Something/Anything?

There comes a time in any person's life when only pure sweet unadulterated pop music will do. If there's a sweeter, more uplifting three-minute (well, 2:59) pop song not written by a Beatle, then surely Todd Rundgren's 'I Saw The Light' is it. And although it's the brightest star in this double album, it's certainly not the only one in the constellation.

I picked this up from a market stall at the end of a very cold trip to Cambridge to visit some school friends at the university. For two or three days, the sky was blue but the wind blew directly from the Urals, or so it seemed. I'd never in all my days of living in Belfast, sheltered by its lough and its surrounding hills, experienced cold quite like that.

The market stall was, I think, Andy's – who went on to establish a chain of shops called Andy's Records. It cost me £3.30, which seemed like a lot of money in those days, but just for good measure I picked up a cassette version years later in a remainder bookshop in Sheffield where they sold books by weight. At the derisory price of 49p, it said Buy me!, so I bought a few copies to give away to friends whose lives would surely be incomplete without it. I don't remember receiving any feedback to this effect.

I suppose it wouldn't be to everyone's taste. There's a blue-eyed soul track on Side 4 called 'Dust in the Wind' and many of the 25 tracks on the album have the throwaway ephemeral quality of DIY pop music. Todd as usual wrote almost everything on the album, produced it himself on his own Bearsville record label and played all of the instruments (on the first three sides), so there's a certain sense of playing around with big boys' toys. Side 2, for example, starts with a silly introduction in which Todd, sounding like a teenage punk, runs through the tell-tale sounds of a badly produced record. And it's followed by 'Breathless', the kind of synthesised noodling that would punctuate A Wizard, A True Star, his uneven self-indulgent follow-up.

But the fact is that 'Breathless' is also the kind of tune that stays in your head and makes you want to whistle along to it. In any case, I needed the record in my life at that time (1973). Probably searching in vain for Mrs. Right, as one does at 18, I disgraced myself during that Cambridge trip by drinking far too much beer with my friends in their student-oriented pub of choice, where I spent most of the evening shut in a privy with my head on my knees.

My young foolish heart would have responded to all the pretty songs for yearning lovers like 'I Saw the Light', 'It Wouldn't Have Made any Difference', 'Sweeter Memories', 'Torch Song' and the delicious 'Marlene' ('you're the prettiest girl I've ever seen'). And that's not to mention the song he resurrected from his days as leader of the proto-garage band, Nazz (whose second album bore the splendid title Nazz Nazz), which would be covered , exquisitely, by The Isley Brothers, and become his biggest solo hit single, 'Hello It's Me'.

But, as the title of the album suggests, there is something for everyone on these four sides: from the heavy metal of 'Little Red Lights' to the up-tempo R&B of 'Slut', 'Wolfman Jack' and 'Some Folks is Even Whiter than Me', to the guitar heroics of 'Black Maria', and even to the cod Gilbert & Sullivan of 'Song of the Viking' (indeed, he would go on to include their 'The Lord Chancellor's Nightmare' on his next double album, Todd).

The predominant influence, though, seems to be the ingenuous spirit of doo-wop and the kind of uptown early soul to which he no doubt listened as a kid growing up in Philadelphia. He always wore his heart on his sleeve and wasn't shy of expressing the kinds of emotions that didn't necessarily go with his alter ego, the guitar-wielding front man of Utopia, his erratic prog-rock band (for whom he insisted on sublimating his not inconsiderable ego and song-writing talents in the name of democracy).

Fortunately, when I saw him live in concert at Exeter University in the mid '70s, it was much more Todd than Utopia. As someone who loved to dabble at the cutting edge of technology, the sound – in an era when high-volume distortion was often the name of the game – was superb and the concert was all the more memorable. Something of a perfectionist, he would go on to record cover versions of songs like 'Good Vibrations' on a curious album called Faithful which were so close to the originals as to be almost pointless.

