David Frankel, John Kelly, Performing Artist, Art Forum, January 1997

A reviewer who puffs up an artwork with the claim that the piece is profound will only end up having to prove it, which is a steep hill to climb. Let the artwork be a performance in which a tall guy sings the songs of Joni Mitchell while wearing her clothes, and the hill becomes precipitous. Yet I did find John Kelly's Paved Paradise profound, or, at the very least, profoundly moving, so that's the slope we're skiing.

Part of the work's beauty is its lightheartedness: besides its basic premise, it's full of jokes. Yet it also has an unexpected emotional power, and this uncategorizable tone, of being simultaneously so slight yet so affecting, has a mysterious tightrope-walking fabulousness that is extremely hard to convey. The basic scheme is relatively easy: Kelly just sings Mitchell's songs, sticking as close to her originals as he can manage. His full high voice is for the most part up to her acrobatic melodies (it should be - he shared a vocal coach with Frederica von Stade), and his band deftly evokes her arrangements, even while whimsically impersonating two of her icons, Georgia O'Keeffe (pianist Zecca) and Vincent van Gogh (guitarist Mark McCarron). Kelly himself plays acoustic guitar and wears a blond wig, thereby raising for himself the long-locked female folksinger's perennial dilemma - where to put your hair? Needless to say, his solutions to this and related problems (like how to dance in heels) are both elegant and eloquent. His in-character between-song patter is likewise a witty evocation of both a person and a period: "We were talking about how the universe is there for you, kind of." Add a spare use of props and backdrops, and a costume change (from a layered hippie/grandma look for the evening's first half, covering roughly 1968-72, to a glittery sheath for the more cosmopolitan Mitchell period that began with 1974's Court and Spark), and that's the piece.

This is essentially a nostalgic cabaret turn, "John Kelly sings Joni Mitchell," of the kind that, if the songwriter were of the Cole Porter generation, say, and if the singer weren't a countertenor in drag, you might find at any number of uptown boites. But these kinds of qualifiers - it would be this but for being that, it would be x if it weren't also y - are embedded in the work's grain. In fact genre as opposed to gender is as good a way as any into Paved Paradise, because the work is so hard to place. One wants to call it parody; but the goal of parody is to kill off a style or voice, not to reanimate it. Perhaps, then, pastiche - what Fredric Jameson calls "speech in a dead language"? Mitchell's language would seem pretty dead, strong female songwriters having passed from being star-dust and golden to being doll parts; yet one of the paradoxes of Paved Paradise is that it makes you want to run out and buy all Joni's old records. What about camp, then? Several of Susan Sontag's well-known 1964 notes on the genre seem to fit: "So many of the objects prized by Camp taste are old-fashioned, out-of-date, demode." "Camp sees everything in quotation marks.  It's . . . not a woman, but a "woman." "All Camp . . . persons contain a large element of artifice." And so on. Yet where Sontag thinks "the whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious," Kelly admits to finding Mitchell's music "powerful," "compelling," even "noble."  And though he certainly shares ground with camp, he claims to be aiming elsewhere.

Perhaps, having gotten caught in these mutual incompatibilities, we might finally turn to gender studies, and to Marjorie Garber's discussion, in her book Vested Interests, of a "third term," i.e. transvestism, as putting an end to binary thinking. (It's interesting that Sontag views camp too as a species of "third," a "great creative sensibility" to put beside comedy and tragedy.)  For Garber, cross-dressing opens a "space of possibility," promoting "not just a category crisis of male and female, but the crisis of category itself."  This would neatly explain the unplaceability of Kelly's piece, and the break in expectation through which its emotion surfaces. Is it through the category crisis, as Kelly/Mitchell might say, that "the universe is there to provide us with a solution"?  It may be a clue that even the title Paved Paradise discovers a category crisis in one of Mitchell's most popular songs.

