FEATURE:
Groovelines
IN THIS PHOTO: Joni Mitchell playing acoustic guitar in November 1968. This image is from a shoot for the fashion magazine, Vogue. Mitchell wore a loose-fitting white dress/PHOTO CREDIT: Jack Robinson/Getty Images
Joni Mitchell - Woodstock
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EVEN though I have…
featured Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock on my blog before, it is a song that I wanted to return to. The penultimate track of her 1970 album, Ladies of the Canyon, I think Woodstock is one of the finest songs in Mitchell’s cannon. There have been some impressive covers of the song through the years – my favourite is Matthews Southern Comfort’s -, but I think there is something about Joni Mitchell’s original that stops you in your tracks. I really like the Ladies of the Canyon album and, if I had to choose, I would pick it as my favourite album of hers. Ending with three brilliant tracks in Big Yellow Taxi, Woodstock, and The Circle Game, you are left wanting more! In fact, there is not a dropped note or song on the album. This year marks fifty years since the follow-up album, Blue, was released. I am going to write about that album closer to its anniversary in June. Now, I want to spend some time about a song regarding a legendary music festival. Woodstock started on 15th Aug, 1969 - so this was a new and exciting revelation at a time when peace and love was being promulgated. I think, against the backdrop of warfare and political strife, Woodstock paints pictures of togetherness and a peaceful army. Woodstock had three versions released in 1970. Mitchell’s was included on her as the B-side to her single, Big Yellow Taxi.
The second release that year was by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; their version has become a staple of Classic Rock radio and is the best-known version in the United States. The third version, by the British group Matthews Southern Comfort became the best-known version in the United Kingdom; it was the highest charting version of the song, reaching the top of the U.K. Pop charts in 1970. It is testament to the strength of the song that two other groups covered it in such quick succession! There are a couple of articles that I want to borrow from that take us deeper into an iconic song. The first, from Far Out Magazine discusses how the song sounds so evocative of the festival experience, despite the fact Mitchell never attended Woodstock herself:
“Woodstock ’69 was one of the most significant cultural events that America has ever witnessed, it would change the course of countless careers and immediately become a thing of legend. However, one person who unfortunately missed out on their Woodstock moment was the great Joni Mitchell.
The historic and groundbreaking event was held from August 15–18 in 1969, hosted on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, New York. Originally billed as ‘An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music’ but people instead just referred to it simply as the Woodstock Rock Festival. The first edition of the festival attracted a mammoth audience size of more than 400,000 who flocked to the fields on the East Coast for the bash.
IN THIS PHOTO: Joni Mitchell plays Woodstock at the site of the original Woodstock festival in 1998
Despite not appearing at the event, the footage from the weekend was unavoidable and Mitchell was inspired to write the song from the perspective of her fear of missing out. The track went on to become one of her most-loved numbers which featured on her timeless Ladies of the Canyon record in 1970 as well as serving as the B-Side to ‘Big Yellow Taxi’.
‘Woodstock’ tells the story of a young music fan’s voyage to the festival and the life-changing weekend that they embarked on — it is the perfect encapsulation of the historical event which played a huge part in creating its legacy despite Mitchell pulling out of the bash.
Mitchell made up for the lost time when she got to perform the track at the site of the original 1969 festival almost 30 years later in 1998 during A Day In The Garden festival which was a tribute to the iconic event and she finally got her belated Woodstock moment”.
The fiftieth anniversary of Woodstock was supposed to happen in 2019, yet it never went ahead. I wonder if we will ever see the festival again because, after such a hard last year or so, many people would love to converge and come alive at one of the world’s most-famous events. I think there would have been something truly evocative about the first Woodstock in 1969. Listening to Mitchell’s song, there is a sense of hope and love; there is also a feeling that, despite everything, true peace and comfort cannot be guaranteed.
This article of 2019 investigates the fact Woodstock offers no guarantee of hope. That said, the song gives us one of Joni Mitchell’s richest vocal performances:
“In her book, Break, Blow, Burn, an analysis of several hundred years of western poetry, Camille Paglia calls Mitchell’s “Woodstock”: “Possibly the most popular and influential poem composed in English since Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy.’” Paglia, a contentious thinker whose opinions on sexual assault and #MeToo have led many to call her “dangerous,” continues, claiming Mitchell’s hymn to show an understanding of what it meant for thousands of people to have merged together without question or violence. “From that assembly rises a mystical dream of people on earth and of mankind’s reconnection to nature,” she writes.
