Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  Crosby, Stills and Nash had cut their album, and the atmosphere in the studio had been giddy. “It was scary; once we knew what we had, you could not pry us apart with a crowbar; we knew we’d lucked into something so special, man,” Crosby has said, of their aural combination. And Joni said, “The feeling between them was very high, almost amorous. There was a tremendous amount of affection and enthusiasm…. Part of the thrill for me being around them was seeing how they were exciting themselves mutually. They’d hit a chord and go, ‘Whoooaa!,’ then fall together, laughing.”

  “Joni was one of the boys,” Graham says. “She would have picked up a basketball and shot hoops. It wasn’t that we were in a club that she needed inviting to. It all came naturally.” She accompanied them to rustic Big Bear to shoot the inside photographs of Crosby, Stills and Nash. In pictures from the day, she’s in the back of the limo between dapper, mustachioed David and handsome, scruffy Graham: demure in a cap-sleeved sweater, a cross dangling on a chain around her neck; straight hair streaming, topped by a knit cap. She kisses a delighted-looking Graham’s hand as she pens a lyric for a song about him, “Willy,” on a notepad: “Willy is my child, he is my father / I would be his lady all my life.”

  In mid-August, Joni and Crosby, Stills and Nash (now with Neil Young, with whom they would record their next album, Déjà Vu) flew to New York to appear at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, and for her booking on the prestigious Dick Cavett Show the night after the festival. By now she had opened for her boys at several packed concerts, and the huge fan reaction had proved that three (now four) male rock stars were exponentially more charismatic than one female folksinger.

  Woodstock, “Three Days of Peace and Music,” was a festival planned for August 15, 16, and 17 in Bethel, New York, at $18 to $24 for the entire three days. Two promoters in their early twenties, Artie Kornfeld and Michael Lang, backed by a twenty-six-year-old financier named John Roberts, wanted it to be the biggest rock festival ever. They had duly emptied their pockets, doubling Jefferson Airplane’s going $6,000 fee to $12,000, and paying Jimi Hendrix, now the biggest rock star in the country, $32,000 (his manager had asked for $150,000 but settled on the smaller figure on the condition that no act follow Jimi). Woodstock would feature the most glamorous, top acts: Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, and Richie Havens (who would open the show); Jimi Hendrix, who would close it, providing, from the depths of a soul torn between erotic showmanship and an embrace of aboriginal New Music, the most dramatic “Star-Spangled Banner” in recent history; the Grateful Dead, the Who, Joan Baez, Country Joe and the Fish, Tim Hardin, The Band (becoming the group, by way of their quirky Canadian-cum-Deep-South roots, fresh-from-the-Civil War sound, and adoption by Bob Dylan), Ravi Shankar, Blood, Sweat and Tears (which included Joni’s Blues Project friend Steve Katz and had been founded by Al Kooper, who was no longer in the group), and tomorrow’s stars: Sly and the Family Stone, Santana, and Creedence Clearwater Revival.

  Throughout Kornfeld and Lang’s negotiations with the town of Wallkill, New York, they continued to insist that a crowd of, at most, 50,000 would be attending. But, given the aggressive promotion the festival was receiving in Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, The New York Times, and on the radio, the townspeople doubted the numbers would stay that low. A month before the festival, the town of Wallkill abruptly rescinded its offer.

  The promoters looked for a savior, and they found one in Max Yasgur, the biggest dairy farmer in the valley and the holder of an NYU law degree. Yasgur offered his 600-acre farm for $75,000, even though, with the crowd count now whispered to be an astonishing 200,000, extensive trampling seemed likely. The promoters enlisted the Hog Farm, the country’s most famous commune, led by ex-Cambridge folkie Hugh Romney (an old friend of Joan Baez and Betsy Siggins), who now called himself Wavy Gravy, to bestow back-to-the-land authenticity and to provide infrastructure: security, food stands, shelter, a “free school” for kids. Wavy Gravy called his cross-country counterpart, Ken Kesey, at his commune in Oregon, and dozens of overalls-clad, acid-tab-bearing Merry Pranksters were promptly dispatched east in psychedelic school buses.