What Garber's somewhat solemn concept does not do, though, is foreshadow either the wit of Kelly's calibrated array of head tosses, hair flips, nasal snorts, and an upper-lip maneuver that benignly evokes Mitchell's own, or the simultaneous feeling that he has somehow restored her music's authenticity. For the remarkable thing about Kelly's Mitchell is that it is sometimes as moving as the original - or, rather, as the original was twenty-five years ago. A '90s guy can barely mouth the lyric of a song like "Circle Game" ("We're captured on a carousel of time . . ."), yet in the peculiar Paved Paradise parallax, he finds himself tearily muttering, "How true!" Through a sentimental pot-informed haze, he might have done something similar when he was fifteen, back when Mitchell was reverently referred to in record reviews as "the poetess," and when her songs seemed the embodiment of glamour and knowledge; but this would ordinarily be a repressed memory. Looking fondly across the gulf of gender at the exemplum of femininity that is Joni, Kelly somehow creates a space in which her music's meanings are up for grabs again, because so many of the categorical judgments that would erase them, and much else besides, are miraculously suspended.

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Stephen Holden, For The Love Of Joni, In Blond Wig And Bonnet, The New York Times, September 25, 1997

Shouts of "We love you, Joni!" periodically erupted through the cabaret at the Westbeth Theater Center during a recent performance of "Paved Paradise," John Kelly's alternately worshipful and uproarious tribute to Joni Mitchell. Mr. Kelly, a 39-year-old performance artist, has been doing impersonations of the flaxen-haired folk-pop diva for more than a decade. But "Paved Paradise," which plays at the theater through Saturday (151 Bank Street, West Village) is a full 90-minute show in which he sings more a dozen songs by the queen of confessional singer songwriters.

Although Mr. Kelly dons a blond wig and wears overlaying granny dresses to impersonate the star in her post-hippie folk-singing days, "Paved Paradise" is less a drag act than a surreal homage. Mr. Kelly is accompanied on keyboard and guitar by musicians done up as crude comic caricatures of two of Ms. Mitchell's muses, Georgia O'Keeffe (Zecca) and Vincent van Gogh (Mark McCarron, wearing a garish plastic ear patch).

To perform Ms. Mitchell's anthem "Woodstock," whose lyric is expanded to mention “Wigstock”, the New York City cross-dressing festival in which he has participated, Mr. Kelly puts on a ridiculous, oversize bonnet of painted sunflowers. "The Circle Game" is illustrated by the Dadaist image of a stuffed chicken whirling on a turntable.

Only someone who has absorbed every nuance of every Joni Mitchell recording could have come up with a vocal caricature as lovingly devastating as Mr. Kelly's. In song after song, he exaggerates her wide, wobbly vibrato, shading it into a shrill police-siren yodel that is at once laughable and eerily compelling.

All the songs in the show, which takes its name from lyrics from "Big Yellow Taxi," except one ("Night Ride Home"), are at least 20 years old, but the years haven't diminished their edgy emotional urgency. Mr. Kelly brought an especially piercing fervor to "Shadows and Light," "Blue," "Down to You" and "Amelia" that revealed these dense, introspective reflections as art songs seething with exquisitely concentrated song-poetry.

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Mary Talbot, Blue Notes: Kelly’s Joni: Hardly A Drag; His Inspired Take On Mitchell Makes For A Fine Night In The City, The Daily News, September 17, 1996

THERE'S ONE REALLY good reason (among others) to see the performance artist John Kelly in "Paved Paradise: The Songs of Joni Mitchell," running for two weeks at the Westbeth Theater Center: You've never gotten over Joni Mitchell.

For nearly two hours, Kelly, who has built an extraordinary career playing extreme artists, male and female, embodies Mitchell's persona and performs her songs just as she did. He has a countertenor that uncannily matches her voice, so it's possible to close your eyes during bars of "Blue" or "Night in the City" and get transported to an emotion-laden aural space eerily like the teenage bedroom, or dorm room, where you played her records over and over.

But there's more to this evening than a man in a long dress and Scandinavian-blond wig doing a hilarious pastiche of a Canadian singer. Kelly so invests himself in his impersonation that the pathos of Mitchell and the pathos of the actor fuse and become confused. Kelly illuminates all that is funny about Mitchell and her heyday (the grooviness, the earnestness), but he also channels all that is poignant. It is an homage that transcends conventional drag.

