Meanwhile, Joni continued her Canadian tour and struck up a platonic friendship with Jimi Hendrix, for whom she opened at a subsequent engagement in Ottawa. Like many women coming upon Jimi in private, Joni found him to be the startling opposite of his reputation. He was “sensitive, shy, sweet,” she’d recall—and obsessed with getting away from what she called the “phallic” aspects of his performance. (Writing in his diary, Jimi called Joni a “fantastic girl with heaven words.”) After the evening’s show, Joni, Jimi, and his drummer, Mitch Mitchell, stayed up late, talking and playing in one of their rooms. It was all “so innocent, but the management—all they saw was three hippies,” she later railed, angrily. “A black hippie! Two men and a woman in the same room!”
After her tour, in the spring of 1968, Joni bought a house in the Canyon, a romantic aerie with wide plank floors, broad-paned leaded windows, and wood-beamed ceilings at 8217 Lookout Mountain. It was close by Carole’s house, but the two women did not know one another. The house was built in the 1920s, right into the side of the mountain, “so when the trees spread out,” Joni has said, “the branches were right at the window; birds flew in and nested.” Joni filled the house with antiques, quilts, and flowers, and she set her guitars on her Priestly piano. A Tiffany lamp and the stained-glass window panels caught the Canyon sunlight, which of course poured in like butterscotch.
In July, Graham moved to L.A. and moved in with Joni. “We were both pretty terrified of a deep relationship,” Graham says, but they slipped into one anyway. “I’d been divorced—both of us had—and I knew she was a little skittish about [commitment].” Joni’s family history was not far from her mind. “She didn’t want to be like her grandmothers,” Graham says. “They had given up artistic careers to take care of husbands.” That lesson was “always an unspoken thing between Joan and me.”
One night, shortly after Graham moved in, David and Stephen came over to Joni’s. The ex-Byrd and the Springfield member had been spending days writing and singing together. For all his rock-bad-boy panache, David was a folkie at heart; he’d originally had trouble playing his guitar while standing rock-style, rather than sitting, and his bottom tenor was luminous. As for Stills, it was his scratchy, bluesy voice that had made the Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” a radical political battle cry.
Stephen had penned a song, “You Don’t Have to Cry,” for Judy Collins, whose high-powered career was pulling his macho nose out of joint. “In the morning, when you rise,” the song asked. “Are you thinkin’ of telephones / And managers and where you got to be at noon?” (Stills’s “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” would be his swan song to her.) Both Crosby and Stills had heard kudos for Nash’s high harmony from everyone from Cass Elliot to the Lovin’ Spoonful’s John Sebastian, but they’d never tried to sing with him. Sitting around Joni’s living room, getting high, Stills and Crosby sang the first bar of the new song: Crosby the tenor, Stills the alto. Nash asked, “Would you sing that again?” Stills and Crosby repeated the bar. Nash listened intently and again asked them to sing the line. When they did, he queried a third time. This time when they reprised the bar, Graham chimed in, producing a straining, poignant, slightly sour top note that lifted the song to an ecstatic new dimension. “All four of us—the three of us fellows and Joan—knew! It was a truly amazing moment,” Graham recalls.
Crosby, Stills and Nash would become a phenomenon—three stars of three different groups, each contributing beautiful songs (Stills’s two for Judy Collins; David’s rich-hippie dreamscape “Wooden Ships” and his elegy for Bobby Kennedy’s murder, “Long Time Gone”; Graham’s “Marrakesh Express” and his ode to his domesticity with Joni, “Our House”) to their eponymous album, sung in their piercing harmony. But it would be a song of Joni’s—one of her finest and most sociopolitical—that would fully introduce Crosby, Stills and Nash to the nation and would give them their signature hit: a hymn to the capstone cultural event of their generation’s decade. That would come a year later.
Graham adored Joni, and he made no secret of his awe of her. “There was always this edge of me looking at Joan and thanking my lucky stars,” Graham admits today. “I felt a little like, ‘What the fuck am I doing here, with this woman? This woman loves me? This is insane!’ I looked at Joan as a goddess, and she was.” He called her Joan (her subsequent boyfriends would, as well); she called him Willy, the diminutive of his middle name. Did Joni recognize her power over men? “I don’t think you can have that power and not recognize it. Did she utilize it or abuse it? Absolutely not. But you can’t be that beautiful and talented and not know that guys are falling for you, right, left, and center.”
