Both set about preparing their respective solo albums, with Mitchell singing backing vocals on what would become Mud Slide Slim And The Blue Horizon – most notably on his cover of Carole King’s “You’ve Got A Friend” – and Taylor repaying the compliment by adding guitar to “California”, “All I Want” and “A Case Of You”. The latter’s readership was similarly smitten with Mitchell, voting her 1970’s Top Female Performer in its year-end poll (ahead of Aretha Franklin, Grace Slick, Sandy Denny and the recently departed Janis Joplin), despite her paucity of live shows.īack home by early ’71, Mitchell and Taylor were viewed by the American music press as Hollywood’s golden couple two young, photogenic singer-songwriters whose liaison embodied the free-spirited ambience of Laurel Canyon. She returned to London at the end of November to perform at the Royal Festival Hall, where the new songs were met with unanimous approval by reviewers, among them the NME and Melody Maker. By October, they were sharing a stage at London’s Paris Theatre, recorded for BBC Radio One’s In Concert series, with Mitchell unveiling a handful of new compositions. A month or so later, she visited him on the set of his Hollywood road movie, Two-Lane Blacktop, where they wrote together and, as Taylor told Uncut in 2015, “had some of the most outrageous good times”. Mitchell and Taylor had met a year earlier, at the Newport Folk Festival, but now they became romantically involved. She returned to her native Canada in late July, playing Toronto’s Mariposa Folk Festival alongside James Taylor. While in Paris, she poured her longing for her adopted West Coast into another fresh tune, “California”. Shifting from one continental base to another only amplified the feeling. And for all the delicious scenery, food and ready company, she was homesick. The pair began a relationship, sealed by a song she’d written in honour of his birthday: “Carey”.Īs more musical ideas started to flow, Mitchell noticed the formation of certain recurring themes – love, loss, escape, a quest for some kind of indefinable spiritual truth. One such figure was Cary Raditz, a wild-haired American chef who was blessed, in Mitchell’s words, with “fierce-looking blue eyes” and “the mark of Cain on his brow”. The experience brought her into contact with a number of characters, who in turn helped reignite her creativity. Mitchell was introduced to the Appalachian dulcimer on Crete and adjusted to the unhurried rhythm of local life. Love, Joan.” “I knew at that point it was truly over between us,” Nash recalled, disconsolately, in his memoir, Wild Tales. He was busy laying a new floor in Mitchell’s kitchen when it landed, it read: “If you hold sand too tightly in your hand, it will run through your fingers. It was from here that she sent Nash a telegraph home. Her main seat of exile was the island of Crete, where she took up residence in a cave amid a hippy community in the fishing village of Matala. Against this backdrop, Mitchell decided to head for Europe, where she travelled around Greece, Spain and France.
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Her intense love affair with Graham Nash, which had coincided with an accelerated spurt of productivity from both parties, was nearing its end, resulting in a series of petty squabbles. There were major upheavals in Mitchell’s private life, too.
Not for nothing did David Geffen once tell her: “You’re the only star I ever met that wanted to be ordinary.” Mitchell came to despise show business, declaring fame “a series of misunderstandings surrounding a name”. Now that the “black limousine” and “velvet curtain calls” of “For Free” had narrowed into the reality of her own life, she needed to regain her peripheral vision, restore a degree of clarity. In many ways, it signalled the start of Mitchell’s conflicted relationship between art and celebrity. I like to live, be on the streets, to be in a crowd…” “A certain amount of success cuts you off in a lot of ways. “I was being isolated, starting to feel like a bird in a gilded cage,” she explained to Rolling Stone’s Larry LeBlanc. Having finished Ladies Of The Canyon in 1970, she vowed to take a year off, ostensibly to recharge her jaded batteries, but also to escape what she felt was an increasing sense of claustrophobia. Clouds had gone gold and brought with it a level of popular appeal that took away some of her everyday liberties. Commercial success didn’t sit easy with Joni Mitchell.
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