How excit­ed would you be to lis­ten to a record­ing, made at an AM radio sta­tion in 1963, labeled “JONI ANDERSON AUDITION TAPE”? If you know much about the singer-song­writ­ers of the mid-20th cen­tu­ry, you’d be quite excit­ed indeed. For Joni Ander­son is none oth­er than Joni Mitchell, who under that mar­ried name would go on to become one of the most influ­en­tial solo per­form­ers to come out of the folk-music scene. Not that she prized the des­ig­na­tion that thus accom­pa­nied her to star­dom: “I was nev­er a folksinger,” she recent­ly remem­bered her­self insist­ing. “I would get pissed off if they put that label on me.”

She had a point. Lis­ten to that 1963 audi­tion tape, on which she sings “The House of the Ris­ing Sun” while accom­pa­ny­ing her­self on the ukulele, and on some lev­el you’ve got to call it folk music. But even at the age of 19, Mitchell — or rather Ander­son — exhib­it­ed the dis­tinc­tive­ly cap­ti­vat­ing musi­cal pres­ence that would get lis­ten­ers of more than one gen­er­a­tion play­ing her records until they wore through.

Whether the teenage DJ who record­ed her demo had any idea of what she would become at the time, he knew full well the cul­tur­al val­ue of the tape when his daugh­ter redis­cov­ered it in the base­ment more than fifty years lat­er.

In the video just above, you can see that DJ, one Bar­ry Bow­man, react to Mitchel­l’s ear­li­est-known record­ing after thread­ing it up in his home stu­dio. “Damn!” he says, mar­veling at the crisp­ness of the sound after all these decades — and the fact that he some­how man­aged to do jus­tice to both her voice and her strings with the rel­a­tive­ly mea­ger equip­ment avail­able to him at CFQC-AM. The tape even cap­tures the dis­tinc­tive sound of her alter­nate-tuned bari­tone ukulele, which she orig­i­nal­ly took up while grow­ing up in Saska­toon when her moth­er vetoed the gui­tar.

Last year Mitchel­l’s 1963 ver­sion of “The House of the Ris­ing Sun” saw offi­cial release as part of the box set Joni Mitchell Archives Vol. 1: The Ear­ly Years (1963–1967). Lis­ten­ing back to the mate­r­i­al of that peri­od sur­prised even Mitchell, and made her change her mind about her ear­li­er folk-relat­ed resent­ments: “It was beau­ti­ful. It made me for­give my begin­nings. And I had this real­iza­tion… I was a folksinger!” She may have tran­scend­ed folk music — just as she left Saska­toon for Toron­to, and then Toron­to for south­ern Cal­i­for­nia — but even Joni Mitchell had to start some­where.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See Clas­sic Per­for­mances of Joni Mitchell from the Very Ear­ly Years–Before She Was Even Named Joni Mitchell (1965/66)

Watch Joni Mitchell’s Clas­sic Per­for­mances of “Both Sides Now” & “The Cir­cle Game” (1968)

How Joni Mitchell Wrote “Wood­stock,” the Song that Defined the Leg­endary Music Fes­ti­val, Even Though She Wasn’t There (1969)

Watch Joni Mitchell Sing an Immac­u­late Ver­sion of Her Song “Coy­ote,” with Bob Dylan, Roger McGuinn & Gor­don Light­foot (1975)

Stream Joni Mitchell’s Com­plete Discog­ra­phy: A 17-Hour Playlist Mov­ing from Song to a Seag­ull (1968) to Shine (2007)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

In the years fol­low­ing the col­lapse of the Sovi­et Union a “tri­umphal­ist dis­course” arose in the U.S., writes his­to­ri­an Richard Sak­wa, “which sug­gests that the Sovi­et demise was a delib­er­ate act plot­ted and exe­cut­ed by pres­i­dent Ronald Rea­gan” with mas­sive mil­i­tary bud­gets and nuclear threats. This nar­ra­tive has less exclu­sive cur­ren­cy today. There are as many the­o­ries as the­o­rists of Sovi­et demise, among them the “com­pelling argu­ment,” says Jim Brown, pro­duc­er of a doc­u­men­tary called Free to Rock, “that rock and roll was a fac­tor — a con­tribut­ing fac­tor of many — in end­ing the Cold War.”

