by David Yaffe
All these years later, Cavett didn’t see the downside for Joni:
“Where did anyone get the idea that the show was supposed to be about Joni? Never was the show conceived as a Joni Mitchell show. We were delighted to get her. Tony, my producer, said, ‘We leapt at the opportunity to do a show on Woodstock because it was the kind of thing that Carson, et cetera, would never do.’ We knew it would get a lot of attention. Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, and Joni Mitchell were to be the artists . . . On the morning we went on we learned that Hendrix could not be pried out of wherever he had gone to ground after closing Woodstock. That morning Stephen Stills and Crosby happened to drop into the studio and agreed to sub to fill in for Jimi. Because Neil Young is Canadian we had to get a special permit for them to perform and we could not get that out of the State Department on a moment’s notice despite the best efforts of the ABC people in Washington. So, Stills and Crosby agreed to do a ‘talk spot’ to fill in the hole in our show. Joni was a dream. Airplane almost drove us into a mental hospital, and of course there was the ‘Up against the wall, motherfuckers’ line in the Airplane song that got broadcast after they promised to change it. In any event, it was never planned as a Joni Mitchell show. Nobody was told that it was. With just Mitchell, we could have stayed in our studio in our theater.”
The set of the Dick Cavett show was as brightly colored as a Brady Bunch montage. He sat in a circle with Crosby, Stills, and the Airplane. Joni was wearing green and seated to his left, looking almost wistful as they regaled Cavett with tales of Woodstock. At one point, her hand is on her cheek and the regret and longing in her eyes is palpable.
About a year later, on the BBC, Joni still couldn’t get over it. Sitting at the piano, she is golden and glowing in a peach-colored crocheted blouse and a turquoise necklace. Her blond hair is parted down the middle. Just as she smiled through the pain during the early performances of “Little Green,” the girl who got left behind is still flashing her big toothy smile as she explains, “So I stayed home in New York and I watched it on television all day. I saw everyone playing and singing. It was really a nice festival, I guess, from the looks of everything.” She then says, “I wrote a little song for my friends to sing.” Then she pauses and taps her own heart. “For myself to sing as well, and it’s called ‘Woodstock.’ It goes like this.”
The new song is a powerhouse and Joni’s voice has never been more magnificent.
I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, where are you going
And this he told me
Graham remembered, “By the time we got back to the hotel, having gone through that tremendous experience, the song ‘Woodstock’ had already been written.” It’s hard to imagine now that the historic event was not even twenty-four hours old, but Joni had encapsulated it all, beautifully, poetically, without cliché: “We are stardust. We are golden. And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” David Crosby marveled, “She contributed more to people’s understanding of that event than anyone who was there.”
“Woodstock” became a classic rock staple in the hands of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, who turned it into an ebullient anthem. But Joni wasn’t kidding when she compared the event to a funeral. Her version of the song is a modal dirge. It can be played on nothing but the black keys on the piano—a minor chord, a suspended chord, and moving down to a ninth chord. It is the product of listening to hours and hours of Kind of Blue, which is based on modal variations. “Woodstock” would have fit in as a brooding ballad. Joni lets out a wordless, tribal moan. This is not only “song and celebration.” It is purgation. It is an omen that something very, very bad will happen when the mud dries and the hippies go home. That garden they had to get back to—it was an illusion. It must have been lonely for Joni. She was the only one who could see it.
After Woodstock, after the Dick Cavett show, Graham and Joni returned to California. They were back in the garden, but their time in Eden would not last. Years later, Joni would tell a twenty-two-year-old Cameron Crowe, “My relationship with Graham is a great, enduring one. We lived together for some time—we were married, you might say. The time Graham and I were together was a highly productive period for me as an artist. I painted a great deal, and the bulk of my best drawings were done in ’69 and ’70 when we were together. To contend with this hypercreative woman, Graham tried his hand at several things. Painting. Stained glass. And finally he came to the camera. I feel he’s not just a good photographer, he’s a great one. His work is so lyrical. Some of his pictures are worth a thousand words. Even after we broke up, Graham made a gift of a very fine camera and a book of Cartier-Bresson photographs. I became an avid photographer myself. He gave the gift back to me. Even though the romance ended, the creative aspect of our relationship has continued to branch out.”