As with his previous incarnations, which included Orpheus, painter Egon Schiele and transvestite trapeze artist Barbette, Kelly nails Mitchell's physicality. He wraps his lips around his teeth for that weird Joni smile and skulks around the stage offering oddly funny patter between songs.

The attention to Joni detail is meticulous. The set is dressed with backdrops in imitation of Mitchell's bizarre primitivist paintings (remember the album covers for "Ladies of the Canyon" and "Hissing of Summer Lawns"?). There's a cafe table set with candles and a miniature Eiffel tower (a nod to "Free Man in Paris" and Joni's many travel songs).

His band completes the Mitchell universe: bassist and acoustic guitarist Mark McCarron performs as Vincent Van Gogh, under a painting of Kelly as Mitchell — as she appeared in her Van Gogh-esque self-portrait for her last album, "Turbulent Indigo." Musical director and keyboardist Zecca is Miss Georgia O'Keefe, accessorized with a squash-blossom necklace and long skirt.

Some of the arrangements are downright inspired. A rocking rendition of "Night in the City" and Kelly's signature version of "Woodstock" showed up the trio's original musicality. And on numbers like the beautifully sung "Amelia" or "River," the audience fell silent, clearly stunned by the pure Joni-ness of it all.

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James Hannaham, I’ll Be Your Mirror: John Kelly Gives Joni Mitchell A Drag Send-Up, Spin Magazine, 1996

"Dressing up like Joni Mitchell is my only brush with pop culture," performance artist John Kelly admits. He's used to portraying more esoteric personalities, like Jean Cocteau or the early 20th century painter Egon Schiele. But now he's crowning folk music's only true diva—and she's got the supremacy, failed relationships, and impossible temperament to prove it—with a bi-coastal off-Broadway homage called Paved Paradise: The Songs of Joni Mitchell.

     Kelly's journey to Joni began in 1984 when, invited to perform at the first Wigstock, the annual convergence of New York's sweetest transvestites, he realized that he could portray his older sisters' idol with his uncanny falsetto. It wasn't Sissy Spacek as Loretta Lynn, but he got Mitchell's California-isms to a T, and he can hit a high D-sharp. Kelly's act, which finds him strumming a guitar, dressed in a long blond wig and a hat made of sunflowers, is now a full two-hour concert, backed up by a bassist dressed as Vincent van Gogh and a drumming drag Georgia O'Keeffe.

     Paved Paradise converges with the Mitchellmania already in progress. She just released two retrospective albums, Hits and Misses; is negotiating a major book deal; and was recently inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The two have yet to meet, though Mitchell has said she may see the show soon, a possibility intimidating to Kelly. "I'd prefer not to see her in the audience. Give me a break, it would be like sculpting for Miichelangelo" .  Still and all, been known to sign her autograph on request. "I don't know what what her signature's really looks like ' he remarks, "but I have an idea she dots her I's with a circle."

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Nicole Lewis, The Man Who Would Be Joni: John Kelly Makes Himself A Homage, The Washington Post, January 2000

John Kelly has a thing for Joni Mitchell. Since 1984 he has been performing "Paved Paradise," his musical homage to the veteran singer-song-writer.  For the show, Kelly dresses in drag, complete with flowing, flaxen wig, and he performs Mitchell’s songs straight, with a little patter in between. "It's really a concert, but it is scripted to a degree," he says. Kelly strums a guitar and dulcimer and shares the stage with a pair of musicians who call themselves Vincent Van Gogh and Georgia O'Keeffe, nods to two of Mitchell’s inspirations.

A singer-actor-painter-performance artist, Kelly, 40, has carved out a niche creating solo and ensemble multimedia works. Many of them focus on one person; a previous Kelly performance piece was devoted to the Austrian painter Egon Schiele.

With Mitchell he saw another chance to embody someone he admired as an artist. " 'Amelia' is one of the great art songs of the 20th century," Kelly says of a composition from her 1976 album "Hejira." "All these chicks that are out there now, they are all children of Joni." Even after hundreds of performances, he says he's not sick of Mitchell's songs.

