Joni Mitchell: "Don Juan's Reckless Daughter" Song by Song Thread

Thank you once again to all of the wonderful, insightful posters who brought their thoughts to our Hejira thread. Today, we continue the journey with Joni Mitchell's ninth studio album Don Juan's Reckless Daughter.

Previous threads in this series
Joni Mitchell: "Hejira" Song by Song Thread
Joni Mitchell: "The Hissing of Summer Lawns" Song by Song Thread
Joni Mitchell: "Court and Spark" Song by Song Thread
Joni Mitchell: "For the Roses" Song by Song Thread
Joni Mitchell: "Blue" Song by Song Thread
Joni Mitchell: "Ladies of the Canyon" Song by Song Thread
Joni Mitchell: "Clouds" Song by Song Thread
Joni Mitchell: "Song to a Seagull" Song by Song Thread

Don Juan's Reckless Daughter


Album Notes
Released December 1977

(Players on individual songs will be listed with each track)

Recorded at A&M Studios in Hollywood by Henry Lewy and Steve Katz
Orchestra recorded at Columbia Studio C in New York by Frank Laico
Additional recording at Basing Street Studio in London
Assistant Engineer Robert Ash
Mastered at A&M Studios, Los Angeles by Bernie Grundman

Jaco Pastorius appears courtesy of Epic Records and Columby Productions, Inc.
Wayne Shorter appears courtesy of Columbia Records
John Guerin appears courtesy of Caribou Records and the L.A. Express

Chaka Khan appears courtesy of ABC Records, Inc.
Airto appears courtesy of Warner Bros. Records, Inc.

All songs written and composed by Joni Mitchell
Except "The Tenth World" written by Joni Mitchell, Don Alias, Manolo Badrena, Alejandro Acuna, Airto and Jaco Pastorius

All songs © 1977 Crazy Crow Music BMI except:
Jericho © 1974 and 1977 Crazy Crow Music BMI
Don Juan's Reckless Daughter © 1976 and 1977 Crazy Crow Music BMI
Dreamland © 1975 and 1977 Crazy Crow Music BMI
Talk To Me © 1976 and 1977 Crazy Crow Music BMI
Used by permission All rights reserved
Personal Management Elliot Roberts
Design Joni Mitchell
Art Direction Glen Christensen
Photography Norman Seeff
Photoprints Keith Williamson
Thanks to Krims for part of the magic



Don Juan's Reckless Daughter is a 1977 double album by Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell. It is unusual for its experimental style, expanding even further on the jazz fusion sound of Mitchell's Hejira from the year before. Mitchell has stated that, close to completing her contract with Asylum Records, she allowed this album to be looser than anything she'd done previously.[8]

Don Juan's Reckless Daughter was released in December 1977 to mixed reviews, but managed to peak at #25 on the Billboardcharts and attained gold record status within three months.

Background and Content
Much of the album is experimental, but especially so are: "Overture," played with six simultaneous guitars, some in different tunings from others, with vocal echo effects; "The Tenth World," an extended-length instrumental of Latin percussion; and "Dreamland," which features only percussion and voices (including Chaka Khan).

Most experimental of all is "Paprika Plains," a 16-minute song played on improvised piano and arranged with a full orchestra; it takes up all of Side 2. In it, Mitchell narrates a first-person description of a late-night gathering in a bar frequented by Indigenous peoples of Canada, touching on themes of hopelessness and alcoholism. At one point in the narrative, the narrator leaves the setting to watch the rain and enters into a dreamstate, and the lyrics – printed in the liner notes but not sung – become a mixture of references to innocent childhood memories, a nuclear explosion and an expressionless tribe gazing upon the dreamer. The narrator returns inside after the rain passes. In speaking to Anthony Fawcett about working on "Paprika Plains," Mitchell said:

"The Improvisational, the spontaneous aspect of this creative process – still as a poet – is to set words to the music, which is a hammer and chisel process. Sometimes it flows, but a lot of times it's blocked by concept. And if you're writing free consciousness – which I do once in a while just to remind myself that I can, you know, because I'm fitting little pieces of this puzzle together – the end result must flow as if it was spoken for the first time."[8]

Don Juan's Reckless Daughter attracted contributions from prominent jazz musicians, including four current members of Weather Report – Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter, Manolo Badrena, and Alex Acuña; all of whom would later become frequent collaborators with Mitchell.