  The divide between young/hip and old/straight had been around since 1966’s Human Be-In in Haight-Ashbury, and it had been celebrated with every smoked joint, every dunking of a knotted cotton T-shirt into a tub of Rit dye, every raised two-finger peace sign. It had taken three years for the lifestyle’s tentacles to stretch to the vast domain of American middle-class youth, and now that it had, a haj to a mecca seemed in order. Where Monterey Pop had been the hip elite—a jazz concert’s savvy crowd of fans close to the age, taste, and coolness level of the performers—Woodstock would be hip democracy: wildly enthusiastic college kids, working-and middle-class hippies, and drug-brined riffraff. Where Monterey Pop had been a bellwether boutique, Woodstock would be Wal-Mart. As Arnold Skolnick, the artist who designed the festival’s catbird-on-guitar logo, put it, “Something was tapped—a nerve—in this country. And everybody just came.”

  As Joni, Graham, David, Stephen, and Neil were preparing to fly to New York, the Bethel town elders and Yasgur’s neighbors were angrily hectoring Yasgur to give back the money and keep the hippies from over-running their orderly town. But Yasgur held firm to his agreement, even as reports shot through the news that 800,000 people—sixteen times the original maximum estimate—were on their way there.

  Joni wanted to perform, but Elliot and David Geffen were fearful for her safety. Besides, even if she got to the festival safely, would she get back in time for the Cavett show, the next night?* The festival had already started; the round-the-clock performances were a half day or more behind schedule; traffic was blocked for twenty miles; many festival-goers had left their cars on the highway or sides of the streets and, truly like pilgrims now, were walking. The stars were being airdropped in by army helicopter.

  The boys hired a small plane to fly them into the festival; Joni went to Geffen’s apartment and, from the point of view of “the girl who couldn’t go to the party,” watched it on TV. “The deprivation of not being able to go,” she has said, “provided me with an intense angle on Woodstock.” That longing showed up in the song she wrote.

  Ultimately, some 450,000 exuberant souls came to the festival, to withstand the rain and mud and the inadequacy of facilities (there were only 620 portable toilets) with joyful brio. Street signs sprouted up: Groovy Path, Gentle Way, High Way. People made love and shared food, tents, acid, dope, Band-Aids, water, blankets. A couple of babies were born. Three people died, and four hundred bad acid trips required medical attention, but no violence broke out. Swami Satchidananda wafted in and gave the crowd his blessing. Max Yasgur (suddenly the biggest rock star of all) intoned to the mic, “This is the largest group of people ever assembled in one place, and I think you people have proven something to the world: that a half a million kids can get together and have three days of fun and music and have nothing but fun and music, and God bless you for it!” Joni, who had been feeling religious of late, felt that what she was watching on TV was “a modern miracle, a modern loaves-and-fishes story. For a herd of people that large to cooperate so well, it was pretty remarkable—there was tremendous optimism.” She also viewed the spectacle through the eyes of a girl from a long line of farmers; Yasgur (she would cite his name early in her song) had done all farming folk proud, including her grandparents.

  Joni wrote her song about the raucous weekend in counterintuitive minor mode; it had a primordial, Nordic winter-forest sound, with biblical echoes that started with the first line’s mention of the “child of God.” The mirage of “the bombers riding shotgun in the sky”—she conflated the peaceful helicopters soaring into the meadow with the military craft of the Vietnam War—“turning into butterflies across our nation” mirrored the naïve hope that had fueled the day. But it was the first line of the chorus—“We are stardust, we are golden”—set to those spectral, pessimistic chords—that made the song so hauntingly elegiac and conveyed the impression
of hundreds of thousands of people speaking as one. Years later, cultural critic Camille Paglia, in her book Break, Blow, Burn, would feistily place the lyrics to “Woodstock” along with works by Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson—and Shakespeare—on her list of the forty-three best poems produced in the English language.

  By the time the boys got back—talking of how they’d commandeered a pickup truck with Jimi Hendrix to get from the airfield to the festival tent and how they hadn’t performed until four in the morning—Joni had completed the song. She’d intuited the significance of Woodstock from her armchair. “[Joni] contributed more towards people’s understanding of that day than anybody that was there,” Crosby has said, of the song that, in rock version, he, Nash, Stills and, technically, Young (whose voice is not heard on the cut) would make into their defining hit.