A 1970 review of Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon in Rolling Stone calls “Woodstock” “mellowing” with a “quicksilver effect.” The album itself, writes the reviewer, is one of “departures, overheard conversations and unquiet triumphs for this hymnal lady who mingles the random with the particular so effectively.” And that she does. With “Woodstock,” Mitchell builds for herself a dream. Propped against the periphery of a great muddy spectacle, she imagines a mystical journey had by innocent individuals against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, amid the destruction of our ecosystems. Hers is a fictional tale rooted in particular events — whether those events were relayed secondhand or taken in through a grainy hotel television set. “The deprivation of not being able to go provided me with an intense angle on Woodstock,” Mitchell once recalled to an interviewer. “Woodstock, for some reason, impressed me as being a modern miracle, like a modern-day fishes-and-loaves story. For a herd of people that large to cooperate so well, it was pretty remarkable, and there was tremendous optimism.”
Mitchell, at first, wrote the song “for her friends to sing,” as she put it in a BBC Live In-Studio in 1970 — quickly amending the statement with a jolty “…for myself to sing, as well!” The two versions are almost unrecognizable as the same song. CSNY’s is a rousing, guitar-solo laden, electronic organ-filled blues bop: totally anthemic, not at all melancholic. From the get-go, it’s all synthy guitars and rock ’n’ roll. Mitchell’s “Woodstock,” on the other hand, is a different beast. A dark jazz piano builds to an unsettling fortissimo. A dream is born.
Vocally, “Woodstock” is one of Mitchell’s most challenging songs. Listening to CSNY’s version side by side with hers, of course, makes the arrangement feel even more herculean. Her voice wriggles, crossing octaves, making statements in mid voice, raising questions in falsetto. In my opinion, the only other time she executes like this is on “A Case of You” — and perhaps also “Cactus Tree” — two songs which convey heaps of meaning”.
At their core are themes of love and humanity: freedom-seeking women both full and hollow-hearted; men so precious you can only consume them as you would wine; and humans understanding, finally — altogether in one place — that they are mere piles of billion-year-old carbon. Sure, there are plenty of other tracks where Mitchell’s voice soars and bounces across time and space, somersaulting through litanies of obliqueness. But not all are as painfully felt, as massively significant as songs like “A Case of You,” in which Mitchell inserts herself, “the lonely painter” or “Woodstock,” in which she melds into a crowd of half a million — and as a lone wanderer, becomes a spokeswoman for them all.
And yet, she makes no promises for her generation; providing little in the way of hope. If anything, the song is more a warning from someone who’s already felt the potential hiatus more strongly than her glittering compatriots. “Woodstock” begs us to stay in that place of hippy grazing, to not let the illusion fade. As David Yaffe, author of Reckless Daughter: a Portrait of Joni Mitchell, writes of the song, “It is purgation. It is an omen that something very, very bad will happen when the mud dries and the hippies go home.” Peace and love, for Mitchell, is very serious business. And getting ourselves back to the garden — well, that’s how we stay out of Gomorrah”.
I wanted to look back on an incredible song from Joni Mitchell. In terms of her finest albums, I would say 1970’s Ladies of the Canyon is her best. I love Blue and other albums like 1974’s Court and Spark. It will be wonderful to mark fifty years of Blue very soon. I think that the first signs of Mitchell’s true genius presented themselves on Ladies of the Canyon. If Blue is more personal and a slightly more emotive and heavier listen, then Ladies of the Canyon is a little broader and lighter. In terms of topics, Mitchell covers everything from the aesthetic weight of celebrity, to observation of the Woodstock generation, to the complexities of love. Ladies of the Canyon is viewed as a transition between Mitchell's folky earlier work and the more sophisticated, poignant albums that were to follow. In Woodstock, she created one of her very greatest tracks. I think it holds immense power over fifty years since it was released. Whilst Mitchell did not attend Woodstock, the namesake track evokes feelings of hope and community set against the backdrop of a turbulent time for the United States. To me, Woodstock is this…
WORK of wonder and brilliance.