioritize infantile politics over movies (Bye-bye Oscars!). The Emmys were always boring and terrible, and the Grammys interested me not one bit, ever. After the fact, however, two events at this year’s Grammys broadcast two weeks ago pinged my ethics alarms. First was the spectacle of a triple winner being arrested at the ceremony and hauled off in cuffs: silly me, I thought the police only set out to arrest people in the most embarrassing manner possible on “Law and Order.” The second was superannuated stroke victim singer/song-writer Joni Mitchell singing at the Grammys for the first time and getting an ovation for staggering through a mournful rendition of her most famous composition, “Both Sides Now.”
Joni is justly celebrated songwriter, less so a singer, even in her prime. The way “Both Sides Now” is supposed to sound is exemplified in the version above, and indeed, Judy Collins had the top-selling recording of Joni’s song. (That has to be a bit annoying for a singer-songwriter: I always felt sorry for Mel Torme having to hear his “A Christmas Song” permanently identified with Nat King Cole.)
Here is how TIME described the performance:
“The song began as a piano playing through darkness, out of which Mitchell emerged, spotlit and facing backstage in a regal Victorian chair. Decked out in her signature beret and braids, and surrounded by crystal chandeliers, she used a bejeweled cane to keep time. And as she sang the opening lines, voice deeper now than that of the soprano who trilled its high notes on her 1969 album Clouds, her throne revolved until she was staring straight at the audience. Seated around Mitchell, like acolytes at her feet, were younger musicians—Brandi Carlile, Jacob Collier, Allison Russell, SistaStrings, Blake Mills, and Lucius—accompanying her with guitar, strings, woodwinds, and backing vocals. She didn’t strain her voice, but she sounded strong and clear…I heard echoes of Plato’s account of an embattled Socrates claiming to know only that he knew nothing. The more life teaches us, the more we realize how much we have left to learn. Mitchell’s wistful grin was contagious as she sang, “Well, something’s lost, but something’s gained/ In livin’ every day.” But it was “I really don’t know life at all,” delivered in stunning a cappella, that left much of the live audience (and, I’m certain, millions of us at home) in tears.
It’s rare for an awards show to give us a performance as moving as this. Mitchell reaffirmed the breathtaking power of a 56-year-old song that aged beautifully alongside its prescient writer. And—in the kind of moment that remains all but unprecedented in a pop music industry that too often values female performers’ lithe, young bodies over their thoughts and words—three generations of her admirers gave Mitchell the love and respect this elder stateswoman of folk so richly deserves.
Well, that’s one side, and apparently the official one. In contrast, I would compare it to the desperate mainstream media telling us the President Biden is tanned, rested and ready to run.
Joni did not sound “strong and clear.” I knew I was in trouble when I noticed that the time the video takes to run was over five minutes. The Collins version is a bit over three minutes, stylistic variations could legitimately add 30 seconds, but five minutes means that the song was either dragged out as a self-indulgent conceit, or that Joni was struggling to get through it.
Who knows why Mitchell decided to subject the audience and herself to this ordeal. Of course they stood and cheered: as Curmie noted when we discussed this vie email [I hope he doesn’t mind my quoting him from a private exchange: if so, I apologize),”If the response was to that rendition of the song, then there’s more than a hint of condescension, rather like praising the less-awful-than-usual 3rd grade choir because your kid/grandkid/niece/nephew/whatever was part of it.” He pointed out that the audience reaction was expressing its admiration for the woman and the artist, who is now 80 and in poor health. “Given her health problems of late, I think the audience was applauding her, and her tenacity, more than the rendition of a classic song from the ’60s.”
I agree. But this was a captive audience, forced to listen to a rendition that would only be tolerated under these very specific conditions. I called the performance “depressing” and “painful;” Curmie preferred “melancholy” and “harrowing.” (As usual, his adjectives are better than mine.) However, I passionately believe that declining singers, like athletes at the end of the line, shouldn’t inflict melancholy and harrowing on their fans. They have, I believe, an obligation to preserve the good memories, not create ugly ones that will blot out the light.
I’m sure Linda Ronstadt, who has retired from singing because Parkinson’s has made controlling her vocal chords impossible, could get a standing ovation if she croaked through “Long Long Time” at the Grammys. Linda, however, has the necessary respect for audiences and herself not to give them the opportunity. I am so happy that Fred Astaire didn’t decide to stumble through a dance routine at the Oscars when he got his honorary award after his dancing days were over.
