The Joni Mitchell song that was too emotional to perform: “I burst into tears”
Every song an artist writes tends to be an intimate experience. The whole point of being able to write a tune is about trying to articulate something that’s too hard to say out loud, but that also leaves people vulnerable to what everyone else has to say about them later. However, Joni Mitchell tried to approach every one of her songs from a place of joy, and she remembered getting emotional seeing the communal feeling of ‘Woodstock’ live onstage for the first time.
Although Mitchell was far from the stereotypical version of what a hippy is supposed to look like, she did have a fascination with what made people gravitate towards that side of flower power. Society was already shifting towards something a lot different, and now that rock and roll was gaining a prominent voice in music, it was up to people like Mitchell and Bob Dylan to document what was going on.
Much like the folk-rock legend did with ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’, Mitchell penned ‘Woodstock’ as an outsider looking in on the festival. While Mitchell wasn’t even able to make it to the grounds of Woodstock on that legendary weekend, her song is more about the feeling created there than actual experiences, usually talking about how much people are trying to find their way to the root of what love and happiness was supposed to be.
Even though Mitchell had written the song, hearing Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young do their own interpretation of it was the kind of team-up that no one knew they needed. Mitchell was always a singular writer, but hearing her piece about peace and togetherness being sung by four angelic voices almost brought to life the sentiment that she was talking about.
Once Mitchell started to add the track to her own setlist, she remembered that the energy almost got the better of her the first night, telling Classic Rock Stories, “For a herd of people that large to cooperate so well, it was pretty remarkable and there was tremendous optimism. So I wrote ‘Woodstock’ out of these feelings, and the first three times I performed it in public, I burst into tears because it brought back the intensity of the experience and was so moving.”
Regardless of how often Mitchell performed the song in the studio, the core piece missing is the audience. The track isn’t the kind of participatory performance that most sports anthems would be like, but hearing her get a response from the audience when talking about the hope for a better world is enough to restore anyone’s faith in humanity.
Then again, every emotion usually has something to balance it out, and Mitchell’s soul-crushing songs on Blue were ripped straight out of her broken heart. That faith in humanity was still there, but that never made the pain hurt any less once she did decide to start pouring out her soul once again.
For a song that was meant as a glorified slogan for one of the biggest concerts of all time, though, there’s nothing shallow or superficial about ‘Woodstock’. It just stands as a piece that happens to hope for a world where people treat each other a little bit better, and in those few days in a New York field, rock and rollers actually managed to pull it off.
