Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Court and Spark by Court and Spark by Sean Nelson. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 660326d91e662b41 • Your IP : 116.202.236.252 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. Sean Nelson Net Worth. Nelson formed in 1993 and played with the band through to its farewell show in 2009. In addition to being the band's lead singer, he was also its Songwriter and keyboardist. The band's debut album Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? was released in 1997 and was certified Gold by the RIAA for sales of 500,000 copies. The album contained the hit single "", which was featured in the 1999 film American Pie and was later used as the theme song for the British sitcom Peep Show . Nelson joined the staff of the alternative weekly newspaper in 1996 while still a member of Harvey Danger. He has held several positions at the publication, including web Editor, film Editor, copy Editor and associate Editor. He is currently the paper's arts Editor. In 2001, Nelson formed a second band, , with . He left the band in 2004, and Roderick has continued the group as a largely solo effort. In 2006, Nelson published his first book, an entry in the 33⅓ series on Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark . His essay "Dead Man Talking" was published in the Da Capo anthology Best Music Writing 2008 . In 2008, Nelson co-wrote and played a supporting role in Humpday Director Lynn Shelton's third feature film My Effortless Brilliance, which enjoyed a successful run on the film festival circuit and was released on DVD by IFC Films in November 2009. He has also acted in David Russo's cult film festival hit The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle and alongside Dax Shepard in Kathryn Aselton's The Freebie, which was released in September 2010. Court and Spark by Sean Nelson. T his is Joni Mitchell�s jazz-pop genius in full bloom, which made the posies from her past records look like cold, blue steely dandelions. Even the palest entries (�Down To You,� �Peoples Parties,� �The Same Situation�) are colored with clever arrangements, while the warmest shine in technicolor wonder. Her ability to make such an album was evident in songs like �California� and �Electricity,� but they were skinny models compared to the Rubenesque beauties of �Help Me� and �Free Man In Paris.� For Court, Joni assembled some of the leading session players (Larry Carlton, Wilton Felder, John Guerin, Joe Sample, Tom Scott), many of whom would later appear on the sophisticated jazz- pop albums of Steely Dan, the most obvious reference point for this sort of music. And yet, as much a revelation as Court is, Mitchell quickly renounced it, refusing to play many of the songs on her subsequent tour. Proving that Neil Young hadn�t cornered the market on Canada�s mercury, she began a string of albums that delved deeper into jazz� difficult terrain and away from accessible pop music (though it�s the same artist at work in all of them). For me, Court represents the peak of her potential as a popular songwriter, moving past the dry confessional to become the sly social commentator. The music is like the background noise of the world at play, and Mitchell moves through it fluidly, gracefully. The lyrics, however, reveal a woman anything but in control: she�s worried (�Court and Spark�), falling (�Help Me�), anxious (�Car on a Hill�), deaf, dumb and blind (�People�s Parties�). In such company, the closing �Twisted� becomes less a playful game of one- upmanship than a waving of the white flag to her own internal demons. I tend to see Court as Joni caught in the starmaker machinery, her flailing mistaken for dancing, with �The Jungle Line� her heroic unstuckness from selfsame machine (hooray). 7E-1001 inner gatefold 7E-1001 back cover. COURT AND SPARK 2:46 HELP ME 3:22 FREE MAN IN PARIS 3:02 PEOPLE'S PARTIES 2:20 SAME SITUATION 3:05 CAR ON A HILL 2:58 DOWN TO YOU 5:36 JUST LIKE THIS TRAIN 4:23 RAISED ON ROBBERY 3:05 TROUBLE CHILD 3:57 TWISTED (Annie Ross/Wardell Grey) 2:18. JONI MITCHELL -- vocals, piano, clavinet, background voices, cover painting MAX BENNETT -- bass LARRY CARLTON -- electric guitar JOHN GUERIN -- drums and percussion JOE SAMPLE -- electric piano TOM SCOTT -- woodwinds & reeds, string arrangement Dennis Budimir -- electric guitar (10) Cheech & Chong -- background voices (11) David Crosby -- background voices (3,7) Wilton Felder -- bass (3,4) Jose Feliciano -- electric guitar (3) Chuck Findley -- trumpet (10,11) Milt Holland -- chimes (1) Jim Hughart -- bass (10) Graham Nash -- background voices (3) Wayne Perkins -- electric guitar (6) Robbie Robertson -- electric guitar (9) Susan Webb -- background voices (7) Henry Lewy -- sound engineer Anthony Hudson -- art direction/design Norman Seeff -- photography. REGION RELEASE DATE LABEL MEDIA ID NUMBER FEATURES US/AUSL January 1974 Asylum LP/LPQ/8T 7E/EQ/T8-1001 gatefold cover, avail. as quadrophonic UK February 1974 Asylum LP SYLA-8756 gatefold cover CAN 1974 Asylum LP 7ES-1001 gatefold cover JPN 1974 Asylum LP P-8412Y US 1980 Nautilus LP NR-11 gatefold cover, half-speed remaster UK Asylum LP K-53002 gatefold cover GER Asylum LP AS-53002 ZAN Asylum 2LP AUD-11305 repackaged w. Hissing of Summer Lawns as 2 ORIGINALS OF. GER Asylum CS 96-0276-4 repackaged w. FOR THE ROSES NET 1988 Warner CD 60593 US 1992 DCC CD GZS-1025 gold disc US 1997 DCC LP LPZ-2044 audiophile vinyl US 2000 Asylum CD E2-1001 gatefold cover. As part of Continuum's 33 1/3 series of in-depth album critiques, Sean Nelson has written a 118-page book on Court And Spark, which you can find here on Amazon for around $10. Apparently, I'm not the master of free time after all. Court and Spark by Sean Nelson. by Sean Nelson Crawdaddy December 20, 2006. Many books come out each year deconstructing rock music: The musicians, their albums, their songs, their showering habits, and their other habits. It's here where we'll take an excerpt of a book for you to check out before you make the purchase. As of now these will exclusively feature the venerable 33 1/3 series, which picks apart an album by a band or musician. In the future, we hope to include more rock books of all varieties. Joni Mitchell: Court and Spark - A Broader Sensibility. I suppose people have always been lonely, but this, I think, is an especially lonely time to live in. So many people are valueless or confused. . . . Things change so rapidly. Rela​tionships don't seem to have any longevity. There isn't a lot of commitment to anything; it's a disposable society. ​Joni Mitchell, 1974. Of course, at this point, it feels as though I'm circling the airport of Court and Spark, trying desperately to clear the air of my deep admiration for the albums that preceded it before going in for a landing. Fair enough. Still, a fundamental question per​sists: How can you pick one album? How can you say, even tacitly, that Court and Spark is better than Blue, For the Roses, or Hissing of Summer Lawns? Or even Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, Dog Eat Dog, or any of the other Mitchell records C&S is empirically way better than. What does "better" even mean? And so forth. But again, the premise isn't that Court and Spark is the best Joni Mitchell album. As we all know, the best Joni Mitchell album is the one that's playing right now. You don't hear "All I Want" and long for "Down to You", or vice versa. No, the prem​ise is that if you regard the period between 1971 and 1975, from Blue to Summer Lawns as a single narrative​a musical Freitag's Triangle of sorts​then C&S is the unquestionable cli​max. It's the point at which Mitchell stepped outside herself just enough to communicate the breadth of the lonely time she felt herself living in, and by doing so, revealed more of herself than she ever had before. Blue is sharply first person (and presum​ably autobiographical) throughout. For the Roses, meanwhile, steps back somewhat to engage in overreaching social meta​phors ("Banquet", "Barangrill", "Electricity"), but also features a second- person voice that often sounds like a direct address to specific people ("Why do you have to be so jive?"; "You imitate the best and the rest you memorize"; "Where are you now? Are you in some hotel room? Does it have a view?" etc) and which therefore functions as first person in drag. Court and Spark is energized by a wider, more adventurous perspective than either of its predecessors: Third person narratives delivered by first person narrators, which is to say character studies, which is to say songs that manage to be personal​often devastat​ingly so​without needing to be autobiographical. After inspiring such intense one-to-one identification in her listeners, Mitchell was now taking expeditions outside herself, trying to identify with the people she met there, to better illuminate the dark corners of their inner lives as she had her own. The women of Court and Spark​the ones who find themselves at people's parties "fumbling, deaf, dumb, and blind," the ones who stay up for hours waiting for their "sugar to show," the ones who know there's going to be trouble because they're falling