Final month, The New York Instances ran an interview with Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner that so damningly revealed sexist and racist prejudices in his considering that he was swiftly faraway from the board of the Rock and Roll Corridor of Fame, which he co-founded in 1983. Within the interview, Wenner shared his opinion that Joni Mitchell was “not a thinker of rock’n’roll,” therefore her exclusion—and that of any girls musicians or artists of colour—from his new guide of interviews with well-known white males. The irony is that Joni Mitchell not solely wrote peerless critiques of rock’n’roll—exposing the myths of “the star maker equipment behind the favored music” on “Free Man in Paris,” the sex-drugs-ego desperation of male rock stars on “Lady of Coronary heart and Thoughts,” and loads of others—but additionally gave among the biggest Rolling Stone interviews of all time.
A lot has been stated concerning the Wenner guide fiasco. The discourse helps contextualize one other event: the twenty fifth anniversary of the discharge of “Lead Balloon,” the fierce rock music Mitchell wrote in 1998 about an notorious confrontation with Wenner. “‘Kiss my ass!’ I stated/And I threw my drink/It got here a-trickling/Down his enterprise swimsuit,” Mitchell sang on the atmospheric Taming the Tiger, her third report of the ’90s following Evening Journey Dwelling and Turbulent Indigo, each broadly acquired then as her greatest for the reason that ’70s. “Have to be the Irish blood/Battle earlier than you suppose/Flip it down/You’ll be able to’t cowtow/You’ll be able to’t undo it/It’s his city/And that went down/Like a lead balloon.”
The incident allegedly occurred at an awards ceremony, although the main points have principally evaded the historic report. Mitchell had been inducted into the Rock and Roll Corridor of Fame in 1997, however she didn’t attend that ceremony. Nonetheless, the long-vexed relationship between Mitchell and Rolling Stone, hinging on Wenner’s flagrant misogyny, has been properly documented.
In 1971, Mitchell launched her homesick Blue basic, “California,” the place she sang of “numerous fairly individuals” in Los Angeles “studying Rolling Stone, studying Vogue,” and, as creator Joe Hagan put it in his Wenner biography Sticky Fingers, her references “[were] telling, capturing the glint of celeb and self-regard that now animated the youth tradition.” It wasn’t lengthy after, in February 1972, that the journal revealed a chart mapping an internet of males Mitchell had supposedly slept with. Below the auspices of “Hollywood’s Scorching 100,” the tabloid-fodder graphic included Mitchell’s title on the middle of a lipstick stain, with arrows pointing in the direction of the names of David Crosby, James Taylor, and Graham Nash—labeling her “Queen of El Lay.” The journal correspondent who drew up the chart, Jerry Hopkins, claimed to have executed it as a joke; Wenner insisted on publishing it. On the finish of the yr, Rolling Stone confirmed that its unapologetic sexism wasn’t an remoted oversight when it named Mitchell “Outdated Woman of the Yr.”
