https://bit.ly/35Xwe7o

People hate Padma Lakshmi. I learned this researching her after watching her Hulu food show, “Taste the Nation.” I highly recommend it. Padma travels across the nation to focus on specific cultures and the food they eat. Sure, she goes to El Paso for Mexican, in an episode entitled “Burritos at the Border,” but she gives context to the location and…did you really know about the Gullah Geechee in South Carolina? Or that Paterson, New Jersey is a hotbed of Peruvian cuisine? There are ten episodes, you can see the locations and cuisines here: https://bit.ly/3xUqes6

Now I don’t remember the last time I watched cable, whether it be network, basic or pay cable. I only watch streaming shows. Therefore, I had no idea who Padma Lakshmi was. But I found out she was the star of another cooking show and she’d been married to Salman Rushdie, who’d gone on record that she was a narcissistic self-promoter who needed to be in the public eye, who needed to be famous. So if I wrote about Lakshmi, I’d probably hear from the haters, and they’re everywhere, complaining she’s posting cooking photos to Instagram sans bra and the rest of my readers, like myself previously, would have no idea who she was.

Then again, I didn’t write when I was hot, when I was excited, before I did all my research. You see there’s a moment when you feel it, and then it passes. You’re watching something, into it, and you want to tell everybody, and then you’re over it and on to the next thing.

Which in my case was cooking shows on Netflix.

I watched a bit of “The Chef Show,” because who doesn’t like Jon Favreau? But the stories were too belabored, I couldn’t get into them.

And then there was all this hype about “High on the Hog,” so I checked it out and it was utterly fascinating going to Africa, not only seeing the roots of the food, but that the nations are not as backward as we perceive. But venerated writer Stephen Satterfield had absolutely no on screen charisma, I mean this is television, Satterfield seemed nice, but he was boring and not dynamic, I couldn’t continue.

And then I found “Fresh, Fried & Crispy.”

Fried food. Does anything taste better? My friend Jeff e-mailed me about Dave’s Hot Chicken, told me I had to go, and if you look at the picture, you’ll get an impression: https://www.daveshotchicken.com Golden brown chicken, fries, artery cloggers. I lived on this stuff growing up. But now? Now I know better, I know I’m not gonna live forever, and I might as well give myself good odds, so I eat fried food very rarely, but I still love it, my mouth still waters, ah, for some nice fried oysters or clams.

So I’m watching “Fresh, Fried & Crispy” and I’ve never heard of the host, Daym. I figured his name was like “Damn, that’s good,” but in truth it’s short for “Daymon.” In the middle of the first episode, he tells his story. Daym started out as a YouTube food blogger. He’d review fast food while eating it in his car. He said he had one clip with ten million views, I decided to look it up. And then I realized Daym’s secret to success, his reactions! Daym wasn’t analyzing the food as much as ENJOYING IT! His reactions were infectious. And he ended up with a TV show on the Travel Channel and now he’s got a Netflix show. Once again, I’d never heard of this guy. But I know how long a road it is to TV stardom, to getting a Netflix series. Hell, Seth Rogen’s a bona fide movie star and he says it takes six to seven years for him to put up a movie.

So Daym’s in St. Louis. Why? I don’t know. And he’s eating fried ravioli. Now that sounds good, doesn’t it? Turns out it’s a St. Louis specialty.

And then Daym goes to a vegan restaurant, he’s anything but a vegan, he’s a beefy Black guy, but the chef/owner of the establishment, also a person of color, tells how she makes this food and damn if it didn’t look good, especially the fake chicken.

But then Daym drove out to the hinterlands. It seemed like a farm. But I couldn’t understand the connection. You had a family, two generations, the parents and the son and his wife, and…was this just gonna be a home-cooked meal?

But it turned out the son had a restaurant in town. And he also had a very good-looking wife. Live in L.A. long enough and you think everybody outside the metropolis is backward and obese, but this is not true.

Anyway, the son, Rick Lewis, has this restaurant Grace Meat + Three, which is a southern thing, if you’ve ever been to Nashville, and his specialty is fried bologna.

Does anybody even admit to eating bologna?

Certainly not that Oscar Mayer prepackaged dreck. You’ll eat that when you’re in your single digits, when they think you’ll eat anything, but you reach a certain age and you say NO MORE! As far as Spam…we never had it in our house, but I heard the bad words.