Kelly grew up in Jersey City listening to his older sisters play her albums and he became a fan. "It was my first exposure to lyricism and poetry and sexy songs about love and traveling," he says. Years later, when he debuted "Paved Paradise," Kelly did it without benefit of singing lessons; he just listened to Mitchell's songs over and over and over to get the hang of them.

A few years ago at Fez, a Manhattan club, she came to one of Kelly’s performances. "I was braced for a lampooning and I didn't expect to be so touched," Mitchell told the New York Times soon after. "I cried in two places." At the end of the show, she presented Kelly with a dulcimer. Since then, Kelly and Mitchell have crossed paths sporadically. He attended her birthday party shortly after the Fez concert and last summer he participated in "Joni's Jazz in Central Park" along with musicians Chaka Khan and Duncan Sheik.  For that event, he says, he performed "as a boy.” 

Kelly had an active imagination as a child, and as he grew older had a hard time deciding whether he wanted to dance, paint, sing or act. After stints with American Ballet Theatre and Parsons School of Design, he decided to do all of them, together in some shows, separately in others.

"It's not that I'm an art slut and always have to prove something to myself by doing something new," Kelly says. "It's just that it's all related."

He started out performing in New York clubs like the Pyramid, eventually graduating to La MaMa and the Kitchen, venues known for encouraging offbeat artists. These days Kelly has a supporting role in a musical version of James Joyce's "The Dead" on Broadway, a first for him. "Broadway was never a goal of mine, but it certainly legitimizes me in people's eyes even though I've been working for twenty-odd years," he says.

But whenever he's low on funds, he dusts off "Paved Paradise." Last summer he performed it in Provincetown, Mass., for two months.  Apparently there are more than enough Mitchell fans out there who want to sing along with Kelly's falsetto on "Both Sides Now" to keep him busy.

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Greg Varner, Both Sides Now: John Kelly’s Worships A Diva By Inhabiting Her Persona, The Washington Blade, January 14, 2000

     When John Kelly sings his favorite Joni Mitchell songs, he's not just noodling in the shower. His performance piece. Paved Paradise, in which he dresses and sings as Mitchell, is inspired by his love for the diva and her music.

"It's as much my admiration for her music as it is for her persona," Kelly says. "I wanted to inhabit her persona, and maybe that's the ultimate diva worship."

His older sisters introduced him to Mitchell's music when he was a child, Kelly remembers, and it was only recently that he first saw Mitchell perform live.

"It was really the words and music I knew before I knew the visuals that went with it," Kelly says, "so I kind of concocted my own visual version of her to go with my own singing and playing of her music."

He doesn't really look that much like her, Kelly concedes, but the long blonde wig and the domes help him conjure Mitchell with his singing — his countertenor recalls her clear soprano —kand his musicianship.

     "I'm trying to sing the music as well as I can," Kelly explains. "I think especially in the higher register, my voice sounds like hers."

Kelly had a lesson in playing me dulcimer from Mitchell herself, who saw his show and pronounced herself moved by it.

"I was braced for a lampooning," she told The New York Times, "and I didn't expect to be so touched." Briefly, Mitchell added, she wondered whether she had died and come back to watch scenes from her own life.

He has a little fun with the "hippie chick" persona Mitchell projected early in her career, Kelly acknowledges, and the fact that he's a man playing a woman has its amusing aspects — "Certainly, drag pushes buttons and makes people laugh," he says — but the Joni in his show is not a caricature.

     "Caricature is not a safe word for me," Kelly explains, "because it implies a joke, and a two-dimensional idea. I really try to have it be a flesh-and-blood experience."  Kelly has been performing as Mitchell since 1984, when he appeared at the first Wigstock drag festival. He has mastered a large repertoire of Mitchell’s songs — more man he can present in a single evening — though he concentrates on her earlier work.  “That's when she was singing in her higher voice," he explains, "and that's what I can do and like to do — and also because her guitar tunings got more complex [later]."

Mitchell is one of a handful of characters Kelly represents in drag. Others are Mona Lisa and Barbette, a transvestite trapeze artist—"She came from Texas and became the rage of Paris in the 1920s," Kelly explains — as well as a fictional alter ego, Dagmar Onassis.  "I like to do drag as theater," Kelly says. He is currently playing a straight role in the Broadway musical. The Dead, based on James Joyce's story.

