In France They Kiss On Main Street

by Joni Mitchell

Downtown
My darling dime store thief
In the War of Independence
Rock 'n' roll rang sweet as victory
Under neon signs
A girl was in bloom
And a woman was fading
In a suburban room
I said take me to the dance
Do you want to dance?
I love to dance
And I told him They don't take chances
They seem so removed from romance
They've been broken in churches and schools
And molded to middle class circumstance
And we were rolling rolling rock 'n' rolling

Downtown
The dance halls and cafes
Feel so wild you could break somebody's heart
Just doing the latest dance craze
Gail and Louise
In those push-up brassieres
Tight dresses and rhinestone rings
Drinking up the band's beers
Young love was kissing under bridges
Kissing in cars kissing in cafes
And we were walking down Main Street
Kisses like bright flags hung on holidays
In France they kiss on Main Street
Amour, mama, not cheap display
And we were rolling, rolling, rock 'n' rolling

Downtown
In the pinball arcade
With his head full of pool hall pitches
And songs from the hit parade
He'd be singing "Bye Bye Love"
While he's racking up his free play
Let those rock 'n' roll choir boys
Come and carry us away
Sometimes Chickie had the car
Or Ron had a car
Or Lead Foot Melvin with his hot-wire head
We'd all go looking for a party
Looking to raise Jesus up from the dead
And I'd be kissing in the back seat
Thrilling to the Brando-like things that he said
And we'd be rolling rolling rock 'n' rolling
Jungle Line
by Joni Mitchell

Rousseau walks on trumpet paths

Safaris to the heart of all that jazz
Through I-bars and girders, through wires and pipes
The mathematic circuits of the modern nights
Through huts through Harlem through jails and gospel pews
Through the class on Park and the trash on Vine
Through Europe and the deep deep heart of Dixie blue
Through savage progress cuts the jungle line

In a low-cut blouse she brings the beer

Rousseau paints a jungle flower behind her ear
Those cannibals of shuck and jive
They'll eat a working girl like her alive
With his hard-edged eye and his steady hand
He paints the cellar full of ferns and orchid vines
And he hangs a moon above a five-piece band
He hangs it up above the jungle line

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
Pretty women funneled through valves and smoke
Coy and bitchy wild and fine
And charging elephants and chanting slaving boats
Charging chanting down the jungle line

There's a poppy wreath on a soldier's tomb

There's a poppy snake in a dressing room
Poppy poison poppy tourniquet
It slithers away on brass like mouthpiece spit
And metal skin and ivory birds
Go steaming up to Rousseau's vines
They go steaming up to Brooklyn Bridge
Steaming, steaming, steaming up the jungle line
Edith And The Kingpin
by Joni Mitchell

The big man arrives

Disco dancers greet him
Plainclothes cops greet him
Small town, big man, fresh lipstick glistening
Sophomore jive
From victims of typewriters
The band sounds like typewriters
The big man he's not listening
His eyes hold Edith
His left hand holds his right
What does that hand desire
That he grips it so tight

Edith in the ring

The passed over girls are conferring
The man with the diamond ring is purring
All claws for now withdrawn
One by one they bring
His renegade stories to her
His crimes and his glories to her
In challenge they look on
Women he has taken grow old too soon
He tilts their tired faces
Gently to the spoon

Edith in his bed

A plane in the rain is humming
The wires in the walls are humming
Some song some mysterious song
Bars in her head
Beating frantic and snowblind
Romantic and snowblind
She says his crime belongs
Edith and the Kingpin
Each with charm to sway
Are staring eye to eye
They dare not look away
You know they dare not look away
Don't Interrupt The Sorrow
by Joni Mitchell

Don't interrupt the sorrow

Darn right
In flames our prophet witches
Be polite
A room full of glasses
He says "Your notches, liberation doll"
And he chains me with that serpent
To that Ethiopian wall

Anima rising
Queen of Queens
Wash my guilt of Eden
Wash and balance me
Anima rising
Uprising in me tonight
She's a vengeful little goddess
With an ancient crown to fight

Truth goes up in vapors

The steeples lean
Winds of change patriarchs
Snug in your bible belt dreams
God goes up the chimney
Like childhood Santa Claus
The good slaves love the good book
A rebel loves a cause

I'm leaving on the 1:15

You're darn right
Since I was seventeen
I've had no one over me
He says "Anima rising
So what
Petrified wood process
Tall timber down to rock"

Don't interrupt the sorrow

Darn right
He says "We walked on the moon
You be polite"
Don't let up the sorrow
Death and birth and death and birth
He says "Bring that bottle kindly
And I'll pad your purse
I've got a head full of quandary
And a mighty mighty thirst"

