Joni Mitchell is undoubtedly a musical icon, but spend a handful of decades in the music industry, and it becomes all too easy to start a collection of artists with whom you have beef. Such was the case for the Canadian singer-songwriter, who ended up having falling outs, terse words, or tense relationships with fellow stars dominating the scene alongside her.
Of course, Mitchell is anything but a shrinking violet, and she makes her feelings about others crystal clear whenever she sees fit. In more than one of these instances, that was a major catalyst of the bad blood.
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1. Jackson Browne
Joni Mitchell dated fellow folk-rock star Jackson Browne in the early 1970s, but the romance was brief and eventually dissolved into full-blown beef. Two decades later, Mitchell wrote a song that seemingly referenced a scandal involving Browne’s then-girlfriend, actor Daryl Hannah, accusing Browne of physical abuse. Mitchell sings in her 1997 track “Not to Blame,” The story hit the news from coast to coast. They said you beat the girl you loved the most. Your charitable acts seemed out of place with the beauty with your first marks on her face.
The scathing song also appears to reference Browne’s wife, Phyllis Major’s death in 1976. His mother had the frailty you despise, Mitchell sings, and the looks you love to drive to [censored]. Not one wet eye around her, lonely little grave, sad, ‘He was out of line, girl, you were not to blame.’
Browne promptly responded, accusing Mitchell of being physically violent and bitter. “Joni Mitchell is, unfortunately, she’s not really well,” Brown told the Dallas Morning News (via Tampa Bay Times). “At this point in her life, you know, she has had deep fallings-out with many people in her life. She’s not a happy person, and what she says in that song is absolutely, 100 percent wrong. And it’s really very nasty, very, very ill, you know, very bad-spirited of her to make this kind of conjecture.”
2. John Lennon
John Lennon was never shy about expressing his opinions about the musicians he disliked, including “flowery” (coincidentally, female) folk artists like Judy Collins and Joan Baez. But when it came to Joni Mitchell, Lennon apparently had the opposite opinion. She wasn’t too flowery; she was too stuffy. Mitchell recalled meeting Lennon during his infamous Lost Weekend, during which he accosted her with unsolicited musical advice.
“You want a hit, don’t you?” Mitchell recalled Lennon saying to her while she was cutting her 1974 record ‘Court and Spark’ (via Far Out Magazine). “Put some fiddles on it! Why do you always let other people have your hits for you, y’know?” May Pang, the assistant with whom Lennon was having an affair during his period of debauchery, later recalled Mitchell sitting in on Lennon’s studio time, smiling at him until she made him so uncomfortable that he left the session.
Mitchell attributed the tensions between herself and Lennon to a “class difficulty he had” in a 2014 interview with Maclean’s. “He’s a working-class lad. I’m sure he had that same fight with [producer] George Martin because he was afraid that he was betraying his class. It was that fear working-class people have of middle-class people.”
3. Judy Collins
American folk artist Judy Collins’ wildly popular cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” might’ve earned Collins a Grammy Award, but it certainly didn’t earn Collins the respect of Mitchell. According to David Yaffe’s Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell, Mitchell made her thoughts on the cover clear, describing Collins’ sound as “the damsel in the green room. There’s something la-di-da about her.”
Collins had previously held Mitchell in far higher esteem, describing the moment she first heard the Canadian artist sing the song over the phone in the middle of the night. “I just thought, this is it,” Collins told Vulture. As for Mitchell’s disdain for what Collins did with the track? Well, Collins isn’t too worried about it.
“I remember hearing something about Joni not liking my version of the song, but I couldn’t care less,” Collins continued. “I’m sure she feels that way about a lot of people who sing her songs. I’m sorry she didn’t have the hit, but I’m sure glad I did! I think she’s a little jealous, but with her history of being this brilliant songwriter, she has no right to actually feel that way. And actually, Judy didn’t make a cent off this song.” (Per U.S. law, royalties go to songwriters, not song performers. But for someone as particular about their songwriting style as Joni Mitchell, not even a royalty check was enough to soothe her sore feelings.)
Photo by David Redfern/Redferns