But bologna was not a bad word in our house growing up. Funny, it was supplanted by salami by time I hit my teens. Why is that, is bologna for kids and salami for adults? And I’ve eaten plenty of salami over the past decades, but bologna?

But when I was five, fried bologna was a treat.

We lived in a split-level, with the tiniest of kitchens. Eventually, in 1962, we added an addition, a large room which included a dining table, couch, piano and TV set, but as for the kitchen? It was till tiny. But when I was growing up, it was even worse, because included in this kitchen was a dining area! Kind of like a booth at a diner.

Anyway, when I was a kid I would eat sunny side up eggs. Now I won’t touch eggs at all, in any form, forget it. I mean if you use it as an ingredient in something else, that’s fine, but if it tastes like egg? No way! And I remember my mother making said eggs, and I also remember her making fried bologna.

I don’t remember there being a cutting board, those seemed to arrive in the sixties, back in the fifties I think you just sliced on the kitchen counter, as if the linoleum or plastic or whatever it was was impenetrable, a breakthrough. Funny how we’ve gone backward. In the sixties the great leap forward was frozen vegetables in a ready to cook plastic bag, better than cans! You had this pouch of frozen vegetables you boiled in water and voila, you cut the bag and served it! This was when time-saving was of the essence, long before the cooking revolution, when the goal was still to do less work. Then again, I don’t know how my mother put a meal on the table every night. Well, not every night. Saturday my parents went out and we got hot dogs and hamburgers from the stand, and Sunday we oftentimes went out, usually for Chinese or pizza, occasionally to the Pepper Mill in Westport, a steak place. And my mother never ever made breakfast. And certainly didn’t make us lunch, we were forced to eat the food in the cafeteria, we begged her to make us sandwiches, but she never would, so the truth is she had to cook five nights a week. Then again, I still don’t know how to cook!

And my most treasured food memory from those early years was sitting at the kids’ table in the playroom watching “The Mickey Mouse Club” while eating noodles with butter, something that disappeared from the menu shortly thereafter, I think they only let little kids eat that.

And the fried bologna.

Now the truth is when I got my first apartment, in 1976, my mother sent me some kitchen stuff. And included was the pan she fried the bologna in. I got so nostalgic, I never ever used it, but I only threw it out two years ago, it was a connection to my youth. It was small, it could fit about four pieces of Hebrew National bologna at a time, and it certainly wasn’t cast iron, we never had a cast iron frying pan at home, never ever!

So first Daym watches Rick make the bologna. It’s kinda like those TV shows about the making of hot dogs, once you’ve seen it, you can’t eat them. Unless they’re skinless and all meat. Nothing worse than a bad hot dog. The Dodger Dog? Nearly inedible! But there’s no accounting for the tastes of the hoi polloi. Then again, Daym is lifting people up from the bottom, he’s meeting them where they live, in the fried food zone.

So Rick makes this giant bologna and then ages it and ultimately cuts off a giant slice to fry.

And as it sits in the pan starting to sizzle I can smell it, all the way sixty plus years back. My mother frying up that bologna. It would start to curl… Hell, we’re Jewish, we overcook EVERYTHING! Then again, I like things just shy of burned, I mean a medium-rare ribeye with char on the outside? Then again, the char’ll give you cancer. Then again, we did so much back then that we subsequently learned gave us cancer. WE DON’T NEED NO STINKING SUNTAN LOTION!

And I’m watching the TV screen mesmerized. And I almost jump up to write about it, but this was only the first episode of the series, did I really want to draw people’s attention to it?

And then I did more research. Reviews were not that fantastic. Then again, it was the highbrows weighing in, and highbrows won’t even eat fried food, they’re the people who say they’ve never ever eaten at McDonald’s, whereas I have so many times that I don’t even have to buy the burger, I can just think about it and taste it.

And I’m wondering exactly what skill, what expertise Daym is bringing to the table. I mean Guy Fieri started out in restaurants, he can go on about the ingredients, the construction, whereas Daym worked at Wal-Mart and CarMax, not known for their culinary offerings. So why exactly was I hooked by this show?

Well, Daym is likable, but it’s not like he’s a gabber, he’s not talking endlessly, it’s not like he demonstrates endless personality. I ultimately realized…IT’S THE FOOD!

The truth is America is the land of fast food. It was invented here. And now, more than ever, people here eat it. Sure, there are fast casual outfits, but they’re not fast enough! We want to get it, eat it, and be done!