Regular readers here know I want to see great performers in all fields know when to quit, and to do it while they still have a spark of greatness. Ted Williams hitting a home run in his last at bat (just like Roy Hobbs!) is my ideal. Frank Sinatra giving concerts when he could barely find and hold the notes in “My Way” is the other extreme. If you prefer a baseball example, I saw Mickey Mantle’s last at bat in Fenway Park. It was pathetic: Mickey could hardly walk, and struck out. Of course we gave him a standing ovation. But what we wanted to see was Mickey showing the world that he could still hit a fastball.
I have one more concession to make before I give you Joni. Being in the audience and seeing this performance live was a completely different experience from watching it on video. I, of all people, know that: I’m desperately fighting to stop the legal profession from accepting Zoom and videos as a substitute for face-to-face, live seminars, because the former are lazy and ineffective, while the latter are dynamic and pedagogically superior. Video doesn’t capture the intangibles like charisma, shared group emotion and energy. Maybe Joni’s lugubrious “Both Sides Now” really was boffo, but you had to be there.
Now here’s Joni…wait: now I see that Paramount has pulled the video since I watched it! Well…good? Here’s a snippet that survives—I guarantee it’s one of her strongest moments:
[WordPress tells me that I should tag this post “Tracy Chapman.”]
Ethics Alarms 
Perhaps the issue with her performance is that Judy Collin’s rendition was faster paced and uplifting while the poem crafted by Mitchell was originally conceived to be slower and more maudlin to reflect some failure as a human being.
Collin’s version was more marketable in the day than this version would have been. That may be because the two singers performed the song at different ends of the age spectrum. Judy was still young and vibrant and the words to a fledgling adult mean something completely different to someone coming face to face with losing youthful idealism than when sung by something at life’s end who is looking back over an entire lifetime.
I agree. How I started my correspondence with Jack: “Well, if there’s going to be a song to get this treatment, this is it. It’s a different song when sung by an 80 year old who’s lived a very full life and is now in ill health rather than by a beautiful 24 year old.”
Really, my issue, as I think I noted, is that Joni can’t sing or perform at a professional level any more, and thus shouldn’t sing in public at all.
Many years ago, I was asked to do a version of “Puff, the Magic Dragon” while a student played guitar. I can’t sing a lick; he knew that when he asked me to do it. So I basically recited the lyrics as a poem. Had Joni done something similar, would that have changed your opinion of the ethics of the performance?
Well, sure. The problem, as you alluded to in your email when you referred to Bob Dylan’s Nobel for poetry, is that most song lyrics, even relatively profound ones, lose so much without the music that they would fall flat as poetry. This is obvious with even the best Beatle songs, and I had another section of the post that I decided to omit discussing the weaknesses of the verses. After the first verse, which is clean, Joni defaults to what Sondheim called “approximations,” which he regarded (and I regard) as desperate and lazy.
Verse 1 is clean (hair/air/where) but Verse 2 rhymes “feel” and “real” with “ferris wheels”. Verse 3 continues that trend by rhyming “proud” and “loud” with “crowds,”—a Jerry Herman-style rhyme—and Joni gave up by Verse 3, with the awful strange/ changed/gained sequence, which is the kind of thing you got from Roger Miller, who just didn’t care about such things. The music greatly reduces the impact of the careless rhyming—I didn’t notice the problem until I had heard the song many times. Recited, however, without the emotional thwack of the melody, I think the song would lose too much.
Still, Joni could certainly have recited the poem well enough.
I saw Merle Haggard perform the year before he died. I wondered how he would sound. Well, not the same. However, rather than sing the songs the way he did in his youth, the changed the arrangements to make it so he could sing them. They weren’t the same, but they did sound OK. It was distinctively Merle Haggard singing his songs, but the songs were just somewhat different. I thought it was a good compromise. I just felt sorry for him that he still had to tour at that part of his life. He sang for 45 minutes and his son sang the rest of the concert. It was worth the $30/ticket for a concert in a 1000 seat theater with Merle Haggard. It would not have been worth it at $200/ticket or in a 20,000 seat basketball arena.
I only went to the concert because my wife asked me “Would you pay to see Merle Haggard in concert?” and I answered “Isn’t he dead?” I felt bad for thinking he was dead. I’m glad I went, though.