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Joni Mitchell’s “Ladies of the Canyon” At 50: A Different Voice

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The summer I turned fourteen I spent a lot of time alone in my room listening to Joni Mitchell’s latest album, Ladies of the Canyon. My windowsill was just wide enough for me to sit on, legs stretched out in front of me. Looking out from my third-floor perch, I was comforted by the beauty of the sound washing over me. I contemplated her words while watching my neighbors move through the courtyard or exchange gossip on the benches.

Like Joni’s Song to a Seagull and Clouds, this album affirmed my sense that even mundane observations are laden with important meaning to a keen observer. Using a purple Flair pen, I filled notebooks with lines of words I called poems.

I listened to a lot of great music from my perch that summer: The long-awaited Let It Be by the newly disbanded Beatles; McCartney’s Beatlesque first solo album; Déjà Vu by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, and Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water. And there was the eponymous Elton John from that new British guy. James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James, released earlier in the year, was still in heavy rotation on my turntable. Its poster on my closet door made JT a presence in my room, his gaze always upon me.

I’d been immersed in pop music for seven years—since the Beatles’ arrival. Experiencing the pop music renaissance of the 1960s as a child and young teenager opened my ears to music. My radio diet went from AM to FM, with vastly expanded offerings and new flavors. Still, most of the music that nourished me—including the now classics I was enjoying on my window sill fifty years ago—was created and performed by men and reflected a male worldview.

Related: “Joni Mitchell’s Weird and Wonderful 80s Music”

Was I aware that the female perspective was mostly absent in the music I loved? I can’t say. The male voice was (and still is) the default, and defaults are invisible until they’re questioned. Second-wave feminism—“women’s lib”—was emerging, and I followed the cultural conversation about “women’s place.” I don’t know if I brought this new consciousness to my music or if I saw then what I can’t now unsee: Young people use pop music as “equipment for living;” each three or four minute story is laden with information about the social world. I absorbed what men think and want, and what men think women think and want. Authentic female thought and experience wasn’t part of the social reality this music defined.

Joni’s voice was an exceptional exception, an anomaly to which I paid close attention. Her attempts to understand her own heart and mind affirmed my own introspection. She told me it was okay to think deeply about everything, including relationships. Her narratives and vignettes offered a different take on the emerging ethos of the moment. She presented another side of the story, the side that would be mine. She spoke to me in a way that John, Paul, Bob, Donovan, etc., couldn’t. Immersing myself in Ladies of the Canyon now feels like returning to a source; a well I drew from often while becoming me.

The album reflects the time and place it was created yet holds up beautifully because it’s, well, beautiful. Her lyrics paint pictures that, along with her voice and the music, make it an immersive experience all the way through. We see the sunlight, the bus, and two people-watchers on a playful romp around Morgantown. Listening to “For Free,” built on one of those mundane but loaded observations, I was drawn in by the contrast between the glamor of her life as a musician and that of the anonymous street musician who caught her ear as she waited to cross the street. She celebrates his real good, free offering, lamenting how commerce blinds us to the beauty around us: “No one stopped to hear him, though he played so sweet and high; they knew he had never been on their tv so they passed his music by.” We see the corner and the zombie-like throng advancing as the light changed—and one slower person off to the side listening

The piano is sonic splendor, and her vocal, especially the last note before she transitions into the softer, almost spoken refrain, is breathtaking. Paul Horn’s brilliant clarinet solo at the end adds to the theatricality.

In the jazzy “Conversation,” a man she wants seeks her advice about a shitty relationship he can’t bring himself to end. She accepts that he sees her “when he pleases” while she sees him out and about with a woman who doesn’t appreciate him. She observes this woman with contempt: “She removes him like a ring, to wash her hands, she only brings him out to show her friends.” Exasperated and anguished, she wails, “I want to free him.” Later, expressing exasperation and anguish for both of them, she anticipates and mocks his dithering: “Why can’t I leave her?” The angry energy of the extended outro suggests this drama isn’t over.

The album’s title song is a tender portrait of three women—Trina, Annie, and Estrella—actual people in the community of artists, musicians, and seekers who converged in Laurel Canyon in the mid to late sixties. Reading about their lives, I learned they’re as interesting as the three I conjured while gazing out the window. Like the mid-boomers I interviewed for Beatleness, I was too young to be a “real hippie,” but old enough to have my imagination and identity tickled by the spectacle. I was intrigued by the free-thinking, creative lifestyle she described.