It’s not a face­tious claim and may have lit­tle to do, as some allege, with the CIA spread­ing for­eign influ­ence in the U.S.S.R. dur­ing the 1980s. A home­grown “rock sub­cul­ture,” writes Carl Schreck at The Atlantic, “had been per­co­lat­ing in the Sovi­et Union for decades by the time Gor­bachev came to pow­er in 1985.”

As Metal­li­ca came to pow­er in 1991 with The Black Album, their best-sell­ing record — and one of the biggest sell­ing albums of all time, world­wide — young Rus­sians did not need to be instruct­ed in the fin­er points of rock­ing out against author­i­tar­i­an­ism and gov­ern­ment con­trol.

Nev­er before, how­ev­er, had Russ­ian rock­ers gath­ered in the open as they did in ‘91, when the heavy met­al fes­ti­val Mon­sters of Rock stopped in Moscow for the first time since its found­ing in 1980, attract­ing a report­ed 1.6 mil­lion fans — one of the largest con­certs in his­to­ry — to see head­lin­ers AC/DC, Metal­li­ca, and Pan­tera. The show “was not the first time West­ern heavy-met­al acts have played Moscow,” wrote The New York Times. “In 1989, Ozzy Osbourne, Bon Jovi and Mot­ley Crue filled Lenin Sta­di­um for two days to help raise mon­ey for Sovi­et char­i­ties.” But Mon­sters of Rock was some­thing dif­fer­ent.

Pro­mot­ed as a “cel­e­bra­tion of democ­ra­cy and free­dom” by its cor­po­rate spon­sor, Time Warn­er, and arriv­ing just a month after a failed coup attempt by Sovi­et hard­lin­ers, the con­cert was some­thing of a suc­cess­ful coup for AC/DC, who “until a few years ago… were for­mal­ly banned in the Sovi­et Union.” (One 1985 list com­piled by the Young Com­mu­nist League said they pro­mot­ed “neo­fas­cism” and “vio­lence.”) Sovi­et music crit­ic and writer Andrei Orlov ges­tured toward realpoli­tik in a remark on the sub­ject: “Look at the graf­fi­ti in the city. AC/DC is writ­ten on every wall.”

Even more rev­o­lu­tion­ary, in heavy met­al terms, was the appear­ance of Metal­li­ca at sec­ond billing on the tour. It would prove to be one of sev­er­al “ live coups,” for the band, K.J. Daughton writes. After their mas­sive suc­cess on MTV with “Enter Sand­man,” “Unfor­giv­en,” and “Noth­ing Else Mat­ters,” the band played sev­er­al major con­certs, includ­ing their “his­toric musi­cal tour de force” at Tushi­no Air­field in Moscow. “In a video of the set,” writes Didi­er Cade­na (watch it in full above), “one can see the ocean of peo­ple mov­ing around and singing along, even though the major­i­ty of the crowd only knew Eng­lish through the music.”

The con­cert was not with­out its moments of vio­lence. “The bru­tal inter­ven­tion of Sovi­et police left 53 peo­ple injured,” writes Daughton (see some of the offi­cial over­re­ac­tion above). But these were the rat­tles of a dying police state. Just a few months lat­er in Decem­ber, the Sovi­et Union offi­cial­ly dis­solved.

Can AC/DC or Metal­li­ca take cred­it? No, but they were impor­tant sym­bols for a wave of dis­af­fect­ed Russ­ian youth the Sovi­et leader him­self had no desire to hold back. Gor­bachev, after all, was “a fan of Elvis Pres­ley,” says Brown. “He liked rock and roll… And I think he takes pride in the fact that after wast­ing, you know, tril­lions of dol­lars on weapons, that words and actions and cul­ture brought these two coun­tries togeth­er.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The His­to­ry of Sovi­et Rock: From the 70s Under­ground Rock Scene, to Sovi­et Punk & New Wave in the 1980s

The Sovi­et Union Cre­ates a List of 38 Dan­ger­ous Rock Bands: Kiss, Pink Floyd, Talk­ing Heads, Vil­lage Peo­ple & More (1985)

Metal­li­ca Plays Antarc­ti­ca, Set­ting a World Record as the First Band to Play All 7 Con­ti­nents: Watch the Full Con­cert Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Dark­er is a bleak mas­ter­piece. Released just 19 days before his death, the album sounds like a warn­ing from beyond, one Cohen seemed to know we’d nev­er heed. His sym­pa­thy for human fail­ure reached its denoue­ment in the posthu­mous Thanks for the Dance, a project “much less apoc­a­lyp­tic” in tone than its pre­de­ces­sor, writes Thomas Hobbs at NME. Unlike many a posthu­mous album, “this point of dif­fer­ence more than jus­ti­fies the record’s release,” even if the mate­r­i­al can “sound a lit­tle scrap­py” at times.

