Joni had already crammed a lot into her short life. She’d been married to a fellow Canadian singer, Chuck Mitchell, and given up a daughter for adoption – an abandonment that ate at her like a wound. Songwriting served as therapy for her pain. ‘It was almost like she wanted to erase herself and just let the songs speak for her,’ reflected her friend the novelist Malka Marom. Joni’s unusual open guitar tunings also set her songs apart from the folk balladry of the day. ‘I was really a folk singer up until 1965, but once I crossed the border I began to write,’ Mitchell says. ‘My songs began to be, like, playlets or soliloquies. My voice even changed – I no longer was imitative of the folk style, really. I was just a girl with a guitar that made it look that way.’
‘Elliot became wildly excited about Joni, and he introduced me to her and I became her agent,’ recalled David Geffen. ‘And it was the beginning of her career – it was the beginning of our careers. Everything was very small-time.’ Established stars were lining up to cover songs from the Mitchell catalogue. ‘When she first came out,’ said Roberts, ‘she had a backlog of twenty, twenty-five songs that most people would dream that they would do in their entire career…it was stunning.’ One artist to pay close attention was Judy Collins, folk’s ethereal blue-eyed queen. For her 1967 album Wildflowers Collins chose ‘Both Sides, Now’ and ‘Michael from the Mountains’. Tom Rush and Buffy Sainte-Marie both sang ‘The Circle Game’.
Joe Boyd, who produced the English folk group Fairport Convention, met Mitchell at the 1967 Newport Folk Festival and brought her to London that summer to open for the Incredible String Band. Both in America and in England, people sat up and noticed the blonde with the piercing prairie soprano, the idiosyncratic guitar tunings, and the wise-beyond-her-years lyrics. When Roberts and Mitchell went to Florida to play the folk circuit there, David Crosby came to see her at a club called the Gaslight South. ‘Right away I thought I’d been hit by a hand grenade,’ he reported later. There was something about the way Mitchell combined naked purity with artful sophistication that shocked Crosby – the sense of a young woman who’d seen too much too soon. He set Joni in his sights, bedding her that week. The affair was never likely to last. ‘We went back to LA and tried to live together,’ Crosby said. ‘It doesn’t work. She shouldn’t have an old man.’
‘These were two very wilful people,’ says Joel Bernstein. ‘Neither was going to cave in. I remember being at Joni’s old apartment in Chelsea in New York and I heard this commotion on the street. And it was Crosby and Joni screaming at each other on the corner. It gave me a real sense of the volatility of their relationship.’ The volatility did not obscure David’s deep admiration for Joni’s talent, nor his awareness of the obstacles she and Elliot were encountering. ‘Everything about Joni was unique and original, but we couldn’t get a deal,’ says Roberts, who took tapes to Columbia, RCA and other majors. ‘The folk period had died, so she was totally against the grain. Everyone wanted a copy of the tape for, like, their wives, but no one would sign her.’
Roberts touched down at LAX in late 1967, knowing few people in the city but using Crosby’s endorsement as a calling card. Joni followed close behind. Immediately she was received with open arms. Epitomising the hospitality of Laurel Canyon was B. Mitchel Reed, the KPPC-FM disc jockey whose radio show was the pipeline of all cool sounds in LA. Reed put Roberts and Mitchell up in his rented house above the Sunset Strip on Sunset Plaza Drive.
Joni wasn’t sure about Los Angeles. She was used to crowded sidewalks, teeming urban life – the bustle and commotion of Toronto and Manhattan. She didn’t like it that people went everywhere in their big gas-guzzling cars. But once she and Elliot got into Laurel Canyon, up among the cypresses and eucalyptus trees that lined the bumpy snaking roads, she started to see the City of the Angels as the ‘new golden land’ that had seduced so many outsiders: the land of David Hockney’s painting A Bigger Splash, of exotic palms and dry desert air and the omnipresent vault of blue sky. ‘Driving around up in the canyons there were no sidewalks and no regimented lines like the way I was used to cities being laid out,’ she recalls. ‘And then, having lived in New York, there was the ruralness of it, with trees in the yard and ducks floating around on my neighbours’ pond. And the friendliness of it: no one locked their doors.’ As for Elliot Roberts, well, he’d grown up in the Bronx, for godsakes: how bad could this paved paradise be?
‘Elliot would sleep on my couch at 8333 Lookout Mountain,’ says Ron Stone. ‘At the same time, Crosby had been tossed out of the Byrds and was mooching off me. We’d smoke a joint and play chess. We were both obnoxious brats. He was my entrée to all of this.’ Crosby urged Roberts to try Reprise Records. ‘Go see Andy Wickham,’ he counselled Elliot, who found David inspiring and radically different from anyone he’d known in New York. ‘Because Crosby “hangs out” so much,’ Jerry Hopkins wrote in Rolling Stone, ‘there’s a tendency to think he isn’t producing much. In a sense this is true. Yet he is an integral part of the LA scene – thanks largely to his track record but also because he is so volatile and opinionated.’
When Roberts officially left Chartoff-Winkler he asked Ron Stone to come and work for him. To Stone it looked more exciting than selling used leather jackets to the socialites of Beverly Hills. Together they found an office further down Santa Monica Boulevard in a building with the fanciful name ‘Clear Thoughts’. ‘Right away it was like Elliot and Ron could take a New York entrepreneurial viewpoint on the whole thing,’ says Joel Bernstein, who would soon be taking photographs of Joni for Elliot. ‘I think it was really eye-opening to these guys that you could come out here and live up in Laurel Canyon in little wooden houses where you didn’t even need heating or air conditioning…and you could still do business.’ With Ron Stone as his new aide-de-camp, Roberts duly trotted off to see Wickham. The young Englishman loved what he heard. ‘In his heart, Andy was a folkie,’ Roberts remembers. ‘His best friend during that whole period was Phil Ochs.’*
With Wickham as her first label champion, the 23-year-old Joni had a demo session green-lighted by Mo Ostin on condition that Crosby produce it. ‘David was very enthusiastic about the music,’ says Mitchell. ‘He was twinkly about it. His instincts were correct: he was going to protect the music and pretend to produce me. I think perhaps without that the record company might have set some kind of producer on me who’d have tried to turn an apple into an orange.’ The sessions that eventually became Joni Mitchell could not have been more auspicious. Recording at Sunset Sound, Mitchell and Crosby kept things stripped and simple: in the main just Joni, her guitar, and such well-worked songs as ‘Marcie’ and ‘I Had a King’. The two of them had now officially split up. ‘They each described to me crying at the other through the glass in the studio,’ says Joel Bernstein. Sitting in on occasional guitar and bass was Stephen Stills, who was across the hall with his group Buffalo Springfield. His bandmate, the dark and brooding Neil Young, was known to Mitchell from her apprenticeship on the Canadian folk circuit. Sharing a uniquely dry Canuck humour, Young and Mitchell had always got along. Neil’s coming-of-age song ‘Sugar Mountain’ had indirectly inspired Joni’s similarly themed ‘Circle Game’. ‘You gotta meet Neil,’ she told Elliot.