“Willy,” written about Graham Nash when he and Joni lived together in Laurel Canyon is, like the vast majority of Joni Mitchell songs up to this point, filled with deep yearning. There’s an achiness to them; love is doomed. Or is it? She muses that being open to love, despite its puzzlement and potential pain, is still better than shutting down: “But you know, it’s hard to tell when you’re in the spell if it’s wrong or if it’s real; but you’re bound to lose if you let the blues get you scared to feel.”

Though deeply in love with Nash, Mitchell couldn’t commit to the traditional relationship he wanted. She was haunted by memories of talented female forebears who regretfully gave up artistic aspirations for marriage; she wouldn’t be a “conquered moon.” The end of their relationship is foreshadowed in “Blue Boy.”

Related: “Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young In Their Own Words”

In “The Arrangement,” she taunts a male friend who opts for a shallow, consumption-oriented life, saying he “could have been more than a name on the door….more than a credit card, swimming pool in the back yard.” She also takes a dig at his conventional, complicit wife. “Rainy Night House” is a vivid movie about a romantic encounter, the male lead played not by Graham Nash, but by Leonard Cohen.

Inspired by a parking lot outside her hotel window in Hawaii, “Big Yellow Taxi” is one of Mitchell’s best-known songs. The upbeat, folky ditty was timely. The first Earth Day was held that spring, oil spills were becoming more frequent, and eight years after Rachel Carson sounded the alarm in Silent Spring people were waking up to the dangers of DDT.

Joni’s version of “Woodstock” created an entirely different feel from the already familiar CSNY version on Déjà Vu. Unlike her buddies to whom she gave the song, Mitchell wasn’t at Woodstock. She was scheduled to appear on the Dick Cavett Show the Monday after the festival—important national exposure at a critical moment in her career. Worried she might get stuck among the muddy multitudes and miss the opportunity, she was persuaded to cancel her Woodstock plans at the last minute. As it turned out, The Jefferson Airplane, David Crosby, and Steve Stills crashed her Cavett appearance. Joni performed a few songs, but the fawning host was more interested in barraging Mitchell’s friends with questions about the experience she missed in order to be there.

Joni’s “Woodstock” is a solemn cautionary tale, while CSNY’s version is an exuberant celebration, made especially exuberant by Neil Young’s guitar. Joni’s voice on the words “butterflies above our nation” may not get your soul free, but it touches it. The piano towards the end (4:12) rings out like church bells, and her final note (4:55) is both a cri de coeur and a clarion call to all of humanity to get our shit together.

“The Circle Game,” written as a hopeful response to Neil Young’s “Sugar Mountain,” has an engaging melody, thoughtful lyrics with universal themes, and a singalong chorus—no wonder it’s been covered close to three hundred times and has become a multi-generational favorite at graduations, bar mitzvahs, and other gatherings where people sing and reflect. The song is brilliant, but I’ve heard it so many times over the years I’m a bit inured to its charms. That said, it’s the perfect grand finale to Ladies of the Canyon.

I didn’t understand everything on this album fifty years ago, but it left powerful impressions. Life is a series of choices, different for women than for men. Choices should be well-thought-out and consistent with who are you—but you’ll have to figure that out first! Exercise your powers of observation. Dress up. Create. Fall in love. Care about the world.

It’s hard not to hear Ladies of the Canyon with my young teen ears, and it’s hard not to feel protective and grateful, watching myself nestled on the window sill, wistfully wondering who in the world I might be.

-Candy Leonard

Photo: Joni Mitchell (Getty Images)

 

 

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17 comments on “Joni Mitchell’s “Ladies of the Canyon” At 50: A Different Voice

  1. Gary Theroux

    This article kind of gives the impression that Joni Mitchell was the only artist to offer a feminine viewpoint on life and love in 1970. Not exactly. The top hitmakers of that year included Aretha Franklin (“Don’t Play That Song”), Diana Ross (“Ain’t No Mountain high Enough”), Freda Payne (“Band of Gold”), Dionne Warwick (“I’ll Never Fall In Love Again”), Linda Ronstadt (“Long Long Time”), Anne Murray (“Snowbird”), Mary Hopkin (“Temma Harbour”), Marilyn McCoo as lead singer of The Fifth Dimension (“One Less Bell To Answer”), Karen Carpenter as lead singer of The Carpenters (“Close To You”), Susan Jacks as lead singer of The Poppy Family (“Which Way You Goin’, Billy”), Tina Turner as lead singer of Ike & Tina Turner (“I Want To Take You Higher”), etc. Well, you get the idea.

