Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  Ladies of the Canyon was released in March 1970 ( just as Clouds was winning the Grammy for Best Folk Performance), and it was shot through with idealism and idealization: idealized long-skirted ladies, the pitfalls of worshipful love, the chafing between idealistic women and “straight” moneyed men (whose offices bear their “name on the door on the thirty-third floor”), the inequity between a rock star’s wealth and a street musician’s poverty, the misguided destruction of “paradise” for the sake of money. Henry Lewy again engineered the spare album (with Joni actually in charge), which contained the title cut, and her two odes to Graham—“Willy” (but with the roles reversed: in the song, the woman is the needier partner) and the haunting “Blue Boy.” “Conversation” and “The Arrangement”—as literate as Sondheim, as so many of her songs seemed to be—both describe a sensitive girl’s affair with a prosperous man who has a superficial wife. “For Free” puts a halo on the shabby “one-man band by the quick lunch stand” while Joni guiltily notes her musical fame. Joni’s big hit from this album (only one of four Top 40 hits in her career), “Big Yellow Taxi,” was written during her and Graham’s trip to Hawaii. “They paved paradise, put up a parking lot” was Joni at her Tin Pan Alley best. “Woodstock,” her lovely “Rainy Night House” for Leonard, and her tuneful “Morning Morgantown”—quaint Canada Joni—round out the album. The last cut is “The Circle Game,” finally recorded in her own voice.

  But still she withheld “Little Green,” the song about her baby.

  With this album, Warner Bros. finally understood young women’s identification with Joni. They created a full-page Rolling Stone ad, in the form of a story—“Joni Mitchell’s New Album Will Mean More to Some Than to Others”—about a hypothetical young woman, one “Amy Foster, twenty-three years old and quietly beautiful,” whose old man just took off with another chick. Amy is blue, and she’s thinking of getting in her van and splitting. Listening to Ladies of the Canyon, Amy is consoled knowing “there was someone else, even another Canyon lady, who really knew” how she was feeling.

  That Rolling Stone ad—with “Amy Foster” planning to drive to Oregon, alone—captured another new reality about young women: they were going on the road, splitting, taking off on (as the paperback jacket copy of Kerouac’s On the Road put it six years earlier) “mind-expanding trips into emotion and sensation…[while] passionately searching…for themselves.” As Joni would soon sing, in “All I Want”: “I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, traveling, traveling, TRAVELING / Looking for some-thing, what can it be?” The Marrakesh Express, which Graham had made famous, and the circuit of glamorously primitive rich-hippie enclaves—Ibiza, the middle-sized of the three Balearic Islands off the coast of Barcelona; Matala, Crete, the ancient port on Greece’s Messara Bay; and tropical Goa, on India’s western Konkan coastal belt—brimmed with long-skirted young Americans, traveling with girlfriends, with boyfriends, or alone. In this new form of travel, everyone went native because they already—naïvely—felt native.

  For females, this meant getting lost in packed, mazelike souks, with angry rug merchants running after you because you’d accidentally bargained too successfully; watching (on acid) someone you’d just made love to break his neck jumping off the Formentera cliff during full moon; being the only English speaker, and in the minority of two-legged creatures, on a steamer on some body of water in the middle of nowhere; barricading the inside of your door in a hotel in Mauritania because the desk clerk, who was banging on it, assumed any solitary Western woman guest was a prostitute. None of this suddenly-typical fare was covered in Arthur Frommer’s guidebook.

  The ultimate adventure—nothing could make a girl feel more like Bonnie of Bonnie and Clyde—was to smuggle hash out of Afghanistan or Morocco, often by packing it in girdles and feigning pregnancy. Rolling Stone regularly devoted a two-page section, “The Dope Pages,” to such applauded hijinx, including the story of a young female graduate of UC Berkeley (initials: L.C.) who spent a full year muling hash all over the world as a “pregnant” traveler: flying from Pakistan to New York via wildly zigzagging routes that took her to Alaska, Denmark, Brazil, Portugal, and Luxembourg. Today she heads a division of one of the largest insurance companies in the country. She reflects on her youth: “The first thing I’d say is, I should have stayed away from that married junkie musician who used my innocence to make money. But after that, I’d have to admit that the adventure taught me skills—about functioning under stress, making split-second decisions, reading behavior, assessing risk, suppressing fear, and thinking outside the box—that have helped me in business and even helped me overcome two serious health crises. Plus, I got to star in my own movie (and, believe me, it was one).”