But before the romance fizzled, Nash would write the song “Our House.” His version of the story began, “I don’t know whether you know anything about Los Angeles, but on Ventura Boulevard in the Valley, there’s a very famous deli called Art’s Deli. And we’d been to breakfast there. We’re going to get into Joan’s car, and we pass an antique store. And we’re looking in the window, and she saw a very beautiful vase that she wanted to buy . . . I persuaded her to buy this vase. It wasn’t very expensive, and we took it home. It was a very grey, kind of sleety, drizzly L.A. morning. And we got to the house in Laurel Canyon, and I said—‘You know what? I’ll light a fire. Why don’t you put some flowers in that vase that you just bought?’ Well, she was in the garden getting flowers. That meant she was not at her piano, but I was . . . And an hour later ‘Our House’ was born, out of an incredibly ordinary moment that many, many people have experienced.”
It was a lovely moment captured by a sweet song. But on a day-to-day basis, it would prove hard for two talented musicians, two bona fide pop stars, to share the idyllic space created within the three minutes of lyrics that make up “Our House.” Nash recalled, “It was an intense time of who’s going to get to the piano first, who’s going to fill up the space with their music first.” This wasn’t a partnership of unequals, as her marriage to Chuck Mitchell had been. With Joni and Graham, it was different, harder. “It was an interesting clash of ‘I want to get as close to you as possible’ and ‘leave me alone to create,’” Nash remembered. Joni for her part said, “Graham and I have been the source of many songs for one another. A lot of beautiful music came from it and a lot of beautiful times came from it.”
The photographs of that era are like stills from a movie that we’ve never seen. There is Graham in a fur coat and Joni in velvet, in a photo-booth-like setting: Joni is on his lap and she is laughing, in frame after frame after frame. There are Joni and Graham walking in the woods, holding hands and swaying to music we can’t hear. Look again and there they are in their house: Joni is wearing a silver bracelet and her golden hair is parted in the middle and she is both artist and muse. The window swings open and Joni is smiling, ever so lightly.
A fragment of the view was used for the cover Joni painted for Ladies of the Canyon, her next album. The house was such a keepsake of so many songs and so much love that, although Joni moved out a few years later, she never sold it. For years, she rented it to her road manager, Ron Stone. She could never quite let it go.
10 LADIES OF THE CANYON
Ladies of the Canyon, released in April 1970, would be an album of first and lasts. It was the first of Joni’s albums to feature the piano; several songs (among them, the lyrical “For Free” and “Willy”) were written when she was exploring the instrument with freedom for the first time. There was mad love for Graham Nash, and the prairie girl Joni would, with “Big Yellow Taxi,” create what The New York Times called “perhaps the first entry in a new genre that might be called Ecology-folk.” It would close with three giant hits—“Big Yellow Taxi,” “Woodstock,” and “The Circle Game”—and the album would be her first to be certified platinum. And it wou
ld mark the end of her folk princess days. Joni would emerge a genuine pop star.
The album opens with “Morning Morgantown,” a burst of simple beauty that Joni wrote in 1967. She overdubbed piano and guitar, as she had on “Night in the City,” but here it was with an almost baroque precision. And there was something new, too: the cowbell played by Milt Holland is the first percussion sound to appear on a Joni Mitchell album, and even the softest of brushes would alter her rhythmic landscape. From there, the album would move on to some of Joni’s most memorable songs—and some of her least. It ends with a triple-header. Just when you’ve been grooving to the Bo Diddley beat and philosophical abyss of “Big Yellow Taxi,” you’re left reeling from “Woodstock” and taken over the top with “The Circle Game.” After Judy Collins and the other hit makers, Joni finally became aware of her own stock. She was an album away from announcing that “songs are like tattoos,” but she was leaving her listeners with something they would never forget. Between the splendors of the opening and closing, there are other high watermarks and a few curios only the initiated ever talk about. Who else talks about “The Arrangement” or “Blue Boy”?
