by Richard Skelly » Sat Dec 30, 2017 3:22 am
Hard to believe, but You Turn Me On, I’m A Radio was the very first Joni single to break into the Billboard Top 30 in 1972. There would only be three others before her jazzier inclinations confined her to the lower rungs of chartdom.
One story has it that Joni devised this song, tongue in cheek, to placate Asylum Records execs who wanted a radio-friendly single. Perhaps. But I detect a calculated approach by the artist herself to play on disc jockeys’ egos with repeated references to their medium. Wilier still, our Joni of the Canyon, laid out a languorous instrumental opening ideal for deejay talkovers.
Only two years later, Joni Mitchell would decry “the starmaker machinery behind the popular song.” But for awhile at least she could oil that machinery with the best of them.
After her devastating aneurysm, Joni Mitchell was feared to be an imminent inductee into the choir immortal. Yet two-plus years later, while scores of her peers pass from the scene, Joni hangs in there. In one public appearance, with friends such as Herbie Hancock, she seemed to be enjoying a concert. Whether or not she can ever communicate musically again, perhaps recovery might allow for a return to painting. Millions of admirers wish her the best.