The posthu­mous album’s exis­tence is also jus­ti­fied by the fact that Cohen want­ed it released. He turned that respon­si­bil­i­ty over to his son, Adam, who also pro­duced You Want It Dark­er and who recruit­ed Beck, Feist, Bryce Dess­ner of the Nation­al, Damien Rice, Richard Reed Par­ry of Arcade Fire, and “long-time Cohen col­lab­o­ra­tors Javier Mas and Jen­nifer Warn­er” to fin­ish Thanks for the Dance.

Many of the songs began as strained vocal read­ings Adam record­ed, then lat­er craft­ed arrange­ments around, as he tells NPR.

I begged him, often “Just record this lyric. Let me sketch some­thing and based on your reac­tion, we’ll adapt.” I was very, very lucky to get him to have these read­ings. Some­times they were read­ings with no metro­nom­ic sig­na­tures, it was just a read­ing of poet­ry. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, on a few occa­sions, that’s all I was left with — just bare musi­cal sketch­es. But they were also so laden with instruc­tion.

Cohen was a lit­er­ary per­fec­tion­ist. “He’s sort of the oppo­site of Dylan, who had this from the hip [song­writ­ing process],” says his son. “My father was much more method­i­cal, he had a chis­el… there were big, big pieces at which he’d been at work for years.” That Cohen would leave work behind for oth­ers to fin­ish, how­ev­er, is ful­ly in keep­ing with his biggest themes: noth­ing is ever per­fect.

In my opin­ion, there’s some­thing about the the­sis of this man’s work, which is about bro­ken­ness. One of the main points of inter­est was this idea of “the bro­ken hal­lelu­jah,” or “the crack in every­thing, that’s how the light gets in.” I think I’m not trans­gress­ing by say­ing one of the posi­tions of what “Hap­pens to the Heart” is bleak, that it breaks. But it’s how one sees one’s own heart break­ing: if you see it as every­one’s heart break­ing, it recon­tex­tu­al­izes it. 

“Hap­pens to the Heart” is also the first posthu­mous film in a “new series of artis­tic respons­es to Leonard Cohen’s posthu­mous album,” curat­ed by Now­ness who “invit­ed a glob­al ros­ter of film­mak­ers and artists to present visu­al inter­pre­ta­tions of Leonard Cohen’s life and lyrics.”

Four of those short films are avail­able on YouTube, and you can watch them here. In addi­tion to “Hap­pens to the Heart,” they include “Mov­ing On,” “Thanks for the Dance,” and “The Hills.” They do not include “The Goal,” but you can stream three dif­fer­ent ver­sions on the Now­ness site. One of these uses “footage from NOWNESS’s exten­sive film archive” in a “visu­al elab­o­ra­tion on the album’s sixth track,” the site notes, “which evolved from a 1998 Cohen poem of the same name” — a quin­tes­sen­tial Cohen lyric filled with wry, mor­bid humor and com­pas­sion for uni­ver­sal human suf­fer­ing.

I can’t leave my house
Or answer the phone
I’m going down again
But I’m not alone

Set­tling at last
Accounts of the soul
This for the trash
That paid in full

As for the fall, it began long ago
Can’t stop the rain
Can’t stop the snow

I sit in my chair
I look at the street
The neigh­bor returns
My smile of defeat

I move with the leaves
I shine with the chrome
I’m almost alive
I’m almost at home

No one to fol­low
And noth­ing to teach
Except that the goal
Falls short of the reach

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Leonard Cohen’s Last Work, The Flame Gets Pub­lished: Dis­cov­er His Final Poems, Draw­ings, Lyrics & More

How Leonard Cohen & David Bowie Faced Death Through Their Art: A Look at Their Final Albums

New Ani­ma­tion Brings to Life a Lost 1974 Inter­view with Leonard Cohen, and Cohen Read­ing His Poem “Two Slept Togeth­er”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness