She’s in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, she has a lifetime achievement award from the Grammys and has been ranked among the ten best songwriters ever by Rolling Stone. You’d think she had more than one top 10 hit song! But that’s the tally for Joni Mitchell , at least in the U.S., and that one hit did it 50 years ago. “Help Me” was at #7 on this day in 1974.
Mitchell by then was internationally renowned and had a number of artists covering her songs, but her own records were a bit of a niche market. Her sixth album, Court & Spark, changed that somewhat. The record was a bit more upbeat than some of her earlier work and nodded at jazz rather than straight-ahead folk music she’d been tied to. Probably not coincidentally, it was her only #1 album in her homeland of Canada and at #2 in the States and double-platinum, her most successful there.
For “Help Me” she played some acoustic guitar but turned to L.A. jazz ensemble Tom Scott’s LA Express for backing music, including Tom himself on woodwinds and Larry Carlton on electric guitar. She wrote it and produced it, as with the rest of the album, but declined to say if it was written about anyone specific. She seemed to draw from her life experiences for many of her songs (“Free Man In Paris” was about her friend and Asylum Records boss David Geffen for instance) and with its context – ambiguity about whether or not to commit to a relationship with a “rambler and a gambler and a sweet-talkin’ ladies man” – people theorized it was about either Jackson Browne or Glenn Frey. Both were Laurel Canyon neighbors and dating her in that time period.
No matter who it was about, it had the sound that connected… possibly to her chagrin. She called it a “throwaway song” and complained “record companies always had a tendency to take my fastest songs on albums for singles… meanwhile, I’d feel that the radio was crying out for one of my ballads!”
The song was indeed her only American top 10 hit, while it hit #6 in Canada, making it her second top 10 there. Critics loved it then and now. It was nominated for Grammys for Record of the Year and Best Female Pop Performance, but lost in both to Olivia Newton John’s “I Honestly Love You.” Chaka Khan and k.d. lang have both done cover versions of it on separate tribute albums for Joni. Years later, Rolling Stone has listed it in the top 300 greatest songs ever, calling it “one of Mitchell’s sultiriest vocals and most brocaded arrangements” thanks perhaps to her having “the tightest musical control over (the record) to date.”