Joni Mitchell's Ladies of the Canyon at 55: "Mitchell was then – and still is – a rara avis"

Sometimes a series of circumstances align almost magically in a certain place and time to enable a period of extraordinary artistic creativity. It happened in the 18th-century Vienna of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven and in the literary Paris of the early 20th century.

This was arguably also the case, between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s, in Laurel Canyon – a craggy, wooded Los Angeles neighbourhood north of West Hollywood, nestled in the Santa Monica Mountains, where chaparral and sage scrubs fill Mediterranean-style slopes with an austere green, and houses are interspersed with California bay laurel bushes, oak and willow trees and sky-reaching eucalyptus.

This scenic neighbourhood became a kind of epicentre for the 1960s counterculture in the US. It was also home to one of the most vibrant music scenes in American history, with a list of residents and their extended families that included Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSNY), members of the Mamas and the Papas, Carole King, The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, James Taylor, Frank Zappa, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Judee Sill, members of The Eagles, and many more.

For over a decade, a community of musicians who either lived in or were associated with the Canyon made music that would prove timeless. There were vibrant, often Summer-y tunes with the ability to make you feel, decades later, like you are driving down a sunbeat road, lying by a poolside, or strolling along the beach to a soft breeze. The evocative power of the music from that era has influenced countless contemporary artists – including Lana Del Rey, Father John Misty, Mumford & Sons, Harry Styles, HAIM, and Phoebe Bridgers, just for starters.

HIP STREET USA

The music of the Canyon was also, as it is often the case with great art, widely misunderstood. Its songs were often lumped together as “soft rock,” and its musicians deemed bourgeois, mellow, self-indulgent. But that facile assessment reflects nothing more than a certain thankfully now old-fashioned rock-crit prejudice.

In truth, the music was complex and rich, evolving over time and drawing from genres as disparate as folk, rock and roll, country, blues, jazz, Latin, psychedelia, and bluegrass. In many cases, the music was also political: anti-police violence protest songs like Buffalo Springfield’s ‘For What It’s Worth’ and CSNY’s ‘Ohio’ became anthems of the counterculture, while a song like Joni Mitchell’s eco-sensitive ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ became so popular and ubiquitous that it is now taught to children in kindergarten.

The attractions of the neighbourhood were manifold. For one, living there was both cheap and beautiful: in a 1970 Melody Maker article titled ‘Laurel Canyon: Hip Street USA,’ journalist and Canyon resident Jacoba Atlas called it “one of the last vestiges of rural living to be had.” And indeed, the Canyon was a natural sanctuary only a short drive away from LA’s Sunset Strip, which itself had become a focal point for America’s rebellious youth from the early ‘60s.

Clubs and coffeehouses had begun sprouting up and hosting the musically gifted who landed in the city of angels. Doug Weston’s Troubadour Club, at 9081 Santa Monica Boulevard, was probably the scene’s most iconic venue: many of the artists who went on to become stars played, or even debuted there. Some even signed contracts that forced them to keep playing the venue after they had become enormously successful.

The Canyon artists hung out, swam in the nude, slept on each other’s floors, scribbled on each other’s walls, and, in many cases, shared drugs. Most importantly, however, they made sweet music together.

For many, it began with The Byrds’ album Mr. Tambourine Man (1965), which was credited with igniting the folk-rock boom of the mid-60’s, when its title-track, a Bob Dylan cover, hit No.1 in the US and the UK. But that was just one of many great and wildly diverse records that came out of the Canyon scene.

Personally, I also think of Dillard & Clark’s banjo-heavy The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark (1968), a hidden gem that reflects the influence of country music and bluegrass in California in the late-60’s. And James Taylor’s iconic Sweet Baby James (1970), with its melodic acoustic guitar songs, exemplifying the rise of the singer-songwriter that took place at the beginning of the decade as artists – perhaps disillusioned by the dissipation of the hippy dream – began to turn inward.

This record feels particularly pertinent nowadays, when so much cheap confessional-ism crowds the charts. Another hidden gem is Judee Sill’s 1971 self-titled debut – which she described as “country-cult-baroque” and which is indeed a piece of art as beautiful as it is intriguing.

Then there are, of course, all the better-known classics, including Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s hard-rock Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969), Young’s laid-back After the Gold Rush (1970) and the gorgeous, landmark Harvest (1972); the light and summery harmonies of CSN’s self-titled debut (1969), and their darker counterpart in CSNY’s Déjà Vu (1970); The Eagles’ almost self-titled Eagles (1972); Jackson Browne's fully self-titled debut, which included hit singles in 'Doctor, My Eyes' and 'Rock Me On The Water'; and many, many more.

SEWING LACE ON WIDOWS' WEEDS

But if you were to ask who is the most important artist to come out of the Laurel Canyon scene, then it has to be Joni Mitchell. Her record Ladies of the Canyon, released in 1970, turns 55 on the first of April, and it is, as its title foretold, one of the essential records from then till now.

So many of its songs are utterly memorable – the title track, for instance, which paints a vivid picture of life in the Canyon as Mitchell sings of Trina with “her wampum beads,” “sewing’ lace on widows’ weeds”; Annie baking brownies with “cats and babies ‘round her feet”; and Estrella “wrapped in songs and gypsy shawls.” There's the infectious ‘Big Yellow Taxi,’ in which pointed lines about how they “paved paradise and put up a parking lot” are made to sound playful; and, of course, ‘Woodstock', which became the anthem for the festival of the same name, and for the generation that lived it, even if Mitchell was not among the attendees (she must be the only person from her generation to admit not having gone).