Artwork
The album jacket is a photomontage and includes three photographs of Mitchell. In the foreground she is in blackface as her "reputed alter ego, a black hipster named Art Nouveau."[9][10]

Contemporary Reviews
"Joni Mitchell's new two-disk album, DON JUAN'S RECKLESS DAUGHTER, is not likely to appeal to the "You Light Up My Life" crowd. It may not even appeal to the broader critical and public audience that enjoyed Miss Mitchell's COURT AND SPARK and HEJIRA albums. But these are still a fascinating pair of records.

The reasons some people may hesitate is that Miss Mitchell seems even less concerned here with commercial obviousness and even more self-involved than usual. In that respect the new set is more like her HISSING OF SUMMER LAWNS-which seems In retrospect to have been seriously under valued when it came out two years ago -than her other recent disks. But it is still mightily interesting. The interest starts with the cover and inner-sleeve art, designed as usual by Miss Mitchell. The art work contains several motifs: basically flat horizon, doves, a young boy. cartoon balloons and Miss Mitchell in three guises: as a black dandy. a Stevie Nicks-ish blonde and a small girl in Indian costume.

Most of these themes are picked up in the verse. As ever, her principal concerns are love and her own painful efforts to reach deeply into others. Mixed in are memories of her childhood and her continued fascination for black people, with several of the songs skating back and forth between a smoky, sophisticated present and her innocent, dreaming past."
New York Times, December 1977

"Joni Mitchell's mistakes arise out of sensitivities - despite her constant and unabashed parading of her own famous sensitivity.

In one song, Otis And Marlena, she draws yet another stereotyped picture of numbskull vacationers in Miami, "the celebrated dump/Sleazing by the sea." There they are, she sings, dreaming "of golden beauty," lost in their tawdry dreamland while "Muslims stick up Washington" (a reference, no doubt, to the Hanafi Muslim hostage drama in Washington last March). The piece is followed directly by an instrumental called The 10th World, an almost seven-minute-long percussion piece with its roots in West Indian rhythm, which is there to tell you that Ms. Mitchell is far more sensitive to the Muslims in Washington than she is to the schnooks in Miami.

There's little on Don Juan's Reckless Daughter to like for even musical reasons. She uses several members of Weather Report on some of the cuts, but only bassist Jaco Pastorius has anything solid to offer. Michael Gibbs' orchestrations, particularly on Paprika Plains, are sensitive and appropriately atmospheric to correspond with the singer's word-painting. Other than that, even the music is self-indulgent."
Toronto Star, December 1977

"She didn't write another "Clouds" for this album. Very few songs could come even close to that one. But she maintained a level of excellence in her lyrics while expanding herself beyond the limits of the cliché slot she's been pushed into.

This is a beautiful record, and for once it's not dependent on a listener's perception of Joni Mitchell as a somewhat battered queen.

It plain cooks too."
Knight-Ridder Newspapers, January 1978

"Don Juan's Reckless Daughter is a double album that should have been a single album. It's sapped of emotion and full of ideas that should have remained whims, melodies that should have been tiffs, songs that should have been fragments. At its worst, it is a painful illustration of how different the standards that govern poetry and song lyrics can be, and an indication that Joni Mitchell's talents, stretched here to the breaking point, lend themselves much more naturally to the latter form. Her writing works best when it's compact, yet the record's expansive mood farces her to belabor, in the title song, the precious contrast between a snake (or a train, as well as the author's baser instincts) and an eagle (or an airplane, plus a longing for "clarity") for nearly seven minutes. Mitchell's music has evolved into a kind of neutral background, rolling on endlessly in either a languid spirit ("Jericho") or a nervous one ("Dreamland"). Somehow, she has chosen to abandon melody at a time when she needs it urgently."
Rolling Stone, March 1978

"The significance of this album is easily explained: it's ambitious as hell; a double-record set of staggering depth, complexity and musical scope from one of the most talented artists working in pop music. It is also the album which will reveal Joni Mitchell's "singer/songwriter" tag to be shamefully inadequate. To those appellations, we most add "composer" and 'musician": if you've ever thought that "Both Sides Now" and "Help Me" are what Joni Mitchell is all about, listen to her guitar work on "Cotton Avenue" or "The Silky Veils of Ardor," her piano playing on the epic sixteen minute "Paprika Plains" and the intelligence behind the arrangements of the above tunes and "Dreamland." There is so much on this record it's going to take months perhaps even years to absorb it all. (If that sounds ridiculous, think back on how long it took you to digest Dylan's BLONDE ON BLONDE or even the Beatles' WHITE ALBUM.)"
BAM, January 1978

