Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (12 page)

She knew she wasn't “fitting in,” but her truth demanded expression—even on the surface level. “I remember showing up at a Carole King concert in Central Park [in 1973] in a pair of Yves St. Laurent pants. And a good shirt,” she told Cameron Crowe. “They were simple clothes, but they were good quality. And I felt... really uncomfortable... I was outside the uniform of rock 'n' roll and it was annoying to some people.” Mitchell was still part Barbie inside. She even bought herself a Barbie car with her first royalty cheque—no, not a pink plastic Corvette, but a brand new car: a Mercedes 280 SE convertible she called “Bluebird.” (The car was stolen in the late eighties, prompting a fit of mourning for the 1969 Teutonic symbol of success. Bizarrely, over the course of writing this book, I not only saw the same car on the streets of Yorkville, but I also encountered someone who said they stole it as a lark.) Mitchell was still grappling with her prairie roots, her mother's moral judgement, and her swelling will to make an impression. She was keenly aware of the difference between the package and the content, between her truth and the constructed image of who she was supposed to be, but she was finding a way to make the dissonance feed her creativity—at least for now.

“Tea Leaf Prophecy”

“Little Green”

“Chelsea Morning”

“Furry Sings the Blues”

“
Magdalene Laundries
”

“Tin Angel”

“Both Sides Now”
from
Clouds

“People have the need to set people above themselves. The stage is the illustration of that—the demi-gods. The god thing is an illustration of that very need of greater power. In lieu of finding out what that greater power is, people set up on their own earthly version of it in order to express it. I stand on stage and I'm thinking, What are you looking at me for, a damn junkie hacking away at the guitar, what is this? This must be a primal need.”
—Keith Richards

Joseph Campbell says we need myth to help us “feel the rapture of being alive” by giving us perspective and the sense of being attached to something larger than ourselves. “When a story is in your mind, then you see its relevance to something happening in your own life,” he says in
The Power of Myth
. “These bits of information from ancient times, which have to do with themes that have supported human life, built over civilizations, and informed religions over the millennia, have to do with deep inner problems, inner mysteries, inner thresholds of passage.”
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The human experience has been well mapped by the countless other souls who have moved through its myriad hallways. By tracing the steps of others through stories, we can gain a better sense of our place in the universe. Myth, therefore, isn't just the result of a collective act of creation, it's a well-worn and accepted shortcut to the life-affirming creative flame. In the same way the individual can feel the “rapture of being alive” through artistic expression, the masses can access the same feelings of wholeness through resonant storytelling.

Much of what we understand Joni Mitchell to be is more myth than reality, but as we've already seen, she was a willing participant in the creation of her own iconography. She and Crosby created a false idol that would soon be worshipped by the masses. Yet, in the hot carnal sweat of the Summer of Love, Mitchell seemed to catch a glimpse of her own mythologized reflection, stand back, and question. In the very same breath, she created the anthem for the collective myth of her generation.

They say that if every person who claimed to be at Woodstock had actually attended the event, the five boroughs of New York City would have been empty—and more than eight million people would have huddled together en masse. People like to be a part of history, even if their narrative is not entirely true, because it gives them the ephemeral gloss of glamour—and the illusion that an entirely average life is noteworthy. Hey, we all want to feel special, and Woodstock may well have been the most remarkable pop culture event of the twentieth century.

As it was for every other soul on the planet—save the approximately 500,000 spectators and hangers-on who actually made it to White Lake in the town of Bethel, New York, for “3 Days of Peace & Music” in August 1969—the mythology surrounding Woodstock was transmitted to my brain from two sources: the documentary film about the event and the song written by Mitchell containing the chorus: “We are stardust, we are golden, and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.” I don't really know how, but these two emblems fused in my brain, and when I first started working on this book, I was under the impression that Mitchell was actually in Bethel and
at
Woodstock. I could even conjure the image of the youthful chanteuse, sans
maquillage
, sitting in front of a sea of people.

This personally manufactured image would prove to be my next lesson in the fallibility of perception and the seductive power of myth, because Mitchell never did take Woodstock's rough-hewn, unpainted stage. Despite a YouTube video mistakenly labelled “Joni at Woodstock” (it's actually the Isle of Wight Festival), which features the singer-songwriter at a piano singing the signature tune inspired by the event, Mitchell watched the whole happening unfold in the all-too-safe confines of David Geffen's leased apartment on Central Park South.