Aside from creating a vivid theatrical experience, Kelly hopes that Paved Paradise does its part to offset me insipid images of drag offered up in popular entertainment like the Robin Williams film Mrs. Doubtfire.

"Drag has come out of the closet in Mrs. Doubtfire and these other banal stories where these heterosexual men have to do drag to see their children," Kelly complains. "The audience wants to be titillated by drag, but at the same time not own it as a regular part of their community. Drag in general has been accepted in our culture [when it is worn by characters such] as the court jester, or the clown, or characters of a dubious sexuality, like Pee-Wee Herman or Boy George. They're always accepted as long as they don*t have a diCK, i.e., [represent] a threat. And that always seemed a little boring to me.

"If there is any threat [in Paved Paradise], it would be in the wielding of craft — that might be a surprise for some people. I'm not trying to pat myself on the back, but I play the guitar and the dulcimer, [and] I'm trying to take it [to] a different place with integrity."

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D. C. Culbertson, Dolls And Divas, The Washington Alternative, January 2000

     New York-based performer John Kelly has created a wide variety of what he calls "dance-theater pieces" in which he's played everyone from artist Egon Schiele to St. Sebastian. Perhaps the most ambitious of his pieces, however, is Paved Paradise, a tribute to Joni Mitchell, in which Kelly not only impersonates Mitchell in appearance and voice, but performs 20 of her songs in their original keys, accompanying himself on guitar and dulcimer.

     "I always wanted to sing [Joni's] music," says Kelly, who first impersonated Mitehell at New York's Wgstock Festival in 1984. The idea of doing a whole performance piece about the rock icon finally took concrete form in 1987. The show was expanded and revamped in 1993, and about three years later Kelly added his guitar—which he hadn't touched since he was a teenager—to the act as well.

     Kelly's backup musicians, Mark McCarron and Zecca Esquibel, are costumed as Vincent van Gogh and Georgia O'Keeffe, which he feels is appropriate since Mitchell knew O'Keeffe and, according to Kelly, is "obsessed" with Van Gogh. (Incidentally, McCarron/Van Gogh wears a T-shirt with his painting Starry Night on it and has a bandaged ear in the second act.)

     Music is only one of Kelly's many talents, and one he came to fairly recently. Originally trained as a dancer and visual artist, he has almost always incorporated music in his pieces—one, for example, featured him lip-synching to Maria Callas recordings while impersonating the legendary diva in what he calls "punk drag." Yet Kelly didn't start singing on stage for real until the early 1980s and didn't even have his first voice lesson until around 1988.

     Nevertheless, he has performed a series of solo vocal recitals at venues such as Carnegie Hall and directed several opera and music theater productions. He is currently about to open in a musical version of James Joyce's The Dead on Broadway, and gay composer David del Tredici just finished a song cycle based on his poems.

In addition, Kelly's working on a series of self-portraits based on the characters he's played. All his efforts have not gone unnoticed by the industry; to date he's won two Bessies, two Obies, a Guggenheim Fellowship and five Choreographer Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

And what do Joni's fans think of the show? "People seem to like it for sure," says Kelly, but adds, "the one

important person is Joni herself," who saw the show when it played at New York's Fez nightclub and loved it.

"I felt like Huck Finn attending his own funeral or Jimmy Stewart in that movie where the angel walks him back through his life," she told the New York Times. "I was, braced for a lampooning, and I didn't expect to be so touched. I cried in two places." In fact, she was so affected she invited Kelly to her birthday party the following night and gave him a dulcimer, which he's used in the piece ever since.

*

Paul Power, By The Time He Got To Wigstock, The Irish Times, Dublin,  June 12, 2001

You might expect to hear John Kelly playing Joni Mitchell on Mystery Train on RTE Radio 1. But you wouldn't expect to see him on stage in a long blond wig and navy 1970s gown, singing the songs of Joni Mitchell. Meet the other John Kelly, a New York-based artist who performs Mitchell's songs in Paved Paradise, a show that involves an uncanny impersonation of the legendary singer-songwriter.

