Before the Gold Rush

by Nicholas Jennings
Book
April 1997

A bumper crop of 186 musical recordings--including Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire," Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode," the Kingsmen's "Louie Louie" and Joni Mitchell's "Blue" album--were inducted Monday into the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences' Hall of Fame. The mix of singles and albums--representing the most honorees ever in a single year--were added to the 263 titles previously inducted since the hall was established in 1973. Trustees of the academy, which sponsors the Grammys, decided two years ago to accelerate Hall of Fame inductions because of "huge, gaping holes" that remained in its pantheon of landmark recordings, academy President Michael Greene said during the Los Angeles induction ceremonies, adding: "For the first time, I feel like the Grammy Hall of Fame actually makes some sense in chronicling the great seminal recordings. . . . Now we're at a point where it's a great representation of great American music." Including this year's additions, the Beatles, Duke Ellington and Frank Sinatra are the most honored artists in the hall, with six entries each. Van Morrison and John Lennon each had three works inducted this year.

Following are the relevant Joni portions from the book

In Montreal, Twenty-four-year-old Leonard Cohen didn't posses a fine singing voice. But he was a published poet and had begun reading his work, beat-style, with jazz accompaniment, at clubs like Dunn's Progressive Jazz Parlour on Ste. Catherine Street. One of his first accompanists was guitarist Lenny Breau, who later also backed Joni Mitchell when she passed through Breau's home town of Winnipeg.

In 1958, Mitchell was still Joan Anderson, a fifteen-year-old living in Saskatoon. That year, she purchased her first instru- ment, a $36 baritone ukulele, with money she earned from modelling. The ukulele was an alternative to a guitar, which her mother had strictly forbidden. But it enabled her to accompany herself, singing Kingston Trio songs and other folk material of the day. Coincidentally, Neil Young also received a ukulele from his parents around the same time, while living in Pickering, Ontario. The thirteen-year-old Young, who, like Mitchell, also suffered a childhood case of polio, had been inspired by seeing Elvis perform on Tv's "Ed Sullivan Show."

As the only child born to William and Myrtle Anderson in Fort McLeod, Alberta, Roberta Joan had grown up in Saskatoon-not far from Sainte-Marie's own birthplace on the Cree Indian Piapot Reserve in the Qu'Appelle Valley. A self- described "good-time Charlie," Joni first wrecked her stockings dancing to the jukebox jive of Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley and The Coasters. But at a certain point, like many teenagers in the early '60s, she traded rock's "jungle rhythms" for the more cerebral qualities of folk music. "Rock 'n' roll went through a really dumb, vanilla period," she recalled. "And during that period, folk came in to fill the hole."

At parties, Anderson began to lead singalongs, accompanying herself on baritone ukulele with chords she'd learned from a Pete Seeger instruction record. While performing at a local wiener roast in 1961, the eighteen-year- old caught the fancy of some people connected with Prince Albert's TV station, who promptly booked her as a one-time replacement for a late-night moose-hunting show. Two years later, while working as a waitress at Saskatoon's Louis Riel coffee house, Anderson ventured to the stage during one of the Riel's weekly "hoot nights." Sitting on a stool, the pigtailed performer screeched into the microphone and plunked away on her ukulele for some puzzled onlookers.

Indeed, her developing taste for folk music left more than a few people bewildered. "My friends who knew me as a rock 'n' roll dancer found this change kind of hard to relate to," she admitted recendy. "The songs at that time [were] folk songs and English bal- lads, and English ballads are always [about] 'the cruel mother,' and there's a lot of sorrow in them. But they had beautiful melodies, that was the thing, and I always loved melody. Melody is generally melancholy and sad, and the text that accompanies it must be the same."

