Chalk Mark In A

"...There is a driving ebb and lush cinematic sweep to these songs that is simply gorgeous. Joni is a prolific and accomplished artist way ahead of her time..."  Amazon reviewer nick dear

I really like Chalk Mark In A Rainstorm. At times I find it:

• sexy...My Secret Place
• moving...Lakota
• fun...Dancin' Clown &
• interesting...The Beat Of Black Wings...Snakes & Ladders

...though, admittedly, it runs out of steam at about 30 minutes...with the last two songs:

• The Reocurring Dream (a tale of insatiable consumerism) &
• A Bird That Whistles (Corrina, Corrina) 

...just kind of hanging there. They're not er...awful or anything...they just seem to do nothing! I'm not particularly fussed about Number One either but the rest of Chalkmark is a fine, fine adult album about adult themes, played impeccably with Peter Gabriel's drummer Manu Katche adding a funk, a groove, that's very cool.

Joni Mitchell Chalk Mark In A Rainstorm

I was totally gobsmacked when I discovered that many Joni fans dismiss it as...unmemorable. What the? For me, Chalk Mark In A Rainstorm is Joni's wonderful book of short stories, vignettes full of detail, told concisely, stories that people of early middle age should certainly find interesting.

Take the opener, My Secret Place, a duet with Peter Gabriel. 

Yes, it's a love song about two people who've recently got together but unlike a young person's song, there's no incredible mojo, no desperation, instead it mimics the easy conversation between two people who find they have luckily drifted into synch.

She:    I'm gonna take you to

He:     My special place

She:    It's a place that you

He:      Like no-one else I know

She:     Might appreciate
           I don't go there with anyone...
           ...But.. 

He:      ...You're a special case

She:     For my special place

He:      M-y special p-l-a-c-e

         My Secret Place

Yow! That's hot! In a world of fake boobs and desperate sexuality (see my article: Another Girl Singer In Heat ), that song and its glorious video just about sums up, for me, what finding someone is really about. Actually, the album features several other duets, with:

Willie Nelson, on a radical reworking of classic Country & Western writer Bob Nolan's Cool Water and it sounds...beautiful, wonderfully calming

"...One of my favorite songs over the years has been Cool Water played by such notables as Burl Ives, Riders In The Sky, Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers amongst others but this version of that song is the most incredible I have ever heard. (It) makes me thirsty and (I) hear the flow of cool water, all at the same time..." Amazon reviewer Brett Beietwieser

Joni Mitchell on Cool Water:

The song "Cool Water" is a song you must remember from your childhood days in Saskatchewan or Alberta, I guess, because that's been around a long time, hasn't it? "...It was a song that I hadn't thought about for a long time until Don Henley called me up, and he wanted me to participate in a benefit on water issues which are very important for the planet at this time. You know, we're messing with our water tables, and we have serious problems in that area confronting us all around the world. So I felt it was an important issue, and I felt that I needed some appropriate material.

And while I was racking my brain in an attempt to write something for the occasion, I remembered - I guess I would be about seven or eight years old, living in a corner house on a street which had what they called wartime housing. These were houses that were thrown up quickly to house young military people coming out of the war and their young families and they were basically your unimaginative ticky-tacky. The only variation was that the door on the first house was on the left and the second was on the right and there might be a little bit of color difference.

So the Mowette's back-stoop and our back-stoop faced each other, the houses were fairly close together. I was in bed. It was late at night. The Mowette's had, you know, a penchant for the booze. So they were sitting and howling on the back steps like a bunch of cats, and what they were singing was 'Cool water, water,' drunk and loud and Mr. Milne, who lived on the other side of them, suddenly appeared in his pajamas, and I heard him say:"Cool water? You want cool water? I'll give you cool water!" And he turned the garden hose on them (laughs)..." Capital Radio interview, 1998 (see below)

Tom Petty & Billy Idol's...cameos on the frivolous (and I mean that in a good way) Dancin' Clown. With Joni, they certainly make an unlikely threesome...but it works, the boys doing spoken cameos in Joni's simple smalltown vignette about two rednecks, Rowdy & Jesse, lusting after Suzie, a sweet young thing.