  Days later, back in L.A., Joni opened for her boys at the Greek Theatre. If there had been doubt as to where she was now positioned in relation to this male group she’d helped ignite, it was banished by Los Angeles Times critic Robert Hilburn, who called Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s performance “a triumph of the first order” and said that Joni’s performance had been “overwhelmed” by theirs. She may have been beginning to wonder: What was the price of being someone’s old lady?

  On the one hand, being an old lady, or a “lady”—the kind of arty, sensual, esoterically spiritual chick for whom the coolest men had lust and awe—well, you couldn’t beat that. All over the country, young women were trying to shoehorn their personalities into that fashionable archetype: talkative girls got stoned and talked slower; unaesthetic girls took to wearing dangly jewelry; pragmatic girls started reading their horoscopes. Verbal, argumentative girls pretended to be anti-intellectual and serene. But many young women (especially, it seemed, in Laurel Canyon) didn’t have to try; they naturally personified this glamorous new femininity. For example, there was Annie Burden, the wife of architect-turned-album-designer Gary Burden (he’d designed Crosby, Stills and Nash), standing at the door of her house near San Vicente, proffering delicious organic treats with a baby on her hip. Then there was David’s pal Trina Robbins, the comic-book artist and designer who made clothes for Cass Elliot, and Donovan, and Jim Morrison’s girlfriend Pam Courson; Trina’s lace-trimmed velvet miniskirts had been all the rage in the Canyon two years before, and, with her long blond hair streaming over her wide-shouldered thrift-store skunk coat, she was a hippie version of a 1940s movie star. And let’s not forget Joni’s kid-sister-like Estrella—she of the blues riffs and the savvy with elephants, who was often “sailing ships and climbing banyans”: there was adventure in that circus girl’s bones!

  Joni turned the three into her “Ladies of the Canyon,”* according a verse to each. The antiquated-sounding term that Joni coined gave a just-right handle to the now-flourishing style that she had helped establish.

  On the other hand, medieval courtliness had its blowback: When you were someone’s old lady, a piece of you belonged to your old man—and he was always coming out ahead, because he was a man. David was madly in love with Christine Hinton again; he elegized her as “Guinnevere” (though one chorus of the song had been written for Joni), and they’d stroll the beaches hand in hand, both of them as long-haired and nude as Lady Godiva. Still, he dominated her. And while there was no dominating Joni, there was this annoying fact: she had written all her songs and had produced her two (soon, three) albums, yet the guys were the headliners. Before long, she would muse aloud to a confidant: was she an artist—or a Crosby, Stills and Nash groupie?

  As their live-in relationship went into its second year, Graham says, “Joni was very cognizant of the power of men on her life, and its trials and tribulations. Only in talking to communal friends, when we should have been talking to each other, did I find out that Joni thought I was going to demand of her what her grandmother’s husband demanded of her grandmother.” Almost plaintively Graham insists: “There was no way I was going to ask Joni Mitchell to stop writing and just be a wife!”

  However, looking back on that time, Joni has said, “Graham was a sweetheart” but he “needed a more traditional female. He loved me dearly…but he wanted a stay-at-home wife to raise his children.” (In support of Joni’s concerns back then, Debbie Green, with whom Joni has been close for decades, makes the point that after Joni, “Graham was never with another creative woman.”) But, in all this after-the-fact categorization, a question is lost: Did Joni sense that Graham wanted her to give up her writing, recording, and performing? Or did she perceive the comfortable domesticity with Graham, in and of itself, as a threat to the edge and the hunger she needed to do her best work? That is more likely. “Women of Joan’s generation raised the bar of how men should treat women and how women should treat themselves; they were the first to say, ‘I’m not wearin’ this bra!’ and ‘Go fetch your own tea!’” Graham concludes today, implying that their relationship may have been a casualty of that process.

  In the early stages of Joni’s grappling with this old lady vs. independent woman dilemma—in fact, at the peak of her boys’ fame, September 30, 1969, the day that Crosby, Stills and Nash went gold—tragedy struck their circle. Christine Hinton got behind the wheel of David’s VW bus to take her two cats to the veterinarian. As she manuevered onto the highway, one of the cats escaped the arms of her friend Barbara Langer, who was sitting in the passenger seat. The cat pounced on Christine, sending her into a collision with a school bus; Christine was killed. “David was completely crushed, and for days he could barely look at Barbara without seething. Christine’s parents were there, but they had to wait on David to see how she would be buried,” says a friend.