Techno-whizz, guitar hero and producer (of, among others, Meat Loaf and Grand Funk Railroad for God's sake), there were so many strings to his bow that he might have ended up dissipating his considerable talents. But he enjoyed a long, diverse and mainly fruitful career that continues to this day. Ultimately, however, he would never top the sheer winning simplicity of this, his third solo album.

For someone whose posturing could be irritating, he could also be very self-deprecating. He talked, for example, of having knocked off 'I Saw the Light' in 20 minutes because it's full of simplistic moon/June-type rhymes. But that's to deny what it must take to write a pop song that still sounds, nearly 50 years on, as fresh as the day it was recorded in his own private studio.

He was a friend and a big fan of Laura Nyro – for which he racks up masses of Brownie points in my ledger – and la grande dame of blue-eyed soul even asked him to lead her touring band at a time when he was still tied to Nazz. Todd was a big admirer of her Eli & the Thirteenth Confession and there's the same kind of short, sharp, soulful quality in many of the songs that grace this, his own enduring masterpiece.

What a team they might have made. Laura Nyro was one of the very best white interpreters of black music (as her versions of Martha Reeves' 'Jimmy Mack' and 'Nowhere to Run' bear out) and Todd would go on to include a convincing medley of soul numbers on A Wizard, A True Star, which includes Smokey Robinson's 'I'm So Proud' and the Delfonics' delicious 'La-La-La Means I Love You'.

But it wasn't to be. While Laura Nyro died prematurely, Todd's career has proved that longevity has its place. Based now in Hawaii, he's still churning 'em out. I gave up buying his albums after 1981's Healing (which typically included a 7" single of two songs that he didn't manage to cram onto the 33⅓ record). Befitting a classic, though, Something/Anything? continues to delight, just as other facets of his career continue to surprise. He has toured with Ringo Starr's All-Starrs, performed 'Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite' at a Hollywood Bowl celebration of the Beatles and, I recently discovered, my beloved Green Bay Packers have adopted his minor hit, 'Bang the Drum All Day', as an unofficial theme tune.

Let us now praise multi-faceted men!

Hejira

Some folks go for Blue and some folks go for Court and Spark. Joni's wackier fans maybe plump for The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Few if any nominate one of the later albums, although 1991's Night Ride Home is pretty damn good. Me, I used to be a Court and Spark man until Hejira came into my life not that long after its release in 1978.

The thing about Hejira is its deceptive simplicity. The instrumentation never amounts to much more than Joni Mitchell's acoustic guitar and, on certain tracks at least, Jaco Pastorius' electric bass. The self-confessed 'greatest bass player in the world' – as he announced himself to Joe Zawinul of Weather Report – can sometimes dominate proceedings, but on Hejira his playing is more a sympathetic accompaniment, tastefully fleshing out the mood created by Joni's inspired lyrical poetry.

As a student of American literature, I always found it a source of shame that I could never finish Jack Kerouac's On The Road. It is, after all, a seminal picaresque novel of the type that revolves around the episodic adventures of a (deeply) flawed hero. How could any self-respecting student of the genre not love it? Actually, I've subsequently met others who have confessed the same guilty secret to me and we've started our own self-help group.

More than anything else, Hejira helps assuage this literary shame – because in many ways it seems to be Joni Mitchell's very own open-road voyage from coast-to-coast voyage across her adopted America. It's all spelt out in the title track: 'I'm travelling in some vehicle/ I'm sitting in some café/ A defector from the petty wars/ Until love sucks me back that way'. In other words, she's hit the open road to get away from all the sapping angst of an on-off love affair in order to be alone, with time for contemplation and clearly, since the album itself is proof of the pudding, creation.

'I'm porous with travel fever,' she sings, 'But you know I'm so glad to be on my own'. If ever an album of the 70s, the era of the great American singer-songwriters, justified a gatefold sleeve with reproduced lyrics, then it's this one. The evocative imagery throughout confirms with each listen that this is top-notch poetry set to music. Consider, for example, the way an evanescent clarinet underscores the couplet, 'Strains of Benny Goodman/ Coming thru the snow and the pinewood trees'.   