In the fall of '63, Anderson enrolled at the Alberta College of Art in Calgary to pursue her interest in painting. But she continued to entertain thoughts of becoming a folk singer and was soon showing up at Calgary's Depression coffee house. Will Millar, then a budding folk singer and later the leader of The Irish Rovers, recalls: "Joni came with her uke and tor- mented us all with a shrill 'Sloop John B' and 'I With I Wath an Apple on a Twee."' But by the following year, Anderson had improved enough that the Depres- sion paid her $15 to entertain weekend audiences of mostly fellow art students. She even got hired to per- form at Edmonton's Yardbird Suite coffee house, which, along with the Depression and Vancouver's Bunkhouse, was a major stop on the folk circuit in Western Canada.

With a guitar now in hand, Joni Anderson pur- chased a one-way train ticket from Calgary to Toronto and set out to attend Mariposa in July '64. She'd quit art college and, whether she knew it yet or not, was a couple of months pregnant-the result of a love affair with fellow art student Brad MacMath. Somewhere between the Prairies and the Lakehead, she penned her first song, "Day by Day," a bluesy piece written to the rhythm of the train wheels that she later described as a "feeling-sorry-for-myself song.

Joni arrived in Toronto and took a bus up to Orillia, only to find that Mariposa was in trouble. The previous year's festival had attracted such an unexpected flood of people that the town of Orillia had been overwhelmed. Although it was hardly a disaster of Woodstock proportions, there had been complaints of traffic jams, inadequate facilities and well-publicized acts of drunker debauchery. The local police chief had claimed that the festival had given Orillia "the worst forty-eight hours in its history." So even though Mariposa had been granted permission to use nearby farm land for the '64 festival, a nervous town council blocked the move at the last minute-and the courts upheld the decision just one day before the festival was scheduled to open.

When Anderson and other early birds showed up, organizers were in complete chaos, faced with the monumental task of packing up and moving several tons of equipment and supplies back to Toronto, where the Maple Leaf baseball stadium had been lined up as a last-minute venue. According to the festival's Martin Onrot, Joni helped to load trucks along with other volunteers. Then, at the stadium by Lake Ontario, she and others braved the rain and cold tern- peratures to watch performances by blues legends Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Mississippi John Hurt and others. In particular, Anderson studied the distinctive vibrato style of Sainte-Marie, who enjoyed no fewer than four standing ovations.

After the festival, the new girl in town had to find a place to crash. She discovered a rooming house in the Annex neighbourhood of the city and, to make ends meet, landed herself a sales job in ladies' wear at the Simpson's department store. Although Anderson must have figured it out by then, her pregnancv was still not evident. Eventually, her weekly wage would enable her to pay the dues required to join the musicians union. In the meantime, she settled for playing several non union coffee houses in Yorkville. The first to hire her was the Penny Farthing, which featured novice folk singers in its basement.

That same month, February '65, Joni Anderson gave birth to a daughter A month earlier, she had moved out of the Annex rooming house and into an apartment above the nearby Lickin' Chicken restau- rant with Vicky Taylor, another folk singer. Taylor remembers that Joni brought the baby girl home for a couple of weeks. But when she realized she could neither support the child financially nor get on with her singing career, she made the wrenching decision to place her daughter with foster parents. "That really tore her apart," recalls Taylor. "She knew that she couldn't be a single mum and do anything with her music. It was a really hard decision for her to make."

The decision haunted Joni for many years. She left clues about the baby, whom she had named Kelly, in some of her songs, including "Little Green" from her Blue album. The lyrics, in part, go: "Call her green for the children that have made her... / Child with a child pretending... / You're sad and you're sorry, but you're not ashamed / Little green, have a happy ending." In a fairy-tale ending worthy of a Disney movie, Mitchell and her daughter, whose adoptive name is Kilauren Gibb, met each other again in March 1997 in an extraordinary, media-hyped reunion.

Above the Lickin' Chicken, Joni began writing songs in earnest. Taylor remembers her getting up in the mid- dle of the night and working, some- times until dawn. "One morning," says Taylor, "she told me that she'd woken up with a tune going around in her head and couldn't go back to sleep until she worked it all out." That song turned out to be "Here Today and Gone Tomorrow," one of several that she later described as "lost-love pieces for a wan- dering Australian who really did me in.