  “Want to go sailing?” David asked Graham. Christine had been cremated, and David wanted to toss her ashes into the ocean from the deck of the Mayan. “I had never been sailing in my life,” says Graham, “but I knew David was fragile and decided to stick close by him.” When David proposed flying to his boat in Fort Lauderdale and sailing to L.A., Graham stammered: “Hey, wait a second. Isn’t that on the other side of this…large country?” Indeed, it was; a nine-week sail—through the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, across the Panama Canal, and up the Pacific—was hatched. Joni boarded in Jamaica; she watched 1969 turn to 1970—everyone’s first new decade as an adult—on the deck of the schooner. It was on this voyage that Joni first talked to Graham about breaking up, a decision put on hold while they were on the high seas but wrestled with for weeks thereafter.

  Also aboard was Florida-based folksinger Bobby Ingram (who’d introduced David to Joni) and his wife—and a young unknown singer named Ronee Blakley. Ronee was a girl from Idaho who, on the strength of hearing Joan Baez’s “Barbara Allen,” had bolted for a creative life in northern California. Ronee attended Mills College, then Stanford, became a political activist, had a romance with the university’s radical student body president David Harris (who later married Ronee’s hero Baez and was currently in jail for draft resistance), moved to New York, and was now relocating to L.A. As the Mayan cut through the volatile ocean and David searched for the right place to toss Christine’s ashes, “Joan and I would ride on this little seat off the aft—it was like being on a roller coaster through a canyon of waves,” Ronee recalls. “The waves could be extraordinarily high; sometimes they would break on top of us, and we were all greased up with Bain de Soleil, so we’d slip and slide and have to hang on to the cables not to go overboard.”

  The trip was like the group’s song “Wooden Ships” come to life—hippie superstars huddled together, alone on the vast sea with their dreams and their body heat. A hired cook made what Ronee recalls as “grand feasts” as joints were passed, guitars were strummed, and the music that, many hundreds of miles away, was wallpapering U.S. FM radio tinkled, a cappella, over the inky swells beneath the starry heavens. “David was a great sailor, and Graham did the celestial navigation,” Ronee recalls. “The men took four-hour turns keeping watch all night, and they manned the s
ails; the women took care of the galley.” At one Caribbean dock the ship was impounded and searched stem to stern. But once it passed muster, peace was made, and David sang “Mr. Tambourine Man” to the island’s suspicious-constables-turned-excited-autograph seekers.

  Ronee got on David’s nerves. The sound of her typing her memoirs so irritated him, he tossed her typewriter overboard; then she lost her copy of Crime and Punishment and it was found in the bilge, blocking the pipes. But it was that very urgently expressed literary streak in Ronee that would form the basis of her friendship with Joni, which was consolidated after they docked in L.A. “Joni’s core was that of an artist, and I was trying to be an artist,” Ronee says. “I carried my weight in the friendship, but she was certainly way ahead of me. Whether we were meeting for dinner at Dan Tana’s or running down to Palm Springs, or calling each other on the phone to play our songs, she was an artist, a pure artist: searching and open-minded and sensitive and vulnerable and tough and disciplined. Anything she did or felt went into her work.”

  Ronee and Joni listened to Edith Piaf and Billie Holiday records together. They both found Nietzsche inspiring and would comb through Thus Spake Zarathustra for signifying phrases: Joni was struck by “Anything worth writing is worth writing in blood,” which had been her writing teacher Arthur Kratzmann’s motto, and she was jolted by the passage where Nietzsche was “scathing,” as she’d put it, toward poets—calling them vain—but then talked about “a new breed of poet, the penitent of the spirit,” which was what Joni wanted to be. Joni taught Ronee how to draw, and Ronee, knowing Joni admired Van Gogh, bought her Dear Theo, Van Gogh’s letters to his brother. Many of the lines the Dutch master had scribbled to his sibling had resonance for Joni. “Where there is convention there is mistrust”: that was the small-minded Canada she’d fled. “I want to go through the joys and sorrow of domestic life, in order to paint it from my own experience”: this validated her confessionalism. And “It sometimes happens that one becomes involuntarily depressed”: this was happening to her, and Graham was noticing it. Finally, “Parents and children must remain one”: she had violated this maxim.