grace: Joni Mitchell

Joni Mitchell has become one of the most influential female singer-songwriters of all time. Her melodious tunes support her poetic and often very personal lyrics. As a performer she is widely hailed for her unique style of playing guitar. Joni Mitchell first became famous for penning "Both Sides Now", a song that helped launched the career of pop/folk singer Judy Collins. When Mitchell began as a songwriter many of her lyrics displayed a wisdom that was remarkable for someone who was in her early twenties. Mitchell was first noticed as a performer in New York City's music scene. Her first album appeared in 1968, which featured her voice and her acoustic guitar with virtually no other accompaniment on most songs. Mitchell is also a noted painter and has created the beautiful artwork that appears on the packaging of her music albums.

(images by Henry Diltz, Jim Marshall; scanned by me from Girls Like Us, Canyon of Dreams, and Laurel Canyon,. Wikipedia).

The wooded Los Angeles neighborhood of Laurel Canyon was "the door to paradise". Members of all the key L.A. rock bands - the Byrds, the Mamas and the Papas, Buffalo Springfield, Love, the Doors , Joni Mitchell - found a rural refuge in the canyon, which was five minutes from the Sunset Strip, the heart of Hollywood nightlife. Musicians gathered in one another's houses, living an upscale version of the hippie dream: "Sometimes I would wake up to find Denny Doherty and David Crosby swimming in my pool, with a half-empty gallon of wine floating in the pool that they would take occasional hits from," says Monkees member Peter Tork, whose mansion in Studio City, on the north side of Laurel Canyon, was a major gathering place."Mama" Cass Elliott's cozy canyon house functioned as a sort of rock salon; she played host to locals and visitors such as Eric Clapton and Graham Nash, then in the Hollies. "There was something happening in '67 and '68 in Los Angeles," Nash has said. "A lot of walking over to people's houses with a new song. We'd be smoking heavily and talking, and a lot of incredible music was being made." Elliott introduced Nash to former Byrd David Crosby and former Buffalo Springfield leader Stephen Stills; the trio joined forces in 1968 as Crosby, Stills and Nash, defining the Laurel Canyon sound.

The Mamas and the Papas