  True to her cohort, in early spring 1970, at just about the time of Ladies of the Canyon’s release, Joni split for the Mediterranean with a Canadian poet friend named Penelope. “I had difficulty…accepting my affluence and my success,” Joni later said, of this period. “Even the expression of it seemed distasteful.”

  In Crete Joni and Penelope drove a mountain road through citrus orchards to a harbor enclosed like a half-curled hand by sandstone cliffs that dropped down to the azure sea. The cliffs housed 1,200-year-old tombs turned caves, originally the homes of the ancient Minoans. People still lived in them. This was Matala.

  The two women rented an apartment in town. One night they went for ouzo at Dephini’s, a beachside taverna, where a wild-eyed, twenty-four-year-old North Carolinian held forth. His name was Cary Raditz. Cary had been an ad copywriter in Winston-Salem and had worked at an art gallery in Chapel Hill in his two postcollege years, but after running off to Matala, he had morphed into a larger-than-life character with long, curly red hair and a devilish beard. One night he dressed like an Afghan horseman—in Pakol cap, loose pants, tunic, and sandals; the next, like a Greek shepherd in blouselike shirt, flared pants, short jacket, and knee-high fisherman’s jackboots, with embroidered caskol tied around his brow. A crooked walking stick completed the conceit. In his one year in Matala, Cary had commandeered a cave to live in, had opened a leather shop and begun making what he boasts were “the best sandals in southern Europe,” and had taken several murky trips to Afghanistan, barely evading arrest, which heightened his prestige among the hip and druggy expats. “I was an outlaw,” he recalls now, “and a self-created sonuvabitch.”

  Cary was Dephini’s—he was cook, bartender, dishwasher, waiter, and bouncer. He also marketed his sandals there. Diners would take their shoes off and Cary would trace their feet on parchment for his partners at his shop, while he danced around, Zorba-style, simultaneously manning the oven, the bar, and the cash register.

  “All these other men were putting Joni on a pedestal, and she didn’t like that,” notes Estrella. “Cary didn’t have the misfortune of seeing her perform—he met her in neutral territory; that’s why she went [to Crete]. She needed life to be harder.”

  Actually, Cary Raditz had heard “Both Sides, Now.” But he wanted to bust Joni a bit. “I had heard that Joni Mitchell was in town, and I saw her with my friends, and they’d get weird—giddy and silly and kind of obsequious,” says Cary. He figured he could cut her down to—maybe even seducible—size by the oldest male trick in the book: being mean to her.

  The night that he saw Joni in the taverna, “I was short with her, I was dismissive of her.” During the wild dancing, everyone in the taverna broke their plates. Witnessing the ear-splitting crash of china to floor, Joni—Myrtle Anderson’s daughter, after all—instinctively took a broom and swept up the crockery shards created by the people in her party. “Joan sweeps the stuff up from the floor—the plates, the mess—and brings it to me, helpfully,” Cary recalls. “‘Here,’ she says. ‘Thanks,’ I say, looking her in the eye. And then I throw it all back on the floor.”

  A few more days of this back-and-forth ensued, with Cary playing the intriguing bastard, ignoring Joni’s fame and charm. It worked. He says, “One evening Joni came over to my cave.”
Carrying her Joellen Lapidus dulcimer, she trooped up the sandstone cliff, and, walking through the natural proscenium arch, beheld the gleaming sea. “I was sitting there, watching the sunset” when she turned up, Cary recalls. He showed her around his lair, which was lined with tapestries from his travels but had no indoor plumbing. His bed was placed over an ancient burial crypt. Sometimes he dug into the sediment and unearthed human bones; he’d stuff them with herbs, thyme, and rosemary, dry them out, and make them into chillums to smoke hash in, like he was doing now. It was perilous to descend the cliff at night. So they didn’t descend the cliff that night. Joni stayed with him.

