Songs for Aging Children

by Gerald Astor
Look
January 27, 1970

Joni Mitchell sings that she's looked at life from both sides, that fear is like stepping-stones or sinking sand, that a lady can be too busy being free - in her Songs for aging children.

Of lover pains, city night-joy, time's erosions and reality-illusion doubts, blue-eyed Joni Mitchell composes, writes, strums, yodels, carols, croons and sings, her waist-length corn-silk hair flowing in the wind.

The music began with a year of piano lessons at age seven. Then Joni turned to art. Her mother taught in a Saskatoon (Canada) country school, knew the wild flowers and birdcalls. Dad blew a trumpet and worked for a grocery chain. Grandmother Sadie McKee, to whom Joni dedicated the first album, "loved Robbie Burns and minor-key music and married a farmer who didn't understand."

After a year at the University of Calgary, Joni drifted east into Toronto's coffeehouse life. "I was 20, I met kids 15. The things they knew, the things they were doing. My God, I blew my mind."

She married a U.S. balladeer, Chuck Mitchell, learned to play guitar from a Pete Seeger record and wrote songs. Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Judy Collins sang them; and then Joni's own recording put her on the charts.

Perhaps because she grew up straight, 26-year-old Joni wounds easily. On a pad in the attic-like workroom of her Los Angeles home, she scrawled, "Sorrow is so easy to express and yet so hard to tell." After a divorce from Mitchell, a rocky love affair left her emotionally shell-shocked last summer. "I'm supposed to take a year off until I get a new motivation. Used to be I couldn't wait until I would do my latest song." As part of the stoned generation. she's smoked her pot. "Grass, it sits you down on your fanny. You can't do anything but see things. It shows you your God. But if you make drugs your God, that's bad."

The eye that drove her to paint dominates her lyrics. Color snapshots pop up in the words. Chelsea Morning delights in "sun through yellow curtains, and a rainbow on the wall / Blue, red, green and gold to welcome you..." Clouds come on in Both Sides, Now as "Rows and flows of angel hair / And ice cream castles in the air / And feather canyons ev'rywhere."

What she sees, Joni turns into a musical statement. There's the dark side of New York, on a ride with cabdriver Nathan La Franeer: "[We] ...crawled the canyons slowly / Thru the buyers and the sellers / Thru the burglar bells and wishing wells / With pangs and girly shows / The ghostly garden grows."

A visit to Hawaii, where plaster, glass and blacktop blot out nature's children, mountains, beaches and vegetation, brought on a bouncy new song that says, "They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot." Typically, she turns the lament into a comment on love: "You don't know what you got until it's gone away."

Joni's songs grow more personal, steeped with conflicts of the heart, concerns of those coming of age. Her thin, sweet voice pipes youth's tunes: "Songs to aging children come / Aging children. I am one."

The photos are from the original article and are taken from photographer Jim Marshall's website.