written and performed by Joni Mitchell

In the summer of 1970 I had left school but I hadn’t yet started work. I remember it as a great time, without a care in the world, as we sat around in the park, played football, went to each other’s houses and listened to music. At that time, I had a friend who was a few years older than me called Stewart. He worked as a mechanic in a local garage and drove a beaten up blue Ford Escort van. At weekends Stewart and our two mates, Dave and Steve would go out and about, usually to pubs where there was live music on in the evenings. North London had a vibrant pub music scene with plenty of bands who later became very successful such as Supertramp, Thin Lizzy, Man, The Average White Band, Dave Edmunds.

The previous year 400,000 people had spent three days at the Woodstock music festival in upstate New York and in June the film had been shown in selected cinemas in the west end of London. We went to see it in Leicester Square and couldn’t believe what we were seeing, a whole city of people like us in jeans and with long hair, just sitting around listening to music by legendary artists such as Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills & Nash. On the big screen and with an amazing sound system it was incredible, just as if we were there right in front of the stage, and so we  really wanted to see the same thing live in the U.K. Plenty of people thought the same way we did and were keen to hold similar events here, and the first one to come on our radar was the Krumlin Festival in Yorkshire. It was going to be a three-day festival from 14^th – 16^th August featuring some of the biggest names in rock and folk music, and we were totally up for it. 

Getting there was our first problem. None of us had ever been north of Watford so finding our way to somewhere in the Pennines just to the north-west of Huddersfield was always going to be challenging, especially as Stewart thought his car couldn’t cope with motorway driving, but we eventually made it by early Saturday evening. We’d been told that the headliners would be Pink Floyd, but when we got there word was that they had been moved to the Sunday. Still, we sat on the grass bank and watched Sandy Denny with Fotheringay who played a nice set. After a while we realised that it was quite cold and windy for August, and then it started to rain, and rain, and rain. Heavy rain driven by the wind. Fairport Convention were next up, and after the first few numbers the heavens literally opened. Very quickly the whole site turned into a mud-bath, Actually, the Fairport guys managed this really well playing continuous jigs and reels that everyone danced in the mud to. But it had to come to an end as the police and the organisers were concerned that someone would get electrocuted. We slept that night in the back of the van as our tent had disintegrated, and the festival was called off overnight. At around lunchtime on the Sunday, Stewart drove to a pub car park and the rest of us fell out of the back of the van. When the regulars saw us they all started laughing at the state we were in –  and we made our way back to London, to get cleaned up. Ironically what we hadn’t noticed when watching the Woodstock film was that it rained there as well, you tend not notice that watching a film inside a comfortable dry cinema; but it’s different when you’re soaked to the skin on a Yorkshire hillside.

Not to be deterred by this – ah! The folly of youth – we immediately set our sights on the Isle of Wight Festival featuring The Who, The Doors and Joni Mitchell from 28^th – 30^th August. We knew this was well organised as it had run successfully before, and I’d been to a church camp on the Isle of Wight in previous years and they said it had never rained there in August, so we were up for this. As Stewart worked during the week our plan was to travel down early on the Saturday morning, but, we hit a snag. The Daily Express newspaper was reporting crowd trouble involving French anarchists (a good story but not exactly true) and so Stewart  wouldn’t go. Joni Mitchell who wrote the song ‘Woodstock’ had not actually been able to go that festival due to prior TV commitments, and now I wasn’t going to be at the Isle of Wight festival to see Joni, the irony was not lost on me.

As Stewart was working and still living at home he had plenty of what is called disposable income and so he would buy two or three LPs a week. Musically, he wasn’t very discerning, but he did have a thing about female solo singers. He leant me Joni’s first two albums, ‘Song To A Seagull’ and ‘Clouds’. The first of these had an intricately designed gatefold sleeve drawn and coloured by Joni, that reminded me of the designs the girls at school created when they put covers on their textbooks. The music was mainly just Joni with her guitar or piano, and seemed like a poetry reading with accompaniment. One thing I noticed was that it was produced by David Crosby, formerly of the Byrds and about to be the Crosby of Crosby, Stills & Nash, and that Stephen Stills played bass on one track. 

The second album ‘Clouds’, was generally speaking similar musically and with a beautiful painted self portrait on the cover, but it also contained two stand-out tracks that were much more rounded songs. ‘Woke up, it was a Chelsea Morning, and the first thing that I knew, there was milk and toast and honey and a bowl of oranges too, and the sun poured in like butterscotch and stuck to all my senses.’ With these lines, she painted a picture in words. I wanted to be in that place enjoying that breakfast. Then there was the mesmerising ‘Both Sides Now’, with it’s lines, ‘Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels, the dizzy dancing way you feel, as every fairy tale comes real, I’ve looked at love that way’.

