The Hissing of Summer Lawns

A remarkable leap forward from Joni Mitchell

I don’t know why I chose to buy The Hissing of Summer Lawns, which recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, as my first Joni Mitchell album. She was an artist I knew very little about. I had heard of Blue, and seen it afforded classic status in some of the music books and magazines I read at the time, and I probably knew Big Yellow Taxi, but other than that Joni Mitchell was just a name to me. However, it was a name that I’d come across enough times to think I needed to find out something about her.

Stretching my mind back to the late 80s, or early 90s, when I first listened to this album, I have a vague, possible false, memory of taking the CD out of my local library. It must have made an impact because I definitely ended up owning a copy at some point, and right now I’m holding an original 1975 vinyl in my hand because it is a breathtaking record, unexpected and eclectic.

The cover

Designed by Mitchell herself, the album cover has five men carrying a snake through a suburb of Los Angeles. One of the houses shown in blue - allegedly Mitchell’s. My album had these men and the snake embossed on the cover, a nice tactile element. What I love is the simple yet imposing font of the title, filling the top of the album cover, all capitals, cool and stark.

The album

Joni Mitchell is a bizarrely pretentious artist. At her worst this results in strange and downright offensive outcomes, such as her persistent use of blackface (“When I see black men sitting, I have a tendency to go — like I nod like I’m a brother. I really feel an affinity because I have experienced being a black guy on several occasions.”¹) At her best she creates a forensic probe into the world, blending imaginative poetic ideas with striking and beautiful music. The Hissing of Summer Lawns does that: a study in loneliness, on male power, on artistic integrity and on the developing palette of her music. It is a wonderful success.

Side one

I had no idea what to expect when I first played this album. In France They Kiss On Main Street seemingly glides into existence, glissando bass and strumming open chords wrapped by warm keyboard sounds. The moment David Crosby, Graham Nash and James Taylor bring in their glorious harmonies for the “Rolling, rolling, rock ‘n’ rolling” refrain is captivating. The song has a marvellous, jazz-tinged guitar solo that slices through the word-heavy song. Joni’s jazz influenced period had begun: she sings with such breezy elegance, throwing out words with perfect timing. A superb opening track, I was pulled in immediately.

It is followed by the stunning drums of Burundi on The Jungle Line, where Mitchell more or less invents sampling, using that looped recording underneath her burping and groaning Moog; the song one of her expressive poems:

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

Edith and the Kingpin is an incredible story built around glacial chords and icy notes. Joni sings with a laid back eye, telling the story, a pimp controlling the world around him, a dark slash of danger hidden in the ringing jazz sounds. It’s a captivating piece of music, Joni’s voice rolling like a saxophone at times. I love how she takes a warm piece of radio jazz-rock and uses it to tell an oblique story of control.

On Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow we have gentle folk chords slowly and carefully ringing out. Joni sings with easy charm, I love that opening, “Don’t interrupt the sorrow, darn right,” and how you can bathe in the music, or listen carefully to the poetic words that set out a picture of female liberation. She knows the way men have tried to control her and others

He says, "Bring that bottle kindly and I'll pad your purse
I've got a head full of quandary and a mighty mighty mighty thirst"

but the fact she wraps it in such intricate and precise music is a joy to behold.

The side ends with Shades of Scarlett Conquering, delightful piano notes opening the song, a pop ballad, buoyed by Max Bennett’s perfect bass notes. It’s a cinematic tale, a Gone With The Wind poem but modernised and real. The deep piano notes that punctuate the song, letting it breathe, are quite incredible, given how simple they are. Joni’s voice rises and falls as she sings

Dressed in stolen clothes she stands
Cast iron and frail
With her impossibly gentle hands
And her blood-red fingernails

Leading to that spoken word ending: She says “A woman must have everything…” the music beating and breathing slowly as it falls to its conclusion.

Side two

Side two opens with the title track, and it is a remarkable piece of work. The Hissing of Summer Lawns sets the image of sprinkles running, watering lawns in a sweet piece of suburbia. The electric piano opens alongside a weaving bassline and Joni sings a dark tale of ownership. This man sees his wife as property, holding her in his “ranch house on the hill”. Joni creates such incredible imagery here

She patrols that fence of his to a Latin drum
And the hissing of summer lawns

but she locks it with a fantastic melody, especially on the falling notes of the chorus, her voice multi-tracked and harmonising with itself. It’s a dark tale because at the end she stays with this man, “It’s the lady’s choice", but we are left wondering why.

The Boho Dance is a piano pop ballad, a hit record sound describing the world of poets and artists without pretension but with poetic beauty. Mitchell often writes oblique, metaphorical lines, and they work because they are linked with such incredible music, making the most of some exceptional musicians.

The songs fades into the next, Harry’s House/Centerpiece. Harry flies into New York, checking into his hotel, dripping with power and decision making. The power imbalance is clear on this song

Battalions of paper-minded males
Talking commodities and sales
While at home their paper wives and paper kids
Paper the walls to keep their gut reactions hid

All the while the song is flooded with a shuffling jazz groove that simply and perfectly snaps along before it is broken by his memory, by him thinking back to a time when his wife was young and beautiful and he is transported, by a new song, to his past, treating his wife as an object. Joe Sample’s barroom jazz piano is fantastic here, drenched in blues. As we move back to the modern day, she breaks. She’s had enough of him, how he thinks of her and treats her, and the song ends with lines spitting out a story of escape.

Shining hair and shining skin
Shining as she reeled him in
To tell him like she did today
Just what he could do with Harry’s House
And Harry’s take home pay

It is one of her greatest artistic moments.

Sweet Bird is a gentle folk song with a quite exquisite melody. It’s just piano, guitars and her voice, Joni playing her open chords and Larry Carlton adding weeping slide guitar in the background. After the angst of the previous song it becomes a release, warm chords and harmonising voices, a hypnotic folk mantra before the final track.

Shadows and Light is a fascinating experiment, you can see how Prince was influenced by her work, even though this sounds like nothing he produced. The song is a wall of her voice, recorded cleverly so multiple voices ring in creating a wall of chords, a strange ARP-Farfisa synthesiser pushing out dark chords as she sings. The way she overdubs her voice so many times is quite incredible; her vocal control quite remarkable.

I was captivated by this album the first time I played it. As it reaches 50 years of age it is no less remarkable than it must have been in 1975. Please have a listen if you don’t know it, please play it again if you do.

Like what you read? Buy me a coffee!

1. The Cut: Joni Mitchell, Unyielding [2015] - https://www.thecut.com/2015/02/joni-mitchell-fashion-muse.html