By the spring of '65, Joni Anderson was back strug- gling to find work as a folk singer. She landed gigs at the Half Beat and the New Gate of Cleve where Mariposa's Estelle Klein saw her for the first time. "She wasn't doing all her own material," recalled Klein, "but she was a nice singer and had a very charming manner." Fiedler was not so quickly impressed, offering the folk singer a job in the kitchen when she first inquired about work at the Riverboat. She turned it down. (Fiedler has always denied this story, but she insists it's true.)

Fiedler says he does remember saying to her, "So, Miss Anderson, I see you're going for the Baez sound," a comment that surely must have rankled her. Truth was, the more she wrote her own material, the less derivative she sounded. "Once I began to write," she admitted, "my vocal style changed. My Joan Baez I Judy Collins in- fluence disappeared. Almost immediately, when I had my own words to sing, my own voice appeared."

You might say Joni Anderson was on the rebound from losing her daughter or maybe it was the wandering Australian. But when the older and wiser Chuck Mitchell blew into town that June, she was clearly vulner- able. He was the "star" folk singer from Detroit performing upstairs at the Penny Farthing, while she was the local girl on the basement stage. When he turned on the charm, the impressionable Joni found him hard to resist. "I was at an indecisive time in my life," she later admitted, "and he was a strong force. He decided he was gonna marry me. So he dragged me across the border; got me some work and we were quickly married."

Quickly is right. Vicky Taylor remembers the courtship as lasting all of thirty-six hours. The two were married in Mitchell's parents' backyard in Rochester; Michigan. "I was totally shocked," says Taylor; "but I figured Joni knew what she was doing." She and Chuck moved into a cheap fifth-floor apartment on Detroit's Wayne University campus and Joni moved into her husband's world. Chuck was well known on the coffee-house circuit, and soon their apartment became a crash pad for visiting folkies, from Gordon Lighifoot and Buffy Sainte-Marie to Tom Rush and Eric Andersen. Andersen taught Joni some unusual open tunings on the gui- tar; which she quickly used to write new songs.

Chuck and Joni began touring together, playing Detroit's Chessmate coffee house and New York's Gaslight Cafe'. Recalled Joni, "I wasn't very good, and I had a lot of trouble with the audience booing and hiss- ing and saying, 'Take your clothes off, sweetheart.' Things like that really shook me up because I didn't know how to counter or act. I thought I'd bombed." Larry Leblanc, writing in Rolling Stone in 1971, described the Chuck & Joni show as a vari- ety act, with him performing very theatrical, "Brechtian" shtick and Joni doing her own folky thing. When they did team up on duets, the songs they sang were often Lightfoot's.

During the spring of '65, while Chuck and Joni were touring the 4D circuit, Joni started adding some of her own material into her sets, including "Both Sides Now," a song she'd written about growing up. One night, after playing at Winnipeg's 4D, a tall kid with a Beatle haircut shuffled up, introduced himself as Neil Young and told her he'd written his own com- ing-of-age song. Later, as the cafe was closing, Neil played Joni the bitter-sweet "Sugar Mountain" which he'd written on his nineteenth birthday. Moved by its tale of a boy too old for the fairground, Joni wrote a response-"The Circle Game." In her song, which cleverly echoes the carnival imagery of "Sugar Moun- tain," she assures the boy that "there'll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty."

In August 1965 Joni took her new material to Mariposa, held for the first time at Innis Lake north-west of Toronto. On a weekend hit by heavy thunderstorms, she made her last appearance as Joni Anderson, sharing the stage with Ian & Sylvia, Phil Ochs, bluesman Son House and The Dirty Shames. (During a power failure one night, Ochs had to sing through a megaphone while illuminated by car headlights.) Joni went over well, both in concert and at a songwriters' workshop. But she insisted on singing only her own songs, which, at that point, were precious few apart from "Both Sides Now" and "The Circle Game." Some people complained, Estelle Klein recalled. "They said, 'She's really nice, but she's singing the same thing over and over again.' So when I invited her back for the next year, I said, 'Joni, I really like what you do, but could you expand your repertoire a little?"'

