Janis Ian
important work in color
1967: Janis
Ian * For All the Seasons of
Your Mind. 1968: The Secret Life of J. Eddy Fink. 1969: Who
Really Cares? 1971: Present Company. 1974: Stars. 1975: Between
the Lines * Aftertones. 1977: Miracle Row. 1978: Janis Ian. 1979:
Night Rains. 1980: Best of Janis Ian * My Favorites. 1981: Restless Eyes. 1993: Breaking Silence. 1995: Revenge *
Society's Child: The Verve Recordings.
Phase one of Janis Ian's career started in 1966 with the success
of
the single "Society's Child." This tale of a doomed,
interracial teenage love affair was banned on many radio
stations, but earned notoriety for writer Ian, who was sixteen
years old at the time. "Society's Child," which is
reminiscent of a classic girl group sound, may be the high point
of the subsequent album, but Janis Ian still is provocative with
its unguarded reactions to the sights and sounds of the sixties.
"Lover Be Kindly" and "Hair or Spun Gold"
have kid-vocal charm. "Then Tangles of My Mind" is the
kind of writing people like Steve Allen and comedian Pat Paulson
made fun of, but the clarity of its statement of personal anguish
redeemed it and set a pattern for some of Ian's morose future
work. Janis Ian was up on hip culture: her early songs were
peppered with groovy, blow-your-mind slang.
The enthusiasm of this 17 year old girl's cultural immersion was sometimes misguided (i.e. she offers advice to a prostitute on "Pro-Girl" and to an older hipster on "New Christ Cardiac Hero"); but there were other times when she seems right on ("Mrs. McKenzie," "What Do You Think of the Dead?"). (Echoes of Alanis Morrisette and Tori Amis.) Shadow Morton's production and the talents of the New York session men (Buddy Saltzman, Joe Farrell, Artie Kaplan, Sal de Troio, Carole Hunter) were flavored with the fifties orchestral band arrangement style which in retrospect, doesn’t seem as slick as latter day production styles.
The early albums leading up to Present Company (1971)
slowly
dwindled in quality, as Ian's bad reaction to being in the
spotlight became a large part of her concerns as a songwriter.
Pop critics tended to respond negatively to the self-pitying
stance of tunes like "There Are Times," "Sunflakes
Fall, Snowrays Call," "Mistaken Identity,"
"42nd Street Psycho Blues," "When I Was a
Child" "Snowbird" and "Galveston,"
although as unsentimental a modern folk icon as Anni Defranco has
found an important, quintessentially feminine, perspective in the
stark depth of many of Ian's tunes. Certainly Present Company,
with its San Francisco musicians,
didn't help matters any as Ian tried a more spontaneous approach
different from the bigger orchestrations of her New York work.
After temporarily bowing out of what she referred to in one of her songs as "a dirty business," she returned a few years later with Stars. The title song is a classic summation of the sickness of yearning for showbiz fame. Stars settled Ian firmly into the low-key, generally slow, studio-bound balladry that would characterize her albums in the seventies. The MOR quality cannot be denied, and the albums don't even register on the rock and roll Richter scale, so the interest for some listeners is going to be limited. But there are times when these productions turn nasty. Melancholy and mordancy pay off on "Jesse," "You've Got Me On a String," "At Seventeen," "From Me to You," "In the Winter," "Watercolors," "Light a Light," "Tea and Sympathy," "Aftertones," "Don't Cry Old Man," "Sunset of Your Love," "Take to the Sky," "I'll Cry Tonight" "Here Comes the Night," "Day By Day," "Have Mercy Love," "Photographs," "Under the covers," "Restless Eyes," "Down and Away," "Dear Billy," and "Sugar Mountain." On "Dear Billy" she says "Dear Billy, please send my regards to your lady, I wish her well; and I hope that one day we will meet on the far side of hell."
Here's a summation of manhood on "Watercolors:" "Go on, be a hero, be a photograph. Make your own myths, Christ, I hope they last; longer than mine, wider than the sky we measure time by."
On "from Me to You," she captures a prose-like dimension: "those people that surround you only want to see you weak enough to crawl. They'll lie for you, decide for you and buy up all your rights & wrongs. And they'll try to stop your singing in the middle of your song. For they do not want you free and they will not make you strong, but only drag you down in the hole they're coming from."
She's the not-so-detached, melancholy, outsider on "Goodbye to Morning" as she observes: "I was sitting on the door step, watching Satan have his day:"
From "Belle of the Blues": "Nobody has a right to say go down lightly, go down slow silently, I'll go down screaming `Give it Back; it belongs to me.'" Which echoes one of her kid tunes ("There are Times"): There are times when I know I'd be better off dying; ... My time? Your time? Time of the mind. You can't have it, because I can't take it ... I'm falling. Please help me."
On the topic of old age on
"Sunset of Your Life": "the old ones like to claw
and clutch; be careful not to offer much; they understand the
fist and crutch; their skin like leather to the touch ... if I
were you I'd think I'd die, here in the sunset of my life."
What's lovable about Janis Ian's
artistry is that it never makes
concessions to happy-times commercialism. The critics who bemoan
her lack of humor are unable to attach themselves to the gravity
of Ian's situations, which at the same time invite smiles just
because they reach so deep and cut so cleanly. But there has been
a sympathetic audience large enough to keep this
always-interesting artist productive to the present day. Some
kind of good collection may make Janis Ian absolutely essential.
As a child pop musical prodigy, she remains one of the few who
have fought it out and maintained a highly personal style. She
has won our continued attention.
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