(Credits: Alamy)
Sun 22 February 2026 4:00, UK
It takes a lot for any pop star to get that much praise out of Joni Mitchell.
She was never exactly cold by any stretch of the imagination, but when it comes to her own musical taste, she gravitated towards music that had a lot more depth than the typical four-chord vamp that most people heard whenever they turned on the radio. If she was going to be wowed, she needed a little something more, but the 1970s were fertile ground for truly groundbreaking to have a shot on the hit parade.
I mean, this is the same decade that managed to get songs like ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ on the radio, so it wasn’t like there was a short window or anything. MTV hadn’t come in to dull everyone’s attention spans whenever they turned on the station, and Mitchell herself was already starting to gain traction with albums that would have never had a shot at becoming a pop hit like Hejira.
At this point, having hits was practically a happy by-product of getting a record done, so what mattered more was getting the right musicians who could bring her songs to life. The LA Express was one of the best bands that anyone could have hoped for around that time, but when she started working on records with Jaco Pastorius and Larry Carlton, there was never going to be a single note out of place. These were fusion players who knew the ins and outs of what a song needed, but they weren’t exactly tied to any particular band, either.
Pastorius was already one of the greatest bassists on the planet, and it wasn’t hard for him to make his way back to playing with Weather Report once his time with Mitchell was done. On the other side, though, Carlton had been one of the power players in Steely Dan ever since their early records, and when Mitchell heard the kind of leap that they made on Gaucho, she felt that they had hit a new watermark in recording technology.
Aja was the proof of concept for what they wanted their sound to be, but it’s a miracle that Gaucho sounds half as good as it does. Most of the arrangements came in between a living hell for the band behind the scenes, but if you listen to ‘Third World Man’ or ‘Babylon Sisters’, you would have sworn that the whole thing was sanctified by musical angels once it was pressed to vinyl.
Despite it bottoming out with critics back in the day, Mitchell couldn’t say enough good things about ‘The Dan’s masterpiece, saying, “I never understood why Gaucho didn’t receive the critical acclaim of Aja. I’m convinced that if Gaucho had come first and then Aja, the same thing would have happened in reverse. To maintain this high standard of musicality and storytelling through two projects is most praiseworthy.”
The sound is absolutely beautiful, but it’s also easy to see why the band decided to call it a day for over a decade after it was done. They didn’t want to go through the kind of rollercoaster ride that they were just on, but even if Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly was still a fairly decent record, there was no way that anyone was going to match the kind of hot streak that they had just been on for the past few years.
Everything had been building towards making a record like Gaucho, so when everything fell apart, it was almost inevitable. Any band will want to make the best record they can, but after years of slogging it out, there was no reason to touch a song that was already spotless from back to front.