  “Joni and I got to know each other. We were drunk. We talked about a lot of things. Her music. How she had become a qualified studio technician over the course of her three albums, and she was proud of that. She was concerned with her life. It was shifting. We talked about the importance to her of being an artist and relationships.” Joni had left the world of fame and touring, she told Cary, because “she did not like getting patronized, cheated, and screwed over by the music industry. She understood the trap of catering to the demands of the audience such that you become a branded product. She was always moving, perhaps to escape becoming a thing.” In this and later talks, the subject of “Little Green” came up, as it now did with all her confidants. She told Cary about the Mariposa sighting. “She said that she regretted giving the baby up for adoption, but what was she going to do?”

  A few days later, Graham Nash was laying a new kitchen floor in the Lookout Mountain house when the doorbell rang. It was Western Union. Joni’s old man took the telegram from Greece, tore it open, unfolded the piece of paper with its pasted strips of jagged type, and beheld a single sentence: “If you hold sand too tightly, it will run through your fingers.” Graham’s heart sank. “I knew right away—it was over.”

  That night, Graham sat down at Joni’s piano and wrote “Simple Man,” with straightforward lyrics: “I have never been so much in love and never hurt so bad at the same time.”* In answer to the worry (and accusation) that Joni had voiced, he said: “I just want to hold you, I don’t want to hold you down.” But perhaps at this time in her life Joni was simply unholdable. And that was a new thing for a young woman to be.

  Joni moved into Cary’s cave and stayed for five weeks, gaining weight on his “good om-e-lettes and stews” and feeling the addictive infatuation with the primitive hippie expat life. “To me it was a lovely life, far better than being middle-class in America,” she would later tell an interviewer. One time she cooked him oatmeal on his small cave stove and accidentally used kerosene instead of water. “Worst oatmeal I’ve ever had,” Cary recalls, “and I’m grateful she didn’t set herself on fire.” Of her enthrallment with him, he says, “You’ll have to ask her why she was attracted to outlaws.” She cheerfully acknowledged (in “Carey” and “California”) that he was “a mean old daddy,” a “red red rogue,”* and “the bright red devil who [kept her] in [that] tourist town.”

  Joni’s idyll with Cary was not untypical. Guys like Cary Raditz were dotted around the reliable outposts in those dope running and vagabonding years, and young women prone to sweeping up crockery shards found vicarious rebellion through the jolt of their outrageousness. It was cathartic to laugh one’s blues and uptightness away, even at the risk of being ripped off in the process. (In “California” Joni grumblingly concedes that while Cary “gave me back my smile,” he also took—and sold—her camera. “Yes, I probably did say to Joni, in my ungracious way, ‘I can probably sell it,’ when she left me her camera,” Cary admits today. “I was an asshole. I wouldn’t have wanted to be with me.”)

  Joni left Cary in Matala and traveled to Ibiza, which in 1970 was the international capital of rich hippie swagger. The chalky white Old City rose from the port in fairy-tale Moorish cliffs, its narrow streets peopled with beautiful young expatriates—sexy, decadent, a few of them wild-eyed—who seemed to have congregated through some secret whispered game of Telephone. They all carried, hanging on long straw strings from their shoulders, big trapezoidal straw baskets, stuffed with pan and queso, as they made the daily rounds: café con leche at Café Montesol or Alhambra, on opposite corners of the dusty main drag; later, dinner at the vegetarian Double Duck, whose owner knew Mick Jagger and the young Aga Khan’s new bride. At night they carefully segregated themselves from the hoi polloi—fresh-off-the-ferry backpackers—at Brooklyn Arlene’s harbor-front La Tierra, where they downed shots of the anise liqueur yerbis, then headed home to their rented four-hundred-year-old stone fincas in the paradisiacal Santa Eulalia Valley, to mescaline trip or snort (and sometimes mainline) cocaine to the strains of Van Morrison’s highly compatible Astral Weeks on battery-run record players.