in love again​are everywomen, at least in the context of a certain corner of California and a certain corner of the '70s. By those same standards, the men are universal, too. The "Free Man in Paris", though famously modeled on David Geffen, doesn't leap off the grooves because Geffen is such a fascinating person, or because of the lurid secrets he was still keeping when the song was written; the song conveys, with forceful grace, the pathos of a prosperous man feeling trapped inside his own life. The simultaneously poetic and novelistic lyrics to this song come out of nowhere for Mitchell​the Free Man owes as much to Sinclair Lewis as to Dylan or Cohen or any of her other folk-rock contemporaries​and are the best representation of the quantum leap her perspective took on the album. Blue is about the self. For the Roses is about the self as reflected in others. C&S is about the city, and all the selves that collide​and fail to collide​within it. "Court and Spark" "Love came to my door," the album opens, "with a sleeping roll and a madman's soul." A few years prior, this kind of hippie calling card would have gained anyone happy entrance to a Joni Mitchell song. Back when she was a lady of the canyon, she might have cooked him a meal and sang him a song, then waxed wistful as he rambled onward. But this "Love" is an alto​gether more complex beast than the ones who had populated Mitchell's universe in the past. The "madman's soul" factor that had once seemed so compelling and agonizing in the lovers she sang about, now begins to seem burdensome, exhausting, not worth the effort. This would-be lover's rap about guilty peo​ple and "clearing" himself and the whole litany of ascetic sacri​fices he's made​having "buried the coins he made in People's Park"​and presumably expects her to make, can't beat out the comfort of her own life. Though she may be tempted ("the more he talked to me, you know, the more he reached me"), the narrator of "Court and Spark" can't let go of whatever she'd have to let go of in order to be worthy of this Love. In the song, it's called "LA, city of the fallen angels." And what LA means is the subject of nearly every song on the record. This open​ing song establishes much of the tone that follows: Ambivalent, unconvinced, torn, circumspect, wary of love's price even while in its thrall, "mistrusting and still acting kind." These aren't entirely new ideas, even in Mitchell songs. What's new is the worldliness of the voice that communicates them; there's no prostration or angst in her rejection of this suitor, just a choice. She admits a pang of sadness, perhaps, that she "couldn't let go of LA," but that's more about herself than it is about him. The operative contrast here isn't between two star-crossed lovers, it's between People's Park​the student/hippie enclave in Berkeley that represented the best of the '60s counterculture energy and some of the harshest retribution against it​and the city of fallen angels, the seat of decadent decay. This isn't "My Old Man" (though, notice that he, too, was a singer in the park) or the absentee "nonconformer" of "Little Green." Or if it is, the woman singing about him has really changed her tune. No more wistful sighs about his charming unavailability; this "Love" sounds like some kind of raving zealot: With all his talk about glory trains, clearing one's self, and sacrificing one's blues. And at the risk of over-literalizing the whole scenario, can you blame her for choosing LA? I always picture the song starting at 3am: Intense guy carrying a sleeping bag and nothing else pounding on the wooden door of a house in the Hollywood Hills, making loud pronouncements about "all the guilty people" and offering his host the privilege of completing him, while pledging to return the favor. There's something vaguely sinister about the whole scenario (a song about a raving hippie with a madman's soul showing up at your door in LA wasn't exactly a lullaby in the post Helter Skelter early '70s). The choice she's really making isn't about a guy, however, or even a lifestyle. She's choosing between a life of realism​however painful that reality might be to accept​and a romantic ideal she simply doesn't subscribe to anymore. The angels in question are fallen not from heaven but from the naïve grace of being willing to sacrifice their blues to go "dancing up a river in the dark." The great tragedy in "Court and Spark" lies in having outgrown the romance of youth without having lost the thirst for romance. And while there's nothing in the song to mark it out as autobiography, the