And in the second episode Daym is eating freshly caught fried shrimp in a Po-Boy at Hudson’s Seafood House, on the water in Hilton Head and…

The breakout feature in “Fresh, Fried & Crispy,” the piece-de-resistance, is the immersive frying camera. Yes, instead of an underwater camera, they’ve got an under oil camera, so you can see the food cook, as they delineate the composition of the oil, the heat and the time cooked.

And then Daym goes to Treylor Park in Savannah. Unlike salt of the earth Katherine cooking at Hudson’s, the proprietor of Treylor Park cooked in New York, and then came back home to create his specialty…the Treylor Park Pot Pie. Which is actually a chicken pot pie chimichanga! They fry that sucker up and… Well, first I’d like a Dark Shark fried peach for…a peach cobbler on a stick, sometimes dessert needs to come first. Or maybe I’ll just settle for the grilled apple pie with chicken sandwich at Treylor’s.

These are normal people taking pride in their efforts to reach the culinary limits of…fried food. You worry about the lifespan of all these people, not only Daym, but the rest of the beings who eat this food. Maybe this is a contributing factor to the ever-lowering age of death in the U.S. of A. Then again, what is life about?

https://bit.ly/3daZRq6

Now this was a good rec. A number of people e-mailed me about it and then I checked RottenTomatoes and the critics score was 95 and the audience score was 98 so we decided to check it out. Glad we did, there’s not another show quite like it.

“Mr. Inbetween” is Australian. So there’s a slightly different sensibility. Australians take themselves a bit less seriously, and they’ve got a sense of humor, and they drink. But still, it’s relatable.

So the bottom line is Ray is a hitman with a regular life. A thug who’s little different from your next door neighbor other than his line of work, and a severe anger problem. You see Ray comes from the school where you’ve got to stand up for yourself, where you don’t tolerate bullies, you hit back, in some cases you even hit first, damn the consequences. And occasionally this gets him in trouble, because normal people default to the law, the rules of society, and Ray doesn’t always do this, he’s got his own sense of justice. Which is moral in its own way.

So, when he’s not the doorman at a strip joint, when he’s not off beating people up, Ray shares custody of his daughter, he gets into a relationship, he hangs with his friends, and these situations are depicted more accurately than in a year’s worth of American TV.

Ray’s daughter starts off young and loving, never mind uber-cute, but as the seasons wear on, she gets older and doesn’t want to be seen with him and has a boyfriend and starts getting into trouble and Ray has to manage all this. One of the funniest and most squeamish situations is when Ray has to tell Britt the facts of life long before she reaches puberty, when she catches Ray in bed with Ally and he’s…

As for Ally… If only relationships could be depicted this well in all series. You can love each other but the relationship still can’t work. And you don’t get over each other right away. And the speech Ally gives at her house, about trying to fix people and standing up for herself…it’s so hard to face reality and do what is good for you when it feels so bad.

So Ray’s got a father he won’t speak to. And a brother with a bad illness. Families, siblings, they’re complicated. And if you’ve been through the war with your brother or sister, you’re bonded forever, you always look out for each other.

And Ray is a good friend. Especially to Gary, his best friend.

Gary is an average guy who is constantly making bad choices, like marrying that Russian woman, but Ray shows up for him time and again, takes the heat, defuses the situation. And Gary does the same for Ray. They’re buddies. But it’s not a buddy comedy, they’re just friends. Remember when you had friends like this? Get older and they disappear.

And Gary is always looking for a way to make a buck.

And Ray takes Britt to playdates and…tries to help the parents of her friends. Life comes with so many obligations. Assuming you’re up to them, and Ray is.

This is a hard show to explain. First and foremost, the episodes are very short. Just over twenty minutes if you watch on Hulu without commercials. Half an hour on FX. And the seasons aren’t super-long, the first only has six episodes, the second eleven and the third nine. In other words, it’s not a deep commitment, you can watch an episode before bed, you don’t need to commit an hour of time. Then again, in an hour you can blast through three episodes!

And these episodes breathe. They’re not chock full of action, nor are the images dense, the writing is spare but so right on. You can tell Scott Ryan took time with them. And the banter between Ray and Gary is oftentimes priceless. When they’re waiting, need to kill time, they’ll play these little games, like what is the best this or that, and they do it just like you do with a buddy, it resonates.