Seventeen glasses
Rhine wine
Milk of the Madonna
Clandestine
He don't let up the sorrow
He lies and he cheats
It takes a heart like Mary's these days
When your man gets weak
Shades Of Scarlet Conquering
by Joni Mitchell

Out of the fire like Catholic saints

Comes Scarlett and her deep complaint
Mimicking tenderness she sees
In sentimental movies
A celluloid rider comes to town
Cinematic lovers sway
Plantations and sweeping ballroom gowns
Take her breath away

Out in the wind in crinolines

Chasing the ghosts of Gable and Flynn
Through stand-in boys and extra players
Magnolias hopeful in her auburn hair
She comes from a school of southern charm
She likes to have things her way
Any man in the world holding out his arm
Would soon be made to pay

Friends have told her 'not so proud'

Neighbors trying to sleep and yelling 'not so loud'
Lovers in anger 'Block of Ice'
Harder and harder just to be nice
Given in the night to dark dreams
From the dark things she feels
She covers her eyes in the x-rated scenes
Running from the reels

Beauty and madness to be praised

'Cause it is not easy to be brave
To walk around in so much need
To carry the weight of all that greed
Dressed in stolen clothes she stands
Cast iron and frail
With her impossibly gentle hands
And her blood-red fingernails

Out of the fire and still smoldering

She says "A woman must have everything"
Shades of Scarlett Conquering
She says "A woman must have everything"
Hissing Of Summer Lawns
by Joni Mitchell

He bought her a diamond for her throat

He put her in a ranch house on a hill
She could see the valley barbecues
From her window sill
See the blue pools in the squinting sun
Hear the hissing of summer lawns

He put up a barbed wire fence

To keep out the unknown
And on every metal thorn
Just a little blood of his own
She patrols that fence of his
To a latin drum
And the hissing of summer lawns
Darkness
Wonder makes it easy
Darkness
With a joyful mask
Darkness
Tube's gone darkness darkness darkness
No color no contrast

A diamond dog
Carrying a cup and a cane
Looking through a double glass
Looking at too much pride and too much shame
There's a black fly buzzing
There's a heat wave burning in her master's voice
The hissing of summer lawns

He gave her his darkness to regret

And good reason to quit him
He gave her a roomful of Chippendale
That nobody sits in
Still she stays with a love of some kind
It's the lady's choice
The hissing of summer lawns
Boho Dance
by Joni Mitchell

Down in the cellar in the Boho zone

I went looking for some sweet inspiration, oh well
Just another hard time band
With Negro affectations
I was a hopeful in rooms like this
When I was working cheap
It's an old romance the Boho dance
It hasn't gone to sleep

But even on the scuffle

The cleaner's press was in my jeans
And any eye for detail
Caught a little lace along the seams

And you were in the parking lot

Subterranean by your own design
The virtue of your style inscribed
On your contempt for mine
Jesus was a beggar, he was rich in grace
And Solomon kept his head in all his glory
It's just that some steps outside the Boho dance *
Have a fascination for me

A camera pans the cocktail hour

Behind a blind of potted palms
And finds a lady in a Paris dress
With runs in her nylons

You read those books where luxury

Comes as a guest to take a slave
Books where artists in noble poverty
Go like virgins to the grave
Don't you get sensitive on me
'Cause I know you're just too proud
You couldn't step outside the Boho dance now
Even if good fortune allowed

Like a priest with a pornographic watch

Looking and longing on the sly
Sure it's stricken from your uniform
But you can't get it out of your eyes

Nothing is capsulized in me
On either side of town
The streets were never really mine
Not mine these glamour gowns
Footnotes to Boho Dance
"Boho Dance"
[submitted by Debra Shea] Joni's Boho Dance is a personal story (it
does seem to me she's talking to a particular person as well as thinking
about where she fits in) and goes beyond Tom Wolfe's discussion of
the art world, but it does start with it. _The Painted Word_ was
published in June 1975, the same year as HOSL, so the subject may
have been talked about in Larry Poons's NY loft, along with Don't
Interrupt the Sorrow (since LP is mentioned in the book, he probably
knew about it before it was published). And it's not so much about
artists and critics, as about the relationship between artists and the
people buying their art (with critics often(?) determining what those
people are buying and the buyers purchasing not only art but the
feeling that they, because of their relationship with the artist, are also
bohemians -- at least briefly). It's Wolfe's premise that the visual arts
are the only art form in which relatively few wealthy people decide what
everyone else will see.

