Mitchell divided her debut album into two loosely autobiographical sections – a conceit easier to bring off in the days of vinyl LPs. The first side (‘I Came to the City’) commenced with ‘I Had a King’, a song detailing – with more than a trace of self-protective bitterness – the breakup of Joni’s marriage to Chuck Mitchell. Part two (‘Out of the City and Down to the Seaside’) found our heroine in the country, by the sea, settled in rustic Southern California. ‘The Dawntreader’ was a gushing homage to Crosby and the boat he tethered at Marina Del Rey. ‘Song to a Seagull’ summarised the theme of the album, with Joni recapping on her urban adventures and subsequent departure for the sea. The song played perfectly into the image of Mitchell as a kind of fairy maiden striving to float free of human need. The final song, ‘Cactus Tree’, pointed forward to deeper themes in the singer’s subsequent work: themes of romantic love, of female autonomy, of commitment versus creative freedom. Describing three lovers – the first almost certainly Crosby – Joni ‘thinks she loves them all’ but fears giving herself completely to any of them. These were important issues for young liberated women in the ’60s, rejecting a society where women had tended to live somewhat vicariously as caretakers to men. A self-proclaimed ‘serial monogamist’, Mitchell would struggle for years with the conflicts between her desire for love and her need for independence.
Hearing Joni Mitchell again all these decades later, it’s difficult to ignore how earnest and worthy she sounds on it. And yet the power of her swooping, pellucid vibrato and idiosyncratic, questioning chords is right there. ‘Joni invented everything about her music, including how to tune the guitar,’ said James Taylor. ‘From the beginning of the process of writing she’s building the canvas as well as putting paint on it.’
In March, with the album about to be released, David Crosby presented his protégée to his peer group. Crosby’s favourite gambit was to host impromptu acoustic performances by Joni, usually at the Laurel Canyon homes of his friends. ‘David says, “I want you to meet somebody,”’ recalls Carl Gottlieb. ‘And he goes upstairs and comes back down with this ethereal blonde. And this is the first time that everybody heard “Michael from the Mountains” and “Both Sides Now” and “Chelsea Morning”. And then she goes back upstairs, and we all sit around and look at each other and say, “What was that? Did we hallucinate it?”’ Eric Clapton sat spellbound on Cass Elliott’s lawn as Joni cooed ‘Urge for Going’, a song inspired by the death of the folk movement. Crosby was at her side, a joint in his mouth and a Cheshire-cat smile of satisfaction on his face. ‘Cass had organised a little backyard barbecue,’ says Henry Diltz. ‘Because she’d met Cream she invited Clapton, who was very quiet and almost painfully shy. And Joni was there and doing her famous tunings, and Eric sat and stared at her hands to try and figure out what she was doing.’
The following day Joni performed on B. Mitchel Reed’s KPPC show in Pasadena and answered questions that whetted LA’s appetite for the new neo-folk star. So much did Reed talk her up that her first live dates in town were all sellouts at the Troubadour. Not that the local attention made much difference to the commercial prospects of Joni Mitchell, which peaked on the Billboard chart at the lowly position of #189. As she often would in her career, Joni felt at odds with her record label, whose Stan Cornyn promoted the album with flip irreverence. ‘Joni Mitchell is 90% Virgin’. Cornyn’s copy read in the ads he furnished to the new underground press – Crawdaddy!, Rolling Stone and company. Joni was irked by the line. ‘She got me on the phone and said it drove her crazy,’ says Joe Smith. ‘I said, “Sleep on it and think about it tomorrow. Anybody who knows you or of you would never associate ‘virgin’ in the same sentence with you.” And she laughed at that.’
‘Like Neil, Joni was quiet,’ says Henry Diltz, who photographed her soon after her move to LA. ‘A lot of these people were quiet, which was why they became songwriters. It was the only way they could express themselves. It was very different from the Tin Pan Alley tradition, where guys would sit down and try to write a hit song and turn out these teen-romance songs about other people.’
Joni found a perfect place of retreat in Laurel Canyon. In April 1968, with money from her modest Reprise advance, she made a down payment on a quaint A-frame cottage built into the side of the hill on Lookout Mountain Avenue. Soon she’d filled it with antiques and carvings and stained Tiffany windows – not to mention a nine-year-old tomcat named Hunter. Within a year her songs were setting the pace for the new introspection of the singer-songwriter school.
On 5 July 1968 Robert Shelton wrote a New York Times piece about Mitchell and Jerry Jeff Walker entitled ‘Singer-Songwriters are Making a Comeback’. In it he noted that, while the return of solo acoustic performers had at least something to do with economics, ‘the high-frequency rock’n’roar may have reached its zenith’. Nine months later, folk singer and Sing Out! editor Happy Traum came to a similar conclusion in Rolling Stone. ‘As if an aural backlash to psy-ky-delick acid rock and to the all-hell-has-broken-loose styles of Aretha Franklin and Janis Joplin,’ Traum wrote, ‘the music is gentle, sensitive, and graceful. Nowadays it’s the personal and the poetic, rather than a message, that dominates.’ It was time to turn inwards.
II: Outside of a Small Circle of Friends
The Los Angeles scene that Joni Mitchell and Elliot Roberts found in the early months of 1968 was in a state of transition. The departures of Gene Clark and David Crosby from the Byrds were symptomatic of a general fragmenting. ‘Groups had broken up over 1967–68,’ Ellen Sander wrote in her 1973 book Trips. ‘Everyone was wondering what was next, a little worried, but grooving nonetheless on the time between. Days were permeated with a gentle sense of waiting, summer blew up the hills, past the painted mailboxes and decorated VW buses, and musicians were floating about.’
Crosby, outside whose Beverly Glen house Cass Elliott’s dune buggy was often spotted, was struggling to land a solo deal. His new best friend Stephen Stills offered consolation. To Paul Rothchild, Crosby touted such new songs as the beautiful ‘Laughing’ and the brooding ‘Long Time Gone’. The Lovin’ Spoonful’s John Sebastian, killing time in LA, helped Crosby demo tracks for Elektra. But, as with Jackson Browne, Jac Holzman couldn’t make up his mind.
Now Stills’s band, too, was unravelling. Neil Young’s on-off member-ship of the Buffalo Springfield was perplexing to some but understandable to those who saw how Stills bullied him. ‘It would make me really angry, because Stephen pushed Neil back constantly,’ said Linda McCartney, who photographed the Springfield. ‘Neil was painfully shy. I thought, “Well, he just doesn’t stick up for himself.”’ Jack Nitzsche, who’d worked closely with Young on the Springfield’s ‘Expecting to Fly’ and ‘Broken Arrow’– fragmented orchestral epics inspired by the Beatles’ ‘Day in the Life’– was among several people encouraging Neil to go solo. Young was over at Nitzsche’s house in Mandeville Canyon one night when they heard a hammering at the door. It was Stills, hunting for his errant bandmate.
‘I know that fucking baby is here and you’re hiding him,’ Stills sneered when Nitzsche answered the door. Finding Neil in Nitzsche’s living room, Stills seized