In the car ride back to Toronto from Mariposa in August 1965, Joni wrote a new lyric, "It's like running for a train that left the station hours ago / I've got the urge for going." Although she has explained that the song was written about the changing folk scene and the need for moving on, it also reflected what was happening in her relationship with Chuck.

"It was not a marriage made in heaven," she admitted. "He was relatively well-educated and in contempt of my lack of education. I was developing as an original, unschooled thinker [with] the gift of the blarney [and] the gift of metaphor. But he ridiculed me in the same way that Pierre Trudeau ridiculed his wife Margaret when she wrote her book. [Trudeau] said, 'My wife is the only writer I know who's written more books than she's read.' So there was this edu- cated pride versus the uneducated and the marriage didn't last very long." Still, Chuck did give Joni some- thing other than a married name. He advised her to protect her songwriting by forming her own publish- ing company, something she still gives him credit for.

Her marriage on the rocks, Mitchell ran into more chauvinism in October when she appeared on CTV's "Let's Sing Out" program with U.S. folk singers Dave Van Ronk and Patrick Sky. Mitchell felt inferior alongside these experienced performers and was look- ing to them for encouragement. But as she recalled, she didn't get it. "Van Ronk was saying things like 'Joni, you've got groovy taste in clothes, why don't you become a fashion model?"' she said, "and Sky was say- ing 'It sucks."' But, she added, "David did like 'Urge for Going' and he asked me for it, I remember. I won- dered what ulterior motive he had in mind after saying all those dreadful things to me. I thought, 'He must just want to laugh at it or something.' I was that inse- cure about my writing."

Despite that insecurity-or maybe because of it- Mitchell threw herself into songwriting with a vengeance. At the same time, other artists began recording her songs. First "Urge for Going got a country treatment by George Hamilton IV followed by versions by Tom Rush, Judy Collins and Van Ronk. Then Ian & Sylvia and Buffy Sainte-Marie covered "The Circle Game." Suddenly, Joni Mitchell's name was known on the U.S. coffee-house circuit, and her songs were earning her a tidy income to boot.

Joni Mitchell faced a much more receptive crowd at Mariposa that summer(1966). In fact, Mitchell returned to the festival as one of its most popular attractions, joining a line-up that included Lightfoot, Doc Watson and The New Lost City Ramblers.

Dressed in paisley and accompanied by guitarist David Rea, Mitchell captivated audiences at both her evening and afternoon performances. This time, she brought a suitcase full of new songs, including "Both Sides Now" and "Night in the City" which she told her audience was inspired by Yorkville. "Music comes spilling out into the street," she sang, "colours go flashing in time."

Mitchell's appearance was a resounding triumph. "This girl has everything," enthused Ruth Jones (the Mariposa founder) in Hoot, the Canadian folk magazine, "looks, charm, personality, an inventive mind, excellent guitar and above all, a voice, which ranges from gutsy to sublime. My guess is that she will be a name to reckon with-and soon." Only two years earlier, Mitchell had come to Mariposa to hear her heroine Bufly Sainte-Marie. Now, she was one of the festival's major stars.

In November '66, Joni Mitchell made her debut at Bernie Fiedler's Riverboat-on the stage, not in the kitchen. It was a triumphant performance, estab- lishing Mitchell as an artist in her own right and a songwriter whose material possessed a distinct Canadian quality. Songs like "Urge for Going," "Winter Lady" and "Come to the Sunshine" that she performed that week were rich in imagery. Each painted a vivid portrait of the changing seasons and owed much to her origins on the Saskatchewan Prairies. Like Tyson and Lightfoot before her, Mitchell was writing songs with a unique sense of place.