Joni and Graham would race each other to the piano after morning breakfasts at Art’s Deli in Studio City. “It was an intense time,” Graham has said. “Who’s going to fill up the space with their music first? We [were] two very creative writers living in the same space, and it was an interesting clash: ‘I want to get as close to you as possible.’ ‘Let me alone to create!’” Those songs of Joni’s that are clearly or presumably about life with Graham reflect that push-pull of intimacy, in lyric styles ranging from biblical reverence (“He would read to her / Roll her in his arms / And give his seed to her,” in the achingly lovely “Blue Boy”), to Nashville-worthy wit (“But when he’s gone, me and them lonesome blues collide / The bed’s too big, the frying pan’s too wide,” in “My Old Man”).
“We’d make love, often, in her tree house,” Graham volunteers. “We’d do crazy stuff. Once, we went to New York, and we saw these kids who had opened a fire hydrant. We got out of the limousine and into the spray of the hydrant, and then we got back into the limousine, completely soaked.” During this or another trip to the city, they ran into Gene Shay, the Philadelphia deejay, at a drugstore in Sheridan Square, and Shay was touched by how Graham “gallantly” kept guard in the aisle so that no one would see Joni purchasing sanitary napkins. Graham’s decorousness is reflected in the opening line of his “Our House”—“I’ll light the fire, you place the flowers in the vase that you bought today.” Respectively Canadian and English, both from Queen-loyal, tea-sipping, lower-middle-class Protestant homes, they were to each other known quantities within a swirling rock-world ethnic melting pot. For Joni, Graham was a natural mate and a resting point. His talent was overmatched by hers, but he knew it and his humility made him charming. He saw her turmoil: “She was vulnerable, lonely inside, and angry, even though she was surrounded by people who loved her,” he says—and it echoed his own vulnerability. “I had never been so much in love. I had never been so unsure of myself. I had never been so fragile.” Yet, “people would say we would light up a room when we walked in,” he says today. Perhaps it was the fragility shining through their confidence and glamour that made them evanescent.
Joni did not tell Graham about her baby right away. “When you’re wooing a new lover, you don’t say, ‘By the way, I’ve got this kid I gave up for adoption.’” But when she did broach the subject, she spoke of the pain of the “shame and guilt and wanting a life” and of the “rejection” she knew she would have faced from her parents had they known about the birth. She recalled her ordeal, describing it all with still-fresh emotion and blaming Chuck—a version of events she had now settled into. Graham felt the surrender of the baby “was devastating for her. It had a tremendous effect on her emotional growth.”
Joni began to spot her daughter at music festivals. “At concerts, she would see a little girl’s face, and she would wonder,” says a friend from those years, Ronee Blakley.
The first Kelly sighting was at the Big Sur Folk Festival that summer.* “We thought we saw her daughter,” says Graham, for he, too, having absorbed her emotions, believed it. “There was a sound check before a communal early dinner. We lined up to get our food. And I remember this young—eight- or nine-year-old—blond girl in line, waiting to go to dinner. The little girl said, ‘Who are you?’ Joni said, ‘I’m Joni Mitchell.’ And the little girl said, ‘No, you
’re not; I’m Joni Mitchell.’ And then Joan looked at me—it was one of those strange, Twilight Zone things—and then the little girl disappeared.” Of course, in 1968 Joni’s daughter would have been three, not eight or nine. But the incident reveals how fixated Joni was on the loss. Graham believes: “Joni’s daughter has haunted Joan since the moment she gave her up.”
Shortly after Big Sur, Joni flew 3,000 miles northeast and attended the Mariposa Festival. There, she had another encounter with a little girl, closer to Kelly Dale’s real age and closer to her likely home now. As Joni later recalled, she and the other performers were corralled behind a fence, but a festival representative came to fetch her—there were some people who wanted to have a word with her. Approaching the fence, Joni saw a young couple. The man had a little boy on his shoulders; there was a little girl (whom Joni judged to be about three) beside them—“a small, curly-haired blond girl—my child had thick, thick curly hair,” Joni noted (apparently referring to her memory of the several-months-old Kelly Dale in the foster home). The child’s fingers clutched the fence’s chain links. “I looked at [the family]. Nobody spoke. Nobody spoke until the child spoke. And she said to me, ‘Hello, Kelly.’ And I said, ‘My name’s not Kelly. My name’s Joni.’ And she said, ‘Nooo…no, you’re Kelly.’” The mother warmly intervened, explaining that the little girl’s name was Kelly. But the child herself continued insisting that Joni was named Kelly. Joni believed the child was trying to tell her: I am your Kelly—your Kelly Dale—and you are my mother.
