The song Joni Mitchell wrote after being booed off stage: “That really shook me up”
Creating the sort of legacy Joni Mitchell can enjoy now takes a lot of time. A lot of time, hardship and resilience.
In fact, all of those considerations should be doubled when you take into account that Mitchell was a woman. A woman coming up in an intensely competitive music genre, where mediocrity from a male artist was labelled innovative, and innovation from a female artist was deemed mediocre.
Mitchell’s strength in the face of this, throughout her career, was unwavering and never did she compromise on her own art to elude prejudices. Her art was authentic and true to herself, as anyone writing in the 1960s and her songs were littered with tales that came straight from the heart. Whether it was ‘River’, ‘A Case Of You’ or ‘Both Sides Now’, she was brutally honest with herself and over time, the music world became increasingly receptive to that.
But it wasn’t always the way. In fact, one very fateful show at a historic venue almost broke Mitchell. If it wasn’t for her artistic genius, in turning raw pain into artistic clarity within the space of minutes, the career of a now global icon may have been cut short at the hands of a few drunken hecklers.
While playing at Newport Folk Festival in 1967, Mitchell tried to deliver a set that balanced her own artistic ambition with what the crowd of folk faithfuls were hoping to hear. But there was a very clear atmosphere in the crowd that made that year’s festival somewhat different from the others, and the setlist began to descend into chaos.
“That was a very bad year,” she recalled in a 1968 interview. “I suppose Newport had a bad year. One where it was full of drunks and people where they’re looking for action rather [than] music. So, I was pretty unprepared. I wanted to do all my own material; I didn’t have much variety. I wasn’t very good. But I had a lot of trouble with the audience booing and hissing and saying, ‘Take your clothes off, sweetheart.’ Things like that really shook me up.”
A mixture of misogyny and impatience punctuated the air of Newport that year, and Mitchell left the stage understandably dejected. But being the truly brilliant artist she is, Mitchell turned the experience into a song. Pondering on what had just happened, the lyrics of her iconic track ‘Urge for Going’ presented themselves to her.
“I didn’t know how to counter or how to act,” Mitchell said. “I thought I’d bombed. On the way back in the car, I wrote a line that said, “It’s like running for a train that left the station hours ago / I’ve got the urge for going but there’s no place left to go.”
Mitchell painstakingly poured her own trauma back into a song without truly knowing how good it was. Marred by the experience that had just taken place, she likely would have questioned her ability, yet pushed on with artistic honesty. It’s an immeasurably brave move from an artist whose resilience in the face of whatever hurdle presented itself turned her into a global icon.