  Joni was the guest of some of these “pretty people,” and, with them, she “went to a party down a red dirt road,” where, even in their rusticated otherworldliness, they were, as she noted in “California,” reading Rolling Stone and Vogue to stay connected to their publicity. But it was through sheer serendipity that she stumbled upon Taj Mahal (whose “Corinna” was the second most played song on the island that season). Hearing what she thought was Taj Mahal’s record wafting from inside a stone finca, she knocked on the door—and there he was, in the flesh. They jammed together, and she would pay him homage in “A Bird That Whistles” on her 1988 Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm. Joni the Celebrity Road Chick came, and saw, and conquered Ibiza. But Joni the Sensible Canadian Girl quickly left that neverland; stopped in Paris—so “old and cold and settled in its ways”—and, like a homesick, guilty lover (“Will you take me as I am?”), returned to what, after five years of city-hopping, was finally home: California.

  One night, shortly after she returned to Laurel Canyon (and Cary had joined her there, courtesy of the first-class Athens-to-L.A. ticket she’d sent him), a spontaneous burst of women’s music bloomed at Joni’s house. Estrella and Joni had been speaking to each other in “prose poetry”—falling into “our creative processes, not interrupting the right-brain hemisphere function, to a point where we spoke in free-form song lyrics,” Estrella says. Friends of Joni’s—other Canyon-lady musicians and singers—came over, one by one, Estrella remembers. “There were, like, twenty-five women in the house; it was this magnetic female jam session. Cary was the only man, practically levitating from all the estrogen.” Joni had already begun writing the songs that would be collected in Blue—“California,” “Carey,” and “My Old Man.” She was falling into what she would later call her “emotional descent…when you’re depressed, everything is up for question.” And she was listening with care and interest to Laura Nyro, whose confessionalism was piercing.

  Among those at the female jam session was another Laura, a northern California singer and songwriter named Laura Allan, whom Joni had met through David Crosby. Barely out of her teens, the daughter of a jazz trumpeter father and psychologist mother, Laura was part of the Bay Area art and music scene. She and her boyfriend, artist Dickens Bascom, were in a clique of “glue artists” who would Bondo found objects to carousel horses, cars (one of which they drove), and toilet seats; she performed at the Renaissance Faire, and she would eventually write a rocking paean to the area’s generational ground zero: Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue. Like Joni, Laura played the dulcimer; she was a friend of Joellen Lapidus, who’d made Joni’s instrument, and who was also at Joni’s house that day.

  According to Estrella Berosini, the recitative phrasing (a departure from Joni’s earlier style) with which Joni would eventually record the songs of Blue sounded much like Laura Allan’s phrasing. “Take the first four bars of ‘California’: ‘Sittin’ in a park in Paris, France’ to ‘That was just a dream some of us had.’ The vocal phrasing over the strum on the dulcimer, the almost-talking style of lyric, the run-on sentences, the childlike detachment: they all couldn’t sound more like Laura. The lyric content is all Joni, but it was entirely Joni’s version of Laura, and a stunning version. Joni’s special brand of m
agic was so consummate that she could put on someone else’s style as if it were a beautiful secondhand dress, and it looked like it had been made just for her.”

  In late July, Joni returned to Mariposa. The festival’s steely director Estelle Klein had also managed to lure James Taylor to the event. James was now a star, on the basis of his second album, Sweet Baby James, and its hit single, “Fire and Rain.” His manager, Peter Asher, had asked for $20,000, Taylor’s going fee. But Klein had crisply retorted: “$78 a day is what we’re paying.” Asher and Taylor had agreed to the token payment.

  Joni had met James briefly the year before, in Cambridge, but now at Mariposa they began a romance. Peter Asher, who was there with James, thought the pairing inevitable, and so did others. “I think they saw a lot of themselves in each other” is how drummer Russ Kunkel puts it. “Both singer-songwriters, tall, handsome/beautiful, soulful, and talented.” “It was no surprise” that they became involved, says Danny Kortchmar, noting that when Joni and James were together “they were both painfully quiet, sensitive, encircling each other.”