 

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As always, we open things up today for discussion of the album as a whole as well as the first track:

Track 1: "Overture/Cotton Avenue"


COTTON AVENUE
Guitar and Vocal Joni Mitchell
Bass Jaco Pastorius
Drums John Guerin

Lyrical Excerpt:
A red sun came rolling down a grey sky
And the frogs and dogs and night birds then
Started up singing sweet country lullaby
You see that patch of city lights
Somewhere in there's Cotton Avenue
That's where I'm going to take myself tonight
With a spit shine on my dancing shoes

Complete Lyrics at Joni Mitchell's Official Site

 

Don Juan's Reckless Daughter (thoughts on full album)
This album and the reaction to it fascinates me. In the opening post, I tried to find a cross-section of reviews to show how this album divided opinion when it came out. Some people honestly thought it was trash. Others were taken by its ambition and the sounds contained within. I think this is always going to be a divisive album and never one that has the kind of universal love of something like Court and Spark. Such is the nature of long, weird double-albums that experiment wildly and push the artist into new territory.

I first heard DJRD when I was in college. I actually listened to it for the first time after listening to the first eight albums all in chronological order. I started with Song to a Seagull, went straight through to Hejira and then put on Don Juan's Reckless Daughter for the very first time. I'm glad I did that. It put the album in clear context. You can hear Joni growing and exploring and changing on each new album, with the jazz elements becoming more and more pronounced as we move from Court to Hissing to Hejira and finally come to DJRD--which is as much as a jazz record as it is a folk or singer-songwriter album. I can't say I 'got' or was completely in love with the record on first listen, but I could instantly hear how unique it was and how Joni stretched out on this record and really allowed herself to go exploring into new sonic territory. It's a journey of a record, as I think most great double albums are, that goes deep into a 'dreamland' and scape of sounds unlike anything Joni had done before. I love the sequencing and how the first side brings us into the world, the second and third sides truly delve into and find the heart of some other world, before the fourth side brings us back out of things with more personal stories. Every time I listen to the album it feels like I'm being slowly funneled into the heart of darkness and then I come out clean and bright on the other side.

The lyrics are often more obtuse on this album and it's sometimes harder to say "this song is about this person or topic" but the words are beautiful and they make strong emotional sense. They also pair beautifully with the absolutely amazing arrangements and playing by Joni and her many exceptional collaborators. This record has a sound that is stirring, unusual, experimental, ambitious and often completely beautiful as well. Joni's singing is fantastic as always. I've grown to absolutely adore this record and consider it one of Joni's very best, even if it was a bit of a question mark on first listen. It's a challenging listen at times, but all the more rewarding for it.

Overture/Cotton Avenue
A tantalizing and ethereal opener that is the perfect entrance into this world. I love the lengthy improvisational opening "overture" combining the overdubbed guitars with Joni's distant wordless vocals. It already feels like a dream and we're barely three minutes into the record. When the song really gets going, it is rich and rhythmic. Jaco's bass is instantly a chief character on the album and his work is fantastic. The song just moves and it's a song about movement and dancing so that works perfectly. We are being beckoned and invited into this special world by Joni and her band and they are painting a picture of somewhere we can all go together to feel the summer in our young blood and feel that rhythm in our bodies. But if you compare this to another album opener with a similar subject matter ("In France They Kiss on Main Street") this doesn't feel like real life. It is odd and maybe not even a real place but instead an idea to journey towards. Cotton Avenue...the entrance point for the world of DJRD. There are also definitely elements of non-white music and rhythm in this song, which is a precursor to other songs on the album. The dream begins...

 

Absolutely love this opening: Overture/Cotton Avenue. Amazing.

The most experimental tracks were a hard listen at first and I listen to side one and side four the most, then Paprika Plains when the mood suits, and hardly ever to side 3, skipping The Tenth world completely....but I've grown to respect Joni's experimentation in the face of mercenary record labels' pressure for another big hit. She is so much like her friend Neil the way the both often fly in the face of commercial success (though both are wildly successful), in favor of following their muse (which is partly why we love them). Side One and Side four are perfect. I often put those two side together as a single listen. Very Nice.