Joni asked the parents: “Do you have anything to say?” They didn’t, and they walked off. Did the encounter really happen that way? Or did Joni part-imagine it? For twenty-five years Joni “always suspected” that that curly-headed girl at Mariposa was her daughter.
In fact, Joni’s daughter went nowhere near a folk or rock concert during those first three years of her life (although she did live near the Mariposa site, in a Toronto suburb called Don Mills, and she did have a brother). Her adoptive parents, schoolteachers David and Ida Gibb, were bookish, earnest, and introverted—the last people one would expect to find at a pop or even folk concert, says one who knows them. David had been born in Scotland and migrated to Canada with his parents as a boy; Ida was of Ukrainian descent and grew up in Winnipeg. The Gibbs’ biological son, David Jr., was four on the September 1965 day that Joni’s seven-month-old baby, Kelly Dale, was officially named Kilauren Gibb. (The similarity between the names “Kelly” and “Kilauren”—the latter, chosen to honor David Gibb’s Scottish heritage—is coincidental.) According to someone who grew up with Kilauren Gibb, shortly after the baby arrived, David Jr.’s parents took him aside and told him to never tell his little sister that she was adopted. Infant pictures of David Jr. were swept off the tables and walls so the lack of infant pictures of Kilauren wouldn’t seem odd. David Jr. was blond, like his adopted little sister; they looked enough alike to be natural siblings through early childhood. Still, by summer 1968, when Joni was experiencing these cryptic encounters with little girls, members of the Gibbs’ Donalda Country Club were beginning to wonder how the beautiful little spitfire could have been born of two cautious, not-very-attractive parents. Every passing year, a few more people in Don Mills would speculate if Kilauren Gibb was adopted. Her parents would always, adamantly, tell her: No! You are our natural-born daughter.
Joni began work on her second album, Clouds, in early 1969. A sound engineer with an interest in Buddhism, Henry Lewy, played producer on the effort, in the same “beard” role that David Crosby had, on her first album. Again, Joni was in control. This time she used guitar accompaniment only (on Joni Mitchell, she had also played piano). For album cover art, she painted a super-realistic portrait of her face: hair streaming over a black turtleneck, she is holding up a bright red, too widely open flower, pointing it at the viewer, at whom she is staring. The exaggerated tips on the petals match the exaggerated tips on her tightly closed lips. The message is one of great self-exposure and great rectitude, all wrapped up in feminine symbols. Behind Joni was the Saskatchewan River—yellow clouds broodingly descending into the dark water—with the medieval turrets of the Bessborough Hotel on the far shore. She dedicated the album to her grandmother Sadie McKee, whose legacy of frustrated creativity she was expressing. The confrontational self-possession was almost groundbreaking, “almost” because, by now, Laura Nyro had raised the bar for female confessional songwriting, a genre she had virtually invented. (Joni would meet Laura in a few months, by way of their mutual manager, David Geffen. They would admire each other’s music.)
But Laura Nyro’s songs were now almost hysterically vulnerable and esoteric. Her Eli and the Thirteenth Confession and imminent New York Tendaberry were tender, frantic operas, full of leaps and hints and dream shards. A listener either got Laura’s plotline of a female naïf baptized by the sanctifying rough-play of soulful life, or was so overwhelmed by the passion that she took it on faith. Joni’s songs were more conventionally melodic and satisfyingly narrative.
Two of Joni’s songs on Clouds were for Leonard Cohen—“That Song About the Midway” and “The Gallery.” There was also “Tin Angel,” in which a woman is surrounded by the accessories one would imagine in the antique-bed boudoir that she had described at the Second Fret: measuring her soothing mementos against the insecure love of a “sorrow”-eyed man. She added her most iconic songs—“Chelsea Morning” and as last track “Both Sides, Now,” which she’d finally stopped hiding behind—Judy Collins’s lusher, accessible covers of which declared that Joni was, first of all, a writer. Her mournful “Songs for Aging Children” would soon be included in the Arthur Penn–directed antiwar film version of Arlo Guthrie’s song Alice’s Restaurant. “I Don’t Know Where I Stand” gave listeners the cactus tree, despiked and humbled, feeling her way through an infatuation so fresh that “even the sound of your voice is still new,” with all its self-consciousness and bet hedging. “I Think I Understand”—full of Child Ballad hoariness—paid homage, like “Urge for Going” had, to the form her own songs had supplanted.