Mitchell was originally booked to play Woodstock the Sunday night—alongside other attractions including the Band; Jeff Beck; Blood, Sweat & Tears; Iron Butterfly; Joe Cocker; CSNY (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young); and Hendrix—but her business mentors Roberts and Geffen felt it was too dangerous for Mitchell to make the commute into the chaos unfolding upstate. The roads were jammed, bus service had been cancelled by order of the police, and the only way to get in was via helicopter. Roberts was terrified of flying, and when he heard his newest act, CSNY, battled a rainstorm in the chopper only to land outside the grounds and subsequently hot-wire a pickup (a hidden talent of Neil Young's, apparently) to make it to the plywood stage, he was nervous about getting Joni there. But Geffen and Roberts weren't really afraid for her physical safety in the midst of half-a-million kids huddled together in the mud. It was more of a career-based decision: they believed her show business interests were best served by staying in the city so she could attend her national TV date with talk show host Dick Cavett. This may sound foolish now, but at the time neither Geffen nor Roberts really recognized the event as anything more than just another festival, and not such an important one at that. Newport was already an established event, and the first Monterey Pop had come and gone without incident. Risking a national TV audience for a muddy love-in seemed like a bad idea, and even worse business. They weren't clued out. The fact is, no one really realized what Woodstock would become, including the organizers of the festival itself.

John Morris, production manager at Woodstock, said they were counting on 75,000 attendees, but when he and his crew stood onstage for a sound check and saw the actual crowd swarming in the breaking dawn, the scale of what was about to happen sank in—prompting Morris to utter the two famed words that christened the first live microphone at the festival: “Holy shit!”

“There were so many more than we guessed,” Morris recounts in Pete Fornatale's book
Back to the Garden
. “The Beatles had drawn 50,000 people to Shea Stadium. Monterey, which was a year or two before, was 35,000 people over three days. The idea of putting 100,000 people in the same place is normal to us now, but the idea of putting something like that together then and having that many people was beyond the pale.”
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Journalist Mike Jahn was assigned to cover the festival for the
New York Times
. He was reluctant to go, believing it would be a disappointment compared to Newport, but hopped into a car and headed to Bethel for what would become a life-altering adventure. “I got about halfway there in my rented car and it was trafficky. You just couldn't get anywhere,” he said. “I called the
Times
and told them what was going on. I said, ‘Look, you better send a hard news team here. I cannot do this myself. This is a major story.' They sent a helicopter for me and that's how I got in.”
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Richie Havens was supposed to play on the final day of the festival but ended up being cajoled into the opening spot when no one else was available, or coherent enough, to perform. He calls Woodstock “a cosmic accident.”
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Joni Mitchell watched this “cosmic accident” unfold on television at Geffen's deluxe duplex at 230 Central Park South, a property owned by Helen Noga, the woman who made Johnny Mathis a star. Spellbound by the sight of so many young people converging on Max Yasgur's six-hundred-acre dairy farm, Joni began composing the soundtrack for the rapidly evolving Woodstock myth: “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: I'm going down to Yasgur's farm. I'm going to join in a rock 'n' roll band. I'm going to camp out on the land. I'm gonna try and get my soul free.”

Stephen Stills, who was still buzzing from CSNY's first show in Chicago a few days earlier, got onstage at Woodstock and announced, “This is only the second time we've performed in front of people. We're scared shitless.” It's always good to show a little vulnerability onstage. It makes you human, and if Woodstock set out to celebrate anything at all, it was the simple pleasure of being outside, listening to music, and being a human being surrounded by other like-minded souls. CSNY lapped up the attention and the hippie vibe, but they also set the wheels of wishful revisionism in motion.

According to an erroneous Woodstock legend perpetuated by Stephen Stills and David Crosby, Mitchell penned the song “Woodstock” after hearing about the event from her then-lover, Graham Nash—as though she was so impressed by the returning crusaders, she needed to mythologize the event and their participation in it. It's a story that's been told, and retold, and chronicled, and re-chronicled. It's now such a standard part of the Bethel narrative, it's considered digital gospel and appears in the Wikipedia entry for the song, which reads: “
Joni Mitchell
wrote the song from what she had heard from then-boyfriend,
Graham Nash
, about the festival.”