But what truly resonates is the depiction of life. Few of us are going anywhere fast, we’re just trying to make a living, get by, prepare the next generation. And we’re constantly pissed at the small intrusions, the injustices. And there are power struggles, and issues of trust and…these all come up in “Mr. Inbetween,” but you’re not being hit over the head.

There’s violence and sometimes blood, but at other times it’s patently sweet. I do not know why this isn’t one of the most talked about shows out there. Maybe if it was on HBO. If it got the publicity it deserves.

“Mr. Inbetween” is a gem, I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Legendary ZZ Top guitarist Billy F. Gibbons has a new solo album, “Hardware.” We discuss its making in the desert as well as Mexican food, hot sauce, automobiles, travel, “I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide” and so much more. Billy is quite the raconteur and you’ll want to hear him opine on multiple topics, it’s like hanging with a good friend!

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/billy-f-gibbons/id1316200737?i=1000526718605

https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/9ff4fb19-54d4-41ae-ae7a-8a6f8d3dafa8/The-Bob-Lefsetz-Podcast

https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast

It wasn’t a hit.

I’m not saying it was a stiff, but most people never heard it. Furthermore, radio didn’t play it. By 1971, FM radio stations were leaning harder, there was no room for singer-songwriters and their quiet music. This even haunted James Taylor, the biggest of the lot. Suddenly, he was an AM act. Same deal with Carole King. “It’s Too Late” on AM radio is what broke “Tapestry,” the album was moribund before that action, it was not being pushed on FM, most people never heard it until it came out of the radio speakers.

We can play this out with James Taylor. He released albums with less and less commercial acceptance. To the point where he ultimately jumped labels to Columbia from Warner Brothers, looking to reignite his career. And how did he do this? Via a cover of “Handy Man.” James Taylor became a cover artist, even before this. “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight” was an original from “One Man Dog,” but it was soft and so far from FM rock as to go totally unplayed on that band. Its follow-ups? DIDN’T EVEN CHART! “Hymn,” “Walking Man,” you may know them, but those who are not Taylor fans do not.

Then, at the end of his Warner tenure, James worked with Lenny Waronker and Russ Titelman and returned to form. Still, he didn’t have any original hits. “Mexico”…made it all the way to #49, “Shower the People” to #22, but “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)”? That was a #5 hit. In other words, James was struggling for radio acceptance, and the only way he could get it was via either upbeat ditties or dirgey love songs, he was at the mercy of a world that was stacked against him.

Same thing with Carole King. One of the biggest selling albums of all time, and then…almost nothing. “Sweet Seasons,” from “Music,” the follow-up to “Tapestry,” made it to #9, but hits dried up, and her albums had less and less success until 1974, when Carole changed sound and had a #1 AM radio hit with “Jazzman” and its iconic Tom Scott solo. This was not the personal statement from deep in her gut, this was nearly fodder, a track that FM would make the sign of the cross at. And after “Wrap Around Joy,” which contained “Jazzman,” Carole’s career went in the wrong direction, she never had another hit, other than a cover of her own hit song “One Fine Day,” in 1980

So…

Joni Mitchell releases “Song to a Seagull” in 1968… Most people were unaware it came out, many are still unaware.

On her second album, “Clouds,” Joni decided to buy a bit of insurance, it contained her versions of two songs Judy Collins had already made hits, “Chelsea Morning” and “Both Sides Now, both of which were written prior to Joni’s debut. Did that help Joni make inroads? Not by much. I didn’t know a single person who owned that album simultaneous with its release.

The breakthrough was 1970’s “Ladies of the Canyon.” First and foremost it was an artistic leap forward. Secondly, it contained “The Circle Game,” a standard in the folk world that Joni was reluctant to include. People now knew who Joni Mitchell was. But it’s not like you saw “Ladies of the Canyon” everywhere, only if you were in the know.

But a year later, in 1971, Joni puts out the iconic “Blue” with no insurance, no past hits and…not a whole lot happens. It was an insiders thing. And whereas you might have heard tracks from “Ladies of the Canyon” on FM radio in 1970, “Blue” was absent from those airwaves in 1971.

So, Joni Mitchell was stuck in neutral. Someone who’d written hit songs for others, but had even less purchase on the public than her David Geffen management cohort Laura Nyro.

