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Few singer-songwriters have been quite so respected and revered by their peers as Joni Mitchell.
David Crosby called Mitchell “unquestionably the best of us” and recalled that during their brief relationship during the ’60s, he would sometimes play her one of his new songs only for Mitchell to come back with three of her own she had written the night before that were infinitely superior to his.
“She is arguably the best singer-songwriter of our time,” he told Howard Stern in an interview in 2021.
Like all the greatest artists, Mitchell has always been a restless creative spirit, perpetually moving forward creatively and searching for something new, challenging and innovative.
Such was the case in early 1976, when she embarked on her eighth studio album Hejira, a graceful and supple masterpiece and her most jazz-orientated album up to that point, which also encompassed elements of folk, rock and ambient music.
It’s an intoxicating mix, as exemplified on Coyote, the opening track and the sole single from album, which features the seductive rhythms and stunning interplay between Mitchell’s percussive acoustic guitar and the mesmerising fretless bass lines and ringing harmonics of Jaco Pastorius.
Above it all, Mitchell’s voice soars, with brilliantly skewed phrasing, complex rhythmic syncopation and rapid-fire half-spoken delivery that all meld into one glorious unique whole.
Inspired by Mitchell’s whirlwind relationship with playwright and actor Sam Shepard, Coyote is exhilarating, cathartic, seductive and intense.
50 years on from its release, the song stands as one of the high points of Mitchell’s rich back catalogue.
She wrote Coyote soon after joining Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour in late 1975, a hedonistic and often chaotic two-leg 57-date concert tour featuring numerous musicians, artists and collaborators. Mitchell played 19 performances in total across 16 cities in the US and Canada.
“Everybody took all of their vices to the nth degree and came out of it born again or into AA,” she said in Timothy White’s 1990 book Rock Lives.
Dylan had hired playwright and actor Sam Shepard as screenwriter for a proposed film of the tour, which was released as Renaldo And Clara in 1978.
Shepard was a relatively obscure cult figure at the time, but was closely associated with several figures within Dylan’s circle.
In biographer David Yaffe’s 2017 book Reckless Daughter, Mitchell notes that she “had a flirtation” with Shepard.
“It was like we were twins,” said Mitchell, who said she was drawn to Shepard’s multi-talented abilities and used elements of his creative approach to help create the song Coyote. “I was forming sentences like he would’ve,” Mitchell explained. “Everything was creating an aversion. But for me, on coke, I found him very attractive.”
The relationship was made more tempestuous by the fact that Shepard was already married and was also in a relationship with his tour manager Chris O’Dell. “Now he’s got a woman at home,” sings Mitchell, “He’s got another woman down the hall/He seems to want me anyway.”
In her 2009 fly-on-the-wall memoir Miss O’Dell, co-authored with Katherine Ketcham, O’Dell referenced the song Coyote and Mitchell’s lyrics about Shepard.
“I loved the lines Joni wrote about how we licked our wounds and took temporary lovers, using ‘pills and powders’ to get us through the drama,” wrote O’Dell.
Mitchell found the intense, freewheeling environment of the Rolling Thunder Revue tour exhilarating and hit a real creative peak.
In the 2019 documentary Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, there is a clip of Mitchell performing Coyote in the living room of Gordon Lightfoot’s house in Toronto on 1 December 1975, while Roger McGuinn and Bob Dylan accompany her on acoustics.
“Joni wrote this song about this tour and on this tour and for this tour,” says McGuinn excitedly as he leans over in front of Mitchell to speak into the recording mic.
Mitchell looks urbane and sophisticated, wearing a black beret, droopy silver earrings, black jacket and a blue silk shirt. Dylan sits strumming, looking at the deft chords Mitchell is playing. He is wearing a big fur hat. His face is impassive.
Mitchell, by contrast, is clearly enthused and excited. As she settles into the pacy percussive guitar rhythm of the intro to Coyote, she looks at Dylan and mouths the chords, just before she lurches into the first verse.
“No regrets coyote/We just come from such different sets of circumstance/I’m up all night in the studios/And you’re up early on your ranch…”
There’s a compelling intensity and urgency to Mitchell’s tearaway rhythms, complex rapid-fire lyrical phrasings and the stream-of-consciousness lyrics. It’s as if the words and ideas are flowing out so profoundly that she can barely capture them in time.
The scenario in Lightfoot’s living room is an intriguing one. Mitchell tears through the brilliant new composition while Dylan sits there, essentially reduced to playing rhythm guitar.
