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

Germany at the Love Parade, where anywhere between 100,000 and 1.4 million (the reports are that disparate, with network of record Deutsche Welle going for somewhere in between, at 500,000) were gathered to let DJs spin them into a substance-induced hypnosis. Also, my hometown of Vancouver erupted into a riot after our hockey team lost the last game of the Stanley Cup playoffs. The thousands who had gathered downtown for the party were all too eager to light Molotov cocktails and torch cop cars. Half a century hence, peace and love isn’t part of the public agenda—unless you can cross-pollinate it with branded merchandise.
    Back when musicians played real instruments on real stages, in three real dimensions, security was a real concern. And for then-governor Nelson Rockefeller, it was looking scary enough in Bethel to call in the National Guard to clear out the longhairs at gunpoint. But for some unfathomable reason—given the polarization between the older and younger generation—he ceded to the judgement of the twentysomething, independently wealthy promoters, who accepted full responsibility for what would happen over the next three days. In so many ways, everything that happened at Woodstock seems destined, as though the world was crying out for an emblematic moment of beauty and transcendence that proved humanity could be redeemed and we really could go “back to the garden.”
Weeding Truth and Fiction
    The only notable commentator of the era who saw Woodstock as an event but did not ascribe to it its own mythology was anthropologist Margaret Mead. In a 1970 issue of Redbook magazine, she writes: “I do not think the Woodstock festival was a ‘miracle’—something that can happen only once. Nor do I think that those who took part in it established a tradition overnight—a way of doing things that sets the pattern of future events. It was confirmation that this generation has, and realizes it has, its own identity.” 14
    This is an important observation because it adds the dimension of personal identity to myth: by following certain mythological strands, we can arrive at our own cave of meaning. Mead continues with a reference to, of all things, Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount: “No one can say what the outcome will be; it is too new,” she writes. “Responding to their gentleness, I think of the words ‘Consider the lilies of the field...’ and hope that we—and they themselves—can continue to trust the community of feeling that made so many of us say of those three days, ‘It was beautiful.’”
    Given what we know now, Mead’s reluctance to anoint Woodstock’s pilgrims as “messiahs en masse” seems rather astute. That doesn’t mean Woodstock and its ethos didn’t give us a lasting legacy of goodness. They did. The modern environmental movement can trace its thickening roots back to Bethel, especially in light of the fact that the first Earth Day took place just a few months later, in April 1970, as did the formation of Greenpeace—which launched itself with a fundraiser called Amchitka, hosted by none other than Joni Mitchell and then-lover James Taylor.
    Somewhat ironically, but not altogether unexpectedly, one of the biggest critics of the Woodstock generation has been Mitchell herself. In a 2008 interview for Mojo magazine with former Los Angeles Times music critic and editor Robert Hilburn, Mitchell called her peers “the greediest generation in the history of America” and railed against the apathy and arrogance of those who swore to fix the system before they acquired the reins to power.
    In their youth, my generation was ready to change the world, but when the baton was passed to them in the seventies, they fell into a mass depression because all revolutionaries are quick to demolish and slow to fix... they kind of degenerated into the greediest generation in the history of America. The