What Joni Mitchell needed was a hit. And by this point she’s on Asylum Records, run by the aforementioned Geffen, and he pushes her to write a radio-friendly song and she does, “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio,” which was definitely heard on the radio, but only made it to #25 in “Billboard” and #20 in Cashbox and…the truth is the album it emanated from, “For the Roses,” was darker than “Blue” and “Ladies of the Canyon” so Joni Mitchell was a known quantity, but her LP was not flying out the door.

And then, in January of 1974, came “Court and Spark.” There were no plays for hits, nothing looking for commercial success, however the orchestration was more lush and the album had more of a sheen…there’s no way it could be cut with a dulcimer in a Greek cave, suddenly you had a sophisticate relating her story of being in Paris and…Joni had hits doing it totally her way, most significantly with “Help Me,” and of course “Free Man in Paris.” And with these insightful songs on AM radio, the young female demo that did not listen to FM rock became aware of Ms. Mitchell and found they could identify with her message and Joni became the most revered, the most exalted female artist extant. She even went on a victory lap tour where she recorded the double live album “Miles of Aisles” and then…

Waited nearly two years and released the jazz-influenced, right turn “The Hissing of Summer Lawns.” These same people, the AM ladies, were eager, they bought it and…THEY REJECTED IT! From superstar to has-been in two years. It was over for Joni, she never graced the AM airwaves again. And having destroyed her commercial career, a la Neil Young, Joni no longer had chains, people were no longer paying attention, and she recorded and released “Hejira” to almost no acceptance. It’s one of Joni’s two best works, and in some ways it’s better than “Blue,” listen to the truth in “Song for Sharon” and “Refuge of the Roads.” But the tracks didn’t comport with anybody’s idea of popular hit music. There were only two tracks shorter than five minutes long, and “Song for Sharon” clocks in at 8:40 and “Refuge of the Roads” 6:42. These tracks wouldn’t even get playlisted today. “Hejira” wasn’t background music, you had to sit in front of the speakers, listen on headphones to get it, it was a deep dive into Joni’s identity, but because it wasn’t upbeat, because it didn’t conform to anybody’s idea of radio commerciality, it barely made a dent.

And from there, Joni marched further into the wilderness. At first she seemed not to care about commercial success, and when she tried later, on her Geffen records, she seemed to have lost the key. Furthermore, these songs were less personal.

So…

“Blue” is one of the greatest albums ever made. And it’s all her, we can’t say its success was really a collaborator’s. But the accolades it is receiving on its 50th anniversary are coming to a great degree from people who weren’t even alive when it was released. Or people who were friends with Joni at the time. Context has been lost.

Forget revealing her truth. Believe me, that was not so extraordinary back in 1971, THAT’S WHAT IT WAS ALL ABOUT! It’s hard to believe that today, with the mindless ditties clogging up the chart, but personal expression was the game, the zenith, you wanted to open yourself up and get it all down. So it took decades for people to realize “Blue”‘s greatness, all the detritus, the imitative, the wannabe dreck had to fade away so it could shine. Kind of like the Mona Lisa. It’s got its own gallery at the Louvre. It stands alone. Exhibit it with other works and it loses its luster. Even more significantly, no one, NO ONE, has been able to replicate the formula. Looks easy, but it’s not. First and foremost, Joni was writing and playing for years before she had her success. Today people don’t put in the time and they want instant validation. Also, today people are gun-shy about revealing their truth, unless they go to the other extreme, as they do in memoirs, detailing the most heinous of activities to shock you. Joni Mitchell was just another person on the planet back in 1971, you could relate to her, she might be richer, but…

Now the truth is after all these hosannas, “Blue” is going to fade back into the woodwork. This is not the Beatles with all those radio-friendly ditties. As for people discovering “Blue” today as a result of the hype? I don’t think many will, oldsters are aware of it, have either accepted it or rejected it, and youngsters don’t see the words in the newspapers touting its value.

It was a different era. There were so many great acts and great albums that Joni Mitchell could release a masterpiece and many could shrug. Today if you cut something half as good, like Adele’s “21,” the whole world is flabbergasted. And believe me, “Blue” has legs that “21” does not.

And then there are the women without Joni’s voice. Men too. People believe lyrics are enough, they are not. As for learning to play your instrument…that takes too much time, you can buy the damn beats, why take all that time practicing off the radar screen when you can start promoting on social media today, be on your way to becoming a brand.