stark tonal contrast of "Court and Spark" with previous Mitchell songs makes it feel like a signifier of a new chapter in the artist's evolution. It's clear enough that the lyric need not be about any specific man, much less a famous one. It might not even be a man at all. "Court and Spark", like Court and Spark, is a story about a woman's on-again/off-again relationship with love. The love that came to her door. The love that buried its coins and came looking for her. The love that read her mind. The love that made her worry sometimes (she worries sometimes). Personified by a man, or at least by male characteristics​although, her description of eyes "the color of the sand and the sea" can't help but suggest a more elemental nature​this love is full of insane demands, and packed with fitful abstractions. The woman in this song, whoever she is, sounds like she might have been seduced by Love a number of times in the past; he does, after all, know where she lives. But where her predecessors in Mitchell's oeuvre would likely have made the sacrifices Love demands and lived to rue them or not, "Court and Spark" heralds the end of the author's sur​render to love. Not the end of her desire for it, nor even the end of her quest for it, but the end of her willingness to subsume herself under it. This particular incarnation of love has a rival for her (self-destructive) impulses: The city. "I couldn't let go of LA" is why she turned love away. But why should love and a city be mutually exclusive? Because love, in this instance, is all strings, all contempt for "all the guilty people," many of whom presumably are among the fallen angels who live there. LA in this song​and as filmmaker Thom Andersen pointed out in his heroically ambitious documentary, Los Angeles Plays Itself, it's always significant when the city's name is truncated to just two letters; it always constitutes a spiritual, as well as a syntactical reduction​is the antithesis of the '60s, of hippies, of the free love experiment. This LA knows that love is never free, and its denizens, particularly the woman who stars in this song, are jaded enough to know better than to trust a madman who offers to complete you if you'll complete him first. Whether she's too scared or too smart to take love's hand is an open question (one that'll be addressed in the very next song). What's signifi​cant is that she chooses not to, and that choice reflects a larger freedom than most Joni Mitchell women​to say nothing of real life women​claimed for themselves in the years behind. You could call it cynical or cold, but the ​70s iteration of freedom​the rebellion after the rebellion​constituted a lot more "no" than its freewheeling predecessor had. That's because the '60s version left a lot of women (Mitchell women, I mean) holding the bag for "nonconformers" who felt free to treat them like property. The new version of freedom, as evinced by Court and Spark, involved the principle of self-preservation, not just against the bastards in power, but the bastards in People's Park, as well. This question of freedom, or rather the questioning of it, of its primacy in the culture (and the freedom-loving coun​terculture in particular), of its very nature, was always one of Mitchell's ripest subjects. Her early quasi-folk song "Urge for Going" seems like a simple celebration of freedom in among a bunch of florid lines about geese and weather, until the little ver​bal twists ("I get the urge for going but I never seem to go" and "He got the urge for going and I had to let him go") complicate the pretty picture. These complications are taken further on "Cactus Tree", the last song from her first LP​a song she later called "a grocery list of men I've liked or loved or left behind." The verses describe elaborate courtship rites (sailing, mountain climbing, letter writing) performed by a string of men to try and woo a woman who, in the last line of each verse is too busy (or "off somewhere") "being free." The surface irony of the refrain lies in the assumed tragedy of the woman's failure to land​or be landed by​any of these avid lovers. But there's a deeper irony that comes from Mitchell's delivery; while the line plainly says "she chooses not to accept their proposals because to do so would mean being possessed," her voice says, "I'm not so sure all this freedom is so much better than the alternative." She's not rejecting the lovers​any of the dozens the song offers up​so much as accepting them on her own terms: "She will love them when she sees them," she explains, then warns that "they will lose her if