David Geffen

stepdad was

stepdad okay yeah um excuse me and she yeah grew up in um a very tumultuous situation she ended up committing some crimes some like petty theft crimes and like went to jail and stuff so she got um was sent to um like a girl's school that was super religious and this is where she learned how to play organ and got all this you know religious indoctrination so to speak all this language that she uses in her music um And then was the first artist signed to David Geffen's label before Joni or any of the other people.

This is the first record he released, which I didn't know.

I thought it was really cool.

She didn't want to be opening for the bands that she was opening for.

She thought she deserved to be the headliner and to, you know, play with other people.

But she had trouble with the business the whole time that she was kind of in it and burnt her relationship with David Geffen and, you know, kind of, yeah,

just

But you had an angry Ron Miller who was determined to prove Don Bluth wrong, that Disney could in fact do an animated film.

So it reminded me of when Spielberg and Katzenberg and David Geffen launched DreamWorks SKG in 94.

Yeah.

And I forget which member of the business press wrote this article.

Yeah, that sounds right.

It's one of those things, it's like, was anybody reading the script? Was anybody watching the dailies? Why was this allowed to continue? And the only guess I can come up with is, speed and twister like this was a dreamworks movie and dreamworks had only been around for a couple of years at this point so for those of you who aren't aware steven spielberg jeffrey katzenberg and david geffen decided to found a new studio which there has been a new big studio in hollywood for like 50 years at this point and kind of go off on their own and there was a there were a lot of A lot of crazy swings in the DreamWorks era because they had a lot of money and wanted people to do what they wanted to do.

Nobody reeled them in.

It didn't last long.

And so the record label one is often the moment that a lot of musicians say, that's when we decided to give it up as well.

Well, Joni Mitchell was very, very lucky in that she was with a manager called David Geffen.

He was one of those early managers who gave the musicians their royalties, their publishing.

So they became very wealthy under his deals.

And there was even people wrote books, I mean, on the groupie as this is just what is kind of expected of for a lot of bands to have that as a, as a just that's what it is that's where you got into music so to have a feminist role model was very important during that time because you had you know like you had Grace Slick and Janice Joplin and lots of others but then you know out of the 70s you got Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Janice Ian you know, there was this sort of the birth of the singer-songwriter that then goes into the 80s with Susan Vague and Michel Schacht and Tracy Chapman but they, and oh yeah, before that you'd had Joan Armatraden in the 70s as well but, you know, it was, it probably wasn't an easy sell because I would imagine each of those record labels were saying could we just, could you just have a bit more, I don't know.

flesh on display and sexualize your look whereas like not

only got very lucky in the sense that not luck well luck luck was part of it but obviously she was she was in a position where she was allowed to be herself as an artist and I think partly that is I mean I could be wrong but it could be because when she met David Crosby he was massively in awe of her and I know he remained in awe of her the whole of his life But he introduced her to his manager, which was David Geffen.

Right.