"...Down the street comes last-word Suzie
She's high yellow, lookin' top nice
You hear the swoosh of jungle blades and the crackle of
Northern ice
'Hot damn!' says Rowdy lookin' up
'Yum!' says Jesse lookin' down
'How would you like to be her dancin'
Her dancin' clown?'..."

                   Dancin' Clown

Joni Mitchell on Billy Idol's involvement:

What about Dancin' Clown then with Billy Idol? "...Well, we were sitting in the Grammys, my husband and I, and Billy was performing, and he was great that night. I just thought he was fantastic. The old spirit, the original spirit of rock and roll was very much there and plus there was a new energy. It was both modern and nostalgic and I said to Larry: 'God, wouldn't he make a great Rowdy Yates?'...he's like the call of the wild. He's like Elvis and he's great..." Capital Radio interview, 1998 (see below)

...Meanwhile, The Eagles' Don Henley pops up on Snakes And Ladders, a delicious reversal of the normal corporate climber story. This time the man, who has done everything for his Barbie Doll wife, is cuckolded and the song ends with him vowing to destroy her.

Again, as on My Secret Place, the lyrics are exquisitely layered between the narrator (Joni) and the victim (Don) although they aren't a conversation this time, they're the facts, paralleled by his obsession...

S-h-e                                                  Just to have and hold
Is the perfect airbrushed angel               Makes you hot just looking at her
Stapled into all his braincells                   Like a centerfold
Oh, Love is snakes and ladders
Snakes and ladders

Get to the top and slide back down
Get to the bottom, climb back up

Buy the townhouse, call the preacher       Oh-h-h-h 

Get to the bottom climb back up
Get to the top and slide back down
Get to the bottom climb back up

Set up credit for the lovely creature        Oh-h-h-h                                      The lovely creature

H-e                                                    On a corporate climb
Set his sights on power for her               On a silver platter
He gave up happy hour for her               Perrier and lime
Oh love is snakes and ladders
Snakes and ladders

The other three tracks are also fascinating:

Lakota...for me, a powerful empathic statement for Native Americans fighting those who would abuse the land:

"...I am Lakota!...Don't you hear the shrieking of the trees? Everywhere you touch the earth she's sore. Every time you skin her all things weep. Your money mocks us. Restitution, what good can it do? Kennelled in metered boxes, red dogs in debt to you..."

The Tea Leaf Prophecy

Joni Mitchell on The Tea Leaf Prophecy:

"...It's fiction, first of all. I must clarify that. But it's based on an experience that's kind of interesting, speaking of prophecy. When my mother was a young woman, she had been a country school teacher, but she had moved into the city to work in a bank. At that time most of the men in the town were away at war...She was 30 years old and a beautiful woman and still unmarried and one day her girlfriend and she went to high tea at a big hotel in Regina, and when the tea was completed, there was a teacup reader who came to their table...She read my mother's tea leaves and she said: "...You'll be married within the month and you'll have a child within a year..." and my mother said this is crazy because, you know...well, two weeks later she met my father on a blind date, a friend of a friend and he was just passing through town and two weeks after that, they were married...and a year later I was born (laughs). So gypsies - there's a prophet for you..." Capital Radio interview, 1998 (see below)

"...Newsreels rattle the Nazi dread
The able-bodied have shipped away
Molly McGee gets her tea-leaves read
'You'll be married in a month' they say
"These leaves are crazy!
Look at this town - there's no men left!
Just frail old boys and babies
Talking to teacher in the treble clef'..."

N.B.: Joni's mother's maiden name was Myrtle McKee and she was a teacher, though I don't know if it was as a music teacher.  

and finally, the astonishing,The Beat Of Black Wings, about a real-life meeting with a broken soldier, Killer Kyle, during the Vietnam war:

"...'They gave me a gun,' he said, 'they gave me a mission, for the power and the glory...Propoganda...Piss on 'em...Keep the drinks comin' girl, till I can't feel anything...I'm just a chalk mark in a rainstorm...I'm just the beat of black wings.'..."