Those are the best-known songs, but there are deeper cuts on Ladies of the Canyon: ‘Willy’, written about her relationship with Graham Nash, is sweet yet sorrowful; and ‘The Arrangement,’ with its harmony bouncing back and forth, apparently written to a suitor or a lover who is locked into a narrow, restrictive lifestyle – something Mitchell would always lean away from.

Mitchell was then – and still is – a rara avis. Among her most remarkable qualities were a natural gift for singing and songwriting, deeply rooted habits of perfectionism, and a wisdom and a maturity that went inexplicably beyond her years. Only a once-in-a-generation type of talent would allow a 25-year-old to write a song like ‘Both Sides Now', with lyrics like “I've looked at life from both sides now / From win and lose, and still, somehow / It's life's illusions I recall, / I really don't know life at all.”

At least some among the Canyon residents were aware she was on a different artistic level. David Crosby recalls playing ‘Guinnevere’ – one of his finest songs – to her for the first time, to which she replied “That’s great!” and then proceeded to play a bunch of songs equally as good or better.

No shrinking violet, Mitchell was aware of this herself. ”I've always been a couple of years ahead of people,” she said in an interview—and she was not afraid to let other people see it, either. “The only thing I would say about (Joni) is I think it’s for other people to compare you to Picasso,” said her tour manager Ron Stone.

My favourite Joni Mitchell record is 1971’s Blue, which is widely considered one of the greatest and most influential albums in the history of contemporary music. What strikes me listening to it is that Mitchell’s voice is not only rare – a projected, melismatic head-voice, as distinctive in its timbre and phrasing as Nina Simone’s or Janis Joplin’s – but also one of the most honest voices I have ever heard.

Joni said it herself in a Rolling Stone interview, published in 2000.

“The Blue album,” she reflected, "there’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals. At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world, and I couldn’t pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy. But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defences there either.”

It might be her honesty, or the fact that she wrote and self-produced the entirety of the album. It might be the minimalism – often mislabelled as ‘simplicity’ – of the arrangements; Mitchell’s innovative guitar tunings or her dexterity with many instruments. Or, more likely, it is the combination of all of these qualities. But the album feels as timeless now as it must have when it was released. The Appalachian dulcimer’s timid strums in ‘A Case of You’; the playful acoustic guitar riffs of ‘Carey’; the suspended piano chords of heart-wrenching ballads like ‘Blue’ and ‘River’ – it all adds up.

And then there’s the lyrics. How many artists that have begun a song with lines as poetic, earnest, and yet funny as “Just before our love got lost you said/ ‘I am as constant as a Northern star’/ and I said: ‘Constantly in the darkness, where’s that at?/ If you need me I’ll be in the bar’”?

DEATH OF ROCK'S INNOCENCE

For all the Laurel Canyon’s beauty, it is important not to blindly idealise the era by failing to acknowledge its darker aspects. I cannot think of the ‘60s counterculture without recalling Joan Didion’s epochal essay ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’. Didion lived for some time in Haight-Asbury, one of the most important epicentres of the counterculture, and got to know more than a few of its flower children. In her essay, she recounts meeting a five year old with white lipstick on and wearing a reefer coat, who said she was in “High Kindergarten” because her mother had been giving her acid and peyote for a year.

Some of her friends were in “High Kindergarten” too.

As Didion put it, for some of the Canyon inhabitants, “the center was not holding.”

Crosby and Stills’ cocaine use was, at least in part, what drove CSNY apart, with manager David Geffen deciding he was done after Crosby threatened not to go onstage for a concert if grass was not flown from LAX Airport. James Taylor’s depressive tendencies were surely aggravated by his heroin use, his tormented relationship with Joni Mitchell inspiring much of Mitchell’s Blue. The Mamas & the Papas’ Cass Elliot also jumped aboard the heroin train.

In many ways, also, the counterculture was less forward-thinking and progressive than its practitioners imagined. Feminine as the male hippies were, with their long hair and colourful clothing, sexism was still the order of the day. Homophobia was common. So too was racism.

Members of the staff at the renowned Troubadour club were known as Big Tit Sue, Bigger Tit Sue, and Black Sylvia. Manager David Geffen’s attraction towards men was an open secret no one really ever talked about. There were girls who cleaned houses and acted as maids for free, a treatment which they accepted just to get the opportunity to hang around the Canyon’s stars. The flower children were, after all, children of their time.

And their time as a phenomenon would come to an end. Writer Barney Hopkins observed that CSNY’S Déjà Vu, with its millions in sales and star-making power, represented the “death of rock’s innocence.” Artist Joshua White said that, from there onwards, people applauded “the presence of the artist rather than the performance.” For others, the innocence of the hippy era had died at the Altamont Speedway Festival, a free Rolling Stones concert in December 1969, at which security was left to the Hell’s Angels, whose violent handling of the audience ended with several injured and a man dead.

Or maybe it was just the dead hand of commercialisation doing what it does so often: melodies stopped being appreciated merely for their beauty, and started being valued for their economic potential; artists’ stopped showing up at each other’s door with a new idea, and collaborations became a matter of business-interests. Artists – or some of them at least – came into incredible wealth, and ultimately moved up and out, and on, beyond Laurel Canyon.

All good things come to an end. If you drive through Laurel Canyon today, you will not see heads with long hair swimming nude together by the pool. There are fewer people sleeping on floors. And doors are no longer flung open, with the sounds of new music wafting into the welcoming sky.

But the music from the late 1960s and early 1970s still stands as one of the greatest artistic achievements of modern music. If you want a way into that magic moment, then Joni’s Ladies of the Canyon – released 55 years ago today – is a fine place to start. Then, just keep going...