“The look in Dylan’s eyes confirms what we all knew,” wrote Jenn Pelly in a review of Hejira in Pitchfork in 2022, “that at this moment Mitchell is the towering genius.”
Shepard of course is the titular coyote in the song, portrayed as a womanising cowboy, pursuing Mitchell, “a prisoner of the white lines on the freeway”.
The speed of the narrative echoes the brevity and intensity of the relationship between Mitchell and Shepard. Mitchell described it as a flirtation, but the lyrics are salacious. In her 2019 book Joni Mitchell: New Critical Readings, author Ruth Charnock describes the song as “either the most flirtatious song about fucking or the most graphic song about flirting ever written”.
In her piece on Hejira in Pitchfork, Jenn Pelly describes Mitchell as an avant-gardist among rock’n’roll people. It’s an astute observation. “Mitchell,” wrote Pelly, “inhabited that slippery space unique to those ahead of the times.”
Mitchell recorded Coyote in 1976 during the sessions for Hejira at A&M Studios in Hollywood. But the song would soon undergo a profound change.
Ever since Mitchell recorded her album The Hissing Of Summer Lawns (1975) she had grown increasingly frustrated by the limitations of rock-based session players.
“There were grace notes and subtleties and things that I thought were getting kind of buried,” she said in Sheila Weller’s 2008 book Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon – And The Journey Of A Generation.
She was reportedly dissatisfied with what she called the “dead, distant bass sound” of the ‘60s and early ’70s and found it frustrating that bass players she worked with always had to play the root note on ‘the one’, emphasising the first beat of every bar.
Session musicians advised her to seek out jazz players instead, and in late 1975 guitarist Robben Ford played her an advance copy of the debut album by bass virtuoso Jaco Pastorius, a prodigious 24-yr-old bass player from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, who had recently joined seminal jazz fusion band Weather Report.
Pastorius was everything Mitchell was looking for in a bass player and much more. Fluid, fearless, mercurial, tempestuous and – crucially – he rarely played on the ‘one’.
Like Mitchell, Pastorius considered himself a painter first and a musician second. But that didn’t stop him introducing himself as “the best bass player in the world”.
Impressed, Mitchell asked Pastorius to overdub the bass parts on four tracks on Hejira, including Coyote.
The impact was immediate and transformative. Pastorius completely redefined the role of the bass in Coyote, adding what is essentially a second melodic voice. Long glissandos, subtle vibrato and vocal-like phrasing imbued the song with a whole new depth and texture.
His fluid fretless bass lines and harmonics elevated the song, creating a unique interplay with Mitchell’s driving, percussive acoustic guitar.
While Pastorius introduced counter melodies he also instinctively recognised the need to simplify when Mitchell’s playing became rhythmically complex and dense.
Along with percussionist Bobbye Hall, Pastorius’s playing introduced a mesmerising groove that became a signature of the Hejira album. Mitchell called Pastorius the bassist of her dreams and his playing helped liberate her music.
In 1987 Mitchell recalled to Musician magazine: “There was a time when Jaco and I first worked together when there was nobody I’d rather hang with than him. There was an appreciation, a joie de vivre, a spontaneity.”
Coyote was released as the lead single off Hejira in February 1977 on Asylum Records. When she returned to touring it would become a staple of her live set.
On 25 November 1976, Mitchell performed the song with The Band at their Last Waltz farewell concert at the Winter Ballroom in San Francisco, an event immortalised in Martin Scorsese’s landmark film of the event, which was released along with the triple album soundtrack in April 1978.
The Band had very little time to rehearse for the show and Mitchell famously uses complex non-standard guitar tunings. The Band’s musical director for the concert, John Simon, recalled that they had to stare intently at her left hand shapes during the rehearsals to try and work out exactly what chords she was playing.
The Band were still largely winging it when Mitchell strode onto the stage, kissed a rather startled Robbie Robertson on the cheek, tuned her Martin D-28 guitar and launched into the propulsive acoustic intro for Coyote.
Bassist Rick Danko’s style was light years away from Pastorius’s but the instinctive playing of Danko, Robertson, Levon Helm, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson ensured that the rendition of Coyote had a feel and intensity all its own.
In his 2016 memoir, Testimony, Robbie Robertson recalled being deeply impressed by Mitchell’s stage presence and her performance of Coyote that Thanksgiving Day evening, back in 1976.
“Joni’s songs might have been the most challenging of the night, with their syncopation and chord structures that kept you on your toes,” remembered Robertson. “but we sailed through that one like a cool breeze”.