The first Joni album that I bought myself was the April 1970 release, ‘Ladies of the Canyon’. This cover also had a self portrait, but it was an incomplete line drawing. Simple though it was she looked less like a girl and more like a woman. She would of course, because she was now twenty six, and her songs had also matured. Twelve tracks about her life, her loves and most importantly for any artist, her observations, with wonderful lyrics such as, ‘Now me I play for fortune and those velvet curtain calls…..but the one man band by the quick lunch stand he was playing real good for free’ (For Free) ‘He says she keeps him guessing, I know she keeps him down’ (Conversation)  ‘He says our love cannot be real, he cannot hear the chapel’s pealing silver bells’ (Willy) ‘The priest sat in the airport bar he was wearing his father’s tie’ (The Priest). 

However, one track on that album stood out for me, it was ‘Big Yellow Taxi’. It wasn’t just that it was a very catchy almost pop sing-a-long song, that was played on the radio a lot, but it was the message in the lyrics that grabbed my attention. ‘They paved paradise and they put up a parking lot………..They took all the trees and they put them in a tree museum…..Hey farmer put away that D.D.T now, give me spots on my apples, but leave me the birds and the bees, Please!’ These days, we are all familiar with conservation, looking after the world we live in but in 1970 the only people that were talking about such things were ‘nutters in California’, such as Joni Mitchell. The other clever thing about the song is that it parallels the loss of the environment alongside the loss of a person with the lines, ‘late last night I heard the screen door slam and a big yellow taxi took away my old man’.  Loss is something we’ll all experience in our lives. For me it was the death of my sister from cancer of the throat on her twenty-first birthday, and then many years later the death of my grandmother, who had been a great influence on my early life. Each loss hurts and it’s real, it changes you subtly. The environment around us is changing, but at least we do something about preventing this loss.

In many respects it was probably a good thing that I didn’t make it to the Isle of Wight festival to see Joni perform. She was from a folk background and sat alone on stage with  either an acoustic guitar or piano. Her songs were intimate, one-on-one dialogues with her audience which worked perfectly in small concert venues with an audience of admirers who would listen carefully, but when she came to play larger auditoria and particularly festivals, where she was one of a number of artists on the bill, she felt vulnerable on stage.

Many years later in an interview for Rolling Stone magazine she said of this time, “I had no personal defences. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world and I couldn’t pretend in my life to be strong”. Faced with this vulnerability she decided to take a year off just to write, paint and go travelling. The songs that she wrote during these months off formed the basis of her next album ‘Blue’.

Many people consider ‘Blue’ to be Joni’s finest album, and it was a huge critical and commercial success. As with the previous albums the songs were deeply personal, but if anything more soul-searching with lines such as ‘I am on a lonely road……looking for something what can it be’ (All I Want) and ‘I’m gonna make a lot of money then I’m gonna quit this crazy scene’ (River).  I see this album, which was her final release for the Reprise label,  as the last of Joni’s folk albums, particularly when it is viewed alongside her first release for David Geffen’s Asylum label, ‘For The Roses’, and subsequent albums.

Her solution to the vulnerability on stage was to add a band, reedman Tom Scott and his LA Express, re-arranging her existing songs with a jazz-fusion feel, and it worked. Subsequently in the studio, she wrote new songs that took on board this expanded musicianship and her songwriting and vocalising developed. Soon she was working with outstanding jazz musicians such as Jaco Pastorius, Larry Carlton, Joe Sample and Victor Feldman and had a jazz-style to her songs.

As her music developed and became more complex so her lyrics became tableaux with characters, as if she wasn’t just painting pictures with words but creating scenes from a drama. She describes: a woman coming up to a man in a bar and trying to get him to spend money on her (Raised On Robbery), the grumpiness of an ageing blues singer (Furry Sings The Blues), an incompatible relationship (Coyote), talking to an old schoolfriend (Song For Sharon), TV evangelical preachers (Tax Free), the plight of the American Indian tribes (Lakota) and how the catholic church in Ireland dealt with unmarried mothers (The Magdalene Laundries). Issues and themes that deserved attention but intertwined with songs about love and personal relationships. Each new Joni album took you on a journey from the last one.

Somehow when I listen to Joni’s songs I feel that I could also be creative. I don’t know exactly why this is. When I was twelve, I could pick up a cricket bat, pretend it was a guitar, put ‘Twist And Shout’ on the record deck and belt out the vocals and believe I could be John Lennon, or score a goal playing football in the park and know any scout watching would immediately sign me up, but, trust me I didn’t imagine for one moment I was Joni Mitchell, it was simply that listening to her was inspiring.

Joni Mitchell Hits CD

Click on the link above the photo to view the album on CD, vinyl (if available), or as an MP3, or to stream.

Click on the link below to access Amazon Music and then type into the search box ‘Joni Mitchell  Big Yellow Taxi’ to access the track.