The songs he performs, which will stir the folk embers of those who still have the albums at home, are taken from Mitchell's first eight LPs, cover- ' ing the period from 1968 to 1975, and include Night In The City from her eponymous debut album. Circle Game and Conversation from Ladies Of The Canyon, Little Green and This Flight Tonight from Blue and Shadows And Light from The Hissing Of Summer Lawns.

But Paved Paradise is more than a ' curio piece, and much more than the dime-a-dozen drag and lip-synching shows that have become almost a performance sub-genre in New York. What Kelly does isn't parody but what he describes as a performance, straddling pathos and irony. His playing, intonation and vocal nuances are so remarkably assured that you have to remind yourself that you're listening to a 41-year-old man in drag.

"When people see a 'drag' show, which to me is a theatre piece, I don't think they expect the level of craft that's involved."

Mitchell has seen Kelly perform three times. A couple of years ago, when she turned up at Fez, an eclectic venue beneath me trendy Time Cafe, she laughed, she cried, she clapped, she sang. She would have bought the T-shirt had Kelly been selling them.

"The whole place knew she was there at the back, so the electricity that night was palpable. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done. My hands were shaking. It was very trippy and very difficult and, ultimately, a great success."

Mitchell was full of admiration and encouragement for Kelly, giving him a dulcimer that he now uses on A Case Of You.   

Although Kelly has an Irish passport - his grandparents are from Mayo - this is his first trip to Ireland. He took the name of his show from the lyrics of the 1970’s song Big Yellow Taxi-; "They paved paradise / and put up a I parking lot /with a pink hotel, a boutique/and a swinging hot spot" -which lamented the loss of one of Mitchell's cherished quarters in Los Angeles. "Like Temple Bar," jokes Kelly.

Kelly grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey, which even then was a cultural wasteland, with precious little exposure to the voluminous artistic references that underpin his work.

He spent a while at art school before dropping out, enrolled in ballet academies, moved in the late 1970s to the East Village - the crucible of artistic activity in New York - and, still painting and sketching, started performing at venues such as the Anvil, the Pyramid and the Mud Club.

So what was New York like back then? "Drugs and madness and drag and punk. It was still quite irreverent to do drag then. It was punk drag, it wasn't out of the closet, and generally the clubs were at that time the most fascinating, because there was a genuine bohemian culture that hadn't been co-opted by things like [the stage musical] Rent or the mass media. The artistic East Village had a short shelf life, although for a while it was an amazing place.

"But it's a typical thing: it happened on the Left Bank in Paris. Artists move in there, do their thing, make it interesting, then the real-estate people look at it and say, "Aha, let's clean it up a bit," and then it's safe, so all the people with money -and those people who want to dabble in it but not get their hands too dirty -can live there and be a part of it without the responsibilities that go with it."

Paved Paradise is one of several shows that Kelly has performed based on cultural figures; the others centred on Mona Lisa, Maria Callas, Egon Schiele and Barbette, the transvestite, trapeze-artist muse of Jean Cocteau.

"When I started doing performance work, I did a piece on Schiele, and for me that was a way of merging my past as a dancer with my past as a visual artist," he says.

"Callas for me represented opera, and she and Schiele were probably the two main influences in my life: his draftsmanship and her artistry.  Kelly invented a character for one of his shows, Dagmar Onassis - Callas's daughter. He also sports an old-fashioned tattoo on his right arm, the kind sailors would come home with from Manila: "Dagmar" in a scroll unfurled across a faded red heart.

What drew Kelly to Mitchell wasn't a tragic life or lifestyle, which is often the case for drag performers - think Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, even Patsy Cline. This was about the words and music, which he first heard when his older sister played the records at home.

"If was my first exposure to poetry, to a certain kind of lyricism: exotic, sexy songs about travelling, soliliquy and internal dialogue, relationships. It was about loving that music and wanting to sing it."

Kelly first performed Mitchell's songs in drag in 1984 at Wigstock, an East Village riposte to Woodstock and the perfect launch pad for his renamed rendition of Mitchell's lovefest anthem Woodstock.

