Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell Read Online Free PDF Page A

Pacific Coliseum that can be found on rare bootlegs).
    Although Zeppelin’s version of the tune is currently the subject of copyright litigation, 11 hearing Robert Plant howl, “We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got got yes we’ve got got to people yeah ooooh yeah ooooh yeah ooooh get back to the garden, back to the mamamama garden, back to the garden, garden, garden,” as Jimmy Page caresses the strings of his electric guitar with a bow is beautiful, kick-ass proof of just how deeply Mitchell’s portrait of the event sank into the popular consciousness.
    Seminal Yippie and self-appointed generational spokesman Abbie Hoffman may have coined the term “Woodstock Nation,” and god knows how many hundreds of thousands have created their own fantasies about attending the event, but there can be no question that over the course of one weekend watching TV, Joni Mitchell wrote the words that would signify an entire generation’s ethos.
    â€œGetting back to the garden” was more than a reference to rediscovering the lost innocence of Adam and Eve, who were tossed from the Garden of Eden for Eve’s pursuit of knowledge. For countless souls—Mitchell foremost among them—it represented the genuine potential of humankind.
    Condensing the thoughts of the Woodstock poster pilgrim, who appears in Mike Wadleigh’s Woodstock movie as he marches down the clogged roads of the Catskills with his girlfriend, Mitchell captured the emotional and existential reality of the moment in her lyrics:
    I feel myself a cog in somethin’ turning.
And maybe it’s the time of year,
Yes and maybe it’s the time of man.
And I don’t know who I am,
But life is for learning.
    It’s brilliant poetry, but it’s also cunning reportage, because the unidentified pilgrim addressed the same thoughts when he was approached by a man with a movie camera. He talked about what brought him to White Lake at that moment in time: “My father was asking whether I was in a Communist training camp or something... and I could understand where he’s coming from. Because he’s an immigrant... he came over here to better himself and... make it better for me... He can’t understand why [the things that have value to him] have [no] value to me. But then again, he does have the wisdom to allow me to be who I am. I will, by doing what I’m doing, learn for myself how to live. And that’s what he wants me to do.” 12
    Even the “billion year old carbon” reference is of the moment. Human beings were becoming aware of their place in the universe as a result of space exploration. The first moon landing happened on July 20, 1969, just weeks before Richie Havens took to the Woodstock stage and spontaneously composed his “Freedom” chant in the waning hours of that fateful Friday afternoon of August 15, 1969.
    For a fantastic and all-too-brief moment, anything seemed possible. The sins of man—at this time symbolized by the “unjust and undeclared” and much-protested war in Vietnam—appeared to be cleansable as masses of young people converged on a single locale without destroying property or killing each other.
    Even as esteemed broadcaster Walter Cronkite, the “most trusted man in America,” mused in I Can Hear It Now/The Sixties , his radio salute to the decade: “The festival was declared a disaster area, and if there had been a riot, the commission that would have investigated it would have blamed negligent planning by the promoters... Yet there was no violence, relatively little illness for a population of this size. Three people died, two were born and in a rare happening, even the police got rave notices.” 13
    More than forty years later, people are still a little dazzled at the idea that half-a-million young people could gather in a single location without violence. While I was writing this book, nineteen people died in