I landed in Canada at the age of 24, very disassociated after living in a hippie commune and travelling around Europe for over three years*. The most played singer on the radio was Joni Mitchell. Both Sides Now, You’re a Radio, Carrie, Big Yellow Taxi and Woodstock. Psychedelia and hippiedom were coming to an end, and Joni’s songs were all bittersweet swan songs to that part of my youth and life.
Then I mostly forgot about the hippie songstress unless Woodstock or one of her 70s hits came on a pop station. Browsing the Marmora Library a couple of weeks ago I made a closing time grab of her biography, Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell by David Yaffe.
What a read, what a ride for over 400 pages! Joni has been turning out albums ever since, constantly changing and evolving more than David Bowie. More lovers, husbands and anecdotes of the music world elite than I can remember.
Yaffe,a musician himself, held countless interviews with Joni and her cohorts. Joni doesn’t hold much back, and if you want to know what Leonard Cohen was really like (an early and influential lover), well, he taught her about Nietzsche and poetry but he couldn’t tune his guitar and his singing was a drone. Joni doesn’t filter anything.
Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Jon Mitchell
David Yaffe, HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 2017
420 pages
*Eel Pie Island Dharma: a hippie memoir/haibun
Unfinished Monument Press 1990/Hidden Brook Press 2012
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