Joni Mitchell:The Beat Of Black Wings:

"...Well, again, it's fiction but it takes as its point of departure an incident that happened to me during the Vietnam War. I was living in New York at the time, and I played a coffeehouse circuit down the Eastern seaboard which included Fort Bragg in North Carolina and my audience there were young soldiers coming and going from the Vietnamese war. Some of them were very gung-ho, which was a new experience to me, living in a rather bohemian scene in New York City. Everyone I knew was avoiding the draft one way or the other, feigning homosexuality or insanity, clutching their guitar to their bosom, you know, as they went into the draft saying: '...No, no, don't take it away...' ...any trick in the book.

So in Fort Bragg I met - one night, I performed and at that time my music was very romantic, I think, ornate, and I had finished singing and I came into my dressing room and there stood a kid really, red in the face angry, both fists clenched, and he said to me: "...You got a lot of nerve, sister..." ...and I kind of stood back. He looked almost dangerous but he was little. I figured I could take him if I had to (laughs). He said: "...You got a lot of nerve, sister, standing up there singing about Love... because there ain't no Love in this world, oh, no...Love is gone, Love is gone for me...and I'm gonna tell you where Love went!..." ...and he was shaking, his face was red, beet red and he told me the most horrible series of events that had happened to him in Vietnam and ended up with me holding him, you know and him crying his eyes out.

He said he was Killer Kyle of the 92nd or 82nd airborne and that all he felt was left in Life for him was to go back and avenge a friend of his who had died in his platoon and he had been a medic. He had had to pick up the pieces of this dear friend. He'd transferred and transferred to get into the same platoon. They were walking through the jungle - oh, and one of the things he said was: "...Give Charlie a hair pin and he'll blow us all away. All our fancy equipment means nothing because it's their war, it's their right, they've got the will. We don't know what we're doing there..."

...So anyway apparently they had been out on some kind of maneuver and the way this bomb was triggered, the first person in the line triggered it...and then there's a delay on it 'til it gets to the middle of the line...and then it blows it all to smithereens. He was like at the end of the line and as a medic it was his job to pick up people and put them into body bags and so on. And among the people that he had to put into bags was this childhood friend of his who he was very close - so he was destroyed...The other thing that had happened to him was he had to go into a village and shoot down into a well, and when he looked down, there were children in a bucket down there. So these were two of the things that had just destroyed him. He said he could never touch a woman again, you know, that he was such a mess that how could Love ever come do him? How could he ever give love with the visions of these atrocities?..." Capital Radio interview, 1998 (see below)

Chalk Mark In A Rainstorm is a terrific, exploratory work of a matured Joni. If you wish to hear an unashamedly liberal adult and hear her substantial journalistic stories, do give this little-known album a listen.   

Joni Mitchell: Chalkmark In A Rainstorm

"...from start to finish I invariably find myself...wrapped up in the splendour of this artist at her immaculate best...(and)...this (album) defines the intelligence and passion of this unique person..." Amazon reviewer glittergirl

"...Joni has put together an album which still retains her wit, lyrical sense and intelligence that charaterizes all her work. Best album from her in the 80's..." Amazon.co.uk reviewer Milt Ingarfield

"...One of her strongest - perhaps not quite Hejira but with enough content...to make it worthwhile - but then Mitchell is always worthwhile..." Amazon.co.uk reviewer Jonathan Bryce

"...When I first purchased this CD some years ago, I tried to it a few times and decided that it wasn't for me. First, it wasn't what I expected from Joni Mitchell. Second, I didn't know what to make of the music. After a while, though, melodies from a couple of the songs came percolating back into my head and I came back to this CD. Now it's permanently in my player....If you've tried Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm but found that it wasn't for you, then try it again....Creative genius has a way of sneaking up on you and then knocking you out..." Amazon reviewer G

For more info, see:

• wikipedia Chalk Mark In A Rainstorm
• a mostly career-retrospective Timothy White interview with Joni Mitchell, promoting Chalk Mark In A Rainstorm, 1988
• all Joni quotes from her Capital Radio interview, 1988