“The Arrangement” is about a Mad Men–type character who “could have been more than a name on the door.” It’s a very ’60s sentiment—you could have been so much more if you hadn’t sold out. But then Joni was learning the distinction between selling herself and selling out, or selling without selling out. And this was Joni’s first platinum album. It was twice “half a million strong,” and what’s wrong with that? She was spreading the word just the way she wanted to.
“Conversation” begins as a straightforward rock and roll song with a pulsating beat, on every two and four—the kind of meat-and-potatoes rock and roll Neil Young was ushering into perfection. But the presence of Holland, a pair of brushes, and a more subtle Latin beat intervenes, changing the feeling of the song. Milt Holland’s musical credits were vast. He played drums with James Taylor and Randy Newman, bongos on the West Side Story soundtrack, marimba with the Beatles.
An early version of the song had more verses of frustration. When Joni introduced it at Philadelphia’s Second Fret in October 1967, this was how she set it up: “Sometimes a best friend won’t tell a best friend really anything near the truth, because they don’t know it themselves. This is a song about a triangle.”
The Ladies of the Canyon version sounded more like a party. This version would not be about brooding or complaining, but about being the girl the guy wants to cheat with, and eventually ditch his old lady for. “She only brings him out to show her friends,” she sings. “I want to free him.” Yes! And we are confident that she will. “Love is a story told to a friend / It’s secondhand,” she sings. We are all hearing it.
Back home in Canada, the Toronto Star raved that Joni’s “old rambling folky lyrics are gone . . . replaced by a more sophisticated, compressed and direct poetry reminiscent of Leonard Cohen’s. The words and melodies are oddly syncopated rather than obvious.” In The Guardian, Geoffrey Cannon boldly declared, “Joni Mitchell is better able to describe and celebrate what it means, and should mean, to be alive today, than any other singer. She tells us what we already know, but have felt obliged, through life’s circumstances, to forget; that we are free. That we have love. And she does this by scrupulous observation and thought only of what she herself has heard and seen and felt.”
In real life, Joni may have been a scrapper, feuding in theory and in person with her colleagues, her critics, and her musical peers, but when it came to her music, she was unwavering in her commitment to truth as she saw it—even when the truth did not always flatter her. Ladies of the Canyon stands out among the early albums because she is growing in confidence as a vocalist and as a musician, but she has also become so much a part of her community that she can write about it, give a whole album a geographical sense of place. She’s no longer the outsider, the girl from up north that she was when she first arrived on the New York folk scene. California in general, and Laurel Canyon in particular, had become, in ways big and small, home.
The title track hauntingly depicts a seemingly utopian community of women from the perspective of one who, as she has said repeatedly in interviews, prefers “the company of men.” There is artistic Trina with her “wampum beads” and her coats “trimmed with antique luxury.” And Annie, the free spirit mama who “always makes you feel welcome” and has “cats and babies ’round her feet.” Then there’s Estrella, “circus girl,” who “comes wrapped in songs and gypsy shawls.”
They were based on women Joni knew well: Trina Robbins, Annie Burden, and Estrella Berosini. Joni’s portraiture of the women in song, as well as the iconic line drawing she created for the cover, would only add to the lore of Laurel Canyon as a countercultural paradise.
When Annie Burden and Joni met in 1968, Annie was twenty-two and pregnant with her second child. As Burden described it, the moment was full of uncertainty for women and the world. “In 1968 we all stood at a tipping point. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. Andy Warhol was shot. Richard Nixon won the presidency. Peace and freedom protests and riots swept the world from New York to Paris to Prague to Mexico City to the Democratic Convention to the Miss America Pageant. Women gathered for the first National Women’s Liberation Conference. The first humans orbited the moon. All the while I gave only passing thoughts to the headlines. With a blinding faith in the future, I simply made babies and brownies, encouraged by the fact that Joni Mitchell saw me as a sort of Martha Stewart of the ’60s. Today, for me, ‘Ladies of the Canyon’ evokes a cherished snapshot of innocence but also a somewhat painful perspective on my own naïveté.”