    • Pearl Cawley

      This is what you picked up after reading such a visually evocative, well analyzed and sensitive article? Obviously there were plenty of other female singers around. Most were interpreting songs written by someone else, usually male. Piping through female vocal chords does not equate a representation of feminine consciousness. Most of what you list are pop top-forty dittys that in no way come close to conveying the weight, observational power or much less the imagery of Joni Mitchell’s poetry. Fantastic writing, Candy Leonard!

  2. Can anyone speak to Joni’s present condition of health? There seems to be a complete black out in terms of current information…the last news I could find seems that her condition is horrific, mentally and physically…It would be good to know and add her to prayers and vigils in real time…She is much beloved.

    • Shining Hair and Shining Skin

      She is still recovering from the aneurysm she had in 2016. I don’t know if “horrific” is an accurate description – she’s been seen publicly with more frequency in the last few years. Do a search of her name and David Hockney and you’ll see them both on an outing to a museum. At the Joni 75 concerts she was seen in the audience responding to her songs and mouthing the words.

      I don’t know if she’s comfortable with ever appearing on a stage or in front of a camera again, but for someone who had such a severe health issue, she has regained much and her quality of life seems to be positive. I am quite thankful for that.

  3. Lynda Rutherford

    WOW Did you ever sum up everything I’ve ever thought and felt about not only ‘Ladies’ but about Joni in general! I’ve been a fan of hers since she first played a place I worked at way back in 1968. So many of her songs have mirrored my life. Thank you for writing such a magnificent article!

  4. Is it just me.or.did everybody blaze right past.Carole King ?

    • Lori Cole

      Carole King wrote music; other people wrote the lyrics to her songs.

      • Irion Nanne

        Not entirely true. What about the following songs that Carole King did write both the music and lyrics for (just to name a few from her album Tapestry):
        Beautiful, Home Again, I Feel The Earth Move, So Far Away, You’ve Got A Friend, Way Over Yonder, Tapestry…

        And speaking of female musicians, how about Laura Nyro? What a genius!

        • Carole King didn’t write about being a woman so much. She wrote on standard social themes. She was focussed on writing hits, as she used to do with her husband. And besides, she has that awful voice that has no nuance.

  5. Daniel Harris

    That 1970 fall my best friend and I decided to hitch from NY to LA. Got as far as Las Vegas, NM after several really bizarre adventures along the way. Found work and a room with a bath in a terrible health food restaurant on the street where Easy Riders crashed a parade and wound up in the local jail with Jack Nicholson. The little restaurant was next door to the jail. Its mood music consisted of Ladies, Let It Be, some piece of John Denver crap and Two Virgins. Joni was sad, but beautiful. Beatles was a sad ending at the time; depressing for our great loss of leadership. The Denver LP suffered from a bad case of plastic immolation, and I maintain to the present day, it most definitely weren’t me, healthy bossman. The Lennon-Ono got 0 play, of course. But it was retained as a collector’s object of distant future desire…wish I had it now in its virgin state.

  6. Sharen Conway

    Great article. My ‘becoming adulthood’ too. Joni expressed things I was feeling that I had never heard a female artist express before. Always will love her and her music.

  7. Cynthia Lasley

    My cousin lived in Topanga Canyon in the late 60’s early 70’s when Joni wrote ladies of the canyon. She is the Annie in the song. I remember that house so clearly, three stories on the top of a steep driveway. Glass on the side facing the mountain and a huge kitchen. I visited them when I was 16, in the summer. They had a gathering at their house and there must have been lots of famous people there but the one I remember most was Henry Diltz, the photographer who took the Doors Morrison Hotel photo. He was kind to a shy 16 year old surrounded by grown ups. I spent most of the night in the 1st floor room where Gary, Annie’s husband at the time had the first proof’s of Joni’s cover for Blue.

    Truely magical memories.

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