Old Man reacts to Joni Mitchell's symphonic masterpiece, "Paprika Plains" (1977) #reaction

Released in 1977 on the "Don Juan's Reckless Daughter" album, this extended 16-minute symphony may be Joni's masterpiece. The song features Joni on the piano with a full orchestra backing her and ends (14 minutes in with her jazz band jamming along.Show more

That group features bassist Jaco Pastorius along with Wayne Shorter on Sax and John Guerin on drums. A link to the album version of the song is here:
https://youtu.be/JMKWLIFNZS4?si=DqwPUdDzVS2k7RSe

The original album cover included lyrics for the extended orchestra section in the middle that were not sung. Here they are:

(Where crows gaze vigilant on wires
Where cattle graze the grasses
Far from the digits of business hours
The moon clock wanes and waxes
But here all time is stripped away
Nowhere on these plains
Is a sprout or an egg in evidence
To measure loss or gain
Only a little Indian band
Come down from some windy mesa
No women to make them food and child
No expressions on their faces
I'm low in a helicopter
And the wind from whirling blades
Flaps their woven blankets
And flags their raven braids
How came they to this emptiness?
How came they to this dream?
How came I to this view
From a flying machine
Of earth and air and water
And a band of Indian men
Without herds or flocks or crops
Or families or fires to tend?
Like a phoenix up from ashes now
A blanket figure springs
With a fist raised up to turquoise skies
Like liberty
And at the point of vanishing
Where the sky and the earth meet
A bomb blooms
Deadly mushroom
White
Gold
Heat
Like a phoenix up from ashes
Up from violent mysteries
And growing 'till the giant blast
Is to it like a golfer's tee
There comes a child's beach ball
And memory takes me back
To the beach to toss it up
To the garage to get it patched
A pink and yellow beach ball
Rolling
Grand
Detached
Turning the blues and greens of earth
From space probe photographs
I float out of the hovercraft
Naked as infancy
And weightless
And drifting
Horizontally
Like a filing to a magnet
Like the long descent of rain
I am drawn
I fall against the ball
And lose paprika plains
I suckle at my mother's breast
I embrace my mother earth
I remember perforated blinds
Over the crib of my birth
And just as Eve succumbed
To reckless curiosity
I take my sharpest fingernail
And slash the globe to see
Below me
Vast Paprika plains
And the snake the river traces
And a little band of Indian men
With no expressions on their faces.)