There's a simple reason for Kelly's concentration on Mitchell's early years: she worked in different guitar tunings, the "weird chords" that some other contemporaries found indecipherable, and the tunings became more layered and complicated with each album.

So Kelly, who plays guitar and dulcimer, has two differently tuned guitars on stage - one for the hippy Joni, theother for the Los Angeles glam Joni - and gets much mileage from them.

The one costume change, from a "hippyish frock" to "a dark-blue, more glam, shimmery dress", reflects me progression, too. Zecca Esquibel, a pianist dressed as the Mitchell idol Georgia O'Keeffe, accompanies Kelly for the performance.

Kelly has also performed as Bartel D'Arcy in the recent Broadway version of The Dead, and done other physical-theatre performances, but is working on a show of Mitchell's 1970s and 1980s music that he may have ready later in the year. Although he's wary of being pigeonholed as the Joni Mitchell guy, the shows sell out and he still enjoys them.

"I really do try to sing and play the music as well as I can and, obviously, there are some funny moments in there. But to get people to forget that it happens to be a dude in a dress and focus on the music, and hear the music through a different lens, that's the job I've set for myself"

Paved Paradise is at Meeting House Square, Temple Bar, Dublin, tomorrow, Thursday and Friday at 10 p.m.,

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Frank H. Jump, “Joni Mitchell: The New York Times”, December 5, 1996

The much awaited piece on Ms. Joni Mitchell by the sapient but often acerbic performance critic, Stephen Holden, was finally out on the press this last Sunday, December 1st in the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times. The article offers a stunning half-page photo of Mitchell taken last year by Greg Heisler. The shot is beautifully back-lit with Ms. Mitchell holding a paper parasol, standing transfixed in a Japanese garden. On a continuing page there is an additional shot of her taken in concert by David Gahr, circa 1969.

In his article, Holden chronicles Ms. Mitchell's legendary attendance at the final evening of John Kelly's "Paved Paradise- The Songs of Joni Mitchell" at the East Village niteclub Fez earlier this past November. Holden describes Mitchell's experience of seeing Kelly's loving and tenderly comic homage as "eerie." He quotes her saying "I felt like Huck Finn attending his own funeral or Jimmy Stewart in that movie where the angel walks him back through his life." She also said, "I was braced for a lampooning and I didn't expect to be so touched." She said she cried during Kelly's riveting rendition of "Shadows and Light."  After Kelly finished "Shadows," I remember her jumping to her feet and cheering.  It was an incredible moment for all of us involved in the production as I'm sure it was for everyone else in the audience, all of whom seemed so tuned in and turned on to her being there.

After Kelly's flawless performance, Mitchell and her friend Melanie presented him with a dulcimer backstage. To Kelly's delight, Mitchell played a few bars of "A Case of You" before bestowing it upon him. Holden claims Mitchell gave Kelly the dulcimer at her birthday celebration a few days later but that is not the case (the dulcimer was actually a gift from Melanie and Joni's art director Robbie Cavolina). Joan and John ate and gabbed and had a great time (I'm so jealous) with her beau Don Freed and long time friend Chaka Khan. After enjoying Kelly's performance so fully, Don Freed invited John to come and of course he wouldn't pass up the opportunity to spend some quality time with his mentor.

Mitchell is described by Holden as being one of the elder statesmen of rock & roll. Holden quotes Kelly saying Mitchell "is like our Franz Schubert or Robert Schumann, a great art-song writer but working through the lens of popular culture....her songwriting is infinitely more interesting than any of the serious classical composers I've heard in the past 20 years, aside from Leonard Bernstein." This has been a year full of awards and long deserved recognition for Mitchell, but Holden describes Kelly's homage to her to be "probably the most heartfelt." Ms. Mitchell truly seemed to have had a wonderful time that evening.

