The Joni Mitchell song that “blew away” David Crosby
For Joni Mitchell, songwriting was like pulling weeds. Her 1970 album, Blue, is suffused with a sense of finality, as though she viewed it as her last chance to clean out a lifetime of baggage. “You have to pull the weeds in your soul when you are young, when they are sprouting,” she once told Mojo, “Otherwise, they will choke you.” This self-determination, this recognition of her own failures, is what distinguishes Mitchell’s songwriting from that of her male contemporaries, many of whom viewed their romantic relationships through a prism of ego and artifice.
‘A Case of You’, like so much of the material that makes up Blue, focuses on the end of Mitchell’s relationship with Graham Nash. The two musicians first met at a Hollies concert in Ottowa, Canada. At the end of the show, Mitchell approached Nash and introduced herself. They got talking and wound up back at her hotel room, where they engaged in what Nash would later describe as a “seduction scene extraordinaire”. Recalling that night, the Crosby, Stills & Nash member said: “She picked up a guitar and played me 15 of the best songs I’d ever heard, and then we spent the night together. It was magical on so many different levels.”
Nash and Mitchell moved into a house in Laurel Canyon, where they stayed until 1970, by which time their love had given way to bitter resentment. Shortly after the split, Mitchell wrote ‘A Case of You’, in which she laments her inability to accept the constancy of Nash’s adoration: “Just before our love got lost you said /”I am as constant as a northern star,” she sings in the opening verse “And I said, Constantly in the darkness
Where’s that at? / If you want me I’ll be in the bar”.
In ‘A Case Of You’, Mitchell frames her relationship with Nash as a victim of conflicting desire. While Nash may have been content to let their souls blend, Joni couldn’t help but feel claustrophobic. “In the blue TV screen light, I drew a map of Canada,” she sings, tired of domesticity and longing for adventure and escape. It’s no surprise that following the breakup, Mitchell left America to travel around Europe, settling in Greece for a time before returning to California.
Mitchell makes no attempt to cast herself as a victim. This honesty is what so impressed fellow songwriter David Crosby, who saw once told Mojo: “I love everything about ‘A Case Of You. When she first sang it to me, it blew me away. But this happened to me every time I heard a song of hers, man. She was my old lady for a year, and I would write something I thought was really good and she would come back with three things she wrote the night before, and they’d all be better. ‘A Case Of You’ is so open and so her. She’s telling you the truth. And she utterly hooks you from that conversation at the start of the song: ‘If you want me I’ll l be in the bar.’ It’s a tough woman, who’s got her dukes up about life, and she’s got an opinion, and that’s Joni.”
Crosby continued: “That line: ‘I could drink a case of you and still be on my feet.’ There’s a duality there that’s deliberate. On the one hand, she’s saying she can’t get enough of him. But she’s also telling him, You can’t bowl me over. Because you know she’s been through some serious trials and tribulations. Polio, Chuck Mitchell – not a good experience. She’d paid her dues. She knew what pain was.”