When Mitchell received the Billboard Century Award for outstanding musical achievement in 1995, Crosby and Nash retold the story—prompting a fit of pique from Mitchell. “When I got my recent Billboard honorary award, I'm sitting in the audience and there's David going (in a nasal, mocking tone), ‘I'll tell ya, man, what a great songwriter she is: We came back from Woodstock babbling about it and she wrote that song from our babbling,'” Mitchell relates in a 1996
Details
article. “I thought, ‘You bastard!' I had that song written before they got back.”
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Mitchell attributes these false memories to male ego and the insistent need to take credit for significant events. Fittingly, when she made her acceptance speech at the Billboard Awards, she raised a flag for her fellow sisters: “I've been thinking a lot about arrogance and humility, trying to find some genuine humility to bring to this situation. But I feel like I'm emerging from the McCarthy era in a certain way. I never thought of it as difficult being a woman in this industry, but it has been pointed out to me... how few women there really were.”
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The Woodstock saga was one moment when Mitchell did feel her gender. She “felt like the girl in the family”
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when the boys were given carte blanche for their adventure in Bethel, and she was forced to stay behind.

In a taped TV interview featured on the Dick Cavett DVD box set, Mitchell describes how she had opened for the newly formed CSNY for their first two shows as a “supergroup” but never made it upstate. “What had happened was that Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young had formed... On a Saturday night we played in Chicago, [and] on Sunday we were supposed to go to Woodstock. The boys were taken in and I was told I couldn't go because I had to do a television show the next day and there was a possibility we could get in but they didn't know how we could get out,” she says. “I felt, you know, [Woodstock] was an amazing thing that occurred, and to me that was an important event and I think I knew that was as good as it was going to get.”
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In the actual footage of the post-Woodstock Dick Cavett broadcast, Mitchell is wearing a flowing, floor-length emerald dress as she sits around Cavett's psychedelics-inspired in-the-round set with Grace Slick, Marty Balin, and other members of Jefferson Airplane. One's never really sure if Cavett is even aware that Mitchell never made it to the gig because he introduces the whole show as something of a Woodstock after-party, and he never asks her how she felt about being forced to miss the event of her generation.

By the time Stills and Crosby show up for the last segment of the show, still clearly buzzed from the trip to Bethel, Mitchell has settled in as quiet observer—and good Canadian. Cavett asks his guests about the intersection of celebrity and politics, given Woodstock's highly politicized peace message in the face of Vietnam.

“Have you ever been asked to endorse a political candidate the way actors and certain singers do?” Cavett asks. Crosby answers: “We usually try not to. How many of them have you ever seen that you would endorse?” Cavett wears a self-effacing grin as Mitchell pipes up with a mention of our sexiest prime minister: “I would sing for Pierre Trudeau.” Cavett finds this quaint: “I guess everyone knows you're from Canada. Your work is sort of unpolitical, in general. Isn't it?” Mitchell seems to ignore the diminishing comment about the content of her work. “Well, yeah. I sing mostly about love and things that I can understand. I don't understand politics, mainly because in Canada, we never do anything that political. The biggest political news that I can remember ever there was the choosing of the flag,” she says. “That took three years and they finally chose one that none of us like... oh well.” Cavett comes back with a global-political quip: “But we're still here... South of you, protecting your border.”

Cavett seems a little lost for the better part of the broadcast, but few people in show business could wear befuddlement—or, for that matter, a safari shirt—with as much charm. He wades into a discussion of the concert by asking Stills and Crosby how it felt. For a few seconds, they talk about fatigue and weather, and then Stills—famously (because everything around Woodstock seems to be famous at this point)—gestures to his pant leg and proclaims: “I still have my mud.”

In subsequent interpretations of this broadcast—and there are many—Mitchell is described as “envious” as she looks over at Stills's still-dirty jeans.

Envy is a strong word, and despite the emerald green dress she wore for the occasion, she doesn't look all that green with it. She looks like the iconic folk hero who won over the masses with her earnest emotion and masterful, image-laden lyrics.

In an interview with Dave Zimmer, author of
Crosby, Stills & Nash: The Authorized Biography
, Mitchell says she was forced to sit on the other side of the performer/audience divide for the first time in years: “I was one of the fans. I was put in the position of being a kid who couldn't make it. So I was glued to the media.”
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