In our first substack blog, we told you that the name “A Mighty Little Song” is a Joni Mitchell quote from a conversation Melanie had with Joni when she first worked for her in the ‘80s. They were talking about the positive change “Big Yellow Taxi” has inspired, and Joni said that the world needs more “mighty little songs.”
Last weekend Joni played the Hollywood Bowl, her first headline concert in LA in 24 years. How spectacular that she has overcome her near-fatal brain aneurysm and is playing in public again! Brava!! Joni – who turns 81 two days after the election – performed Elton John’s “I’m Still Standing” and quipped, "I think I have to sing, 'I'm still sitting after all these years.’" Such a boss.
During the show on Saturday, an audience member yelled something up to Joni and she responded, “‘F*ck Donald Trump!’ I love that song!” She was referring to the YG and Nipsey Hussle rap protest song “FDT (F*ck Donald Trump)”
At the end of the show, Joni reiterated, “F*ck Donald Trump,” and admonished everybody to get out and vote, saying, “This is an important one. I wish I could vote. I’m a Canadian – I’m one of those lousy immigrants.”
A decade before Melanie started working for Joni, she and her sister Nancy attended a lecture series on the music business at the UCLA School of Business Management taught by David Geffen. This was 18 years before Geffen co-founded Dreamworks in 1994.
In one of the lectures, Geffen told a story about a cab ride he took with Joni and her manager Elliot Roberts in New York City in the ‘60s. According to Geffen, they were going through a “rough part of town” and saw a man beating up a woman on the sidewalk. Joni yelled for the cab driver to pull over. She jumped out – swinging her purse over her head – and broke up the fight. Geffen laughed at the memory and said he and Roberts remained in the cab, cowering in their seats.
Joni has been swinging her purse for social justice for seven decades even in the face of the gross sexism that’s rampant in the music business. When she signed with Reprise Records she had to pretend that David Crosby was producing Song To A Seagull because the record company wouldn’t let a woman produce her own record in 1968.
Just last year, Jann Wenner, co-founder of both Rolling Stone magazine and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, published a book of seven interviews of rock royalty called The Masters. All seven of Wenner’s interviewees were white men: Dylan, Lennon, Jagger, Townshend, Garcia, Bono, and Springsteen.
New York Times journalist David Marchese interviewed Wenner about the book and asked him why no women or black musicians were included. Wenner said no female musicians were "articulate enough on this intellectual level." Wenner continued: "You know, Joni was not a philosopher of rock 'n' roll. She didn't, in my mind, meet that test. Not by her work, not by other interviews she did."
The backlash was instantaneous. One of our favorite tweets came from Valerie Bertinelli who said something like, “Do not in the name of all that is Holy buy this f*cking book.”
Canadian cartoonist Barry Blitt produced the most brilliant response to Wenner in a cartoon he titled “JANN WENNER, JONI MITCHELL (TO SCALE, CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE-WISE).”
As we work though the last two weeks before the election, take heart that our Get Out The Vote machine in this post-Dobbs era is unlike anything we’ve seen in modern US politics and is way more powerful than what any of the pollsters are accounting for. And who is leading the charge? Post menopausal women, swinging their purses for democracy, who remember what life was like before Roe and who aren’t going to let us go back to that Hellscape. The Republican party castigates older women as useless except as babysitters, but they’re about to find out they’ve poked a giant.
We’re still standing, and we are so glad to be in this good fight with you and Joni,
Roy and Melanie
Share this post