they follow." And then the killer ending: "And her heart is full and hollow like a cactus tree / While she's so busy being free." That "hollow" is more than just a handy rhyme. The woman in this song isn't so terribly different from the one in "Court and Spark"​except inasmuch as her language has become less baroque. More notable is that the suitor in "C&S" comes offering even less than his "Cactus Tree" forbears: Just intense words and a sleeping roll (and a madman's soul). It's as if, year by year, would-be lovers have decided that courtly love isn't worth all the hassle. Women Crush Wednesday: Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark. Who better to celebrate on #womancrushwednesday than Joni Mitchell? An emblem of female empowerment, Mitchell has always retained publishing rights to her music and has produced, often solely, her own albums. Though primarily considered a pop artist, the songs she wrote carried a signature folk rock sound with a jazz influence. Mitchell’s success as a solo songwriter and singer in the 1970s music scene certainly gets us going. Sean Nelson’s Court and Spark (2006) looks at the 1974 album, Mitchell’s sixth, as a concentrated effort for a hit record. This analysis pushes Mitchell toward the pop star image, but the album retains her signature influences from rock, including guest performers, as well as folk and jazz; the electric guitar features just as strongly as wind instruments. Court and Spark reached #2 in the United States in March of 1974, eventually receiving double-platinum certification. “Help Me,” “Free Man in Paris” and “Raised on Robbery” all became hit singles. When I listen to this album, I can’t help but analyze it in relation to other pop and rock music that I love from that era. “Same Situation” has similar vibes to Queen’s “Somebody to Love” (1976), though instead of looking for somebody to love, Mitchell’s lyrics call for “somebody/Who’s strong and somewhat sincere,” suggesting a much more nuanced, if embittered, plea for partnership. The perennial search for love in music does not always call to mind the sacrifices we anticipate in the continual bargaining of partnership. The chorus ends with “Caught in my struggle for higher achievements/And my search for love,” echoing the dichotomy faced by countless women who have given up careers and other personal achievements in exchange for a partner and family in the decades before and since Court and Spark . In Mitchell’s lyrics, the female voice and figure receives a more nuanced, complicated, and bittersweet appraisal than one is accustomed to in comparable records of the time. This also applies to “Raised on Robbery,” which is sonically different than most of the album. The opening bars are played on the electric guitar. Mitchell’s voice, supported by back-up vocalists, cuts in, in a style reminiscent of the vocalists of World War II-era songs like Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” or “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” I’ll describe it as sharp, harmonized vocals with understated instrumentals in the background. In Mitchell’s case, this style shortly gives way to a more contemporary style. Meanwhile, the lyrics quickly subvert the upbeat music with the sad tale of a woman struggling to make rent after a male relation drinks away the money that was supposed to help them survive. If anything, the fast-paced music, which adopts a jazz-folk feel, is indicative of the woman’s resolve in light of her unfortunate circumstances. Though over 40 years old, this album is surprisingly relevant today and specifically to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. For anyone sequestered in their home but still trying to navigate the online dating scene, “Help Me” resonates. The narrator frets about falling in love too quickly, while “hoping for the future/And worrying about the past.” We cannot help but think of the future and how good it will be—to wander outside, to sit in a bar, to hug someone—but we’ll never get to live in our future, post-COVID-19, the way we lived in our past. The catchy chorus finishes with “We love our lovin’/But not like we love our freedom,” which in this crisis I interpret as the collective freedom we will achieve when the spread of disease slows, which will happen faster if we refrain from breaking quarantine to date. As a woman, as an artist, Mitchell engages with and pushes against the norms of the industry, all the while retaining a singular sound and reputation. May we all strive to achieve Joni Mitchell’s level of career power and lyrical grace.