Take a moment this Thanksgiving to kick back and regroup. Remember what life was before the struggle, if you can. If you are Gen Y or later, I’m afraid you probably have known nothing but.
There was a woman in the theater department who was everyone’s muse. The last time I saw her, a friend and I stopped by her mountainside cottage on the way home from skiing. Back when it snowed here more often. A stream whispered in the woods behind the house. There was bread baking in the oven. Incense burning. Joan Baez (or was it Joni Mitchell?) on the turntable. (Yes, back then. Hate me, I’m a boomer.)
We visited, ate warm, fresh bread, and drank herbal tea. It was chilly outside, but warm and impossibly cozy inside. Home. Someone’s anyway.
It wasn’t Mitchell’s Laurel Canyon. Far more rustic. But as a North Carolina native sang, long ago and far away. Things were far less complicated.
The muse eventually married. An accountant, I think. Ronald Reagan won in a landslide. There were several wars, open and clandestine, with terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. somewhere in there. A couple of economic crises and moral panics. Torture. A plague or two beginning with AIDS. Mass shootings too many to count. Police murders with protests following. Friends and artists who died too early. A wannabe autocrat in the Oval Office, in the streets a cast of supporting fascists. A quarter million U.S. dead from COVID; over 12 million infected. Life takes its twists and turns.
But around the time of that ski trip, I saw Joni Mitchell live in Charlotte. About the only album selections she left out of her set that night were from Blue. Those times came back when a friend as old as this tale posted the story behind this rare 1974 London footage:
“The Blue album, there’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals,” Joni Mitchell once said of her masterpiece record. The album has gone down in the annals of music history as the archetypal confessional record but there’s one song on the LP which stands out above the rest. The song is sincerely dripping in sentimentality, orchestrated with authenticity and marvelled at by the music world for being one of Joni’s best, of course, we mean ‘A Case of You’.
Light a fire. Pour yourself a glass of wine. You need it.