PS. Please "tag" me, PW.

 

After about 45 years as a Joni fan, this is my favorite album of hers.
Jaco becomes legend on this record, it was so moving when I first heard it..so much to explore, and to me, you can lump this with other great double albums of the rock era. This is fusion at its finest, a challenge to the audience and extremely personal and heartfelt.

 

Much like FTR, I find this album to be a mixed bag of tracks that dont hang together as well as the tracks on her previous albums. But for me there is much to like here. I especially enjoy Tenth World and Dreamland. And the ambition of Paprika Plains, also. I love that she let herself get very experimental. But I dont know if that necessarily made for an album that is equal to her previous work. On my last listen to this album I remember thinking that Talk To Me, in particular, seemed to be rather unexceptional for a Joni Mitchell song. I look forward to reviewing these songs in the coming days with all here.

 

This is my Joni Mitchell album now. No-one else's. Not even hers. It took so long to reach me, I can't bear anyone else having the crazy idea of taking it away from me. I'd kill them. If I went deaf this is the one I would still play and watch revolve on a turntable or learn to groove read.

The first time I heard literally any of it was in 2016 when on a whim I thought I might as well complete my physical Joni collection and bought second-hand copies "Wild Things" and "DJRD" (Ladies and Chalk Mark too to replace CDs stolen from a car in the early 90s). The only things I would have been able to tell you about Don Juan was it had a second version of Miles of Aisles 'Jericho' on it and one of the songs had a terrible jokey name for 'Shakespeare'. I never even saw it in record shops much and if I did the cover was so off-putting I never considered buying it.

 

ok let's talk Overture...
even after the crazy tunings of the acoustics, Jaco's overdubs on bass deserve awards.
The Joni vocal overdubs are fab and it's one of the weirdest overtures ever, giving dreamlike snapshots of the other tracks on the album.
It almost seems like she went into a trance when she wrote it.

 

Not super familiar with this album, but getting there. The guitar and bass interplay on this is fabulous

 

David Yaffe is something of an apologist for the 'Art Nouveau' character, but before I start, I have to say that his book made me reconsider Mitchell's judgement. Even forty years ago, appearing in blackface gave the teenage me pause, but she apparently took this 'persona' to the streets as an alter ego/disguise! Not cool, JM.

But the music on DJRD is my favourite of all her catalogue in many ways. Last night the dog decided it was time for his walk midway through Paprika Plains. Nope. You're waiting, puppy. I gotta hear every last chord.

Their was no attempt this time to deliver a hit. This is just pure composition.

 

This is an album I have been meaning to investigate for years, and this is a great way to do that. I remember when this came out, I was pretty excited to hear the follow up to such a beguiling record like Hejira, and because it is so challenging I didn't put the time in to fully absorb it. I never did get back to it.
Right out of the box Joni is pushing the envelope, but once we get to "Cotton Avenue" we are in very familiar territory, and that magical trio of Mitchell/Patorius/Guerin is right in the pocket. The vocals on these tracks is otherworldly-that must have been fun to record. Joni's guitar sound here reminds me so much of Michael Hedges. I love Jaco's ethereal bass, dipping in and around the melody. Joni's throwing down the gauntlet-can you hang with her?

 

Like the eclectic double album of the sixties it resembles in ambition and subject matter more than any other – 'Electric Ladyland', (yes I did just write 'subject matter': more later) it doesn't introduce us to its intentions slowly.
Overture is uniquely itself and yet also precursor to the epic 'Wolf that lives in Lindsey'.
I adore the 2:40 mark transition to Cotton Avenue but I always wish we could have a minute or more of Overture. Fantastic start to proceedings.

 

One advantage of growing up in Canada, I suppose (along with Universal Health Care) is that, because of Canadian content requirements, Mitchell never left the radio through the first twenty years of her career, so her releases were always in the record shops. The winter of '78 I was working in a record shop, and I remember looking at a wall of DJRD.

 

I don't really have anything super-insightful to add to this thread, but just wanted to say I've been a huge Joni fan for decades but only heard this album for the first time a month or two ago. Fell in love with it instantly, an absolutely staggeringly beautiful piece of work. Can't believe I've been so stupid to ignore it all these years!

 

Don Jaun's Reckless Daughter has been my favorite Joni record since I first heard it in early 1978, and the opening salvo of "Overture/Cotton Avenue" is probably my favorite bit of Joni ever recorded. A stunning record that I still play often.