Few musicians, but only the best: Jaco Pastorius; snatches of Larry Carlton's eloquent guitar, the session musician who made The Crusaders' Chain Reaction such a funky jewel; Victor Feldman, ex-Miles Davis, whose vibes illuminate 'Amelia', the song inspired by Amelia Earheart, the doomed pioneering aviatrix, and a vision of 'six jet planes/ Leaving six white vapor trails across the bleak terrain/ It was the hexagram of the heavens' [Is that not magnificent? Ed.]; the solid long-standing jazz rhythm section of Max Bennett on bass and John Guerin on drums, unsung heroes of Frank Zappa's Hot Rats. And Neil Young, whose harmonica graces 'Furry Sings the Blues'.

Given that half the music I listen to is instrumental, while half of the other half is in Spanish, Portuguese or some obscure African tongue, it's hardly surprising I suppose that the musical rather than the lyrical content has always been my primary concern. Hejira is perhaps the only album in my collection where it's the other way round – notwithstanding the heavenly chord changes of 'Song for Sharon' that make me break out every time in shivers.

Either side, it makes no difference. You pull out big fat plums of literary deliciousness from each sampling of the pie. 'Coyote', the first track, for example, establishes our introspective heroine memorably as 'a hitcher/ A prisoner of the white lines on the freeway', picked up by the kind of human coyote who watches the waitresses' legs as he 'stares a hole in his scrambled eggs'. And that's just the beginning.

In 'Amelia', the next track, 'I pulled into the Cactus Tree Motel/ To shower off the dust/ And I slept on the strange pillows of my wanderlust'. She can out-Kerouac a Kerouac. 'Furry Sings the Blues' follows, painting a wonderful picture of a crotchety old bluesman, scratching a living in the 'carcass' of Beale Street, Memphis, one-time cradle of the blues. 'Old Furry sings the blues/ Propped up in his bed/ With his dentures and his leg removed.' In 'A Strange Boy', her portrait I think of a former lover, she offers us the notion that love is 'the strongest poison and medicine of all'.

Love as a double-edged sword is on her mind throughout and in 'Hejira' she finds 'comfort in melancholy'. Opening Side 2, 'Song for Sharon' finds her in New York contemplating the thrills and illusions of weddings and marriage. Quite apart from the chord changes, the melancholic imagery singles it out as possibly the best track on the album. How do you top the image of 'this vigorous anonymity' of the 'skaters on Wollman rink'? Maybe only with the verse about 'A woman I knew just drowned herself/ The well was deep and muddy/ She was just shaking off futility/ Or punishing someone...'

In 'Black Crow' – which incidentally was covered sublimely by the jazz singer, Cassandra Wilson – she asks 'I've been travelling so long/ How'm I ever going to know my home?' But in the very next track, the beautiful, lazy 'Blue Motel', she's thinking of her lover and all his female hangers-on and on her way back home to 'LA town'. For the moment, though, she's in Savannah, Georgia, where 'it's pouring rain/ Palm trees in the porch light like slick black cellophane'.

In the final track, 'Refuge of the Road', there's even a teeny-weeny brass refrain, as if to symbolise being back on the west coast (with 'a thunderhead of judgment/ ... gathering in my gaze'). In the final verse, 'in a highway service station', she sees a photograph seen from the moon of the earth as a 'marbled bowling ball', on which you can't make out cities or forests or the highways of her musical travelogue – and least of all its heroine and her 'baggage overload'. Brilliant. Who needs On The Road?

Introspection in my mind has never been this rewarding. 'Hejira' is my favourite Joni Mitchell album by a country road and captures her at the very pinnacle of her art. In it, she sings of 'the hope and the hopelessness/ I've witnessed thirty years'. Now, in her old age, she is understandably disillusioned and I find the anger of the recent Shine too uncomfortable to listen to. It makes me think back sadly to 'Big Yellow Taxi', in which she sung about her concern for the environment with such youthful humour and pizzazz. I share her disillusions, but never when I listen to Hejira.