Not that knowing any of this is important to appreciating Joni's work, but
I do like placing Joni in context, as opposed to her seeming to create in
a vacuum. So now when rereading The Painted Word with Joni's Boho
Dance in mind, some quotes jump out at me:

"...the [art mating] ritual has two phases: (1) The Boho Dance, in which the artist shows his stuff
within the circles, coteries, movements, isms, of the home neighborhood, bohemia itself, as if he
doesn't care about anything else; as if, in fact, he has a knife in his teeth against the fashionable
world uptown. (2) The Consummation, in which culterati from that very same world, le monde, scout
the various new movements and new artists of bohemia, select those who seem the most exciting,
original, important, by whatever standards -- and shower them with all the rewards of celebrity."

Wolfe then describes Picasso as an artist who excelled at this art mating ritual, compared to
Picasso's friend Georges Braque, who is really the one who came up with Cubism:

"...here we have the classic demonstration of the artist who knows how to double-track his way from
the Boho Dance to the Consummation as opposed to the artist who gets stuck forever in the Boho
Dance. This is an ever-present hazard of the art mating ritual. Truly successful double-tracking
requires the artist to be a sincere and committed performer in *both roles.* Many artists become so
dedicated to bohemian values, internalize their antibourgeois feelings so profoundly, that they are
unable to cut loose, let go ... and submit gracefully to good fortune; the sort of artist, and his name is
Legion, who always comes to the black-tie openings at the Museum of Modern Art wearing a dinner
jacket and paint-spattered Levis's . . . *I'm still a virgin!*"

One verse especially seems to come from this paragraph, although Joni's words are so much richer.
Joni's conclusion is that she's not involved in this art mating ritual at all: "The streets were never
really mine. Not mine these glamour gowns." Is that because she was making music, instead of
showing her artwork? At first I thought this song went beyond the art world and was about anyone
getting stuck in a certain lifestyle, even if it's hurtful. But maybe she WAS just talking about the visual
arts. Most of the song is criticizing someone else. It does seem like she's aloof and separate from
the Boho Dance, not that she's learned how to do it comfortably herself. Hmmm, is this actually a
song about Joni's relationship to the art world?
Harry's House/Centerpiece
by Joni Mitchell

Heatwaves on the runway

As the wheels set down
He takes his baggage off the carousel
He takes a taxi into town
Yellow schools of taxi fishes
Jonah in a ticking whale
Caught up at the light in the fishnet windows
Of Bloomingdale's
Watching those high fashion girls
Skinny black models with raven curls
Beauty parlor blondes with credit card eyes
Looking for the chic and the fancy to buy

He opens up his suitcase

In the continental suite
And people twenty stories down
Colored currents in the street
A helicopter lands on the Pan Am roof
Like a dragonfly on a tomb
And business men in button downs
Press into conference rooms
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

Yellow checkers for the kitchen

Climbing ivy for the bath
She is lost in House and Gardens
He's caught up in Chief of Staff
He drifts off into the memory
Of the way she looked in school
With her body oiled and shining
At the public swimming pool ...

... 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
Sweet Bird
by Joni Mitchell

Out on some borderline

Some mark of inbetween
I lay down golden in time
And woke up vanishing

Sweet bird you are

Briefer than a falling star
All these vain promises on beauty jars
Somewhere with your wings on time
You must be laughing
Behind our eyes
Calendars of our lives
Circled with compromise
Sweet bird of time and change
You must be laughing
Up on your feathers laughing

Golden in time
Cities under the sand
Power ideals and beauty
Fading in everyone's hand

Give me some time

I feel like I'm losing mine
Out here on this horizon line
With the earth spinning
And the sky forever rushing
No one knows
They can never get that close
Guesses at most
Guesses based on what each set of time and change is touching
Guesses based on what each set of time and change is touching
Guesses based on what each set of time and change is touching
Shadows And Light
by Joni Mitchell

Every picture has its shadows

And it has some source of light
Blindness blindness and sight
The perils of benefactors
The blessings of parasites
Blindness blindness and sight
Threatened by all things
Devil of cruelty
Drawn to all things
Devil of delight
Mythical devil of the ever-present laws
Governing blindness blindness and sight

Suntans in reservation dining rooms

Pale miners in their lantern rays
Night night and day
Hostage smile on presidents
Freedom scribbled in the subway
It's like night night and day
Threatened by all things
God of cruelty
Drawn to all things
God of delight
Mythical god of the everlasting laws
Governing day day and night

Critics of all expression

Judges in black and white
Saying it's wrong saying it's right
Compelled by prescribed standards
Or some ideals we fight
For wrong wrong and right
Threatened by all things
Man of cruelty-mark of Cain
Drawn to all things
Man of delight-born again born again
Man of the laws the ever-broken laws
Governing wrong wrong and right
Governing wrong wrong and right
Wrong and right