A Carnegie Hall concert on February 1, 1969, announced Joni as a celebrity. Her parents flew down from Saskatoon and stayed at the Plaza. Backstage, Joni stood with Graham (who looked suitably rock-star foppish) in her thrift-store felt skirt with sequins in the front and giant artichoke and American flag appliqués. Myrtle, aghast, said: “You’re not going onstage at Carnegie Hall wearing that, are you?” Bill Anderson placated his wife. “Oh, hush, Myrtle, she looks like a queen in those rags,” he said, as their daughter took the stage for the performance that would earn her a standing ovation.
At her next concert, in Cambridge a month later, a lanky, handsome unknown with deep-set eyes, long brown hair, and a thin mustache opened for her. He played a song he’d written, “Something in the Way She Moves,” and when he got to the words “my troubled mind,” his nasal-voiced melancholy hinted at a real troubled mind, though his well-bred manner belied all his brooding and slumping. His name was James Taylor, and he was back in America, after making his first Apple album, dividing his time between his family’s Martha’s Vineyard home and L.A., where he would soon start recording his second album, Sweet Baby James. He was hanging out with Kootch’s crowd. James came back to Joni’s dressing room and said hello. But she was involved with Graham Nash, and he with Margaret Corey.
Meanwhile, the fan base Joni had first found in her post–Chuck and Joni concerts was gathering number. Clouds would better Joni Mitchell’s Billboard standing by half (it charted at #93). Joni’s face—framed by her waxy blond hair; sporting a wary, sideways expression, her long, manicure-nailed hands forming a little teepee in front of her lips—filled a Rolling Stone cover in May, accompanying an article that began: “Folk music, which pushed rock and roll into the arena of the serious with protest lyrics and blendings of Dylan and the Byrds back in 1964, has reentered the pop music cycle.” The review ended with, “Joni Mitchell has arrived in America.”
Signif
icantly, the article mentioned that Joni “shares a newly purchased house with Graham Nash.” This, of course, was Rolling Stone—not a “straight” magazine like Life. Still, in mid-1969, a tossed-off reference to “living together” announced an avant-garde state. Choosing to cohabit out of wedlock with such thoughtful, romantic gentility as Joni and Graham were applying to their lives (the article took note of Joni’s “antique pieces crowd[ing] tables, mantels, and shelves,…[her] antique handbags…on a bathroom wall, a hand-carved hat rack at the door…castle-style doors…a grandfather clock,” and mentioned that during the interview, Nash was “perched on an English church chair” while Joni was “in the kitchen, using the only electric lights on in the house…making the crust for a rhubarb pie”) elevated the seedy state of cohabitation to elegance and proved you could get the piety of the wedding-in-the-woods without the wedding. Increasingly, young middle-class-turned-hip women were choosing to “live with” their boyfriends, not marry them. You had to have a name for your living-withee, so, to cut against the elite sweetness of the lifestyle, gruff working-class terminology was appropriated: “my old man,” “my old lady.” Joni wrote “My Old Man” to legitimize this phenomenon and to locate herself and Graham within it; Graham’s “Our House” seconded the motion.
Being someone’s old lady was a proud sign of emotional security (a young woman didn’t need marriage to feel that she was not being taken advantage of by her boyfriend), and it was the expression of a new—negative—way of viewing the institution of marriage. It wasn’t just the guy who liked things fine the way they were, who (as the crass saying went) wouldn’t buy the cow now that he’d started getting the milk for free, while the girlfriend longed, and lobbied, for commitment. Rather, it was the girl who now disparaged marriage in her own right, out of idealism and anti-authoritarianism. Joni presented the argument, in folky dialect: “We don’t need no piece of paper from the city hall, keeping us tied and true.” (“And we did feel that way,” Graham says. “We didn’t need to get married to feel that way.”) Living with a man without a wedding license had always been considered low-class (“common-law” marriages were for common people), desperate, or morally shady—or all three. Now, the choice to live in a situation that included sex but not a wedding license was a mark of enlightenment for a young woman.
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