And then there’s Mo Ostin and Warner Brothers. He supported you if you didn’t have a hit. He signed you to a five album deal and it was assumed you’d make a record every year and get better and find yourself and at some point maybe your music and the public would align. Today Joni Mitchell wouldn’t even get signed, she wouldn’t have the data, and on top of that she doesn’t make radio-friendly music, today’s radio that is. Sure, people covered her songs, nice. But those live numbers…you play coffee shops, great, call us back when you’ve moved up to theatres.

In other words it’s a whole different environment, a whole different game. Never mind there not even being a folk scene, never mind a coffee house to play in. And it’s all about loud, that’s how they EQ the records, if it’s not in your face, it can’t break through the clutter. Oh, we’ll give a chance to quirky, but the truth is Joni Mitchell was not quirky, she was part of the mainstream, which was broad if you were a fan, after all Jethro Tull, Randy Newman, the Mothers, the Beach Boys, and Alice Cooper were all on Warner/Reprise at the time. You can’t find this diversity today, even if you look at all the acts on all the labels of Universal Music!

Then again, you have no idea of the power of music back in 1971. If you wanted to know which way the wind blew, you turned on the radio, you played a record. Making money? It was secondary to finding yourself. It was about laying down your statement. In a way nobody does today. But it’s not only music, it’s films too. The top ten grossing flicks of 1971 included “The French Connection,” “Summer of ’42,” “Carnal Knowledge,” “A Clockwork Orange” and “The Last Picture Show”…and only “French Connection” might be green-lit today.

So “Blue” was of a time. But how great is it that we have a perfect document of that era!

And the great thing about a record is you bring your own identity to it, you form your own story, in truth Joni Mitchell does not represent your fantasy, ask anybody who knows her, then again this is almost always the case with great artists, who can oftentimes do only this one great thing, they are unique, with rough edges, narcissistic, strong-willed, they need to do it their way, and we respect this because most of us don’t have the cojones, we aren’t willing to hang it all out there, to risk it. Sure, you might think you do, but no one’s paying attention to you, you don’t have a record deal, no one’s spending money on you, you have no pressure, and when you do to stay the course, hew to your values…that ain’t easy.

Then again, back then labels didn’t have the right to reject albums. They didn’t tell you to remix them. Most contracts said you just had to deliver it and they put it out. And back then no one could truly predict a hit. And hits were different. FM radio was less about generating album sales than ticket sales. And if you were lucky, you crossed over to AM radio and physical sales took off and then so did ticket sales and then…you were cursed with the blessing of having to follow it all up.

You think it’s easy? You sacrifice your life to feed the starmaking machinery and at some point, if you don’t O.D., you want to get off the wheel. Silicon Valley talks about the “flywheel,” that’s the goal, but people can’t work 24/7 ad infinitum, they break down, then again, no machine can write “Blue.”

Now I don’t think you can get “Blue” unless you’re open to it, in the right headspace. Actually, I’d tell you to start off with “Ladies of the Canyon,” then go to “For the Roses” and “Court and Spark” and then back to “Blue,” then you might get it, you might be open to it. It’d be like going on a first date with someone who opened all their wounds but also said they liked you and…if you do this, most people run away, you’ve got to dribble out your details. Unless it’s the perfect one. Who gets you, who understands you. Listening to “Blue” you thought Joni Mitchell was the perfect one, the fact that she was an artist signed to a record label didn’t enter the equation, this was a person, this was her story, and it was a snapshot in time, she’d be somewhere different next time around, as she was. Joni was not locked into a rut, she didn’t keep repeating herself. “Blue” is part of a continuum. Really, it should be seen as part of the body of work.

And no one’s got a better one in rock and roll. Except maybe the Beatles. And Bob Dylan. Then again, “Blue” is the White album with more coherence, it’s got the upbeat elements of “Abbey Road” yet it is not solely sunny and just like “Sgt. Pepper” there were no hit singles, it stands on its own. As for Zimmy…musically, Joni trumps him hands down. And Joni has never been accused of plagiarism. Joni Mitchell is an original, and in a me-too conformist world that is everything, that is what we are looking for, that’s why we’re even talking about “Blue” fifty years later. The greats break the mold. The lame are restricted by it. Fifty years ago, music was a great leap forward, and Joni Mitchell outjumped the boys, she set a record that still holds. And we can only marvel at the result.