Holden goes on further to illustrate the many musical transitions Mitchell made in her illustrious career. I remember when I bought "The Hissing of Summer Lawns" in 1975 when I was just fifteen. I was breathless after hearing "The Jungle Line" for the first time. I went out and bought every recording I could find of the Burundi drummers. Joan introduced me to many other different styles and nuances in music, as she did many other singer/songwriters from Sting to Annie Lennox. Unfortunately the critics (an often rigid and bitter group of wannabes) were not very accepting of her experimentations and she lost some of her airplay because of it.  By "Mingus," she was most certainly blacklisted by radio disc-jockeys.

Often taken out of context by interviewers, Mitchell's comments on contemporary artists have recently been hurtful. As Holden reports, Details magazine published an interview where Mitchell criticized Alanis Morissette's work and she later found out that Morissette cried after reading it.  Mitchell told Holden, "I would rather tell you what I'm listening to than I would dis people....I'm listening to Debussy, the Sons of the Pioneers, who backed up Roy Rogers, and to some Stravinsky I'd overlooked."

Holden reports that we have several literary venues of Ms. Mitchell's to which we can look forward. One is a volume of her song lyrics, another a coffee table book chronicling her painting accomplishments and an autobiography that will focus more on the synchronistic and mystical aspects of her life as opposed to the tabloid gossip about which we all could live without hearing. Mitchell told Holden, "I want to start with a phase of my life that covers a four-year span and embraces my meeting with Charles Mingus and Georgia O'Keeffe." Holden says Mitchell spoke of seeing herself writing several memoirs cataloguing different phases of her life.

Mitchell recalls the period between "Blue" and "Don Juan's Reckless Daughter"- her so-called "confessional" phase- as being the unhappiest period of her life. It was, Mitchell coined, her "descent." She felt transparent and vulnerable. She could see right through people as well. Mitchell then began her search of self by reading all she could about psychology and spirituality. I imagine her meeting with Charles Mingus, who she once said had a keen bullshit detector himself, was a breath of fresh air. It was her collaboration with Mingus and her synchronistic visitation with O'Keeffe that may have provided her with the psychic stimulation she needed to continue her art without any preoccupation with the expectations from the bloodsucking record industry.

She says she prefers the no-nonsense lyrical poetry of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen to the pretentious and distant "suicide chic" of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, to whom which she is often compared. Rather than calling herself confessional, she prefers the term "penitence of spirit." This can be evidenced in her recent lyrics as well, such as in "The Sire of Sorrows: Job's Sad Song" from “Turbulent Indigo”:

"Was it the sins of my youth? What have I done to you, that you make everything I dread and everything I fear come true?"

Mitchell has recently become very excited by a newly developed MIDI guitar (the Roland VG-8) that allows her to store over 55 different guitar tunings she uses. She is two-thirds done with recording her latest album that features this new guitar. She debuted this computerized guitar in New Orleans last year at the Jazz Festival.

The conclusion of the interview ends wistfully, but hopeful about being reunited with her only daughter she gave up for adoption when she was a young art student. Mitchell explains that her fame has made this search somewhat problematic since there are "a lot of wannabes" out there. She said it would be nice if her daughter could meet her real grandparents while they are still alive.

I definitely identify with Mitchell's desire to meet her daughter. One of the most profound experiences of my life was meeting my biological father when I was twenty-two. He died only six years after I met him, but we had a really great bond and I can honestly say that he was my friend. He never judged me and I never laid any guilt on him. In an attempt to show me how accepting he was of me, on our first meeting, he took me to a local gay bar in Hallandale, Florida where we watched a drag performance. He particularly liked this guy who "did" Bette Midler. I'm sure if he were alive today, he would have been thrilled to have seen John Kelly do Joni Mitchell for Joni Mitchell. I can only hope for Joan that when she finally meets her daughter, it will be as exhilarating and positive an experience for both of them as it was for me and my father. Joan, you deserve it. It will happen.

When asked by Holden if she missed those days when she was idolized as "pop's beautiful, truth-telling goddess, the queen of L.A., she quietly replied "I slept through that queendom." When asked if she was even aware of her status then she said, "It's hard to say. It's better not to think about it." Recently on the Rosie O'Donnell show, Rosie asked if she is getting used to all of this adulation and she laughingly replied while sucking on a Ricola candy, "I'm getting used to my strokes."