The songwriter David Crosby and Leonard Cohen agreed was on another level to everybody else
There was something in the water in the 1960s.
Maybe it was the free-flowing supply of hallucinogens, but artist after artist was appearing from the woodwork, with a different musical masterpiece. Everyone from The Beatles, The Beach Boys and Bob Dylan was churning out songs that went beyond laying the foundations of modern pop. They are songs that, to this day, remain some of the greatest of all time and have rarely been matched.
But equally as enduring and important as all three of those aforementioned names was Joni Mitchell. Floating across America with nothing but a guitar strapped around her shoulder, she was the true embodiment of a troubadour poet. She bottled up every aspect of life before pouring it over her fretboard to make musical magic.
Originally from Canada, Mitchell worked her way down through North America, stopping at every dingy bar or cafe she could find as a means of sharing her music with the world. It was when she had arrived all the way down to America’s southern coast that David Crosby first saw her and was immediately struck by her genius.
“I walked into a coffeehouse in Coconut Grove, and she was standing there singing those songs, and I just was gobsmacked,” Crosby told the Tampa Bay Times in 2016. “I fell for her immediately. It’s a little like falling into a cement mixer. She’s kind of a turbulent girl.”
Later on, in an interview, Crosby defiantly described her as “arguably the best singer-songwriter of our times,” before adding, “I don’t get along with her that well anymore, but I do love her with my whole heart for what she’s given us.”
It wasn’t just Crosby who felt a similarly conflicting sense of love for the musician. Leonard Cohen also expressed similar feelings, firstly describing her as “some kind of musical monster, that her gift somehow put her in another category from the other folksingers”. Cohen added, “There was a certain ferocity associated with her gift. She was like a storm. She was a beautiful young woman who had a remarkable talent.”
But like Crosby, that love was slightly tampered with by an underlying feud. The ferocity Cohen rightly points out became a source of frustration for him later down the line. The pair enjoyed a romantic connection that later soured and fuelled their respective music, but Cohen escalated it a step and accused Mitchell of plagiarism.
“Leonard got mad at me, actually, because I put a line of his, a line that he said, in one of my songs,” she once explained. But it wasn’t a line Cohen had penned in a song himself; rather, it was something he had said to her in real-life conversation, which we can all decipher as creative inspiration and surely, par for the course of being in the orbit of someone as observational as Mitchell. “To me, that’s not plagiarism”, she claimed. “You either steal from life, or you steal from books. Life is fair game, but books are not. That’s my personal opinion.”
Mitchell unwaveringly put her music before anything. Her life served her songs with pure authenticity, which is perhaps what bent certain noses out of shape, but what definitely made her one of the all-time greats.
