How Led Zeppelin used ‘Going to California’ to show their love for Joni Mitchell
Led Zeppelin had some obvious forefathers in their sound. They borrowed liberally from blues legends like Robert Johnson and Howlin Wolf as well as contemporaries like Jake Holmes and the Jeff Beck Group. But Led Zeppelin took influence from artists that weren’t nearly as hard rocking or bluesy as they were, most notably folk-jazz icon Joni Mitchell.
“That’s the music that I play at home all the time – Joni Mitchell,” Page told Rolling Stone in 1975. “The main thing with Joni is that she’s able to look at something that’s happened to her, draw back and crystalize the whole situation, then write about it. She brings tears to my eyes. What more can I say? It’s bloody eerie.”
Robert Plant was also a fan of Mitchell’s. “[She’s] the queen of all that beautiful music that was written around that time for the late ’60s on through,” Plant gushed about Mitchell during his appearance on the BBC Radio 2 programme Tracks Of My Years. “Her catalogue is incredible, and her concerts were really beautiful, incredibly moving. The whole Laurel Canyon music scene up there in Sunset Boulevard was something really special.”
It was possible to hear Zeppelin pay direct tribute to Mitchell. On the classic Led Zeppelin IV album cut ‘Going to California’, Zeppelin adopted the light acoustic setup that Mitchell favoured in her own work. Plant even managed to fit in an oblique reference to Mitchell’s work in the lyrics, with the line: “To find a Queen without a King / They say she plays guitar and cries and sings,” referencing Mitchell’s ‘If I Had a King’ from her debut album Song to a Seagull.
If that allusion wasn’t clear enough, Plant would frequently call out Mitchell’s name while performing the song live. Mitchell seemed flattered by the admiration from Led Zeppelin, especially compared to some of their peers who didn’t seem to want to give Mitchell her due credit.
“Other artists would cross the street when I walked by,” Mitchell told Interview in 2005. “Initially, I thought that was due to elitism, but I later found out they were intimidated by me. Straight white men. They would come up to me and say, ‘My girlfriend really likes your music,’ as if they were the wrong demographic. Led Zeppelin was very courageous and outspoken about liking my music, but others wouldn’t admit it.”
For their part, Led Zeppelin didn’t feel welcomed by Mitchell’s peers in the California rock scene either. “The people who lived in Laurel Canyon avoided us,” Plant later stated. “They kept clear because we were in the tackiest part of the Sunset Strip, with tacky people like Kim Fowley and the GTOs.” Despite some of their gripes, Joni Mitchell and Led Zeppelin shared some mutual admiration during the early 1970s.
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