Tag: Joni Mitchell

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When I listen to a song, I create a movie about the song. The song creates images when I listen to it and these images carry on through out the song. Once I have these images, my tendency is to have the same images the next time I listen to the song. Different images may evolve over the years if I listen to a song for a long time but usually fixed images based on my first listening take over and see the same images.

Recently this has become a problem as I am learning that my understanding of words can be wrong. Last year I learned that I misunderstood a line from Joni Mitchell’s song California. I thought Sunset Pig was an animal unique to California. She is actually using a term that people in the 1960’s used when referring to cops.

For almost 40 years, I took a different meaning from the song which is OK. I mean it is the audience’s song once the singer stops singing. But learning this changed the meaning of the song for me and I can’t get back my original understanding. It is a less sweet image. Thinking about Joni trying to kiss a cute little pig who is trying to wiggle free of her embrace is kind of sweet while thinking of a policeman on Sunset Boulevard that she derogatorily calls a policeman isn’t. It doesn’t amuse me any longer. It changed my experience with the song.

This brings me to Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale. “ The song is an enigma and people debate what it actually means and often are wrong. Keith Reid, the writer of the song, wasn’t referring to Chaucer when he wrote the line about the Miller telling his tale even though most critics think that is what he is referring to. So trying to understand what the song actually means is probably a losing battle. It isn’t meant to be understood in a straight forward manner in the first place. Still, one line now bothers me because I realized something about the song writer. The line is:

And would not let her be/One of sixteen vestal virgins/Who were leaving for the coast

I have assumed for years that the coast meant California until I realized that Reid was British. Does “the coast” mean something different for somebody from Britain. I could only find definitions that meant California although one person defined “the coast” as the whole American Pacific Coast. But mostly when people use the phrase “the coast,” they meant California.

As far as I could learn, British people mean California as well. But it has begun to bother me because why would a British person getting on a plane and saying they were leaving for “the coast” mean California. California is pretty far away and “the coast” is pretty vague. I would think any British person leaving for California would actually say California.

But I do think it would be important to know what Reid actually means here because it changes my understanding of the song. If a British person is taking a plane to Blackpool instead of to California “the coast” means something different. For the time being, I am sticking with California unless someone can give me a reason to think differently. Let me know.

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Bob and I were recently listening to Joni Mitchell’s song “California.” In the song, Mitchell sings about her desire to return to California. She wants it so badly that she will “even kiss a sunset pig.” Bob, who lived in Los Angeles at around this time, remarked that she was talking about the policemen who worked the Sunset Strip who had a bad reputation for breaking up protests going on then.

I was stunned. I thought she was talking about an actual pig. As soon as I heard his explanation, I knew I was wrong. I don’t know how I got it wrong because when I was young a lot of my contemporaries called the police pigs. Given that Mitchell wrote her song in 1967 when protests were frequent occurrences with the contingent police confrontations, the police definition makes much more sense than my pig. Somehow I conjured up an image of Mitchell holding a baby pig and attempting to kiss it while it squealed and struggled with her when she wanted me to think about a policeman.

Yet, even though my understanding was wrong, I actually liked the image of her kissing a pig more so than her being so desperate for home that she even would deign to kiss a policeman. The real meaning irritates me. It is a hard and unnecessary jab. My opinion of the song has changed. There is a meanness to it. It’s no longer just a sweet song about a homesick woman. I was perfectly happy with “California” when I thought she was kissing a barnyard animal. Now I am not.

It also makes me painfully aware of how I might misunderstand what other people mean. Even when I get the words right, I can miss the point. How often do I jump to the wrong conclusions because I understood words incorrectly or just differently than the speaker? Probably a lot more than I would like to admit.