I think I'll play it today.

 

I too don't feel I have much I can contribute to these Joni threads, but I am with you every step of the way and have been listening to each album many times. Some of them were relatively unfamiliar bar one or two tracks - Mingus was the first of her albums I bought.

At first Don Jaun's Daughter seemed a little inaccessible, but now, after a few plays through, I enjoy it just as much as her previous albums. Again, I have the luxury of having access to both the original vinyl and 24 bit remaster - both are wonderful.

I think it fully justifies the double album format. It's great to hear what she can do with some much space to expand into.

 

I agree that your approach in listening to this album was/is the best method - in context of the artist’s creative arc. The context of Joni Mitchell’s musical journey provides that bridge to be able to enter into the aural soundscapes she creates.
(In 1977, that unsaid prerequisite for hearing an album wasn’t known of - and it’s not even a mandate that Joni declared - it just seems so logical now, with you mentioning your personal experience in hearing Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter.
As a near-comparable example, I wouldn’t give a new Neil Young fan the album “Tonight’s The Night” to hear before “Harvest” nor “After The Gold Rush, etc)

 

Playing it right now.
I always play it very loud on headphones and quietly on speakers for some reason. The album is reputed to have a tremendously large dynamic range and my ears do take a battering. Does anyone know what Duke Ellington song (played or sampled) is in the background in the last 20 seconds of Cotton Avenue, by the way?

 

Janet Maslin wrote that RS rip review, and IIRC she was another singer-songwriter purist ala Stephen Holden.

Back later today when I can properly sink my teeth in.

 

DJRD is where Joni started to fade off my musical radar.

I remember giving it a few listens when it first came out and thinking “There’s some great stuff here, and I should get more familiar with it.” But I never did. It’s the kind of album you need to put on and just soak in. I got distracted by life and by other music, and frankly just didn’t have time to give it the kind of attention it deserves.

Anyhoo, got DJRD playing in the car now, gonna give it a fresh listen during this thread.

One thing I will say out of the chocks is that the recording is superb. For you audiophiles out there, “Overture/Cotton Avenue” is ear candy. I don’t know the details about how it was engineered or produced or whether any special techniques or equipment were used, but to my ears, the sound is more liquid and pure than on any of her previous albums.

@HenryFly - “If I went deaf this is the one I would still play and watch revolve on a turntable or learn to groove read.” One of the best comments I’ve read anywhere.

 

In the lyrics to 'Cotton Avenue' she's being a terrible tease. She's inviting us sexily one minute to dance with her there and then next thing we know she tells us that hey it's actually not really any better there than to just kick your heels off where we stand. It goes up through the gears musically and down again and resembles the ebb and flow of the last quarter of Paprika Plains and Mingus in particular of course.

 

Same back to you @Socialguy for your high quality posts and sense of humour throughout.

 

"It's in tune, it's out of tune, it's in tune again!" Charles Mingus, talking about the piano part in "Paprika Plains."

The analog era....

 

This is in Joni's words:

Somebody played him some of my records. Now, this is a story that came to me - there's a piece of music of mine called Paprika Plains which was done in sections. The middle of it is about seven minutes of improvisational playing, which I had somebody else orchestrate for me. And then stuck on to each end of it is a song that I wrote later around it. It was improvised off of a theme; then I abandoned the theme and just left the improvisational part which I cut together. It's a modern technological way of composing.

It was recorded in January, and the piano was tuned many, many times, so by August I when I played the verses, which were born much later, the piano had slightly changed. So when it was orchestrated, it's in tune for a while, but then it hits that splice where it goes from the January piano to the August piano. With a fine ear you notice. So somebody was playing this piece for Charles, and Charles is a stickler for true pitch and time, and he kept saying, "It's out of tune, it's out of tune." But when the piece was over he said that I had a lot of balls!

 

Yes, that looks like the quote that I slightly mis-remembered, from an interview in Musician magazine. From the 1980s, when the magazine did long-form articles and extensive interviews in each issue that held as much content as the best stories in the New Yorker.

These days, their interviews with musicians are more like three paragraphs about their struggles in getting out of a record label contract, or something. How many popular musicians nowadays would actually have something to say, if they were to be interviewed on their artistic vision, their musical inspirations, their technical innovations, their philosophy of life? How many journalists would know what questions to ask, to draw them out?