Her Riverboat performance was a turning point. Afterwards, Mitchell left her husband and moved to New York where, she hoped, bigger things lay in store. Settling in Manhattan's Chelsea district, she turned her one-bedroom apartment into what she called her "magic princess" retreat, with bedroom walls covered in tinfoil and door frames lined with crepe paper. There she began writing as many as four songs a week, including the buoyant "Chelsea Morning" (for which U.S. president Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, later named their daughter). "I Had a King" detailed her marriage break-up with its lines about the man who "carried me off to his country for mar- riage too soon." With $400 in the bank, she told Rolling Stone, she thought she was "filthy rich."

But Mitchell was about to become much richer, very quickly. While performing for $15 a night at New York's Cafe Au Go-Go, then the hottest club in the city, her new friend Bufly Sainte-Marie brought along her manager Elliott Roberts to see her. Although Roberts remembers Mitchell as "a jumble of creative clutter with a guitar case full of napkins, road maps and scraps of paper-all covered with lyrics," he was aston- ished at her talent-so much so that he promptly quit managing Buffy to handle Joni exclusively.

Yet Cohen, who would not record his debut album Songs of Leonard Cohen until later that year, stole the show at Newport from Joan Baez and Pete Seeger with his poetic ballads of romantic despair.

Meanwhile, backstage, there was an instant attrac- tion between Cohen and Mitchell. Their love affair lasted for part of the summer as their paths criss- crossed on the festival circuit. Ultimately Mitchell would write two songs about their brief affair-"The Gallery" and "That Song About the Midway"-both of which would appear on Mitchell's Clouds album. On "Midway," Mitchell wrote of Cohen, "You stood out like a ruby in a black man's ear." She would later refer to Cohen, along with Dylan, as her only real "pace- runners" when it came to songwriting.

Mariposa was something of a love-in itself that summer. Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen continued their not-so-secret affair there at Innis Lake north of Toronto. With Mitchell, Cohen, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Murray McLauchlan (making his Mariposa debut), there was a heavy emphasis on Canadian singer-songwriters, now becoming a strong national tradition.

After the summer of '67, Joni Mitchell left behind her "magic princess" castle in Chelsea to become a lady of California's Laurel Canyon. Immediately, she began work on her first album, with singer David Crosby producing. Crosby remembers "a willowy blonde with blue eyes and high cheekbones, singing art songs in a bell-like soprano with a Canadian accent and accompanying herself on acoustic guitar and dulcimer. ..not anyone's idea of the next big thing."

But Joni surprised everyone. The self-titlded album was a quiet, sparsely produced chronicle of the past year of her life. Side one was titled "I Came to the City" (meaning New York), while side two, featuring songs like "The Dawntreader" about life on Crosby's boat, was called "Out of the City and down to the Seaside" (presumably the Pacific Ocean). The album established Mitchell as an artist in her own right. In December she performed at the Miami Pop Festival before 100,000 people, on a bill with Marvin Gaye, Fleetwood Mac, Canned Heat and Three Dog Night. The same month, Judy Collins's version of Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" became a major hit.

Nor did Joni Mitchell perform at the Woodstock weekend. Mitchell, who'd released her second album, Clouds, featuring songs that others had already made famous, was scheduled to appear on Dick Cavett's popular talk show in Manhattan and her manager didn't think she'd have time to get back for the show's Monday taping. Mitchell did, however, capture the event in her song "Woodstock," which became a number-one hit for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

With 1971's Blue, Mitchell created her master- piece. Deeply haunting, the album defined a whole new genre of music-confessional songwriting. Mitchell had dramatized her relationships, writing about Graham Nash in "Willy" and James Taylor whom she had met at Mariposa '70 in "Blue." Her love affairs became a source of constant fascination for her fans, who hunted for evidence of them in her lyrics like sleuths on the trail of some tabloid-style scandal. The tawdry speculation about her romantic relationships with famous musicians hit rock bottom in 1971 when Rolling Stone voted her "Old Lady of the Year" and "Queen of El Lay." It would be a decade before Mitch- ell would speak to the magazine again.