Annie’s husband, Gary, designed album covers and was a pioneer in the field. His work graced the albums of such artists as Mama Cass; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; the Doors; and Jackson Browne. There’s a photograph taken back then by Henry Diltz that shows Pic Dawson—Mama Cass’s on-again, off-again boyfriend and drug dealer—Eric Clapton, Joni, David Crosby, Gary Burden, Mama Cass, and Annie’s daughter, Amanda, tumbling on the grass in front of them. “My husband, Gary, worked from his studio off the back of the house,” said Annie. “This brought a constant parade of artists and musicians flowing through. Many became friends, and nine days out of ten I set extra places around the dinner table. I never thought of myself as part of the scene—until Joni’s song framed my role as a homemaker-hostess in the eye of the creative storm. I took it as a great honor to be included in the song, and I still do.”
Trina Robbins was an underground comic book artist at a time when the art form was truly coming into its own. Like many artists of her era, Robbins started out as a science fiction fan in the 1950s. San Francisco was the heart of the alternative-comics world in the ’60s, but Robbins soon discovered it was a decidedly closed boys’ club. She worked for a feminist newspaper called It Ain’t Me, Babe and eventually helmed its all-female comic issue, “It Ain’t Me, Babe, Comix.” She would go on to become the first woman artist to draw Wonder Woman for DC Comics. Part of how Robbins made money was by sewing clothes, and she remembered that in 1970, after Ladies of the Canyon came out, “in gratitude I made her a little black minidress, very simple except for a patch pocket made from antique lace.”
Of her part, Estrella Berosini has said, “That is the core of the beast, a.k.a. me. I was raised in the circus, the daughter of a Czech high-wire performer, Vaclav Veno Berosini. Before he legally changed his last name to Berosini, for theatrical purposes, it had been Holtzknecht (translation: Knight of the Forest). This means that, in the reality of my father being born in Bohemia, just as Bohemia was changed to Czechoslovakia, my true heritage name is Estrella Holtzknecht. It also means that I am, genetically, half Bohemian, and the circus life was nothing if not entirely what we come to think of as a Bohemian lifestyle; a life created by one’s own imagination.” With artistic wisdom, Joni boiled all that down to “Estrella circus girl.”
Of course, in writing ab
out all of those women, Joni was also writing about herself. Like Trina, she was a visual artist; she, too, filled her drawing book with line. She was a mother like Annie, even though very few people knew it, though they knew she was mothering—to her lovers, to her friends, to the circle of people who were part of the canyon. Her house was a very fine house because of the way Joni filled it with music and pies, friends and cats, flowers and love. And she was also a bit of a circus girl, producing and writing and performing: a one-woman three-ring circus.
Just as Laurel Canyon was exploding as a place to be in the 1960s, so was Hawaii. Its history with, and as part of, the United States was relatively recent. Imagine this: while the islands had been annexed by the United States in 1898, Hawaii had only become a state in 1959, less than a decade before Joni traveled there in 1968, riding a wave of American fascination with the nation’s most exotic state. (Important cultural markers: 1961, Elvis in Blue Hawaii and the birth of Barack Hussein Obama on August 4, at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children, Honolulu; and 1968–80, Hawaii Five-O.) And just as she had managed to encapsulate all the hope, energy, and magic of Woodstock in a single song, she would, within a matter of days, write a song that captured the conflict between our longing for beauty and the impact that we, as tourists and citizens, have on the places we flock to see.
Between 1960 and 1970, tourism in Hawaii grew from 296,000 visitors a year to 1.7 million. And even in 1960, a travel editor for the Chicago Tribune was bemoaning, “Hotels are rising on every hand. Apartment buildings are springing up like mushrooms. Stores and offices fill land that not so long ago was garden.” When Joni got to Hawaii, she looked out her window and saw a magical landscape paved over for a parking lot and the kitschy Royal Hawaiian, which was, as the lyric says, actually pink. And she lamented. But with a beat you could dance to, and a peal of engaging laughter at the end.